Pokémon Sun/Moon (Part 2)

Pokémon Sun/Moon: Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6

Pokémon Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon : Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4

Are we finally going to our first trial?

Verdant Cavern

The epitome of posturing to look tough, but being pitiful
instead. And at the amount of posturing these idiots do...

At Hau'oli's pier we meet Ilima, but we’re interrupted by members of the local criminals: Team Skull! These guys sport bandanas and wear clothes that makes them look like, well, skulls. They throw their hands around as if they couldn’t settle on a single gang sign, so they’re just tossing them all at once. Full disclosure, most encounters with them are minor and not worth mentioning every single time. Occasionally, they serve to introduce other NPCs (such as Faba or Hapu), but that's about it – so I won't go over every single appearance. These reviews are long enough as is!

Ilima fights one, Nic fights the other. The defeated grunts flee like cowards. As thanks, Ilima heals the Trainer’s Pokémon. After which, he challenges the trainer to a battle, and upon defeat, invites him to Verdant Cavern for the island trial.

Ohh, ohh, ohh, Ilima's Smeargle is gonna paint at me.

Inspect Dens to lure out Yungoos (or Rattata), battle them,
access the Totem. Get unlikely help from the Skull losers.

Nic travels up Route 2, passing by a motel and the Hau’oli Cemetery, then finally, the cavern's entrance. Ilima explains the trial: Nic must defeat three Pokémon that will jump out of their dens, then collect the Z-Crystal on the pedestal at the end. Careful, though; a Totem Pokémon, larger and tougher than the others, may be guarding it. This first trial needs to show how different it can be from the gym battles we’ve seen in every other Generation. The solution? Have a bit of everything. Battle wild Pokémon (which you’re not allowed to catch during the trial, but you can return afterwards), explore or investigate areas, complete quests, answer trivia questions. Most trials end with a fight against a Totem Pokémon and you obtain a type-specific Z-Crystal as a reward; Nic gets a Normalium Z here, but he has to battle a large Gumshoos (in Sun) or Alolan Raticate (in Moon) for it. Totem Pokémon have an aura providing stat boosts to make them into “bosses” at the end of these trials. Totem Pokémon will always call allies.

Almost 10 years later, I still freaking hate this thing's
design. I just do.

Pokémon Sun/Moon (Part 1)

Pokémon Sun/Moon: Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6

Pokémon Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon : Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4

Even the tone seems to differ between these two sets.

For this blog’s 12th anniversary, I will be doing something special. This is going to be two game reviews, and you can already tell what the concept will be. Yep! I’m doing a Pokémon Special! Full coverage of Generation 7’s Pokémon Sun/Moon and their updated rereleases, Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon. Two sets of games so intrinsically linked that I couldn’t review them apart. There’s just too much going on across four games.

Sun/Moon and Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon (S/M & US/UM) are weird beasts in the Pokémon mainline series. We’ve seen similar stuff before, but not to that extent; games that are remade within the same Generation, with a different plot, wider pool of Pokémon, and more stuff to check for. Even previous remakes I covered (FireRed/Leafgreen and HeartGold/SoulSilver) were separated from their originals by one Gen, and had plenty of changes due to the transformations the franchise had seen in that time. (Also, those remakes are considered good. Same can’t be said for the Gen 4 remakes, from what I heard!)

It's also different from the situation of  Pokémon Black/White and Black 2/White 2. In that case, the latter were sequels to the former, not the same story with changes. Game Freak has never done that again; but, in all fairness, it did allow for B2/W2 to correct some of the more glaring issues of the original B/W. I can’t help but think that this may have helped inspire Gen 7's Ultra versions.

Also, wat a pretty setting it is for the adventure.

A major aspect of Pokémon Sun and Moon, released on November 18th, 2016 in North America, is that desire of change from Game Freak. A wish to experiment with a formula which, let’s be honest, had gotten stale. Leave home with your starter, go through eight Gyms, beat up the evil gang, defeat the Elite 4. Well! In Alola, based on the islands of Hawaii, you don’t fight Gym Leaders; instead, you partake in an Island Challenge made of several Trials, which generally involves battling, but may add more. Totem Pokémon are introduced, and perhaps more importantly, this is the first Generation to have Regional Variants of past Pokémon families.

That was a whole lot of getting ahead of myself, wasn’t it? How about we jump in? (For the record, I played Pokémon Sun, but I’ll mention Pokémon Moon wherever relevant.)

RollerCoaster Tycoon 3: Platinum!

Spend a lot of money to install your coasters! And make sure
your peeps pay through the nose to ride it, too - or else,
how will you make that money back?

Sometimes, you buy a game just because of one feature you really want to try out. I can’t say I wasn’t ever guilty of that, and in fact, I can think of quite a few games I bought just because I was intrigued about one thing I wished to test! Today’s game, for which the version I'm covering is no longer available on Steam, is one of those. The RollerCoaster Tycoon (RCT) games were a creation first of Chris Sawyer and later of Frontier Developments released from 1999 to 2004, and yet all of them were great examples of what computers could achieve at the time, even if some of them used interesting game dev magic to function. RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 was first released in 2004. It’s available on Steam under the name Complete Edition, which was released to online stores in 2020; but what I own is the Platinum! edition, which was pulled from online retailers in 2017 due to an ongoing lawsuit between Atari and Frontier. And, well, after Complete’s release, there's no need to bring it back.

I’ll review the version I have. This version includes expansion packs: Soaked!, which focuses on waterparks, and Wild!, which favors animal exhibits and shows. Let's manage some parks!

The Peeps are Back

Always gotta think of entrances, exits, and paths towards
both anytime you place a new attraction.

The core concept of RollerCoaster Tycoon is to manage amusement parks with different objectives. You may be asked to have a certain number of guests in your park, or to hit a certain park value; other times, you  tend to VIP guests and must satisfy them before they leave. The Peeps are as funny – and numerous! – as ever. But, I must be honest here, there is exactly ONE reason why I bought this game when I already owned RCT1: In 3, you can use the camera to get aboard the rides and roller coasters you place around your park, giving you a first-person view of all the excitement. So, as you can imagine, my first instinct when booting up this one was to go into Sandbox Mode and create everything I could, just to experience it myself right afterwards. That alone was worth the price.

Descending soon... WHEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAHHH!

Clint Bushton: Coaster amateur, ex-president, likes women
named Monica. All similarities with persons living or
dead, yadda yadda.

But! There’s still a game behind all this! 18 scenarios in the classic package, and an extra 21 (9 in Soaked!, 12 in Wild!) across both expansions, for a total of 39. All of them have objectives split in three ranks: Apprentice, Entrepreneur and Tycoon. You can’t move on to the next rank until you’ve finished every mission of the current one. On early scenarios, the later rank missions are just extensions of previous ones (ex. Have 450+ guests in your park for two months on Entrepreneur, when one request in Apprentice demanded 300+ guests for one month).

Exploring the Switch's Nintendo Classics #2

Outdated image!

I was planning on continuing these articles under the Nintendo Switch Online denomination, but then Nintendo decided to change it due to the upcoming release of the Switch 2; they are now known as the Nintendo Classics (...even though it includes stuff from the SEGA Genesis, and a lot of third-party games released on retro consoles). Oh well! I'll manage. Just a quick name change, right?

I was hoping to cover a different console for the second such article in a row, but as it turns out, the NES section has most of the shortest games among the Nintendo Classics, so – might as well do this again! For the foreseeable future, I might try to release full articles covering the short games from just one console, at least as long as it will be possible. I'll cover games from other consoles soon enough!

Sports

Go Canadians Go! ...Oh wait. Canada isn't one
of the two teams here.

Ice Hockey: Released in January 1988 in Japan and two months later in North America, this title is self-explanatory – you play a hockey team in a match against another. You choose your team (one out of six), then the opponent, the speed of the game, the duration of the match. After which, you can change the layout of your team of five; the goalie never changes, but the other teammates can be slim and weak but fast, average all around, or stocky and slow but strong when brawls happen. Yep, there can be brawls in this game. Aside from when you’re put in control of the goalie, you swing the hockey stick with A, and swap to another teammate with B. It’s a complicated game that requires way more skill than I’m likely to ever have, and I doubt I’ll play it beyond these first few tests. Though, I am told there’s a decent number of extra little programming details, like the crowd noise being louder when the game is a close one.

Spectrobes: Origins (Part 4)

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4

We end this today!

Krawlosphere

Final dungeon looks like a dump and is just not
interesting to explore. Checks out.

Rallen and Jeena land their ship inside the planetoid and step out. The place is nothing but writhing Krawl flesh. Gross. No other way but forward. I mean it, too; this dungeon is nothing but one long corridor forward with larger rooms for battles. You have exactly one unavoidable battle in each corridor, and then one longer fight in each room. Multiple rounds of enemies topped with mini-bosses. Thankfully, the mandatory fights don’t return once they have been cleared, which means that you can go back to the ship at any time to save, heal your Spectrobes and swap your team around.

Rice balls! Pluck 'em right out of the ground, and eat 'em!
It's okay, they're clean! Somehow!

Kinda annoys me that there’s no other way whatsoever to heal your Spectrobes, other than when they level up. The only healing items in this game are rice balls, coming in four varieties that heal your player character 30, 100, 300 or 1000 HP. Nothing for your creatures. No way to bring them back into action during a battle after they’re fainted, either – no Revives here! Nope, the only controllable way to heal any of these battle beasts is through a save point. And, oh yeah, you can’t buy rice balls anywhere. There's only two ways to find some. The first is to find them with your searcher critter. The second is to discard a cleaned fossil, which trades it away for random items – can be minerals or rice balls, gotta be lucky. Not a very reliable thing. Kinda sucks when you're short and need many, quick, before heading out to fight a boss.

These charged attacks are pretty awesome to watch.
They're better when they actually deal, y'know, good damage
to the enemies and bosses.

And the Krawlosphere being what it is, you won’t find any fossils, crystals or healing items here. Any light patches to investigate will summon enemy encounters. Which, to be fair, makes the planetoid a perfect training spot if your team is still weak against what’s coming up.