Created and published by Toronto, Canada-based indie developer Benjamin Rivers, Home debuted in 2012 and is available on a variety of platforms including the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita, where I played it. The 2D side-scroller wasn’t scary per se, but the disturbing story at its core was chilling.
They’re a fun element of modern gaming a nifty way to compare progress with and compete against friends, and an element that I care way too much about.Ĭontinue reading Overcooked! – Review →Īs its full title suggests, Home is a unique horror adventure. Even when they’re not crafted well, I still feel compelled to obtain them, or at least do a cost-benefit analysis to determine which are worth my time. When crafted well, they can complement the gameplay experience by rewarding experimentation or offering up unique challenges. If I’m digging the game, I’ll do my best to unlock as many as possible. Similarly, when I play a video game on a modern PlayStation or Xbox, trophies and achievements materially impact my experience. As I’ve mentioned before, when I experience something, I want to experience the whole of it. Heck, even Pokémon encouraged competition, whether through the core trainer battles in the video games or via the infectious theme song of the anime.Īnd speaking of Pokémon, I can make a case that that franchise influenced my completionist tendencies. It was the mechanism that gave me the drive, the motivation to succeed. Competition was a means of self-improvement. Not necessarily against others in this case, but against myself. I wanted to win! In terms of my schooling back then, my parents instilled the importance of studying, that the effort I put in would result in good grades, which in my mind was a competition of sorts. This translated to other activities, such as Monopoly, or anything else that had an element of competition to it. I spent my youth playing organized soccer, and the desire to win was real. BUT! It’s an otherwise enjoyable, refreshingly brief-for-an-RPG, video game. Unfortunately, the co-op didn’t wind up being as much of a draw as I had hoped just as with the SNES Final Fantasy games, the second player really only participates in battles, so the non-combat sections leave them… waiting to play. Being slightly familiar with the game’s Valkyrie Profile inspired battle system, and the prospect of a couch co-op RPG, the nine dollars practically flew out of my wallet. And no, not THOSE games for some reason, but actual good games, like Indivisible. This is all to say I was surprised to actually see Walmart put a handful of games on clearance. That game came out in 2008 – 13 years ago! The developer has gone out of business in the years since THQ, the publisher, went bankrupt and has even come back in the intervening years! Just discount those games, or trash them, there’s no point in having them take up shelf space! And they have the GALL to charge a ten spot for them! Listen, Walmart, I don’t think anyone is going to drop ten bucks on The Naked Brothers Band: The Video Game at this point. Heck, in the year of our lord 2021, the closest Walmart to me STILL has a few licensed PlayStation 2 games. But like they say, go big or go home.Īs someone who browses the video game section nearly every time I enter a Walmart or Target (sorry honey), I know from experience that the former never really puts games on clearance. Those gold trophies are front loaded in the first half, leaving only a measly bronze for folks with little shame. The game’s twenty stages go by with little difficulty, little change in scenery, and thankfully, little time to ponder if it was worthwhile. Now there’s a downside, and in this case it’s playing Pacific Wings. Even better, obtaining them required little effort, and less than a half-hour! While lacking a platinum trophy – the most coveted trophy of all on Sony platforms – it nonetheless contained a few gold trophies, the next best thing.
It’s a shameless clone of Capcom’s 1942, developed Sprakelsoft, a German purveyor of similar clones on mobile storefronts.ĭebuting as a free-to-play app on Google Play in 2010 – the digital storefront for Android devices – it has since seen release on a number of other platforms, such as the PlayStation 4. Nowadays, games whose rewards are not hard-earned are bountiful. For achievement and trophy hunters, there are plenty of temptations. We’ve all done things we’re not proud of.