ITT BL reminisces over his entire game library

January 9, 2021

Gabriel Belmont (Castlevania: Lords of Shadow)

Oh come the fuck on. So much for washing the taste of one game down - now we have this?

The most concise description for Lords of Shadow that I can manage is that it's a game with absolutely no fucking soul. The only consideration that the Castlevania source material was given is brand recognition and absolutely nothing else, used as a vehicle to steal every god damn fucking overused cliche under the sun. The gameplay, graphical style and ledge climbing of God of War, the musical stylings of Lord of the Rings, the boss fights from Shadow of the Collossus, a fixed camera system I haven't seen in so long I can't even remember the exact game that inspired it, and the quick time events of what feels like goddamn every executive who has never touched a gamepad in their lives. It's bad enough to be this shameless and uninspired on its surface, but Lords of Shadow doesn't even do any of it particularly well. The combat has absolutely no weight to it, feeling like you're whipping people with a cotton string rather than an enchanted, steel forged chain link whip, and gets incredibly messy further down the line just for trying to do way too many goddamn things at once, mechanics apon mechanics apon mechanics in place of a concise identity for the game to rally around. It's pathetic in every sense of the word, and emblematic of exactly the kind of shit show that modern Konami has become.

One mechanic that this game uses to try and switch things up is light and dark magic, which you would think lead to even more complexty and a system of spells to cast, right? Nope, literally all it does is imbue your standard attacks with an elemental trait, which sounds like such an underselling of the way they describe it. There's not even a thought provoking method in their usage most of the time - you'll usually rely on light magic more than anything else because landing hits with it restores your health, whereas dark magic is supposed to simply increase the amount of damage you deal but I honestly struggled to see the actual impact it had on gameplay much of the time. Maybe buried under the dozens of upgrades the game throws at you is the ability to make this actually matter, but I can only spare a day per game and I honestly don't respect Lords of Shadow enough to go that far in depth in lieu of any time I can't simply just remember my original playthrough offhand, especially because this is a pretty long game as it is - so long, in fact, that it's split across two discs, a fucking ridiculous antiquated practice I thought we'd grown out of when we established DVDs as a format. Even Elder Scrolls has never needed you to switch discs, what the fuck makes Lords of Shadow think it has any fucking right to?

Honestly, I'm just tired of covering games like this, because it really is just the same story every time - executives don't know how game design works, order stooges to chase every trend imaginable instead and are somehow consistently surprised every time whenever it inevitably fucking backfires, so complacent in their relative fame and success they are that they don't consider that it can all be stripped from them with just one mediocre entry, a loss of trust that will forever anchor everything they could hope to do after the fact. When taken by itself it's just dumb, but when they use the name of a once respected and lauded franchise for it it's all the more unforgivable. They have no respect for the things that have made them successful - all they see are names and dollar signs, and their greed essentially takes those names to the grave with them. I guess the good news is that bar a few outliers, this is about the worst it gets from here on out in the list, so hopefully I won't have to write about this kind of depressing gloom too much more.

January 10, 2021

Bubbles (Sonic 4 Episode 1 / 2)

Okay, so I kinda lied. After all that doomsaying I did with Sonic last time, I genuinely forgot I had other games left in the series to make examples of. This game is kind of an interesting distinction from our previous entry - whereas Lords of Shadow was only interested in their brand name insofar as pretentions of a get rich quick scheme, Sonic 4 was at least on the surface level still interested in appearing like it knew how to be a Sonic game. And both are crap, make no mistake, but this is the lesser of two evils because it shows that people making decisions still have SOME kind of self awareness and ability to feel shame, as well as the ability to hear and respond to what invested fans of the series are trying to tell them at all. Of course, this is Sonic we're talking about, so naturally that means they gotta break out the monkey's paw again. They would delegate a game inspired by the classics that made them, definitely - but their understanding of them was indeed surface level only. At the same time, they would lean into that surface understanding too heavily while neglecting the parts of it that actually made classic Sonic tick, to the point that the entirety of Ep1's levels were utterly shameless ripoffs of shit they'd already done before. I'm not talking just the level tropes, I mean to the point that they were essentially just upscaled tilesets of existing zones, with backing tracks that were essentially soundalikes of their original source material, and a smattering of Badniks from previous games shoved in wholesale sometimes even without respect for the theming of the zone they're supposed to coexist with. By that point, why even keep up the pretense of being an original game at all? Just use the actual zones and music verbatim instead of making out like you're trying to bootleg your own fucking franchise.

What most people here actually remember the Sonic 4s for, is a cripplingly poor understanding of physics. I don't mean just the classic Sonic model of physics, I mean like... fucking any physics I can think of. And honestly, having a discussion about this kinda pisses me off because Sonic fans like to use the word "physics" as a bludgeon without understanding or explaining exactly what that even means in Sonic's case, usually opting to say some shit like "iT's SoNiC rUsH tHrEe" instead - and side note, no, spotting a single boost pad in three seconds of gameplay during which the physics aren't even active doesn't make you a genius analyst, it makes you a pretentious prick looking for an excuse to rile people up. In any case, my personal understanding of the Sonic physics of old is that inertia plays a huge part in making it feel as influential on the gameplay and image of the series as it does, even though later games in the series physically move much faster than it. You have to build up your speed over time rather than just having it given to you on the first button press, and to come to a complete stop means having to physically challenge your own inertia and move against it. Some might say this is slippery, but I say it makes your speed feel genuinely powerful, a force of nature all its own that you have to learn to tame over the course of a given game. In Sonic 4, the opposite is true - inertia only exists as long as you're commanding Sonic to move. The moment you let go of the control stick or try to change directions, all of that momentum abruptly vanishes into the fucking aether, never to be seen again. This is on top of the fact that you still have to build up speed over time, so in addition to your momentum feeling incredibly weak and flimsy it also obliterates any sense of flow and pacing the game has, making it extremely stop-and-start in practice because you have to rely on abusing your Homing Attack to fucking get anywhere. And this is on top of the fact that rolling somehow carries your momentum down and up slopes worse than simply running does, amidst a cornucopia of physics fuckups that are honestly less trouble to show than to tell.

But the most grevious sin that this game commits is probably the name. Yes, just five letters and one number. Some people will probably argue that I'm blowing this out of the water, but even something as simple as the name of the game can well and truly change everybody's perception of it, and its importance in the grand scheme of the franchise. Understand that this was a numbered sequel to a subsect of the series that hadn't seen a new game since ninteen ninety four, in a gameplay style that hadn't been seen since 2004 and was debatably already seen as Sega's understanding of it worsening year by year. You do NOT set expectations that fucking high unless you know exactly what the hell you're doing, and to be perfectly blunt, they really didn't. People were harsh on this game specifically because it was called Sonic 4, because it felt like a betrayal of everything they knew and loved about the gameplay style, and had they just called it Sonic DL like they'd originally planned to everybody's expectations would be much more down to earth for it. Episode 2 tried to mix things up, but despite doing many things even worse than the first it would not have mattered much anyway, because you simply do not get to make a first impression more than once. And this I fear, is leading into history repeating itself - because with the failure of the opposing extremes of Lost World and Forces, there seems to be a renewed call for a literal Sonic Adventure 3, in spite of the fact that nothing about Sonic 4 could live up to its name and despite coming from many of the very same people who called that naming convention out like the shitty nostalgia bait it was without seeing the obvious double standard. Can we not fucking do this again?

January 11, 2021

Anon (Tron: Evolution)

Tron Evolution shares a lot of parrelels with Enter the Matrix right off the bat - namely that it's a licensed game based on an upcoming movie, but acts as a side story to it rather than a direct adaptation. Also that the time sensitive nature of trying to release a movie and game in tandem obviously outstripped whatever ambition it was they had for it, leaving in its place a confused, discordant mess that sometimes scarcely knows what to do with itself. Okay, level with me here guys - have you ever watched a Tron flick and thought to yourself "Goddamn, this is nice and all but do you know what it needs? More parkour"? No? Well clearly someone high up did, because it makes up a bulk of this game, debatably more than anything that makes Tron, well, Tron. I'll be perfectly honest, I'm not a big enough expert on Tron to know if Legacy - and Evolution, by extension - occupies the exact same case study that Sonic 4 does, in sequelizing a really old property without comprehending it. I'm just saying I wouldn't have minded it so much if it worked well. It has all the usual moves you've come to expect since Prince of Persia, but executes it in a way that comes off as really stiff and lacking in signposting, and honestly doesn't feel all that satisfying even when it's working completely as intended. It doesn't help that the scenery is just buildings and rocks, partly because it's generic as fuck and partly because it makes you pine for a freerunning game that's a lot more open ended than this, constantly teasing you with scenery you'll never reach - and sometimes even scenery you CAN, but the game kills you for trying. It ALSO doesn't help that the game makes you vault and wallrun through specific objects to recover health and energy, usually in a way that it absolutely does not flow with any given skirmish they're shoved into. Shit, it's saying a lot that even WET handled its mid-skirmish parkour much better than this.

The actual fighting might have seemed like standard God of War fare, but for one very notable distinction - rather than separating into strings of light and heavy attacks, Evolution is split between throwing your disc at enemies for one keybind and physically swinging at enemies with disc in hand for the other. Not only does this create an interesting dynamic of choosing your method of attack based on proximity and motion rather than just finding one good combo and abusing the shit out of it, it also means that projectile attacks themselves can effectively be combos in of themselves, albiet weaker to incentivize using the hand to hand moves at all. It isn't too long, however, before the game starts throwing other disc-wielding enemies at you, and they quickly develop to a point that they will consistently kick your ass throughout the game without a clear indication of what exactly it is you're doing wrong. That is, until you realize holding the freerun button lets you attack while you're moving, and this attack is stronger and more consistent than literally anything else in your moveset on top of the fact that it combos into itself, so the fighting still devolves into abusing one move over and over at the end of the day once you come to realize just how fucking overpowered it is compared to just trying to play Tron like a regular videogame.

For whatever reason, you're given four different disc weapons to choose from, which mostly just influence the meter burn attacks you can perform - and then in an attempt to incentivize using any of them besides Heavy Disc, they've given enemies specific weaknesses to which the discs act as hard counters, which honestly feels like a lot more micromanaging than a game of this type is worth, even putting aside that you might have struggled to even tell the fuckers apart unless you had a pretty good TV at the time. The game does have light cycles and light tanks, but they're every bit as linear as the freerunning bits on top of being frustratingly cheap, trial and error trash on top of it. So as usual, for a licensed game Tron Evolution will come as absolutely no surprise, besides that it also has an incredibly forced online multiplayer mode that I've never tried personally - and for all I know, died weeks after the game came out anyway just for the lack of faith that the singleplayer campaign inspires. Just get Tron 2.0 instead.

January 12, 2021

Cole Phelps (LA Noire)

LA Noire is a game that I REALLY want to love, for all the effort that has clearly gone into it. It's biggest boast as a detective sim is its questioning and interrogation scenes, where you're expected to look at people's expressions while they're giving statements and recognize subtle facial cues that they're lying, and Rockstar really spared absolutely no fucking expense at all to make sure their mocap technology can accomplish facial animation that intricate. Debatably, it's the best facial animation videogames have ever had, before or since. But it needs to be said that "sparing no expense" was used here in the absolute most literal sense of the word - it costs a fucking LOT to animate a game this way, especially when you're the one that has to invent the tech for it in the first place, and Rockstar needed to recoup their losses somehow - certainly not the kind they'd get back from a detective sim alone. So LA Noire does the Resident Evil 6 route of "shove in as many wildly different things as possible in hopes that fans of each of them will give the game a shot", and honestly, I can't think of a single time this has ever worked, critically or comercially. As a GAME, LA Noire would have been so much better with most of the fat cut out to focus on the detective parts, which were always going to be the best part of it. The shooting is bog standard, the driving feels slippery and is often held against you in the final ranking for a given case, the brawling is aboslutely atrocious even for the standards of a Rockstar game, and... honestly, why the fuck was this even billed as an open world game? I know I've gotten on the case of other open worlds and sandboxes for being big empty maps with samey fucking busywork littered all throughout them, but this game doesn't even have THAT - you have almost literally no reason to explore the gigantic world they've painstakingly recreated besides occasionally finding some secret cars. Whoop de doo???

However, even the detective work quickly falls apart whenever you fail to meet the game's expectations. There isn't really a universal tell for whenever somebody is lying in this game, and game doesn't really make any attempt to clue you in on what exactly the fuck a tell is supposed to look like by their standards, so sometimes calling people out is either based on the logic of the case instead - and when you don't have that, whether you make the right call or not can often be a complete fucking crapshoot, made worse by the fact you can't re-ask a question that's already been answered with some kind of penalty like you would be able to in say, a Phoenix Wright trial. It would certainly help if I had any idea what the fuck Cole is going to say before make a decision of which way to treat a witness's statement. You always pick one of three responses to any given statement - humour them and assume they're telling the truth, bluff to try and catch them out on a lie, or to present a piece of evidence you think directly contradicts their stance. If you pick the wrong one, especially if it's a Doubt, Cole has a habit of going off on wild, completely fucking unfounded tangents that border on effective retardation, which would make the choice a lot simpler if I had any idea what the opening line would be ahead of time. This was already long a staple of games with multiple choice dialogue, so I have no idea why LA Noire pulled this shit and then had the nerve to mock its players for it.

Regardless, there will eventually come at least one point in the game for everyone where they botch an interrogation hard enough that the case effectively dead-ends, leaving you with no further leads to track. And yet, LA Noire doesn't really have a fail state except when you're taken down in a fight, so the game often just contrives some stupid excuse for the case to continue regardless, which gets annoying and unsatisfying REALLY quickly. I think back to some of the earlier Phoenix Wright games and some of the absolute worst they had to offer, having to restart sections over and over again for a means of progression that isn't always entirely obvious or even intelligent - and I genuinely preferred THAT over the amazingly asspulling, patronizing bullshit that LA Noire gives you. I've never actually played the game in its entirety, partly because of this and partly because, well, it gets fucking boring after a while and kinda peaked right at the end of your run in the homocide department. It's not often I get to say that a game jumps the shark before it even has the chance to establish itself as a series. Just so we end this on a higher note though, I wanted to post the bloopers for this game because they're both hilarious AND a pretty good demonstration of how nice the mocap is for this game:

January 13, 2021

Eye of Cthulu (Terraria)

While AAA games for a time loved stealing parts of Minecraft without realizing they acted as parts of a whole, unsurprisingly there wasn't any shortage of titles that acted as flagrant ripoffs of Minecraft as a whole. Terraria, originally, was one such game, albiet as a 2D slice of a given world rather than a full 3D environment to explore and settle on. Over time, though, Terraria would start to drift apart from its inspiration and form an identity of its own, where exploration is the name of the game, settlements are only built as a formality for places to stash loot and vendors, and kitting your character out is a long, gruelling, RNG-fuelled process of mixing, matching and fusing perks over the course of your playthrough rather than just immediately digging to y11 in Minecraft and putting together some diamond armour right there and then. There's good and bad in this approach - namely, that materials continue to be consistently useful through other means in Minecraft even after you advance past their tier in equipment, like minecarts and tracks for iron and enchanting setups for diamond and leather, whereas materials in Terraria become useless at an absolutely shocking rate once you move past them. For the life of me I have no idea what you're suppose to use Demonite for after a certain point besides a fancy building material or a bartering tool to raise funds for other shit.

Honestly though, I feel like the dependence on randomess to obtain certain kinds of gear really holds this game back. Don't get me wrong, a certain amount of this is entirely expected for a procedurally generated game - much of the best stuff in the game is found in chests randomly strewn about the world rather than forged wholesale from materials you find buried in the ground, and you absolutely NEED to find lots of these because they're usually the only way to upgrade your mobility in most areas and many categories of them can be fused together to merge their perks and free up slots for other gear. But the game makes no consideration for exactly how much of a given item exists in the world, or whether it exists AT ALL, so sometimes you'll run into hard barriers that keep you from progressing down a certain path at all unless you generate an entirely new world and try all the fuck over again. Sometimes ENTIRE FUCKING BIOMES never generate even if you make the largest world possible, and I dunno, I don't think it should be controversial to suggest that every item should be possible to obtain in the same world you started in? Don't even get me started on that Monster Hunter esque dynamic in which you have to fight the same bosses over and over and fucking over again for a chance of getting the actual items you want or need, or the Minecraft esque tendency of needing to constantly check back on the wiki to know bosses drop these items at all and realize they would work well with your character build.

Worst of all though, is that after you defeat a very specific boss at the very bottom of the world, the game officially enters what's called "Hard Mode". This is actually where the majority of the game takes place, and it fucking sucks. Not necessarily because of the difficulty - it's certainly more annoying than playing the game normally - but because the game suddenly turns into an unbearable grind after this point, because just about all major upgrades and means of progression are locked behind "soul" pickups of various colours and flavours and only have a small chance of spawning from enemies defeated in specific biomes - biomes that by the way, are now infectious and spreading all over the world in real time, corrupting other blocks in their vicinity and potentially making your home uninhabitable unless you're actively fighting off the spread and containing it to certain areas you can control. It honestly feels like they ran out of ways to milk one world for a progression system this long and involved and still finding ways to gate shit off so brand new players can't find it right away and sequence break, so said "fuck it, let's just spawn a bunch of random bullshit in postemptively after a point so the player has to re-scour the entire map all over again". It's one of the most boring and tedious experiences I've ever had with a game, and I cannot get over the assertion people have that this game is somehow better than Minecraft because of it, not in spite of it. Nevermind that you only get one chance to fight a boss after you've summoned it, so if you fuck up (and let's face it, you probably will), that's it, back to half a fucking hour of farming souls again. Fuck this game sometimes.

January 14, 2021

Alice (Alice: Madness Returns)

As one might deduce just by looking at it, the Alice games are very much a darker and edgier take on Alice in Wonderland. I'll be the first to admit that it's incredibly mixed, at least as far as Madness Returns is concerned (I haven't played the original, otherwise I would have covered this much earlier). It can be really nice to look at when it wants to be, but at frequent points throughout - usually about half an hour into any given chapter - the world suddenly just becomes fucking shader city, presumably to represent Alice's failing psyche with an atmosphere of dread and unease but honestly, it comes off as just extremely dull whenever it comes to this point. Nothing is more frustrating that knowing full well that the developer can do much better than this, but they actively choose not to for the overwhelming majority of the game, like the gorgeous juxtaposition of colour ful environments and gorey, unsettling combat and enemies only exist to be juxtaposition themselves against a long, boring slog through generic, sepia shaded drivel you usually see dime a dozen of in a typical indie horror game. It was always the brief, cheerier looking sections that I ever persisted through the game for, because my brain just tunes everything out whenever I have to lookg at it any other time. Even this I would have less of a problem with, if it spent all that buildup on literally fucking anything.

Madness Returns has exactly one boss fight - the final boss right at the end of the game. In spite of this, every major chapter of the game constantly teases you with the presence of a major antagonist, sometimes even several, and then straight up resolves any conflict you could hope to have with them through cutscene alone. And it's not even the exciting or engaging kind of cutscene, just fucking sepia tone clipart, the likes of which you could conceivably have seen on an epsiode of South Park if not for the artstyle difference. This is honestly just pathetic in every sense of the word I can think of, the kind of thing that usually only happens if a game suddenly runs out of time or money and has to wrap up development very suddenly and quickly - and knowing this was published by EA, could very well have been the case? But it's not the impression I get from playing it - every other aspect of the game is feature complete, honestly lending the impression that this constant anticlimax was absolutely by design, and I can't fathom why anyone would make a game this way out of anything besides sheer, incomprehensible laziness.

And I think a big part of why I've been struggling with this writeup for hours is just because it's all so BORING. Most of the fighting can be summarised as "just spam X", and whenever it's not that its "just spam x and hit the dodge button to get around that uninterruptible attack the enemy has". All of the platforming is trivialized by the fact that Alice has a slow falling ability and a fucking QUADRUPLE JUMP right from the start of the game, and because the level design is made with them in mind it has a bad habit of devolving into tiny platforms with huge gaps between them over a generic void rather than designing any actual level around it. And I don't know how they did it, but this game somehow makes the concept of insanity boring, because it's used mainly just to shepard along a narrative grounded firmly in the real world where all the interesting plot developments happen without really much to join the two together - which might sound a little silly, until you play Disco Elysium and realize it managed just fine. Most games usually have to TRY to be this mediocre with these kinds of concepts under its built, but Madness Returns makes it look easy.

January 15, 2021

Garcia Fucking Hotspur (Shadows of the Damned)

Suda51 is known for some goddamn kooky shit - understatement of the century, I know. We had No More Heroes before this, and the even kookier Killer 7 before that, which broke so many conventions in writing and gameplay both that it honestly felt like it was coded in lovecraftian script at times. So when they met with some of the brilliant minds behind Resident Evil 4 and Silent Hill, you better believe there were some pretty fucking lofty expectations to fill. And yet, when the game finally came out, it would prove to be... still kooky, but considerably more grounded by comparison to all of its peers under the publisher's wing. Don't get me wrong, I genuinely love all the little touches Shadows makes in its lore and setting, where hell operates on rules besides "haha evil guy go here when they die" - for example Fleming, the big bad of this game, makes bosses out of people not because of how deadly or ruthless they were in life, but whether they died in a unique and entertaining way, and you see this as early as the first boss who makes harmonica noises whenever he breathes because he died with one lodged in his throat. However, the premise and the gameplay is utterly bog standard for the most part, mostly just a regular ass third person shooter with bone themed weapons and a narrative that can mostly just be boiled down to "go to hell to save a damsel in distress". Hmm. I wonder why that could be? I'll give you a big hint - look at the boxart:

Fucking SERIOUSLY, guys? You assembled a dream team of some of the biggest names in eastern action and horror, and you sought out fucking EA of all companies to publish it? Even back THEN you must have realized this was a huge fucking mistake. Honestly, if I ended the writeup right there, you'd probably believe Shadows of the Damned was a total disaster, right? Well... not quite. It wasn't brilliant, certainly. Kind of short too - in subsequent playthroughs I've managed to clock it within the day. And the enemy design, for the most part, is really just fucking zombies again by any other definition, just sometimes with extra armour and an occasional miniboss. But you know what? It's fun. It clearly still revels in what sillyness it has left, to the point that it can even get kind of campy at points, and if there was anything that EA was clearly hoping for when these guys approached them it was definitely just "more Resident Evil 4". I like it, and I'd happily replay the whole thing any time I have an excuse to unpack my 360 again. So all's well that ends well, right? The boys make a modestly good game, EA gets what they asked for, and everyone goes home happy? Oh, if only it were anywhere near that simple.

Long story short, despite the backing of EA, they didn't advertise it all that well, and it bombed. Hard. More importantly though, this wasn't even the game Suda51 had set out to make. Originally Shadows of the Damned was leaning MUCH further towards the horror spectrum than the action side of things, and honestly, Matt here does a much better job explaining the specific concept than I ever could. It would be bad enough if they had to change games just once, but to hear them tell it they essentially wrote five entirely different games in revising the draft to EA's expectations in response to their constant rejection of pitches. And I'll be totally frank, it is ludicrously FUCKED UP that developers are beholden to publishers this way. Sure, I get it, sometimes you need to rein in the lunacy of developers a bit until it's palatable to the general public, but they should never have to compromise THIS much on their visions just to be able to put a game to market at all. As far as I'm personally concerned, I feel like that responsibility should be reversed - publishers should be working on how to make what they're given marketable, not giving up and fucking injecting themselves into the development process to push their completely out of touch mandates onto people that don't even natively speak the same fucking language as them. ESPECIALLY when it then turns out they're directly responsible for essentially ruining the game and accept no cuplability regardless. And this, really, is sort of a microcosm of why I fucking hate EA so goddamn much - it's one thing to slay IPs in their entirety, but they're toxic to the very idea of ideas, thinking success in the industry is as simple as following a simple formula and staying true to it no matter the context, and somehow never learning to the contrary despite killing everything they try to force their formula onto. So if there's a moral to this story, it's really just more of the same you've already been hearing - never, ever, EVER do business with EA. You will always have better options.

January 16, 2021

Ballistik Wars

And for yet another change of pace sandwiched between two mismanaged games on this list, here is in all likelihood the only mobile game on the list. Even before it settled into the state it's in today, I only ever sought out mobile games as a means of convenience, to have something to play when I didn't have the pocket space for a DS, because right from the get go you're making games with a huge control disadvantage. Making a traditional game means relying on virtual controls that lack the haptic feedback and responsibity of buttons, and making a game with the intention of touching objects onscreen is finicky too because it often means completely obscuring the thing you're trying to touch with your thumb, which leaves mobiles at a definite disadvantage on everything from platformers to first person shooters, and to an extent even point and click adventure games. What this usually results in is an avalanche of bargain bin puzzle titles, in which time is of no essence to allow mistakes to rest firmly on the player - and in this hellscape of generic match-3 puzzles and clones of other puzzlers which originated as clones themselves, I've always had a firm appreciation of Ballistik Wars because it carves out a niche that's both familiar and unique, and respects the capabilities of its platform of choice in the process rather than trying to fit a square peg into a round hole like SO many other games on the mobile market desperately try to.

I'm tempted to call Ballistik Wars a tower defence game, but that would imply deploying hard defences anywhere on the battlefield, which this game has none of. Any given game has two towers, of which you own one. A steady stream of units pours out of the opponent's tower, so you have to strategically deploy units of your own fight back the oncoming horde and push them back to their own base to level it. What's interesting here is that once you deploy a unit, you have no direct control over it - they simply advance forwards, only stopping to attack when an enemy moves within a certain range of them. And this creates a level of strategy that I don't think I've seen in a lot of other games of this type, where you have to make decisions around the behaviour of your own units as well as the composition of the enemy's army. For example, there's a unit whose attack completely obliterates any missle attacks that are fired into it as a side effect, so one can lead their charge with specifically these units while building missile units of your own to back it up, or one can bundle up slow and tanky units first, back them up with projectile units that can fire from behind them and then only break out the speedy, glass cannon units once the momentum of the fight is well and truly in your favour. It's a gameplay style that I really want to see more of, and whether for lack of existing or lack of trying, I can't seem to find outside of its developer, PONOS. I just wish on some level it had more to do - the game has exactly one campaign and an arranged hard mode version of it, and nothing else. No competitive VS mode, no endless mode, no ability to design your own wave sequences to overcome, nothing.

If there's just one genuine complaint I have with the game though, it's that the opposing side cheats, sometimes to absolutely absurd and flagrant degrees. Some levels are challenging not because the enemy AI is smart or has any capability to read your army composition and counter it, but because they have the ability to pump out at least one devastating unit before you've even had the chance to build up even a modest army of your own. In fact, they operate on completely different rules to you altogether, in that they spawn a scripted sequence of units over time once the battle starts and then switch to a different sequence once their base's HP falls below a certain amount - usually a massive clump of the same unit at once, in spite of the fact that all of your own units have a cooldown time in addition to the normal resource cost specifically to prevent them from being stacked this way. Despite that, I like the game. I just wish there was more of it to play. I also wish it was... well, still playable. See, at some point, there was an iOS update that rendered a huge swath of games on the appstore completely unplayable at once, which the developers would have to manually overcome by updating the app. PONOS didn't do this. Why? Because they'd just put their hand in the live service pie.

After this they would go on to release Battle Cats, which mechanically speaking was virtually the same game - and like any other free to play live service game that is still alive to this day, it's loaded to the fucking brim with buyable premium currency, lootboxes and every manipulative FOMO business practice you can think of. And I gave it a chance because I liked Ballistik Wars, but unsurprisingly it becomes really unfun to play if not literally unplayable after a point when you don't have the ultra rare hard counter units a certain battle or campaign expects of you, much less the absurd amount of resources you need to dump unto them to bring them up to the max level cap it expects for EVERY FUCKING BATTLE after a certain point in its campaing progression. And I'll be honest, it stings REALLY fucking hard that a genuinely great mobile game had to die in order for this to flourish, when it like many on the platform today intentionally makes its own game worse to convince people to fork more money over to make it playable. There are many stories that can be told of the descent into the barely moderated, greed driven, downright fraudulent cesspool that the mobile market has become today - but this I think, will be the only one I tell, because it's the one that has personally hit me the hardest.

January 17, 2021

Duke Nukem (Duke Nukem Forever)

The first and most immediate moral of Duke Nukem Forever's story is hubris. An ages old tale of development hell fuelled by ceaseless perfectionism, of chasing trends and of throwing out babies with the bathwater all the while. Understand, first and foremost, that the legendarily long and stalled development time on Duke Forever wasn't spent on just one game - what would often happen is that 3D Realms would work on a variation of a game, build it up to near completion, then the development heads would find some new trend to chase or a hot new engine to switch to, and in doing so completely scrap all the work they'd done to that point and start over from scratch. There was nothing ever wrong with what they'd made, and shit, had they originally released when intended it could have been a genuine competitor to Half Life - but the higher ups were so terrified of being dated on release that they repeatedly scrapped and redid the same game, over and over, for as long as publishers kept feeding them the money to - which ironically, resulted in the game becoming more dated overall every time they pushed it back, because the design doc clearly wasn't being updated with their engine switches. Including the final Gearbox release, this single game went through something like four different major builds, and that's just the ones that we know of from trailers. By ANY metric, that's fucking absurd.

As far as the end result is concerned of its own merits, there is one thing I'll give it credit for - the Ego system is a really nice idea, perfectly fitting the image Duke already has for himself as a character. Essentially, instead of a HP meter, Duke has an Ego meter instead. Duke games are traditionally known for being pretty interactive as far back as Duke 3D, but in Forever it goes hand in hand with Ego, in that most of them are themed around Duke's own narcisissm and masculinity, from curling weights to finding a cigar to smoke to even printing a picture of your own ass on a photocopier at one point, and every time you find an exploit a medium like this, your maximum Ego increases, turning it into a game long quest to become the most self-absorbed action hero possible. It's very much the peak of the character that started taking shape in Duke Nukem II, and if there's any real missed opportunity left in Forever in this regard, it's that they couldn't do dialogue that does his silent portrayal justice. It's very much the "we spoiled all the best bits in the trailer" style of writing - the Halo roast got a genuine giggle out of me when I first heard it, but most of what remains is incredibly stale and dated, and obsessed more with referencing than actually parodying. This, as a reminder, was a game that spent over a decade in development - they had more than enough time to refine this, completely independently of all the fucking engine and asset changes they went through over the years.

And again, DNF spent plenty of time chasing trends over its many revisions, becoming a victim of the very things it set out to mock. This game has plenty of interesting weapons, as is the standard for Duke games in almost all forms, but only allowed you to carry two of them at a time. And worse still, most enemies of miniboss tier and above were completely immune to everything besides explosive damage, which meant constantly carrying around an RPG that only held something like four shots - so effectively, you only had one slot and a backup for killing bosses. Even after the game was patched to allow carrying four weapons at once, it still lives on as an incredibly arbitary and bizarre limitation coming from a series - hell, a fucking subgenre - that typically just allowed you to carry everything at once and allowed you to switch on the fly for what the situation and your ammo counts demanded of you. Another trend represent a really strange tonal shift right in the middle of the game where it becomes super serious and dark all of a sudden, which is probably them trying to be creepy but just like Alice above it just comes off as dull instead, and even long after you're past that section the stain it leaves still remains and all the levels after that point look like they've been dunked in either a grey or brown vat. Again, I should remind that Duke was trying to make fun of games designed this way, sometimes even by name, but somehow goes to the trouble of playing it completely straight anyway. I'd say that's like making an Alien parody and trying to make it scary instead of funny or witty in any way possible, but Duke forever pulled that fucking shit too.

I think above all else though, the main thing I wanted to stress in this writeup is the importance of letting go of a lost cause. I don't mean just cancelling Duke Forever or hastily wrapping it up and releasing what they had early on, even though there was plenty of good arguments for both of those too. No, I'm speaking strictly as a fan on this one. I remain invested in Sonic because I liked him in his prime, their owners and developers still openly show an interest in returning him back to his prime and against all odds, good Sonic games do still get made. For the longest time, I tried to show that same appreciation for Duke against all odds, but the truth of the matter is that Duke Forever basically killed this franchise. Not even its new owners Gearbox show much interest in making games for it anymore, and they're absolute scum in the first place, clearly interested in the IP only for making money and even then only for half assed cameos, like the laughable bonus they did for Bulletstorm's re-release by replacing the main character with Duke without even fucking re-dubbing anyone else's lines so they don't even so much as get his NAME right. And well, I guess I'm making this writeup as a means to say all hope is lost, and it's time to move on to better things. So long as Duke belongs to Gearbox, and Gearbox belongs to Randy Pitchford, there won't be another good Duke game again - and nowadays, there are so many indie alternatives in his old stomping ground of choice that it barely even matters that he's gone.

Bye Duke. It was nice while it lasted.

January 18, 2021

Sam B (Dead Island / Riptide)

Alright, first of all let's just get the elephant in the room out of the way:

This is a good trailer, that portrays a zombie apocalypse for its poignancy more than a convenient excuse for psycopaths to torture and maim hordes of meat puppets that only technically aren't human anymore. This trailer is also a FUCKING LIE. I don't mean that just in the sense that it isn't representative of gameplay, but that it isn't even representative of the tone of the game, something even the most flagrant, obvious fake trailers don't dare to falsify - probably because it hides the fact that Dead Island is just a convenient excuse for psycopaths to tortue and maim hordes of meat puppets that only technically aren't human anymore, which was already getting tired even around the day this game was made. I'd ask why anyone thinks they can do this without pissing people off, but instead I think I'd rather ask why anyone thinks they can pull a stunt like this more than once, because it was clear right from the start that Deep Silver wanted to franchise the shit out of this, and people have already gotten wise to stupid gimmicks like this. "Fool me once", as they say. Bad publicity doesn't necessarily translate into sales like some executives seem to think it does, as I'm sure they found out when they tried to peddle a decaptiated bust with tits as a preorder incentive.

One of the best things Dead Island had going for it was its setting. The island resort is really pleasing to the eye in a way I don't think many games have managed before, and much like Dead Rising it forms a nice backdrop to the carnage that otherwise dominates normal gameplay. After the deception of that first trailer wore off, it was always going to be its main selling point, which is why I can't understand why they only maintain that facade for a mere third of the game, transitioning into utterly generic slums and forests after that point and only ever returning to it for a single quest dropoff that you discover early on and can't turn in until the lattermost third of the game. Shit, Riptide didn't even bother with it at all. It feels like this really should have been a no brainer, to just have the map expand into more and more luxuries and facilities as the game progresses, not turn into basically any other first person game ever made before the main plotline has even had a chance to develop. I don't know why I ever bothered to see the game through to completion after that point - certainly not because it's an inspired take on zombie survival games, that's for fucking sure.

Dead Island has flavours of western RPG going on, which is something I've always found incredibly strange because most weapons don't seem visibly sharper or harder than others, and yet you're constantly swapping out weapons to micromanage factually better stat numbers, hammering on batteries or burning rags or poison to give it elemental attributes, levelling up every now and then to manage an assortment of character specific perks and - hold on a fucking sec, isn't this just Borderlands repackaged as a zombie game? It pretty much is in retrospect, and I've come to dislike its brand of padding just as much here as I did in Borderlands itself, rife with accepting every fucking quest at once and then taking a path through a map in mind of intersecting as many objectives as possible, and I dunno, it never really felt to me like it flowed all that well in either series. But at the very least, it functioned much better in the environment of Borderlands where it benefits from futuristic conveniences like fast travel, instantly materializing vehicles and guns that could in any way function against zombies if hit anywhere besides the head despite the fact that severing limbs and hitting centre of mass is a perfectly viable strategy any other time. Once first impressions run out, Dead Island is just an absolute dialtone of a game that just drones on and on with no apparent end in sight, and then occasionally sends a wave of annoying cunting sprinter zombies that shave off half your HP at once in an effort to keep you on your toes.

January 18, 2021

Isaac (The Binding of Isaac / Rebirth)

I'm not usually a fan of McMillen's work. Replaying the same screen over and over for platforming precision that requires dozens if not hundreds of attempts for one level has never really been my definition of fun, and part of the reason I've gravitated towards roguelikes is that I generally prefer a spread out sense of difficulty, in that you have to make a small amount of resources last throughout a playthrough and play consistently well all throughout instead of just banging your head against a wall for 15 minutes until something gives, sometimes in a way that you're not entirely sure what you did differently. I'm saying this in advance because holy shit did McMillen knock this one out of the fucking park. It's pretty gross, but that's kind of par the course for this guy's games. The premise of this is that you're a baby whose mum is trying to kill them, so you escape into a basement filled with monstrosities that you slay by crying on them. Yes, seriously, you cry projectile tears at enemies, and you increase your rate of fire by finding items that make Isaac even sadder, like among things, a wire coat hanger. I'm probably going to hell for laughing at that the first time I saw it, but let it be known that McMillen isn't exactly known for designing this game with tact in mind, and it's not uncommon for Isaac to essentially look like a pincushion before the run is over.

I guess the first lesson when talking about Binding of Isaac is holy shit don't ever make a commercial videogame in Flash. I don't know exactly what it is they did but this game gradually slowed to a fucking crawl the longer you play it, to the point that it's practically a slideshow by the time you get to Satan, and I don't feel like that should even be possible for a game of its day running exclusively in such simple 2D graphics. I feel like most of the reason Rebirth exists is so that people have a version of the game that isn't optimized like Path of fucking Neo, and for the most part that's the version of the game I'm going to be talking about here because it really is just a straight upgrade of the original game in every sense of the word, and still gets updated even today thanks to McMillen's somewhat recent policy of integrating fanmade content into his ongoing updates. However, as much as I appreciate a game - ESPECIALLY a singleplayer game - that continues to receive support for such a long period of time, I have to be honest and say that this has resulted in drawbacks of its own, and that sometimes more does not in fact mean more.

Listen, I appreciate the work that McMillen has clearly made towards making the game mostly playable at all with completely base stats, which is something that SO many roguelikes skip out on and are so much worse for it because winning is mostly dependant on luck - but it's just not very fun. Every playable character in this game has a completely unique archetype based on their stats and starting items, but most of them (with some exceptions - Judas and Azazel come to mind) really struggle to get work done at their starting level and some of them might never truly move on from that level depending on what items the run blesses them with. At the lattermost stages of gameplay, most runs are an endless loop of making a dash for the first item room and then immediately restarting if it doesn't singlehandedly make the run worth it, and it feels like this could have been alleviated by restricting what can spawn on the first floor or simply just choosing what your first item will be. And because of McMillen's insistence of dumping tons apon tons of items into the game, these runs simply became more and more unlikely because the original balance of the game hinged on a certain ratio to specific types of item to other specific types of item, a ratio that wasn't maintained or enforced whenever he added more of them. Made all the worse that some endings for the game are completely luck based, like one requiring you to get all the way through a floor and its boss without taking any red heart damage and even then only having a chance of the right room spawning and having the bombs needed to trigger it, and another which is built to be able to fight otherwise broken character builds by design.

I can't deny that I spent a lot of time playing Rebirth, but I feel like updates have made the game worse over time rather than better, making runs more and more luck dependant as they add more shit to the game and then making even more unlockable shit that requires exactly that kind of luck, leaving a cock-up-cascade of factors that the player really doesn't have enough influence over. Or worse still, you might not ever see new items when they're added to the game because they're lost in a sea of over five hundred others that have been building up over the years, working to smother and bury one another. And I think it's high time they started thinking about taking another approach, because this clearly isn't working anymore.

January 20, 2021

Magolor and Susie (Kirby Return to Dreamland / Planet Robobot)

I'm bundling these two games together because a) they're essentially variations of the same graphical and playing style, and b) they're tied for my favourite game in the entire franchise, and in a franchise that has only ever been "it's okay" at the very, very worst you better believe that's one hell of a pedigree. And as usual, that makes it a struggle to talk about them, because they don't really have much in the way of flaws to dissect. Instead, I'd like to start with the intro level of Return to Dreamland, because I believe it's a work of Megaman X-esque brilliance:

You might not think so, if it has to place big billboards with button prompts on them, but these are cleverly utilized in that a) they're strictly visual guides, which makes them a lot easier to localize, but more importantly b) they teach multiple lessons at once under the impression of just one by cleverly arranging the level around a new player's expectations. For example, inhaling is set up in a way that the first thing the exhale collides with is a star block, demonstrating that a) exhales damage things and b) this block is destructible. Similarly, the copy abilities demonstate that you can attack through obstacles, the sprinting demonstration points out that 1 block gaps are treated as solid ground while sprinting, and the hovering tutorial puts you right in the path of a Bronto Burt to demonstrate that yes, that puff of air is indeed a projectile that can also damage things. This all might sound silly to some people, especially veterans of the series that have been around since Dreamland and Superstar, but it's very unwise to treat all players of a given game as if any of this is supposed to go without saying, and it's also unwise to patronize them with constant spoonfeeding of every thinkable mechanic that comes into play. Return to Dreamland, in this respect, is a perfect happy medium, immediately demonstrating only the fundementals and then arranging the level in that said demonstration unveils additional mechanics just by watching them in action, and it's honestly a standard of design that I hope to aspire to some day.

I think there's just two minor nitpicks that keep both games from utter perfection for me. One, they bother have a mechanic which are billed as an excuse to absolutely flatten everything in your way - the super abilities in Return to Dreamland, and the mechs in Robobot. Which on its own, is fair enough, but they're actually used for just solving puzzles the majority of the time, which can lead to an overwhelming sensation of blue balls before long, like a huge misuse of the kind of power they're giving you. The other is that despite the gameplay being pretty simplistic overall, every copy ability has completely different controls for... no perceivable reason? Super Smash Bros was a work of brillance in that every character shared the same basic control scheme and different in how those controls were applied, and on the surface it often looks like copy abilities are taking that same approach, but then throws in light button combinations for certain moves for... no perceivable reason? And aren't shared across any other copy abilities? It really feels like one should be able to just pick them up and play them, not have to go into a fucking movelist menu to figure out what obscure bullshit Sakurai hid this time. The man worked on both games, and doesn't seem to want to transfer the experience he made between them for reasons I can't really comprehend.

Nevertheless, Kirby games still appeal to basically fucking everyone, and I would definitely recommend picking these up in particular if you have an opportunity to.

January 20, 2021

Unpopular opinion: Epic Yarn was way more memorable (for me) than Return to Dreamland. RtDL seems like a fever dream to me: I got it when it came out but barely remember playing through it. I can't tell you what any of the stages were like, or any bosses, or any collectibles? Like I remember all the cool copy abilities, and... that's it. Nothing more. Whereas Epic Yarn I remember so many details about that games. I remember I did enjoy my time playing RtDL but not much else.

January 21, 2021

22 hours ago, Angyu said:

Unpopular opinion: Epic Yarn was way more memorable (for me) than Return to Dreamland. RtDL seems like a fever dream to me: I got it when it came out but barely remember playing through it. I can't tell you what any of the stages were like, or any bosses, or any collectibles? Like I remember all the cool copy abilities, and... that's it. Nothing more. Whereas Epic Yarn I remember so many details about that games. I remember I did enjoy my time playing RtDL but not much else.

It was pretty much the opposite for me. I know the difficulty is supposed to be in getting as many beads to the end as possible, but the total lack of a fail state really takes all the gravity out of it for me, and I really can't remember any point I felt particularly rewarded for doing so. It's very much the Mario Bros 2 of Kirby games, in that they pretty much took an original concept and slapped an established IP onto it for quick mass appeal. This isn't to say that it's bad, so much as I don't think it's for me - and I think we agree that both games are still great in their own way, which is still a point for KIrby as a whole.

...this has also reminded me that I actually forgot to add Epic Yarn to the list and I didn't realize it actually came out first, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa... guess I'm adding that to the "shit my hastily made original list didn't catch and I've realized too late to cover it on time so I guess I have to catch up on it after I finish the main list" list.

Dog Pope (Reelism Gold)

No, that's not a typo. This isn't a Doom mod themed around a realistic angle on a space marine that can otherwise outrun cars and survive splash damage (besides, we already covered Hideous Destructor for that). Quite the opposite, in fact - Reelism is silly in a way I don't think any other Doom mod has ever approached, and that's quite a feat when Doom mapping literally has a subgenre designed to be funny and shitposty. The basic gameplay loop of Reelism is simple: you're dropped into an open-ended arena map, and three slot reels start spinning, hence the name: one that determines what kind of weapons spawn, one that determines the kinds of enemies that spawn out of fixed areas in the map (usually way too many of them to blast them back into a chokepoint), and a third slot usually for passive effects that are happening in the background, like slow health drains, low gravity or exploding enemies. Survive for 60 seconds and the enemies remain, but the slots reroll into a new configuration, which you then endure for another 60 seconds. Do that 5 times, and a boss spawns for you to kill in order to win the game. Even on its absolute most basic level, Reelism is incredibly replayable, and something you'll come back to frequently whenever something else fails to thrill, and that's to say nothing of the fact that it's moddable in of itself, with new maps, reels and bosses available to add completely at your discretion. But if it were only just that, Reelism wouldn't be on the list.

Naturally, Reelism is at least in part a celebration of other boomer shooters and mods of its era, with content from Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem 3D, HacX and Blood just to name a few, but just about everything in this mod exists in some kind of tongue in cheek equilibrium - as demonstrated above, sold to great effect with the flavour text on reels and item pickups. And whenever it isn't all but using weapons or enemies verbatim, its referential humour gets downright toasty, like a reel that covers the map in Kryptonite fog, onscreen touch controls that don't do anything, summons harmless Bronies that can't fight back, a reel that makes weapon spawns drop randomized crates instead which can in turn drop poorly censored medkits, complete with a bleeping noise playing over their pickup sound - and yes, a boss that is a dog that shoots bees from its mouth. Shit, Reelism is hilarious even when you take just its basic mechanics into account. Most Doom mods are infamous for making a point of just increasing the gore and blood splatter, but if you shoot someone at point blank with a super shotgun in Reelism they'll instead launch into the fucking sunset with a vapour trail behind them the whole time, and if you set an enemy on fire, no matter the type, they'll run around in circles screaming like a little girl - and the same will happen with you if you happen to die of fire damage, complete with a brief cameo of everyone's favourite drowning jingle:

If there's any real problem with Reelism, it's too much clutter. There are a fucking LOT of weapons in this mod and they're not taken from you between rounds, so scrolling through your list to find the one you really want or need for a given situation becomes incredibly tedious really quickly. Many of these weapons also have their own ammo types too, despite clearly being the same category of weapon, such as Duke's Chaingun Cannon using its own ammo pickups instead of the ones native to Doom that most other bullet weapons do. This is kind of a common problem with weapon modding in almost every shooting game, wherein this bad habit has a tendency of giving you dozens of weapons and only a microscopic amount of ammo for each of them because there's simply not enough opportunity to spread it all out, making you constantly juggle weapons for no real reason other than the author has no idea what the fuck pacing or balance is. Thankfully, Reelism's bite sized rounds keep it from being an issue for too long, and if you get into the habit of hunting down weapons right at the start of the round even if you're otherwise well kitted out you can mitigate the problem for yourself too.

Much to my surprise, it turns out there's a squel in the works now too, and I can't wait to see where it leads.

January 22, 2021

Darkling (The Darkness II)

I usually hesitate to put a sequel on the list when I've already done a previous game in the series, but this is such an interesting departure from the original that I couldn't help but cover it separately. It's strange in a way that they're even considered sequels to one another, because it's two entirely different developers and two entirely different artstyles and two entirely different tonal focuses and almost entirely two entirely different gameplay schemes, linked together only by their name and license. Most people will tell you your mileage will vary between the two games, but honestly, I'd go as far as to suggest Darkness 2 is the better game. It's noticably shorter, but only because they cut all the fat out of it - those stupid open-ended hub worlds are gone in favour of a more linear - but more focused - string of levels, and the extra manpower that this freed up has clearly gone into giving you more things to do in combat and making it control much more fluidly. Using the Darkness tentacles to kill things isn't just a basic stab anymore, you can control which direction it swings in and knock over whole swaths of people at once, or launch them into the air and attack or shoot at them in transit Devil May Cry style. It also has glory kills much akin to Doom 2016's, but you can pick and choose from a small list of them and this choice actually influences your reward for pulling it off, so not only do you have to weigh the risk of grabbing someone with people shooting at you, you also have to take stock of what resources you're lacking in when you do it like health and armour and defences, which I appreciate a lot more than punching a low health dude and just getting a little of everything.

One thing that struck a bit of controversy is that there's only one Darkling in this game, as opposed to the variety of four of them the first game had, and you can't just put together a squad of them. This too, I'd argue, is a bit of streamlining that the game really needed because you didn't really benefit from having more than one of them most of the time, and you couldn't order them around anyway so there really wasn't any strategic depth to it. I remember there was this one segment in the first game which lets you summon four of them at once and I swear it's just 5-10 minutes of sitting behind a fucking dark corner waiting for Darklings to actually do anything useful because it's a brightly lit chokepoint and you get lit the fuck up the moment you peek around to take potshots. Meanwhile when you get fed up with Dark 2's Darkling doing his own thing, you can just physically pick him up and hurl him at the nearest face to ruin someone's day. Cleaning up little inefficiencies like this is what I most appreciate about the work that went into this game - it feels like the game was actually legitimately designed around Jackie's abilities now, whereas the levels and enemy design of the Darkness 1 often felt like they were made in a vaccuum before they knew what kind of game it was supposed to be for.

The graphics are... okay, fine, even I can't defend this. It's not like the Darkness 1's uninspired, grey-coated sludge of an artstyle was much to look at either, but at the very least it clearly matched the tone it was trying to create - Darkness 2, meanwhile, somehow decided it was a good idea to go in the complete opposite direction and cel shade all of the character models to lend everything a somewhat cartoony look amidst all the gory carnage that goes on in normal gameplay, and even once you get past that almost nobody in this game actually fucking emotes, reading lines through an unchanging facial expression in which NPCs look perpetually slightly annoyed at you whether they're on your side or not. This is less noticable in the elements of the game they've clearly placed greater story importance on - and let's be clear here, this is a pretty goddamn well written game - but it nadirs in the mansion sections between levels where it forces you to chat up with higher ups in the mob to figure out your next step, which coming from a game that visibly placed a lot of focus on cutting extraneous fat out of the experience it comes off as a really bizarre and unnecessary bit of fluff that didn't really need to be in the game when they could have just had a post level cutscene and transitioned into the next one, done and done.

So yeah, both are good games, but I rank the second higher than the first. I think it's better to play them both in sequence anyway, because despite their lack of thematic and gameplay continuity the second game DOES directly build off the first's events, including huge spoilers that won't bite quite the same way if you know they're coming.

January 23, 2021

Pit (Kid Icarus: Uprising)

I'll say it straight: this game is fucking phenominal, as far as I'm concerned easily the 3DS's killing app and a testament to exactly what Sakurai is capable of when he isn't tied down to Smash Bros and Kirby. It looked RIDICULOUSLY good for its day and still isn't anything to scoff at even today, it has a compelling gameplay loop made of deceptively simple gameplay mechanics and quirks, the equipment system - and the fusion system, by extension - in tandem with its dynamic and ultra-customizable difficulty will keep people replaying the game LONG after their first full playthrough of the game, and uncharacteristically for a Nintendo game, fantastic writing backed by fully voiced over dialogue, in an era where Nintendo were considered absolute luddites everywhere besides a game's core gameplay values. Handhelds usually don't get games of such absurd production values, nevermind the love and attention to detail usually only characteristic of a main console release, and one could honestly be forgiven for thinking it was a Wii game at first if you saw the original trailer without that context.

And it really pains me to say it, but I'm one of the lucky ones, because many people's individual experiences can ultimately boil down to bad luck - not because of the game, but because of the system and the players themselves. The controls are fantastically responsive for a handheld game once you get a feel for its style of touchscreen aiming, but it's absolute murder on your wrist because it requires you to hold the whole system with one hand, leaving it imbalanced and with nothing to support the other side because you have to grip the stylus with your spare hand. And even this simply did not work for some people, because the 3DS only has one method of analogue control, located on the left side of the system - so if you happened to be left handed, you were shit out of luck when it came to this game, because even with the option of using the face buttons as movement controls it couldn't hold a candle to the responsiveness of the circle pad. Likewise the 3D functionality, already a massive gimmick the most classic Nintendo sense, was literally imperceivable to some people for various reasons, and even the people who COULD see the 3D effects had to hold the 3DS in a very specific position to maintain it because they implemented this gimmick before eye tracking existed, which murders the fuck out of your wrist even more taking into account that you're already balancing the whole thing lopsidedly with one hand. The controls work brilliantly, but come at the expense of the player's comfort in the process, and it really feels like there should have been a better way than this.

Another thing about Uprising that's totally uncharacteristic of Nintendo is of all things, an online multiplayer mode. And the weapon fusion system comes into effect fucking BEAUTIFULLY here - basically, two weapons can be combined into a completely different one, and traits of both weapons are selectively transferred onto the resulting weapon, and through carefully planning you can craft a unique playing style of your preference by keeping track of which stats are maintained between fusions, which is a style of micromanaging that I'm surprised is as compelling as it is, especially nowadays when developers like to monetize the absolute shit out of systems like this. You'd be forgiven for thinking that this can make the balance of a PVP game kind of lopsided, and... honestly, sometimes it can be? There's a few design hiccups here and there, such as the fact that the Babel Club can already virtually one-shot people with its charge attacks and there are stats that can boost charge shot damage even further, but Uprising implements an interesting counterbalance in that the outcome of a match depends on points, not lives - and points are based on the value of of a player's weapon whenever they're downed, making genuine incentive to specialize and pick perks carefully rather than just mindlessly shoving as much shit as possible onto one weapon and then being a burden on your team whenever you inevitably take a death - which is pretty much an inevitablity in this game, because Uprising is VERY strict with its healing outside of the campaign, and even then you have to ration the hell out of everything you find there further up on the difficulty settings. Of course, you probably won't experience most of this because I doubt the servers are still online anymore, but I still think it's worth writing for in a historical context nevertheless, because it's a unique and fucking splendid take on competitive multiplayer that I don't really think has been done since.

Even just for the singleplayer campaign though, Kid Icarus: Uprising is absolutely incredible, and if you have a 3DS you should absolutely own this game. Easily a contender for game of the whole fucking generation and a huge standout in Nintendo's entire catalogue, usually occupied by the same 3-4 franchises in holding pattern, and I would kill to play it again with controls that don't feel like my wrist is going to fucking snap at any moment.

January 24, 2021

Gomez (Fez)

Fez is an indie puzzle platformer with hipster pretention just oozing out between the cracks in its brickwork. Its main gameplay mechanic is that it's a 2D platformer that can rotate on a 3D axis in 90 degree increments at any time, so solving puzzles and finding your way around is quite often a question of changing perspective so that platforms appear to be in reach from that perspective even if they're physically not, or rotating to an angle that footholds are actually visible from on the back of a wall or otherwise hidden by level geometry. This can be fine if you're actively solving puzzles but Fez just never fucking stops with them, needing to constantly and carefully pathfind just to find your way around the world, and as far as I can tell it doesn't have any fast travel system either so you can frequently get hopelessly lost looking for that one puzzle room you found last session and trying to figure out which specific door on the map goes to what room, having to trial and error every last one of the fucking things which isn't easy because they usually require quite a climb to get to. And sometimes they aren't even puzzles so much as QR codes that all but outright tell you the solution once scanned with your phone, which I've always felt is kind of a poor precedent to set - if you ever require the player to venture outside any means the game itself gives you to solve its puzzles, you might as well just leave up a sign that says "look up a fucking walkthrough" for all the difference that it makes. If that was all that was wrong with Fez, it wouldn't be on the list. No, this is more about its creator, Phil Fish.

Fame can do strange things to a person, especially when they come apon it suddenly, but it can be even stranger when they choose NOT to change to adapt to it. And Phil Fish wasn't just outspoken before and after, they were INCREDIBLY toxic on the social stage, and honestly just lacking in any kind of humility and modesty whatsoever, which are... not particularly admirable traits to have in any situation, and certainly not when you're sitting on the critical success of just one game. Fish would unapolegetically get into fights with fucking everyone and say shit that would honestly probably get you banned on Twitter today, and when gaming outlets caught wind and started covering his entitled, bratty shitfits he started taking it out on them too. And I'm not saying one should be all buddy-buddy with gaming news websites - just that it's an incredibly fucking bad idea to do this when you're an indie developer that depends on word of mouth to get your fucking products sold. This culminated infamously in the abrupt end of his career when, in the middle of telling people on Gametrailers to kill themselves, he suddenly cancelled Fez 2 out of the blue and withdrew from making games altogether. It's honestly fucking pathetic - he never had an issue with verbally (textually?) abusing everyone who ever interacted with him for the smallest perceived sleight, but gave up on everything when he couldn't take it in turn from the entire cumulative internet.

I think the lesson of this is pretty simple - no matter what you think your status is in the grand scheme of the internet, you should generally want to be building bridges, not burning them. It's one thing to be critical of things that aren't you or yours, but if people catch wind of the fact that you're a total and unrepentant cunt, word will spread fast and nobody will want to do business with you anymore. Even if Phil HAD endured all the abuse he'd frankly invited onto himself and pushed through to finish Fez 2, there is no way he would be able to replicate the success of the first game - his name and his behaviour would still hang over it like a stink, and that's even assuming publishers aren't all like "oh fuck no I ain't touching that" just at the mention of him. There is no version of this scenario that doesn't end with crushing, depressing failure, except to treat people with some semblance of decency or to just shut your fucking mouth and stick to making games. Because once the internet latches onto a narrative, it NEVER forgets.

January 24, 2021

14 hours ago, Blacklightning said:

Gomez (Fez)

Fez is an indie puzzle platformer with hipster pretention just oozing out between the cracks in its brickwork. Its main gameplay mechanic is that it's a 2D platformer that can rotate on a 3D axis in 90 degree increments at any time, so solving puzzles and finding your way around is quite often a question of changing perspective so that platforms appear to be in reach from that perspective even if they're physically not, or rotating to an angle that footholds are actually visible from on the back of a wall or otherwise hidden by level geometry. This can be fine if you're actively solving puzzles but Fez just never fucking stops with them, needing to constantly and carefully pathfind just to find your way around the world, and as far as I can tell it doesn't have any fast travel system either so you can frequently get hopelessly lost looking for that one puzzle room you found last session and trying to figure out which specific door on the map goes to what room, having to trial and error every last one of the fucking things which isn't easy because they usually require quite a climb to get to. And sometimes they aren't even puzzles so much as QR codes that all but outright tell you the solution once scanned with your phone, which I've always felt is kind of a poor precedent to set - if you ever require the player to venture outside any means the game itself gives you to solve its puzzles, you might as well just leave up a sign that says "look up a fucking walkthrough" for all the difference that it makes.

The creator aside... agreed with what you said. I really liked the game. But if it were made today, instead of 2012 (started development in 2007 apparently), the game itself would not hold up. The indie game market now is so competitive, whereas back then it was still in its early stages of its current iteration. It is disappointing that we didn't get a sequel, but unless some major changes were made, it wouldn't stand much of a chance I'd think. I guess QR codes were a quirky gimmick back then (tbh did they even exist when the game began development??), but now that mechanic would be so pointless and annoying. And the backtracking... the transport system was so limited. Like... why even bother? You can only get to like 2 points on the map with it.

January 25, 2021

11 hours ago, Angyu said:

The indie game market now is so competitive, whereas back then it was still in its early stages of its current iteration.

I think this more than anything highlights just how much Steam has transformed the indie space, for better and worse. Back in the time of Braid or so, it was big fucking news for a game with a single screen's worth of credits to receive widespread acclaim, and bigger still when they could get it into a space as prohibitive as the console market. Nowadays virtually everyone can put a game out on a platform that can pay them for it, but there's so many of them that they end up cannibalizing each other in the process. To be totally honest, I'm not completely sure if it would bother me on a personal level? If I ever get into making games properly, it'll be more for the fun of it and to share the experience with others - if I get paid for it, that's still secondary to fun for me.

Lee and Clementine (The Walking Dead: Season 1/2)

Well, this puts me in a difficult spot. I usually gloss over the writing of games in this list, partly because I'm bad at analyzing it and partly because I feel good writing is best experienced with as little context as possible going into it. But The Walking Dead is pretty much ALL writing - it's pretty much a point and click adventure by any other name, which won't come as much surprise from the guys responsible for Grim Fandango. The point is, there isn't much I can say without spoiling that context - just that it is, at least for the most part, well written. So I'll do what I can, but this is probably going to be a pretty short writeup because of that.

First things first - yeah, zombie games are overdone, and the 2011s and the 2012s especially were fucking full of them. But the Walking Dead is poignant in a way that most other games period, nevermind zombie games, really struggle to be, and it might very well be the first videogame that's ever actually made me cry, for how good it is at establishing development and appreciation of its characters. It's also a game that, in that same thought, is good at establishing uncertainty through its narrative and the illusion of choice, which can throw a wrench into even the best made plans and catch you off guard no matter what your preconceptions are. And sometimes, your choices aren't even illusions - it can mean the difference between some characters living and dying, and the game coyly doesn't allude much to what choices can affect the outcome bar that it's better when characters can trust you, but it certainly doesn't have an issue with judging you for them. The end of every episode is concluded with a percentage of people who picked one choice over another, and on which side of the spectrum yours fell. I'm not saying it isn't kind of a dick move to rake people over the coals for choices they may not have known the consequences of, but I almost kinda wish more games did it? It's an intriguing, if brief, look into the psychology of the player base, and game design is best informed by knowing or anticipating the way your players think and designing around it.

Okay that's about all I got I think. Season 1 is brilliant. Seasons 2 less so. Haven't played Season 3, and I don't care to after Telltale suddenly shut down and stiffed its workers on severance. And honestly, for any acclaim this game can garner for its writing it's still only about as complex as a Flash title, and honestly about as optimized - you can get almost the same experience just watching a longplay on Youtube.

January 26, 2021

Juliet Starling (Lollipop Chainsaw)

Fucking christ on a pancake, I complain just once about how overdone zombie games are and the list IMMEDIATELY throws another one at me. Oh well, I guess if it had to be any other zombie game it might as well be Lollipop Chainsaw - a game that is a convenient excuse for psycopaths to torture and maim hordes of meat puppets that only technically aren't human anymore, but does so with a brand of sillyness that is pretty much signature Suda51 flair. Probably most notable among it is that while zombies can be dismembered and decapitated, most of the blood and gore is instead stylistically replaced with sparkles and rainbows. Yes, seriously. She also carries around the decapitated head of her boyfriend on her waist and sometimes even uses him as a weapon in special attacks, and the bosses are a particularly memorable cast of caricatures ranging from a punk rocker that literally attacks you with cusses that form into physical words that fly at you, to a hippie that makes you hallucinate all throughout the level leading up to her. But much like Shadows of the Damned, it feels like Suda51's weirdness is dialed back and grounded on account of having to share design space with other people and less desirable publishers, this time WB Games - so it only has some of the signature Suda51 weirdness, and a gameplay scheme that is pretty much as generic as they come - wail on things with an assortment of different types of attacks with the face buttons, and reserve one for dodging at the slightest hint of an enemy's wind up animation, just like pretty much any action game of the era and even a lot of them that are still being made today. Oh but the chainsaw is also a gun, because apparently being just a generic slasher wasn't good enough.

Lollipop Chainsaw tries to break this up by forcing minigames into the mix that you can't skip, and I hope this is the only time I have to say it - if you have to keep distracting from the core gameplay loop instead of adding to it, that's an indictment of how fucking boring or broken your core game is. Whether it's just for a small section of game or an entire alternate playstyle, this train of thought is incredibly misguided and honestly brings down what could otherwise have been much better games if they just stuck to one fucking thing and worked within its limitations. We see a LOT of this shit in Sonic games, for example, but it still leaks into other games every now and then, and this would definitely have to be one such example. I wouldn't mind so much if they weren't a complete waste of Suda51's perchant for sillyness - one of them for example is running zombies over with a combine harvester and Lollipop Chainsaw somehow manages to make even THAT boring by forcing you to drive it in circles around a track for about three minutes and then making you do it AGAIN if you didn't run over a specific amount of zombies during that time? Why? How the fuck should I know? There's no real reason this is touted as a requirement, and the game never references it again afterwards, and it's much the same for all the others too. Just "door is locked because reasons" or "you spontaneously get sent to a different map once this minigame is over".

Speaking of broken core game, it's kinda just not particularly well balanced either? Most of the game will be spent just spamming one combo once you get a feel for which one suits your needs best. And it's hard not to feel like that's by design, because the game gives you currency for decapitating multiple enemies through a single move or combo and there are only a small amount of moves in the game that are even capable of that. It really takes what little weight the game still has as a combo-based slasher when it devolves into kiting out zombies into lining up neatly so you can decapitate them all simultaneously with a single twirl, like it's making a complete mockery of the mechanics it created by itself, and the fact that it usually happens with the backing of Toni Basil's Hey Mickey certainly doesn't help. Hey, I guess all that WB licensing money had to go somewhere.

January 27, 2021

Cpt. Martin Walker (Spec Ops: The Line)

The developers of Spec Ops had to know right from the outset that what they were making wasn't going to sell all that well. From the outside it looks like an utterly generic, Call of Duty esque military third person shooter, and it plays an awful lot like one too, with weapons that are largely just variations of the same tired machinegun/shotgun/pistol/sniper archetypes, an allied squad you have almost no control over besides "tell squadmate to kill the thing you're already aiming at", and a bafflingly narrow designed gimmick of "if there's sand resting on a pane of glass and you shoot the glass it falls onto anyone standing beneath it and smothers them", which comes into play a total of like three times throughout the entire game and even then it's only practical once because there's a section in which enemies infinitely respawn until you do it. It looks like yet another example of the classic executive mistake of trying to chase Call of Duty's coattails, not realizing that anyone interested in playing a Call of Duty game is already getting actual Call of Duty games, and getting them annually no less, to keep fans of the series from being starved enough to consider one of its many, many bootlegs - however, knowing The Line's subject matter, I would say that CoD fans are exactly the kind of people that need to be playing it.

That's in no way a diss - in fact, I say it with a certain amount of respect that I can't reserve for many other kinds of games. That sounds weird, until you realize that The Line itself is built as a callout to the exact kinds of bullshit that Call of Duty pulls, and it would be nowhere near as effective without the element of surprise - appearing from the outset that it's about shooting brown people for sport like any other military shooter, and then picking just the right point in the game to beat you over the head with it. They could easily have compromised and told people they were doing that in the first place, but they didn't, and lost out on sales because of it. And again, I can't help but respect it when people give up their shot at money for artistic integrity. It certainly helps that it's genuinely well written in its own right too - in fact, it's often seen as a case study for exactly how videogame stories should be written, as it portrays poor Walker slowly losing his grip on reality throughout the latter half of the game before building to a crushing twist right at the end - and I'm being VERY careful around this subject, because once again it's difficult to talk about without ruining exactly what it's building up to. I'll just say that, as a game that was inspired by Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now and is very much the videogame equivalent of it, it works really goddamn well, considered a cult classic by pretty much anyone who has played it all the way through.

There aren't many other problems I have left with it besides the uninspired shooting. The graphical style isn't very inspired either - obviously it couldn't be, if it wanted to draw in CoD kiddies - but there's attention to detail in places that I don't usually expect, such as the fact that your character's facial expression changes depending on how hurt they are, or that you and your squad get progressively more wounded and tired over the course of the game until one side of Walker's face looks like it's been held against a red hot sanding belt and his eye looks cracked like a fucking marble. Most other games - certainly no other CoD clones - would just reuse one model for the entire game regardless of context. However it has some absolutely draconian loading times, which sting all the worse because some sections of the game will really kick your ass and force you to reload from checkpoint repeatedly. And that's a trend in videogames that I've never really understood. Why is anything in the game ever programmed to unload everything and reload the entire area you were already playing in? Surely it would be so much less trouble to just move the player and their squadmates back to the checkpoint, despawn the bodies and guns and respawn the enemies where they were beforehand? Is this just laziness? Do games still do this nowadays?

Regardless, I feel like if you're into shooters of any kind this is a game you should absolutely play at least once - because it will recontextualize pretty much every other shooter you play afterwards, and make you realize just how impotently they have been used as a storytelling medium until now.

January 28, 2021

Leo (Anarchy Reigns)

In terms of core mechanics, this feels like what Madworld should have been in the first place - a basic moveset and a secondary button for meter burn moves, and progression is mostly based around kicking ass rather than jamming sticks into people and looking for an environmental hazard to drag people into. Was that so fucking hard, Platnium? Well it needs to be said that the singleplayer was kind of an afterthought this time, mostly just an excuse the contextualize the roster of playable characters it has for its new online multiplayer modes where they would otherwise be a gaggle of absolute nobodies and guest star Bayonetta, which would make me wonder how much better this could have been as Platnium Smash Bros if not for the fact that their biggest hitters were Capcom property by this stage. Anyway, it pulls the No More Heroes route of "story missions are locked until you have a certain amount of currency, which you can only get through repeatable side missions", which is a level of grinding this game neither needed nor benefitted from and I don't think it was a good idea even when No More Heroes did it. Maybe they were trying to do the same "raise points in an open level to fulfull a quota to get into the boss room" thing that Madworld did and got sidetracked? Whever their thought process was, it was a mistake, and it legitimately would have left them better off if it was just a string of arcade levels instead. Well whatever, because the singleplayer wasn't the focus anyway, right? What's that multiplayer like?

Well, as best as I can tell, Anarchy Reigns is the first beat-em-up battle royale that I know of. And there's a lot of shit that can unfold throughout the course of a match, and I don't mean just that people will keep running up on you from behind and burning their whole meter on you while you're distracted with straight fighting - hazards can show up as time goes on, sometimes going as far as to change the shape of the arena itself. Construction equipment can suddenly power on and swivel through a section of the map, a fucking plane can crash on it and act as a ramp to other areas, and I'm pretty sure boss-tier enemies from the campaign can show up too? The balance of the game seems to overwhelmingly favour mostly heavy characters though, especially Big Bull, returning midboss from Madworld, because they're the ones that can hurt you most with their meter burn moves and they don't seem terribly bothered by their lack of mobility because all of them have the ability to charge through the battlefield and grab up to two people simultaneously, made all the more jarring by the fact that their grapple is often their strongest attack. Most of my comments on the meta are inevitably going to be speculation, though - not because I didn't get a chance to play it online, but because there was nobody online to play it with me.

See, Sega in their infinite wisdom decided it was a good idea to take a videogame that was already pretty much finished and sitting in a release date slot on which it had virtually no competition, and then delay it SEVERAL FUCKING MONTHS over to a new date which DID have stiff competition, and then not even bother to advertise the fucking thing around the time it DID get released. If you weren't subscribed to Platnium's youtube channel, you wouldn't have known it released at all. There doesn't seem to be any strategic reasoning for doing this besides spite, which feels like a running theme if you remember how they treated Bayonetta too, and as much as I wrack my brain looking for a reason why Sega would do something this mind numbingly, gobsmackingly, fucking black hole brained stupid, I can't fathom any other rational explanation for it. The whole appeal of having 16 player online deathmatches is actually having other fucking people to play it with, and that shit is not going to happen unless you advertise it out of the ass. By the time I finished the campaign and thought to give it a whirl for myself, there were a grand total of TWO people online, and both of them were in lobbies for 1 v 1 fights instead. Frankly it's a huge saving grace that this game has AI to play with in lieu of that, otherwise I would have a much, MUCH fucking lower opinion of it.

January 29, 2021

Dust (Dust: An Elysian Tail)

This is one of those games that seemed great while I was first playing it, but really just doesn't stand up to hindsight all that well. One of its biggest boasts is that it claims to be hand drawn and animated, and well, that's only half true. I don't doubt that the environments were all done by hand, and Dust's sprites and the dialogue boxes clearly have some good work put into them, but every other character and enemy in the game has this look about them that, for lack of better description, looks like they were done in Flash. Like they're a collection of individual body parts that shift and turn about to imitate motion instead of the "every frame a painting" approach they were clearly presenting with their main character, and it's hard to feel like that isn't just a little dishonest. Alright, so say we get over the looks and look at Dust for how it plays? For the most part, it's fine. Its focus is more on juggling than anything else, and when it's just that, it's fine - but things get a little weird whenever it tries to be anything else.

I've never understood the rationale behind making you combo the shit out of big enemies and bosses that don't even flinch, because it really takes the perceived weight out of your attacks and makes you feel like you're trying to do the equivalent of whacking a boulder with a whiffle bat. LOADS of action games do this in all fairness, Dust far from alone there, but this feels like the best chance I'll get to talk about it because it feels like a design misstep every time it happens because you run out of ways to really sell the impacts of your blows when fights are designed this way. If you had big moves that enemies respond to regardless of context, that can be a nice compromise, but Dust doesn't have big moves - he has command grabs that almost always affect only the smaller enemies in the game, and he has a spinny sword move that you mostly just use between other attacks to keep enemies locked in infinite combos, which doesn't work if there are enemies that don't even flinch from it. Wouldn't it be nice if you could just hold down the attack button and have your character just perform a slower, stronger attack on enemies that necessitate it? Well, Dust doesn't even open that opportunity up because holding the attack button down is how you block in this game, which is a bizarre, clunky design overlap that doesn't feel like it needed to happen at all when it could have just had a dedicated button, or at least been folded into another button that ALSO had defensive applications like the dodge roll that every fucking action game seems to have nowadays.

I would be perfectly fine with replaying Dust any day, if it weren't for the latter third or so of the game, where the game suddenly throws in enemies that can block you without any obvious way to get around it - like I don't know, a fucking heavy attack - and the writing and dialogue takes a sudden, sharp plunge into absolute stupid town when they have to reveal every detail they've been acting coy about up to that point, including the amnesia subplot that had been driving it the whole time. And this all cumulates in a final boss sequence that I can only describe as infuriatingly bad, going through FOUR phases that are largely identical to one another except enemies or allies appear in some of them, and the whole thing just feels pretentious in a way that it didn't really earn from the way the story built up to it. It honestly feels like they had to rush this for a deadline or something and had to just make shit up to get it done, because I don't think I've ever seen such a huge drop in quality in the endgame of anything else I've ever played. What the hell even happened here?

It's a game you'll probably play once and never go back to. What weirds me out is that Dust was supposed to be a side project - last I heard, they were trying to do a whole movie in the same animation style and same universe. Whatever happened to THAT? Did they get discouraged by the way Dust turned out, or what?

January 30, 2021

Jehuty (Zone of the Enders: HD Collection)

God, thank fuck this is the last giant mecha on the list. If I have to do something this detailed again I swear I'll break something. It's also the last Kojima game on the list, too. Almost certainly one of the lesser known ones, but his influence is hard to miss if you look at its storytelling devices - namely, lengthy dialogue breaks between fights, usually in the form of a cockpit view with absolutely nothing else going on, and the second game even uses the same "two character portraits talk to each other over the radio" format that Metal Gear Solid popularized. To be totally honest though, I think I prefer ZoE's writing a lot more, if only because characters have an actual propensity to grow and develop over the course of a game, and it can get philosophical about its subject material without being incredibly confusing and difficult to follow in the process. Meanwhile Metal Gear's characters have been largely stagnant for 20 years, and if it has a good point to make you can bet it'll be buried within something like ten actual minutes of exasperatingly boring exposition between dialogue boxes, like they couldn't even be bothered to fucking animate it.

The combat itself though, is where ZoE truly shines, through a combination of deceptively simple mechanics - mostly, you get a Z-targeting-esque lock on, an attack button, a dash function and a "burst" function. If you attack at a distance, you shoot projectiles, and if you attack from closer in your character approaches and swings with their arm blade in melee instead. Doing either of these while bursting simply gives you a slower, stronger variation of these moves. It's incredibly elegant in its simplicity and plays off of it incredibly well just by how these mechanics interact with each other, for example when two melee attacks clash and cancel each other out, with some occasional fluff like subweapons thrown in. It's everything that one should expect from a DBZ game of all things, and it's honestly criminal that more DBZ games don't follow ZoE's example because from a mechanical standpoint this is like one of the best fly-y slashy games I think I've ever experienced, and mecha games are usually obsessed with overcomplicating its controls and mechanics in a way that makes them feel like trying to operate a piece of fucking construction equipment - lest we forget the insanity that ensued when Steel Batallion couldn't entrust that level of control to just a mere gamepad.

If there's any issue I take with all this, it's mostly in ZoE 2. The sequel introduces a grab mechanic and REALLY wants to rub your fucking face in it, making it completely mandatory for many of the game's opening conflicts and heavily incentivized for many more, which I would hate less if not for the fact that it's really clunky to use compared to the otherwise stellar nature of the core mechanics it introduced in the first game. I swear to god, the game immediately jumped from a 6 to an 8 the moment I had to stop fighting Nephtis, who was seemingly specifically designed around this gimmick and usually can't be damaged without first throwing something at her or throwing her at something, which is really frustrating because she's nimble enough that grab attempts are hard to land on her and she can dash tackle you from like halfway across the fucking map. And as long as we're talking ZoE HD specifically, I hear a lot of people like to regard this version - especially the 360 one that I had - as worse to the originals. I don't have that context because I've only played the HD versions, but it slows down strangely in parts enough that I can kinda see where they're coming from? These were games that were originally released on the PS2, so Konami would have had to fuck something up pretty bad to drop frames on a much stronger system. All the same, it's still a fantastic and memorable playing style once you get past the obnoxious grab bullshit, and I really wish more games like it were made.

January 31, 2021

Hey guys, remember when I had milestones? God, that was a fucking while ago now, wasn't it? All the way back in October in fact, with the introduction of the Xbox 360. Today's the first real milestone I've had since then - today marks the introduction of the WiiU, and consequently, nearly the end of the seventh generation of consoles, one that stagnated and lingered for WAY too fucking long by the standards of just about everything that has happened since the NES. It also marks a time in my own life that, despite what owning a WiiU might suggest, I started to become less prone to buying games purely on impulse, so in that sense we're starting to see the end of the list itself! So if all goes well, this will come to a close sometime around March, and then will come the long, tedious process of making a unified background to pose all of these sprites on. But I'm getting ahead of myself! Today's WiiU title, as it was the first for many WiiU owners:

Monita (Nintendoland)

Let's face it, Nintendo were putting out a device that intentionally defied design trends, and whenever somebody does this they're obliged to put out at least one game for no other purpose than to demonstrate exactly how their strange alien gaming system can be used. For the Wii it was Wii Sports, and while that was a fun and solidly designed minigame collection there also wasn't anything particularly original about it, and it missed out being on the list mostly on that basis. Nintendoland on the otherhand, while still a minigame techdemo collection all the same, does it in a way that's genuinely inventive in the process, and while they're at it casts it as a patchwork celebration of its own properties, even a few that had been neglected for years leading up to this, such as F-Zero, Metroid, Game and Watch, Balloon Fight and... The Mysterious Murasame Castle??? Jesus, now THAT's reaching into some really fucking obscure territory. If there's an overarching theme to most of these, it's going to be that Nintendoland does so well as a techdemo that it pretty much ascends beyond and becomes a great game in its own right, even if it didn't act as the springboard of game ideas to other publishers that it clearly intended to be.

The best known - and honestly, probably the most fun - minigames in the collection are the competitive and asymmetric ones. My personal favourites among these are the Mario, Animal Crossing and Luigi's Mansion events. Respectively, they're about everybody else trying to tackle one player, one player trying to tackle everyone else by controlling two guards simultaneously, and an invisible ghost that everyone else has to take down by exposing it to a flashlight. And the WiiU pad is a fantastic usage of couch multiplayer in these respects, because all three of them afford the odd one out player an element of surprise that their role desperately needs in order to succeed at their given role. The other two, Zelda and Metroid respectively, demonstrate a subsect of motion aiming that would begin to come standard over Nintendo consoles, and are pretty much what the logical end goal of motion based aiming should have been in the first place - the right analogue stick handles turning and large, broad movements, while the tilt of the gamepad fine tunes it to the more subtle degrees a stick can't replicate, and for reasons I'll get into on a certain other title, it works fantastically. There's just one problem. If Nintendoland, gamepad and all, had come out literally any other time in gaming history it would have been much better received - but the WiiU sat right at the end of a concentrated effort by both of its competitors to force out couch multiplayer completely, forcing them to get internet connections and paid service subscriptions AND their own invidifual copies of a given game in order to play with one another. And although I feel like this is honestly a huge loss for the gaming industry as a whole, in Nintendoland's case it also made its best feature look like kind of an out of date relic someone had tried to upgrade without modern sensibilities, like someone drew a fucking DBZ scouter on the Mona Lisa.

What remains after that is mostly singleplayer affair, with the exception of the Pikmin game which can be played cooperatively. Many of them are still designed intelligently around the Gamepad's tech and the capabilities of the player, such as the DK one which involves guiding a little cart around the screen with your gyroscope with a level of dexterity one might expect from a Super Monkey Ball game, and the aformentioned Muramase Castle one that requires you to hold the gamepad vertically and aim it towards the screen, flinging ninja stars from it to your TV through the touchscreen in a way I'm fucking shocked works as well as it does. But the rest of them, at best, are kind of just... there. Some of them are virtually indistinguishable from anything a DS could realistically have already done, and that opens up a whole other host of problems when a game requires you to use the control stick, the face buttons and a touchscreen stylus all at the same time. Between this and the N64 I'm beginning to think there's a QA tester somewhere deep in Nintendo that has three fucking arms, because there's just no other way for a human being to engage with all three of these things simultaneously, yet it continued to worm its way into other Nintendo games from this point onwards in spite of this simple fact. Even when you take the face buttons out of the equation entirely, you still run into the same problem that Kid Icarus Uprising did: you still have to support the entire gamepad's weight on one hand while using the stylus free on the other, and the WiiU pad in case you haven't heard is MUCH fucking bigger than any other handheld ever made.

Be that as it all may, when Nintendoland does something right by GOD does it fucking do it right. The rest honestly feels a bit like filler, something they were obliged to put in the game in some form to demonstrate a gamepad functionality or concept that the others hadn't yet. Aside from its take on motion aiming, though, almost none of them ever actually went to use in any game after this, and even Nintendo themselves would produce a lot of games after this that could just have been made on any other controller they'd ever designed prior to this, presumably out of the same naieve expectation they had with the Wii that 3rd parties would pick up some of their slack. I guess some old habits die hard, eh Nintendo?

ITT BL reminisces over his entire game library

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