That didn’t sound right to me but Mobygames does say that the C64 version came out in late 1989. I know the sequel never came to the Commodore, which always bummed me out. But I too eventually picked up a copy of the Genesis port. Even though I don’t own a Genesis.
edit: man, poking around Mobygames I had totally forgotten how vitally important 1989 was for me in terms of gaming. Starflight, Magic Candle and Ultima V were released on C64 that year. Those stole so much of my time! Well that’s not fair to say, I gave my time willingly.
I remember playing Starflight on my old C64 around 1990. Thought it was completely awesome but, alas, my disks were corrupted and I had to abandon the game about 1/4 of the way in. It was one of my biggest regrets in gaming because I found the sense of discovery amazing.
Rumu is a short game (1-2 hours) about a robotic vacuum cleaner who gets taught how to take care of its inventors’ house by a friendly AI. There isn’t a ton of gameplay, and probably nothing you’ll have to think too hard about, but the story and atmosphere are worth checking out. Watch the trailer and see if it’s something you might like.
Coming here to recommend the intro movie for Haven. The game is not bad so far, either (it’s on Game Pass), but I don’t know that anything can live up to this watercolor music video:
For whatever reason, I get a kick out of games that let me mine. Minecraft, SteamWorld Dig, etc. So this was a no brainer for me. I actually don’t remember that last game that I bought that didn’t have achievements, so that’s how much I like this type of gameplay.
It has digging mechanics very similar to SteamWorld Dig, but no story. You just mine and upgrade equipment from the profits you make. You can “die” pretty easily by letting a boulder fall on you or dropping too far down a shaft. You then instantly start up at the top of the mine, but you lose whatever ore/gems in your backpack.
Yeah that’s awesome, I totally didn’t know that Miner Dig Deep existed outside of that Xbox indie thing. I’m totally picking that up, I really enjoyed that game.
I also installed Doom Eternal and Dragon Quest Roman Numeral, but what I’ve been actually playing on Game Pass is a Metroidvania+Pokemon game called Monster Sanctuary. Plot is fine (standard hero story - I’m pretty sure I’ll have to defeat the big bad evildoer and become the saviour of the monster sanctuary at the end of this)
The platforming bits are mixed with 3-on-3 (or more rarely 6 on 6) turn-based battles that have a solid amount of depth - different damage types and status effects, stats and gear slots. Monsters have a tiered skill tree that you get to choose how to fill out - tiers unlock every 10 levels, but you can also buy a skill reset for cheap at the shops so respeccing is easy. The monsters also give you metroidvania skills to use in the exploration/puzzling (destroy obstacles, traversal skills) and you can easily switch any of your monsters. The puzzling and platforming is light and mostly unlocking access to treasure chests or new areas - I’m basically pretty bad at jumping puzzles but the bit in here was at my level of fun (so if you’re an expert they’ll probably be trivial). It’s a supersolid B++/A-- game - nothing new or groundbreaking, but its all the good parts you’d expect from the description, implemented with polish. Pixel Art warning though!
That sounds pretty cool… except for the pokemon battles, which I find tedious. Are they menu-based battles like in pokemon? The trailer makes it look like maybe they aren’t. How do they work?
It’s a 3 on 3 turn-based menu battler. Your 3 monsters each get an action (you can choose order) and then the enemies attack. You have Health and Mana Points, but these are completely refreshed between battles. You have a default attack, but all your main attacks take Mana Points, which you recover every round. There’s a combo system, where you get a damage bonus based on the number of hits/buffs done by your other monsters this turn, so a lot of attacks are mult-hit, and one strategy is to do lots of smaller multi-hits with the first couple monsters and then a big final hit. Lots of damage types and resistances. You get scored based on how fast you finish monsters, the amount of health you have at the end of your turn, and how well you exploit the combo/damage type weakness, and get a rating out of five stars which determines your loot quality. Five stars generally requires you to hit hard and be done fast (in 3-4 rounds), although you can get by with a couple stars if you bring damage types the enemy resists/doing lots of healing. There’s even a basic “weak to this damage/resists this damage/attacks with this damage” in the monster selection stage before a battle starts, although I’ll still read it wrong or forget that I only put one point in that element’s skill, etc…
There are Champion fights where you fight your team of 3 against a single supercharged version of one monster that has extra stats and can act twice in a turn. And “Keeper Battles” = Trainer battles where you can bring a team of 6 (PvP works this way) - still 3 vs 3 at a time, but you replace monsters that are ko’ed with one from the bench.
One thumbs up I read was that they’re a Kickstarter success story - they raised money for stretch goals and implemented what they promised, which is always awesome.
Murder By Numbers combines a visual mystery novel with Picross-style puzzle-solving. Picross is a spacial logic puzzle where you use numerical hints to fill the correct squares in a grid until a (rough, pixelated) picture is completed.
What Murder By Numbers gets right is this smart basic concept–which is well integrated into the story, in the form of your robot sidekick who identifies clues no one else can find via solving puzzles–as well as the game’s sense of style, its cute (if light and unserious) dialogue, appealing characters, and the relatively high quality of the crimes you have to solve. (There are four cases, each of which is longer than the last.) The jazzy easy listening soundtrack, by Phoenix Wright composer Masakazu Sugimori, is also excellent, if a little repetitive. You’ll be bopping your head while clicking grid boxes, even if you hate easy listening music. Trust me.
These good qualities come with some rough edges: The UI isn’t always helpful or as clean and polished as it could be. The way the puzzles are designed, they all end up feeling pretty similar, which if you know a game like Paint It Back, doesn’t have to be the case. I also wish the balance of dialogue to puzzles was tilted a little more in favor of the latter, though this mixture gets batter later in the game.
But that’s it. Just a few rough edges. Otherwise, the game is delightful and worth your time. Picross has always been a wonderful time-waster. The sassy story in Murder By Numbers gives you a greater reward than just passing the hours away.
