ITT BL reminisces over his entire game library

October 1, 2020

Quote (Cave Story)

Cave Story is considered by many to be indie gaming at its absolute pinnacle - just one or a handful of guys making a game however they're able, for nothing more than the simple love of videogames. To be perfectly honest, it's a position that I envy. Although I still hope to make games of my own eventually, money is honestly a secondary objective for me - all I really want is to be able to share an experience, and it's not hard to imagine it was probably much the same for Pixel when he finally finished it, because it was originally released as freeware for anyone to play. Emphasis on "originally". We'll get back to that later.

As one might expect for a game made largely by one person, it isn't exactly much to look at, but Pixel works with their own limitations pretty well - much of the time the animation isn't all that sophisticated, but he uses motion pretty well in its absence, to the point that he can sell impacts with just two frames of animation if he really needs to. I know some people here today might scoff at that, but it needs to be said that not many games like Cave Story existed back during its day, and designing games this way for many people isn't really a sylistic choice so much as the only option at their disposal. I know I said it all the way back during Nightmare 3D, but it still bears repeating - making a game singlehandedly at all is a huge feat, and its original release even then still took five whole years even in this state, which is a perspective I don't think many people have when they choose to look down on games like this. It is what it is, and for what it is, it's great.

It's also pretty bloody hard, as it turns out. For many reasons, but I'm going to pick one that stands out - every weapon in the game has a levelling system, which you increase with golden triangles of varying sizes whenever you blow an enemy up. However, whenever you take damage you LOSE some of your weapon's level, causing it to downgrade if you take too many hits. What this often leads to is a frequent and strategic juggling of weapons, destroying enemies with higher levelled weapons and remembering to switch back to new or underlevelled ones so they benefit from the spoils, usually right in the middle of a firefight because the "experience" only stays active for a limited time. Although Cave Story is largely balanced in its difficulty, there's still a handful of spikes and beginner's traps here and there that keep me from saying outright that it's perfect - I can't even remember how many attempts it took for me to take down Monster X at the end of the day.

All the same, Cave Story is everything an indie title should aspire to be, and although Pixel is known to be pretty modest about it, he has every right to be proud. It's just a shame he doesn't actually own it anymore. See, when Nicalis went to develop console ports of the game - again, something that was almost completely without precedent at the time - Pixel was entirely screwed out of the rights to it, like many other small developers that have done business with them, to the point where one could almost argue that it's their business model. To add insult to injury, they still regularly shove him and others into crossovers that they almost certainly see no royalties for, in addition to not actually making any new titles besides re-porting the original repeatedly. So I guess today's biggest lesson is "always read the fine print" - because this industry has a storied history of preying on naievete, and WILL fuck you over if it means more money for them and none for you, no matter who you are.

October 2, 2020

Hiroshi (Ao Oni)

RPGmaker horror games are almost literally a dime a dozen, and I don't think anyone makes any secret of that. It stands to reason that if you give people a means of making games in a way that requires almost no actual talent, people without any game design sense at all will flock to it en masse - and while it can lead to some surprise hits from people who simply just lacked tools at all before, a lot of the time it will just result in tripe laden in awful puzzles and shitty trial and error deaths. Ao Oni leans more towards the former spectrum than the latter - which isn't to say it doesn't still suffer from some of these problems, more that it distracts from them with some quirks I'm genuinely surprised it took so long for anyone to think of.

One overlying criticism I have of most horror games in general is that you can only really experience them once - after you've played through it once and experienced all of its scripted scares, a horror game doesn't really have any way to sting you anymore. And while Ao Oni still has plenty of scripted sequences, it also has something that in retrospect is strange that nobody else wrangled out of an RPG engine - random encounters. Almost any time you're out in the open, the Oni can burst in through one of the room's entrances, forcing you to immediately drop what you're doing and run for your life. Just like I mentioned with ObsCure, the best horror games are the ones that leave you unsure whether you are truly alone at any given point, and in Ao Oni you might literally not be irregardless of the game's progression when you're out and about trying to piece together how to solve a given puzzle. Most horror games in GENERAL, much less RPGmaker ones, don't think to do that and they miss out on so much because of it.

It's just a shame that the chases themselves lose a lot of their agency once you start to grasp how their mechanics work. What the game encourages you to do early on is to run to a dead end room and hide yourself in a closet to end chases. If they're already in the room when you jump inside a closet, you die regardless, and that's fair enough - but even when you have a head start and hide yourself away long before there's a sign of the Oni in the room, there's a chance that you'll still die anyway, Isn't that just great? You have a chance of being doomed to failure no matter what. Well, at least that's the impression the game gives you initially, because if you run circles around the map enough, the Oni just... gives up and vanishes anticlimactically, which feels equally as stupid to me. Although not knowing when a chase will start is still the best part of this game, the chases themselves feel like they could've stood to be more developed than just "keep running until the monster gets bored".

And the puzzles are all the expected RPGmaker fare, IE: goddamn guide-dang-it atrocious. Probably the worst example of it happens about midway in:

Spoiler

There's a room with a bunch of dolls and a sliding puzzle. The sliding puzzle is a picture of one of the dolls and has an empty slot for the head at the top, with the actual head on the bottom right. You would think the solution would be to move the panels so that the head panel matches up with the slot, but this entire thing is a red herring - the sliding puzzle is fucking unsolvable. What you're actually expected to do is find a blue gem, insert it into one of the ACTUAL doll's eyes, find another doll with a red one already embedded in it and rather than say, prying it out with your screwdriver, taking it to a fireplace and fucking BURNING it to retrieve the red gem by itself to put in the previous doll with the blue gem, which then causes the head to pop off as an item which you can then slot into the head slot on the sliding puzzle.

And that's before you get to doors hidden behind uneven wallpaper, which in addition to already being hard to spot need to be torn open with, of all things, a shard of a fucking broken plate instead of almost anything else that could obviously have done the job better, like I dunno, the god damned screwdriver?

Honestly, if it weren't for the random encounters, it's possible I would have skipped over this game entirely. It's the one shining gem in a sea of bad puzzles and murky translations, and I feel like it should have worked so much harder for the cult status it has nowadays.

October 3, 2020

Let me first preface this entry with a writing prompt. You wake up for the first time in what seems like an eternity with your body in a form that you don't recognize, forced to share it with a stranger who claims you stole it from them. Neither of you can remember the exact truth of what happened, just that both of you want things back the way they remember it - which is easier said for him than you, because the very world is alien to you now. Are you even on Earth anymore? If that brief synopsis has filled your mind with possibilities, even just for a moment, then congratulations - the writing prompt has served its purpose, and with it, part of the point of this entry - namely, the ability of a gaming work to inspire people to make their own creations.

Psi / Synn (utterly shameless self-insertion)

So yeah, an OC is an incredibly obvious violation of my own ground rules. But you know what? Fuck you, it's my list and I'll put in it what I want. What I hold to higher importance is the ability to reflect on each entry as its own design lesson - and there lessons I have learnt in refining what was originally a fan character over the years, as well as analyzing exactly what inspired it in the first place.

Let's start from the beginning. One of the most obvious ways to encourage a booming fan community is to put strict creative limitations on certain facets of its writing or character design. This is the main reason I opened up with a writing prompt, to demonstrate that these limitations actually prove to be the opposite of limiting when it comes to fans making their own works - one of the biggest problems with starting a creative work, if anything, is often too much information to process into a single work, and defining elements of your work as must-haves or must-not-haves is a focusing influence that challenges the creative mind to work within those limitations. Even something as simple as naming conventions can be enough to inspire a character of one's own. In Sonic's case it's usually a simple, one-word description of the character or their abilities - "Sonic" by itself is an expression of sound, which is the thing he's regularly credited as outrunning, just like yes, Psi is called that because all of their abilities are in some way psychically related. This isn't even a concept native to Sonic - Stands in Jojo Bizarre Adventure are regularly named after bands, many Argonians throughout the Elder Scrolls series follow a theme of Verbs-The-Noun (such as Watches-The-Roots), and the Dragon Ball series has a different one for practically every individual species short of humans, with the most commonly known being the fact that Saiyans are often named after foods and vegetables, just to name a few

While we're on the topic of focus, an important lesson I've learned over the years is to avoid too much clutter when it comes to designing their abilities. Even characters that are defined in a series of distinct techniques are usually best when they all draw from a common source, an overlying theme that holds them all together in a way that doesn't make it seem like you're just dumping shit arbitarily onto their toolkit to see what sticks. I find it's best to define a character's abilities somewhat broadly and figuring out what's possible within those bounds rather than starting narrow and inventing new shit whenever you hit a dead end - for example, rather than using the ability to throw fireballs as a starting point, just define it as the ability to create and control fire, so that other applications like creating thrust or self-immolating without harm come off as natural extensions of the character's ability whenever it occurs. Psi, once again, is themed around the power of the mind, so although the ability to telekinetically move oneself and others may be implied immediately, being able to read surface thoughts and induce hallucinations is introduced a lot more naturally than if his kit had initially been described as just telekinesis alone. This train of thought can apply to their characterization too, starting off as "cheery" or "angsty" or so on and refining the intricacies of their character based on the challenges they face along the way - though preferably you want to have some development already done before the narrative starts, because being one dimensional from the start is kind of boring.

And lastly, although for some it might go without saying - just interact with people within your own community! So many developers, for better or worse, keep the people experiencing their works at much longer than arm's length throughout the creation of a thing, and I find this often leads to developers and fans viewing each other as kind of subhuman, for lack of a better description. Although it is undoubtly without some element of stress, I feel like it ultimately leads to a better outcome for all when both sides can just talk to each other somewhat naturally about a labour of love and learn more about it than one side or the other may have initially considered. Fresh perspective is great to have no matter whether you're speaking up or down to somebody - fans learn more about the creative process, and developers take in angles they might not originally have considered, and both walk away better off in the end if they're open to the idea that they're not actually perfect by themselves.

If all goes well, there may yet be a time where I can act on this insight and make Psi a game of his own so he can belong on this list unconditionally. Until then, one can only hope!

October 4, 2020

Leon and Ashley (Resident Evil 4)

And here is the fourth game of the Capcom Five. If you're wondering what happened to the second and third - Dead Phoenix was cancelled, and I never played Viewtiful Joe so I don't know enough about it to give it its own entry. Sucks, but I wasn't in control of my own games library until the generation after this one, so inevitably I missed out - that's luck for ya.

RE4 is without a doubt the hugest game of the Capcom Five, and honestly, one of the most influential games in all of fucking gaming. Which is pretty amazing for a game that still runs on tank controls - yes against all odds, even this late into the Gamecube's life. If there was ever a representation of tank controls at its peak though, it's definitely this game. Finally gone are the fixed camera angles of yesteryear, instead placing you into a steady third person shooter perspective for the whole game. You no longer have to guess whether your gun is actually aiming at an enemy either - nearly every weapon in the game has either a laser sight or a scope, and the laser sights can aim at anything currently on the screen like kind of a pseudo rail shooter whenever you raise your gun to aim, which works a hell of a lot better than I probably made it sound. To top it all off, you can stun enemies by shooting them in the head or the legs, which allows Leon to perform melee attacks on them, and the rhythm of popping someone in the cheek and then roundhousing them through a crowd of their mates like bowling pins is satisfying and addicting as all hell when you start catching onto the sweet spots of it all.

Unfortunately, while RE4 is more influential than any game I can think of short of mascot platformers and CoDs, it's also one of the games most misunderstood by the people chasing its trends. Understand that RE4 rocked a muted colour pallette in comparison to most other games on the market at the time, and looked fucking amazing by comparison because of it. It still does. But the colour theory was just one element of its artstyle and why it stuck out the way it did - everything that needed to be bright was still bright, everything that needed to stand out still popped out, and everything that looked dull and grey was to promote a prevailing grim atmosphere integral to the game's own setting. In the layman's terms, the look was built to suit the game, and the game was built to suit the look. Nobody else seemed to get or appreciate that, or even be bothered to develop it as an actual art style so much as lazily slap a sepia filter over the entire game and call it done and done.

Of course, I haven't even gotten to the BIG one yet. Resident Evil 4 is hardly the grandfather of Quick Time Events, but it's definitely the game that would popularize them for a decade to come. Look, nobody likes QTEs. Not a god damned soul. I know I don't - when given the choice, it's always better to implement actual game mechanics that can handle all the cool shit your character can do instead of triggering them in cutscene with a button press beyond any other semblance of your control. But in RE4, there's a very big fucking disclaimer to make, and that's the fact that they ARE actual game mechanics in this game. Enemies in standard gameplay can perform attacks that are impossible to dodge without using the QTE prompts they open up, and in that sense it's basically just a dodge button that's only available exactly when it's relevant - in that sense, their usage in cutscenes is if anything, in fact an extension of that very same application of the QTE prompt. Almost every other developer of note who adopted QTEs did so as a crutch to avoid making actual game mechanics, but having the end result unfold through cutscene alone isn't as enthralling as a lot of these people seem to believe. I mean for fuck's sake, there are turn based games that are more engaging than this.

At the very least, RE4 is still an incredible game by its own merits - just that against all odds, most people learnt the wrong lessons from it, which I feel poisons some of the perception it gets today, especially with some of the games that immediatelly succeeded it in the series.

October 5, 2020

Slippy and Falco (Starfox Assault)

Assault in my eyes is possibly the most textbook definition of a jack of all trades - it tries a lot of things at once and doesn't really mess any of them up, but it also doesn't do a great job of anything. It's not to say I hate it, in fact it probably ties for Lylat Wars as my favourite game in the series. But I still have to acknowledge that a more focused and streamlined design would have done this game a LOT of favours, and a higher standard of polish tends to emerge when you have less mechanics competing with each other for the developer's attention - something that Nintendo is usually better at when most of its own titles and IPs are concerned.

Probably one of the more baffling things about the game is once again, the application of tank controls. You have to hold down a shoulder button to strafe in this game, which you need to do a lot of to avoid enemy fire and peek out of cover in a way that doesn't take like 5 whole seconds to do. The fact that they're there isn't what baffles me - we just had RE4 the month previous to this, and given its focus on balancing infantry and vehicle fighting it's clear it wasn't the only game it was trying to crib style points from. No, the baffling part is that the game has two control options, the other being traditional twin stick controls where the right stick controls only aiming and the left one controls only moving, just like almost any other shooter worth their salt - and the tank controls were the default fucking option. Many people don't even KNOW there's a way to make Assault's controls not suck and continue to hold it against the game to this day, which on some level I can't even blame them for because the game doesn't draw a whole lot of attention to it. Who the hell DOES that???

Going back to that "balancing infantry and vehicle" thing, one thing I've always hated is that enemies continously spawn in Arwing territory almost every time you're doing a ground mission, represented by a gauge at the top of the screen that causes you to fail the mission if it reaches full. And much like in Lylat Wars, your teammates are fucking useless whenever they're not playing a scripted role, so as far as I can tell they don't deplete the gauge or even so much as slow it down whenever you're not out there. What this usually means is that almost all of your actual mission objectives will be in places you can only reach on foot, but you will regularly have to disengage and abandon them to get back in your Arwing and spend the next few minutes wiping the field clean so you can go get back to doing your actual job. This is worse on some levels than others. The best case is when you can (or need to) use your Arwing to travel from one objective to the next, so thinning out the hordes in the sky front can come as a natural extension of moving from place to place, but the absolute worst case happens on the space station in the third level.

The route through the Sargasso Space Station is mostly linear, so the further you progress into it, the longer you have to backtrack to make your way to an arwing and get back to the space battle and help out, and the longer you have to backtrack AGAIN to where you were in the station previously, except now it's incredibly tedious and boring now that there's no longer any opposition in your path until then. It's astonishing to me that they didn't see the problem with designing a map this way, even with the elevators you can turn on to somewhat speed things up. Could they not have just made multiple fucking hangars to progress through? Frankly, it's a mechanic I'd remove from the game completely if given the option - if the objectives are ground only, have all your wingmen support you on the ground, and if the objectives are in the air just make it an Arwing section. The mechanics aren't built in a way that you benefit from being on foot until space concerns keep you from driving a Landmaster into someplace, just like you don't benefit from being in a vehicle if all the objectives are unreachable by them - so either split the workload or don't bother giving the player an option to switch, and certaintly don't halfassedly implement some lame fucking power gauge to distract the player from actually doing anything of note.

I think what ultimately pains me the most is that Nintendo never really returned to Assault's way of doing things, especially after they later proved they could make genuinely brilliant, sometimes even killer-app tier games with mechanical focuses extremely similar to it. It's not to say a purely rail flier in Lylat Wars's vein is a bad approach at all, but Assault was really onto something here, and just a little more focus and attention could have turned it into something special.

October 6, 2020

Sam Fisher (Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory)

If there was ever a game that could rival Thief 3 on the stage of stealth games, it would definitely have to be Chaos Theory. Your choice between the two will probably boil down to a lot of personal preferences - Splinter Cell is the modern political espionage to Thief's dark ages "I'm just trying to pay my fucking rent, man", the first person shooter to Thief's pseudo slasher/brawler. As characters, both Sam and Garrett are equally likeable, but again it depends on whether they keep their dry quips to themselves (Garrett) or have an audience to bounce them off of (Sam). It wouldn't be a Ubisoft game, though, if there weren't SOME kind of caveat.

Ubisoft games are usually known either for recycling the same core designs en masse, or for using some kind of game specific gimmick to differentiate them. Although I haven't played enough of the other games in the series to state the former, there's enough that I can attest to the latter - Sam's pistol has an EMP attachment that allows him to temporarily disable most electronics from a distance, usually light sources and cameras. You will usually be doing this a LOT, because breaking shit by shooting it, even with silenced weapons, will usually alert guards that there is a hostile presence in the level, and you do NOT want guards to sound alarms because it makes entire buildings more antsy and makes them more heavily armed and armoured. Honestly, it puzzles me that I don't think the used this anywhere else in the series because it's actually a pretty bloody good gimmick, managing to be a really cool and useful tool without completely trivializing stealth all by itself.

One personal pet peeve with this game though - and a fucking LOT of stealth games, for that matter - is the distinctions between fatal and non fatal takedowns on enemies. I'll say it straight up - most of the coolest shit you can do in this game usually results in your target dying, but you're usually penalized if not punished outright for actually killing people at all. Which makes it all the more irritating when this game - and again, a LOT of stealth games in general - try to sell this as a viable choice because dead men can't squeal, and yet guards usually still sound an alarm regardless of whether they find a dead body or an unconcious one. Why should any of this shit matter if the mission's circumstances don't depend on it? Just let players do cool shit, don't teasingly dangle the option in front of them and then give them a point penalty for taking the bait. It's stupid and irritating. Stupidly irritating. Can you imagine if Doom Eternal punished you for every Glory Kill you performed? Yes, it's THAT kind of irritating.

If there's one element of Chaos Theory I have nothing but acclaim for, though, it's the multiplayer. Not only does it have a co-op mode following an entire separate set of missions and plot developments to the main mode, it also sports the famous Spies Vs Mercs competitive online mode, one of the earliest examples of asymmetric multiplayer I can conceive off the top of my head, not to mention one of the best designed. Much of it is designed around the naked eye - there are shadows legitimately dark enough to conceal human players to other human players, not just a gauge in the corner of the screen that arbitarily decides whether or not you're visible to people looking in your direction, and the art direction that goes into consistently enabling people to utilize the darkness is nothing short of fucking masterful. Players on BOTH sides get lots of fucking awesome gadgets for evading and hunting the other side respectively, and it makes me sad that Double Agent dropped the ball so hard on it that we never really got anything quite as well designed as it since, within the franchise AND without.

October 7, 2020

Spy Vs Spy

Let's address the elephant in the room right away. Self depreciation is a big part of MAD Magazine's humour, and I don't think they've ever made any real secret of it. I can still remember when they railed on Hanson and the MmmBop song when it was still at the peak of its popularity, and they got a lot of hate mail for it - I should know, because they open their mags with responses to mail from readers, and most every accusation of them being despicable hack writers was met with paraphrasings of "yep, that's us lol". Frankly I don't think I'm doing their writing enough credit, because in context it was legitimately hilarious. Fast forward to August 2005, issue #457. Their front page attraction is "50 worst things about videogames", which in general was an article they were already unusually blunt and on point about when articles like this of the day were usually massive generalizations from people who didn't really understand the medium, but to link this ramble back onto the subject at hand, the VERY FIRST entry was, and this time I'm quoting directly:

Quote

Games that, despite being based on "cool" characters, just plain suck. You know, like, Spy Vs. Spy

Think about that for a moment. There's self depreciation for a gag, and then there's outright telling your audience that a game was a complete fucking waste of your characters. If that isn't a big red flag for the kind of tripe we're getting ourselves into here, I don't know what is.

To tell you the truth, I'm not actually completely sure what the overall focus of the game was supposed to be. It's clear that the game takes nods and inspiration from the original Amiga title, which was a game that the Spy Vs Spy brand of humour better played into with its focus on placing traps for your opponent to stumble into while looking for a series of four mcguffins to win the game - even back then, the game was at its absolute worst when you were fighting directly, so believe it or not, legitimate subterfuge played into getting the edge in a match. In the campaign of the Xbox version, though, it's scarcely even a consideration - most stages are littered with non-Spy enemies without much rhyme or reason, and while I can occasionally appreciate them on a purely aesthetic level alone, like the robotic machineguns hidden in pot plants in the first level, it contributes to an atmosphere and gameplay style that lacks any of the subterfuge and wit Spy Vs Spy had as a comic, or even all the way back in its 8-bit outings.

When traps DO come into play, they're almost exclusively scripted. Here's what will almost always happen without fail - the enemy spy sets a trap, you pass through the trap without triggering it (sometimes by going around it, usually just by sneaking), you trick the enemy spy into triggering it instead in via cutscene and the stage continues as normal, like the entire thing is just an afterthought they have to shove in to be able to claim it's a Spy Vs Spy game. It seems like a consolation to have traps featured in the campaign at all because much like the Amiga version, they were built for a multiplayer environment - in fact, the level design itself feels like it was built to try and dual purpose as both singleplayer levels and multiplayer arenas, and somehow manages to do an incredibly shit job at both of them, because the hideouts for every player spy (think the lobby areas in Counterstrike where you buy all your gear) all lead into a central hub area within naked eyeshot of each other. The second level is absolutely ridiculous for this because the Black and White Spy spawns are directly across the room from each other, not even 5 metres apart. Almost all fighting happens in this one hub alone, and anyone who happens to walk out into the level at large is never seen again because people don't have either the means or a reason to actually get out there with all enemies already centralized in a single room. This focus on multitasking absolutely DESTROYS this game and any potential it could have had to be a decent title.

All of this would be bad enough if the fighting were any good, but it isn't - it's atrocious, in fact. All ranged combat in the game is handled by this autoaim system that isn't explained all that well to the player. You can be directly looking at and facing a hostile target at any given time and it'll still be a crapshoot whether you weapon will actually shoot in their general direction at all, so a lot of actual firefights will devolve into either spraying and praying, or taking the shitty aiming system out of the equation entirely and using a melee weapon or the flamethrower. It's not even the only thing in the game that feels like it just straight up doesn't work - the audio is incredibly inconsistent and cuts out channels frequently, leaving you with no music, no sound and sometimes just no audio period. I don't think I'll say it much over the course of this list, but Spy Vs Spy feels like a game that shouldn't have been made at all, and nothing at all would have been lost if they just stopped.

October 8, 2020

Anya Romanov (Stolen)

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Stolen is perhaps the best endorsement a game can have. Unsurprisingly for its name, it styles itself primarily as a catburglaring game, but it also steals a little bit from just about every other major stealth game of its time, from Thief to Splinter Cell and even elements of Metal Gear Solid thrown into the mix. The end result I feel, is an awkward mishmash of ideas that don't gel together as well as the developers probably thought they did, with a budget that seems to have gone mostly into their theme song which they must be pretty fucking proud of because they keep reusing the thing in just about every action sequence that happens within.

I feel like the biggest area this shows are area transitions - areas are only rendered one room at a time, and the area beyond doorways is rendered as an indistinct black void, so it's difficult to tell whether you're about to run right into a guard's line of sight whenever you move between rooms. Stolen tries to remedy this with a Sonar visor that allows you to peek through a door, but it pulsates almost sickeningly in a way that makes it difficult to tell which direction a guard is facing or even whether they're moving towards or away from you, made all the worse by the fact that it can only render when it detects sound, so you won't be able to detect stationary guards or cameras at all. Sometimes this means whistling to create sound that the Sonar can pick up, which guess what, also attracts any guards nearby. It's a lot of needless over-engineering that could have been solved with a fiber optic cable ala Splinter Cell, or being able to peer through the keyhole, or I don't know, not rendering only a single fucking room at at time and just being able to look through an open god damned doorway.

The MGS side of things mostly comes from its minimap system, but unlike MGS, cameras and guards don't have positions and visible vision cones on the map by default - you have to shoot every one of them, individually, with a Tracker from your silenced gun to be able to see where they are and which way they're facing at any given time. Tools like this are strewn about the map without any real context to why they are there, so pretty early on this becomes a puzzle of determining where the limited resources you're allocated are supposed to be used - which you have no way of knowing if you're playing a heist for the first time. This is a pretty common problem in stealth games, but at least in most of those games you can choose your own loadout to some degree, so you can plan for contingencies that you're more comfortable with. You can brute force a room to some extent, and the game even encourages you to take down guards via chokehold if they're in the way of something you're trying to steal, but not only do you get a score penalty for knocking them out, they don't even stop being a threat even when knocked out - they wake back up on their own an indeterminate amount of time later and radio in, putting the entire fucking level on alert. Which means you better get used to hearing this a lot too, because alerts take a LONG time to run out:

Honestly, the only thing I truly appreciated about Stolen is the ending. This isn't me being smarmy and saying "hurr hurr game is best when not playing it" - the ending is a fucking FANTASTIC accumulation of all the events that had led up to it, and that's not something I get to say often about a videogame. For anything else though, you're better off playing Thief or Splinter Cell.

October 9, 2020

Garcian Smith (Killer7)

Final game of the Capcom Five. When people think of Grasshopper Manufacture, this is one of two games that usually comes to mind - weird enough that it could conceivably have been designed by aliens or some ancient eldritch entity, but not in a completely aimless kind of way that outright makes the game awful. Key among this strange design philosophy would have to be its bizarre, distilled control scheme. Ready for this one? The button to move forwards is the fucking A button. Your character moves along a set path until they reach a fork in it, during which you have to manually select a path to take from a series of options onscreen. You can pull out your gun at any time to aim from first person if an enemy shows up, so the best one can describe Killer7 genre wise is some odd mashup of rail shooter with bits and pieces of point and click and inventory puzzles, but even THAT doesn't accurately sum up the weirdness of this game and how, despite its stubborn refusal to follow any kind of trend or standard from the industry at large, still manages to be pretty consistently good all the way through.

Of course, those conventions usually exist for a reason, and you can only flaunt them so much before something starts to suffer for it. For me, most of them revolve around usage of the Smiths themselves. Specifically, you don't really have good reason to use them most of the time - usually you'll just run Dan for his damage output, occasionally switch to KAEDE if you have enough space to shoot something far away, and then only touch the others if there's a situation with the level design only their abilities can solve, which to be perfectly fucking frank is the absolute worst way to design a character's abilities in any game. Because it essentially boils their entire purpose in the game down to being just a keycard with a gun for all the difference it makes. Parts of this boil down to the self-imposed design restrictions Grasshopper gave themselves, of course, so just giving Coyote the ability to jump at any time for example might not have worked out so well, but giving characters abilities that are almost exclusively context sensitive seems like an absolute pisstake of a compromise that leaves you no real reason to invest blood into levelling them up - cos you're certainly never going to develop them to a point that they can out-damage Con or Dan.

Then you get to the boss fights, which regularly flaunt the game's OWN rules and conventions to the point that many of them are almost literally totally different games. Traditionally boss fights are designed to test the player's accumulated knowledge and skill up to that point, so if you're going to flaunt that expectation the very least you can do is design them with mechanics that are either self explanatory or can be safely picked up on over the course of the fight. The mid bosses are usually enhanced variations of the basic Heaven's Smile template that, credit where credit's due, manage this just fine, but the level end bosses are pretty awful in this regard and at best, tend to come off as pretty awkward to fight. There's a boss that doesn't react to damage at all unless you shoot them in their wings of all things, another one that punishes you if you draw your gun too early, and probably the best case in point here, one that determines victory or defeat based on the quantity of shots landed, not the actual amount of damage dealt, in a limited space of time. Something that the game doesn't warn you of in any way beforehand, and to make matters worse, railroads the Smith with the lowest rate of fire into the fight first, effectively forcing you to take a death before backtracking and bringing Con out.

And while we're on the subject of death, it forms pretty much this game's most annoying mechanic. You don't actually game over if you lose all your health most of the time - that Smith just becomes temporarily unavailable. To get them back, you have to bring Garcian out, trace your steps ALL the way back to the closest room he can reach from the place that you died, collect their head and do a button mashing minigame to revive them, all the while praying you don't lose Garcian himself because you DO game over if he dies, then drag your newly revived character ALL the fucking way back to where you were from the last safehouse you visited to try it all over again. Once again here - punishing the player for dying is one thing, but tedious and irritating backtracking shouldn't be the end result, especially if the route to and from your last location is reduced effectively down to non-gameplay from all the opposition you've removed between both points since. There would be so much less trouble involved if you weren't automatically sent all the way back to a safehouse just for losing ONE Smith, even when you still have the rest of the party on standby.

It's still a great game all things considered - just don't expect it to make a whole lot of sense, especially on your first playthrough.

October 10, 2020

Paragon (Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects)

Marvel Nemesis is a fighting / beat em up game published by... oh for fuck's sake, YOU guys again?

Marvel must have thought they'd struck gold when grabbing a publisher as big as EA, but as we all know by now, there are few companies out there that deal with them and come out completely unscathed. Some of the unluckier ones end up losing their IPs, their studios and entire fucking brands - of course, given that Marvel is still around these days, it's safe to assume that the worst that happened is they got one medicore-to-crap game out of it and then backed off.

The closest equivalent to Nemesis I can think of is Power Stone, in that the arenas are full 3D, the perspective is mostly isometric and there's a shitton of debris everywhere to use against your enemies. Frankly you'll be using a lot more than actually bothering to engage enemies directly, because the fighting is embarrasingly basic in this game, and usually consists of just using the same 2-3 hit string over and over until enemies can't fight back anymore. In fact, the movesets in general feel like they're designed to meet quotas rather than to represent any of the characters in question - every character *has* to have a 2-4 hit button mashing string that ends in a launcher, every character *has* to have a meter burn variation of it that barely looks and feels any different to it, almost every character *has* to have a projectile move that uses the same input, and so on and so fucking forth. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for characters that share the same inputs, in fact a recurring criticism I have of most fighting games is that characters have different controls for no particular reason at all but to fuck with the learning curve and artifically pad the game out more - but you still need to differentiate the moves themselves while you're at it, otherwise it devolves into absolutely homogenous sludge like this. You can put Spiderman and Hazmat into the same match and were it not for their postures you legitimately wouldn't be able to tell them apart.

Speaking of characters, this was to serve as the introduction of the titular Imperfects, a series of anti-heroes created by experimentions from the big bad of this game, but the game doesn't actually get a whole lot of use out of them - they only have a single boss fight each and don't appear anywhere else in the game's narrative, so you don't even get a grasp for their backstory outside of a pre-baked FMV, spending most of the game fighting generic aliens instead. They do, however, tie into a certain system of edge that was very much the style of mid-2000's games. And before I get into the specifics of that there's something I want to pick on first, because it's a choice that to this day still beggars belief: you make a Marvel game with the intent of being dark and edgy... and you kill off the fucking Punisher in the opening god damned cutscene? What the hell were you guys thinking?

Okay okay, back to my point. At any given point between missions, you have a choice of up to four different characters - one who is currently relevant to the story, while the rest get optional challenges after you complete their story arc. At regular intervals throughout the story, you have to pick a character for a "last stand", but you don't fight as that character - you fight against them, usually as one of the Imperfects, serving as the opportunity to play the aformentioned backstory FMVs. You have to do one of these fights to progress, and once you win one, that character fucking dies and is removed from your roster (except for The Thing. For some reason he gets better). If you have to take an edgy approach, this I feel is the best way to go about it - it makes the stakes feel a lot higher when you know not everyone will survive the journey, though I feel like it would the system would have a little more agency if most of it weren't predefined in who gets killed by who, and consequently, having unlocks hidden behind fighting as those characters in the story which you have a very limited number of opportunities to obtain. So close, but sadly, still no cigar there.

So in the end, yes, plenty of edge, but still no actual substance. It probably won't be the last time I say that here - the worst offenders are still yet to come...

October 11, 2020

Point Man (F.E.A.R)

Okay, real quick now. Can I just say that I've really come to hate the idea of a protagonist in a first person game not really being an actual character to speak of? And I'm not saying that just because that makes it really fucking hard to find reference art of them - even though I'm not the best at eloquently explaining why, as it's probably been evident through my mostly gameplay-focused writups so far, I feel like games as a whole suffer when they don't have a central character to rally around. It doesn't always need to be someone on the same tier as Sonic or Duke Nukem or even fucking Ryo Hazuki - Doom has a character that is only ever heard grunting and only ever seen through a headshot in your HUD, and still shows infinitely more character and presence than Point Man ever will.

One of the reasons I bring it up here is that FEAR screws up even the concept of a silent protaganist, because the game mostly treats you as just a camera with a gun mounted to it, without even the implication that you're interacting with them at all like most characters of that type do in order to envision the player in that character's shoes, like they would with say, Link. And this has a tendency to, among things, cause problems that could be easily solved if Point Man were in any way capable of communicating danger or objection - for example, there's a level early on where you're operating as part of a squad, and have to take a detour to open a gate for them. You find a brutally murdered dead body in the control room for that gate, and because your character can't tell them what's going on, the rest of your team also gets murdered immediately after that gate opens and everyone acts surprised that they didn't see it coming. It's a layer of stupidity that honestly defies belief, and it happens CONSTANTLY throughout the game. Of course, one only needs to look at the boxart to know that the narrative isn't exactly the focus in this game, but it's something that's always bothered me about this game's writing above all others, which would probably not acknowledge the player's presence at all if it honestly could get away with it.

Like most high profile shooters of its day, feedback is the name of the game in FEAR. Big, punchy guns, flying bodies and gratuitous gore, sometimes to the point that it takes me out of its otherwise realistic-looking setting. It's already one thing to be able to borderline drive a ragdoll corpse into cartwheels with an MP5, but being able to blow people to pieces with a fucking shotgun is honestly just ridiculous even for the day this game came out. There's no doubt that it's all satisfying gunplay, but you can't be both Doom-esque ridiculous and Counterstrike-esque down to earth at the same time, especially if it means most enemies are literally fucking identical clones besides their weapon choices - pick one or the other and spread it across the whole game, otherwise they actively work against each other. You can't suspend disbelief enough to take it seriously, and you can't switch your brain off enough to just have dumb fun with it.

And it's about now that I point out, in a game where you mow down clones by the dozens and are constantly looking for creative ways to wipe them out through some combination of your arsenal, bullet time powers and the environment... this is supposed to be a fucking horror game.

FEAR tries occasionally to justify that label through occasional segments of inactivity, plagued by the most c-rate horror tropes I could possibly fathom. We're talking absolute bottom of the barrel shit like creepy ghost girls, jumpscares, rooms full of blood and stuff like that, sometimes stuff that isn't even scripted all that well - you might sometimes hear a scare chord and not know what the fuck it's supposed to correspond to, because FEAR usually assumes you're facing a specific direction when you enter its trigger area instead of just triggering the scare when you are looking at it. The closest the game gets to being actually scary is a handful of dark sections with invisible motherfuckers that honestly, are just more annoying than anything else. I get that horror shooters have come a LONG ass way since FEAR and this is me probably more punching downwards in hindsight, but sometimes I wonder why the horror aspects of this game didn't get more attention if they clearly intended there to be enough of it to classify as a subgenre. It's like calling Halo a driving game based on the fact that it has jeeps you can hop into.

October 12, 2020

Guildmaster Wigglytuff (Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series)

God. It feels like nobody, not even Gamefreak, knows what they have with the PMD games. Am I really the only one who genuinely prefers them over the main games? Is that really a controversial thing to suggest?

Alright alright, fine, I'll elaborate. You remember what I said all the way back on page one?

Quote

I don't think a journey has much point if there isn't hardship along the way, and the games that walk that fine line between imposingly challenging and infuriatingly difficult are almost always for the better

Well if I had to pick one word to describe PMD's gameplay, it would definitely be "imposing". In just about every game in the series, dungeons are long, trecherous slogs, where packing and preparing beforehand are key and a single mistake can potentially doom the entire expedition. And not everyone can handle strategizing their way around Pokemon 10-15 levels higher than them - fine, I get that. But I still wouldn't have it any other way, because it makes EVERYTHING feel like a genuine accomplishment, even the little fundraising side missions you do in between encounters with the main storyline. I won't say it's absolutely perfect. Hell, there are a LOT of things I wish they would change, because I honest to god believe it could stand toe to toe with the main series if Gamefreak and Spike Chunsoft took it seriously, even though it has steadily been improving with every successive game.

For example, you only directly control one Pokemon in your party at any given time, leaving the rest to be controlled by AI. There are aspects of their behaviour you can influence, such as their aggression or which specific moves they're allowed to use, but positioning and strategic moveset application means a LOT in PMD fights, and simply put, you're almost always not given the options to utilize it to its fullest extent, and often it feels like it could have been as simple as allowing players to go through every party member's actions a single turn at a time whenever they're not just wandering around looking for loot and exits. What makes this lack of strategy all the more annoying is that there is a great deal of importance placed on getting through confrontations with minimal losses, and again, can mean the difference between living another day or having to restart an entire 20 floor dungeon from scratch - quite literally, in the first few games, losing either yourself or your partner to fainting is a failure state, even when you have other team members to carry on. And it doesn't help that you also lose almost everything you were carrying, which is a layer of punishment none of these games need and it pretty much forces you to reload from a save for how much time and money it wastes getting back up to that point again.

I also think that, despite quite obviously being fashioned after a roguelike, I think it could sometimes stand to be more... well, roguelike? Granted, I totally expect some aspects of it to have limited options - making character portraits for nearly a thousand Pokemon is already a pain in the ass, nevermind the eight or so frames you need to make for major character's mood portraits. But just the same, I kinda wish something like Zero Island was a standalone mode or a side game you could pick up and play at any time, where you're given a literally random level 5 Pokemon instead of one of a selection of existing starters and a few fan favourites you can choose from in the story mode, then forced to clear a gargantuan dungeon with only whatever resources and party members you can gain along the way. It would be nice to have some element of it I can play at any time without having to invest in it beforehand, in much the same way I would get out of The Binding of Isaac or the survival mode in Puyo Puyo Tetris, not so subtle foreshadowing.

One aspect of PMD that unquestionably shines above the others, though, is its writing. It's something that I wish that I could explain in better detail, partly because it's hard to talk about without spoiling it and partly because I'm honestly pretty bad at talking about characterization to begin with, but PMD is just so goddamn good at creating likable characters out of their pocket monsters where previously they were just somewhat intelligent animals with a one word vocabulary, and I would honest to god have the audacity to say they all trounce the main series's writing by a pretty fucking huge margin - yes, even Gates to Infinity, widely upheld as the absolute nadir of the series for its comparitively mediocre writing and smaller roster. They're really good at getting you invested in its setting and its characters, and will always set you up for a real tear jerker of an ending whenever it can help it, even when you know exactly why ahead of time. There is a single digit's worth of games I can say that about and genuinely mean it. I am dead fucking serious.

Look, at the very least, you owe it to yourselves to try Explorers of Sky and see for yourselves, because so much of the gaming populace is really missing out on what should be considered a classic in its own right, and I think that just might be a sadder truth than any ending that Pokemon Mystery Dungeon can muster.

October 13, 2020

Shadow the Hedgehog

Oh fuck no. Do I really have to talk about this game? Ugh. Let's get this over with.

Right from the very word go, ShTH is a designer's worst nightmare - a concept concocted by clueless executive chasing every fad at once without even the slightest clue of how any of them gel with each other, much less their own series, so they leave the onus of figuring that out only to the people they pay to make these games for them. The end result is a game that is constantly at war with itself, in identity, mechanics and setting alike. I'm sure it doesn't need to be said that there's a limit to how dark and edgy you can make a game about cartoon hedgehogs that get around by rolling down hills, so it seems poignant to point out that the very reveal of this game started out with taking a gun to their own legacy.

...ahahaha, did you think that was a fucking metaphor? No, they literally shot up a projection of their own legacy - the one that people far and wide adored them for in the first place. You cannot make this shit up. It's as if to make a point that they absolutely did not give a shit about it anymore. That it was unimportant to the making of this game. And believe me, that shows. It shows a lot.

Irregardless of how you feel about Shadow as a character, I think most would agree that Shadow is defined very heavily by Shōnen archetypes, to the point that he's basically a furry DBZ character (to the point that I think Iizuka emphasized that he's the Vegeta to Sonic's Goku? Correct me if I'm wrong there). On his own terms he is already disproportionately strong, at least as fast as Sonic, perform energy-based attacks in the form of "chaos energy", and depending on where you look, even fly unaided and travel through god damned time. So even on the absolute most basic level, it begs the question of why the fuck anyone thought needed guns and vehicles to accomplish anything his basic abilities could already feasibly handle on their own - even IF you suggested his game needed a bigger focus on ranged combat, right from the start he already had a NAMED attack designed specifically to attack from range, and already looks more powerful than anything a bullet can muster. Why the fuck wouldn't you just design a moveset around moves like that intstead?

Well, instead of doing that, ShTH takes an approach to game design that you're probably going to start seeing more of as the years pass by - they created a new problem just to justify a new solution, rather than working with what they already had. In ShTH's case, it was to give most enemies ludicrous amounts of health and making physical attacks, including the Homing Attack, deal amounts of damage tantamount to absolute fucking worthlessness, in order to justify full automatic weapons that can wipe out health bars in seconds. Even WITH this concession, though, most elements of gameplay in this game don't seem to be designed with each other in mind. Sonic is a series designed with speed and flow in mind, but you have to constantly come to a stop to engage enemies because among things, you have no fucking way of knowing who Shadow is aiming at so you have to come to a complete stop to ensure you don't waste very limited ammo spraying and praying as you run past. Oh, "very limited"? Yeah you can only hold one gun at a time and don't get ammo for the others whenever you're holding one - because apparently something as fucking simple as an inventory system was lost on these absolute god damn hacks.

The worst part of this game by a large margin, though, is its level progression. ShTH has a RIDICULOUS amount of levels for a Sonic game, but you don't play all of them in a single playthrough - rather, they're laid out Lylat Wars style, in that actions you perform during a level will change which one you venture to next. This is fine - great, even, and I'd like to see a Sonic game return to it one day. Level progression is also based on a rudimentary morality system - you will go further north if Shadow turns evil, and south if he turns good. Strange, maybe even a little nosensical, but okay, it can still work. The biggest problem when addressing this system is the actual requirements to determining your route. Most are stage dependant, but are almost always fucking awful unless it's the neutral route (which is just "get to the level exit - you know, what you SHOULD be fucking doing in a Sonic game). Often the mission will just be helping out one faction by wiping out the other. And I don't mean "killing key enemies to make the lesser ones a non-threat to your allies". I don't even mean "enough that you could conceivably be considered more friendly towards one than the other". I mean EVERY. SINGLE. GODDAMNED. ENEMY. IN THE FACTION. EVERY LAST ONE. What should be a platforming game about getting to places as fast as possible becomes an incredibly awful and tedious scavenger hunt unlike anything the franchise has ever experienced. Even Emerald Hunting in SA1 and 2, for all the infamy it has, still gives you a fucking indication of where to look, and never makes you hunt down more than three of the fuckers at once. Oh, and did I mention the fact that no matter which faction you choose to side with, both sides are almost always still shooting at you regardless? Even simple gratitude seems to be lost on the AI in this game.

This is assuming your path from one level to another even makes any narrative sense, which it pretty often doesn't. Nothing in your playthrough takes into account the events that happened previously, leading to frequent plot holes and inconsistencies if you happen to deviate from anything but a very specific path at any given time because they all assume you took the mission immediately previous to it on the same morality scale instead of making concessions for the specific path you took through the game. And worst of all? Even none of THIS shit is relevant, because once you have every ending in the game, ShTH just throws you a final campaign that renders almost everything else that happened throughout non-canon, making its tagline about a choice between good and evil completely fucking worthless. This, from a game that was made to tie up Shadow's story once and for all, and to smooth out any plotholes that yet remained. Honestly, there's only one self-own in the series of greater magnitude than that. We'll get to that soon.

October 14, 2020

Neo (The Matrix: Path of Neo)

Much like Enter the Matrix, if there's anything lacking in Path of Neo it's certainly not ambition. Rather than act as a side story, though, this game summarizes all three films by itself, acting as a complete retelling of Neo's story all throughout and even a few events that happened offscreen, such as the training sessions he takes right before sparring with Morpheus. Some diversions of this kinda are great. Most aren't. You might have already heard of the most infamous examples, but for those of you who'd rather see for yourself I'm going to put the rest of the story stuff in spoilers:

Spoiler

FIGHTING. FUCKING. FIRE ANTS. What the hell, Wachowskis???

The example that always stuck with me personally, though, is the fight with Smith at the very end, which would have been the culmination of The Matrix Revolutions. Neo actually loses this fight in the film, and goes on to make a heroic sacrifice to delete Smith in his entirety, effectively saving humankind and machinekind both. In Path of Neo, though, he wins his one-on-one with flying colours, because the Wachowskis didn't think gamers were all that into heroic sacrifices. Uh huh, sure whatever you say. Even putting aside the fact that this is flagrant bullshit, especially in hindsight, the reason I know they have this stance at all is because they broke the fucking fourth wall to say it:

And this fourth wall breaking was a cutscene right before the ACTUAL final boss, in which they preemptively try to justify making all the Smiths amalgamate into a gigantic mecha smith made out of chunks of buildings with the Smiths acting as the glue that holds it all together. No, seriously. That's an actual thing they did. I WISH I was fucking joking about that.

Okay, stupid writing aside, how does it play? Long story short, like mollasses. This game is full of slowdown in every sense of the word - the bullet time mechanic from Enter the Matrix returns, of course, but most key impacts are also sold with very long, uncomfortable pauses, usually to segue into other moves, and that's all on top of a framerate that closely resembles a late N64 title whenever the bullets start flying. Say what you will about Enter the Matrix, but despite how it looked it ran at a pretty crispy 60fps and didn't drop frames all that much, so how a game that came out much later, right at the tail end of the Xbox's life, and still ran this bad is something that honestly beggars belief. What remains is a game that lacks pretty much any concept of flow because it just keeps PAUSING whenever you get to the action, and frankly would still feature a lot of stop and go even when it's functioning correctly.

Fighting in Path of Neo features exactly one combo, and a shitton of scripted attacks that trigger more or less at random when you land the final hit of said combo. It's more or less just button mashing with QTEs mixed in, because whenever you have an opportunity to perform a scripted attack the game will basically pause outright for 2-3 seconds with a button prompt for executing it - as such it never really feels like fighting actually has any semblance of strategy, and frankly it feels like most of it unfolds almost automatically as it is. I haven't even mentioned gunplay yet either, which works on some really bizarre automatic targetting system that sometimes locks onto shit you aren't even remotely looking at or have any active interest in shooting at, which can be irritating if there's an undetonated fire hydrant at the end of a hallway opposite to the group of SWAT officers currently lighting your ass up.

The nicest thing I can say about Path of Neo is that it's an improvement over Enter the Matrix - but anyone who's ever played EtM will tell you that's not a huge bar to clear.

October 15, 2020

So before I start today, I have two milestones to announce. The first is the introduction to the Xbox 360, and with it the seventh generation of consoles. The second, and probably more important, is that this marks a rough halfway point in my list. That might sound a little weird for a game that came out in 2005, but the seventh generation is by and large the longest lasting one out of any in recent memory, lasting nearly an entire decade as opposed to the 4-5 years most other gens get. This would also be around about when I could finally start buying games with my own money, without the common sense to avoid impulse buying shit, so needless to say there will be a LOT of games centred around this one generation to cover. Can I just say though, goddamn games are getting pretty long by this point? It's getting pretty hard to digest games down into a few paragraphs when you usually have at most an hour to review them in your spare time, and I'm almost certain I've made mistakes already, so here's to hoping I still do an okay job of it in a day per game as I always have.

Without further ado, we open up gen 7 with:

Jack Dark (Perfect Dark Zero)

Time has not been kind to this game. Granted, I don't think there's a single developer out there that wouldn't struggle trying to match the legacy of a game like Perfect Dark, AND it had the added problem of recently having been snatched away from Nintendo platforms, given a two generation gap between titles and given the burden of holding up a console launch to fuck with its public perception all the more. Now that we're long past all the hype and fanboy backlash and can speak on it with almost no bias, I think it's fair to say now that... even on its own merits, it's not all that good? Even visually speaking, although all the usual hallmarks of a generation leap are there like a jump in polygons and more elaborate special effects, it doesn't really rock all that interesting a look and if anything detracts from it with some of the new advances it's made, such as this god damn motion blur you get when turning now that keeps you from actually making out distinct shapes at all unless you're almost at a complete standstill. I suppose that's lesson number one already: making a game look prettier shouldn't come at the expense of being able to fucking play it, and although PD0 is hardly the worst offender, it's still notable enough that I can't ignore it completely, especially in the leaf cover in the jungle levels that make it just obnoxiously fucking difficult to see anyone.

Weapons overall feel like they're just designed worse than the Perfect Dark arsenal, and I'd argue PD64 already had a handful of issues yet to resolve in the first place. PD64 might still have a glut of full-auto weapons it overrelies on in between its more unique and gimmicky picks, but even when just spraying out bullets rapidly was their only job (like the AR34) at the very least their design was inspired and their sound design was still a thing of beauty - I have a hard time remembering most of the weapons in PD0 because most of them are flagrantly just real world weapons with fake names, with a handful of precursors to PD64 weapons that somehow manage to lack most of the charm the originals had like the Falcon, Magsec and the Laptop Gun (...okay fine, the Laptop Gun is still cool). And I could deal with less inspired weapons if they were at the very least designed particularly well, but there really aren't all that many weapons that have good synergy between their primary and altfires. An AK with a launchable bayonet? A magnum that can fire a silenced shot for the sole purpose of making the gunshot sound like it came from a different direction? A heavy machinegun - one, mind, that reduces your speed when you have it equipped - that can... drop caltrops? A P90 with a scope, but not the accuracy to be able to act on the scope's zoom without missing like 75% of your shots? It almost feels like the firemodes were picked at complete random, without any regard to where and how the gun was supposed to function. And we haven't even gotten into the inventory system yet.

See in PD64, your weapons were based on the level - what you started with, and what you could find along the way. In PD0, you have to choose your own loadout before actually entering a level, and they often don't tell you what kinds of threats or level design you're actually going to be encountering. So that often means bringing a really boring jack of all trades weapon like the scoped/silenced P9P pistol to every mission just to make sure you have bases covered and don't get surprised when stealth or sniping turn out to be the only viable options. And to make matters worse, you have a very limiting inventory system that keeps you from packing an arsenal for every situation - you only have four inventory slots, and anything bigger than a pistol takes up multiple fucking slots, and if you want a loadout with the intention of dual wielding you need separate slots for both fucking weapons, unlike PD64 which bunches them both up under one slot. What purpose does limiting the amount of weapons you can carry this way serve but to fuck with your ability to accomplish basic tasks? Why do this at all when the original game already worked just fine?

I could get past that if the levels were any good but jesus christ I don't even know where to start. It's bad enough that they repeatedly devolved into a habit of slathering bland grey surfaces onto everything, but they're also even less forgiving of mistakes than PD64 was - they have a tendency to throw fail states into just about every mission, oftentimes forcing you into a tedious crawl to make sure you can get past without issue, especially when stealth is a borderline or literal necessity for clearing it. It's not to say PD64 didn't make you restart an entire level for messing up things besides dying, but PD0 does it a lot more often with the added problem that stages can take like 10-20 whole minutes apiece to clear, especially on higher difficulties where you have to milk your dwindling regenerating health for everything that it could possibly be worth. And it's so stingy with checkpoints that I often forget the game even HAS any, and it might as well not have for all the difference it makes sometimes.

As usual, the biggest shame about this is that after defining a whole console generation by itself and being one of the most beloved shooter games of all time, this was what killed the series - just a single mediocre launch title. And I can't believe i have to say this, because it seems like some people -executives mostly - take stuff like this as a sign that nobody has interest in the franchise anymore, but people don't dump on Perfect Dark 0 because they're tired of the IP, it's because it's a mediocre game. That's it. People need to learn to distinguish the two badly, because publishers keep letting good ideas and franchises go to absolute waste because they can't figure out what the fuck they did wrong or even whether they were at fault. That, and it would save them the trouble of milking out Halo constantly for their first party FPS fix, effectively killing one franchise to make another stagnate and making both worse off.

October 16, 2020

Ethan Thomas (Condemned: Criminal Origins)

Condemned is a first person game that blends elements of shooting, brawling and detective elements, the lattermost of which was still a fairly new concept in the mainstream space at the time. One would think that lends this game a perchant for testing the player's observation and deduction, but sadly the detective work is mostly scripted window dressing - you can only equip detective gadgets in specific areas and use them on specific objects and surfaces, and even then all the deductive work is made for you by a voice over the phone. At that rate you might as well have just not bothered and made it all cutscene based for all the difference it makes, and that really is a rotten shame because Phoenix Wright had already proven by now that this kind of gameplay could work pretty well - why not add a combat system on top of that for the full cop experience?

Actual fighting is a deceptively simple affair, consisting of no more than a single swing at a time and a parry mechanic to act as a defensive option, and a self-charging tazer that can work as a wildcard to swing fights in your favour by giving you a chance to disarm enemies or simply land a cheap shot while they're squirming. This actually works a lot better than it sounds, once you start getting a feel for the variations in the enemy's mo-capped animation, whacking them in the face and parrying their inevitable frenzied counter to land a second whack in their face and repeating until they fall over, somehow never actually getting repetitive in the process. At least, not until the mid-late game anyway, where they start throwing in buff motherfuckers with absolutely stupid amounts of health, nevermind the few boss encounters sprinkled occasionally throughout. If there's any reason to fault the fighting in this game, it's certainly not because of the core mechanics of them - they're pretty goddamn superb despite, even arguably because of, their simplicity.

No, I feel like Condemned's biggest problems, if anything, come from its weapons, several of which have options outside of combat. For example, the fire axe can break down weak doors, the crowbar can pry open lockers that usually have guns in them, sledgehammers can break padlocks and shovels can force open some electronic locks by jamming into the cords at their base. Most of these are pretty mediocre in a fight, usually because they take a long time to swing despite doing a crapton of damage, but you're usually incentivied to carry them around over most other alternatives because of their ability to open routes, some of which are absolutely mandatory to progressing through the game. You would think you could just keep a utility weapon in storage while packing a more well-rounded weapon for fights, but you can't actually hold more than one weapon in this game at all in this game, which seems like an incredibly strange ommission in a game that can punish you for having the wrong weapon at the wrong time, both in terms of combat AND utility. At the very least it would have been nice to be able to holster a pistol just in case - what the fuck kind of detective doesn't have a place to stash a gun when they're not using it?

The AI of most given enemies though, isn't necessarily just about making a beeling straight for you and bashing your brains in, which leads into this game's other big feature - enemies actually attempt to be stealthy in a way that doesn't disadvantage the player, which is something you don't see a lot of in FPSs period, much less first person brawlers. Much like any attempt at stealth, human or AI, it can look somewhat goofy if you know what they're up to, or they run through open ground to get to their hiding spot of choice, but the fact that they can seek out areas obscured from your line of sight at all instead of some dumb invisibility mechanic is something that doesn't get played around much with, as is their propensity to rush you when your back is turned or to throw a sucker punch once you approach the corner they're hiding behind. You only have to lower your guard for a few seconds for the AI in this game to show its true colours, which somewhat unfortunately means the milage you get out of it varies a lot player by player - someone who actually understands their habits or is paying close attention to them will probably just see a long string of goofs instead.

So yeah, long story short - competent brawler, nice atmosphere, great lighting for a launch title, kinda just wish the detective stuff got more love than it did.

October 17, 2020

Sometimes it feels like comedians have the easiest fucking job in the world today. Some of them don't even really have to write actual jokes about modern affairs anymore - you can just run a clip of a political gaffe completely unaltered and in context, and the absurdity of the shit they spew on a regular basis will often draw laughter just by itself. Reflecting on it a little more made me think back to some of the earliest years I spent on the internet interacting with other people, who shared much the same sentiment towards videogames - often the best way to get a point across was to make it funny, and often the best way to be funny was to be blunt as a fucking brick. A lot of this did lead to dozens of people trying to be internet tough guy at once, and admittedly it had a tendency to create a lot of drama that didn't really need to be there, but there's a part of me that still feels slightly nostalgic for those years, where it wasn't yet socially inappropriate to just murder a motherfucker with words to make a point, even if they weren't asking for it.

Some internet personalities embraced this way in covering videogames themselves, which brings us right back around to the angriest gamer you've ever heard...

The Angry Video Game Nerd

A character concocted by one James Rolfe, AVGN holds a fair bit more influence over my outlook on things than I'd probably like to admit, and is probably the reason I find the bad easier to pick out than the good in any given game. He originally started out as the Angry Nintendo Nerd before he was picked up by Screwattack, and his schtick was mostly picking on shovelware in the NES library - "playing the shitty games so YOU don't have to", or so the saying goes. And true to the opening paragraph, AVGN was at his funniest when showing a game exactly as it was and letting it speak for itself, albiet with his profanity overlapping it. Out of all the episodes I've watched, I don't think a single one exemplifies this better than the one that got me into him in the first place, the Dick Tracy episode:

Usually when he cuts from the game, it's to elaborate on his thought process a little more, engage in dramatic cartridge smashing (or system smashing, as it was in the 32X episode), or just to playfully vent about the given situation some more. But he sometimes has a bad habit of going off on some extended skit that is almost irrelevant to the game at hand, and to be perfectly honest I can't think of a single time it's actually been funny? He was so close with the Atari Jaguar episode, but he milks out what should have been just a cut and dry gag of a character breaking the fourth wall and instead milks out out with almost two minutes of shooting at gifs with various peripherals and teasing his cat with a laser pointer. That's pretty tame compared to some of the shit he pulls in later episodes where he more or less draws it out into short films in of themselves, to the point that I've started just shutting off videos out of habit once he runs out of game to cover because I already know the video is just going to go downhill after that point. Some people can pull off this kind of irrelevant humour practically without thinking about it, like Jontron, but James is definitely not one of those kinds of people. Are his fans just too nice to tell him that or something?

I think one last thing that's unique to AVGN, though (besides his unique perchant for shit jokes, of course, and I mean that in the most literal sense and not as a jab), is that he's very much a sole survivor of the old guard of his era. He wasn't the only person from back then who based himself around openly raging against terribly designed videogames, and he even had many copycats trying to flock to the success he had doing it - but he's one of the few people I know of who's STILL doing it, yes even today, without even a single controversy to his name. And believe me, there were controversies. And I think this is a better indication of his true character than anything he shows as a character - he has no ulterior motives, no histories of abuse, not even any tendencies to beg for likes and subscribers. He's just a guy that loves doing what he does, and I hold a hell of a lot of respect for that, and I probably still would even if he DID stagnate somehow.

Judging from the Ecco video he put out not long before I made this post though, I'd say he's still got it.

October 18, 2020

Magnum Revolver (BLACK)

BLACK is a game concocted by Criterion, who you might better recognize as the masterminds behind the Burnout series. And as one might expect, it was made with the intention of ticking all the same boxes that Burnout did - instant gratification, crunchy sound design, and a metric shit-ton of raw destruction. What results is a game that is flagrantly just gun porn, and lots of it, to the point that the arsenal gets a lot more love than anything in the game, even the characters (and frankly, you can tell it influenced my choice of sprite today). The title screen alone is probably enough to register as NSFW in some communities:

Unfortunately when your game only has a single focus, and that focus isn't how the game plays, it tends to suffer really badly as a result. While some might appreciate its sound design, it is singularly the most boring and generic first person shooter I have ever played in my god damned life. I am dead fucking serious when I say there are CoD games more entertaining and inspired than this, even though they're the poster children for bog standard military shooter tropes. It's bad enough to play that shit completely straight - it's worse still to be horrendously fucking bad at them. I'm still not completely sure what the plot is supposed to be because you spend most of the game shooting russians with all the radio dialogue drowned out by explosions and gunfire, divided by incredibly boring and hard to follow FMVs between missions of the same two guys talking in an interview with most of their faces obscured and stock images and footage spliced in. If the focus was simply to have sweet, punchy guns to shoot, why was any of this shit even in the game? It could have been an arcade or score attack shooter, or it could have just refused to take itself seriously at all, shit, BLACK even could have been intentionally campy with it and still been much better off for it.

I could forgive that much if the gunplay was any good, but even that is mediocre at best. Most of the guns have absolutely ridiculous spread, making it almost impossible to consistently hit shit beyond a few metres in front of you. Imagine playing Deus Ex with the Rifles skill permanently set to Untrained and then being forced to shoot at shit from across the map with the assault rifle and you almost have an idea of how badly BLACK handles it. This is already bad enough, but the guns aren't even hitscan, which means you can miss distant targets even if you DO happen to get a bullet directly in their direction, and the enemies all take a really silly amount of damage for how hard it is to him them with these fucking guns in the first place. The one saving grace is that the first bullet in a spray is always accurate, which often means that a game that should be about going nuts and letting loose instead gives you assault weapons that are only effective in single shots at a time, and even then only if you land headshots, and even then headshot detection is so inconsistent that enemies can appear to be shot in the head multiple times without much real difference.

BLACK's fixation on gun porn even has implications on the gameplay - which is to say, it actively works against trying to play it most of the time. Most weapons in the game have a lengthy cocking animation when selected regardless of the circumstance, so if you're in the middle of a firefight you're inevitably going to get shot a few times if you need to swap to one better suited to the circumstances. Reloads are even worse, because in addition to taking a long time for anything beyond a pistol they also BLUR THE ENTIRE FUCKING SCREEN EXCEPT FOR THE WEAPON while you're doing it, so in addition to not realizing if you're about to run into an enemy, you might not even be able to see the fucking level geometry and temporarily get completely lost until the PC orgasms over the thought of a fresh mag in his russian-perforating AK. And honestly, even when some things are working as intended it comes off as a silly juxtaposition to its otherwise serious setting, where some shit just explodes for literally no reason, like safes and sandbags, and shooting at a sniper or RPG emplacement can often cause the entire building to detonate basically unprovoked. Once again, you can't have that shit both ways - either make a shooter that's down to earth or one where the setting is as over the top as its mechanics, otherwise one will detract from the other and both will be worse off.

I don't think anything in the world will offend me more than the fact that in spite of how fucking awful this game is, it somehow got favourable reviews and seems to be beloved by much of the gaming community. For fucking what? Because the guns sounded good? Did they even do THAT right? They're loud and obnoxious and it gets old pretty fucking quickly, to the point that I dread having to fire them after a certain point because it legitimately gives me a headache. Fuck this game. Fuck it to hell, and fuck everyone who still believes it accomplished even a single fucking thing of note.

October 19, 2020

Jet (Sonic Riders)

Like it or hate it, any time a racing game is made that allows you to punish other racers requires a catch-up mechanic - Blue Shells for example, have long been a necessary evil in the Mario Kart series because 1st place faces no opposition from in front of them, so if 2nd and 3rd place get into a squabble, 1st place increases their lead and no longer faces any opposition from behind either. This is absolutely not a hypothetical situation. People dominated with 30 entire second leads in Sega Allstars Racing because nobody had tools to keep the leader in check. If in no other respect, Sonic Riders is a stroke of conceptual genius because one, racers always have access to their entire kit without the need to find items on the track, and two, challenging the leader is ultimately as simple as following them.

The main gimmick of Riders is "turpulence", a windy half-pipe left in the wake of the lead racer. Anyone behind them can ride it for a burst of speed, and even perform tricks off the outer edges of it to refill their hoverboard with air, which is the single resource that all techniques in the game draw from and is at a relative premium for everyone without access to it. So maintaing a lead is a challenge of knowing your character's routes well, carefully rationing the air you DO have access to through capsules and stunts and picking just the right time to drop a tornado in the path of someone just about to overtake you without letting the resulting speed drop give an edge to the others right on their tail. While I love it on a conceptual level, there are aspects of it that definitely could have been done better - you're automatically locked on to the turpulence's path whenever you cross it instead of having to manually and skillfully trace its path through the level, and the exact air usage of many moves seems unnaturally strict for what they actually do, not to mention I'm not sure why you should need to spend any for something as simple as fucking drifting. It isn't like you can just run on empty sans special moves like say, F-Zero GX - you have to continue on foot if you run out of air, which is a much bigger disadvantage than it sounds for a Sonic game.

In fact, Sonic Riders is pretty rough around the edges in general in spite of its ideas, sometimes in ways it had absolutely no right to be. Drifting never feels like a smooth motion like it does in just about every other racing game of note, corning hard and jankily and then shooting you straight off as if you hit a boost pad whenever you release the button. For the longest time I thought grinding was fucking broken, but for some reason you have to press the jump button, then press it again as you come into proximity with the grind rail instead of just landing on it? And even then you don't preserve any momentum between jumps whether you're on a rail or the track, so the timing for each jump is a lot different than it immediately appears while playing it. And although Riders uses rings for increases in speed in a similar manner to Mario Kart the cap is at a hundred rather than ten and you lose ALL of your fucking rings if another racer hits you once or you fall off the track, which is a lot of investment to put into a resource that can be immediately stripped from you at any moment, especially if the leader drives off the track and takes almost everyone behind him along for the ride.

Regardless, it's still a good game as it is, I just think it was onto something much bigger that it didn't get a chance to capitalize on - because the sequel flipped the script and used a completely different (and frankly much worse) gimmick, never returning to turpulence in its true form again. So in a sense, the main lesson today is the same lesson it's always been for 21st century Sonic - you should ALWAYS be polishing what you already have, because throwing the baby out with the bathwater leads to both ridicule and failure and leaves you without a core foundation to build a franchise this fucking big apon.

October 20, 2020

Sheogorath and Nazeem (The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion / Skyrim)

Shitting on Bethesda seems to have become fashionable in the span of about a few weeks with the release of Fallout 76, but some have chosen to go as far as shitting on their past accomplishments retroactively because of it. To be totally frank, I think that's kinda bullshit. Much like Sonic, they do form a pattern of behaviour that leads to their respective 06, in their perchant for recycling the same engine over and over without fixing bugs that have gone untouched for decades - fine, that much I'll grant you. But it doesn't change the fact that they were accomplishments in their own right nonetheless, with worldbuilding dense enough to withstand the weight of its flaws and a sense of scale that, unlike SO many other games in the sandbox genre, make adequete use of the ridiculous amount of space they allocate as playing areas, and can easily make for a playthrough hundreds if not thousands of hours in length for the continuous upward climb you experience in all of the areas you're allowed to specialize in. That being said, the two games in question take different enough approaches to most areas that I'm going to be comparing them directly, but if you just want the tl;dr - sorry purists, but Skyrim is the better game.

A lot of this is down to the way both games handle scaling. Have you ever noticed that in Oblivion that despite all the work you put into combat skills, enemies never seem to go down any faster? That's because when you level up, every enemy in the game levels up with you, effectively leaving you right back where you started unless you HYPERspecialize in a single combat skill and level up based almost on that alone. Skyrim also has enemy scaling to some extent, but also features enemies in varying tiers that are stronger or weaker than one another, so there's always lower mooks you can definitely see the results of training on and midboss tier ones that will consistently challenge everything you've learnt up to that point. It also doesn't help in Oblivion's case that most enemies short of wolves and rats have absurd, damage-spongey amounts of health almost irregardless of where you are in the game and how much damage they can do back to you, so most open fights will devolve into wailing on a single enemy for like 5 continuous minutes only to let your guard down out of sheer boredom and get wasted in 4-5 hits. I've tried tinkering with difficulty settings before, but it always comes out as "high HP and fuck you damage", or "schmucks go down in a few hits and can barely touch you", without ANY fucking middle ground.

It's even worse when magic is concerned. Oblivion's magic system is very open ended in that spells can have a certain type, but the exact variables are never set in stone and can vary a lot depending on where and when you found them (yes, like enemies, they're affected by scaling too - learnt that the hard way doing Finger of the Mountain late into the game one time). However, even when you gain the ability to make your own spells, they universally do way too little damage for the extortionate amount of mana you have to use to cast them and the very slow rate at which you get it back, made worse by the fact that they don't scale with you when the respective magic stats and skills increase, so staying focused in a magic-oriented character build requires CONSTANTLY gaining new spells to replace your old ones, leaving older and shittier spells to pile up and clog your inventory because unlike items you can't fucking get rid of them. Skyrim streamlined the system down to a select few spells that are constantly levelling up with you and are almost never entirely irrelevant even after you gain stronger equivalents, and fans keep acting like this was anything but an improvement. The hell is the matter with you people?

Even in terms of sheer worldbuilding, the only edge Oblivion has over Skyrim is that the latter suffers from application of the good ol' "real is grey" hammer. Oblivion still has loads of dungeons dotted about its landscape, but many of them are literally just caves filled with monsters, sometimes without any real rhyme or reason thanks to the way it handles escalations in monster scaling. Most of the ones in Skyrim however, tell a minature story all on their own - sometimes directly, sometimes through books and notes left behind, sometimes inferred through just the organization of props, bodies and NPCs, which is an attention to detail that Oblivion only tends to approach if the location is specifically a part of a quest. I don't even want to know how hard they pushed their developers to put this much STUFF into their game, especially since so much of it is fully voiced by the same maybe 10 or so people, but if there's any one reason Skyrim became as prolific as it did, this is probably one of the big ones. People consistently tolerate Bethesda's usual bullshit because you can count the alternatives on one hand, and very few still even come close to the amount of time and work these guys put into it.

I just wish there could be just a LITTLE more to the fighting sometimes - the biggest fights in any given game seem to be solved more through exploits than the game's own intended mechanics. Most characters will become stealth archers to some extent because there are encounters in the game that are unsolvable almost any other way short of frequently menuing for health potions, made all the worse in Skyrim by the fact that the main antagonists are dragons that you can't hit with melee weapons until they land and do such ridiculous damage in close quarters that it's scarcely even a consideration anyway when they do. I can totally get keeping the fighting accessible so just about anyone can get into it, but sometimes it feels like the game's mechanics just don't work for what they're trying to do. Maybe even after Skyrim, there's still yet more rebalancing to be done.

October 21, 2020

Agent 47 (Hitman: Blood Money)

All throughout this thread, I've made various references to the "Hitman school of game design", and never as a compliment. You could almost say it's a blend of shooter and puzzle game, wherein you're tasked with finding the safest and most efficient means of murdering specific targets with the tools and environment you have at your disposal, and indeed Hitman games tend to get categorized a lot as the kinds of games where you need to think deep and think ahead before drawing the garrote wire down on someone - and frankly, I feel like this is largely a mischaracterization, because these games often just throw you into a mission with minimal introduction, assistance or knowledge of almost any of the things you need to be able to act on to complete a hit with any kind of subtlety. The learning process, consequently, usually isn't casing a joint beforehand, studying your target's habits and vulnerabilities - rather, to fail constantly and repeatedly until you can brute force a solution out of the game in a way that doesn't involve risking a shootout with literally every armed guard on the level.

For example, there's a level later into the game where you have three targets to kill, but only one of them is in the building at the start of the mission. Two of them take a ride on separate elevators some time after the mission start, which you can exploit by climbing through a hole in the top of the lift and hang them with the garrote to kill them and pull the body out of sight. You have no way of knowing that they do this before attempting the mission, and it's a limited window of opportunity that you can easily miss the first few attempts, potentially leaving you without a clean way of finishing the mission at all and forcing a restart. This can happen a lot on missions that need 5-10 minutes of prep work before forcing you to do it all over again, and frankly it's really frustrating and tedious design even with the ability to use limited quicksaves depending on your difficulty of choice.

Blood Money tries to give you some leeway by allowing you to express some creativity with most hits. Probably the most famous one comes maybe three missions in where your target is a stage actor, and the scene he's practicing involves getting shot at its apex. Just choking the motherfucker out backstage is still an option, but you can replace the prop pistol with a loaded one, or you can take the place of the extra that fires the shot and execute him onstage yourself. As long as you can minimize expenses, there aren't many TRULY wrong ways to play Hitman - killing people besides your target tends to have penalties, but leaving living witnesses is even worse, and if a guard catches wind of what you've done, you can pretty much count on again, literally every armed guard in the level knowing about it, which is a very messy situation that very rarely results in success and usually leaves you a lot worse off than you started even if you do, because you have a notoriety meter that stays persistent between missions and if you don't pay money to lower it, there is a chance that guards will recognize you immediately in future missions and force you into a shootout before you've even done anything.

Does it make you feel slick as fuck when you pull it off and get away scot free? Abso-fucking-lutely. Does it need to be this punishing to do? Probably not. Honestly, I feel like Perfect Dark handled that school of design best, wherein the lower difficulties have less objectives - so at least when you're ready to for a more complicated take, you at least already know the basic layout of the level and can act on gradual diversions to what was previously the main task. Hitman could probably benefit a lot from a system like that, even if it's as simple as less or more targets to kill depending on the mission.

October 22, 2020

Tommy Tawodi (Prey 2006)

Prey is probably the lesser known of the two big profile development hell scenarios that have come out of 3D Realms. If that sounds hard to believe looking at the game as it actually released, you should probably know that there playable builds dating back as far as 1998:

Despite its troubled development history, though, it really isn't all that bad a game. The worst I can say about it is that it can come off as disorienting, gimmicky and tech-demo-y at times, but even that works hand in hand with its own setting, working hard to sell it as alien both figuratively and literally. Sometimes things are made to be unfamiliar just for its own sake - weapons are unconventional in either design or function if not both, enemies are mostly bipedal but can go from zero to absolutely monstrous really fucking quickly, and level design can border on non euclidian thanks in large part to its usage of portals and magnetic pathways. I can't think of many other games besides the Metroid Primes that have really nailed the feel of exploring a genuinely alien world, and graphically speaking it is a true technological marvel in a way most launch window titles struggle to pull off, even if it does have that signature Doom 3 "oh my god I can't fucking see shit it is so goddamn dark" look at times. You know, shared engines and all.

One thing I've been avoiding covering until now is that because Tommy has Native American heritage, that translates into playing around with spirits because of course it fucking does. What this usually translates into is that he can separate his spirit from his body and move independently of his physical form. This is usually as a means of solving puzzles, because your spiritual self is immune to forcefields and is unaffected by the aformentioned magnetic paths, but can otherwise interact with the environment normally. Because the spirit has a bow and arrow, though, you can also use it for combat purposes if you can hide your physical body somewhere safe first, which can actually be a better option sometimes because your spirit has a separate resource that functions as a health bar when used this way, and you don't actually die when it runs dry. It does tie into what happens when you ACTUALLY die, though, and I think it might form my biggest criticism of the game.

When you bite the dust, you're sent into a spiritual realm that acts as something of a post-death minigame where you shoot at colourful bat-looking creatures with your bow, and the amount of red and blue ones you manage to hit determines how much health and spirit you respawn with. Yes, a singleplayer shooter with respawning mechanics. The developers try to make this off as a tagline, as if it's supposed to make dying fun (no seriously, it's on the back of the fucking box), but it comes off as irritating and tedious instead, and honestly sucks a lot of the stakes out of the game knowing that even in canon there's nothing the aliens can do to kill Tommy completely or so much as inconvenience him more than just being flung right back into the same skirmish with MAYBE a little less health than before.

Despite that, though? I'm glad they tried, because history is littered with the corpses of games that tried playing things too safe to appeal to broader audiences only to fade from memory because they were boring and stale as a result. And I think it's better any day to strive to be ambitiously unique for it to turn out not to be the best move, than to just do the same shit everyone else is doing and not have any way to stand out. The absolute worst that will happen is that people will learn from your example why people don't do that, which is honestly kind of a necessary evil in the industry either way.

October 23, 2020

You know, I usually struggle to get excited for a new generation of consoles. Even when backwards compatibility of some kind comes into play, it usually means letting go of SOME quantity of your previous titles, and it also means paying a sizeable investment into a chunk of hardware on the promise that it'll become worth it sometime in the future, which is a lot of trust to put in a manufacturer and a bunch of gibbering idiots who will use the increased specs as an excuse to get lazy with their coding and graphic design more than anything else. I tend to find games are at their best when they DO have to contest with technical limitations and I find it all the more impressive when people are able to pull off technically intense shit on weak hardware, because through that lens it's only the people who actually know what the hell they're doing that can shine through with flying colours and come up with a game that is more than just good looking for it.

But Dead Rising is one of the only times I've ever said to myself "okay yeah, you definitely couldn't pull this shit off on anything less than a next gen console at all".

Frank West and Chuck Greene (Dead Rising 1/2)

If you told anyone in 2005 that this was an undoctored screenshot, they'd have thought you were taking the piss. But if there's a reason there was a glut of zombie games starting with the Xbox 360, this was certainly one of them - the sheer quantity of actors one can have on the screen at the same time and not see a drop in performance, and honestly, to a point that even individual zombies still have a decent amount of detail on them. This is impressive to everybody, even those that don't have a clue what kind of specs are involved, because these kinds of crowds had never really been done before in a videogame, even games that were already built around it like the Warriors games. Not only does Dead Rising take a similar glee in mowing them down by the dozens, it gives you plenty of opportunities to fool around while you're doing it and weaponize literally anything that can be be carried. From entire park benches, cash registers, giant lipstick props, vision obscuring head props and shower faucets you can jam into their heads and watch blood pour out through them, on top of the more mundane and reliable stuff like baseball bats, machetes and the occasional firearm. It's the kind of game that knows every zombie trope in the book and steers way clear of most of them for the sake of the childlike fun that comes from having an entire mall all to yourself and having a bunch of meat puppets to abuse, which is always hard not to admire.

It's just a shame, then, that one of the major mechanics of Dead Rising is escort missions.

Whenever you're out and about, you get regular radio messages from a janitor you're sharing a safehouse with, and most of these messages point you towards story missions, survivors in distress, boss fights with psychopaths, or a combination thereof. Both games have multiple endings based on your attendence of these events, and you have to wait real time in between story missions in order to actually advance the plot, so it's pretty hard to just ignore them completely on principle. This much could be forgiven if they could hold their own, but even when armed they're often absolutely useless and will get stuck in crowds constantly even while you're actively carving a path out for them, and this is on top of the fact that you have a limited window of opportunity to complete most cases, which sometimes isn't even communicated to the player through the radio system. What results is a game that will take multiple playthroughs to truly conquer, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. I do appreciate that there's a lot of different ways to play the game, a lot of different ways it can end and subsequently, a metric shit ton of replay value, but it's hard not to feel like it's more dependant on the AI not being dumb than your own efforts to rescue them. Dead Rising 2 made them more competent, but traded that off with absolutely asinine requirements to get them to follow you, including I shit you not, beating three of them in a 10-20 minute long poker game.

Don't get it twisted, Dead Rising 1 and 2 are still great games despite this one glaring flaw, but it's a series that has stayed less and less true to itself with every entry in its series before eventually becoming a hollow, soulless shell of itself, and that brings us right back to the same lesson we just covered in Riders - consistency is generally better than chasing trends if the original formula works fine, and if it does, there's really nothing wrong with making more of the same shit people already enjoy as long as you're consistently polishing it along the way. You'll know if people are starting to get tired of it.

October 24, 2020

Boy (Lumines Live)

Lumines is a puzzle game with a very simple premise - you have block of two colours, and you have to organize them to create 2x2 squares of the same colour before a line on the screen sweeps past them to clear them. That sweeping line however, ties into its better known quality - this is a rhythm puzzle game, and several aspects of the game from the speed of the clear line to the pace at which the game responds to your inputs is dictated by the rhythm of the music. Even the sound effects change in response to the music and practically act as extensions of it, creating an absolute masterpiece of sound design that very few developers have ever been able to match. As a game it's positively hypnotic, able to be played hours apon hours on end because the regular switches in backing tracks and visuals will keep the experience from going completely stale, and I think honestly the only complaint I have in that regard is that the effects could stand to be a little less dazzling, because I honestly feel like my eyes are going bad sometimes. This is all well and good, but none of this is the reason I included the game in the list - rather, that it was my first real clue towards the insidious, cancerous greed spreading through the industry that we have all taken for granted today.

Simply put - the game was released unfinished. This is a ten dollar game that came with nearly forty dollars of DLC, and most of it is shit that should have been in the game right as it was released anyway. New playlists are fair enough, it forms both the biggest selling points and clearly the biggest investments in the entire game, and these kinds of boards require a lot more forethought than just slapping a background graphic and an MP3 together. But four bucks for a playlist that only has four songs in it? A buck and twenty five cents for avatars? Nearly four dollars for extra play modes that are already on the fucking main menu and are clearly already functioning on a high enough level to conceivably have been included with the base download? You don't even have to take my word for it on this one - the XBLA page for the game is still up and running today. Just about any aspect of this game that can be monetized has its own fucking price tag, and there's literally no reason for most of it to have one but to enrich the developers further for less work done. And this is before we get into the fact that these prices originally weren't even measured in dollars.

In fairness to the developers of Lumines here, this is something they had absolutely nothing to do with, but this is probably the best chance I'm going to get to talk about it. See, rather than allowing you to buy content online with actual currency, there was a point in time where almost literally all exchanges of money were handled through a middleman premium currency called Microsoft Points, which had to be bought in stores in form of cards and redeemed based on a code printed on them, much like prepaid internet, gift cards or one of the fucking bajillion different kinds of microtransaction cards that are flooding retail right now.

This wasn't to make online transactions convenient. Quite the fucking opposite, actually - putting aside the fact that you have to type out a long string of text onto a console that doesn't have a keyboard, this currency was designed to be manipulative and entice player into spending more cash on them for two main reasons. One, because there's no robust scale between MS points and the amount of money you spend on them, the actual value of them is obsuficated and consquently, the amount of real world money you're spending on fake money that only works on their storefront, so you can often be dumping more money on it than you actually realize. Two, the amount of points you get from store-bought MSpoints cards is intentionally designed to be at odds with almost everything that is bought on their storefront - no matter what you spend the points on, you ALWAYS have some left over, creating a never-ending cycle of psychological fuckery that alternates between going to stores to buy cards, spending them on shit at home and then realizing you're JUST short of what's needed to actually completely empty the card, forcing you to get another one and making the cycle start anew. And before you think about scoffing at it, this kind of psychology is exactly why mobile games abuse the shit out of it today, knowing full well that no authority is going to tell them to stop.

But hey, Lumines Remastered on the Switch is alright and doesn't have any more price tags after the initial purchase, so at least these guys have learnt from it.

October 25, 2020

Shigi (Tenchu Z)

The biggest flaws of Tenchu Z are visible almost immediately - it flagrantly has all the signs of a shoestring budget, with aspects of it that are either merely on par with previous gens or direct downgrades from it. Much of the graphics are murky and poorly defined, the sound design doesn't have the same impact it did before, there's no longer an English dub, and even the dialogue the game DOES have often doesn't have any lipsyncing to accompany it, on top of re-using content constantly and relentlessly like entire maps and scenarios practically verbatim. Having a low budget isn't always the end of the world, though, as long as the design is still solid where it counts. There's enough quality of life changes that I can still recommend it as an alternative to Wrath of Heaven, and even of its own merits I have to say this is one of the most relaxing stealth games I've ever played, which probably seems like a weird thing to suggest about a game that not only shares WoH's insistence of murdering every guard possible for rankings, but further incentivizes it by basing cash rewards on them, which you need lots of in order to develop your character.

Yup, that's right - this is a game that stars an OC of your own creation, serving as a fresh recruit of the Azuma clan under previous protaganist Rikimaru, mostly competing day to day tasks - or night to night, as the case often is - for Lord Goda. Once could say it fills a niche that most live service games occupy today, in its focus of drawing an adventure out into a long series of tasks that may or may not have any relation to the overarching narrative, but Tenchu Z never felt to me like a game that gets particularly grindy because of it, in large part because much of the game can still be completed in relative comfort with your starting abilites. Most of the stuff you can learn in addition to that feels like personalization and specialization more than anything else, and it includes some incredibly cool shit I wish previous games had, like being able to blend into walls, cling to cielings indoors and perform a short, intense sprint that can cross half a football field in about a second, on top of MUCH more open ended level design to make good use of everything your character can potentially do. I just wish you could have a good idea of what you're getting into BEFORE you spend money on it, because some abilities - like the wall running ability - are way more useless and less cool than their ingame descriptions make them sound, and don't even get me fucking started on the fact that you can't even preview cosmetic items before bying them.

So about those quality of life changes. First and foremost - you can stealth kill most boss tier enemies in the game now. All but two of them, in fact. I get that dramatic confrontations and speeches sound cooler from a narrative perspective, but it sorta puzzles me that it took this long to apply Tenchu's most iconic mechanic this broadly. Secondly, sneaking itself has been revamped around shades of Splinter Cell and Thief, with meters for how visible you are and how much noise you're making at any given time, and the fact that you're more visible when your sword is unsheathed, incentivizing you to keep it in its holster until the last moment possible. This in turn forms several other layers of strategy that are intertwined with one another, such as the fact that unsheathing your sword makes noise too unless you obtain a special upgrade for it, and the fact that if you kill guards in a fight instead of with a stealth kill future guards will SMELL the blood on you and become wary the moment you're in their presence, adding layers of caution that previously in Tenchu were simply just avoiding line of sight and not much else. It can be frustrating to contest with when you're just starting out, especially if you're more familiar with Wrath of Heaven's way of doing things, but once you start to get a grasp of the game's mechanics, it's absolute zen.

I didn't even mention the fact that this game was built with co-op in mind, both LAN and online - and while the game was still fresh, it was some of the most fun I'd ever had playing with complete randoms in just about any online game I can think of, and I think it's a testament to the relaxing mood this game puts its players in because pretty much everyone I ever played with was super chill through victory and failure both. At the very least I would have changed it so that the entire mission isn't failed if a single player out of a potential party of four dies, but it's still relaxing enough that having to restart a mission once or twice won't really phase me much, which is something I would never expect to say in hindsight coming from the guys that would later go on to create Dark Souls.

ITT BL reminisces over his entire game library

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