What I Played and Read This Week - '25/12/21

Games

My journey through Data East's platformer catalogue continued with Congo's Caper. I appreciated it for its verticality (think Sonic the Hedgehog if switching 'tracks' was often only a high jump away), but what I'll remember most of all is the strange powerup system. There's only one powerup that doesn't just give you lives: the red gem. What it does depends on your current state:

• When you're Monkey Congo, collecting a gem turns you into Human Congo and taking a hit kills you.
• When you're Human Congo (the state you respawn in after losing a life), collecting a gem fills one notch of the three-part transformation bar. Taking a hit turns you back into Monkey Congo and empties the bar. Only by collecting three gems in a row without taking a hit can you turn into Super Congo.
• When you're Super Congo, taking a hit only removes one notch from the bar; if there are no notches left, you return to Human Congo. Collecting a gem refills a bar, or gives you an extra life (!) if the bar is full. Also, you jump way higher and have a Tanuki Suit-style slowfall you can do by mashing. 

Hence a strange rich-get-richer system where if you play well, you're very strong until you play very poorly, but if you play poorly, you're very weak until you play very well. I don't think this is necessarily bad; it makes the kind of sustained skilled play necessary to hit Super Congo in the first place feel much more rewarding. It's just very odd.

Joe & Mac 2 is the next entry, taking away some of the first game's brawler elements and moves (RIP the high jump) in favor of some vestigial RPG elements. Instead of a linear stage select screen, you can navigate a world map, doing four of the game's six stages in whichever order you wish and visiting a town to spend wheels on items. Unfortunately, all of the items are either healing consumables or completely pointless; you can upgrade your house, and send girls flowers in the hopes that one of them will like them and marry you, but neither of these things actually do anything. Subweapons are gone, replaced by food that temporarily replaces your club with a rather slow and inconvenient projectile spit and a powerup that makes your club emit a shockwave. The game overall is rather easy except for some frankly ridiculous jumps across tiny moving platforms over a death pit in the volcano area, and an odious boss rush in the final stage that expects you to defeat every boss in the game on three lives, with no heals. Annoyingly, running has been nerfed, now preventing attacking (even when holding still so long as the button is held!) and making you horribly slippery (half the problem with the awful volcano level). In a first for the series, the final boss was not Satan!

Kirby's Dream Land 2 is a deeply unremarkable Kirby game; like Kirby's Dream Land 1, the gameplay benefits from the smaller screen, with the lack of vertical space making it less trivial to fly around enemies. Discovering the different copy-ability-and-animal combos (and learning which ones are overpowered, like Spark x Fish) is also fun. Otherwise, it's whatever and I don't think I'll finish it.

As for RPGs, I've been taking another crack at Titan Quest spiritual successor Grim Dawn, this time with all the DLC. I think its bland attack VFX are a problem that a Diablo-like—a power fantasy about mowing down hordes of monsters with flashy attacks—can't afford to have, and it doesn't push you toward an interesting skill rotation like Last Epoch; my build currently consists of a big AoE on cooldown, a smaller AoE with no cooldown, and a bunch of passives and sustains, with the potential to grab one or two more cooldown AoEs later. The continuous, semi-open world is neat, at least.

Books

Unfortunately, I really slacked on my reading this week. I'm trying to read a chapter of Anne of Green Gables a night because it seems like that sort of book, but I haven't been great about it. I also started Evolution: A Very Short Introduction, which opens, amusingly, by defending the existence of evolution. The early aughts, everybody!