Recently played through an absolute brain-bender of a puzzle game called Patrick's Parabox.

Initially I was a bit cheesed off. I'd had my eye on this for ages on itch.io, where it seems to be DRM free. I was just waiting for it to go on sale. Then one day, I saw it on sale on Steam. I could find no information about its DRM status on that platform, but thinking a little indie game like this would surely be DRM free there as well, I took the plunge. It didn't take long to find out I had been incredibly mistaken, when I tried to back it up and play it on my main, Steam-less, machine.

Lesson learned.

So after I sighed my frustrations out, I got down to playing. So, what's it all about?

In this game, you play as a little square, and you have the task of pushing other squares around until the necessary spaces on the level have the correct kind of square on them. Sounds pretty easy, right?

Well think again.

Things start to get really weird really quickly, when you start pushing squares into, through, and out of one another, including into and out of themselves in seemingly infinite loops.

The game progresses through a bunch of different stages, where each stage contains a bunch of puzzles and side puzzles that all center around a similar theme or mechanic. As you would imagine, at the start of the game, these mechanics are quite simple, requiring only a little bit of thought. But as the game continues, some of these newly introduced mechanics and ideas started to blow my brain.

Each stage only requires you to beat a certain amount of puzzles in order to advance to the next, but early on in the game I planned on clearing all of the puzzles. However, a few puzzles started to creep in here and there which I simply couldn't wrap my head around. And before long, especially nearer the end of the game, I was finding it hard to beat enough puzzles to get to the next stage.

The last stage, called Multi Infinite, warped my brain so much that I put the game down for a week just to reset, before going back and managing to beat it. Phew.

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I continued my adventures through the weird and twisted landscapes of DARQ, by playing through the two DLCs.

Both DLCs use a new mechanic, in that you can control your head separately to your body, by rolling it around through small gaps and such. The difference is that, in the second DLC, called The Crypt, this mechanic was overdone to the point of frustration. The amount of times I had to switch back and forth between my body and head to try things in a slightly different way or slightly different order had me ready to throw my computer out of the window.

The first DLC, The Tower, was a lot more enjoyable. The puzzles just seemed to make more logical sense to me, and there was less frustration.

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I remember watching the old Karate Kid movies as a kid, and I guess I enjoyed them as much as anyone else did back then. But I've never really thought back on them with any kind of fondness like I do for films like The Goonies or Gremlins, for example.

So who would have thought that the Cobra Kai series would end up being one of my favourite things over these past few years?

A little while back, a beat 'em up game based on the series was released. It only seemed right that I grab Scoob and bring him along for some merciless beat downs on our opponents.

For the most part, the game is just like any other beat 'em up, where you travel from left to right wailing on opponents with a variety of different skills. But there's a strange thing about this game. Well, at least for a game that is supposedly based in "reality", anyway. And this is that the characters can unleash all kinds of strange attacks, like explosions and ice spikes and so forth. This is explained away by the whole plot being a flashback, with two of the kids from the show re-telling events to their school headteacher, and dramatically overexaggerating.

Now, we like beat 'em ups, and for the most part enjoyed this one as well. But all of these wild explosions and effects happening all over the screen often made it difficult to see exactly what was going on, and this brought the enjoyment down for us. It was just chaos all over the screen. There were also a lot of issues with the camera, like enemies being off screen and able to hit us, while we couldn't move the camera to see them and hit them back.

Add in the fact that the game felt like it took a lot longer to play through than most other games of this type, and because of this we've gotten a bit of burnout.

This means that, while we completed the Cobra Kai campaign, we still need to play through the Miyagi-Do campaign to fully complete the game. However, I simply don't know at the moment, whether we, or just I, will return to it at a later date.

I was really hoping to play more spoopy games over the past couple of weeks. But alas, along with work kicking my ass as usual, I've also had a surprising number of social commitments. Pretty strange, for a loner nerd like me, but unfortunately it left me with little time for gaming.

So to try and squeeze at least one more in, I looked for the game on my list that had the shortest play time. And I ended up with this one: DARQ.

DARQ is a side-scrolling (most of the time) puzzle game, that is set in a strange and depressing dream world. In order to progress to the next level, the game has you operating levers, turning gears, connecting power cables, rotating parts of the world, defying gravity, and avoiding monsters, to name but a few.

The strange mechanics make for quite a curious and unique take on the puzzle platformer genre, but the horror elements were very lacking. It can barely be called a horror game at all, to be honest, but I was clutching at straws for some quick spoops.

And quick it was. Just as the internet told me, the game was very short, at around 2 hours or so. But this felt like the right kind of length for the game. Especially as I was just about able to get it done before saying goodbye to October again for another year.

Back in July, Scoob and I got around to trying Total War: Warhammer again. We played a few games as Orcs against 2 easy CPU enemies, and got absolutely smashed in each of them.

Clearly, the way I used to play Rome: Total War just wasn't working in this game. I needed to get good. Or at least, I needed to get better (because let's face it, I'll never actually get good).

So off I went to Youtube to watch some simple tutorials and some breakdowns of the different factions. Turns out, it's still pretty much the old rock-paper-scissors format of Rome, but the things that assign each unit into the different categories are slightly different in this game.

Armed with some knowledge, I played a few 1v1s on normal, again using the Orcs, and smashed them easily enough. Then for a laugh I played a selection of games with 2 CPU allies against 3 CPUs, with us as the "evil" factions, and the opposing team as the "good" factions.

All of these were also victories, except one. In truth, one of the victories looked like a certain loss all the way up to the end when the enemy team mass routed and we somehow clung on. The only loss was due to me being silly and taking an entire army of Goblin archers on spiders. I wanted to try and get behind the enemy line to pepper them with poison arrows to assist my allies on the front line, but took way too long and did far too little overall.

So, feeling a little more confident in the game, I started the Orc campaign, whereupon I was greeted with a complete crash after about 40 minutes of play time. Upon reloading the game I discovered there was absolutely no auto saves, so my progress, though quite small, had all been lost.

What's even stranger is, after starting the campaign again and remembering to do a manual save, the game then started autosaving.

Not that it mattered. After about 13 turns, my meagre forces were smashed when two much stronger, larger and more advanced armies came stomping into my territory. After a bit of research I've also learned that the campaigns go on for a great deal of time. I was hoping they'd changed that after all the shit I went through to complete Rome: Total War, and I have no intention of doing it again. So I'm definitely going to stick with skirmishes for this one.

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Not sure why, but I recently thought it would be a good idea to try Dune 2 Legacy in multiplayer. This was something I never got around to when I finally went through this old RTS a decade ago.

Scoob joined me for a trip down memory lane, and we teamed up to smack and get smacked by the AI for a few games.

It definitely made a change, and was a fun little distraction for a while.

Luke warm on the heels of the last little bundle of Amiga games I played, is this one. Here I try to shunt and smash my way through several racing games that I played on my old Amiga back in the late 80s and early 90s. I couldn't complete them back then. But what about now?

Spoiler: see the title of this entry.

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Here's an Amiga game I played on a lot as a kid, but never got very far. This one is called Ivan Stewart's Super Off Road, and holy crap, does it get hard.

It has proven itself to be yet another one of the growing list of Amiga games that I am sure I can complete, only to utterly fail after multiple attempts.

The main issue here is that the vehicle is very inconsistent with how and when it turns. Sometimes I would be holding the turn button down and it would barely turn at all. Yet at other times, just touching the turn button would have the vehicle turning way too early and crashing into the wall.

Didn't help that the game always starts you last on the grid, and any slight touch between you and the other racers always slows you down, but barely affects them.

Looking at a longplay of this on Youtube, I think I got to around two thirds of the way through the game. But each race was taking multiple attempts to get through. And by the time I'd tried the last one about 12-15 times, I just decided to call it quits.

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Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge was a game I only played 2 player back in the day, and I don't remember any of us that tried to play it actually getting that far.

Despite really needing to bring home another completion trophy, this has become yet another Amiga game that I found myself unable to push through with. It was just too annoying to play.

I started on an easy competition, which was the only one of the three that I managed to complete. My mistake was starting this challenge with automatic gears. This was because, on the many, many occasions that my speed was reduced, the auto gears often did not change down to allow me to quickly accelerate and build up speed again. This was especially infuriating on the last race of the easy championship, when there are quite a few uphill segments. There's nothing more infuriating than trying to crawl slowly up a hill in high gear while AI cars that you've already battled like mad to pass simply breeze passed you once again.

So when I started the medium championship, I went with manual gears. This took a little getting used to, but definitely did increase my control of the car. But the fact is that this could not cover up the other issues that were evident in the game.

For a start, the AI cars always do their very best to block or bump you as you try to get passed them. This is all well and good, if the game would allow me to do the same to them. However, with no rear-view mirror of any kind, it's impossible to see when they are catching up until they are passed. Also, I doubt this ability would do much anyway, as any collision I had with an AI car, even side-on, would slow me to a crawl, but do nothing to slow them down in any way.

The other ball-ache that really got on my nerves, was the fact that in many races, I would have to do a pit stop to take on more fuel, but the AI cars would not. Just another thing that tipped the game's balance too far into the unfair category.

After wrestling with the medium category for a few races, I decided life was too short, and I was getting too little enjoyment out of the game.

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Third in my little trilogy of racing games was Super Cars II, and boy did I need a good run. I remember playing this mostly in 2 player back in the day, but we never used to get very far.

This time, with save states, I was able to win the easy and medium championships, just having to re-do certain tracks if I didn't get high enough points to keep me in the lead.

It's a very finicky game, particularly concerning the handling of the car. Attempted little corrections on the steering would do absolutely nothing, but hold the button in a millisecond too long and the car would over-correct. It made lining up the car for the invisible tunnels, or rows of jumps, very difficult.

Anyway, I trudged through it, and all I needed to do was win the hard championship. After a few races I was top of the standings, but then the game started throwing up lots of graphical errors. I read online that some of the discs of this game are buggy. But I tried several different disc images, and was not able to find one that allowed me to continue.

Oh well. Seems like I'm fated not to finish an Amiga racing game.