Year Plans 2025: What I've Missed

Boy, this has been… a year. Please ignore my twitchy eye. Or the emotional exhaustion. Let’s just… talk about video games today, alright?

For the newcomers: I started setting up Year Plans in 2023, as a way to force myself to check out games selected somewhat at random through my collection. The idea was that if I only ever chose on my own what I wanted to play, there are games I own that I’d never touch! So why not leave it to luck? Of course, as I realized at the end of that year, I can always misjudge and overshoot. After all, I take direct inspiration from HowLongToBeat lengths to make these random picks, and I can never know how long a game will truly take me, versus how long that website says it takes on average. That said, I’m a very thorough player and I often go beyond just finishing a game's main story, so it often takes me longer than those indicated lengths to finish games.

Every year so far, I ended up with plenty of games I was hoping to cover in those 12 months, that I ultimately ran out of time for. 14 in 2023, and 17 in 2024. This year, however, I am proud to announce that I don’t have a lot of leftovers… only 8. I call that a win! But still, I wanted to operate the same way as before, by playing just an hour of each game and report on it for the last article of the year. Hell, there were so few this time around, I juggled with the idea of playing two hours of each instead! But nah. One hour will be enough. I’ll just write more for each.

The estimated duration of the eight games today ranges between 11 and 67 hours (…don’t start), and would have taken me an extra 250 hours to get done. I don’t think I would have had enough time.

Well then! With so few, I guess I won’t split these into categories!

Team Sonic Racing

Out of my way, Amy! I'm gonna steal the third place from
you!

There are many Sonic racing games out there, though for a while they existed under the “Sonic & All-Stars” umbrella that allowed characters from other properties to join the roster. This doesn’t quite work for Team Sonic Racing's concept, where characters play in their classic teams (with a few changes) and have to rely on each other to win each race. Each team has a Speed character (Sonic, Amy, Shadow, etc.), with a race car that has faster speed than average; a Technical character (Tails, Omochao, Rouge, etc.) with better handling and the ability to pick up rings more easily; and a Power character (Knuckles, Big, E-123 Omega, etc.) that is slower, but unaffected by most road hazards.

Five teams, 15 characters total, and the entire game is built around teamwork. The car of your teammate closest to first place leaves a trail behind, and the other two can drive along that trail to gain a speed boost. It feels a little like teamwork rubberbanding. Racers can pick up Wisps as power-ups – many of which feels directly inspired by similar items in Mario Kart.

One hour wasn’t enough to go too far into it, so I haven’t seen yet whether having to rely on your two CPU allies to get ahead leads to issues down the line (you never know how well the AI will play, after all), so… guess I’ll see when I get around to it.

Quick Review: LostWinds

Among the four elements, we tend to underestimate the power of the wind. This game seeks to change that.

LostWinds is a creation of Frontier Developments and was released on Steam on March 24th, 2016. However, the game is a little older than that, as it was originally released as a WiiWare title in May 2008, explaining some of the cursor-based controls.

A world so colorful, even the caves have colorful stones.

In a bright and colorful world, a young child named Toku gets lost in a cave and finds a magical stone. The stone contains the spirit of Enril, a wind deity who once helped seal the great evil Balasar with the help of her fellow elemental spirits. However, the barrier of Balasar’s prison is growing weak, and Enril cannot do much while she is trapped in this stone – her range of ability is limited. Toku must therefore carry her stone around and use her many wind-based abilities to prevent the return of this evil beast!

Do you believe you can fly?

This platform title feels a bit like a Metroidvania – you start with very few abilities, and gain more as you progress, therefore making more areas available, and so on. You control Toku moving left and right, and he jumps using Enril’s power. Examples of powers unlocked later include the ability to carry items and fire around thanks to the wind, and a vortex that traps an item in midair, allowing Toku/Enril to toss it with force at enemies and barriers. The world itself is rather small, but its 24 areas and their intertwined entrances (see the map below) can make it a little tricky to visit, even if you get rid of all the obstacles. You’ll also have to do a bit of backtracking all over the place as you gain new abilities, which is normal for Metroidvania-like games, fair enough. The world is also quite pleasant to visit as well and feels whimsical.

With how simple it is, you can call it Baby's First Metroidvania.
Which is fair, everybody needs to start somewhere,
and a smaller game is a good starting point.

Omnomnom. Then destroy the remains.
Nobody can have this big fruit after me!

The game is a bit on the short side (although, to be fair, all the games covered in Quick Reviews are), but very fun and a treat to both watch and experience. It’s very cute. The difficulty is just right, perhaps a little on the easy side; I didn’t struggle in a lot of places. My biggest struggle was when I missed some information on how to do an important ability (the vortexes), and had to look up how to do them (turns out, it requires the right-click mouse button when all of the previous abilities used the left-click one). There’s also a side-quest involving 24 statues, one hidden in every area, and gathering them nets an achievement. The in-game map helpfully shows which areas have statues that Toku hasn't found yet, which makes seeking them a lot easier. All of the other achievements are progression-based, so you get them by playing through the story.

Winc can carry fire, water and stone boulders.
It's the superior element!

The original WiiWare version likely involved holding A and moving the Wii remote to create Enril’s wind-based effects. I can imagine that one issue with that version, which can also be felt in the PC version with the Wii remote swapped for the mouse, is that sometimes the game will detect multiple targets that can be influenced by the wind. If, say, Tuko jumps near a boulder, the boulder might follow along, even if for some reason you’d want it to stay where it is. There's also the imprecision of relying on the mouse to do a lot of things in the game, but that's thankfully not too bad.

No1 Tuko, stop moving, I am trying to control the ball
now! Stop! You're in the way! Augh!

In short: Very few flaws, a definite recommendation. If you buy the game, play it, and enjoy it, then know that a sequel was made, subtitled Winter of the Melodias.

LostWinds is available for 9.99$.

Sonic Month: Sonic The Hegdehog 4 Episode 1 (WiiWare/Steam)

One example of a 2D moment in Sonic Colors.

The Sonic franchise never entirely let go of its 2D roots. Several 3D Sonic titles have areas where the perspective shifts to a 2.5D perspective – AKA, a side-scrolling 2D platformer with 3D graphics and backgrounds, sometimes appearing in the middle of a level that has 3D perspective and gameplay everywhere else. I recall many moments from Sonic Colors that were made that way. It would also be incorrect to claim that there weren’t new, pure 2D Sonic games released between 1994 and 2010, as many 2D titles were released for handheld consoles during that gap. As an example, we had Sonic Advance 1, 2 and 3 for the Game Boy Advance. However, due to the leaps in technology in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, the franchise focused on full 3D titles for its big releases on home consoles.

In October 2010, we saw the release of Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 1 on all current home consoles. It would be released to other platforms later, such as on Steam on January 19th, 2012. Fun fact: I bought the game on the Wii Shop Channel’s WiiWare section way back, at the price of 1500 Wii Points. That’s about 15 dollars. Though Episode I is sold for roughly 10$ on Steam, I got both it and Episode II as part of a bundle on Humble Bundle, which included several other Sonic games (Sonic CD was part of the same bundle). Since I own two versions on different platforms, I decided to try both versions for this review.

It's a small world, but big enough for a Mach 1 Hedgehog
to run around freely in.

Official material around the game discuss a fairly basic story for this one: After Sonic’s last adventure involving Knuckles and the Master Emerald, Eggman has been defeated (or so we assume). Sonic discovers a new set of territories and sets out to explore them. However, his old archnemesis is back, with new and improved variations on several of his previous badniks and machines. Once again, the hero’s duty calls for Sonic to protect these lands from the malevolent Doctor! I swear, that Robotnik is like a cockroach, there's nothing that keeps him down for good.

In the game itself, there isn’t much of that. Once the game starts, we’re in Splash Hill Zone, Act 1. After this level is completed, you unlock all three levels in four Zones: Splash Hill, Casino Street, Lost Labyrinth and Mad Gear. Each Zone also has a boss, accessible only after completing all three levels of that Zone. Simple enough. I’m surprised the game is non-linear like this. Want to try Mad Gear right away? You can. That’s nice. Completing all four Zones unlocks a fifth, consisting of a single level.

"Rated M" Month: Sexy Poker

Hello my fellow perverts! This is Nicolas, and I’m back again for our famous segment! You see, the other day I was reading an old Summum from my personal stash. I’ve said it previously, I’ll say it again for the new readers, Summum is basically Quebec’s answer to Playboy, so they’ve got excellent articles to read between full-page pictures of almost-naked ladies. As a fan of good journalism, and as an admirer of the female figure, I heartily approve of this. Anyway, I stumbled on an article about famous Quebec poker player Jonathan Duhamel, who won the main event at the 2010 World Series of Poker. This got me thinking… I rarely ever play card games, so I’ve never played poker with friends. For some reason, the article made me want to try something like it. But how to play poker… I mean, I already had a little poker game for my Nintendo DS, though it was part of a collection of games. But that was not enough. Especially not for my dirty brain. Therefore, I looked around and found a little game on the Wii Shop Channel called Sexy Poker. Sounds right up my alley. And 500 points? 5 dollars? Not bad for a little game.

For those who cannot guess from the title, Sexy Poker is basically a strip poker game on the Wii. You’ll tell me a game like this has no reason to be on a console aimed at children, but then again there’s been a Grand Theft Auto game on the Nintendo DS, and the Wii has the No More Heroes series, MadWorld and a few other M-rated title. Obviously, Sexy Poker is also rated M. It does remind of the skewered priorities of American censors, though; we have no problem subjecting kids to heads cut off, Mexican stand-offs and random acts of ultraviolence, but you better hide that breast! We’re a lot more lax about those things in Canada; Hell, the Deadpool movie was rated 13+ in Quebec rather than R! And it has a pegging scene, for Christ’s sake!

Art of Balance

Let’s see if we can finish the year with a review of another good WiiWare game! As I’ve proven multiple times in the past, a lot of WiiWare games turn out to be, well… less than stellar. It appears that a greater proportion of WiiWare titles are meh at best, horrible at worst. That’s in part why I like the idea of trying out demos of certain games available there. I would download all the available demos, try them out, and write a little post about each on this site. In fact, there will be Demo Reviews throughout all of December. However, there’s “trying” and then there’s “buying”. And one month where I had some extra bucks, I went through the Wii Shop Channel. I was looking for whatever WiiWare and Virtual Console games that looked interesting. I finally chose to buy Art of Balance, a puzzle game for which a Demo had been made available. I remembered liking the demo, so I told myself “hey, why not?” and paid.

So, what are my final thoughts on this game?

…Oh wait, I’m too early for that.

Let’s start at the beginning: Art of Balance was released by Shin’en Games in 2010. There are three versions of this game:

-The Wii one, which I am reviewing today;

-The 3DS one, adequately renamed Art of Balance Touch!

-And the Wii U version, also titled Art of Balance. Yep. Same title for a game different from its predecessor. Is that confusing enough for you? I mean, couldn’t it have been called Art of Balance U?

The full WiiWare title costs 800 points (thus approximately 8$). Sure, this can be a bad thing if the game doesn’t offer enough to justify its price (Looking at you, Pop-Up Pursuit), but from what I’ve seen so far, this is an excellent price for a high-quality game. The full game offers a hundred levels in its solo mode alone. And for a puzzle game, that’s a good start.

Defend Your Castle

This is gonna suck, isn’t it? I can tell when something is gonna suck, and I get the feeling that this is gonna suck. Then again, I’ve been wrong in the past… but this one, I don’t think I could be wrong. This looks sub-par even for an Internet-based game. I really wonder why I paid 500 Wii Points on this and not on something better- Ah yes, wait, I remember. I had bought only for 10 dollars of Wii Points, and I had already spent half of it on songs from the Just Dance 2015 store. Silly me. But hey, at least dancing to Papaoutai was fun, and Gangnam Style was good workout, so… I guess it doesn’t really matter?

Oh well. Defend Your Castle is one of the stranger ideas on the WiiWare section of the Wii Shop Channel. It kinda looks like something put together in a day by a single creator on Newgrounds. With minimal means.

Good thing it starts off pretty simple...

The idea behind the game is that you have a castle, and you have to defend it from incoming invaders (represented by freaking stick figures). At first, all you can do is grab the invaders with your godly powers, raise them high in the air, then letting them fall to their doom. At the end of a level, you can pay points from your score to upgrade your castle, repair its walls, increase its defenses, and all that stuff. As the levels go by, you find that more and more stick figures are coming, and you can’t keep up anymore. At some point, larger beasts come by, and you cannot lift them; instead you must click them three times.

Play With Birds

Can I go back to playing the Raving Rabbids' games, please? Why is it that I'm so unlucky with WiiWare games? Why do all the games that look fun end up sucking? Urgh...

Play With Birds was released by Games Farm on April 11^th, 2011. On the Wii Shop Channel, it costs 500 points (5 dollars). And had I known what was awaiting, I probably would have skipped. I guess that's the problem with WiiWare: There's no guarantee that you'll get something worth your money, and since you're probably not gonna look at a WiiWare game's reviews before buying it, you'll frequently end up playing some pretty bad stuff. Pop-Up Pursuit looked fun. It was horrendous. This one looked fun. Instead, it's creepy, unfinished and just plain annoying.

So, what's the idea? You are a little bird. In the game, your character first hatches from an egg, and then you have to fly around, play minigames, poop wherever you want (Yep, there's a poop button in this), collect Fame Points (the purpose of which is never explained in-game...), find a mate and make chicks. The cycle of life, in a nutshell.

But everything in this game is done so poorly that you pretty much can't enjoy it, no matter how much you try. In fact, I'm starting to doubt Nintendo even applies some form of quality control over the games distributed on the WiiWare... oh, and probably over the Wii games, too. This is leaving me kind of disillusioned. Do the higher-ups at Nintendo care about the image of their console? There's a lot less crap being put out on the PlayStation and Xbox consoles than there is for the Wii. That's a sad fact, but a fact nonetheless. Hell, there's also a lot of shovelware being put out for Nintendo's handheld consoles.

Hell, apparently this game was considered of “good enough quality” for the WiiWare section, but re-releases of games like La-Mulana weren't. And from the looks of it, everyone keeps on praising La-Mulana! So I seriously don't get it.

Sigh... let's get into the game, shall we? Figuratively, I mean, because literally it's impossible, and Thank God it is.

WarioWare: D.I.Y. Showcase

This review of the WiiWare game WarioWare: D.I.Y. Showcase is a follow-up to my review of WarioWare: D.I.Y., which you can read here, here and here.

Here it is, the final part of this mega-review of WarioWare: D.I.Y. and its WiiWare tie-in, Showcase! For those who didn't read the last three posts, this WarioWare game is all about creating your own content and sharing it with other people. One way to do this is from your DS to a friend's DS. A now-defunct way was to use Friend Codes, a feature called the Warehouse, and the possibility to share with people you had never met in your life. The final way to share your games, records or comics? Transfer them to this WiiWare game, which was made just for that.

No, really. All in all, WarioWare D.I.Y. Showcase is just that: An additional sharing tool that also lets you play your microgames on the big screen in your living room! Plus, you will not need an Internet connection to send stuff from your DS to your Wii! It also serves as an expansion to the plot shown in WarioWare: D.I.Y..

It even looks like it's smiling!

In case you don't remember: After a bad dream that involved video game creatures coming out of their world and attacking him (Geez, that sounds an awful lot familiar, doesn't it?), Dr. Crygor makes a machine called the Super MakerMatic 21, which can be used to make microgames, records and comics. Wario instantly smells jackpot (with his big nose, he can also smell truffles, illegal merchandises in suitcases, or the overly-smelly Ax body spray a mile away). He immediately orders the machine be mass-produced. Meanwhile, many of his employees have left WarioWare to create Diamond Software, all because of Wario's greedy ways. As a result, Wario hires the player to make games for him. Quite literally; he doesn't pay you. In fact, all the remaining employees of WarioWare seem absent from the DS game. They created their own company, Diamond Software, probably as revenge since Wario took all the credit for their creations.

Oh, but no worries. Wario seems to have moved his base of operations on an island. Why? No reason. The guy's just a jerk, and he's bitter towards his employees. This doesn't seem to have caused much friction; the only real broken friendship is that of 9-Volt and his ex-buddy 18-Volt; 9-Volt left for Diamond Software, while 18-Volt stayed behind to work for Wario, along with Kat, Ana, Dribble and Spitz. As such, there are four stages in Showcase, a total of 72 new microgames that you can send to your DS. That's awesome? Why, yes. Yes, it is.

Pop-Up Pursuit

I could live anywhere inside the great
big red circle, fopr all you know.

A bit of history: I am not originally an English speaker. I am very much a Québécois, with the French language and all. Okay, not quite French, but, well, our French dialect, with many differences with the international French you might know. Either way, I am the best English speaker in my house. If you called my mother and spoke to her in English, she'd hang up immediately; and my father knows English words, but only the names of the tools he works with. Ironically, he doesn't know the French names to those tools. He doesn't use a “cliquet”; he uses a ratchet, and the word "ratchet" appears in the middle of his French sentences like it has always belongd there.

I was also trying to introduce my parents to gaming. I tried, every once in a while; my mother loves to play bowling on Wii Sports Resort, and my father likes fishing games. I was looking for a party game that wasn't too expensive, one I could buy on the WiiWare, and which I could play with my parents and have fun with myself. Because what's the point of video games if you're not having fun? ...Anyway, this quest led me to buy a game called Pop-Up Pursuit.

I regret that purchase. You'll see why here and now.

New Updated List of Games

It's that time of the year again! Since the last list, in November 2013, my collection has grown quite a lot. Not to mention the amount of reviews that I've released since. Therefore, I think it would be better if I made the list of games that I own, those that I have reviewed so far and those that are to be reviewed.

By the way, with Planned All Along's first anniversary coming soon, don't forget to answer to the poll on the rigth side of the screen! Tell me which game or which theme month I should do in July 2014, amd what I should add to the blog for its first anniversary.

Bit Boy (WiiWare)

Um... Nah. ...Maybe... No. I could... Uh... Meh.

There's only so little I can say about a game devoid of all creativity. This WiiWare title... is not devoid of all creativity, there was a good idea at first... but then you see how it's handled, and... Urgh. Look. Bad ideas can be done in a way that they seem fine. You can't make something amazing out of something awful, but you can still do something of very relative quality if you are careful.. On the opposite side of the spectrum, there's ideas that seem creative at first, but which are handled so damn poorly that the results are just not very good. This... fits in the second category.

This is Bit Boy. It reminds of many different things, notably Pac-Man. I'm not a Pac-Man fan, though its influence on the gaming world is undeniable. However, Pac-Man wasn't bad, it was challenging, but you had to be really persistent if you wanted to beat all 255 levels. Sadly, not all imitations are good. This one is... indeed, bad. But it's hard to describe... I'd say the best way to show how bad it is... well... it's to describe how the game goes, as usual.

I hope you enjoy this review. Took me way long to find
pics for it. I mostly got images of "Meat Boy". No, really.

Should you buy it? Or should you skip this one? We'll see.

Reel Fishing Ocean Challenge

Just in case I haven't said it enough, Happy New Year! I hope you've celebrated the last moments of 2013 and the first moments of 2014. As for me, it was one gigantic family reunion at my house. My mother's side of the family is enormous, we had about twenty guests. It was epic. And it was really fun. Of course, it takes a lot of organization, what with thinking of the meals, the number of guests, the drinks, the activities, the desserts, the chairs and tables, the snacks, the decorations, space to park all the cars outside... did I mention the food?

Yeah, now we can really relax. I mean, I've relaxed pretty often during the two or three weeks I had away from university; I watched at least one film per day, I played a lot of games (as I can prove with my Demo Reviews; by the way, the last Demo Review for this one will be up tomorrow, and Sunday will be a post with links to all the Demo Reviews I posted), I had a lot of fun. I also met my friend, the Pokémon fan, to trade some Pokémon. And of course, I bought a couple games during that time.

Now that I think of it, there is one way to relax I have never really done: Fishing. I never had the chance to attach a worm on the hook, throw the line, and pull back when the line shakes. I never did that... In real life. In the gaming world, however, I had one major opportunity to do so, and it's called Reel Fishing: Ocean Challenge.

This is as simple as a game like this can be, and it's not a problem. The game is found on the WiiWare with a couple more fishing games, all of these also under the Reel Fishing franchise. I think I can start the year with an easy review like this. I ended last year so powerfully, I really need something simple to start 2014. Are you ready? Forget the cold weather outside, put on your fisher hat, and get ready, we're going to catch some fish!

Updated List of Games

As promised earlier today, here's a list of all the games in my collection. It changed a bit since last time, so I guessed it would have been a good idea to update the list.

Pokémon Rumble

(Sorry for posting this so late today; I had a lot of university homework and other real-life stuff to do that were, I have to admit, more important for my future as a whole than it would be to post this review. Anyway, here it is.)

Poké-Month is almost over, and we're getting closer to Halloween! As you noticed, I'm now in full Halloween mode, with a horror film review once in a while. However, the most horrifying thing ever isn't horror movies; it's endless repetitions.

Okay, just joking. But endless repetitions is a major problem in some games. Repeating the same thing, often the same tedious – or boring – task multiple times, is sometimes a factor on whether you'll replay a game or not. Likewise, a story aspect that gets repeated endlessly becomes boring after a while. Don't you just wish Peach would FINALLY put some protection around her castle to prevent Bowser from getting in or kidnapping her? Aren't you tired that Wile E. Coyote never, ever catches the Road Runner? Have Homer's stupid acts become annoying at best, insulting at worst, now that there's over 500 episodes of The Simpsons? Repetition is a problem that can hit anything that has run for a long time and whose formula has changed never enough to become interesting again. However, cases like this are much rarer inside a single game than it is as a problem that hits the franchise as a whole.

Today's game is this. The same concept gets repeated not once, not twice, not thrice, but a total of nine times. Each time with different critters. And yes, I know I'm talking about Pokémon, the series that has followed a similar formula in its main series ever since the first games. But Pokémon Rumble is not a main series game; it's a minigame spread out into a large game. Enter with me into the wonderful “world” of Pokémon Rumble and see if it should really be sold 1500 Wii Points.

New Games

Hi everyone! Just a little update on new games I bought recently.

So, first of all, a week ago I bought a game called Bass Pro Shops' The Hunt. It is, well... a hunting game. And so far, it's a lot of fun, even if it's not really easy. Some parts are really difficult, but I am more than halfway through the game. Expect a review of it someday. Much later, probably.

Also, I bought a Wii Points card yesterday, so I bought two games on the Wii Shop Channel.

The first is Pokémon Rumble, because I just felt like having another Pokémon game in my collection. That game might be too easy, however. Eh, I'm just gonna finish it faster and I'll be able to review it soon!

Last but not least, there have been games I keep hearing about and I want to play, badly. With the announcement of Mega Man in Super Smash Bros 4, I bought the first Mega Man game for the Virtual Console. I'm finally gonna play with the famous android.

Also, maybe someday, if I run out of WiiWare or Virtual Console games, I might spend a post talking about the Demos you can buy for free. That ought to be interesting.

Don't forget to tune in Sunday at night for the second part of the Thrillville: Off The Rails review!

Yard Sale: Hidden Treasures Sunnyville

(Note: The game reviewed today is also available as a game on Internet as well as a PC game, so there might be some pictures that are from those versions of the game.)

After last week, I needed a break. The Bullet Hell got the better of my thumbs, so I decided I would play a game that's not as harsh on one's fingers. And I might have found such a game on the WiiWare. Remember my article on the strange stuff we can find on the WiiWare? Well, not everything in there is that bad. There's a lot of gems on the WiiWare. You just gotta dig through the thousand or so games in the collection to find the good ones.

Today's game isn't half bad, actually. As long as you can appreciate calm games. You probably noticed that the past two games were related to the Internet: Tower Defense games and Bullet Hell games. Well, once again, this is a type of game we can find on Internet for free, which is not to say all games like this are of the same quality; likewise, while we can indeed find games like this on Internet for free, it's also a very popular type of computer game that you can buy at the nearest store. The WiiWare section actually has a few of those games, but I'll review only one. Or, anyway, I don't think I'll review another of those.

This is an object finding game. The whole point behind such games is that you are given multiple still images containing lots and lots and lots of objects; you are given a list of objects, all of which you must find in the image. Each environment is a different level, and usually it gets harder as the game progresses. Harder, as in the objects are hidden better, or there are more objects to find.

Welcome to Yard Sale: Hidden Treasures, where every level is a yard sale and you can steal decorations, animals, cars and even LANDMARKS from caricatures.

WeirdWare

I talked about it in yesterday's post, now here it is! An overview of the strangest things you can find in the Wii Shop Channel's Wiiware.

I like to call these jewels of bizarre WeirdWares.

For the record...

Just to be clear, here's all the games I presently own.