Celeste

The mountain teaches you about yourself.

At a glance, this certainly isn't the prettiest platformer with blocky sprite graphics - but the music and story are definitely top notch. In it, you play as a girl who has decided to reach the summit of Celeste mountain but is not so secretly undermining her own quest.

There are deaths a plenty (mine got to just under 1700) but the game is always encouraging, and difficulty wise the main story is far easier than Super Meatboy and IWTBTG. If you are aching for punishment though, there are plenty of secret levels that will scratch that itch.

It's a bit of a slog to reach the summit!

It also comes with an "assist mode" which can help if the game is still too tough, but if you don't like platformers, you aren't going to like this - assist mode or not. If you DO like platformers, then this one is highly recommended. I give it 3 strawberries out of 5.

Insight: Grab and jump with no direction key will let you leap directly up a wall.

Treasure Adventure Game

Enjoyable and fun, until it starts to kill you! :P

While the advertised quest is to simply collect 12 treasures, the story and world in this pixel platformer has some surprising depth and decent game play, featuring a good variety of 8-bit music, puzzles, and boss fights.

The talking animals are a cute idea too.

Its also quite lengthy thanks to all the parts where you will undoubtedly get stuck and go backtracking. Fortunately, travel methods improve in speed as the game progresses.

Lastly, while not as hard as Super Meat Boy or IWBTG, there is still a fair amount of difficulty in this game, enough for me to wave off anyone who isn't into platformers. For everyone else though, this itself is quite a treasure. I give it 3 bumbling henchmen out of 5.

Note: Treasure Adventure World, the reimagining of this game, has better graphics if the pixel stuff bugs you too much. You can get it on Steam. :)

Super Meat Boy

[Post #15 of the Blaugust Challenge!]

I know this has been out for awhile but I only recently got my hands on it thanks to one of my guildies gifting it to me. Simply put it is a challenging platformer and muscle memory game in which the player controls a square who is trying to save another square from an evil square. Yes, the graphics are quite on the simplistic side but the animation and humor makes up for it rather nicely. You've probably never seen squares this cute, or monsters so happy (most have a smiley face).

This poor cube dies a lot. :P

Difficulty wise it is more forgiving than I Wanna Be The Guy, at the start anyway, and slowly ramps up as you play through each stage and then through each dark world zone which contains similar maps just harder with more traps and/or in reverse. To unlock dark world zones you have to beat a set time limit on each Light world zone. These range from 3 to 60+ seconds depending on the map. Personally, while I have cleared all the Light world stuff some of the Dark World remains unplayed for me (15% to go according to the stats) and I've not yet completed all the extra warp zones nor collected all the other collectibles in game. The Kid from IWTBTG is actually a playable character too, so you can guess the difficulty level once you reach him.

There are also leader boards which add some reason for re-playability if you like having small numbers next to your name. My best rank was 12,325. What is most impressive for me, after some of the deviously designed stages, is the soundtrack. Each zone has a theme done three ways. Light, Dark, and 8-bit for the warp zones. This is on top of boss fights and cut scenes, and given there is no voice or speech the music carries a fair bit of weight. 

Lastly I should mention that the loading screen always highly suggests a controller to play too, though I'm doing just fine on a standard PC keyboard (which is my personal preference anyway). Maybe it's easier with a controller but given the nature of the game... why the hell would you use a controller anyway? All up I give this frustrating yet addictive game four whirling saws of death out of five. Just be sure you have a patient temperament to dying well over 9000 times before getting it.

Blaugust Bonus: One of my favourite foods is spaghetti and I love almost all types of it as long as they avoid seafood. Anytime I go into a new restaurant it's one of the first things I look for to order then judge the entire establishment based on that. I think it's one of the easiest things to cook, so if they can't get that right then there's no point in coming back to order anything else. It's just one of those things I can eat all the time. I'd just get fat(ter). :P

A Valley Without Wind

In the year 888 reality collapsed, and instead of killing everything it just killed the majority of mankind and messed up the world like a jigsaw puzzle of time eras now controlled by an evil overlord and the never ending storm that rages across the planet. That's the premise of this game which has most of its focus on platforming through various randomly generated terrain though it does have a tiny building and strategy component as well.

It's up to you to travel through the very strangely designed structures and pyramids full of card board boxes to find survivors, build a colony using wind shelters (that look like ordinary wind mills) to push back the endless storm and ocean buoys (that somehow calm turbulent seas) and ultimately defeat the very passive main bad and his four lieutenants.

They don't like coming out into the rain I guess.

The music is pretty good but with the size of some maps (mainly the annoying and sometimes dark mazes) you'll probably be turning it off due to repetition. Controls wise it's pretty slick too and has great adjustable difficulty that should suit the most novice of players to those who are already "the guy" (IWTBTG). Be warned though that it is very grindy. While you are free to march straight to the overlord's lair at any time you will probably want to do a few things before hand such as clearing a path through the storm to his place, levelling your skills up by harvesting and crafting stuff, and levelling him down by defeating his lieutenants and convincing other survivors to go attack him.

There are a variety of extra missions scattered around which mainly deal with fighting foes or surviving the environment but you would have most likely played all of them by the time you beat the first lieutenant. To that end I'm not sure how many people actually continue on after defeating the overlord to sail to the next continent and basically do it all again. Still, it is pretty addictive and is a decent ride for those who enjoy platforming games (at least through the first playthrough) so I give it three wind shelters out of five.

Vying for my Attention

Interesting matchup this week between two of my "active" MMOs with Neverwinter Online's Summer Festival versus the return of the Super Adventure Box in Guildwars 2. Both are temporary events which will be gone in a few weeks and both will require some doing before I am "finished" with them. Going purely by the rewards, NWO wins out. Sure, SAB may have cool new skins that I also want but NWO is offering a mount and a companion which in the grand scheme of things is a more worthwhile reward. It's always functionality over fashion for me. Also the Summer Festival tasks are pretty trivial but this makes them severely grindy, especially when it comes to pseudo pvp in the race to harvest flowers. The festival has attracted many trolls to it, and most of them are of the player variety.

Conversely SAB will probably be more fun (/frustrating) to play, but is less rewarding. I am especially looking forward to the "Tribulation Mode" which the designer already stated weeks in advance is for a small minority of players. Specifically those who liked IWBTG (which I won). Can't help but wonder what the current villain is going to be doing while all the heroes go and play a video game though?

A deceptively cute cover for a fiendishly tough game.

So what's a guy to do then? Play the field, obviously! Having an alternate to switch to after burning out in the other should work well in theory. I'll let you know how it goes in practice! Elsewhere, Disney has decided to close their kid MMO "Toontown". Nothing like a server wipe/shutdown experience for the youngins. They wished upon a star, but were a few millions years late. That star is dead. Just like their dreams.