Greetings Backloggers! Welcome to column 007, where if I were planning better, I would have gone and played one of the various James Bond games lurking in my backlog. Instead, I set out with a plan to knock out a seemingly easy SEGA classic that’s been in my backlog in one form or another since picking up Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection for my PS3 back in 2009.
That didn’t quite go as planned. Either I’m rubbish at old arcade games (entirely possible), HowLongToBeat.com has their data based on a save-scummed Easy mode run (also possible), or most likely it’s a combination of the two. Regardless, where HLTB puts completion time for Super Thunder Blade at under a half-hour, I’m currently sitting at five times that the final level yet to go. More on that next week.
About to start some trouble.
Everyone’s got to sleep, right?
In the meantime, I decided to knock another short Visual Novel off my list, and fired up Invisible Apartment, Chapter 1 – a free introductory chapter to the much longer Invisible Apartment VN. In this introduction; we meet our heroine, a teenage hacker with a mysterious past, an uncertain future, and a chip on her shoulder.
After nearly getting caught hacking into the city’s Central Computer, she finds an apartment that’s been removed off the grid by a master hacker. That’s where things really heat up, with a mysterious ally, a dark secret, and a sinister cabal all coming into play. There’s a branching decision tree, though paths lead to either failure or the same ending conclusion. The writing is decent, although marred by a few minor grammar and spelling issues that a good editing pass really should have caught.
A little later with our two main characters
The biggest issue here is that this game really didn’t help my backlog. Oh sure, it’s off now, but the introductory chapter did its job, and now the other three chapters are sitting on my wishlist waiting for a good Steam sale to jump into my backlog! Therein lies the danger with episodic games, I suppose. Quick to finish a single episode, but you may end up with a longer backlog than when you started.
Backlog Verdict: Worth playing, especially since it’s free, but you may find yourself adding three other chapters to your backlog when you’re done.
Previous Backlog Count: 1,136
Current Backlog Count: 1,132 – Removed a few MP only games, plus finishing Invisible Apartment, CH1.
Next Time: Wrapping up a classic.
