Game #849: Aggressive Inline

 As Tony Hawk as you can get without being Tony Hawk.

 I purchased Aggressive Inline back in the day because, I think, Gamespot's review convinced me that it was the next big thing. The game was alright, but it was no Tony Hawk, that's for sure. And that's pretty much my opinion right now, the game is decent, but it ain't the Birdman itself.

 The game follows Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 blueprint, although, to be fair, this game released first. Still, considering the released the same year, it was probably a coincidence. I felt like removing the timer and adding mission giving NPCs was a step in the right direction, so the fact that this game does that is a pretty good thing in my book...

 ... Except that the timer isn't really gone. While there's not a ticking clock breathing down your neck, you do have a JUICE gauge that you need to keep full, by performing tricks or collecting Juice boxes from the environment, lest you want a game over. It's an incredibly dumb mechanic, and sometimes, when searching for stuff or when I got too invested in a certain objective I lost track of it. You can get back into the game for 100000 points, but this mechanic shouldn't be here.

 Only 7 levels, but they are decent. Factory was the only stage I really hated. Each stage has a Key and a Upgrade. The Key opens up a section in another level, while the upgrade adds a major buff to one of your techniques, such as SPIN, FAKE or JUMP. You also upgrade your stats by performing actions associated with them. Want to enhance you grind? Do a lot of grinds and land the combos. In my opinion it takes a little too long to level up your stats, and every character must be leveled up separately. They start off with abysmal stats.

 Basic gameplay is where ultimately the game comes up short when compared to the Hawk. Flips and Tricks are both done with the square button, to pull a flip instead of a grab you need to press to directions on the pad before tapping square. Needless to say, it doesn't work as well as giving each action a separate button. On the flip side, the Circle button is context sensitive, and can be used to vault over walls or swing from poles. It's a really good idea, but it shouldn't have to had cost us dedicated buttons for flips and grabs.

 But the biggest problem are the manuals. C'mon, don't lie to me or yourself, when you play Tony Hawk, you mash Up and Down like there's no tomorrow. You just do. Here, coming out of a Revert(Cess in this game) and mashing Up and Down will just end your combo on a whimper. You must actually time Up - Down or Down- Up as as soon as the Cess animation ends. Do it sooner or later, or press a third direction on the pad, and your manual won't come out. It's not impossible to get the hang of it, by the last levels I was able to link 5 cesses or more on a single combo semi consistently, but it's still not ideal and it kinda ruins the flow of the game.

 Besides that, there's a general sense of lack of polish that permeates through the game. Sometimes you'll try to jump of a ramp or quarter pipe, but your jump won't come out just right and stuff like that.

 All that said, the soundtrack is glorious. It has a few rap songs I didn't really like, but most of it is rock and pop punk, and there's a lot of music I listen to while I work nowadays!

 Aggressive Inline did its best to copy Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, and for the most part, the got it quite right. The game itself is good enough, even if lacking a bit in polish, and the goals per level are quite decent, but the things they changed in an effort to be different actually hurt it in the end. They should've gone full rip-off, because at least then we'd have an excellent clone instead of a decent imitator.

 6.5

Game #848: Spongebob Squarepants - Battle for Bikini Bottom

 Sink or swim? I'd rather sink with this game.

 Last year I heard a lot of good things about Spongebob videogames so I decided to take the plunge and bought a whole lot of them, including this one here Spongebob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom. And mind you, I was never too big of a fan of Spongebob, as a matter of fact, I outgrew it pretty much after it's first season and hated it afterwards.

 It's REALLY good, like really good. Movement feels slippery and cheap, y'know, like those quick 'n' dirty low budget platformers that tend to plague every console, however, the game plays really well.

 The characters and world of Spongebob translated very well into this simple 3-D models, probably because the art style itself is very simple. It's fun seeing all the different gestures Spongebob and his friends pull off.

 It's hard for me to explain why it's so good, because the puzzles aren't particularly imaginative and the platforming challenges aren't particularly exciting, however, everything works well and the game is just fun to play.

 The game's biggest flaw are the bosses, they take too long to complete because their patterns are lengthy, but they aren't hard at all, they are just boring.

 I liked how Spongebob, Patrick and Sandy have different abilities, so it makes sense why you can only swap to a specific character during levels. I found Sandy to be my favorite character because of here ever useful gliding ability, plus, her basic attack is a Karate chop. Patrick was probably my least liked, his basic attack, a belly bash, had a short range, and lifting/throwing melons wasn't my cup of tea.

 Not every level is a winner. There's a stage with a lot of sneaking required, which isn't too bad, but it has this Museum stage... at first, Barnacle Boy won't talk to you unless you go in as Spongebob, but the platforming challenge inside is impossible... unless you're playing as Sandy. I was stuck for son long attempting impossible jumps until I decided to look online and it turned out I should've been using Sandy all along. Still, to be fair, most Platforming games have at least one or two annoying stages or parts.

 Gold Spatulas are the main collectible, but there are also Shiny Things. Literal shiny things. These are a form of currency that can be used to open up routes to Golden Spatulas, purchase Golden Spatulas from Mr. Krabs and open up the theater, which I don't know what it does(Might look it up!) since it requires an obscene 40000 shiny things. Needless to say, grinding levels for this isn't my idea of fun.

 I hate to say it, but Spongebob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom is REALLY good. And this is coming from someone that cares very little, if at all, about the character. Sure, it has that cheap-feeling slippery movement that is pretty much a trademark from low budget, low effort platformers, but it actually plays really well, it's easy to tell that the people that made this game cared.

8.0

Game #847: Naruto: Ninja Council 3

 Hot ninja garbage!

 Way before I got into the Naruto anime, I played Naruto Ninja Council 2 on the GBA, back before it even got translated. I remember this mysterious unlockable character named 'Rock Lee' and I couldn't wait to see how he looked like. I liked the game a lot, so much so that I purchased it after it got localized and even started a FAQ for it, not that a beat'em up needs a FAQ. Naruto Ninja Council 3 was Naruto's first Nintendo DS game, and it's also a sequel to Ninja Council 2, using the same graphics and everything. It also sucks.

 There's no story, just a 7x7 grid made out of 49 missions. And it's dumb stuff like 'break 10 rocks' or 'defeat 10 bats', capture 10 flags before the opponent. It's idiotic and mindless. Maybe it's more fun in multiplayer. You can unlock 13 other missions.

 The controls take a while getting used to, it's so weird having B as the run button and not the jump button, since usually the attack button, Y in this case, is next to the jump button, A, but not so here. I keep running when I mean to jump. The wall jump is very clunky. Using touch buttons for the super moves is uncomfortable and dumb. And they also require touch minigames to work, and sometimes, even blowing into the mic. What the hell??

 In the game's defense... there are a lot of playable characters, 27 in all. And I've always liked these sprites, I thought Ninja Council 2 looked great, and this is no exception.

 Stages are one huge multi-leveled map, which makes gameplay dumb, because you are usually searching for stuff. Sometimes your target actively avoids you, which makes it a chore. You are given a radar on the bottom screen, but it only highlights enemy bosses, and since it's a radar and not a proper map, it's not very helpful. There's a new High Jump, Up+A to help you reach the higher parts of a stage, but platforms usually stop you on your way to the top.

 After clearing each mission you get nuggets of infinite wisdom such as 'hitting an stationary enemy is easier than hitting a moving enemy'. Thank you, captain obvious. Other times you get useless advice, for example, in a mission you have to defeat two giant spiders, and after you beat it, the piece of advice is "Defeat the smaller spiders first". Don't. It's a waste of time and they don't get in your way. What the hell????

 There are a few missions about defeat a certain amount of a certain enemy. This missions seem impossible at first... You are expected to use a screen-clearing super move, like Naruto's Toad Blade or Sasuke's Phoenix Flower, to supposedly defeat about 8 enemies a pop. It's ridiculously dumb, you have to constantly spam this move, even when no enemies are on-screen, in order to clear missions.

 It's bad. The mission structure with no plot is already a poor idea by itself, but the fact that so many missions are boring, like collecting banners, or dumb for the license, such as defeating X amount of animals, is the final nail in its coffin. Level design ranges from abysmal to just plain annoying as a million different things  hit you and your opponent, be it rocks or bats. The character variety is nice, but what's the use if the game sucks? Honestly, this is one of the worst Naruto games I've played next to Powerful Shippuden, and that's just shameful considering how much I liked Ninja Council 2.

 2.5

Game #846: Super Scribblenauts

 Who said you can't play god?

Tons of bite-sized stages. Most can be solved as soon as you type the correct word. You get a playable avatar, Max(Although you can use a few alternate skins), and you can move him around with the stylus or the D-Pad, but most of the stages end as soon as you write the right word to produce the required object.

 It's amazing how many words and adjectives the game recognizes. There's so much you can create it's incredible. You can type words either letter by letter, on the touchscreen, or by writing every letter with the stylus, but it isn't very accurate.

 The are so many fun interactions and things you can do that it's even disappointing that we don't get bigger and larger stages. Things like creating a "Small Good Cthulhu" and give him a Katana to fight a "Evil Giant God". You can create things like jetpacks, excavators or other vehicles and/or accessories and have your very own created characters use them!

 I can't stress enough how many fun things you can create, like a 'Suicidal doctor', or a 'zombie spotted robot'. Most stages can be solved with multiple different solutions, for instance, there are many ways you could jump over a hill. A 'trampoline', a 'jetpack' or maybe a 'plane'. Some stages actually require being beaten 3 times using different words for 100% completion.

 The "Press Start" screen is actually a small playground you can toy around with. There's also a stage creator.

 There are about 120 levels, and some of the final levels are a bit tough.

 All in all, it was pretty fun. I just wish it had bigger, larger and longer stages I could play around with. I think the gameplay has potential for bigger and more ambitious things. That said, what we have here is fantastic, and that's why I wish we could have more of it.

 8.0

Game #845: Trick'N Snowboarder

 Snowboardin' zombies.

 Let's get this out of the way first: You can unlock Resident Evil 2 characters, namely Leon, Claire and a Zombie cop, in Trick 'n Snowboarder. That should've already sold you on the game.

 Tony Hawk this is not, but as soon as I could I mapped X to jump, Square to flips and Circle to grabs, because that's the correct scheme for x-treme sports videogames that involve boards. R1 and L1 are used to spin on the air, for tricks, or to help you turn while snowboarding down. Overall, it felt a bit clunky and stiff, but I got used to it and started having fun.

 The game is pretty arcadey, which is why I wound up enjoying it so much. It's all about scoring points by tricks, and most of the time it's you against the slope, but there is a multiplayer mode. There's also a Story Mode, which has you performing tricks on specific parts of every stage as well as snowboard against 'rivals' and a free mode to snowboard to your heart's content.

 There's a very lame create-a-character mode, and you enhance you stats by going through story mode. You can unlock unique characters seemingly at random by playing the Story Mode. They look pretty neat, the 2-D artwork of these characters is top notch.

 There's a small but serviceable amount of tracks. The story mode can be beaten in under an hour, but considering characters unlock at random... that's for the best.

 The framerate can take a dive, specially in Story Mode whenever you get the 'trick cam'.

 The game is quite fun to play, but not as good as the Tony Hawk games. And maybe that's an unfair comparison, but the game is similar enough to warrant the comparison, 'sides, I'm pretty sure Activision had a Snowboarding Tony Hawk clone. Still, the game can stand on its own two feet, and the Resident Evil 2 characters are a neat curiosity.

 7.0

Game #844: Assassin's Creed Syndicate

Grand Theft Carriage.

 Do you like Assassin's Creed? You're in luck, Assassin's Creed Syndicate is pretty much identical to every other game in the series!

 There are two protagonists, the twins Jacob and Evie Frye, and while I was a bit put off by Jacob's lame one-liners, I really liked how the played off each other. You can play as any character for every non-story part in the game. Both characters share money XP, but have different equipment and 3 exclusive skills each: Woke Ubisoft decided that Jacob, the man, had to have the strength/combat based upgrades, while Evie gets the stealth ones, because she's a woman. To be honest, both characters are practically identical so not to worry.

 The game finally went GTA, you can hijack carriages and drive around, and you can even cause some light destruction around the city. The police will come after you, however.

 The controls are a bit weird, more limiting, probably to help with how inaccurate movement could get sometimes. I always tolerated it because it felt like a byproduct of the freedom you had in climbing pretty much anywhere, well, the new tweaks are unnecessary and to the game's detriment. Holding R2 enters parkour mode, and holding X will move you upwards and O will move you downward, just like Unity, except that now you can't press X to jump any time. This means that if you are on a ledge and you want to go below, to a pool of water for example, pressing X will result in Jacob and Evie staying rooted to their place. The water is below, even if you want to jump down instead of dropping down, so you have to press O. It's counter intuitive to how we've been playing Assassin's Creed, so it produces more issues than the ones it solves.

 Equipment has been limited a bit, now you can customize wrist guards, belts and outfits. It's alright I think, while I miss the larger variety in pieces and clothes from Unity, you also don't have as many pieces that turn obsolete because their stats are atrocious and you should be wearing something with better stat increases.

 1880's London is smaller than the piece of France we got in Unity... but I actually like it this way, Unity was a bit TOO big. As a result, this piece of England feels a bit more dense. Sure, at the end of the day it's just a lot of busywork, collect the flowers, collect the posters, find the chests, yadda yadda, but I like the mini dopamine-rushes. Lockpicking is no longer a mini game, praise the gods.

 I'm not too fond of the Experience system. You only earn XP by doing missions or doing actions that unlock perks. For example, only your first 120 assassinations will give you any XP, afterwards you won't get more XP from simply assassinating enemies. The perk system, however, is kinda neat. Performing a certain task a certain amount of times will give you a small, passive enhancement to an ability related to said action. For example, use sub-weapons mid-combo 75 times to get a damage boost on sub-weapons mid combo.

 I hated how they gated progress in this one. Basically, higher level enemies can take an ungodly amount of punishment, to the point that it seems like their final third of health lasts forever. They can also break your attacks mid combo with an attack that is impossible to dodge unless you guess it's coming and preemptively press circle to dodge. And while you can unlock high level equipment as you explore the city, equipment now has level requirements.

 That said, I am a hard-headed explorer, so I toughed it out and managed to outcheese some harder level missions by using subweapons and stealth, and thus was ready to continue the game at level 8. I hadn't even gotten the dart rope!

 The dart rope works similarly to Batman's grappling hook in Arkham City but worse. It's hard to gauge the correct distance when using it on foot, and a lot of times pressing L1 just had Jacob use the rope behind him, behind where I wanted to go. That said, when it works it's a neat new way to explore the city, it gives you a lot of horizontal freedom when scaling.

 Present day parts are still only cutscenes. I can only ever be so thankful.

 Bugs and glitches, oh boy, boys and glitches. People said Unity was buggy? I played both games unpatched and this one was way worse. Evie was invisible in a few cutscenes that involved Greene, and he himself was duplicated in another cutscenes, not to mention the many bugs and glitches mid missions that forced me to restart a mission. The Hypnotist's mission was particularly bad, I had to restart like 3-4 times because something would go wrong, like the Hypnotist entering an alert state while in the carriage so I couldn't get him out to the fact that the mission doesn't tell you that if you knock him out it's game over. The game crashed twice, Blue screen of death kind of crash. Honestly, this made Unity look like high art.

 There's an entire zone dedicated to World War I. A portal stealthily appears after Chapter 6 at the right edge of the Thames. If I didn't know that this part existed I could've easily missed it, which is really dumb. You don't get a single hint or notice that something appeared over there.

 Syndicate is alright. Honestly, it's just another Assassin's Creed game, you know what you're getting. It's a safe, fun way to spend some time, but it's very forgettable. Unity was simply more ambitious and more interesting, which is disappointing considering how I love this era's wardrobes. At least we finally get a female Assassin tied to a more than decent game. Aveline deserved better.

7.0

Game #843: Elite Beat Agents

 Has there ever been someone with less rhythm than me? I think not!

 Elite Beat Agents is really hard man, even on the easiest difficulty setting, at least for someone like me who was born with no sense of rhythm whatsoever. It's really fun though, I can see why the game exploded in popularity.

 This is the game that made the "Tap/press the numbered buttons to the beat of a song" genre popular. And it's very addictive and fun, so I can fully understand why it became so popular. That said, as popular as it got, it's a bit weird why Nintendo never capitalized on their popularity.

 The game has covers of famous songs, but they are good covers. There are comic book vignettes before, during and after each song, and they are hilarious. Each stage has a song and a plot in which the Elite Beat Agents must help someone with some ridiculous task, such as a mother affect the weather itself in order to get a sunny day for her son, or a cat having to rescue a baby. Not only are the stories hilarious, the songs on the background make them so much more fun!

 The game has 19 songs, and I think I liked all of them. Each difficulty setting has a different Agent, which is just a cosmetic thing, but I think it's a nice little touch.

 8.0