Earthbound and Dune 25.04.16

Lovely Planet (PS4) I'd seen and heard a bit about this when it came to PCs last year and so I was really pleased when this popped up on the PlayStation store last week. It's a simple enough game, and FPS platformer where the levels are condensed into 10-20second chunks. Starting off simply, it progresses enemy types from static squares, to static squares which fire to balls which upon landing kill you instantly (which puts a real sense of pressure on playing as soon as you hear the distinct noise of them launching). The game is so quick to jump into then get back into once I inevitably died that it works really well, and as the levels get harder and seemingly more impossible I found myself doing specific routines through the levels, only ever annoyed at my own mistakes. I had a great time with it, the music is the only downside, at first it's chirpy and novel but it's on a short loop and gets repetitive really quickly. 

Starfox Zero (WiiU) I really, really wanted to enjoy this game. I really don't like what I've played of it, I can't get to grips with the dual screen mentality of aiming and piloting the ship, the issues I had with it started early on when aiming down and the spider like creatures, it felt so awkward looking down at the game pad while I was crashing into all kinds of things on the main screen. With no visibility of health on the gamepad on the rare occasion I felt comfortable enough to look up at the television screen I realised my ship was all but destroyed. When factoring in end bosses with specific points to target I found all of these overly complicated controls way too overwhelming (and this was level one). It got even more rough when adding the chicken walker type ship, the pacing of levels drops to a standstill at this point and I was scratching around looking for fiddly objectives (which on the two occasions I took to this mode of transport where identical). The level I left the game on was a messy affair involving a gyrocopter and a robot hanging off it, which was painfully slow and had the worst application of hacking I've experienced in a video game. I will go back, it was a little more bearable once I'd reduced the application of motion controls, but the issues I had were so much deeper than the two screen features. On the rare occasion it stripped back to just me in a spaceship shooting waves of enemies I had a feeling of nostalgia which wasn't unpleasant. Sadly to even the traditional Arwing combat felt at time sparse, especially the fight against Pigma, I had a feeling of isolation in space which I don't imagine was intentional, searching a sea of darkness for a lone pig in a space ship throwing insults at me. If this was how the game was meant to feel it was a daring take on the genre I guess. To look at it has some nice details and it has some neat throwbacks to the older games. Coming with it is Starfox Guard, which I played a few rounds of, and that was a much more fun experience. I want to play that a lot more than the game it was a bonus to.