Still not feeling like committing fully to one of the larger games, I spent Day 7 bouncing around the smaller titles and shooting for some stamp-heavy playlists, and of course, reporting for my daily dose of Ghoulies torture…

Check out the previous days here.

Milestones

Gunfright: Amazingly, I found myself completing all the milestones in Gunfright. It’s a simple game, requiring you to wander around the map searching for a wanted bandit by following the directions given to you by pointing townsfolk. When you reach the bandit, you go into a duel, which requires you to shoot them before you do. How I’d have the patience for this without the rewind function I don’t know, as most of the time they hit you first, and in doing so send you back to the start of the hunt.

Rewind lets you effectively have as many cracks at the duel as you like, which is a massive relief, as wandering around the town is a huge chore. Scattered around the town there are cacti, women, pointing townsfolk and tumbleweeds. Making contact with any of these things means instant death. Two things serve to make this particularly aggravating: The first is your excruciatingly slow walk speed, and the second is the fact that they move in complete random directions, meaning there’s no way to anticipate where they might move next, taking any skill out of the act of avoiding them. Again, rewind relieves the pain of this feature, but it’s still infuriating navigating your way through the town.

Interestingly, hitting Y switches the perspective of the map, facilitating a 3D illusion to the isometric gameplay. It’s neat, but never useful and only really serves to confuse things. A feature that really is good however is your horse, Panto, who doubles your walk speed which is a godsend. If only he lasted longer than a few seconds.

It’s a repetitive game but far from unplayable, which is why I trudged on through to the 20th duel in one sitting. The names of the villains are cool, and they all look different – familiar aliases like Billy the Kid, Buffalo Bill and the Sundance Kid all make appearances, that is until the final three, one of which bizarrely is just called ‘Mexicans’… damn those Mexicans?

It was a relief to finish off the milestones, but I’ve still got the final Snapshot to do, which is a pain. All things considered I’ll be glad to see the back of this one.

Grabbed by the Ghoulies: Finally some milestone stamps are starting to happen in Ghoulies. After running into an exploding worm in the garden, I gained the ‘Only Ghoul in the World’ achievement, indicating I’d encountered every enemy type, which also gave me a stamp.

When I checked the milestones page, to my relief I discovered that there are some achievements that don’t actually give you milestones stamps – and these are some of the tougher ones, namely beating Death and completing Challenge 21, which is essentially replaying the whole game on Hard Mode. I was dreading Challenge 21 as I’m already sick of this game, so it’s a relief I won’t need it for a stamp!

I also triggered the cleverly named ‘Future of gaming’ achievement and stamp, which essentially requires you to survive 20 quick-time-events. Sneaky.

As for the game itself, I’m almost at the end of Chapter 3 of 5 now, but I understand the final 2 chapters are mercifully much shorter. The game isn’t horrible, just pretty shallow compared to Rare’s better offerings. What I will say thought is whoever thought twin-stick attacks were a good move really made a poor decision. This was the first Rare game with a controller with two sticks, so it must have just been an exciting thing for them to try this I suppose. Having the camera mapped to the shoulder triggers and attacks to the stick just feels wrong, and you never quite get used to it.

Jetpac: Finally got the final two stamps here, one for total enemies killed and the other for scoring over 250,000 points. I still feel these two stamps are too demanding, as you have to essentially complete the game four times to trigger them.

Killer Instinct: Ok I’m in trouble here. I’ve never player KI before, and I’m generally terrible at fighting games at the best of times. I jumped right into arcade mode and got destroyed. I fired up training mode and learned some moves, but I can tell this will be a long, steep learning curve for me. Please leave any tips in the comments!

Snapshots

Sabre Wulf: I thought I’d try Sabre Wulf stamps again. What a mistake. The gameplay is just horrible. The hit detection is way off, and the enemies just spawn constantly at random. I hate this game.

Cheap stamps

I’m not proud of doing this, but you’re awarded a stamp for simply starting every game. After my patience had been ground down in Gunfright I needed a quick fix, so I did it. I opened every single game I hadn’t played yet, just to get the respective stamp. Sue me. I’m now apparently an Aficionado, level 2.

Playlists

In one final effort, I had a quick go at the ‘Collect-a-thon’ playlist, and thankfully nailed it! It wasn’t too hard, but I definitely fluked the final Digger-T-Rock jewel collecting one. 5 stamps earned. I’ll take it.

Overall

Despite some good progress, particularly with Gunfright and the playlist, this was probably my least enjoyable day so far. I’m worried this will become a bit of a trend if I’m not careful, and should probably sample at least one N64 game per session to keep my morale high.

Stampers Forever Progress: 39%

Check out the previous days here.

Rare Replay is available from Amazon, check out the price here.