Thanks for that warm welcome back to the games review world.  I didn’t mandate expect such a thunderous applause!  My readers = best readers.

 

First Life

Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed (Vita) 

First off that’s an extraordinarily long title for what could easily be called “Sega Karts” or something else easier on the tongue.  Not that you should play this with your tongue mind you.  Anyway, this is a cart racer with Sonic and some “All Stars” going at it in a game that looks suspiciously like every other cart racing game ever made.

 

• What gets carte blanche: A lot actually.  My initial thought was, “A cart racer from Sega.  This won’t end well.”  Way to be objective Skare.  So I loaded this bad boy up and chose Sonic and his super fast car thinking I would easily win my first race.  Then I got destroyed.  Sonic sucks.  It takes him so long to accelerate and I crashed into walls so much that I never got to see that blazing speed.  Then I chose Alex Kidd, a character long buried in the annals of video game history.  He rocks.  That’s the first big plus.  Choosing the right character for how you race makes a big difference.  Anyway, what’s fun about the game is the “transformed” is in reference to the vehicles that transform based on the segment of the race.  So if you hit water, now it’s a boat instead of a car.  Oooooooor, you can launch into the air for some segments and fly.  It sounds gimmicky but the controls were actually really well done for all segments and it was a real thrill to incorporate the different vehicle styles into one race.  Tracks can also change mid race.  Lap 1 may feature all road while later laps see collapsing highway give way to a water section.

• What should be carted off: Nothing is so glaring a flaw that I would say “stay away” but there’s some fairly generic things going on here.  The weapons are pretty standard for the genre with nothing standing out.  Some power ups actually seemed to put me at a disadvantage.  There was one that looks like it should supercharge your vehicle but the brief increase in speed is followed by a fairly severe deceleration where you then need to get back up to normal speed.  I actually lost a race thanks to this “power up.”

 

How far did I get: I played through several races with Alex Kidd and leveled him up once which was semi rewarding.

Who is this for: Cart racing fans should check it out for sure.  It’s not the prettiest and may not have the most recognizable characters for everyone but it performs well and pumps a little fresh thinking into the category.  Any old school Sega fans might get a kick out of it as well.

 

Second Life

Urban Trial Freestyle (Vita) 

You’re on some super cool dirt bike and trying to get through some tracks laid out in the middle of the city for money and points.  This is the 2D sidescroller of bike games which puts the emphasis solely on speed control and landing.

• What’s full throttle: First and foremost, mistiming a flip and landing on your head will never grow old.  The environments are over the top in a good way and can bring a lot of interesting elements to the basic concepts of ramps, jumps hills and valleys.  Smashing your face on something while the bike keeps going never gets old.  The physics and controls are both well done so it’s a nice pick up and play title.

 

• What’s idling: While landing on your head from a failed flip never grows old, landing the flip well does.  The very simple game mechanics lead to levels feeling very repetitive.  Tricks are essentially “back flip” or “front flip” with the possibility teased of maybe being able to land a double back flip if you play enough to start getting the best upgrades.

 

How far did I get: I played for a little while to unlock some new tires and a new engine to see if they made the game fresh again.  A little, but it took an agonizingly long time to get them it felt like and involved a lot of replaying levels for better scores and more money.

Who is this for: I have trouble recommending this to any subset of gamer, but if you want something you can play for a few minutes and put down without losing sleep over it, this might be a winner.

 

Hunger Game

Don’t Starve (PS4) 

This survival adventure makes great use of the lessons learned in Dark Souls (I’m a reviewer and must therefore do the trendy thing of using the phrase “Dark Souls” to hook more readers).  Patience, careful exploration and creativity will lead to a successful outing as the “Gentleman Scientist” character tries to scrape out a continued existence in a landscape filled with imaginable horrors (someone had to have imagined them or they wouldn’t be in the game right?).

 

 

• What will leave you hungry for more: Graphically it’s nothing special but artistically it’s a treat. Dark humor is interspersed well and makes it enjoyable to really sink your teeth into the available content.  For example, after catching a rabbit I of course wanted to prepare it for food (starving to death is a thing in this game).  I was greeted with the command of “murder” for my live rabbit.  Priceless, if not just a little morbid.  Searching the landscape is different every time thanks to a procedurally generated map.  Combining things to make new things is fun and often intuitive.  The race against multiple clocks provides real tension to the game.  Hungry?  Why wait?  Seriously, why would you wait?  You need to find food or you’re dead.  Is your brain meter diminishing (I think it’s supposed to be sanity or something but regardless it goes down).  Make sure you know where to pick flowers to boost that cranium level.  Getting dark?  Yup, that’s a problem.  You’re gonna wanna stop what you’re doing and make a fire.  Adding even more to the tension is the fact that if you die, you’re dead.  Gotta start from scratch.  So yeah, the stakes can be quite high.  I did find an altar to Satan or something that revived me after one death (something in the dark took me, and I have no idea what it was) but essentially dead is dead.

• What will leave a bad taste in your mouth: Starting over can be a huge turn off for a lot of players.  With my first run ever I spent about two hours playing.  I made it ten days which, after reading other people’s reviews and general community consensus, seems to be pretty fantastic (not to toot my own horn or anything….toot toot).  When I finally died for reals (this was the run where the Altar of Satan gave me another chance) it meant that the last two hours were meaningless for the next time I played.  Unless you count the fact that I unlocked a new character.  She can burn things with her lighter.  That was pretty cool.  Anyway, the net result is that when I loaded the game again (with my pyromaniac character) I had to start off collecting twigs and flint to make an ax again so I could get wood for fire.  I had to collect grass and twigs for traps for rabbits again so I didn’t starve (I did starve eventually thanks to carelessness).  I had to collect flowers again to make a pretty head band to ward of insanity.  It’s grindtastic!  Capping this off was the excruciatingly sudden and almost cheap way I died with my first character.  I was running around mining for rocks so I could use my science machine to learn how to make walls to make my fortress of awesomeness and out of the blue (not literal, I don’t think the game uses the color blue a lot) came two hounds that killed me.  Just like that my gentleman scientist was no more.  Crap.

 

How far did I get: Well there’s no levels or anything so time (two hours the first time, about an hour the second) is one measure.  The game seems to be predicated on how long you survived.  My record was ten days.  The second run I learned how to make a sleeping bag which I then used immediately.  I forgot I was close to starving and woke up in a lack of food haze that led to my demise.  Crap.

Who is this for: If you like surviving you gotta try this. Plus or not it’s a very well put together game.  Beware of the grind and dive in, it’ll be a blast.