ITT BL reminisces over his entire game library

October 26, 2020

Silver the Hedgehog (Sonic 06)

It's really fucking bad lmao

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That's it. That's the entire writeup.

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Look, what the hell do you want me to say? To say that this is beating a dead horse would imply that there's a horse left to beat - this game has been the scapegoat and whipping boy of the entire franchise for nearly a decade and a half, and that dead horse has become just pulp and bonemeal since. You already how bad it is. You already know why it's bad. The only reason you're bothering to read this at all is seek some sense of vindication, and to be perfectly fucking frank I'm fed up with giving this game any more attention than I need to - if it were ever an option, I would have skipped over this game outright. There are plenty of people who have covered it in way greater detail than I ever could. And if by some ridiculous miracle you're one of those people who have been completely out of the loop on Sonic '06 all this time, fine, here's a couple such videos on the subject.

Go watch those, then fuck off and don't come back until tomorrow.

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No, I'm serious. Go away. There's nothing to see here.

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Stop clicking these.

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Alright then, motherfucker. You want a writeup that badly? Fine. Today's writeup is about you. Yes, you, specifically you. There is only two reasons you would read this far against all advice. One, you giggle like a fucking schoolgirl at the thought of this game being handed yet another savage takedown you've already heard before, and you post Sonic Cycles without any trace of irony for the simple purpose of getting people titled. Two, against all fucking common sense you believe that this is a good game unironically, or that it was somehow onto something despite its end result, and are just ITCHING to dissect every little goddamn thing I say about it in an effort to claim your fucking stupid agenda has some kind of merit. I don't think it's enough to say that the two of them are what's wrong with the fandom - frankly, I think it represents everything that is wrong with society as it is today.

To the former, what the hell do you think you've proven? That Sonic 06 is a bad game? We know already. We've literally heard it all before. Your insight and input isn't new. All you're doing is regurgitating the same tired talking points as if it applies to everything the franchise has done since. News flash, sunshine - the problems we're dealing with right now are a lot more fucking nuanced than that, and trying to summarize everything that's happened since as JUST a lack of time or JUST a lack of Yuji Naka or JUST the usage of every playable character possible misses an absolute shit-ton of subtext that honestly causes more harm to this franchise than good when it's neglected. If your only contribution to this fanbase is harping on and on about how past his prime Sonic is, maybe you should go out and get a god damn hobby.

To the latter, no. You're wrong. Sit the fuck down. This is one of the most dissected critical disasters in gaming history, and even all the shit-talking memes speak a lot to how much it fucked Sonic up in his public perception in a way he has never truly recovered from, even during the brief respite that Generations gave. The longer you hold to a stance like this past all the evidence that's been put forward over the years, the longer you cling to it past the prime of the game itself and the players that can easily call you out on any bullshit you spew forth. This isn't just flagrantly wrong, it's cowardly to hold onto this misconception after people have moved on, and only a few rungs beneath really fucked up shit like holocaust denial gaining wind in its sails because the actual prisoners and historians are starting to die out. Yes, I just invoked Godwin in a post about '06, but you're probably used to that by now, aren't you? Regardless, when this many people tells you shit sucked, you need to learn to take their fucking word for it. This is a lot bigger than memes like IGN being paid for, or some ridiculously inplausible and fucking stupid idea like the thought of reviewers conspiring against Sonic as a series for reasons you will inevitably fail to produce.

Either way, the both of you need to move the hell on. There is literally no more insight left to find from obsessing over this piece of shit. I'm done.

October 27, 2020

Otori (Red Steel)

Oh great, another game with a faceless mute protagonist. There's no way this is going to get old as the years progress. Red Steel serves the dubious honour of being the first Wii title on the list, and as was the style for most games made for a launch window, it plays very much like it was made as a tech demo first and then fleshed out into a full game second. Unlike most other console launches though, which emphasize leaps in graphical technology and not much more, the Wii was made to promote the usage of motion controls at the expense of graphics, which in turn has a profound impact on the way the game itself plays rather than just looks. There's no point beating about the bush - the Wii was an act of marketing genius and the poster child for how little graphics can ultimately matter in making good games and being appreciated as such for it, but Red Steel's rush to link as much of its being as possible to motion-based controls truly did turn this game into an absolute pile of shit.

The nicest thing I can say about it is that despite how it works, at least the aiming is still generally better than traditional twin sticks, on many levels about the same responsiveness you'd expect from a lightgun game - you point at a thing on the screen, you press a button, your character shoots the thing. This of course, depends on your target actually being on the screen at the time, and the Wii doesn't exactly have a second stick with which to handle turning. So the approach this game took in its stead - and the example that just about every shooting game followed after the fact - is through what's called a "bounding box" around the edges of the screen. If your cursor enters one of these edges, your character turns towards that direction. I get that Wii games had to work within limitations - yes, LIMITATIONS - that the Wii controllers introduced, but this makes a lot of FPS games feel really clunky whenever the turning isn't handled for you, and honestly it's the only time I would have accepted going all the way back to the original Doom way of handling things and just making one of the nunchuk buttons a strafe modifier. I know, I can't believe I'm suggesting that as an improvement either.

I would honestly forgive Red Steel if that was my only gripe with it, but it consistently and hamfistedly shoehorns motion controls into applications that are effectively just a motion mapped to a button press, like flicking your nunchuk downwards to pick up weapons or shaking it to perform a quick melee attack in gunfights (with the added bonus that you need to have your wiimote cursor on your target the whole time, which is really fucking hard to hold steady while vigorously shaking your other hand, so this will miss at LEAST half of the time), and sometimes even for incredibly mundane and stupid shit like sheathing your sword to spare someone or physically gesturing in response to a yes or no question. Look, I shouldn't even have to explain this to people - a motion control has a wide range of motion and output, while a button is literally just one digit of binary, "on" or "off". When you tell the former to do that latter's job, it's inevitably going to be less responsive at it. Would you ever think about using the right control stick in Halo to pick stuff up and whack people? Yeah, that's what I fucking thought. Even from the standpoint of making games more immersive, which little doubt is the reason people praise tripe like Red Steel. the reason this works in say, VR and not Wii is that the full range of motion is used and accounted for even in rudimentary tasks, like people having to physically align their hand towards if not directly over an object first, whereas in Red Steel it's all literally just button presses with extra steps.

I say that even as to include the swordplay, which was pretty much this game's selling point - the ability to swing the wiimote around and have your character mimic its movements. Right from the start we have a problem - you can't actually pull out your sword on command, the game decides that for you and only allows you to engage in swordplay when another solitary enemy approaches with sword drawn and forces you into a duel. Problem number two is that the swordplay doesn't account for rotation - if you treat the bottom of your wiimote as the leading edge of your sword like your character does onscreen, the game will treat it as though your wiimote is still upright and your character will swing in the wrong direction. It's not like they didn't know how to account for this, or that the Wiimote was incapable of doing so, because it works just fine in gun battles and allows you to hold your gun sideways even though it serves literally no purpose to do so. The REAL problem though, is that the swordplay is a complete facade - your character will follow your movements when idle, but the actual act of attacking people is all handled through completely scripted motions, no different to what would happen if you held a direction and pressed attack in a Zelda game.

It's the barest implementation possible that can be done and still considered technically "motion controlled". What pisses me off more than anything else though, is that almost nobody strived to do any better than this in the entire seven years the Wii was on the market, save for its sequel Red Steel II which absolutely aced the controls but was a crap game in just about every other respect. Lucky for you, though, I get to go into the how and why of that in our very next entry:

October 28, 2020

Midna (Twilight Princess)

Over time, I've really come to despise this game. Not because it's bad - it's a definite step down from Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker, sure, but that's like saying wine is a step down from ambrosia. No, I hate it because it represents just about every little thing that went wrong with the Wii's software output from then on out, and set the precedent that it quickly became infamous for right at the start of the generation: that you don't even have to build games with the gyroscope in mind, just map button presses to generic shaking motions (which we will dub "waggling" from here on out, as much of the community and gaming press did) and spew out some vile PR bullshit like "iT's JuSt LiKe SwInGiNg A rEaL sWoRd" to bait and switch people into thinking it's anything that couldn't have been done on the Gamecube. Now there's some elements of this I do absolutely get in this case, such as the fact that Twilight Princess literally was a Gamecube game and had to be ported pretty quickly to have a release on both generations. But you can't tell me it was too much fucking trouble to at least match the direction the player swings to the same direction that Link swings - even fucking Red Steel, for all of its faults, still managed as such in a way that actually functioned correctly. In TP, it's literally just the B button mapped to waggle, and you still have to use the control stick to direct your swings into chops and thrusts. Even the jump attack is just a button press and doesn't involve physical swinging at all. Why is it that so many people never actually fucking talk about this???

Let's talk about buttons, actually. For sake of argument, let's bring back out the Gamecube controller.

You guys should already know my stance on the physical button layout by now, but I want you to pay close attention to what's within reach of the player's fingers at any time. The left hand has access to a shoulder button, the start button, a control stick and a d-pad, the latter three of which are mutually exclusive because both use the thumb but they're at least in close enough reach that you can jump to one or the other without trouble. The right hand gets two shoulder buttons, the right stick and every remaining button, with your right thumb doing most of the work. The thumb tends to rest between the A and B buttons and most games built specifically around the Gamecube will exploit this, but the remaining buttons are still in comfortable enough reach of one another that you can use any other combination that involves the A button - Y and A, and X and A. All caught up? Good. Now let's talk about the Wiimote and Nunchuk.

Honestly, the Nunchuk is the best part of this - it has two "shoulder" buttons and a control stick, and are arranged in such a way that they can be controlled independently by individual fingers. But the Wiimote itself is fucking stupid. The resting positions on the Wiimote is the A and B buttons, and nothing else. That's three vectors of input if you include the gyroscopic controls too. Your thumb CAN reach three other buttons, and you'd think they would be important ones, right? Nope, it's the Start, Select and Home buttons. A normal human being can't reach anything else on this controller without physically adjusting their grip on the fucking thing, to the point that the 1 and 2 buttons are generally not touched AT ALL unless you're holding it in such a way that precludes the Nunchuk completely. Who the fuck designed this thing, and how did it make it all the way to market in this state? It's embarrassing, and it puts limitations on games that really have no reason to be there - even in Twilight Princess, for example, you can tell they had to get unnecessarily creative to get previous gameplay to work on this thing, key among them that you have to use the B button for all items and the Dpad simply swaps over which item currently uses said B button, instead of having a handful of buttons that each activate an item of your choice instantly. Oh, and let's not forget that the Wiimote does not have a fucking stick, so you better get used to abusing the "center camera" button all the time because you have absolutely no control over the camera besides it.

Finally putting my gripes about controls aside, I feel like the biggest issues I have with Twilight Princess mostly come from bloat and context sensitivity. It has 15 items in total if you skip over stuff like upgrades, but many of them like the Slingshot, Ball and Chain, Dominion Rod and the Spinner only have any real usefulness exactly where the game tells you it does, which seems like a huge cop-out when it comes to the way Zelda items are traditionally designed. Okay sure, Ocarina still had the Lens of Truth which was virtually the same problem, but think about what you can do with say, the Boomerang - you can use it to hit switches, stun if not kill enemies, hit multiple of them if your aim is good, and retrieve items just off the top of my head. And it seems like a rotten waste when so many items don't share this same versatility or even just the simple ability to play around outside of their intended use case. Can you imagine if say, the Dominion Rod could possess ordinary mooks and allow you to fight their mates with them? And then there's the wolf form, which for some strange reason isn't treated as an item when you get the ability to switch on command - you have to talk to your Navi expy and tell them to do it for you, which much like the Iron Boots in OoT is an extra step that doesn't really seem like it was needed.

So yeah, if you're for some reason nostalgic for this game, just avoid the fucking Wii version and go for the 'cube or HD versions instead. Once you take the halfassed motion controls out of the equation, it's fine. Not great, just... fine.

October 29, 2020

Galactic Colossus (Supreme Commander)

I don't know if I'm in the best position to be talking about real time strategy games. It's not something I've ever played competitively, for fear of the amount of micromanaging needed just to contest on some levels, and even cooperatively I haven't had much experience with them save for occasionally LAN-ing two laptops together for a few games of Battle for Middle Earth II (which itself I didn't really have enough to say about to form its own entry on the list). So for the most part, I can only speak to what I've experienced through campaigns and bot matches, which again, really limits what I can say about any given game in the genre. What I CAN speak to, though, is that Supreme Commander is perhaps the best controlling RTS I've ever personally played, a few elements of such that I'm shocked other giants of the genre haven't adopted.

Much of the reason micromanaging is ever necessary in an RTS is that units can only ever accept one order at a time. Some orders have multiple implicit objectives, usually in the form of "move to location, but immediately stop and engage if you see any enemy units en route", but nothing that allows you to plan surgical strikes in advance based on what you know of the enemy's positions. Supreme Commander on the other hand, allows you to queue orders for any given selection of units just by holding a button down while you're issuing them. Even on a basic level this allows you to assign units on a very specific selection of targets in an assault rather than just blanketedly hitting everything along a specific path or selecting one target and waiting for it to expire before issuing another order manually to move onto the next. As a few hypothetical examples, you could have air units sweep in and take out turrets in preparation for land assault for a separate squad, or launch a nuke, gunship down all their nuke defenses and bug out before the nuke hits. How the hell did it take this long for a strategy game to allow you to plan out these kinds of attacks?

Supreme Commander has an... interesting approach when it comes to its balancing. Units in most RTS games have their own specialties and cost efficiencies, but are never truly useless in a war - for example, a unit might be overall worse off than others in an open firefight, but their relative cheapness might favour them early on in a match for scouting positions and spamming to harrass people with poorly defended positions or under-developed armies. In SupCom, all units are placed into one of three tiers, with a fourth consisting of units so large they need to be built on the map in the same way as a building. To put it bluntly, tier one units are absolutely fucking worthless in almost every instance, because the obligatory building unit you start every match with is a heavily armed mech that will hold its own against just about everything you can throw at it right at the start of the match, to say nothing of the fact that pretty much no amount of tier ones will be able to contest with hardpoint defences of any kind, even ones of the same tier. It honestly does beggar belief that they're even in the game at all, because they don't have any real effectiveness even when built en masse. You never have any reason to do much early game besides tech rushing to at least tier 2 and snatching as much of the easy resource nodes as you can in the meantime.

At least that I can rule out as a quirk of the game. The main real problem I have with this game is good lord it is so god damned slow. Matches can take hours to settle completely, and a lot of this is down to the fact that besides air units, everything else in the game has just ludicrously low movement speeds and takes forever to cross from one side of the map to the other. There are some circumstances where you can speed up the clock to alleviate some of the hassle, but matches between players to my knowledge only advance as fast as the slowest player, who might not ever see any reason to speed the clock up even when it DOES benefit them to - not to mention airstrikes and artillery can fuck with an advancing army REALLY quickly, so you might not even be able to slow the clock back down in time to save all the ones that matter if you're caught off guard. Supposedly the sequel is somewhat better in this regard? But I can't speak to that for sure because I've never owned or played it.

Whatever the case, it's a sense of scale that's seldom portrayed anywhere else, from just the sizes of individual units to the amount of relentless chaos and destruction that can be unfolding at any one moments, to the point I don't think I know even other RTSs manage to approach often. It's definitely a game that anyone with an investment in the genre should at least try out.

October 30, 2020

Agent (Crackdown)

Seriously? This again? Just "Agent"? Look, I get what they're trying to go for here - the player character is essentially a product more than a person, and in universe that would defy the need to give them an ordinary name. But even other games built with almost exactly the same approach to their lead characters, like System Shock 2 and Hitman, still at least gave their lead characters a fucking serial number. Honestly this kind of narrative halfassery permeates just about everything that happens in this game - all you're told is that crime is running rampant, all of law enforcement has been cornered into a single monolith in the centre of the city, and you're an artificial human genetically built to be able bring down all the gangs in the city singlehandedly. Beyond that, it's just hunting down all the kingpins at your own pace. Okay, so it's more an excuse plot than anything else - that's not a problem if it's fun to play around with on its own. Is it? Well... I think it's fair to say your mileage may vary.

Your Agent develops in one of five categories as you play through Crackdown - Agility, Guns, Strength, Explosives and Driving. Let me just say this right off the bat - driving is fucking useless. Supposedly levelling up your driving skill makes Agency vehicles better in some way and gives them some extra tricks, but it never actually makes them any better at traversing the environment or taking down gangters. There are occasional - and I mean fucking occasional - time trial events you can use to gain points in Driving, but for the most part you just run gangsters over. You wanna know where you see them when out and about driving? On the sidewalks. You know who else occupies the sidewalks? Ordinary pedestrians. You know what happens if you run over pedestrians? Your driving skill GOES DOWN INSTEAD OF UP. You never need to get into a vehicle anyway because your Agility skill quickly gets to a point that you can run as fast as most cars anyway, and most kingpins are located high up on buildings that you need to be able to climb to reach anyway. If you really wanted to make vehicles into an entire skill class, why the fuck would you not at least arm them? Give me a chopper, a chaingun buggy and a tank, not a supercar, a 4WD and a truck.

Okay whatever. Just don't use vehicles at all and the game still works fine. My main gripe with it is that it just never gives you a fucking break. No matter where you go, gangsters are CONSTANTLY shooting at you, and they never shut the fuck up, howling insults at you in foreign languages (yes, they're all racial stereotypes because of course they are) the moment you come into visual range of any of them. You can't just wipe them out as you go, because engaging them causes them to start sending hit squads and make you engage MORE enemies, much like the noteriety systems in your typical GTA title. And you can't really just hide and wait for it to blow over either, because they're goddamn everywhere and they're borderline omniscient anyway, so they'll simply just re-aggro and resume shooting you the moment you come back out and dare to have fun jumping between buildings again. It's a game that really, really tries your patience, and trying to play it for more than an hour at a time will really exhaust you, and honestly it never felt like a game that really needed to. Game really needs to just fucking chill with the enemy spam, man.

I think it's really telling that they bundled this game with a beta for Halo 3 - because without it, this game would have had nothing. Immediately forgotten like a fart on the wind. Kinda like what happened after Crackdown 3 came out, come to think of it.

October 31, 2020

Erazor Djinn (Sonic and the Secret Rings)

Okay, let's be blunt about this right off the bat - Secret Rings is a bad Sonic game that caught a lucky break just by virtue of releasing alongside an even worse one. That being said, in retrospect I hold Secret Rings in even lower regard than 06. 06's crappy design, buggy expoits and absurd, under developed narrative have lent it sort of an endearing quality in hindsight that make it difficult not to just laugh at when you know exactly what you're in for, but this game on the other hand has the dubious honour of being one of the few Sonic games that are physically painful to play. Nevermind that you use the Wiimote to steer Sonic like a fucking car even though you always have a D-pad within reach, you have to shake the controller every time you want to perform a Homing Attack, and quite vigorously too, and many enemies need to be hit multiple times to get them out of your way. Even just the simple act of moving backwards and forwards requires you to tilt the controller towards or away from yourself - and let me tell you, playing the entire game almost exclusively with the controller on a 30 degree slant is a nightmare on your wrists by ANY metric. Did anyone even playtest this?

Even when you take motion controls out of the equation entirely, the way this game controls is nothing short of hair-brained. For some reason it's not enough to just press the jump button and have Sonic jump on command - you have to charge your fucking jump up to be able to perform anything besides a short hop. Considering just about every other Sonic game handles variable jump height just fine while you're already in the middle of of a jump, it beggars fucking belief that Secret Rings honestly believed it needed a system like this to such an extent that it completely fucks up any flow the game has the second you involve any kind of platforming. And I swear the ability to jump between rails is just flat out fucking broken in this game because you'll constantly overshoot and undershoot adjoining rails during critical moments, especially during Pirate Storm, and I've never actually figured out what the hell I was doing wrong if it was ever indeed my own fault. Knowing my luck, it could very well have been an unlock.

See, another aspect of Secret RIngs is that throughout the process of playing it, you're constantly unlocking perks that affect the way that Sonic performs. And just thinking about it makes me want to tear my fucking hair out, because it wasn't enough for these guys to make the controls as responsive as the player - their unresponsiveness is intentional, because the ability to unlock better fucking controls is considered a game mechanic. And honestly, even when you DO have upgraded controls it can be hard to tell where you end up sometimes, because even though the entire game takes place in an on-rails path for some reason the path can take very unpredictable twists and turns that can make it difficult to follow trails of rings and pearls that keep snaking through them, nevermind enemies and hazards.

And finally, the progression through this game is just dumb. There are both story missions and challenge missions, but you're required to do challenge missions to unlock other missions, including the story ones - and the game doesn't fucking tell you what unlocks what, so whether you'll actually earn the ability to progress through the story or just be forced to do more irrelevant bullshit is a complete crapshoot that drags the game out a lot longer than it has any right to. Which is a rotten shame, because despite all the qualms I have with this game, it's actually one of the better written ones in the series, arguably even one of the best. If there's even a single aspect the series could stand to draw more of from the storybook games, it's absolutely that. Just stay away from the fucking motion controls if you don't know what the hell you're doing, okay?

November 1, 2020

DERP and HERP (Hideous Destructor)

What's the first thing you think of when you think of Doom? Is it the relentless power fantasy of being able to singlehandedly wipe out demons by the dozens? The twitchy, evasion-heavy gameplay with a player character that can outrun freight trains? The ability to literally rip someone's fucking heart out and asphyxiate them with it? No matter how you play Doom, there is usually SOME aspect of this that is preserved, through expansions, mods and total conversions alike. Hideous Destructor, on the other hand, is a Doom mod where you are absolutely not this guy:

You are at best, this guy:

Hideous Destructor is a mod that turns the game into something of a milsim, where completely standard marines have to fight their way through Doom maps with all the strength and athleticism of an ordinary human being. There's no cannon fodder here - all the enemies in the game are now at LEAST as dangerous as you are, to the point that even regular ass zombies can leave you to bleed out like a total bitch if they get one good shot off on you, and to the point that fireballs from Imps and Hell Nobles can completely immolate you, forcing you to physically stop, drop and roll to put yourself out (although given engine limitations, it's more like crouching and waving your mouse around wildly). Which is of course to say nothing about monsters higher up in the ranks, which are legitimately the stuff of nightmares - and worst of all, don't always cease to be a threat even after you kill them completely. The less said about the new Arch Vile, the better.

Even on a basic level, HD is incredibly complicated to learn and play. Gone are the days of just walking over discarded weapons to siphon up their ammo - take shotguns for example, which you have to physically pick up and add to your inventory, unload the side saddle for each individual shell, unchamber the shotgun and then unload each individual shell from the shotgun itself. Just about every ammo type in this game has its own little intricacies like this, such as the 7.62s which you can slowly recycle by collecting all of your fucking shell casings and cramming other bullets into them, or the plasma batteries that can be set to drain into each other to concentrate your energy into full batteries and leave less partial ones lying in your inventory, or the pistol caliber bullets that can be hand loaded into empty clips or kept as loose ammo to load into revolvers respectively.

Probably the most memorable example though, comes from the default rifle and its variants, which is clearly designed by the lowest bidder. It deals a lot of damage for how commonplace it is, especially if you can keep the fucking thing steady while full autoing it (yes, there's detailed weapon handling too - don't act like you're surprised). But the fucking thing can jam right in the middle of a firefight, essentially voiding the rest of the mag when you finally do clear the breach, and it can overheat and cook off your entire mag if you hold down the trigger too long, forcing you to wait patiently for it to cool down otherwise it'll cook off ANOTHER mag if you insert another one back in too early. But this is all before we get to the fact that the gun has fucking DRM built in - it's the only ammo type in the game that will tell you exactly how many shots are in a mag, but only if you load a full, completely unused mag into it, and jamming a partial mag into it by force will glitch the display and force you to guess how many rounds are left, which is absolutely something you don't want to chance when multiple motherfuckers are bearing down on you. Even handloading it, in addition to not bypassing the DRM, will randomly cause rounds to discharge, effectively wasting rounds and unsteadying your hands for a few seconds to make them even more likely to erupt.

Oh yeah, and I haven't even talked about the medical system yet! Nope, you can't just walk over a medkit and watch your health go up. Though it's streamlined insofar as you don't need to insert your own fucking sutures manually, you still need to take your armour off and find a safe space to make medkits work their magic - and honestly, the sound design makes it sound just as painful as gunshot wounds by itself, sometimes even worse when you have to apply Second Flesh to heal lasting damage from burns you'll no doubt pick up a lot of from the sheer amount of fucking Imps most mapsets have. And if you're playing this with a mate, you have to unwrap a brand new medkit to treat them because your own blood is most likely already on the old one. You can use Stimpacks to temporarily stabilize yourself, or pop a Berzerk kit if shit is absolutely beyond fucked (which is incidentally the closest you'll ever get to being actual Doomguy), but sooner or later you're going to have to mend your wounds up properly to avoid bleeding out like a bitch from the first gunshot.

What this all adds up to is a gameplay mod that that is overwhelmingly oppressive and daunting, and has a very high barrier of entry that I honestly don't blame anyone for giving up on - even the likes of E1M1 turns into a 15 minute long trawl when HD is booted up, and by the author's own admission there are entire genres of maps that are borderline if not literally unplayable as a result of the mod's mechanics, and even some of the official ones such as TNT. But once you grasp all the keybinds and mechanics that matter and figure out that fighting out in the open is absolutely the worst thing you can do, it's strangely difficult to put down. Much like what Brutal Doom was for a while, it has its own little subculture in the fandom with its own mutually exclusive mods and maps, and most of them are all too happy to show newbies the ropes if there's things you still don't get. And if there still remains any doubt, just remember - all demons fear the Chaingun.

November 2, 2020

Kane (Command and Conquer 3)

Well, this is going to be a tough one. As I've already mentioned with Supreme Commander, RTS games are definitely not my forte, but unlike most traditional fighters I'm willing to admit that it's not down to a fundemental failing in the way that most of them play. There are some I've had more fun with than others, but ultimately I don't think I tend to play most of them on a level greater than "build base, turtle inside base while building army, flatten other base with fully built army". Part of the reason I'm scared to cover C&C3 is that I legitimately don't KNOW if the things I take issue with are fundemental and essential not just to its own being, but to the genre as a whole. Well, okay, there's a few things I can say with relative certainty - the campaigns are polluted with the same B-C rate live action FMVs that felt outdated even when the Sega CD did it, frankly aren't all that well written even when you put aside the bad acting outright, and really aren't much more than just extended tutorials for Skirmishes and online battles. So Skirmishes is exactly where most of this writeup will be focused on.

I feel like most of the issues i have with this game revolve around economy. I get that there has to be a limit to how many units and structures you can pump out at any given time, and that map control plays a big part in how far you can push that limit without going broke at the worst possible time. Even still, I could never wrap my head around the idea that maps should have a finite amount of resources that you can physically empty long before a match draws to a close. This can create long, boring stalemates in which neither side has the money nor the forces to do anything to each other for long periods of time because all the convenient Tiberium on the map is simply just fucking gone, and there is usually no other alternative to raising money besides structures on the map that can be captured to generate money over time, but even those can be permanently destroyed and there's no way to repair or rebuild them once they're gone. A smart commander can leverage this advantage and cut their opponents off from gathering Tiberium outside of their own safe spaces, effectively starving them, but I still don't think there should be an element of ANY competitive game which can leave both players unable to actually fucking play the game at all. For how much victory in Supreme Commander can depend on harvesting trees and husks of previously destroyed units, at least there are still plenty of ways to keep making money with relatively few strings attached, while still affording the player with consistent map control every right to dominate.

Which is why it then irritates me when powers in this game almost always cost money, in addition to having the usual cooldowns associated with them. I can deal with having one or the other - money based would still have your economy being a limiting factor, and time based would still force you to ration them until the best moment knowing it could cost you dearly if you missed a better opportunity because of it. Was there any reason to do both? I say this because they almost never actually get used in this game, because it's almost always a better investment to spend that money on more tanks than it is to drop a few grand on a map ability that might take out a couple of refineries or might wreck a handful of tanks, and even if you have a dominant hold on most of the Tiberium on the map the cooldowns keep you from using them all that effectively regardless. Even the nuke tier superweapons, for all their spectacle and devastation, are still free once you dump the money into their initial building, so it really begs the question why the map powers couldn't have been handled similarly and balanced accordingly.

I suppose your prefence between this and Supreme Commander after all that is said and done will depend on preference. SupCom is MUCH better at handling micromanaging, but C&C3 is geared more towards somewhat quicker skirmishes, and its factions have a much more diverse choice of playstyles that honestly, I think SupCom could have done better in anywhere outside of its Tier 4s. Neither are bad games necessarily - just on a personal level, the very limited funds on C&C3 maps has a propensity to irritate me in more drawn out fights.

November 3, 2020

Alicia (Bullet Witch)

Honestly, I'd be lying if I said the name alone didn't catch my attention. As tends to be the style for eye catching titles though, it's is a pretty low budget game at the best of times, and was obscure even on the day it came out... which is why it came as a massive fucking shock to me when I found out the game had a Steam rerelease just two years ago, to no apparent reasoning or fanfare. Honestly, games like this are exactly why I started this project in the first place, because Bullet Witch has always been something of a guilty pleasure for me - it's one thing to enjoy a game in spite of its flaws and knowing it has flaws, but on a personal level I feel like you can't be a quote unquote "true fan" of something unless you're willing to acknowledge its faults, take honest critical looks at it and be able to say it could have done better whenever there's any place it could have. And believe me, there is a LOT this game could have done better.

Let's start with the good. Though BW has a ridiculous gun that can fire in four different forms, being a witch she can also use more powerful or specialized spells as a wildcard whenever the going starts getting rough. Some warrant their upgrades more than others, but they all still have their moments - she has a force push which shunts along nearby objects which aren't bolted down, which can be used for kills of convenience whenever enemies take cover behind cars and debris. Then you can summon temporary walls for your own cover, set loose a murder of ravens to distract huge crowds of enemies, heal downed humans with some of your own health, and my personal favourite, throw a rose which summons a group of spears out of the ground where it lands, which impale humanoid enemies and then set them on fucking fire. And then you get to Lightning, which calls a massive bolt from the sky onto a target of your choosing and positively fucking obliterating it and anything unlucky enough to be around it. It's incredibly useful for taking out tanks, giants and bosses alike, and the game knows it because every time you cast this spell is practically an event unto itself:

The menuing system for spells is admittedly kind of strange, but it clicks once you memorize spells as bumber-bumper-x instead of bothering to actually read or navigate them. I just think it could have done better by assigning separate menus to LB and RB respectively, and maybe moving the GUI to someplace it doesn't block most of the fucking screen whenever it's open. If there's any problem I have with the magic in this game - well, with most things in this game in general - it would probably have to be a simple lack of consistency. The aformentioned rose spear, for example, doesn't just pick enemies in its radius and impale them, the way the spears sprout through the ground is complete random and will only kill enemies if their path just happens to intersect with an enemy. Which can sometimes lead to a whole wave of enemies dying brutally at once, but it has a tendency to completely miss where it feels like it shouldn't have, and its intended use case - to kill enemies that are hiding behind barricades and bunkers - seems to fail something like 75% of the time, which is fucking annoying when your only other real alternative is to hop the fence and pray you aren't turned into a fucking sieve by all the gunfire coming your way in the time it takes to clear them out. Many enemies are incredibly inconsistent too, with some motherfuckers who zip around so fast they practically teleport, big-brained assholes who telekinetically throw cars at you and can sometimes kill you by accident just by drawing one towards him in preparation to throw it and you happen to be in the way, and god damn cunting instant kill snipers who track you with a laser sight but you have no way of knowing exactly when they actually fire.

And that brings me to environmental destruction in this game, which is like... okay hear me out on this one. You know those old Crash Dummies toys that look like they break into pieces whenever you ram them, but are really just pre-cut pieces that you reassemble whenever you want to smash them again? A lot of the destruction in Bullet Witch is pretty much just like that. Blowing up a petrol station and watching chunks of roof and concrete fly in the aftermath is satisfying, not doubt, but there's always the sense that the fragments are pre-cut from wherever they originated from instead of chunks that visibly look mangled and torn by the sheer force of the explosion. More importantly, it's difficult to tell whether you're going to get flattened by physics objects even when you're well clear of the explosion itself, and honestly, dying to physics in a way that neither you, the game or your enemies never intended is pretty irritating. And that's assuming you aren't just trapped into an area by crap that gets strewn about the place, as was what happened with me when I casted the Tornado spell in a forest one time without realizing nearly all the trees nearby could be uprooted, blocking the exit from sight completely.

Actually, the level design is probably the worst fucking thing about this game, and if you played it in modern days you would probably think it was some kind of asset flip. A lot of the maps feel like they were made from premade assets first and simply sprinkled enemies into it second, using goddamn annoying colour coded barriers to funnel you through it and try to put off an impression that its design was anything but completely aimless. As if getting completely lost on gigantic city streets wasn't already a problem, you have to remember that at the end of the day this is still a third person shooter, and taking on waves on nigh-hitstcan bullets completely out in the open with little to nothing to hide behind, and with what obstacles remain either being explosive or loose enough to be grabbed by telekinetic brains is a recipe for irritation, and later repeated restarts when enemies actually start learning how to aim. Made even worse by the fact that apparently western releases turned damage from your guns down to encourage them to use spells more without actually rebalancing it or considering its impact on the game, or realizing that the change makes the final boss take nearly half a god damn hour of constant shooting to kill.

The writing is ridiculous, but in my opinion in the best kind of way, much the same as what you would expect if you took Growl's writing and expanded it into a modern release. If you need to know what kind of sillyness that kind of thing entails, just know that there's a character named Maxwell Cougar, one of the boss fights is set on top of a god damned passenger jet, there are possessed humans that sound like broken cassette players and attack with their own fucking ribcages, and there is apparently a working printing press somewhere in a post apocalypse that wiped out 80% of human civilization that keeps printing headlines on the destruction you leave in your wake. Honestly, if I didn't have writing like this to keep my suspension of disbelief so low, I would probably have MUCH less fond memories of this game. It seems all too aware of the bad hand it was dealt, so might as well have fun with it while you're going down with the ship, right?

November 4, 2020

Alucard (Castlevania: Symphony of the Night)

Symphony of the Night is the other game that forms the namesake of the metroidvania genre, and much like Super Metroid it has every right to that kind of iconography. I personally feel SotN is the lesser game, but only marginally - still a great game, just held back by a handful of pet peeves, some famous and some not. Yeah yeah, we've all heard the "WHAT IS A MAN???" memes before - this game's voice acting is legendarily bad, insofar as nearly all the lines have the same forced emphasis that sounds an awful lot like characters are shouting at each other rather than having a casual discussion. And honestly, it's be best kind of bad voice acting of this era, because at the very least all the dialogue is spoken clearly. The alternative is actors that mumble incoherently instead, and sometimes cast with people who clearly don't even speak English as a first language, like was the case with Megaman 8 for example:

As tends to be the style for metroidvanias, you're only given clear pathing and signposting for about 20 minutes before the game starts branching out. This tends to lend to a feeling of being overwhelmingly lost much of the time, mostly just looking for the places you haven't explored yet and checking them off one by one to find the areas that actually advance the plot or contain abilities and gear that allow you to get through an area that was previously a dead end. SotN at least has the edge here, because nearly all of the "sorry, you can't do anything here yet, come back when you have the right ability" moments are clearly communicated to the player the moment they appear, whereas in Super Metroid you often had to bomb or rocket every individual fucking tile in the room to figure out whether you needed a new toy to open the way up, at least whenever it wasn't just a door with a different colour than you were used to. I just wish they were marked on the map while they were at it, because I've had long periods of time where I knew I needed Mist Form for something but couldn't fucking remember WHERE I'd last seen the plot-critical grille I needed to slip through.

Fighting as usual is my favourite flavour - relatively non-complex, favouring movment and positioning over most other things. But this time, there's a BIG caveat.

Are you actually fucking serious with this right now??? At what point was this ever necessary? Nevermind that this is a platforming game in which you're never guaranteed to be facing your target, and consequently never sure whether any of these commands are relative to your left or your right - even by the standards of fighting games these command inputs are fucking ludicrous, made all the worse by the fact that moves like Soul Steal are borderline necessary to get through many of the furthest points of the game, and that there are weapon specific command moves that aren't told to you AT ALL and you tend only to discover by pure chance. Don't take it from me - take it from people who speedrun this game, especially as Richter and Maria, who need RIDICULOUSLY frequent, carpal-tunnel-inducing command inputs just for the simple act of navigating the map in lieu of Alucard's ability to double jump and fly.

Finally, you might be wondering what this game is doing so late on the list when it came out back when the N64 was still relevant. To make a long story short, I didn't get to play this game until the Xbox Live Arcade version, which I consider a separate version to the PS1 original because if the AVGN is to be believed, it had some truly ridiculous loading times for a game based largely around sprites. It might not sound like much in restrospect, but just look at it:

I get that CDs are cheaper and all, but I feel like we truly lost something when we moved away from cartridges, and a noted increase in loading times was definitely one side effect of such that was thankfully averted in digital releases by having the entire game on your hard drive. Of course, that bears one last mention, the fact that Symphony of the Night has a large, CD quality soundtrack, and it fucking kicks ass even when you take said sound quality out of the picture completely:

It might not top Rise of the Triad's OST to me, but goddamn it gets close.

November 5, 2020

Eledees

Also known as Elebits abroad, which makes this one of the more puzzling regional name changes I've seen on this list. Nevermind that the original name sounds so much better, it's still similar enough that they might as well have not bothered changing it at all. What gives?

Anyway, this is a shooting...? Game? Honestly, you have a gun and you point it at things, but that's about where the similarities end. You're a kid hunting down the titular Eledees, which are tiny little creatures the size of a fist that are apparently responsible for all domestic electricity use in the world, or something? I dunno, the exact plot escapes me - I never really found myself terribly engaged in it because the voice acting is goddamn atrocious and it clearly wasn't the focus of the game anyway. The point is, they get loose and start acting like jerks, so you gotta go out and catch as many as you can with your fancy schmancy Capture Gun. There are a handful of wildly different mechanics at play in this game, but this being an early Wii title, you can bet it's going to be gimmicky and tech-demoy in ways that don't always work to the game's or player's benefit.

Key among them is that Eledees usually don't roam about right in the open. They like to hide behind, underneath and within objects strewn about the map, so your capture gun doubles as some kind of tractor beam, and it gets used for goddamn everything, from opening closets and cabinets to emptying bookshelves and lifting just about any household object that could conceal them. This is all well and good, but problems start when you have to twist your wrist for it, which you have to do to open every door with a handle and turn every faucet in the entire game, as well as a few more esoteric applications like tipping a bin upside down and shaking the hell out of it to empty it of any Eledees hiding inside. Once again, even if this isn't painful, it's still uncomfortable as all hell, and I don't know why so many Wii games - Nintendo's own included - ever thought this was okay.

Another thing is that controls are streamlined in a way that both capturing Eledees and lifting items uses the same button, which is a big double-edged sword in this game. It's good in that the controls largely speak for themselves and can be figured out by anyone with even the slightest sense of intuition or experimentation, and let's be real, that was exactly the demograph that Nintendo capitalized so hard on with the Wii - but because they use the same button, their functionalities clash and get in each other's way. Most notably because if you hit an object that can be lifted with your beam, even if it currently isn't strong enough to actually move it, your beam locks onto it and keeps you from drifting your beam anywhere else until you release A and take another shot, which is irritating because holding a steady stream and drifting it over an exposed Eledee is otherwise the most efficient way to actually hit and capture them. Using A and B for capture and tractor beam respectively rather than cramming both onto one button would have done this game a LOT of favours.

So taking everything here into account - the size of the Eledees themselves and the focus on basically ransacking places to uncover more of them - lends this game a quality of getting a surprisingly large amount of use out of tight, confined spaces, to the point that one of the most fun levels of the game is the very first one, in which you're confined to just your own bedroom. They gradually expand over the course of the game, though, from your room to the top floor to the entire house (which yes, means you have to visit areas from previous levels pretty often), then to your neighbourhood and eventually an entire goddamn amusement park, which in addition to leaving you with so much more ground to cover with your slow walking speed starts to make the game physically chug in the framerate department with the sheer number of Eledees to capture and the amount of physics objects flying and tumbling all over the fucking place. I still think it's a good game, but it increasingly starts becoming a chore the longer the game goes on, to the point that some of the penultimate levels can take 20-30 minutes to clear individually. I would say maybe show a little more restraint next time, but this is Konami we're talking about - the fact that this game got sequels at all is kind of astonishing with that in mind, honestly.

November 6, 2020

Jackie Estacado (The Darkness)

Oh, what's that? Dull pallettes? Writing that sounds like it was written by a prepubescent sailor and a mouth to match? A main character that looks like they came right out of Hatred? The literal title of the game is "The Darkness"? Boy oh boy, it's time for mid 2000s edge again! Unsurprisingly, teen me loved this shit, and although the dialogue hasn't aged TERRIBLY well I honestly can't find a standout problem with its writing. Some might say it was even ahead of the curve in some ways a lot of games of its type usually weren't, not just with intelligent and creative setpiecing but through its characters too and the way you interact with each other. One of the most famous examples happens pretty early on with your first meeting with Jackie's girlfiend Jenny, where you just... sit down and watch a movie together, which is a lot more poignant than it sounds considering how the story unfolds later. Much like Chakan though, this is based on a comic license, so I suppose some element of this is reaping the benefits of narrative that's already been told - but for everything it's worth, it's still good all the same. And whoever the fuck they picked to voice the Darkness itself, gotta say they deserve a fucking medal, because their performance in this game is absolutely legendary.

As one might expect from the name, darkness plays a huge part throughout the game, thanks in large part to those tentacles coming out of your back. It is effectively a resource all its own, dampening incoming damage and regenerating any you DO take, as well as being the fuel that all of your powers draw from - basically if it isn't shooting or moving, it probably involves darkness somehow. What this usually means is that although you're ridiculously powerful, you can't maintain it for very long whenever you step out into the light, which usually means either picking your points of engagement very carefully or meticulously picking out every light bulb you find along the way. Speaking of meticulous, this game has some fucking weird obsession with hearts - every time you kill an enemy you can have the Darkness eat their hearts, and you're expected to collect hearts to level their powers up, so after every firefight usually follows a lengthy cleanup job where you relieve every corpse of their hearts and have to sit through a long animation for every individual one before you can move onto the next. Truth be told, this part grows tiring really quickly.

Map design wise The Darkness has similar issues to Bullet Witch - wild open streets or fields without much cover and much variance, and a walking speed that takes forever to get from place to place, especially if you go to the trouble of taking on side missions that NPCs about the place occasionally hand you, though thankfully it does go indoors a lot more often than Bullet Witch does - so when the plot DOES start developing you can count on running into this problem a lot less. If I have any real problem with the game, it'd probably be the GUI - minimalistic, intentionally so, to the point that you'll usually only ever see brief snippets of how many clips or weapons you have left whenever you reload. Your screen does redden as you take damage, but it's still very difficult how tell how close to your limits you are whenever you start getting lit up, both figuratively and literally. And this is to say nothing of the fact thaat you have no idea how much darkness you have left at all until you walk into a dark patch to recharge it, which seems like a faux pax that didn't really need to be there. You can have a minimalistic HUD and still have a clear indication of how much health and power you have.

Still a neat game overall. Kinda wish I could say more about it.

November 7, 2020

Aaron and Lucian (Lunar Knights)

Just in case you thought Hideo Kojima made just Metal Gear titles. Honestly, a lot of my issues with this game can be summed up just by looking at it:

The entire fucking game is on a 45 degree slant. This kind of thing can work relatively fine if it's, say, a turn based game, but Lunar Knights plays out in real time in a manner one could liken to Gaunlet - and let me tell you, this never feels comfortable, for one simple reason - Dpads are plus shaped, not cross shaped. Going along the game's cardinal axis at any given time - which you will need to do constantly - will always require you to press two directions instead of one. I know this sounds like an incredibly petty complaint on its surface, especially knowing you'll move diagonally plenty in a lot of other games, but it just goes to show how much we take it for granted. Even in games that use control sticks, the cardinal directions are still very much seen as the "default" method of motion and for the most part, deviations from that are seen as incidental based on the situation, not the default method of motion. And I might not seem so grumpy about it if not for the fact that they clearly only designed the game this way so they could skip out on creating a single extra set of rotation sprites.

Of course, it wouldn't be Kojima if it didn't have needlessly over-engineered gameplay mechanics. The central mechanic of Lunar Knights is that Lucian and Aaron charge their weapons up with the power of the moon and the sun respectively. Which means you have to have both clear contact with the sky and be at the right time of day to be able to recharge, which you might not be able to do anyway because much of the game is spent indoors with only skylights acting as your only window to the outside world, and sometimes even THEN you won't be able to recharge at all because there is a fucking weather system that can create cloud cover and obscure celestial bodies in the skies anyway. And this affects both player characters disproportionately - Lucian's sword works fine when you're out of energy, but Aaron is literally useless whenever he runs dry, and frankly he doesn't do enough damage to compete even when he has juice to spare. And this is on top of the fact that sprinting uses energy too, which is a tool you need to use quite a lot because mobility options are almost nonexistent in this game and your shield will probably break on the very first hit if it's used anywhere it could actually matter.

Lastly, this is a game that likes to use the DS's features in a way that really doesn't benefit the game at all. You have a wildcard mode in the form of Trance Mode, but to even activate it you need to tap a button on the touchscreen instead of, I dunno, using one of the actual buttons at your disposal. The results of that depend on which element you have equipped at the time, but most of them use the touchscreen in some way. Oh, but it's not enough to just tap the screen and send a fireball down, you have to draw circles to dictate where they land. Honestly I don't remember what the rest of them do, just that I remember that one of them was a wind one where you had to blow into the microphone. For fifteen seconds. Yup, definitely never doing THAT shit again. To top it off, after every boss is a shmup section where you have to use the touchscreen to both move AND shoot, which is exactly as awkward as it sounds and precludes you from doing both at once, which is kind of a stupid design choice when your spare hand will always have access to either the Dpad or the face buttons anyway.

It could definitely have been much, much worse. This game was a spinoff of the Boktai games, whose defining gimmick was - get this - having a fucking light sensor on the cartridge, so you had to be physically outside and in broad daylight to charge your weapons up. And frankly, I'm convinced Kojima still would have done that if he could fit one on a DS cart. Kojima's a nice guy and a quirky designer, that's for sure, but this is exactly why you need people to reign him in, because quirky just for quirk's own sake really doesn't work.

November 8, 2020

Andrew Ryan (Bioshock)

If I had a penny for every time I saw a spiritual sucessor to System Shock, I'd have three pennies. Which isn't much, but it's a little weird that it happened three times.

Some people seem to argue that Bioshock is somewhat dumbed down for consoles compared to System Shock 2, but honestly I feel like it's a blessing in disguise - because if you remember what I said about SS2, you'd know that its GUI might as well exist on another plane of reality for how fucking bloated and mystifying it is to navigate. It gets even worse when it comes to any kind of specialization in Psi abilities, which come in 5 tiers of seven different powers each. There's way too many of them to bring out an ability of your choice quickly, made all the worse by the fact that many of them really only exist to take up space. I fucking love System Shock 2, but even I have to admit it was badly in need of a bit of streamlining, and that's where Bioshock shines the brightest among the Shock-alikes - there are 11 powers total with versatile applications between each, and most can be upgraded with the game's resources so you don't end up with almost entirely redundant abilities like Cryokinesis and Pyrokinesis were to each other in SS2. Weapons are similar in that there are a smaller number of them with a wide variety of applications, thanks to a mechanic that this game has in common with its inspiration - multiple ammo types.

See, SS2 had bullets and grenades that came in several different flavours, but honestly for the most part their only real differences came in damage types and not much more - usually some variation of "this one hurts people, this one hurts bots, this one is a boring but common middle ground". The pistol and machinegun still follow this trend, but they're the exception rather than the rule, because everything after that is amazing fun. Shotgun with lightning rounds? Grenade launcher that can hold proximity mines and heat seeking rockets? How about a freezethrower and a flamethrower in one, or a crossbow can can set electrified tripwires? Between these and plasmids, it's a game that will reward forethought and creativity over simply just blasting motherfuckers outright, because even though there's an entire button binding just for medkits even in console versions you better believe you'll chew through them really bloody quickly if you go into many situations guns blazing - as is the standard for this kind of subgenre, but I think it bears repeating nonetheless.

If there's an element of Bioshock that is held up beyond dispute, though, it would probably have to be its atmosphere. And I don't mean that just because of its world and sound design, though it's still as great as always with Ken Levine at the helm - its worldbuilding paints an incredibly unique and captivating narrative of post-utopian disaster that I don't think anything else in the medium has really ever matched, in a society where nothing is truly considered taboo. Bioshock, for reasons I won't spoil ahead of time, tries to make this out to be a moral dillemma and tempt you into doing a bad thing on the promise that you'll need to in order to get the resources needed to survive in its crazy world - but frankly it's ruined by the fact that taking the riteous choice gives you almost as much Adam long term as you would taking the evil route, plus a few gifts from Tenenbaum you wouldn't otherwise get. It's a little weirder still that there isn't a neutral ending in this game - if you do even a SINGLE bad thing the game treats you like the second coming of satan. It's bad enough when games treat morality on a flat, boring black and white scale to begin with - it's even worse still when there aren't even any shades of grey in between, on top of the fact that the rewards for being good are debatably better than the alternative.

Beyond that, it's honestly really hard to complain - it hits every nerve and scratches every other itch it set out to do, and the end result is a masterpiece in just about every metric imaginable, with a massive twist that will leave you unable to see a simple three word request the same way ever again.

November 9, 2020

Strogg Technician (Enemy Territory: Quake Wars)

Quake can just never seem to make up its goddamn mind. One game it's lovecraft, then it's cyborg aliens, then it's a tourney shooter and then it's back to cyborgs again. From the outside looking in, you would think this to be the game where they finally lost the plot completely - an utterly generic looking class based shooter with occasional nods to Quake shoved in like they forgot until the very last minute what IP they were supposed to be making a game for. Most games built this way tend to be utterly predictable disasters, and Quake Wars is... against all odds, an exception to the rule??? Don't get me wrong, it absolutely lacks the design flair that makes post-Quake 2 creatures and weapons memorable, but it's a surprisingly fun game in its own right - and even if you never play with other huamn players, the bot support is still robust and can carry you through a wide variety of campaigns just fine.

Though the human and Strogg factions have different names for their classes, they're essentially just different shades of the same specializations: frontline fighters, healers, builders, artillery and spies. One thing I find facinating about QW is that with the exception of the soldier classes, everyone has a deployable structure they can bring to specific grids on the battlefield to support their team, and every player can only summon one build each, which means careful cooperation can be needed to make sure you don't occupy a position that one of your engineers might be better suited to drop a turret onto, in addition to the cooperation one already gets out of a class based game wherein only one class tends to have the ability to play objective at any given time so the rest have to find a way to support them. I think the biggest issue, again, is the fact that most classes just don't have visually distinct designs to be able to tell them apart on the glance, and it doesn't help that it has that age old rEaL iS bRoWn filter to muddy the waters even further.

I think if there's any one thing that brings the game down for me, like most other multiplayer-centric games it would probably have to be just a general lack of continuity. Even if you're playing in one of the several 3-4 map campaigns the game has on other, it never feels like it's building up to a climax for either side - just a perpetual war where your skirmishes only ever serve to buy your side a little extra time and breathing room. It doesn't even have to be anything groundbreaking, just something more fulfulling than "congrats you blew the thing up, mama is pleased". This has been a problem in the genre since seemingly its dawn, and nobody seems to agree on how to fix it bar that just about everyone has done it completely wrong, and I think more of them could stand to look to say, Left 4 Dead for the right kind of inspiration on how to be primarily multiplayer and still feel like you have an ultimate goal and a narrative to work towards.

At the end of the day, it's a Quake game that's published by Activision, so there probably won't be much about that game that will surprise you besides the fact that it's not total shit. What I wouldn't have given for the Strogg classes to more closely resemble the Quake II/IV bestiary, though...

November 10, 2020

The Kid (I Wanna Be The Guy)

Well, this game certainly puts me in a tight spot. Most games on this list are here because I wanted to discuss game design that is, for lack of a more concise word, bullshit - but what the hell do you do when the entire point of the game's design is to be bullshit beyond any pretense of "tough but fair"? It's a game that constantly plays on the player's expectations and punishes them for assuming the most obvious scenario at any given time, with platforms that will start falling without any prior warning, Delicious FruitTM that will fall and cause you to explode without any regard to pattern, foreshadowing or even gravity, disappearing block puzzles that didn't need much changing because they were already fucked before when Megaman did it, and fatal spikes on just about every surface imaginable to the point that most sections in the game have to stretch the Kid's mobility incredibly thin to be able to get through them at all. What makes IWBTG unique among many games that would later be inspired by it, though, lies a unique sense of humour that is either subversive or referential whenever it isn't both, like a "greatest hits" of shitty level design that obviously inspired the creation of this game.

And in that respect, IWBTG honestly sometimes feel like a game designed more to be watched than played. From the outside looking in, many of the gags are absolutely hilarious, like the aformentioned gravity defying Delicious FruitTM falling upwards and killing you, or having to dodge Tetris blocks and getting flattened by a gigantic Dr Mario pill if you take too long, or a Megaman-esque boss intro screen in which you're flattened by Gutsman if you stick around. Actually playing the game, though, this humour only really serves to soften the blow of deaths you had no way of seeing coming in advance - or some that you can, but the precision or window of opportunity needed to clear sections is needlessly demanding. And even by the game's own standards, there are sections where IWBTG takes it way the fuck too far. Because sometimes, "blanket every surface in spikes" isn't even a metaphor.

And honestly, if there's even one thing I despise about the legacy that I Wanna Be The Guy created, it's absolutely this - most designers itching to jump on this game's bandwagon took only "use spikes for literally everything" from it, and nothing else, especially not the sense of humour that made it bearable in the first place. You have to make a game really fucking engaging to be able to get away with making it unusually tough, and honestly, being both difficult and boring is one of the biggest design sins I think one can commit. It doesn't always have to be just comedy that drives the game through this kind of opposition - I may not agree with some of the ways Celeste handles it, for example, but I can still acknowledge that its narrative is a big driving factor in compelling people to complete it, and it provides unique mobility options that prompt you to approach its overuse of spikes in different ways all the time.

As is to be expected, though, IWBTG has become a rallying point for gamers who throw around "get good" unironically much like Ninja Gaiden once was - a title people will constantly boast about and claim that people today have it too easy, when all that's really happened is that standards changed. It gets harder to recognize challenging game design - sometimes even bad game design - over time because the community has grown wise to all the tells that games throw at them and designers have for the most part developed a better understanding of what's fair and what's not as the years have progressed. In that respect, IWBTG is a relic from times long past, for people unable to move on from it because nothing really phases them anymore. I do genuinely miss it from a comedic standpoint, but I really do wish modern platformers would use hazards besides fucking spikes and pits all the time.

November 11, 2020

GLaDOS (Portal 1/2)

God it sucked to be a casual fan of Valve stuff back in this day. If you bought a game anything less than day one, the best twists were already internet memes before you could even get your fucking hands on it - especially irritating because the dialogue forms some of the best qualities of both games. Yes, you've almost certaintly heard the shit about combustible lemons and fabricated confections, but GLaDOS remains a wonderful source of cold, unfeeling snark in both games, and manages to carry the entire first game almost singlehandedly by being one of only two voiced characters therein. It's a kind of dark, clinical humour that seems to have become pretty popular in recent days, and though I'm sure it's been done before Portal, this game certainly served as my own introduction to it.

In terms of gameplay, Portal will mostly be remembered from a technological standpoint. Sure, there's plenty to say about how brain bending it can be to find which combination of two portals placed where will solve a given puzzle, or that they can be placed in a way that defies gravity as you move through one to the other, or that it remembers your momentum in such a way that you can drop off a cliff into a portal and be launched when you exit through the other one. But even just visually speaking, getting portals to work the way they do is quite a feat. Most games would have compromised in some way, like the non-euclidian element of the portal being baked into the map in some way, or making the portal itself just an image on the wall that updates less frequently than your monitor's refresh rate and still looks awkward if you peer into it from an angle. But through some combination of clever programming, black magic and poaching the entire team and concept from lesser project Narbacular Drop, every portal is like a genuine window to the other, to the point that objects can be embedded halfway into them and still have a presence on both sides. And somehow, Portal does it in a way that never, ever drops frames or sacrifices any visual fidelity for it, even on console releases.

I guess the only thing I can really take issue with on the first game is aesthetics, which feature either bland, sterile testing chambers or grungy, generic factories, both of which get really boring before long. Their featureless design I guess is one way to keep the player focused on the puzzles at hand without getting distracted, but it really feels like stages need some downtime every now and then to allow the player to relax and branch out instead of just relentless puzzles one right after another - which is an element Portal 2 does better at, albiet at the expense of puzzles that are sometimes literally just "guess which distant part of the backdrop you can place a portal on to progess". It did give us a lot more characters for dialogue to bounce off of each other and an environment that is more interactive and pleasing to the eye, though, so I can't complain too much.

So yeah, Portal's another one of those games that's difficult to talk much about simply because its high standards of design leave little room for dissection, at least in the way I tend to analyze things. That's a compliment. Take it and let's move on.

November 12, 2020

Zack & Wiki

Point and click adventures were practically already a long dead genre by this point in time, so if nothing else you have to admire the balls on Capcom to try making one at all this late - they had to know this wasn't going to perform terribly well, so it can only be assumed it was done out of love of the concept and the desire to make a good game more than anything else. Well, I certainly hope that was the case anyway, because the alternative is that Capcom were idiots, and frankly that's not outside the realm of possibility. Anyway, what makes Zack & Wiki is that not only is it a point and clicker in 2007, it's an incredibly rare example of a CONSOLE-based point and click game, made possible largely through the Wii's use of its IR sensor as a pointer, among many, many other context-sensitive uses of its motion based controls. Yet another outlier still is its gameplay structure, wherein instead of taking place over one long adventure everything takes place within smaller, self-contained puzzles which each task you with getting to a treasure chest containing the game's mcguffins alive, resetting your inventory each time and forcing you to make do with whatever you find there.

And right away this fends off one of the other main flaws most point and click puzzlers tend to have - just a general sense of unnecessary item bloat. Oftentimes a puzzle could be difficult to solve just on account of how many variables you have to consider at any given time, regardless of whether any of them have any actual application after their initial usage or whether they ever had any usage and all and only occupied inventory space to be a red herring, such was the case for one item in Teenagent way back. Because a stage will ONLY contain what you need to complete it in Z&W though, there's a lot less room to get distracted by a key you might have found four stages ago that your character might have held onto after the fact for some reason. If you thought this made this game's puzzles any easier though, boy are you in for a fucking surprise - because not only do you have to logic your way around your items and your environment, you even have to figure out how the controls work relative to them.

This is where that earlier blurb about "context-sensitive uses" comes into play. You would think that making the controls a complete mystery to the player would be a point against the game, especially where MOTION controls are concerned - but even if many of them aren't 1:1, this game makes surprisingly good use of them, arguably one of the best on the system, giving you only an indication of how you're supposed to "hold" the item with your Wiimote and figuring out the rest yourself. There are some elements that could maybe have been explained a little better, such as the ability to flip items upside down to use their opposite end for some specific purpose, but either their usages are self explanatory or figuring out how to use them is part of the puzzle itself, and I'm still weirded out that it works as well as it does. It's not to say the puzzles are still perfectly balanced all the way through - there's this one stage closer to the end of the game where you have to get to a snake deep underground offscreen, and your solution is just to... click on them. Not use an item, not walk up to them physically, not even to find an item you can drop down their hidey hole to provoke them into surfacing like you have at least one point prior, just click on them. With your cursor. What kind of moon logic is that???

If I have any problem with Z&W, it's that the game sees it as necessary to grade you on every single puzzle you solve, based on how quickly you solve it and how many mistakes you make in the process. In a point and click game. Where all the puzzles are effectively only puzzles once. So either you're playing the game for the first time and are given basically a consolation prize for daring to experiment to figure puzzles out, or you're playing the game with retrospect on your side so you're basically speedrunning the game anyway. Either way, the points have virtually no bearing on your actual skill and really don't belong in a game of this kind but to shame you for taking your time and trying to play things safe, in a game that will force you to redo the entire puzzle from scratch if you mess up and has MORE than a few cheap tricks to screw you out of winning even if you don't directly die as a result.

On one last note, can I just say that goddamn is this game gorgeous to look at? It's a game that understands the Wii's technical limitations perfectly and works around them incredibly well, trumping them with an artstyle so well done that it could have realistically been done on just about any platform and still looked brilliant for it, which is a really refreshing change of pace compared to all the glum and bloom I've had to cover over the past few games. It's absolutely a cartoon in motion, and it fits well with its stylings and sense of humour. In all, it's a game that still has flaws that are virtually innate to the genre, but Zack and Wiki still stands as one of the best games within it - and it's sort of a shame that this game didn't receive more fame for the trouble and risk it went to.

November 13, 2020

Trilby (Trilby: The Art of Theft)

I feel like most of us by now have at least a passing understanding of what Zero Punctuation - and by extension who Yahtzee - is. Back then, perhaps moreso than he is now, he was known for his blunt and euphemistic approach to reviewing games, to the backdrop of black, white, yellow and blue clipart slideshow as opposed to footage from the actual game - and there was once a point back around the time of this game where he wouldn't readily admit to liking anything unless it was Portal or Saints Row 2. Perhaps lesser known, though, is the fact that he occasionally makes games of his own outside of his work at The Escapist, and that his avatar in Zero Punctuation episodes, Trilby, is a recurring character in his games too. Today's game is a sidescrolling stealth title in which you play the part of a modern cat burglar not entirely unlike Garrett covered a page or two back, and if you thought their propensity for grilling games for their mistakes made for good game design abilities, well... let's just say Yahtzee should take out a mortgage on a house that isn't made out of glass.

Most of Art of Theft's ideas are sound on paper. Great, even. It's rare for Trilby to actually be in any mortal danger during a heist - your biggest barrier to completion is if anything, his own ego. His characterization is probably one of the best things about this game, in that he is a massive narcissist and perfectionist, to the point that he'll just smokebomb out and abandon a heist completely if he makes one too many mistakes. Usually this just means being spotted one too many times, but interacting with guards at all is also discouraged, and every time you knock one out is held against you in the mission's final ranking. These rankings are then used to determine what abilities Trilby can learn to make later heists less obnoxious, and trust me when they can get Obnoxious with a capital O. I dunno about you guys, but replaying the same mission over and over again to polish out its rank just to make later missions not suck isn't particularly my idea of fun, especially when much of the highest skill curves seems to be built more around exploiting the bad AI than it does being a master of the mechanics that the game has handed you.

One of the obstacles to working this out is the game's own presentation - guards and cameras don't have any animations for turning from one direction to the other, so you have absolutely no warning that they're about to look in your direction like just about any other game ever made where line of sight is that important to avoiding detection. So often you can be spotted from all the way across the screen and forced to take an alarm and feel like you didn't really have a say in it - and you can't just taze whoever's in your way to make sure you can steal shit or pick locks safely, because you're punished for that too. Sometimes the presentation issues are embarrasing by any metric, such as the fact the game that the game doesn't consistently put sprites on the right layer. So sometimes you can have guards pass behind Trilby while he's clinging to the background. I'm not saying the graphical design should have been on par with I dunno, fucking Castle Crashers or some shit, especially if it's still largely the work of a very small handful of people, but this seems like the kind of thing that shouldn't have escaped testing, and even a single interim frame between facing left and facing right would have done this game wonders.

It isn't like Yahtzee wasn't capable of it - it's clear plenty of work went into animating Trilby himself, in that it forms the opposite problem and causes controls to not respond until a given animation has finished, making it feel a lot jankier than it really has any right to be. Combine this with with the level design, in which the way forward or through isn't always immediately clear and where doorways have no indication as to where they lead and aren't coy about immediately dumping you right the fuck into the line of sight of security, and a wire cutting minigame which can cause an alarm if you cut the wrong wire but you have no way of knowing which fucking wire that is, adds up to an experience that is overwhelmingly and unapologetically trial and error. I think the greatest irony of all, though, is that I only knew about this game because someone noticed the disconnect between his ability to review and the ability to design games, and went to the effort to trash his game in his own style:

November 14, 2020

Yoda (Lego Star Wars series)

Honestly, I could have picked virtually any Traveller's Tales Lego game for this slot, and it would have been virtually the exact same writeup. It's a formula that's robust enough to have virtually any IP thrown at it for passable results, but because TT chooses to exploit it that way it's become incredibly stale and homogenous as a result. Playing any of these games after The Complete Saga doesn't really have much point because it was already milked entirely to death by then, and the only real sense of invention to come out of it since was Lego Dimensions, whose gimmick was to... lock content behind an effective pay wall by requiring you to own minikits of the content in question. I don't know what's worse, that people fell for it completely or that many of them were the same people who denounced on-disc DLC without seeing any irony or double standard at all. Anyway, the point I'm making is that, besides one exception I'll make much, MUCH later on the list, all the TT Lego games are virtually the same game, so you'd be doing yourself a favour by getting The Complete Saga and then never touching another TT game again because by that point you've practically already played them all for the cost of one game.

One of TT Lego's two most defining features is a perchant for very simple mechanics and the execution thereof. For the most part you have guys with melee weapons, and guys with guns. Melee characters have a three hit buttonmashy combo, a jump attack and a ground pound used out of their double jump, and the ability to deflect blaster shots just by pressing attack as a shot is incoming. Gun characters just shoot at things based on which way you're facing, and have a dodge roll instead of the melee deflection. Most of the character abilities from then on were context sensitive, and honestly usually in the most boring kind of way, in that certain characters can only use or open certain pathways. So even taking the most optimal route to the end of the level, nevermind exploring bonus areas like the game clearly encourages you to do, requires you to switch characters constantly, and often even completely abandon routes and force you to revisit levels later because there are some areas you can't access at all with the characters you're given in the actual story mode.

Which brings us to the second of two defining features - through and through, TT Lego titles are absolutely completionist games above all else. On its face, I wouldn't have a problem with this, but a lot of what goes on in these games feels like busywork more than anything else. It's one of those games that gets boring incredibly quickly, but can't put down immediately over the repetition alone because your brain has fooled you into thinking all progress is good progress, even though much of what you do in Lego Star Wars isn't actually rewarded with much worthy of consideration. You might eventually get a handful of bonus levels, but can you guess what that amounts to? That's right, more busywork! It's the kind of game that knows you'll never have any incentive to replay it once you're finally done, so it does everything humanly possible to pad the game out and milk your engagement out of every last drop of its worth, rather than I dunno, being genuinely fun enough to play to warrant doing it all over again.

I guess it's a good game to have around if you have kids visiting - the drop-in coop is incredibly easy to set up and there probably isn't a person on the planet that won't be able to grasp this game's mechanics on a meaningful level. But if it sounds like I'm being a little harsh on a game that is ultimately meant to be played by kids, I'd like to reinforce one of the reasons I made this list - to be able to look back apon games I might have once viewed through rose-tinted glasses and be able to recognize how they could have done better. And I'm tired of this assumption that making a game for kids should be a justification for making them really goddamn boring, so there's that too.

November 15, 2020

Mario (Super Mario Galaxy)

Can you believe I haven't had a chance to cover a Mario game until just now? Well, technically this is the second Mario game I owned - the first was Mario Land for the Gameboy Pocket, but would you want to be introduced as "basically NES Mario except total dogshit"? Yeah, that's what I thought. In stark contrast to that, Mario Galaxy stands not only as debatably the single best game of the franchise, but without hyperbole, one of the best platforming games ever created. There almost isn't a single aspect of this game that isn't the best possible version of itself - the soundtrack is backed by an amazing live orchestral score that nearly all games thereafter draw from to some capacity, and form some of my most favourite leitmotifs out of any game in the series. The graphics are a masterpiece that seems to defy time itself, remaining such a testament to the agelessness of finely crafted artstyles that it will regularly humiliate games made on much stronger systems, and continues to do so to this very day, two bordering on three whole generations later. It even has an incredibly cool gimmick to set itself apart from all the other Marios if you were ever worried about playing the same game all over again, implemented intelligently in a way that benefits - not distracts - from the core tenents of what makes Mario gameplay great to all who love it.

Most Mario games since 64 have a design process that is pretty hard not to envy, tantamount to locking Mario in a single room for the opening stages of QA and not letting him out of there until the designers can make movement fun even in that tiny, singular room. You can see the fruits of this right on the first stage of Good Egg Galaxy, where its initially confusing layout simply just doesn't matter on account much fun there is in the simple act of moving and jumping around the place. It gets all the more mesmerizing still when the planetoid system is taken into account, where you are constantly learning new ways to interact with your environment. If a small enough planetoid has its own gravitational pull, you can even achieve an orbit with a well used long jump, and it's so strange to think I've played actual space sims that don't pull this off in quite as satisfying a manner. Honestly, I hope whoever designed and programmed this got a fucking raise, because they more than earnt it.

I think any complaints I could have beyond that are kind of opinionated and petty, honestly. I don't know if it's his running speed or air friction or what, but Mario's physics behave in a way that I tend to fall just short of jumps on enemies a bit more than I'd like, which seems to be a running problem I've had with a lot of 3D Mario games that I've never been able to entirely pinpoint. If I had to pick one specific to Mario Galaxy, though, it's that it really didn't need to be a motion game - attacking is just a waggle motion that could easily have been a button press on any other system, most of the stage specific gimmicks could realistically been controlled with an analog stick, and let's be honest, you don't really gain any benefit from being able to shoot at enemies on your screen lightgun style, especially when the ammo it draws from is also a crucial resource for unlocking bonus levels later into the game. Mario Galaxy has a Coop mode, but this is the second player's only means of interacting with the game at all. At that point, why even bother? Thankfully this is an issue that its sequel Mario Galaxy 2 fixed, not insofar as making an entire separate playable character but giving 2P's cursor a lot more interactions with the world in a way that is honestly surprisingly fun without fucking with the first player's enjoyment too much.

Either way, make no mistake, this game is a fucking classic, and if you have the means to play it you absolutely should. It's an orgasm for all your senses, a well crafted series of gimmicks and mechanics and a self-contained game design lesson on how movement in platformers really ought to work, all in one package, and if you skipped over it like you likely did for Mario Sunshine, well let me be the first to tell you that you've missed out on a lot.

November 16, 2020

Travis Touchdown (No More Heroes)

For the longest time, this game was held up as having some of the best motion controls on the Wii, and for the fucking life of my I can't comprehend why. The crux of it is really simple - at any given time your enemy could be guarding high or guarding low, and you hold your wiimote upright to attack high and horizontally to attack low. That's mostly it, besides a quick waggle motion the game uses for finishing off low health enemies. This is nothing that couldn't have been done with buttons, to the point they literally DID do it with buttons when the game was later ported to HD systems with normal bloody controllers, and it wasn't like you didn't already have two buttons at your disposal on the Wiimote anyway, so thinking back on the praise these controls got makes me want to tear my fucking hair out, especially when at the time this game was released, the most involved motion swordplay game on the Wii was still fucking Red Steel. Would it have fucking killed anyone to take the gyroscope seriously for a change?

Okay, fine, it's a petty complaint. I'll admit that. Mechanically, there's not a whole lot wrong with No More Heroes - the most I'd change about it is the fact that powerups are given to you at complete random by way of a literal slot machine that rolls every time you finish an enemy off. Inconsistency is already bad enough on its own, it's worse still when there's no guarantee there'll even be enemies in the room when you happen to strike it lucky, and I'm willing to bet this shit drives speedrunners absolutely bonkers because many of these powerups include the ability to waste enemies with a single hit. Could these powerups really not have just been placed in the environment, or in the hands of specific enemies you can focus down to make dealing with the rest easier? There's a couple of bosses too, especially Bad Girl, which could have stood to be designed with clearer tells, especially when she can instakill you on the fucking spot for reading them wrong.

I think where I take issue with this game above all else though, is its structure. You have an open world to explore between missions, but the game doesn't really benefit from having it. I know I said the same thing about GTA Vice City, but at least there you could let loose on the world whenever you were sick of it - in No More Heroes you can't even do that, so the only real purpose it serves is as a hub menu with lots of extra steps, with a side objective of collecting balls around the map that are marked on your minimap anyway. And it isn't like you can just ignore the world and ride directly to the next mission whenever the opportunity arises, because every main story mission has a steep entry fee that you can't pay with your earnings from the last, leaving you to grind side missions and actual minimum wage part time jobs to raise funds just to progress. It may not ultimately be as ludicrous as Shenmue II earlier, but it's still an utterly shameless padding barrier that has no right being there. It isn't like they didn't have a way of filling those gaps some other way - these were the same guys who made Killer7, which required no such grinding to be lengthy and engaging on its own.

Once you look past the need to grind between missions, No More Heroes is still a good game, and it's no surprise that it has the following that it does. Here's hoping that NMH3 can live up to and past it.

November 17, 2020

Charles, Balthios, Cyberdwarf and Hoopz (Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden)

It's hard to know where to start with a game like this. Games made essentially as playable shitposts aren't entirely unheard of (and there are definitely some I would have put on the list if it were an option, like The Malkavian Mod), but it's rare that anyone spares the time to fashion them into a full, feature complete game. Even rarer still in Gaiden's case: it's actually a good game, both ironically and unironically, once you can get past its incredibly silly premise. Styling itself as an unofficial sequel to Space Jam of all things, Gaiden is set in the B-Ball post apocalypse after Charles Barkley performs a dunk so intense it effectively rivals a nuclear bomb and wipes the city out, resulting in a backlash that results in the entire sport being banned, most remaining basketballers being hunted down and murdered, and I can only assume an affliction that causes people to start every place, currency and thing with "neo". A lot of the parody elements in this game is people talking about shit like this with a completely straight face, which I guess flies over my head more than it really should - but even when it does, I can still appreciate the narrative it weaves around a Charles Barkley who, while not a BAD person, is just sick of the world and the guilt he's built up over what he's done and only wants to do right by his son at the end of the day.

Funny or not, though, this is a turn based JRPG at the end of the day - yes, a JRPG about a basketball post apocalypse - and in a way that makes me a little sad because besides lengthy rants from a sentient petrol pump that serves as your save points, most conventions and flaws of the genre are played completely straight. From bizarre and poorly explained gimmicks for the normal attacks for most characters, to special attacks that use WAY the fuck too much energy for what they do and giving you no non-item based way to restore it save for the occasional inn or equivalent thereof, to enemies that use annoying-ass debuffs on you that last for the entire fight and can't always be reversed (and you usually need to commit to using an item or more goddamn energy even when you can). It honestly feels like it could have stood to play around with expectations a little more - usually the extent of it is that the status effects have eccentric names like Diabetes and Glaucoma, and the enemy design is usually themed around basketball and its players, in some instances greater than others, like a referee with a sawblade for feet or a gigantic whistle with feet.

This is a game I wish I could talk about more, partly because it's been a while since I last played it through in full and partly because talking about it in too much detail would honestly probably ruin the experience for you. That being said, it is a free game - of course it is, it would have to be, for all the assets it steals from other games I Wanna Be The Guy style - so assuming you can get it to run you would probably be better off just checking it out for yourself, because you ultimately lose nothing for trying.

November 18, 2020

Dante and Nero (Devil May Cry 4)

As I did with Turok Evolution, I have to start this writeup with a small disclaimer - this is the only DMC game that I've played. I've certainly heard talk that this game is a step down from some of its predecessors, but I can't speak on that because I have no point of comparison to make. So I apologize in advance if this writeup doesn't suit your preconceptions of what you think it should say, but I really don't have any choice but to judge this game only off its own merits. And by those merits: it's alright. It fancies itself a high octane, combo oriented action game in much the same light that Ninja Gaiden was, and has a similar design sense in its movesets in that most of your character's given kit will link to each other as naturally as its structure and appearances will allow - if you can close the gap. See, while DMC4 has the ability to create free-flowing combos down-pat, it lacks most of the defensive and mobility options that made it work so well in Ninja Gaiden, especially in the department of dodge rolls, far reaching jump cancels, and even just the simple ability to block in most cases. Quite often this means taking damage you should realistically be able to avoid, but the game either doesn't afford you the tools to do so, or they're cumbersome to use or simply don't function as well as they should.

What main character Nero gets in its stead is his devil arm, which mostly functions as a grappling to punish openings - openings that, as a reminder, you won't be able to act on with many enemies because you're simply too goddamn slow and lacking in mobility to act on it. You have a dashing move that can close the distance quickly, but the end result of that move is almost always to knock the enemy further away when it connects, leaving you right the fuck back where you started. It's also entirely possible that, despite the incredibly patronizing tutorials the game dumps on you for the opening couple of chapters of the game, this game is just really bad at explaining shit - for example, you can use the devil arm as a pseudo parrying mechanic by grabbing right as an attack hits to cancel it out, and you're required to know this in order to beat the final boss, but the game does not fucking tell you at all the devil arm can be used this way. And I haven't even gotten into Dante's way of handling things yet.

See, Dante DOES have many of these options - just never at the same time. They all occupy the same button that Nero's devil arm would otherwise use, and you switch its function around using the D-pad. For exhibit number fucking one for why this is a bad idea, you need only look at the D-pad for the X360 controller itself. The short version is that mechanically, it does not in fact have separate buttons for each cardinal direction, and is built more like a third control stick more than anything else, effectively becoming the worst of both of them. Even if this was done on a system with a responsive D-pad, though, I still think refusing to spread these functions across the controller as a whole was a mistake, and having to cycle through options to gain access to your entire kit at any moment is a level of delay that keeps you from being able to respond as quickly as you need to - especially when one of them, Royal Guard, has a mechanic you can only exploit through frame perfect blocking. Honestly, Dante feels like he was thrown in as an afterthought to get fans to shut up about their most iconic character being replaced, because he doesn't even get any unique stages - he just goes through Nero's ones in reverse with some extra gimmicks added in, arrange mode style, to pad the game out some more.

Lastly, this game feels so in bed with shonen stereotypes it legitimately feels like it was written by a 13 year old. There's good and bad in that - I feel like most people remember the DMC games for being able to wield ridiculously big swords as if they were weightless than character design that looks like an early teen's idea of what cool and/or sexy is, but it's the kind of thing that will only age worse and worse as time progresses. As a game, though? It's still alright. Ninja Gaiden is better at just about everything it does, though.

November 19, 2020

Hacker (Rez HD)

After playing games like this and Lumines, it's hard not to feel like the entire gaming industry has been approaching their sound design - specifically, their music design - from the wrong angle entirely. The overwhelming majority of games are content just to leave one backing track playing in the background, maybe switch between a handful of them depending on whether or not a fight is going on. But it misses out on a certain feel that more cinematic mediums have going for them, where the music can swell and react directly to the action going on at any given moment. And in this regard, Rez provides an elegant solution - the sound effects are literally extensions of the backing track, and said backing track builds up on the player's progression through the stage or boss rather than making assumptions of the player's progress without a care of whether they pull ahead or fall behind it. What results is a psychadelic experience that feels an awful lot like a playable music video, with all the visuals to match.

Of course, the fact that it's on rails really helps when it comes to making an audiovisual experience like this, because despite basing the soundtrack's progression around the player's performance rather than the composer's, limiting the player character's ability to move really helps to control their pace and as such, the amount of variables that the game needs to consider to sync the player's actions with the rhythm of the backing track. Even taking that into consideration, though, I find it a little bizarre that the player can't move in any capacity, even to weave around incoming attacks like just about any other rail shooter I can conceive off the top of my head. Even the most bog standard games in the genre I can think of, like Time Crisis, at least allow you to take cover from incoming fire. The fact that this game was originally created as a Dreamcast title - a system with only one fucking analog stick - probably has something to do with that, given that they had no way to separate aiming and moving at the time it was made, but it feels like an increasingly conspicuous ommission the further it's passed down through console generations, long after twin sticks became standard.

Gameplay wise, it will probably be familiar to anyone who's done a complete playthrough of the Sonic Adventure games - you have a cursor onscreen, holding it down locks onto up to 8 targets, releasing fires shots at all of your targets in sequence. You would think this would incentivize you to use the full 8 lockings as much as possible, and you'd be absolutely right - but it also forms the entire basis for defensive options too. Usually - not always, but usually - you can target enemy projectiles themselves to shoot them down in transit, and most of them are mercifully slow to allow for it, but others you kinda just have to know in advance which enemies are going to be an imminent threat and shoot them down before they have a chance to attack you, and some enemies don't have an obvious tell for it until moments before you're due to get hit from it. And either way, there can be so much shit going on onscreen that individual threats can be hard to make out, especially in the latter half of the game. These aren't constant occurances, but notable enough that I couldn't just leave them unmentioned here.

Unfortunately while Rez is a glimpse into what great sound design can be, I think it's also an indication why it isn't done so often - it's an approach that is difficult and time consuming to create for how under-appreciated the end result can be. With the resources that could have gone into much grander games overall, Rez is only a scant five levels long, maybe five and a half if you consider how bloody long the final level drags on for. And yet, the game is only ever considered at best a cult classic, with sales numbers that only barely scrape the lowest end of six digits, in large part because it's difficult to justify such a short game for full price. And really that's just a rotten shame, because the true potential of sound design in this industry is still largely untapped to this day, save for a few outliers I hope to remember to bring up later.

ITT BL reminisces over his entire game library

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