ITT BL reminisces over his entire game library

February 24, 2021

Poncho (Quadrilateral Cowboy)

You'd be right to think this look seems familar - this was made by the same guys behind Gravity Bone earlier, and shares a lot of the same visual and narrative stylings of it. I'm covering this as a separate entry because unlike all its predecessors, Quadrilateral Cowboy has actual objectives and fail states like, well, an actual videogame, instead of just being a vehicle for silent storytelling. Of course, it wouldn't be these guys if the concept wasn't still contrary for its own sake, so rather than anything that could be straightforward to make or play this game instead goes for something of a computer hacker emphasis in a first person heist setting - you carry a laptop around with you at almost all times, and you can use it to interact with digitally linked objects in the physical game world. The catch is that you have to specify each and every one of them manually through typing them down on a DOS-esque command prompt, learning to string commands together in a way that still gives you time to do everything that's needed because often you can only hold certain states in effect (like setting doors to open) for three seconds at a time without sounding an alarm, which carries severe time penalties and usually causes turrets to activate and kill you.

Quadrilateral Cowboy is usually pretty good at weaning you into these restrictions and challenges at a gentle and steady pace. Many of the first 2-3 sets of heists have little to no opposition at all and all the time in the world to get used to the commands and the precision needed for the the gadgets they start introducing after every set of three heists, and you can straight up just noclip through the geometry to get a good idea of what to expect in the next room. But then the difficulty spikes SHARPLY once they introduce the "Case", an unfolding rifle that you deploy in the game world and aim/fire exclusively through command prompt, and this I feel is one area where the limitations of DOS prompt style manipulation starts to show. You don't use your mouse to aim it, or even the arrow / movement keys - you have to manually type out EVERY fucking aim adjustment through degrees of x and y rotation. Any time the Case is involved in a heist, you can bet that the first 5-10 minutes of it will be JUST fine tuning the aim to be able to nail a button on some distant wall you can't reach normally, and then setting it up to fire in a way that it won't leave you trapped after it goes off. The worst example of this is after they also introduce Blink, which basically just lets you manually blink and lets you assign a command macro to a certain number of blinks. There's a building you have to rob that you can't bring your laptop into, so in additon to the agonizing prep work with the case you ALSO have to prepare every command you could conceivably need in advance to be able to remotely manipulate all the buttons you need to push with the Case from the outside. And then just for one last dose of masochism, the objective you need to steal is linked to a pressure plate that sets off an alarm 10 seconds after it's triggered, so you THEN need to quickly need to flip through at least two different Blink macros in succession to escape in time and hope you don't fumble it in a panic and have to redo ALL OF THAT FUCKING PREP WORK COMPLETELY FROM SCRATCH AGAIN.

Maybe I wouldn't have minded so much if this were an endgame mission where that kind of imposing difficulty would be right at home, as a test of everything you'd learnt up to that point rather than slap bang in the middle of the fucking game where you're still getting used to some of the gadgets given to you this heist and one or two of the previous ones. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if this was a rage quit moment for a lot of people, because I sure was tearing my hair out over it for a while and it probably could have used another heist or two to ease some of the mechanics in separately. Come to think of it, it's a pretty short game in general - pretty long by the standards of Citizen Abel games, definitely, but most prior games were lucky if they lasted longer than 15 minutes. It does have a sparsely populated Workshop page if you want to try some extra heists, but unfortunately the map makers are even bigger masochists than the original game's and put you into some absolutely absurd and unforgiving puzzles that honestly, I'm convinced aren't worth it besides maybe El Sorrado Speedway. One thing's for sure, though - this game still carries on the spirit of narrative that Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights of Loving started, just this time they put some actual substance between scenes so you have to work for the rest of it. And even though I do wish it was longer, it's still a fulfilling game all the same. Just don't be afraid to use the help command to see what your options are, and have a convenient pillow to scream into whenever you have to deal with that fucking Case again.

February 25, 2021

Nuru (Starbound)

Once AGAIN, right off that bat - there's no fucking point to making a game world that's tremendous if you can't fucking fill it with anything of substance. Starbound boasts a literal universe's worth of planets to explore and only the most asinine reasons to ever even bother with it, because under their surface most of them are virtually identical and even on the surface most don't offer anything particularly interesting or unique. On a personal level, players will only ever have to find exactly one planet - one lined with soil that rains frequently, so they can leave crops to grow on it without their interference, and leave a flag / teleporter nearby so you can warp back to it between expeditions. So what reason, then, do you have to ever visit any other planet? Simply put, in spite of the focus on a procedurally generated universe, you still have story missions to fulfill that don't take place in any of them, rather in scripted, self-contained maps that are basically just generic platformer design by any other name. And to unlock those, you have to find specific kinds of stars, visit settlements in specific types of planets orbiting them, and... scan objects. That's it. That's the entire state of progression in Starbound: spend like an entire hour just scouring settlements for shit that makes numbers go up when you scan them, and then go on to engage in a platforming level completely divorced from the mechanics of a sandbox game.

And I'm just wracking my fucking brain trying to contemplate how on earth anyone in Chucklefish decided this was the right thing to do for a genre that is by definition all about letting players do things their own way. Hey, here's a tip for free - just make the story areas physical fucking locations in the universe. At least that way, the journey becomes the actual focus again - your main objective becomes gaining enough fuel to make it to the next story planet or at the very least another solar system closer to it, and the Diablo-esque micromanaging of weapons, armour and tools becomes an incidental part of engaging with the populace and its commerce or looting dungeons in search of all the stuff you need to complete the journey itself. And if sequence breaking is really such a concern, just gate areas off behind upgrades you can only get through the story missions. It wasn't like you weren't already doing that with EPPs, just make certain kinds of blocks unbreakable without a digger upgrade and make most of them story rewards. Or do what Minecraft did and spread the ingredients you need to unlock a key area across several nearby planets. Fucking christ. These people had the tech to make a nearly infinite universe and completely wasted it on circumnavigating globes in search of shit to scan. What the fuck has the world come to that people ate this shit up?

At the very least, Starbound is mechanically solid, though with Terraria as its obvious inspiration that's not a huge surprise. I think the one solid complain I have about it is its hotkey system. For most versions of the game, Starbound was defined by a strange dual wielding system - originally it meant selecting one primary tool normally and selecting a second one by holding a button down while using your mouse scroll wheel, which was incredibly strange and awkward to use and too clunky to fuck around with while you were getting your ass kicked about the place. Later updates switched to a system which makes every number binding a predefined combination of items that you can change around in your downtime and in which a two handed item occupies both hands (which is necessary because they have all have alternate modes, unlike the one handed versions). This SHOULD have been objectively the better system... except in doing so, they for no fucking reason at all stripped the hotkeys down from ten - one for each number on the keyboard - to six. It isn't like it's because they're lacking in HUD space, because there's still tons of empty space either side of it, so once again I'm left wondering how the fuck Chucklefish came to the conclusion that they had any reason to cut things down like this. There ARE mods that bring it back up to the full 10 slots again, so we already know it's not impossible.

I've tried repeatedly to get back into this, but I've only played the game to completion once and every subsequent attempt has just bored the shit out of me, even with the incredibly generous Workshop support to add extra flavour and unfuck whatever Chucklefish managed to screw up. And much like Terraria, trying to add brand new content to a world balance that's already finished and unchangable doesn't really work all that well, most notably in the case of mechs which have very limited usefulness in planets and can't be brought into story missions at all, only seeing genuine use in space combat which serves no other purpose but to give you more mech upgrade material you already still can't use to meaningful capacity anywhere else. I dunno man, this feels like a game that should have gone back to the drawing board a LOT fucking earlier than this.

February 26, 2021

Fish Sticker (Beglitched)

Beglitched is a puzzle game that isn't going to be everybody's cup of tea, and I think it's important that I be up front about that. The core focus of the game just isn't going to click with everybody who plays it, and its learning curve is very much sink or swim past a certain point - there are certain levels where you are just going to end up dying a lot, losing all progress and having to start the whole stage from scratch. It is without a doubt one of the most exhausting puzzlers I've played - at least, the most exhausting one on this list anyway (honestly, I would have put Jelly No Puzzle somewhere on it if I had more than a paragraph to say about it). So first of all I'll try and describe how this game plays on a basic level: first of all every stage has an overworld map that could generously be described as some kind of Minesweeper variation. Whenever you step on a tile, it shows you a bunch of symbols that correspond to rewards, exits, traps and occasionally services, but they don't correspond to the tile you're standing on - they correspond to the other tiles it's linked to, so much like Minesweeper you have to use a process of elimination to figure out which neighouring tile corresponds to the good shit before digging into it and risking blowing yourself up or resetting the current map. Even knowing exactly how the mechanics of this work, though, this STILL gets me mixed up every now and then and I end up digging into tiles like an idiot thinking that the shiny cash prize was for the one I was standing on.

This is still only half the game, though, because these overworlds have enemies and encounters are fought off mostly in their own grids, which on first glance looks like some kind of Bejewelled clone. The short version is that you have to set off an explosion at the enemy's position on the grid to damage them, but nearly all enemies in the game are completely invisible - so not only do you somehow have to by some miracle align a bomb tile with the enemy's position, you have to find out where the fuck they ARE first to even begin to hope to make any actual progress, and I feel like a lot of people give up on Beglitched (Oh, Bejewelled? Beglitched? I only JUST got that) because they have trouble grasping just how to find an enemy that has no visible presence, and then on top of that only have a limited amount of turns to do so before THEY get damaged. You're expected to use a combination of two different tiles to hunt enemies down - one that shows the distance between it and the enemy when activated, and one that shows its general direction but is pretty much useless until you upgrade it - and cross reference the two to get a feel for the enemy's coordinates before you act on them. And this is before enemies start fucking MOVING between turns, and that's to say nothing of the boss fights which all have their own brand of assholery, with notable examples being one early on which instantly damages you if you try to use your detecting tools at all and an endgame tier one where your number of turns depends on how much you pay them and the fight immediately ends if they get a chance to attack. And I honestly don't blame anyone for giving up on this game, because goddamn, getting through bosses in this game can be a fucking achievement all its own.

I think this game on the list more because I liked how the writing was starting to unfold in the mid to late game, and I honestly feel like its ending kinda wasted it. For obvious reasons, I'll be tagging this part.

Spoiler

The basic narrative concept of Beglitched is that you're just some random person who uncovered a laptop belonging to someone called the "Glitch Witch", somebody you quickly learn is well known and feared in hacking circles and who most people who encounter you mistake you for. Said Glitch Witch had gone missing for quite some time - and still is missing, despite what the locals think of you - so you take it apon yourself to search the webs in search of her and her former friends, who don't seem to like her - and by extension you - much anymore. It starts to raise a lot of interesting questions over the course of the game, some directly and some by implication. What the hell did Glitch Witch do that made almost everyone shun her? Are you in effect becoming a new Glitch Witch? Are you even a real person, or just some random program who thinks they're on the other side of the monitor controlling themselves? Having all these questions linger unanswered honestly makes finally locating the Glitch Witch herself oddly terrifying, because you're almost afraid of what the answers are going to be, which is a kind of intrigue and curiousity I don't see too often in videogames.

But against all common sense, there's no payoff for it. You walk up to the Glitch Witch, ask if she wants to talk, and then the game just abruptly cuts to credits. That's it. I honestly had to replay the ending stage a second time to make sure I'd seen that right because I was fucking gobsmacked that an ending would leave me with such blue balls after everything it was building up towards. With some of the final steps you need to get there in the first place, it was like deciphering goddamn heiroglyphs and figuring out after all that hard work that they said "I'll do this part later". Who DOES that???

So in closing, you'll want to be playing Beglitched more because you see something in its mechanics and don't want it to beat you - anything less than that, and you probably won't enjoy it. Just be prepared for an anticlimax at the end if you do decide to see it all the way through.

February 27, 2021

Niko (Oneshot)

Once apon a time I played a game on Newgrounds called One Chance. It, like Oneshot, styled itself on the idea that despite any number of your choices affecting the outcome, it could only be played once and you had to live with your decisions once you were done with it. I thought this was pretentious garbage, but it wasn't until Oneshot that I could put into words why - it makes absolutely no attempt to make the player invested in its world, and by consequence no real attachement to its characters that make its consequences feel meaningful. And its consquences, for that matter, feel incredibly unfair because most of them aren't telegraphed in any meaningful capacity, and sometimes just straight up don't make any sense as was the case for my playthrough when I chose to play with the daughter only to find it wasted the entire fucking day without warning me beforehand, and then she ended up dying anyway even though she survives if you choose another option? All I'm telling you about Oneshot in advance is that it's an order of magnitude better in both of these respects. The rest is best experienced completely blind, preferably with a few hours of free time at your disposal.

And yes, I know it's on Steam. I've yet to play the Steam version to know how it compares. That's my bad.

February 28, 2021

Mae and Gregg (Night in the Woods)

Yeah fuck, I know, it's another one of those story driven games that I can't talk about much without spoiling the magic of it. That's an endorsement, not a critique. I think the only real critique I can give of it is that it's an incredibly slow burning narrative - you can easily be 3-5 hours into it before the main plot hooks of the game even START to become apparent, and a few hours more before you actually start becoming capable of acting on them. That being said, it's sort of a struggle to complain about it, because even casually NitW has a relatable charm to it that few other games of its type can manage, to the point that I honestly would not have complained if the entire storyline was composed of moments like them. Just a bunch of college dropouts hanging out trying to get by in a rust belt town, doing minigames for otherwise relatively mundane sounding stuff like feeding each other pastries or trying to haul a heavy box up some stairs. There's a truly ridiculous amount of dialogue to find at your own pace if you take it apon yourself to chat with every NPC every day, a lot of places in town to find and explore as your understanding of its nooks and crannies opens up, and it even has a game within the game which itself would have still been good enough to buy all on its own, much less as an optional side thing to do in a game like this.

So yeah, it might be sort of underwhelming to do a one-paragraph writeup twice in a row, but just to emphasise it further - if I'm quiet about the story in a story driven game, it's because I feel story driven games are best experienced with the least amount of context possible and I have too much respect for it to spoil it for people who have yet to experience it in that way. Believe me, if a story-driven game was ever on the list because it was BAD at storytelling, I would have a LOT fucking more to say about it. NitW is a good story driven game. Go play it if you're looking for that.

March 1, 2021

Arle and Tee (Puyo Puyo Tetris)

This is a game I sorta felt obliged to try just on principle more than anything - Puyo Puyo was at the time a series that hadn't seen an english localization in literal decades, and fans of the series were rightly fucking miffed about that happening so consistently despite the obvious demand for it outside of Japan. And I'll be the first to admit that it will probably take a while to grow on you if you don't already play either Puyo or Tetris religiously, because there's a surprising amount to them despite what their appearances might suggest. It's not unheard of that some people won't even be able to finish the story mode without a lengthy break, with Ecolo being the one boss that essentially gatekeeps your ability to finish it all the way through to the end. Once you learn how T-spins and Puyo stairs work though, it almost feels like a completely different game, and despite being on the higher end of this spectrum for once I still feel like I have to point out that this is still kind of a flaw from a design standpoint. SRS - the system that enables unusual rotations like T-spins in the first place - is absurdly janky and poorly explained, forming such a ridiculous gulf between new and competent players that it's hard not to feel like it's encouraging some kind of elitism in its players, which is pretty much the same problem I have with fighting games that use cheat codes for standard moves. If you can complete the whole story and STILL feel out of the loop on all the obscure tricks and techniques needed to fight consistently well, something has gone horribly fucking wrong with your learning curve.

All the same, there's something about the combination of Puyo Puyo and Tetris that sets the imagination ablaze. Nobody expected these two properties to have any synergy, much less enough to be able to get into fights with one another, but Sega makes it look incredibly easy by tapping into the one element both games have in common - sending garbage over to your opponent's board to force them to top out earlier than you. And there are a LOT of puzzle games that follow similar mechanics that are similarly popular, which makes me wonder if one could just say "fuck it", cram them all together into one title and make puzzle smash bros or some shit like that. That being said, even the balance between these two isn't perfect. Tetris players will generally dominate any given match because 1) They can Hard Drop, which sends their current piece to the bottom of the board instantly, 2) They can store a single piece for later to give them more options, 3) Puyo Puyo can do neither of these things, and 4) garbage in Tetris boards can be directly weaponized if you're good at keeping certain lanes clear.

Worse still, the garbage system doesn't change depending on the puzzle system you're fighting, which is a MUCH bigger problem for Puyo than it is for Tetris - Puyo receives garbage from above which blocks off carefully constructed chains that they desperately need to trigger to survive, while Tetris receives theirs from below, which only pushes their already existing setup upwards to the point that they invented 4 Wide combos that allow them to survive and keep attacking even when most of their board is COMPLETELY FUCKING OFFSCREEN. And it's hard not to feel like most of the balancing issues could have been solved just by making Tetris players receive Puyo garbage on top of their board rather than below it, so they have to deal with the same punishments for actually receiving hits. There's a reason that IGN's insistence that the Tetris players are at a disadvantage has become a huge meme among most of the game's playerbase:

To be totally honest, I got a lot more mileage out of this game casually more than anything else. If I was bored and had nothing else to play, I could always count on picking up PPT, booting up the survival mode and seeing how many AIs I could blow through before finally topping out (usually ending on Schezo, because holy shit how do you actually stop him from launching instakill chains). I just wish the game had a traditional arcade ladder to go through members of the cast in order of difficulty, because the survival modes repeat lower tier characters a LOT and I was kinda disappointed that the sequel didn't do anything of such - and if anything, somehow made the story mode even MORE confusing. And honestly, it's hard not to feel sometimes like the outcome of a fight will hinge on who triggers their combo first, because the overwhelming majority of matches will end less than a minute in on the very first intentional attack the victor launches. But I like PPT regardless. Now please do something more about it instead of just treading water, Sega.

March 2, 2021

Sader Fiasco (Heat Signature)

Remember how I vaugely alluded to another game during the Superhot writeup? This is that game. It doesn't exactly take Superhot's mechanics verbatim, but it does share a very similar focus in slowing or stopping time for the player's benefit, allowing them to play very carefully on how to deal with their current situation with the tools they have at their disposal - even if there are bullets already flying. It allows you to pause the game at any point and sort through your inventory at your leisure, and absolutely does not judge you for doing so. In fact, it's actively encouraged, and it opens up a whole host of incredibly badass and inventive solutions to problems you would ordinarily need to act extortionately quickly on. Bad guy turns around at the last second? Whip out a Stealth Shield and point it at them to apparently vanish from thin air. Guard fires a shot off while you're trying to stab them? Use a Swapper and warp him into the path of his own bullet. Need to take someone alive, but backup is closing in and blocking your exit route? Hurl yourself and your target out the fucking window - yes, into the cold, deadly vacuum of space - and then remotely pilot your boarding pod to catch both them and yourself before they suffocate to death. The crazy shit you can do in this game is amazing, and exactly the kind of angle Superhot should have taken besides just "shoot gun at red things".

Missions have something of a roguelike focus in Heat Signature - every character starts with about two items of mediocre value, and have to build up to cooler and more useful ones over the course of a run - that "run" being to raise enough funds to unlock a personal mission for that character's end goal, of which forms my first real critique of this game. These missions are usually borderline suicidal in nature and tend to have at least one trait to them that requires heavily specialized gear or a lot of luck to tackle - most commonly armour that can only be breached by certain weapons, or shields that are completely immune to damage without a tool that can crash or hack them. These tools or weapons tend to be fairly rare and take a lot of investment to find, but you have no idea what kind of shit you're going to need until after you unlock your personal mission - and you're disincentivized from performing too many missions as one character because their influence starts to diminish after they reach a certain amount of fame, which is what you need to unlock gear in shops - the only other way to get specific tools besides finding them at complete random on enemy ships - and liberate stations which is the thing you need to do to progress on a broader scale than a by-character basis. The point is, if I almost absolutely NEED a certain tool to complete a specific mission at the end of an individual run, and that tool takes a while to get, why the fuck isn't it alluded to at the start of a run?

Also if you play it long enough, you start to catch onto chinks in its armour and incredibly low tech ways to cheese it - most notably with ordinary ass wrenches, which you either start with or can obtain just minutes into any run. Melee weapons are great for taking out isolated targets because most of them can lunge at a target from several character lengths away and deck them nearly instantly, but they also have a cooldown time after every swing, which is supposed to disincentivize wading into a whole room of guards and trying to bash them all into unconciousness because you'll knock out one, at most two of them before they shoot you. However, that cooldown isn't for all usage of melee weapons - it's specific to every individual one, and if you have multiple melee weapons all the other ones are still usable if you swing one of them. Rooms like this are supposed to take careful planning, strategic tool usage or a lot of patience waiting for one of them to go on patrol and brain them while they're away from the group - but once you're keyed in on how these mechanics work, you can just bring 6 wrenches to every mission and juggle them like an idiot to knock out every last one of them before they can react. It's a really ridiculous exploit that was never patched when it feels like swinging melee weapons should have applied globally to every melee weapon in your inventory - at least that way the Shortblade, the weapon intended for rapid chain-stabbing of tightly grouped enemies, would see some actual usefulness for once.

Irregardless, Heat Signature is pretty hard to put down once you get into a rhythm, and is one of those games that's really good at providing writing prompts for all the amazing shit you can pull off when you think you're backed into a corner. Just don't expect it to click right away - most people will die or get captured several times before they start to get it, and there's really no shame in not being John Wick the first time you pick it up.

March 3, 2021

Megaton Rainfall

As I might have alluded to waaaaaaaaaaaaay back during the Superman writeup, it's really hard not to to talk about this game without drawing direct parallels to Superman. You're a nigh invincible, absurdly overpowered juggernaut of a character that can cause dozens of casualties with a single stray shot from your most basic projectile, wipe out entire cities just for aiming charged shots in their general vicinity and circumnavigate the globe in a matter of seconds. The first few minutes of this game are absolutely breathtaking, effortlessly portraying this incredible sense of scale through a surprisingly low tech assortment of visual trickery and rendering tricks which I'm surprised more games don't resort to these days. It can look very rough around the edges at certain extremes and at some points later into the game but I'm willing to give it some leeway because it is ultimately an indie game - honestly, it's a feat that they managed to portray this scale at all, much less as well as they did. Which is why, then, that a lot of people take issue with the game refusing to let you go all-out on literally anything the game throws at you - sometimes justified, sometimes not.

See, much like Superman, your duty is to the people of the planet, not just the destruction of those threatening it. It's not like anything can threaten you - there's only one actual way to die in this game, and you have to go out of your way to look for it, so the only other fail states in this game involve simply failing to protect people in cities - or causing too many of their deaths, accidentally or directly. So the core focus of the game, then, is taking these ludicrously destructive powers and using them in a way that only hits enemy targets, not the streets or buildings, because they are implied to be always inhabited. This, taken on its own, is completely fine. What DOES get on my tits is that you have all of these powers capable of creating ludicrous amounts of devastation, and can only fully express them by losing. The only things in the game that DO express this kind of fragility are human structures - all of the enemies in game are coated in material that's completely indestructible, except for a tiny glowing weak point that usually causes the entire craft to spontaneously detonate. I can tolerate alien spaceships being stronger than human structures, but don't you fucking dare tell me that it was beyond your power to blow gigantic spaceships apart chunk by chunk after all the trouble you went into modelling skyscraper demolition. It is possibly the most limp-wristed application of your powers imaginable, and a constant anticlimax compared to what should be a brutal and systematic shredding of anything big and stupid enough to oppose you. At the very fucking least give me an alien world or two to invade so I can give them a taste of their own goddamned medicine.

Megaton Rainfall is thorough in ways it didn't need to be, and absolutely does not benefit from. It's entirely possible to exit Earth's atmosphere, leave the planet completely and explore the entire universe, but there's nothing to actually find out there but a series of collectible monoliths that give exposition - god pretty much tells you as such the moment you gain the ability to. Why go to the trouble of modelling entire other planets that literally do not have anything or anyone on them? Why even go looking for the monoliths if they don't affect your progression or the outcome of the game in any way? I dunno, why make a system for structure or population devastation and not actually use it on anything that deserves it? Maybe I'm just bitter because that development time could have gone into making a game that's longer than like, 2-3 hours. I won't say I didn't enjoy what I played, but it didn't feel like there was enough of anything in the game and its world to get attached to it, leaving the end result kind of confusing and anticlimactic when the ending rolled around. And yet, this is still the best alternative to a Superman game out there, where most Superman games don't even get the basic sense of scale and destruction right.

Honestly, that's kind of sad.

March 4, 2021

Hat kid (A Hat in TIme)

Collectathon platformers are a lost genre that so many developers have tried - and horribly failed - to revive and reinvent out of nostalgia for the legendary output of the Rare of yesteryear. In recent memory, I don't think any were higher profile than Yooka Laylie and A Hat in Time, two games kickstarted with major and relatively modest success respectively. If ever you needed an indication which one did better, you need only acknowledge the fact that only the latter made it onto the list. Its lower budget does have implications on how rough it looks and how densely the content is packed and how long the game is overall in some places, but make no mistake, Hat in Time's core design is incredibly tight where it actually matters. Movement tech is the name of the game in HiT, boasting movement both closely modelled after earlier 3D Mario games and distinct enough to be its own separate beast, and it's a performance that's honestly hard to criticize at all. At least, while we're talking about the base game anyway. We'll get to that.

As far as levels are concerned I feel like I need to pick on Subcon Forest a bit, not for the incredibly sudden and drastic tonal shift but because honestly, there's just so much empty space for not a whole lot of payoff. I wouldn't mind if it was bumpy and varied enough to be a platforming playground no matter where you went, as is the case in Mafia Town in particular but still remains so even for most of the less memorable hub-syle stages in the game, but Subcon Forest is just so flat, foggy and fucking boring that looking for extra goodies anywhere off the beaten path is a huge chore. Unless you find a way up to the treetops most of it is just holding the sprint button down and spending entire minutes waiting to arrive at a new destination, and hoping you don't get lost in the fog because there's no map and most of the optional areas have pretty poor signposting with their Pon placement. Honestly Subcon is really lucky it has both Snatcher and Vanessa to liven it up, otherwise it would easily be the least memorable area in the entire game and a much lower point in what was already frankly one of the game's lower points, a very strange outlier in a game that usually has absolutely stellar level design otherwise.

AHiT also had a decent amount of post-launch support, which is just as well considering the launch was just a little bare. Two in total, with their own respective story campaign. And let me just say first of all that the Nyakuza update was fucking amazing, with a level that while a little confusing to navigate is still real tightly designed and chock full of shit to find, and then on top of that they added online multiplayer and goddamn Steam Workshop functionality, the latter of which adds SO much replay value to this game even if most ventures won't match the quality that Gears for Breakfast puts into the game. Seal the Deal, on the other hand, is weirdly short considering how open ended the area is, and came packed with Death Wishes, a series of arranged challenges that took complaints that the game was too easy and took it to mean "okay, let's make it excrutiatingly, draconianly awful to play instead". Okay, let me dial that back a bit - I don't mind a challenging difficulty mode if the difficulty is self explanatory for those that have finished the game already, like hazards that move quickly or bosses that have more intense versions of their original attacks, but too often a Death Wish will give you challenges that from outside appearances seem literally impossible and don't give you even the faintest idea of how you're supposed to clear them, such is the case for most of its speedrunning challenges as one example which expect you to use tech and routing from the highest level of play without ever alluding ingame as to what any of that even is, or building up to that level of play gradually over the course of enduring its challenges. You have to be pretty well designed to get away with difficulty this high, and Death Wishes are just not that, plain and simple.

Aside from all that, though? Fucking legendary game, which deserved a budget about twice as big as it actually got. Hopefully Gears for Breakfast will strike it bigger next time, now that they've made it known that they are absolutely not to be slept on.

March 4, 2021

12 hours ago, Blacklightning said:

Hat kid (A Hat in TIme)

Collectathon platformers are a lost genre that so many developers have tried - and horribly failed - to revive and reinvent out of nostalgia for the legendary output of the Rare of yesteryear. In recent memory, I don't think any were higher profile than Yooka Laylie and A Hat in Time, two games kickstarted with major and relatively modest success respectively. If ever you needed an indication which one did better, you need only acknowledge the fact that only the latter made it onto the list. Its lower budget does have implications on how rough it looks and how densely the content is packed and how long the game is overall in some places, but make no mistake, Hat in Time's core design is incredibly tight where it actually matters. Movement tech is the name of the game in HiT, boasting movement both closely modelled after earlier 3D Mario games and distinct enough to be its own separate beast, and it's a performance that's honestly hard to criticize at all. At least, while we're talking about the base game anyway. We'll get to that.

As far as levels are concerned I feel like I need to pick on Subcon Forest a bit, not for the incredibly sudden and drastic tonal shift but because honestly, there's just so much empty space for not a whole lot of payoff. I wouldn't mind if it was bumpy and varied enough to be a platforming playground no matter where you went, as is the case in Mafia Town in particular but still remains so even for most of the less memorable hub-syle stages in the game, but Subcon Forest is just so flat, foggy and fucking boring that looking for extra goodies anywhere off the beaten path is a huge chore. Unless you find a way up to the treetops most of it is just holding the sprint button down and spending entire minutes waiting to arrive at a new destination, and hoping you don't get lost in the fog because there's no map and most of the optional areas have pretty poor signposting with their Pon placement. Honestly Subcon is really lucky it has both Snatcher and Vanessa to liven it up, otherwise it would easily be the least memorable area in the entire game and a much lower point in what was already frankly one of the game's lower points, a very strange outlier in a game that usually has absolutely stellar level design otherwise.

AHiT also had a decent amount of post-launch support, which is just as well considering the launch was just a little bare. Two in total, with their own respective story campaign. And let me just say first of all that the Nyakuza update was fucking amazing, with a level that while a little confusing to navigate is still real tightly designed and chock full of shit to find, and then on top of that they added online multiplayer and goddamn Steam Workshop functionality, the latter of which adds SO much replay value to this game even if most ventures won't match the quality that Gears for Breakfast puts into the game. Seal the Deal, on the other hand, is weirdly short considering how open ended the area is, and came packed with Death Wishes, a series of arranged challenges that took complaints that the game was too easy and took it to mean "okay, let's make it excrutiatingly, draconianly awful to play instead". Okay, let me dial that back a bit - I don't mind a challenging difficulty mode if the difficulty is self explanatory for those that have finished the game already, like hazards that move quickly or bosses that have more intense versions of their original attacks, but too often a Death Wish will give you challenges that from outside appearances seem literally impossible and don't give you even the faintest idea of how you're supposed to clear them, such is the case for most of its speedrunning challenges as one example which expect you to use tech and routing from the highest level of play without ever alluding ingame as to what any of that even is, or building up to that level of play gradually over the course of enduring its challenges. You have to be pretty well designed to get away with difficulty this high, and Death Wishes are just not that, plain and simple.

Aside from all that, though? Fucking legendary game, which deserved a budget about twice as big as it actually got. Hopefully Gears for Breakfast will strike it bigger next time, now that they've made it known that they are absolutely not to be slept on.

Well you've convinced me to give it a go! After my next paycheck anyway.

March 5, 2021

Alright guys, level with me. How long have the image links on previous pages been broken? I dunno what the fuck happened, but a lot of them aren't embedded anymore even though the links for the image files haven't changed. Ugh, what a pain. I'll fix up what I can later, but I'd still expect some broken images here and there wherever I've linked to stuff that isn't mine.

Scavenger SV-4

Just from a glance, you've probably noticed at least one of two things from today's sprite: one, it's a noticable departure in artstyle from my usual stuff, and two, it's significantly more developed than anything I've had just a single day to work on. In the interests of transparency, I feel like it's fair to say I kinda cheated on this one. There was once a time where any spritework I ever did was purely edited, as was once the style in this fandom. This specific sprite, however, is the first one I ever made completely from scratch, and where I learned to use reference material instead of just trying to doodle something from memory like an idiot. And I dunno, I could have made another one from scratch, but on some level it felt wrong not to reuse this one vertbatim, if nothing else as a point of reference for how far I've come since I started taking this semi-seriously. Also, I'm fucking tired. I think I can afford to take one break out of the two hundred and something days I've spent working on this.

So about the game itself. The basic premise of Scavenger SV-4 is that for one reason or another, you're a random character who happens by chance apon the coordinates of an uncharted planet with a fortune's worth of alien archeological findings on it. It also happens to be grotesquely radioactive, to the point that even remaining in its orbit for long is really bad for your health, nevermind actually attempting to land on it. So instead, you have to send a remote controlled drone down to the planet's surface to gather items from derelicts, bring them back to your ship and research them to determine their contents, value and what purpose they serve when mounted and installed on the drone - because many of them are weapons, and some of the armed derelicts on the planet are still active. In this respect, it's almost a horror game, trying to make shit out on the grainy images you receive from the surface and second guess whether it's just the wind or whether something just shot at you. There's also a horror element to SV4 that burns MUCH slower, taking 10-20 runs before it starts being introduced, and although I won't describe any of them to spoil the surprise, I'll just say I'm disappointed that most of them are dealt with the same way once you realize it's a thing that can happen, which takes a lot of the perceived stakes out of it after it happens the first time.

Much like Heat Signature, it can come off as another one of those "writing prompt" kinds of games for the kinds of things that can happen. In many cases, though, this can actively work against you because of how badly the RNG is weighted in the potential items you can find. In fact I've only ever noticed it weighted in exactly one context - in the area immediately surrounding where your drone first lands, which has a higher concentration of buildings than normal and one of them is almost always guaranteed to be a weapon (because you don't start with one). This can be incredibly problematic because a drone also needs to balance power and cooling requirements whenever it has gadgets in use. There are often items you won't be able to make any use of simply because the game just never gives you the right kind of loot to synergize and make proper use of each other. Not just having weapons and gadgets you can't use because of low power, but also risking having the fucking thing burn up apon atmosphere entry if it runs too hot or actually having plenty of power generation and nothing to expend all that power on. These problems increase exponentially if you make the decision to travel light and maximize the amount of shit you can pack into the drone's spare room, which you're heavily incentivized to do in order to maximize score, one of only two major long term goals this game has to offer.

One of the most common complaints this game seems to get is that people don't seem to like physically pulling themselves away from the drone to mitigate damage they've taken from the planet's radiation, but honestly it strikes me as people who are very bad at managing their downtime. The drone takes quite some time to land on the planet or return to the ship, usually enough time to duck into the autodoc for a checkup, clear your loading dock, send some items to the research room and others to storage, actually initiate the research on said items and still make it back to the cockpit with time to spare, which either through lack of learning curve or lack of forethought on the player's part a lot of people don't seem to do? If there's a genuine issue I take with it, though, it's a lack of ongoing support - the structure of this game was well and truly set for constant content updates that for the most part didn't actually happen. In all fairness, the intent was there, but the game was struck with a really nasty stroke of bad luck - out of the blue one day, the game started getting a ton of antivirus false positives which they could never find the cause of, and preventing them meant contacting every one of them, one at a time, manually, in order to flag the executible as an exception. The good news is that all but one of them obliged (McAffee, in case you wanted to know the scummiest of them), but the bad news is that he would have to repeat this process every single time he wanted to make an update to the game. I can't blame him for thinking it wasn't worth the trouble.

It's a shame that Scavenger SV-4 isn't the best possible version of itself that it could be, but I still think it's a pretty overlooked and underappreciated game that will eventually reward patience if you devote enough of it to the game. Just be warned once again that it DOES burn slow, so don't be surprised if your first few attempts are slow, boring and/or anticlimactic.

March 6, 2021

Supraland

All things considered, Supraland has a pretty strong start. The opening hour or so sports some good if not funny writing, good puzzle design and a perchant for stuffing secrets into just about every crevice possible, and the coyly gating off a few more behind upgrades you don't have yet to reveal that yes, this is a first person metroidvania under the guise of a bunch of toys in a literal sandbox. But to be honest, it feels like the only thing that stays consistent after this first section is the writing. It starts to get really frustrating once the game starts involving backtracking and other upgrades into the mix. The same amount of cramming for secrets still remains, but trying to get almost anywhere important is a puzzle in of itself that just never seems to fucking let up, and that shit just gets exhausting to deal with pretty quickly. It's for this reason that many games of this type and structure - such as a typical Zelda game for example, besides Skyward Sword which is very much emblematic of the exact same problem - have simpler, broader areas in between its more challenging ones, to give the player's brain some time to unwind and reflect. Which seems like an art that more and more developers, concerningly, seem to be neglecting in more recent days. For fuck's sake, I don't play a videogame to get more stressed than I started out, and I'm sure I can't be alone in thinking that.

For more specific examples, let's talk more about the actual process of unlocking additional abilities. Some of them, as you'd probably expect, are just prizes at the end of a particularly difficult puzzle section and are used as a means to backtrack out of them, but others are bought with ingame currency dropped by enemies and hidden chests at various settlements scattered around the game world. Oh, but it's not enough to just buy the fucking upgrade outright, you have to find special barrels outside, drag them ALL the way back and place them in a designated slot just to UNLOCK the ability to buy a new item there. These barrels are a total pain in the ass to find and collect, to the point that I don't think that I even managed to find all of them in my playthrough. Honestly, it's a few extra steps that didn't need to be there - secrets can already contain chests loaded with currency, why not just add more of those and use wallet upgrades to gate off certain items if you REALLY need them to be obtainable only later on? Or I dunno, just put the fucking upgrades in chests?

It's not just the puzzles that are relentless though. Enemies constantly respawn too, even after you clear an entire area out, from these fucking graves that can't be broken until pretty late into the game. And these enemies don't really have a clearly communicated tell for when they've spotted you and are advancing towards you, such as I dunno, audible footsteps, so what the developers have done instead is make the game trigger a LOUD musical sting when an enemy spots you. EVERY. SINGLE. GOD. DAMNED. TIME. And these fuckers have a borderline goddamned infinite detection radius, so you can be jumping through treetops looking for a way to get that one chest that's so far completely eluded you only for some necromancer on the other side of the goddamn map to spot you and then alert all of their mates at once which in turn make their own individual musical stings, and it's especially annoying in the case of these fuckers because they have a ranged attack you can hear at the same volume no matter how far they're shooting at you from and often don't bother to stop shooting even if you're completely fucking obscured by the level geometry. Having to deal with this shit contstantly while you're looking for secrets is one of the most fucking annoying experiences imaginable. Can you at LEAST wait until I leave an area before you start respawning shit, instead of constantly distracting me with annoying little shits that I need to shut up so I can actually focus on something?

Even when enemies aren't a factor, its puzzle design is very much reminiscent of The Talos Principle - in that it's almost intentionally frustrating and obtuse, but at least Talos Principle has a narrative justification for it. In Supraland's case it feels more like it just wasn't tested all that well and has a tendency to suffer for it. I'm being a bit more lenient on this than I probably should be because it is an indie game at the end of the day, but playing this game still nonetheless gives me the shits and I still think it could have turned out much better than it did if any of these issues were addressed much earlier in development.

March 7, 2021

Gumshoe Gooper (Hypnospace Outlaw)

Right from the outset, Hypnospace Outlaw is like a time capsule of 90s EARLY early internet nostalgia and most of the limitations and standards that came from it. We're talking 256 colour pallettes, Bonzi Buddy expies, a MIDI-heavy soundtrack, the works. And one can't help but imagine how developed the world of Hypnospace is in ways it didn't need to be - obviously it can never hope to match the actual internet, but there is a ridiculous amount of shit to find and explore just by clicking links and following search tags, composed of all manner of things from so many different spectrums of its users - teenagers, writers and artists, teachers, "good ol days" conservatives, roleplayers, conspiracy theorists and yes, even a decent amount of fanatical christians, with noticable overlaps between them. A game like say, Phoenix Wright, keeps the player only within certain boundaries that are critical to progression of the plot at some point, and for good, respectable reasons - because creating areas that don't have any relevance to the plot creates red herrings, which can in turn make puzzles about finding certain areas or things in certain areas very difficult and time consuming. But HO, to its credit, doesn't seem to make any issues out of it.

There's a few different reasons for that. Every page has various tags based on its contents and its authors, and as a moderator for Hypnospace, you're able to search those tags up and jump right to any page that uses them, which doesn't always get you directly to an offending page but it's always a handy tool for getting you on the right track when you aren't expected to simply just scour the entire ingame internet for clues. More importantly, though, it's just a very easygoing game in general. There are no fail states, no punishments for wrong guesses, no annoying reminders for what you need to do and no time sensitive challenges to speak of. If you want to just goof off and absorb the world of Hypnospace at your pace, it absolutely does not judge you for it. Hell, somtimes it's even encouraged to an extent. Sometimes you might even stumble apon clues for your current case completely by accident, or find subtle foreshadowing for events that might happen later into the game. Sometimes you might skip ahead a couple of ingame weeks and have to clean up incidents that have sprouted up. Sometimes, the world of Hypnospace itself might transform in direct response to your actions, and sometimes you might even still be online to see it happen in real time - though this being a game about moderating a simulated space, you obviously shouldn't expect most of it to be warm and welcoming.

Speaking as a moderator myself, it intrigues me how much the work and techniques involved can mimic the real thing, even if Hypnospace Outlaw is obviously streamlined for playability and enjoyment. You would be surprised how often catching bad actors is just a matter of search terms or comparing one piece of data to another that you think we can't see, and sometimes you can make interesting observations from it that aren't even relevant to your tasks, such is the case for example with Zane and his girlfriend. It's also clearly a commentary on accountability and ethics, which are things I can say pretty proudly our particular staff don't humour the thought of tackling incorrectly. This much is emphasized pretty early on in the game, as your very first case is a copyright case in which you're expected to remove images of a 1960s mascot from Hypnospace, which predictably invokes the Streisand Effect and reoccurs over the course of the game, but even as you progress you see stuff like

Spoiler

punishments not being doled out equally or appropriately, or your own employers gleefully breaking rules they set for other people

and I suppose that makes it a commentary on monopolies as well, because that kind of thing can kinda only happen when the entire internet is overseen by a small group of people rather than individual groups of communities and servers.

Coming back to that Phoenix Wright comparison, in much the same way it's a game that loses something once you learn all of its solutions - you can only really play it in its intended mindset once, and then all further playthroughs are mostly for nostalgia's and hindsight's sake. It DOES have modding capability, but I've yet to see actual story or game content posted to it so much as memes, wallpapers and cursors. But that first playthrough is nonetheless something special and memorable, and I'd easily recommend giving it a shot regardless.

March 8, 2021

Hatchling (The Outer Wilds)

It feels like a really unfortunate coincidence that this and The Outer Worlds released within months of each other, because I kept having to remind myself that they were separate titles. And I can't be the only one who almost missed out on it because of that. It was only when Worlds finally came out on Steam that I decided to get Wilds on impulse to see what the fuss was about, and that's when I realized Wilds was... actually pretty brilliant, whereas Worlds in fact turned out to be pretty dull and misguided in trying to mirror its Fallout New Vegas success in a way that mirrors Yooka Laylee so much it's uncanny. Enough about Obsidian, though. My point is, did Wilds really have to have such a confusing name? There's no way the comparison didn't show up while they were making it, and it really feels like changing the name at some point might have done them some huge favours.

As far as the game itself is concerned, it could very loosely be defined as a metroidvania. If you're wondering "how loosely", well, there's no combat, no physical upgrades, no hard barriers or progression gates and by extension, no sequence breaking. If you know the game's mechanics ahead of time, you can complete the whole thing in under ten minutes. So how then, do I define it as a metroidvania? The simple answer is that the game's mechanics are absolutely mystifying in a way that most players will have no way of grasping immediately how they work and how to take advantage of them without a demonstration or explanation of those mechanics by ingame text logs. It's both a stroke of brilliance and an achilles heel for The Outer Wilds - because all of the progression in this game is based on ideas, not physical items. It's an amazing feeling to figure out a strange phenomenom that has been bugging you almost the whole playthrough up to that point and find out that it leads to further clues for getting around and through the various enclosed areas in the solar system. Of course, like any other puzzle of this type I still have to give that disclaimer again - you can only really solve puzzles like that once, and then the sense of mystery the game gives off is forever lost to you. It's sort of ironic, really - the more memorable and brilliant a puzzle is, the less effective it becomes on subsequent playthroughs. And I don't think there's many games that demonstrate that more aptly than The Outer Wilds.

As far as the narrative of the game is concerned, well, much of it is left to the same sense of mystery that its mechanics are. You've recently graduated into a space program to roam the stars as you see fit. I feel like everyone remembers their first expedition, but they all end the same way - the sun abruptly goes supernova and explodes, you die a horrible fiery death, and inexplicably wake up again 24 minutes prior back at the same campfire you first awoke at, and nobody seems to realize what has happened besides you. All the specifics - how you went back in time, how the sun exploded with no apparent warning and how exactly you're supposed to save the galaxy, singlehandedly, in the span of less than half an hour - are mysteries you have to solve on your own by exploring the solar system with the limited time you have each reset, just like you do with the hidden mechanics needed to progress further through. It's SO CLOSE to perfection, but for one small flaw - there's no consistent point of reference for exactly when the sun is due to explode. Most planets have features that change over the course of any given loop, which in turn makes locating certain clues time sensitive in of themselves, but it's hard to know how much you can accomplish in one loop when you don't have a clue when it will end. The only warning you get is a musical jingle that plays out just seconds before the supernova starts, which really isn't helpful at all - and if anything, sets up for a really cruel learning curve trap late into the game that I'm going to put in spoiler tags - as stated, because it will completely ruin your playthrough if you already know it in advance:

Spoiler

Okay so long story short - there's a starship on one of the planets that is capable of warping out of the solar system towards a magical mcguffin of a solution, but the power source for its warp drive is broken. As luck would have it, there exists another power source that can plug into the warp drive - but it's the one currently powering the device that sends you back in time every time you die. All indications seem to suggest that you'll only get one chance to do this, and to have all your cards in order before even attempting to unplug the core and dash to the other side of the galaxy to swap it into the starship... but apon leaving, the end of loop jingle plays IMMEDIATELY, which lead me to believe that I had only seconds left to live (which I honestly believed, because you have to wait a pretty long time to get access to the core anyway) and that I'd screwed the entire run over for a mistake I had no way of seeing coming. In truth, the jingle just continuously loops the entire trip from there to the starship. Could you not have just made a completely new fucking song if your intention was just to build dramatic intention? Why would you set a completely false impression like that?

Oh yeah, and the loop just restarts as normal if you die anyway - you just have to restart through the title screen instead of being booted right back to the campfire. So much for high stakes, right?

All the same, The Outer Wilds is still a brilliant game overall, and the poster child of a game that can hoist itself by its narrative in the complete absence of combat. And even if you like combat centric games I still feel like you should give the game a shot anyway. It may be difficult to get the same experience out of it more than once, but your first playthrough will be memorable in a way that it'll stick with you for years even if you aren't actively playing it anymore.

March 9, 2021

So, big news! Today's our final milestone before the end. Today's game was originally the final game on the list, but it needs to be said that the original list was kinda hastily made, and I've been adding games to it after I started working on them. As will quickly become apparent, some of them I realized were missing too late to simply just add them back where they belonged chronologically like the others, because I'd already moved past that point of the list by then - so for those exceptions I've put together a secondary list in no particular order to finish things off. Don't get too excited - it's only nine games after this one, and then the whole list is done. So without further ado, the youngest game on the whole list:

Noita

Noita is a game that's always facinated me from a technical standpoint, having caught wind of it long before it was due for a release. And its tagline is very much emblematic of exactly why: "every pixel is simulated". It's already facinating how every material in the game has its own physics and durabilities, with some falling freely without solid ground beneath it and trickling downwards if it's stacked too high, or soft ground being relatively robust but scattering when disturbed, or liquids that flow and pool up realistically and can layer on top of one another depending on their density as well as conduct electricity, and the list just goes on and on - but more than that, the engine seems to handle it all so effortlessly. It takes a LOT to make this game physically chug in framerate, and it really makes me wonder what kind of fucking magic these guys did with their coding that so much can be going on at the same time and yet your computer rarely seems to give a damn. And that's before we get into the fire spreading system too, lest we forget that burning down like half the fucking mine complex in the opening level is a genuine option for carving out new routes to certain places whenever you run out of limited use bombs.

From a gameplay standpoint, Noita is something of a Soldat-esque roguelike, in that the game world is segmented into various zones and there's a safe zone to organize all the randomized shit you picked up along the way. Said stuff is categorized by wands, items and spells, with the safe zone itself granting a selection of three character perks you can only choose one of. And you'll spend a surprising amount of time here once you get a grip of how the game's mechanics works, because another defining feature of Noita is the ability to mix and match spells, which opens up a crazy number of possibilities. The wands themselves have their own stats, like mana and rate of fire and recharge time, which means even something as simple as swapping your starting Spark Bolt onto the wand normally used for just bombs can turn it into a goddamn machine gun, to say nothing of spells that exist just to add effects to other spells and rarer wands that will always cast a specific spell independently of other spells and mana requirements. With some creativity, perk synergy and old-fashioned luck, you can work your way up to builds that are almost literally game breaking - and even then, somehow the game still manages to expect it and leaves more content just laying around everywhere, even beyond the absolute border of the game world. And honestly? This is the one thing I hate about Noita, because most other endings for the game besides the default REQUIRE you to do this, despite the requirements being absolutely draconian.

I'm not even going to bother spoiler tagging it this time, because frankly there's no way you're going to figure most of it out without looking it up on the internet anyway. The absolute simplest alternate ending you can get is to obtain a mcguffin that the final boss is guarding, and then instead of taking it further down to the normal ending, digging upwards back to just above where you started. Just getting down there in the first place is already really fucking difficult because there are only two sources of healing in the entire game - a single use full heal in every safe zone that only very rarely spawns outside of it, and a healing potion which you almost always have to craft yourself, the ingredients to which are 1) not revealed to you in any way and 2) COMPLETELY FUCKING RANDOMIZED EVERY PLAYTHROUGH. And a single mistake in Noita can potentially kill you borderline if not literally instantly, so making the health you have in the first place last all the way to the final boss already doesn't happen often, but then you have to go through virtually the entire game backwards without any health refills at all? And it's STILL not the best ending? Nevermind that RNG doesn't guarantee you a means of getting through the extremely dense materials that separate every floor, so you might not have the means to get it despite any amount of prep work you put into it, which is absolutely the worst and most frustrating thing a roguelike can be.

No, for the best endings, you have to collect orbs - collectibles that boost your maximum health, and unlock spells the first time you find them - and essences - which activate constantly active, usually detrimental perks when picked up. Almost none of these are within the normal play area - you have to break the game just to REACH most of them, nevermind actually locate the fucking things. Even if you were to pick them up just for the max HP boost, none of them heal you and most of them are a MINIMUM of 15-20 minutes off the beaten path. Just trying to collect any of these things, much less all of them, can add entire hours to a run, and that's before we get into the fact that many of them are populated with post-endgame enemies, and oh, did I remind you of the fact that YOU'RE STILL EXPECTED TO DO ALL OF THIS ON ONE FUCKING HEALTH BAR??? It's one thing to make secrets and alternate endings harder to get, but the requirements for accomplishing anything other than the standard in Noita go beyond being simply skillfull and/or lucky and delves into obscurity and absolute fucking stupidity, and yet the developers and community both seems to revel in exactly this kind of design for some reason??? Look, cut the bullshit, cut the fucking memes. This can be a MUCH better game, and you all fucking know it. Ironically shit difficulty is still shit.

Look, I guess the game is just fine if you don't get invested in postgame content? But considering the default ending is arguably the worst one, it's really hard not to. At least almost everything in The Binding of Isaac is acheivable within completely normal gameplay, even if there are randomized options for some things that make things easier.

March 10, 2021

Blaze the Cat (Sonic Rush / Rush Adventure)

You know, for how much we talk about Boost mechanics being mechanical dead ends as far as the Sonic franchise is concerned, nobody ever seems to talk about the games that birthed them all that much. Let's be clear about one thing right off the bat - Dimps have never really been particularly great at Sonic games, even if they haven't always been Sonic 4 levels of awful at it. Until Sonic Rush, they were always just those games that were just there, which were convenient to have if you were on the go (because the overwhelming majority of them were handheld titles, if memory serves right), but you'd usually default to one of the console Sonics if you ever had the option. Even in this game most of the hallmarks of Dimps Sonic design are still there, including most of the trademark flaws we are all too familiar with today thanks to Sonic 4 - the main difference being that back then, they were better at concealing them, so you had to actually go out of your way to look for them instead of constantly bumping into them by accident trying to play the game like normal.

Well, besides that weird, janky, instantly-halt-all-vertical-momentum-the-moment-you-let-go-of-the-jump-button jump. In hindsight, THAT was fucking annoying.

If there's one thing that Rush and Rush Adventure do better than any other boost game, though, it's that they're MUCH better at managing downtime than any other games in its archetype. Theses are games in which you don't gain boost meter back just for collecting rings - already a massive fucking improvement all on its own - and instead recovered gauge mostly through a trick system that you gain access to whenever you launch off of ramps or springs. Not selected ones, as it has been for Unleashed and onwards - I mean ANY fucking spring or ramp. And some of those tricks in turn give you a momentum boost in a direction of your choosing, which in turn allows you to reach new areas you couldn't normally or shoot off straight into a running start from a launch rather than waiting to completely touch the ground first, in addition to the boost gauge refill it gives you. Although you will still be spending most of the time boosting whenever it's an option, it's a gameplay focus that more closely rewards the ability to read the level design around you and react to it accordingly, because without that ability you will just end up running completely out of boost a lot - compared and contrasted against what we have today, which are often literal corridors lined with rings, enemies and occasional launches to other boost corridors, it's really hard not to miss how engaging it was when the Rushes did it. Especially when, out of all possible things, the move to 3D should have been a huge benefit just for the simple ability to see more than half a screen in front of you.

Neither of them are perfect. For some reason the boss fights, rather than working the boost into a means of attacking through some kind of reward system similar to tricks, strip the boost from you completely instead. What this usually amounts to is having to wait large amounts of time doing nothing but occasionally dodging as a scripted statue goes through its motions, waiting for it to open up an opportunity to attack it. Rush Adventure handled this a little better in that most bosses can be comboed by landing on top of them repeatedly from one jump, which is harder and more thrilling than it sounds because you bounce off them at an angle instead of directly upwards and have to constantly course correct - but even then, the majority of most fights are spent just waiting, instead of proactively attacking them or trying to find or open up their weak points yourself. To be frank this is pretty goddamn lame boss design, and I can only count the memorable ones on one hand because of it. Also, as was tradition for Dimps up to this point, the special stages have a tendency to be extortionately difficult, and the exclusive usage of touchscreen controls has, if anything, seemingly been used to demand inhuman precision out of its later stages. The 7th one in Rush leaves almost no room for error - you have to collect virtually every ring on the course and not lose a single one of them, and I swear that requires nearly frame perfect weaves between dense fields of spike balls that will immediately void your run from the ring loss if you touch a single one of them.

But you know what? Out of any boost titles in the series, the Rushes are the ones I look back most fondly on. Yes, even including the likes of Unleashed and Generations, which aren't bad games but come with asterisks MUCH bigger than anything I had to deal with in the Rush titles. And if Sega is absolutely insistent on keeping the boost around despite how fucking tired everyone is of it, they really need to take more influence from these games - because make no mistake, this was the boost style at its peak.

March 11, 2021

Corvus (Heretic)

One of the main complaints I've always had about Heretic is that it's in many rights just a bootleg fantasy Doom. Much of the mechanics and structure are identical, right down to what it accounts for in its end of level screen and how it calculates them, it has analogues for seven out of Doom II's nine weapons, and it even uses the exact same engine that Doom did to the point that modern Doom source ports run it just fine with virtually no tweaking involved. Doom isn't a bad example to follow, let's be clear about that, but when your game is set in an ancient history far removed from anything Doom could ever hope to be and your weapons are all themed around a host of magical artifacts or medieval weapons, it feels like a tremendous waste that the overwhelming majority of them are designed strictly around Doom archetypes. A weak hitscan starting weapon, a rapidfire version, a beefy splash damage weapon, a spammy stunlocking weapon... hell, even the Gauntlets of the Necromancer, which look and sound fucking amazing, are ultimately just a chainsaw reskin. Hexen never seemed to have an issue with this, even if it's more of a class-based affair, so it does leave me wondering why only Heretic was like this.

In its place, Heretic instead has a much higher focus on inventory management, specifically with single use items scattered about the levels. One problem I did have with Doom is that powerups always activated instantly apon pickup, and more often than not they had a limited amount of time until they ran out (except for the Berzerk Pack, despite what appearances might suggest). Often this meant either randomly plonking items into the level arbitarily and just hoping the player can make any use of them, or make level design around them and place them only exactly where they were useful, which would normally leave you up shit creek without a paddle if they ever ran out. Heretic on the other hand, allows you to keep them in your inventory and use them on command, making them MUCH more versatile. It's a really huge relief that that one invulnerability pickup you found earlier on can be saved for a tough encounter or a desperation move to save yourself from an ambush instead of having to just know in advance where it can actually be put to good use and having to race halfway across the fucking map to abuse it before it runs out.

This creates problems of its own, though - there are SO many items to choose from that your inventory gets incredibly bloated, to the point that individual healing items are added to inventory instead of just being used on the spot. If you play the game with keyboard only this just straight up fucks you over, nevermind with a mouse and the source port conveniences we have today. It means either memorizing a LOT of individual hotkeys for each items, or scrolling through them one by one with methods you'll frankly have to come up with yourself because the defaults mean having to move your hand away from either the mouse or the movement keys. Here, I'll give you the best keybindings for free: WSAD for movement keys, Q for scroll item left, E for scroll item right, F to use selected item. Fuckin' magic. Even then, there's a strange glitch that sets all item counts to 1 whenever you clear a stage even if you had more than one of them, which I think annoys me more than just wiping the entire inventory between levels because at least that way I would feel compelled to use them before the end of episode boss.

One last thing to note is that some of the level design, while still aeons better than most of what we get in modern shooter fare, has a tendency to dip into mystifyingly bad and confusing fare at several points, especially in the Shadow of the Serpent Riders expansion. Have you ever pressed a button, had no idea what the fuck it even did and had to scour almost the entire level looking for a sign of progress? There have been times where finding every secret in a stage is somehow easier than finding the fucking exit because of this, and it's a good reason why most Doom levels use keycards when it needs to gate parts of the level off initially - or if it HAS to delve into switch hunting fare, at least designs maps in a way that the effects of a switch are visible and/or audible whenever you flick one, not make it open a random door on the other side of the fucking map and leave the player to figure that out for themselves. If you can stomach all that and just want a decent Doom alternative, hell, I'm not stopping you. Just be aware that there's good reasons Heretic didn't hit as hard as OG Doom did.

March 12, 2021

Spike (Ape Escape)

Back during Stormrise and Too Human, I remarked on how bad an idea it was to use the right stick for anything besides camera control. Both times, I had people bounce back and tell me "well what about Ape Escape?", and shit, with the amount of egg I have on my face right now you could add a few slices of buttered toast and a couple rashers of bacon and use me as a breakfast plate. Well, not so fast. I feel like the best thing you can say about Ape Escape's controls is that they function. For context, the Playstation didn't always have dual analogs - shit, it didn't even have analogue sticks at all when it first launched - and the dualshock was brand new when Ape Escape came out. So in that respect, it's a very similar niche to what most of us think about early Wii titles today. It works, but doesn't do anything that couldn't already be accomplished with buttons and honestly, in hindsight does so in ways that are objectively inferior to them. In some cases it's incredibly obvious, whereas in others need a little more explaining.

Probably the worst offenders are the Super Hoop and Sky Flyer, which are activated by repeatedly spinning the right analogue stick in circles. Even in context I don't feel like they ever needed to do this, because it adds a delay to operating them that really doesn't need to be there and can sometimes even get in the way of accomplishing tasks they were clearly designed for, especially if you need to use the Flyer to save yourself from a misplaced jump. Then there's the Time Net, Stun Club and Magic Punch, wherein the right stick is used to aim them horizontally. This is honestly done even worse than it would be normally, because in addition to being confusing and difficult to aim and align for the same reasons Whip Select was in Stormrise (ie: you're rotating on an X-axis from a view that isn't from a directly overhead perspective), you never have any reason to separate your aim from your movement anyway because these weapons draw you to a complete stop whenever you issue a command to use them - unlike the RC car and radar, which allows, expects, and most importantly benefits from controlling it and yourself simultaneously, which is exactly the right approach to twin stick gameplay that isn't just optimizing the camera controls.

When I came to the Slingshot - and its requirement to pull downwards on the right stick to ready a shot - I came apon a sudden epiphany. Because it forces you into first person to aim it most of the time, and it's hard not to think of Ocarina of Time in that respect because it features the same tool and the same application thereof, besides the fact that the Slingshot has multiple ammo types (which let's be real, you probably never used unless the level or enemies absolutely required it). And that made me think "wait, why the hell do I need the right stick for this when it already has its own button binding?". And with that, the dime drops. Ape Escape isn't even particularly unique in its gimmickness - it's mostly just Ocarina of Time with extra steps. Why does the Hoop and Flyer need spinny stick movements when you can just hold a button down? Why do any of the melee weapons need a second stick to dictate aim when you can just press a button and use your current facing to determine which direction it's used? Why does the slingshot need you to hold a stick downwards when you can just hold a button down? Let's be clear, there isn't a wrong answer to this - there are genuine arguments for sacrificing that little bit of control for immersion's sake, especially if it isn't especially demanding of responsivity and reaction times like has been the case for many waggle games on the Wii. But the point remains that it's unnecessary, and from the standpoint of just making a character concisely do a thing, an objectively inferior option.

Once you separate Ape Escape from its gimmicks, it still isn't a bad game. Hell, it was the only Playstation game I could bring myself to include on the list, so I think that counts for something. Its core gameplay loop is still nice - hunt for monkies in a platforming environment, catch them with the Time Net and make sure the little shits don't give you too much grief in the process, preferably by sneaking up and taking them by surprise so they don't have a chance to slap you or give you the slip. There are definitely a few incredibly strange control oddities here and there, such as the tank that you have to control by directing both invidiual treads instead of just... steering it, and backtracking can be a huge pain in the later stages when you're going for 100% completion. But honestly, it's fun even when it's awkward, and I think that's all anyone can ask of a gimmick game.

March 13, 2021

Croc (Croc: Legend of the Gobbos)

Holy crap this game aged horribly. Usually one thinks of Sonic Adventure first when the subject of badly aged games comes up, with its atrocious camera, cutscenes that were already dated even on the day it came out, and its insistence on shoving in bullshit as irrelevant as fishing as main gameplay hooks, but at the very least one could count on holding the control stick a certain direction in Adventure and having their character move in that direction. Croc is a 3D platformer so early in the spectrum that it still used fucking TANK CONTROLS. That kind of thing was already unthinkable after Mario 64 took the stage, nevermind today... wait, what the hell do you mean this game came out after Mario 64????

In fairness to the level designers, they seemed entirely aware of their movement's limitations and did a decent enough job working around them. Tank controls are something you really don't want to be doing a whole lot of turning with on the move, especially if you have a limited amount of time to act (which very well can be the case once they introduce collapsing and disappearing platforms into the mix), so many platforming sequences will happen in straight lines if missing a jump is dangerous, or at most a 90 degree turn between jumps when the challenge is ante'd up. That being said, most levels come in absolutely microscopic chunks that are gated off with individual loading screens, which in retrospect looks a little sad compared to even modest 3D experiences of the day, and even with that limited amount of space the designers still find ways to be assholes every now and then. How about some platforms that are not only absolutely microscopic, but are sloped at the edges so you fall off and into the lava or deathpit below if you don't land on them dead centre? How about ice physics? How about levels too dark to see more than a few steps in front of you? How about dark levels WITH ice physics? Honestly, it's a wonder I was ever any level of patient with this game as a kid, because there were design snafus here and there that left me absolutely gobsmacked in hindsight - and whenever it isn't that, its level design trends honestly just get boring after a while instead. Which feels a little unfair to pick on with the benefit of hindsight, but then again I did start this writeup with how badly Croc had aged.

All that remains after that is its combat. I mean, it's not complex, that's absolutely the style for a game like this - you just hit a dude and they vanish. But the hitbox on this fuckin tail whip is really inconsistent and short ranged, on top of the fact that you have to aim it with tank controls in the first place, so it's not uncommon to make embarrassing misses and not feel like you were at fault for it. The main reason I bring it up is more for the boss fights. Most of them are INCREDIBLY basic fare: wait for boss to do a thing, boss does a thing, boss is vulnerable to damage once boss does thing. Because this usually involves the boss chasing you, though, it often means leaving your back to them and not being able to SEE them for half the fight because there isn't a dynamic camera or anything. That's still a pretty minor concern, though, compared to two particular outliers - Flibby and Itsy. I was stuck for the longest time on Flibby because he appeared to be effectively immortal, but despite what appearances suggest tail whipping alone doesn't do any actual damage - you have to ground pound him afterwards, despite nothing ingame alluding to that. Itsy meanwhile is just ridiculously hard to hit after the first time because the whole boss arena is on an ice rink, you have to somehow bait the boss into attacking without sliding directly into them and taking a hit, you have a VERY limited amount of time to follow up after he does his ground pound and all of his animations speed up after the first hit INCLUDING the recovery time from that flop on top of splitting into two from the attack. It's an absolutely infuriating combination of bullshit in its own right, let alone for a game designed for kids.

I dunno why I bothered adding this game back to the list in all honesty. It's probably for the better - part of the reason I started these writeups is to get over cases of rose tinted glasses I had for certain games, and this is definitely one game that was a lot worse than I remember it being. Nowadays it's probably only worth playing for historical context, because videogames as a whole have moved on so far from it since.

March 13, 2021

2 hours ago, Blacklightning said:

Croc (Croc: Legend of the Gobbos)

Holy crap this game aged horribly. Usually one thinks of Sonic Adventure first when the subject of badly aged games, with its atrocious camera, cutscenes that were already dated even on the day it came out, and its insistence on shoving in bullshit as irrelevant as fishing as main gameplay hooks, but at the very least one could count on holding the control stick a certain direction in Adventure and having their character move in that direction. Croc is a 3D platformer so early in the spectrum that it still used fucking TANK CONTROLS. That kind of thing was already unthinkable after Mario 64 took the stage, nevermind today... wait, what the hell do you mean this game came out after Mario 64????

In fairness to the level designers, they seemed entirely aware of their movement's limitations and did a decent enough job working around them. Tank controls are something you really don't want to be doing a whole lot of turning with on the move, especially if you have a limited amount of time to act (which very well can be the case once they introduce collapsing and disappearing platforms into the mix), so many platforming sequences will happen in straight lines if missing a jump is dangerous, or at most a 90 degree turn between jumps when the challenge is ante'd up. That being said, most levels come in absolutely microscopic chunks that are gated off with individual loading screens, which in retrospect looks a little sad compared to even modest 3D experiences of the day, and even with that limited amount of space the designers still find ways to be assholes every now and then. How about some platforms that are not only absolutely microscopic, but are sloped at the edges so you fall off and into the lava or deathpit below if you don't land on them dead centre? How about ice physics? How about levels too dark to see more than a few steps in front of you? How about dark levels WITH ice physics? Honestly, it's a wonder I was ever any level of patient with this game as a kid, because there were design snafus here and there that left me absolutely gobsmacked in hindsight - and whenever it isn't that, its level design trends honestly just get boring after a while instead. Which feels a little unfair to pick on with the benefit of hindsight, but then again I did start this writeup with how badly Croc had aged.

All that remains after that is its combat. I mean, it's not complex, that's absolutely the style for a game like this - you just hit a dude and they vanish. But the hitbox on this fuckin tail whip is really inconsistent and short ranged, on top of the fact that you have to aim it with tank controls in the first place, so it's not uncommon to make embarrassing misses and not feel like you were at fault for it. The main reason I bring it up is more for the boss fights. Most of them are INCREDIBLY basic fare: wait for boss to do a thing, boss does a thing, boss is vulnerable to damage once boss does thing. Because this usually involves the boss chasing you, though, it often means leaving your back to them and not being able to SEE them for half the fight because there isn't a dynamic camera or anything. That's still a pretty minor concern, though, compared to two particular outliers - Flibby and Itsy. I was stuck for the longest time on Flibby because he appeared to be effectively immortal, but despite what appearances suggest tail whipping alone doesn't do any actual damage - you have to ground pound him afterwards, despite nothing ingame alluding to that. Itsy meanwhile is just ridiculously hard to hit after the first time because the whole boss arena is on an ice rink, you have to somehow bait the boss into attacking without sliding directly into them and taking a hit, you have a VERY limited amount of time to follow up after he does his ground pound and all of his animations speed up after the first hit INCLUDING the recovery time from that flop on top of splitting into two from the attack. It's an absolutely infuriating combination of bullshit in its own right, let alone for a game designed for kids.

I dunno why I bothered adding this game back to the list in all honesty. It's probably for the better - part of the reason I started these writeups is to get over cases of rose tinted glasses I had for certain games, and this is definitely one game that was a lot worse than I remember it being. Nowadays it's probably only worth playing for historical context, because videogames as a whole have moved on so far from it since.

And to think that was gonna be a Yoshi game for Nintendo hardware originally... dodged a bullet there, that would've gone down as their first, and one of the first, 3D platformers.

March 13, 2021

Red (Solatorobo)

God, this is a game I wish I could hold in much higher regard than I do. The writing and worldbuilding is fantastic by any standpoint - like Traffic Department 2192, there's always a sense of anticipation for what comes next, and the whole "civilization in the sky" thing has always filled my mind with intrigue. But TD2192, for all its faults, doesn't beat about the bush more than it has to. This game on the other hand, is incredibly fucking slow paced, and filled to the brim with all manner of generic busywork typical of its genre. It's a game designed as an RPG yet had no real reason to be, and comes with all the same padding involved, obsessively bloating the game with side quests that really could have just gone into developing the actual story of the game instead. Even that I might not mind so much, if most of them weren't so god damned boring. The opening mission does a good job setting a pace for the rest of the game, so to go from that to moving fucking boxes around and hunting down torn up photos stolen by little kids feels like a massive misstep. I love the world of Solatorobo, really I do, but I've never actually finished this game because it bores the piss out of me, and there's just way too much fat to get through before getting to the actual meat of it.

Even once you get past the sidequest bloat, however, its mechanics still leave a lot to be desired. I'll be honest, I do admire the bravery of making an action RPG predominantly based on grappling - it's a new and unproven approach to combat that doesn't tend to get explored much outside of the sphere of fighting games, and even THEN they usually aren't given this kind of importance. Imagine building up a collection of grapples and throws over the course of a lengthy ~15-20 hour long game, and then adapting them to the situation and your ability to chain them altogether... and then lament the fact that despite being styled as an RPG, sidequests, level ups and all, you never actually grow in any manner besides some numbers going up. Here's how fights unfold once you get a feel for the mechanics: you grab a dude and flip them, then grab them in midair and slam them against the ground, then do it again, and then do it again, then wait for them to hit the ground, grab them and flip them to repeat it all over again. That's the entire fucking gameplay loop of nearly every fight in the game. It isn't like even incredibly simple mechanics can't be exciting in their own right - we briefely touched apon that in the bosses section of the Sonic Rush writeup, after all - but there's just nothing here that can hold up the weight of a 15 hour long game by itself. There really needs to be more to it besides doing the exact same chaingrab combo over and fucking over again, and yet the completely arbitary overhaul the game goes through in its second half, if anything, arguably makes things worse because now the combos are shorter and you have to wait through lengthy scripted animations to play out all the while.

That's really about all I have to say about it. Fantastic worldbuilding, great writing, but the gameplay is bland as all fuck. When I was researching this game though, I was pretty surprised to find that it's based on another game - Tail Concerto for the PS1. Is that any good? I might think about giving that a shot sometime if the worldbuilding is anywhere near as good as this.

March 15, 2021

Faith (Mirror's Edge)

Platforming in most first person games is usually kind of an afterthought - a thing you put into a game as a moment of levity between shooting scenes without regard for whether or not the game is built to work well with it. Although there may be other games I'm not accounting for, Mirror's Edge is to this concept what Wolfenstein was to FPSs as a genre, the game from which most later games of its type draw direct influence from. To wit, Faith isn't just a character that is permanently upright, jumping from box platform to box platform - she is constantly flowing and changing in state, sporting wall runs and wall jumps and slides, rolls, vaults and climbs specific to most of the kinds of objects you can find scattered all around the rooftops, making this very much an inversion of what first person games typically tend to be: the combat is the afterthought, the one thing you're expected to avoid any opportunity you're given simply to finish the levels as fast as possible. Well, almost any opportunity. We'll get to that.

While this is flashy as all hell, it also brings to light a key reason why most first person games don't take platforming seriously - simply put, you can't see your fucking feet most of the time. Those being, the point of which your model needs to make contact with a physical surface in order to not be falling. If you can't SEE that, it's very difficult to gauge when the best opportunity to jump is going to be, especially when a missed jump will almost always result in a death. This is honestly such a fundemental problem with first person platforming that honestly, I don't know if I could ever conceive of of an elegant solution to the problem besides taking player input out of the equation entirely ala Ocarina of Time and just making the player character jump automatically when running at a ledge, which kinda seems like a cop out. I think it's also kind of telling that Mirror's Edge highlights climbable and jumpable objects in red - which don't get me wrong, is a fantastic mechanic and can be turned off if people find it distracting - but even WITH that still makes routing unusually difficult on occasion. I swear I was stuck at the elevator climbing section near the end of the game for ages because it doesn't present you with a clear way forward in any direction, and attempting ANYTHING wrong will cause death from plummetting down the elevator shaft and leave you fuming over yet another loading screen as the game needs to reinitialize everything for some reason. Neither of these things tend to happen much when viewing your character model from the outside, where seeing yourself in relation to the environment and having a broad view of said environment is exactly where platforming of this kind usually thrives best. Doing it in first person looks cool, but it's a self-imposed restriction that the game can function better without.

And then there's combat. In most situations, you're the only person without a gun, so actively going out of your way to take out pursuers is usually a very bad idea. Sometimes you can catch an enemy isolated and close distance in time before they notice, but even then you'll usually have to take them out by disarming them rather than attacking directly, which is a counterattack to them trying to butt you with their weapon, the timing for which tends to be either misleading or downright draconian. There ARE moves that do a better job of taking out enemies directly whenever you aren't just shooting at them (which you probably won't be, because time spent shooting isn't time spent moving and there's an achievement for not killing anyone anyway), but they're mystifyingly obscure and tend to require a very specific set of circumstances that frankly, you usually won't have time to acknowledge in time for them to be useful, such as jump kicking off of a wall run or landing on an enemy from a great height. Even when you DO try and perform them intentionally, they tend to require a lot of precision, certainly more than the consoles they were designed for could muster. Why am I bringing this up at all if the objective is to run most of the time? Because at least one section in the game REQUIRES you, for no explained reason, to take out every enemy pursuing you before you can progress, thanks to the insistence of our favourite dumbass executives at EA who thought they knew better than the people who were actually putting it together.

Unsurprisingly, despite its faults, Mirror's Edge has a pretty robust speedrunning community, and even has inbuilt time trials for people looking to test themselves on it. I remember thinking the par times were kind of extreme in that you can't always reach them without outside perspective on how to route them, but I suppose that's part of the brilliance of modern speedrunning - that it's a cooperative experience of sharing strats and pooling together how things could potentially be optimized. It's a good game all in all. Just expect to slip from rooftop edges a lot because you thought you were still in contact with them.

March 16, 2021

Marx (Kirby Superstar / Superstar Ultra)

I skipped on this originally because in all essence, it's a minigame collection. However, it remains THE Kirby game for a lot of people and is weirdly iconic because of it, so I guess my arm has been twisted. While Superstar does have minigames of the most literal kind, most of them are simply just... games that are minature in scope. They all share the overwhelming majority of core mechanics between them, to the point that I wonder why they didn't just stitch them together into chapters of the same ~2 hour long game. I don't know what compelled Sakurai to make a game in this style, but its influence would still remain in the franchise for years, if not in dividing games into bite sized chunks then to spend time on unnecessary fluff, to the point that at least one of them - notably Mass Attack, off the top of my head - honestly feels like more minigame than actual game. And although it wasn't the game that introduced it, Superstar was also many people's introduction to the Copy ability, so I feel like I have to vent about its caveats too.

Simply put, a lot of them operate on completely different control schemes and their full functionality isn't usually immediately evident to the player, which in a game of this kind I feel like is a failing of the designers when every new ability you find requires you to pause and examine a moveset for tricks you may have missed like it's an incredibly low budget fighting game. If it were just more obscure abilities for flashiness's sake and absolutely nothing else, like it is in the case of say, Yoyo's Gazer Spiral, I wouldn't mind so much. But many levels require you to, for example, hit enemies or switches right through solid walls, and the ability of some copies to do that - like Jet, that can create a shockwave by cancelling a fully charged boost mid-flight - are never really demonstrated to the player in any form outside of that god damned movelist. Kirby games never really let go of this habit, in fact they often double down and make movesets more complicated while still requiring you to break flow and constantly pause to figure out how that shit works. I'm not saying giving a copy ability more moves is a bad thing necessarily, just that they could stand to be teaching them more by example than by a generic fucking list in the pause menu, which is only a touch less lazy than one of these:

There's also balance and usefulness concerns in general with copies, but I'd be going all fucking day if I had to talk specifics. So let's just move past that and talk about the individual games themselves:

- Spring Breeze is basically just a SNES remake of Kirby's Dreamland, a game that didn't even have copy abilities. So what concessions do they make for it? The answer is none - it's almost exactly the same bosses and levels the original game had, just with copy-able enemies scattered throughout it. Predictably, this wrecks most of the original game's design, which were built around the idea that you'd have to use certain attacks against them - imagine Lololo and Lalala, which once required you to suck up the boxes they were pushing around, and just fucking shooting them right through it instead. It doesn't work, and it's no surprise it's the easist game in the list because of it.

- Dynablade is more in line with what I feel like Spring Breeze should've been - the bosses are designed with the copy ability in mind, but sucking wind and using their own projectiles against them is still an option for those who want to self-impose doing it the way Kirby's Dreamland would have. I just wish some bosses would have put more thought into that than "they hit the ground and create a star, and that innocuous looking star can be sucked up and spat out". I said it all the way back in the Kirby's Dreamland writeup, but it still makes no sense to me.

- Gourmet Race almost feels like an afterthought, honestly. I'm sort of tempted to say doing well depends on knowing the level design ahead of time, but frankly you're only ever going to unintentionally lose at most one out of the scant three races it gives you. Most people nowadays only ever know it as a backing track for Super Smash Bros.

- Great Cave Offensive is interesting in that the whole thing is just one long level with no stops or pauses involved. Even though it's largely linear, nothing is stopping you from going backwards or forwards through the game as you please, which you may feel incentivized to do because the game also features collecting hidden treasures as a side objective. I just wish they contributed to literally anything besides a number going up - you don't even get an alternate ending based on how much treasure you get, which feels like a huge cop out. On the plus side though, it has some of the better bosses of the compilation, including Computer Virus, which is just like... one of the most fucking unique boss concepts ever? Seriously, that shit merges genres together and has absolutely no right to work as well as it does.

- I dunno what else to say about Revenge of Metaknight that I haven't said about the others, beyond that Metaknight and his goons give silly commentary while Kirby is wrecking their shit and I like it as a storytelling device that none of the other games have - and honestly even in modern Kirby games, tends to get neglected.

- Milkyway Wishes is the big motherfucker of the bunch, and the one that will take the longest to finish, especially if like Great Cave Offensive you do it for completionist's sake. Your copy ability is disabled completely, and instead you have to find them one at a time through planets in the game's overworld, which are really just arranged versions of tropes you've already been to and bosses you've already through. I... really don't like this, honestly? Because it essentially means they no longer have to intelligently make level design around the enemies they place in it and the copies you would otherwise need to find specific secrets, and it shows. It also means you have to pause the game completely and tediously flip through every copy ability one at a time if you need a specific one or had it knocked out of you by damage, which is possibly the least elegant solution they could have used.

So in closing? It's fine. It's overrated as hell, and really didn't need to be a minigame collection, but despite all the gripes I've displayed they're relatively minor optimizations in the grand scheme of things. Speaking of optimization, holy shit did the SNES version always run that badly? I swear the framerate basically halves whenever you use a Beam attack and I didn't realize it was that bad until I looked back in hindsight.

March 17, 2021

Prince Fluff (Kirby's Epic Yarn)

It isn't hard to see what Epic Yarn was going for here - it's a game themed around soft things, scored with a minimalistic, largely solo piano soundtrack, sports absolutely no fail state and is narrated entirely by one guy who is clearly trying to run an impression of a very young English children's show. I understand what they were going for - I just don't like it very much. And okay, picking on a game clearly meant for people much younger than me is obviously kind of a cheap shot, but that hasn't stopped people from trying to find value in its design decisions. Key among them being its philosophy on difficulty. Now if you're anything like I was when it first came out, you're probably asking "what difficulty? Didn't you just say there's no way to die in this game?", and honestly, you'd be right to ask. Even falling into a bottomless pit just has the game lift you back up onto a nearby platform.

The basic idea is that your end of level rank is determined by how many beads you collect in the course of any given level, and taking a hit or falling off the screen causes you to drop some. From the outside, it looks like it tries to tap into the same kind of magic that Kirby's Dreamland had - people of any skill level can play it, and none of them are entirely left out. Avoiding damage is one thing, but I find it difficult to consider obsessively hunting hundreds of meaningless pickups engaging, let alone enough of a measure of the player's skill to grade them on it. It's pretty much the same problem I have with most TT Lego games - most of the time it just feels aimless in its design and hoarding shit for hoarding's own sake, although even the Lego games at least left you SOME reward for it that wasn't just a shiny medal. And I dunno, just in general I feel like it really fucks with the perceived stakes of any given game when you literally cannot lose it, and I liked it better when Dreamland simply just gave you an alternate, much harder mode instead for those left wanting more after the first playthrough.

To make a statement that's less controversial though, this is one of those kinds of games any franchise of decent legacy seems to inevitably get. You know the type - your Super Mario Bros 2's, your Starfox Adventures's, your Metroid Prime Federation Force's and your Castlevania Lords of Shadow's. It's a game that has absolutely no business being a Kirby title, but gets thrust with the name and face of it anyway just for brand recognition and an incredibly vauge resemblance. Credit where credit's due, it's astonishingly smooth and well animated in gameplay, is a unique concept in its own right and as far as I can tell, works just fine with its actual intended audience. Did Nintendo really not have enough faith in those things for it to be able to hold up based on its own merits? This was a Wii title after all, right at the height of the public impression that they were ultimately for kids above all else, and I can't imagine it would have fared much worse if it'd sold on Prince Fluff's likeness instead. For me personally though, I just find it kind of dull once I get past its visual style. There is certainly room for difficulty without fail states, but it requires difficulty to be based on something other than tedium as a punishment, and this ain't it.

March 17, 2021

20 hours ago, Blacklightning said:

I just don't like it very much.

This is one of my favorite games and I was excitedly reading your blurb until I hit this sentence. Ouch.

Granted, your opinion is valid, I understand that most people are not like me, and easy, kid-friendly platformers aren't their favorite thing. But man I really enjoyed all the set pieces, the entire aesthetic, going through each level to find hidden objects.

As for the game being a "no business being Kirby" thing... Kirby has had so many of those lmao. Tilt N Tumble, Canvas Curse, Pinball Land, Dream Course, could even say Air Ride. Kirby has had more spin-offs than main games at this point, with completely different gameplay.

That said, I agree that Epic Yarn is the most obvious, because it's been stated that it was never meant to be Kirby. And it makes me sad that this means we could be missing out on Prince Fluff being in Smash, or having sequels to this game (that involve having actual punishments for getting hit or falling down pits), had this been his own series.

Have you played Yoshi's Woolly World? You can actually die in that one. xD It's a mix of standard fun Yoshi gameplay, with some yarn elements thrown in from Epic Yarn, and it's great.

ITT BL reminisces over his entire game library

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