Also available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows There have been a few games over the years either somewhat or directly inspired by Army Men, but none have been so open about it as The Mean Greens: Plastic Warfare. The title is dumb - the Greens are the good guys, so what’s “mean” about them? - but the game itself is pretty reminiscent of what Army Men might be if the series were still around today. Well, it is in some ways, anyway. The Mean Greens is a multiplayer only third person shooter. The original release featured no real tutorial or offline play with bots, but that has thankfully since been added in updates. There’s still no true single player mode, though; it just has the exact same game modes as online but with bots. I know that I’m in a minority of gamers in that I expect a true single player offering with games, but that’s especially true with Army Men games (and those directly inspired by it). They’re toys, and it’s not technically an Army Men game; other than “Green good, Tan bad,” you don’t have an established canon to worry about sticking to, and the fact that they’re toys in the real world gives you a ton of creative flexibility. I can’t help but see the decision not to include any kind of a single player mode as anything but lazy. As a multiplayer shooter, though, The Mean Greens is, for the most part, pretty good. Imagine Sarge’s Heroes 2’s multiplayer but online and in HD. The level designs are absolutely fantastic and genuinely blew me away with how fun they were to fight in. The controls are okay; the aiming feels a little bit jerky, and while adjusting the aim sensitivity can help with that, it never feels quite as smooth or fluid as Gears of War. The real problem I have is the weapons. In most games, you get some basic weapons at the start, and as you play, you gradually unlock better weapons or upgrades for those weapons. The Mean Greens doesn’t do that. There are five weapons - assault rifle, sniper rifle, shotgun, bazooka, flamethrower - plus grenades, and you start off with everything. You have finite ammo for each, but whenever you spawn, you have everything. Nothing upgrades or anything, either. On the one hand, new players don’t get spanked by veteran players purely because of equipment. On the other hand, there’s little incentive to keep playing. “But having fun should be incentive enough!” Yeah, it absolutely should. But we all know from over 20 years of Call of Duty that our lizard brains are immensely gratified by arbitrary progression. Without XP or upgrades or unlocks or levels, the game just feels...a little empty. Also the grenades suck. They’re about as effective as lighting an M80 firecracker and throwing it at someone in real life. You randomly get assigned to play as either a Green soldier or a Tan soldier in team based games like team deathmatch or capture the flag, and that’s cool. I’m also a huge fan of the fact that free for all matches assign you a random color. Sometimes you’re Green, sometimes you’re Purple, sometimes you’re Red, so on and so forth. With no storyline or lore, that loses a little of its coolness, but if you just mentally superimpose Army Men lore where Green, Tan, Blue, and Grey are the major powers but there are lots of minor powers like Purple, Orange, Red, Cyan, etc.; it becomes a really neat aspect. It doesn’t make up for the so-so controls and the fact that nine times out of ten your default M-16 is the best weapon in the game, but it is definitely a cool touch. The Mean Greens: Plastic Warfare, for what it is, is a decent game. It’s virtually impossible, at least from my experience, to find a match online these days, but fortunately, playing offline with bots is still totally doable and has the same core gameplay. It’s a shame that the weapons are so unbalanced and the controls feel so sluggish and jerky because that really holds it back from being a genuinely good game. If the controls were better, this game would be fantastic for those of us nostalgic for the good ol’ days of Army Men. With the controls what they are, though, it’s stuck at “decent.” That’s a shame, too, because the level design proves that a ton of care and effort were put into this game, just not enough into refining the controls. It’s normally $10 which is a fair price, but it’s important to know if you buy it that you’re probably going to be playing mostly if not exclusively against bots. I definitely recommend it even at full price for fans of Army Men because it’s definitely a fun “what if” for the series, but for those with no special love for Army Men, wait for one of the frequent sales that drop it to between $1 and $3. I have fun with this, and I’m glad I’ve got it on my Switch, but this isn’t a game that is going to wow anyone outside of the level design. My Rating - CSungrand has never been a studio to repeat a formula or make the same game twice. Their flagship series, Silver Falls, spans numerous genres from traditional survival horror to platforming to survival construction to action RPG. I’ve come to expect new and novel experiences from Sungrand’s games, but even I didn’t expect them to release a homebrew “get drunk and make out” simulator for the DS. Silver Falls: Makeout Miracle Mania is a dating sim that has you try to match up the denizens of Silver Falls through a mixture of latent attraction, good vibes, and a lot of alcohol. The premise of the game is that the Dusty Cactus, the local bar, has a new mixed drink with some...interesting side effects. In addition to the normal inebriating effects of alcohol, this drink seems to have a strange libido-increasing quality. You have to figure out, through trial and error or having a little bit of background knowledge of the characters and their personalities, who is going to be willing to swap spit with whom. It’s a pretty unique concept in my experience as most dating sims I’ve played are about figuring out how to make your chosen character fall in love with the player character; this one, on the other hand, has set “right” and “wrong” choices, and what you have to figure out is what’s the right match up and what’s the wrong match up. The gameplay is also really unique. To my knowledge, there isn’t another DS game quite like this one. Like BrainAge or Silver Falls Gaiden: Deathly Delusion Destroyers, you hold the DS sideways like a book. At the start of the game, you have a certain amount of money - $6 when you first play and then $8 in subsequent rounds - to spend on drinks and sandwiches. You’ll have random pairs of characters, and while I didn’t count, it’s somewhere around 15 pairs until the bar closes and the game ends. With each pair, you can have them share a sandwich, have them share a drink, or have them kiss. To have them share a drink or a sandwich, you just tap the correct icon on the touch screen. This is where it gets unique, though; to have them kiss, you have to close the DS and re-open it; when you close it, you’re making them kiss because the character images are pressed together face to face when the two screens come together while closed. It’s super clever, and I don’t personally know of another DS game that includes closing the clamshell as a core mechanic. What the kissing mechanism being a core mechanic means, though, that the only way to play this and really experience the true game is to get an R4 card that will work with it and play it on an actual DS or clamshell 3DS; an emulator won’t really work except for DeSmuME, a 2DS won’t really work, and turning the ROM into a VC title to inject into a CFW Wii U won’t really work. I say “an R4 card that works” because the one I had, a 2018 R4 Gold card, wouldn’t load it for some reason. And no, it’s not a “time bomb” issue; my card doesn’t have that problem. What I ended up doing is going on Amazon and buying an Ace3DSX card, allegedly the best DS SD cartridge on the market. It works perfectly with that card, but I have no idea why the Ace3DSX works with this ROM and the R4 Gold doesn’t when it’s worked with every other game I’ve tried. The goal of the game is to get as high a rating by the end of the night as possible. To do this, you need to get your Vibe meter and your Romance meter as high as possible. Vibe is increased by having characters share drinks and sandwiches so long as those characters both like sharing them with each other. Romance is increased by having characters who are attracted to one another kiss. Because there are ten Silver Falls characters included, that’s 100 different possible match ups. That means two things for the player. First and foremost, you will only get a small fraction of possible pairings in a single game. Second, you’ll never remember who likes what with whom. How much a character likes something is denoted by how many hearts appear, and if they don’t like it, you’ll see a frowning face and anime-esque frustration clouds. The reactions are not always going to be reciprocal, either. Take Karn and Bull, for example. When you make them kiss, Karn gets 4 hearts, but Bull just gets pissed off. What I did was go all late 80s Metroid on it; I made a spreadsheet with each possible character combination and, as I played game after game, used trial and error to record what worked with whom. Even having played over a dozen games yesterday, there are still a handful of combinations I haven’t gotten, and there were few instances where I got the same pairing twice in a row. On the one hand, that means your success is somewhat dependent on luck. You can only buy so many sandwiches and drinks, and you have to guess how much of each you’ll need. If you get pairings that hate drinking together and kissing, but you didn’t buy enough sandwiches, oh well, guess you have to piss them off and lower your Romance and Vibe meters. If you have characters who hate kissing but LOVE sharing drinks with each other, but you’re out of drinks, the best you can do is tread water by having them share a sandwich - something few seem to dislike - and essentially waste a turn. There’s definitely strategy here with resource management, but it’s just as much based on luck as it is strategy. Silver Falls: Makeout Miracle Mania is a WEIRD game. It’s a fun weird, though. If you’ve played Mount Your Friends or Baby Maker Extreme on the old Xbox 360 Indie storefront, that’s sort of the kind of weird this is. You’ll be constantly asking yourself “Why the hell did he make this game?” and simultaneously be unable to stop playing because there’s something about it that just hooks you. It’s a free homebrew download, so you don’t have to go hunt for it or make sure there’s money in your eShop account or anything, but since it does require an R4 card to work - Twilight on modded 3DSs doesn’t seem to work with this game - the barrier to entry, while low, is a little different than most homebrew Silver Falls games. Still, though, an R4 card isn’t expensive and is, in my opinion, a great investment for DS enthusiasts anyway, so if you have one, give this game a shot, and if you don’t have one, go online and order one and THEN give this game a shot. If simply for its unique and novel concept and mechanics alone, it’s absolutely worth checking out. My Rating - B |
I'm a teacher.And I like to play video games. I like to collect video games. I like to talk about video games, and I like to write about video games. During the day, I teach high school history; during the night, I spend my spare time gaming. Then I write about it. Archives
June 2024
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