ITT BL reminisces over his entire game library

November 20, 2020

Goku (Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 3 / Raging Blast)

When Dragonball FighterZ came out, I remember hearing a lot of blurbs on how much it felt like a DBZ game - and on some level, that never made a single bit of sense to me. DBZ has always been about the scale of everything to me more than anything else - being able to punch a motherfucker so hard they're sent flying across the landscape, and having the resources to chase them down as they're flying away, to say nothing of beams and projectiles so potent they can physically alter the landscape in their wake. And for all its flaws, I feel like the Tenkaichi and Raging Blast games are the only titles out there that have truly nailed that "DBZ feeling", for better and worse, where all the other games have just felt like any other 2D fighting game with licensed characters in it. And while these games do have a few odd mechanics to get used to, the core of it is mostly simply to pick up and adapt to - and more importantly, you don't need to learn a new set of controls for every fucking character, which is great because these games have the largest playable rosters of any game in the franchise. Again, for better, AND worse.

I think the first thing I wanna bring up is that the sense of destruction in this game, while still grand in scale, is still pretty basic. I could understand this in the Tenkaichi games, which were built around the PS2 as the lowest common denominator, so it made sense to me if all they could do with a building is make it essentially just melt into the ground if somebody looked at it funny. But they were still doing this in Raging Blast, an entire console generation removed from it, so it's still kind of weird to me that they didn't have the tech yet to dynamically just blast huge craters in the world wherever your blasts - or victims - land, just as it was to have soft barriers around the whole arena to bring your launch combos to an abrupt halt. It's like it's never been a serious consideration in any DBZ game, even these ones, and I still can't wrap my head around that. Is there really anything stopping them from going full blown Red Faction with it?

Then there's the characters themselves. Look, I've already said it, I think fighting game rosters are all better off when you can apply knowledge garnered from one to all of them - but in most cases, characters don't have kit that's distinct from one another save for their special moves, which is something I'll freely admit that FighterZ handled brilliantly by comparison. It feels like all that everyone should have had in common is basic flurries, launches, vanishes and chases, with some room for variation in between, and yet most characters only differ in how they're animated, which feels like a huge missed opportunity, again considering just how many characters there are in this game. And speaking of characters, this is probably something you've already heard of, but the balancing in this game is an absolute joke - characters are so objectively better and worse than one another that many of them have a multiple health bar advantage over others, to say nothing of attacks that can clear several at once. Characters like Chiaotzu and Appule are in the game, but why would you use them over fuckin' Super Saiyan 4 Gogeta? They had no reason to balance the game this way. None.

And to top it off, Tenkaichi and Raging Blast represent a problem that just about EVERY DBZ game has - it's just another retread of the show. DBZ games have been a thing for the better part of thirty years, and almost never have their own material to show for it. It's just boring now. Honestly, some of these criticisms I could direct even at the shows, which have been milking the same characters and arcs to this day without much variation, but I still feel like both of them can do much better than this. It's not like they weren't able to - Ultimate Tenkaichi, despite being incredibly crap QTE infested garbage gameplay speaking, still managed to use most of its characters in a new and refreshing way once it didn't have to depend on existing canon to do it. Honestly, I just want more of that. Can we stop revisiting the same plotlines after DBZ Kakarot and just get more of that? Please?

November 21, 2020

Rom Check Fail

This is a small indie game that might seem innocuous on a glance, but every five seconds or so the game is flipped completely on its head, randomizing the player character, enemies, music and backdrop to completely different - and often completely separate - games. And on its surface I've long appreciated it as an experiment into how completely different mechanics interact with each other, and how consistently the player can deal with sudden changes to fundemental gameplay at regular intervals. It's surprisingly addictive when all is said and done - even with the relatively small number of things to randomize into, there's still quite a lot of different combinations to go through, to the point that it doesn't usually feel like you're playing the same game twice. If there's another big thing that this game has demonstrated, though, it's exactly why this kind of game isn't usually attempted seriously.

Simply put, even knowing the limitations of every character you can be forced into and a good understanding of exactly when you'll have to swap, you can often be forced into situations where you have no choice but to take a death - sometimes repeatedly. For example, Pacman's power pellets only spawn at the start of the level, so unless you're camping it you'll be completely defenseless, and potentially cornered depending on the level design. Some characters, like Spy Hunter and Defender, can only attack on one axis, so if enemies bundle up in an incovenient spot - and they often will - you'll have to just hide and idle until the next cycle to be able to actually do anything. And I don't have a fucking clue why the Space Invaders paddle is even in the game. It can't move up and down at all, so just about any time you're switched into it you might as well just kiss that life goodbye and pray you aren't spawncamped to death. Obviously making the most of the chaos is part of the fun in RCF, but honestly it still feels at times like there should have been just a little more method to the madness, at least insofar as handing you scenarios that are virtually impossible on their own.

I also think that the lack of modularity is kind of a missed opportunity in a game like this. I mean sure, I'd love to be able to add extra characters and enemies, but I totally understand if doing so in a user friendly way is kind of complicated - it's the lack of a level editor that puzzles me more than anything. The level layouts are the one truly consistent thing about Rom Check Fail, and are always played in the same sequence no matter what the tiles appear to be, so I would have appreciated being able to add that extra layer of unpredictability of my own initiative. Be that as it may, I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. This shit is free, and nowadays you only need a browser to be able to play it, so it's well worth dedicating an afternoon to it and checking it out for yourself.

November 21, 2020

Alcohol Demon (Condemned 2: Bloodshot)

I've covered sequels so far that have improved on their predecessors in every way and sequels that are a genuine step down from them, but I think Condemned 2 is the first time I've ever had to cover a game that is more or less a sidegrade to its namesake - it does certain things a lot better and other certain things a lot worse, balancing out in a way that I believe is roughly equivalent in quality to the first game, just for entirely different reasons than before. The most obvious trait - and failing - of this game is once again, mid-2000's edge. Put it this way, there are pseudo QTEs for dialogue prompts to tell people to go fuck themselves, and nothing else. If that doesn't convey to you the drastic change in tone Ethan has been given between games, I don't know what will. Even back when I was into this kind of edge unironically, I could never understand why the same main character in two separate games comes across as an entirely different and frankly less likable character with seemingly no actual provocation between games.

Gameplay wise, there's a handful of refinements that the game has gone through - some good, some bad. One of the bad ones is that since Ethan is an alcoholic now, his aim with guns is all over the fucking place unless you take a swig of booze to calm his nerves. Which is ironic, because I've seen worse weapon sway in games with completely sober protaganists, but it doesn't stop it from being fucking annoying. Another thing is that melee weapons can break now - a trait I DO like, because choosing weapons in the first game was only ever a matter of either micromanaging stats or context sensitive usage, so now you have a more genuine incentive to swap regularly so you aren't stuck with your bare hands. However, the combat has introduced some kind of stupid "combo" system where certain moves will do extra damage when swinging left or right in a certain order, whereas in the first game swinging was just kind of an incidental part of exploiting openings and vulnerabilities in your opponents and was much better off for it. But hey, at least you can actually use your holster now. Still surprised the first game didn't use it.

I think my favourite changes though mostly revolve around the investigation system. Of course, like most puzzles the investigations will probably grip you less while you know what the answers are, but C2 differs from C1 in that you actually have to make your own observations from the evidence you find rather than your forensics mouthpiece over the phone doing all the work for you, and I fucking love it. Depending on how you answer things, it can change the outcome of the level a little and grant you upgrades later on to give you edges in the fighting, so sometimes there's actual incentive to replay levels if not the whole game to find the right conclusions and max everything out. I do really wish there was more of it, but I also understand that it was always going to be a side focus to the visceral melee fighting and psychological horror - I appreciate that it was there at all at the end of the day.

Let's talk about that horror element, actually. I don't think I've ever played a game that was so WILDLY hit and miss at it. At its peak it's the most terrified I've ever been of a game not built entirely around thrills, but horror is always a delicate balancing act between being ineffective and being annoying, and Bloodshot repeatedly dips into the annoying end of the spectrum, such as it was in a later section of the game where

Spoiler

you have to run from a rabid insta-kill grizzly bear in a lodge without a single indication of where it's actually safe to go, resulting in dozens of cheap deaths before you start to grasp where the awkward level design is trying to funnel you towards.

Not only is it not the only time you have to deal with such a sequence in the game, there are times where the game intentionally dims your flashlight, presumably to try and spur fear in being unable to make out threats in the world but leaving you mostly unable to see fucking anything, which made this game a real fucking pain to play on TVs of the day once you got later into it. All in all, it's a game you'll probably still like if you liked the first game, but for how much has swapped around in between your mileage will probably vary beyond that.

November 23, 2020

Dan and Ben (Ben There Dan That)

Do you know what happens when an entire genre all but vanishes between generations? People start getting fed up enough to take it into their own hands. Knowing that money can't be counted on to solve the problem anymore, they'll just get a bunch of mates together and spin out a little game between them, out of nothing more than the want to see more games like it. Ben There, Dan That is one such game, a tongue in cheek, British as fuck Lucasarts style point and clicker. As you might have guessed from the intro, BTDT certainly won't win any rewards for presentation - much of the graphical work is pretty much typical MSPaint fare, walk cycles are only two frames long, and the background music consists of so many 5-10 second loops it'll make you long even for something as repetitive as the soundtrack for Yume Nikki. I know that doesn't matter to you, though - what you're really asking is "does it stack up as an adventure game?". The simple answer is "about as well as you'd expect".

It's a game that's held onto a lot of contrivances of the genre simply because they're considered standard, not necessarily because it works to the game's advantage. For example, a good point and click game can make do with just right clicking for examinging something and left clicking for interacting with them, or vice versa, but this game makes you scroll through multiple different kinds of interactions ala Space Quest, including, looking, walking, touching, talking and "making Dan do it" (which to its credit, is utilized hilariously in this game), and the last item you had selected from the drop down menu. For a game that likes to take the piss out of traditional adventure game conventions, it has a really bad habit of playing them completely straight regardless. What's wrong with just having two functions you can access at any time, and scrolling for items only when you really need to use them?

As for the puzzles themselves, they can be a little esoteric, but for the most part can be figured out with the resources the game itself gives you with some occasional trial and error rubbing-shit-on-other-shit-until-something-gives, another thing they're quick to make fun of early on - the one puzzle that truly stumped me turned out to be, of all things, a fucking language barrier:

Spoiler

Later into the game, there's a guy in an iced over dimension you've just thawed out who will refuse to help you until he's been given something to help him "warm up". For some reason, the game doesn't consider a thermos full of liquid fucking lava warm enough. It turns out, what he's ACTUALLY after is booze, because it's a traditional expression for the way it makes you feel warm once your face gets flush from drinking it. It doesn't in fact physically warm you up at all, in fact as I later discovered from Mythbusters it's the last thing you should be doing to keep from freezing.

In the end, I just don't think it'll grip you unless you're a fan of old style adventure games in general - and even then, I'm not sure I could justify paying actual money for it. It's part of a twin pack on Steam nowadays, but if you just want to see the game's humour in action and nothing else, you would probably be better off just watching a longplay on Youtube.

November 24, 2020

Citizen Abel (Gravity Bone)

Oh hell no. You don't get out of it that easy.

It's free to play, takes about 30 minutes to finish and can run on just about any functioning PC. I can't discuss this thing in any capacity without ruining it anyway, so just play it yourself.

November 25, 2020

Tim (Braid)

Long thought of as one of the first true indie success stories, Braid is a rare act of genius that understands its own limitations perfectly, working within them to create platforming puzzles that are equal parts brilliant and fiendish. To wit, getting to the end of a level in Braid is only a side objective - the bulk of your time will be spent collectathon-ing various jigsaw pieces scattered all over the levels to assemble them and unlock the game's conclusion, and it's these elements that the game guards fiercely with its time bending puzzles. Honest to god, it's shit that a lot of other games would consider exploits, not solutions, and every world in the game has its own gimmick to put a completely different spin on how Tim interacts with it. And somehow, against all odds, they still find room to put secrets into the game above even all that to culminate in an alternate ending to the game's penultimate chase sequence, which was already a work of absolute brilliance thanks to a creative spin on the game's own ability to rewind time.

That being said, there are a handful of rough edges here and there, which are difficult to talk about in depth without spoiling the game entirely. But the one that always stuck with me is that there's a world where time flows based on your X position on the level, flowing forwards and backwards whenever you physically move forwards or backwards within it. There's one section where keys are affected by this time scaling too, so they physically leave your hands whenever you move backwards, and can abruptly zip around the level and out of your reach if it wasn't on your person at that point in "time", such as if an enemy was holding it. It's not to say this isn't a clever usage of the game's mechanics, but it's definitely the one that's the most poorly conveyed to the player, and it comes off as incredibly janky and fucking infuriating to deal with even when you do understand exactly how it works. Normally I wouldn't pick on a single puzzle in a puzzle game so much, but this was the one that almost made me give up on the game entirely, so I think it deserves particularly special mention when the rest of them are so well done by comparison.

To round this writeup off, it needs to be said that this game has some goddamn fantastic presentation. It would have been so simple just to make a bunch of tiles and slot them all together, but Braid's levels are all designed from scratch as a single image, to the point that every one is practically a painting all by itself. The character sprites are no slouch either, and Tim himself sports splendidly smooth - for once, in a way that doesn't preclude the player from doing things during certain animations, which has long been a failing of games with shitloads of frames. There really aren't many games out there that are designed like it visually. And that's before considering they plan to remaster it all early next year in the form of Braid Anniversary Edition, something that definitely escaped my notice before I started putting this entry together. Will I get it? Honestly, I dunno. Like most puzzle games, the magic is kinda just gone once you know all the solutions, and I defintely don't have the patience to go hunting down all the stars I didn't get last time, but I definitely would still recommend it to just about anyone who has yet to experience it for the first time.

November 26, 2020

Castle Crashers

It isn't just point and click games that that have declined as a genre between generations, even though few would argue it's not one of the worst off - arcade beat em ups, especially sidescrolling ones, have faltered a lot too over the years. Unsurprisingly, coinciding with the decline of arcades themselves, outside of which many of their conventions and mechanics are considered either dated or flawed (and some even within the arcades themselves - they call them quarter munchers for a reason). Honestly, I find this train of thought terribly misguided, but I digress. The point I'm getting to here is that most big publishers abandoned the genre, and when a once great and appreciated medium is thrown to the wayside you can always count on the indie spectrum to identify a void in the market and fill it themselves. With the rise of the Xbox Live Marketplace, the door was opened for indie games to become commercial successes, not just critical ones - and this is where we open with Castle Crashers.

Honestly, Crashers is a game that's at its best when you don't take it seriously, and I don't mean that just from a tonal standpoint. Granted, much of the setpiecing is designed to elicit a laugh or two, usually in the most juvenile manner possible (seriously, there's an entire level that's basically just poop jokes), but even gameplay speaking much of it will ultimately just devolve into button mashing after a point. Once you learn that you can juggle most mooks borderline infinitely it betrays the need to attack any other way, which you might recall is the same problem Growl had all the way back on page one - one option is so useful that all other options in the game are almost completely redundant. It also means that, despite having a system for levelling up individual stats, you never have any reason to put points into much besides attack strength and health. Bows don't keep you mobile enough to deal with most threats late into the game, and Castle Crashers laughs at you if you're dumb enough to drop points into magic. I'm not saying it has to be Street Fighter tier complexity or anything, just that there should be more to standard gameplay than just jumping and literally just rubbing your thumb against the X and Y buttons.

You would think that, hearing that this is an arcade brawler, that it would be a pretty small game overall, but it's actually a pretty lengthy game by the standards of the genre - a single playthrough can last about 3-4 hours depending on how much you restart levels, and you're incentiviezed to play the game multiple times on account of multiple characters that need to be levelled up individually, further ones to be unlocked through subsequent playthroughs, and extra weapons and pets that can be uncovered within the levels and shops. There's good and bad in this. Staying power in an arcade brawler is a rare treat, and even if you only play one or two characters it'll keep you busy for a while - but it's hard not to feel like it IS busywork at times, especially considering you need to level up characters individually, and you have to remember that this is 3 hours you're going to spend mostly doing the same fucking aircombo over and over again. At least Growl ends too quickly for jump kicks to overstay their welcome.

Whatever the case, it's great with friends. Though that's probably the least surprising part of this whole ordeal. I'd be more shocked if playing an arcade game multiplayer ever made a game worse. Feel free to quote me on that - I'm actually genuinely curious what the exceptions could be.

November 27, 2020

Baldur (Too Human)

Alright, so you guys remember this tiny little tidbit back on page four?

Quote

As far as I'm concerned, the critical success of Eternal Darkness was a fluke, as Silicon Knights would go on to produce bomb after bomb since - where that story ends though, is a tale for another entry in this list...

That's right. This is where that story ends. Too Human is a game that is something of a pet project to Silicon Knights - it would have to be, if they held off on finishing it for a whole ten (!?!?!?) years. You would think that would make a game like this their magnum opus, right? Ahahaha, far fucking from it - in fact, it's the single game credited for the death of the entire company.

Let's start with how it plays. Probably its best known trait is that it uses the right stick for attacking rather than controlling the camera, resulting in the worst of both worlds - giving you a shitty camera that frequently necessitates attacking enemies that are completely offscreen, on top of being incredibly shallow and honestly, really confusing to use. It has a ranged combat system in which Baldur usually dual wields, autoaiming with one weapon and aiming pseudo manually with the other, but there's really no rhyme or reason to what the game prioritizes as a target, which is especially bad because some enemies explode on death and inflict incurable debuffs when you're close to the blast, and shooting them is the only way to avoid this. I don't think I truly appreciated the absolute awfulness of this game, though, until I started bumping into these big spider-like enemies that attack with ground pounding moves that you can't jump over to avoid because THE FUCKING GROUND POUND CAN SOMEHOW HIT YOU IN THE AIR. As it turns out, you're expected to dodge roll to avoid it. On the ground. Right in the middle of the ground pound. Instead of, you know, literally not being in contact with the fucking ground when they pound it. How the fuck does something THAT stupid not get caught in QA?

So you die a lot, for reasons outside of your control. And what happens then?

It takes damn near 30 seconds to get back into the fray again, while a valkyrie descends from the sky, picks your corpse up and slowly flies off, before plopping you right back into the game immediately - and I mean fucking IMMEDIATELY - after the cutscene ends with no delay or fanfare, often just to get immediately wrecked again. You can't skip this by the way. I hope you like boss fights that are about 50% waiting for valkyries to hurry the fuck up and let you play again. I'm geninely concerned that something this obnoxious was left in the game after - and I honestly can't stress this enough - ten fucking years of development without a single person working on it apparently not seeing an issue with it.

The biggest lessons to learn from this game, though, come from the character of its developers rather than the contents of the game itself. We see most of it through its founder, Denis Dyack, and to make a long dissertation short, Denis is a perfectionist and a fucking baby who never accepts fault and is constantly looking for ways to pin shortcomings onto other people. It would have been so simple just to acknowledge that something had gone wrong in their design or development process and go back to fix it - lord knows they had no fucking shortage of time to do so. But rather than attempt to better his company's work, Denis looked for boogeymen to pin the blame on instead - in this case, Epic Games, because the latest and soon-to-be-final build of the game ran on the Unreal Engine. Denis went to court with them on the completely unfounded accusation that Epic was withholding developer tools and documentation from them to make their then biggest project, Gears of War, shine by comparison. And you don't pick a fight like that with a company that big unless you're really prepared for it, because they will really make you fucking regret it.

See, Epic had counter accusations that were founded - specifically, that despite Dyack's insistence that they were abandoning Unreal Engine and making their own, they had stolen much of UE3's code to do so and attempted to hide the fact that they did. And although Silicon Knights would make a handful of games after this, I think it is absolutely not hyperbole to say this game singlehandedly caused the death of the company - because not only was Too Human a legendary critical and commercial flop, they had to pay damages just shy of eight figures for losing their court case with Epic, and because Too Human was made with stolen code, the judge ordered that all unsold copies of the game had to be recalled and destroyed - at Silicion Knights's expense. All just for Denis Dyack to avoid admitting that his dream project had issues, and that he had absolutely nobody else to blame for them but himself and his company. Was it worth it Denis, you fucking hack?

After the death of SK, Denis went on to found a new company for the specific purpose of recreating a spiritual successor to the one success story they still had to their name. Of course, because it was on Kickstarter and nobody wanted to drop a million dollars on a single episode of an Eternal Darkness successor that frankly, looked like it was ripping all of its level geometry completely verbatim from the original game, it ended up going nowhere, and THAT company ended up going under too because they couldn't put out a single game. And now he's trying the same thing with Legacy of Kain. Some shit never changes, eh?

November 28, 2020

Karoshi (Karoshi Suicide Salaryman)

Another advantage of indie games is that, without the looming threat of corporate or publisher pressure hanging over every decision they make, they can make all manner of decisions that anyone trying to sell it would deem too risky for the general public. I don't mean that just in terms of politically correct, despite what that title might imply - they can make mechanical and gameplay decisions that completely and unexpectedly flip the player's expectations on their head, and what could be more out of left field than a game that completely inverts the player's objectives from the norm? To wit, the objective of Karoshi is not to make it to the end of a level or collect some kind of macguffin scattered throughout, but to find a way to die with all the resources any given level affords you. And far be it from Karoshi to make it as simple as diving into the first pit of spikes you see - somehow this game finds ways to actually make that challenging with mechanics as simple as switches, pushable blocks and togglable floors, and is in fact at its best when it can make a simple-looking problem into a fiendishly difficult issue.

Throughout the series though (yes, there are several Karoshi games), these games sometimes stumble apon a bad habit of making solutions unusually meta and esoteric in ways that are completely irrelevant to the mechanics it introduces to the player. Some of them are actually pretty clever with the right signposting, like introducing your cursor as a solution to some puzzles or subtly screwing around with your mobility or walls that form between you and a hazard if you approach them in a certain way, but every now and then the game throws out stuff that can be only be described as "random bullshit how the fuck was I supposed to guess that". One recurring puzzle throughout the series is figuring out that you can spawn a hazard into the level by pressing a completely arbitary button on the keyboard that is often only vaugely hinted at, and sometimes going as far as requiring you to react to it before it ceases to be a threat and forcing you to restart. There's one puzzle in Karoshi 2.0 where dying requires you to physically insert a fucking music CD into your actual computer to trigger the means of killing yourself. Does anyone even put audio on fucking CDs anymore? How the shit do you figure that out even when it IS commonplace?

And if that wasn't a clue for the kind of open contempt Karoshi as a game has for the player, it occasionally dips into the I Wanna Be The Guy school of making the experience miserable for the entertainment of anyone watching them. There's another level in Karoshi 2.0 where the screen is constantly rotating but the gravity isn't. It know full well how fucking nauseating this is, which is why it forces you to do semi-intricate platforming ON TOP OF figuring out where you are and what your controls are relative to whatever angle the screen is tilted on at the time you jump. And don't even get me started with some of the shit that Super Karoshi pulls. Be that as it may, all but one game in the series is completely free, so you lose nothing for checking them out but time. And maybe a few strands of hair trying to figure out exactly what the designer was thinking with certain puzzles. No judgements if you look up workthroughs for some of these ones.

November 29, 2020

Isaac and Nicole (Dead Space)

Well, the most immediate lesson I learnt from this game was hands on more than anything. Did you know that since the format was invented over 30 years ago, GIFs still don't support partial transparency? I sure didn't! I was tearing my fucking hair out trying to figure out why the smooth fade I animated for this wasn't working, and I ended up having to make do with a low tech alternative instead, because as it turns out the computer industry still hasn't moved on from some standards that still existed alongside the fucking NES. Sorry, sorry, didn't mean to open this up with irrelevant bitching. Lemme bitch about the game I made this for instead.

As a game - and a horror game in particular - the biggest sin of Dead Space may very well be that it just gets too predictable too quickly, and I think it's a rare example of how too much signposting can devolve into coddling and hand holding the player through every threat. Part of the thrill in horror games is never feeling truly safe no matter where you are, and no doubt seeing a necromorph you once thought dead suddenly rise to their feet or have them burst out of a vent in front of you can be startling the first few times. But they proceed to milk this gimmick for everything it's worth over the course of the game, to the point that every corpse and every vent is just an invitation for more enemies from the player's perspective. Even the act of severing limbs, the game's most iconic mechanic, feels like it was mismanaged in this regard. It feels like the player's priorities in this regard should have been figured out mostly through experimentation or observation that necromorphs are more dangerous without a head instead of a leg, or at least save hints to that effect until about half an hour into the game - but severing limbs is one of the very first hints gives you, and the game's marketing is positively RIFE with claims of the impact blowing off legs and claws has on the gameplay, so this element of the horror is never even given a chance to really surprise you. And that's saying nothing of the fact that whenever weak points aren't appendages, they're these giant glowing orange pustules so obvious that even the fucking Legend of Zelda would dial in and say "woah bro, isn't that a bit fucking much?"

Dead Space is appreciated in spite of these flaws, and I don't contest that. It's still a good game for its day - that's not why it's on the list. Dead Space is a tale of executive meddling and sunk cost fallacy as old as the industry itself. The scary thing is, for most people I don't even need a single full word to sum that tale up - just two letters.

Yup, these fuckers again. When EA saw the modest success that Dead Space pulled off, they were determined to turn it into a smash hit that regularly sold gangbusters alongside commercial titants of the industry - most of which at the time, and still are, mostly straight up shooters. This is a lose-lose situation no matter which way you spin it. Even at the BEST of times horror games are comparitively niche experiences rather than big budget blockbusters, so EA would never get quite the avalanche of cash out of it they hoped for if they left it to do its own thing. So they interefered with the creative process and insisted it start leaning further towards plain old shootyshooty bangbang instead of the suspense of old, and that doesn't work either because people who bought Dead Space for the horror left disappointed that it was turning into literally any other third person shooter, and people who wanted a third person game for the shooting already had much better and more well known alternatives they were probably already playing, satisfying neither party. This is of course, on top of actively harming the games themselves of their own merits - Dead Space 2 had a bigger focus on fighting but the same focus on ammo management, to the point that I'm convinced there physically isn't enough ammo in the game to actually finish it by the time you get to the lattermost parts of the game.

This all culminates in the infamous failure of Dead Space 3, which EA dumped way more money into than was ever reasonable or sensible, seemingly still ignorant of the fact that this was a FUCKING HORROR GAME they were trying to peddle to SHOOTER FANS. The game forever lives on in infamy for the claims from execs that DS3 needed to move five million copies, in an industry where anything more than ONE million should still be considered a remarkable feat. That's not five million to reach some arbitary sales quota or expectations - that's five million copies just to fucking break even on the amount of cash they'd dropped on it. And this resulted in some truly dire intrusions on the design process to try and milk back their money's worth from the amount of people who DID buy the game, unwittingly setting the groundwork for microtransactions in full price games in the process by making upgrade items buyable with real world money. And do you know what the most fucked up thing about this is? Dead Space 3 still sold around three million - a runaway success by any other metric - but EA cancelled all further games in the franchise and basically killed the developer in the process because they still missed the 5 mil mark. That they set. Effectively, they forced one of their loyal developers into an unfavourable, unwinnable situation, either through malic or absurd incompetence, then made them fall on their swords and take all the blame for it because as it turns out executives don't have any fucking idea of how videogames are actually designed and don't want any of you to realize they pull this shit over and over again.

So if there's any moral to be glaned from Dead Space's story, it's that you should never, ever, fucking ever work under EA. To most of you that already goes without saying, but it really can't be stressed enough that they'll make you do incredibly stupid and suicidal shit, make you take the blame for it and get off completely scot free themselves in the process. The best case scenario by then is that they poach your team and make you work on boring, corporate-distilled sludge for the rest of your career. Stay away from them, no matter how untouchable you think you are.

November 30, 2020

Vault Boy (Fallout 3 / New Vegas / 4)

It's Oblivion with guns.

Honestly, I'm struggling to say a whole lot more than that, because the similarities in both franchises honestly outweigh the differences. They're both open world shooter games lined with so much busywork that one can honestly get hundreds of hours playtime out of the game without ever finishing the main questline, with worldbuilding far and above almost any other open world game on the market but a formula that has aged progressively worse with each successive entry. They even share more or less the same gameplay engine, which itself has grown increasingly dated despite its graphical updates between both franchises, and the absolute joke that is Fallout 76 has put the fate of both of them in doubt. Honestly you could just read the writeup I did for Elder Scrolls, substituting Oblivion with Fallout 3 and Skyrim with Fallout New Vegas, and there still wouldn't be a single part of it that would be inaccurate besides references to the magic system, which Fallout being a post-apocalyptic themed game obviously... does not have. So although melee weapons still play a part and control virtually identically to its source engine, the lion's share of gameplay will be done with guns unless you're running a stealth-heavy character build.

If I could pick out a few difference between them, it's probably that Fallout in general refines a lot of variables that probably didn't need to be there. Take healing, for example. Unless you did all of your healing through magic (and god help you if you did - even in Skyrim, it was generally too slow to help you in a pinch), all potions in Elder Scrolls are only as effective as what your alchemy skill was at the time you made them, or whatever the vendor's was when you bought it, and often just basically random whenever you find them in containers about the place. Even though healing items in Fallout have definite tiers of effectiveness, they all depend on your Medicine skill, so stimpacks are dependable whether you find them in the first cabinet you search or in a strongbox 50 hours later. Similarly, you don't have to keep manually increasing base stats like HP every single time you level up - you set those priorities right at the start of the game and your abilities increase based on that initial stat spread, and you can even upgrade elements of it later if you're dissatisfied with some of it, whereas Skyrim still makes you pick stat increases before perks and Oblivion is just micromanagement hell, despite how much "dumbing down" purists will tell you goes on in other games in its orbit. This is very much love it or hate it kind of stuff - but like I said, I'm honestly stretching for reasons to talk about the games here.

I guess I could talk about the aesthetics? After all, the problably form the most iconic facets of the series, a retro-futuristic look that was probably what people in the 1920s thought today would look like. To its credit, there really aren't many other games I can think of that have gone with this look and pulled it off quite so well, and it isn't just the design sense either - it really loves cribbing music from the era too, to the point that I Don't Want to Set the World On Fire by The Ink Spots and Marty Robbins's Big Iron have become virtually inseparable from its identity. Oh yeah, and there's V.A.T.S too, through which you can pause the action and let RNG rolls determine whether or not a series of shots lands their mark on specific parts of a target. This can be good as either a panic option or the first word in a firefight, but I find it has that same XCom problem of "how the fuck did you miss that shot when it was practically guaranteed", to the point that it occasionally turns right into artificial stupidity and shoots a fucking wall instead of your target even when the odds of hitting are literally 100%, so I guess your experiences will depend on your preferences, luck and Agility stat.

...Okay that's three paragraphs, fuck it that's plenty. Long story short, still Oblivion with guns. You'll like this if you liked Oblivion, and vice versa.

December 1, 2020

The Jackal, Vaas and Rex "Power" Colt (Farcry 2, 3 and Blood Dragon)

Farcry (and by extension most Ubisoft franchises that still exist) is a series I've grown increasingly annoyed at as the years have past. Not necessarily because they're bad (though Blood Dragon in particular is something of a shark jumping moment that has left steadily worsening games in its wake), but because they represent a growing trend of halfassery in the AAA open world marketplace. Sure, they'll have a main questline and all, but all the usual side busywork has become absurdly homogenous and boring. And I think of all people, Dunkey said it best while covering Assassin's Creed for similar reasons: "There's actually over 90 side missions, believe it or not! And when I say 90, I mean there's three side missions, 30 times each". Nearly ALL Ubisoft games have that same fucking problem now, and Far Cry was my first exposure to it. Farcry 2 isn't SO bad about it - there ARE genuine side missions, and most of the diversions after that are just fundraising for a reliable supply of weapons which you can just pinch from enemies anyway if you can tolerate them being in shoddy quality. The latter two, though, make a big deal of recycling the same shit over and over again under the guise of side activities, with the only real distinction being the exact location you find them in. This is dumb, and it's super fucking boring, and it makes games like this a massive pain to play more than once over. Which I imagine was entirely their intention, because they no longer have to give a shit once they have your money bar how long it can hold your attention until they pump another game out.

Another thing just about all Farcry games have in common from 2 onwards is a system of fire physics, which is something I have to admit they're clearly put a lot of work into. Fire in most videogames is usually just an AoE effect and a DoT effect combined, but if you throw a molotov into a grassy field in Farcry you can count on seeing most of it burn RIGHT the fuck down, leaving a charred wasteland in its wake. For all its attention to detail, though, I find it's incredibly difficult to weaponize. Fires burn in relation to the wind, which is very difficult to gauge with almost no feedback to how strong it is and which way it's blowing, leaving it incredibly unpredictable at the BEST of times if not just blowing directly back towards your stupid ass less than a minute after you set it off. Most of the time enemies aren't dumb enough to sit around close and long enough to a raging blaze to be actually taken down by it anyway, so despite the work they've put into this system I have to ask, what actual mechanical purpose does it serve? Even if you were to use it to flush enemies out of hiding, you already have hand grenades and several varieties of explosive weapons for exactly that purpose, and it depends on having a LOT of grassland around to keep it flowing right into where you need to be, which they'll selectively cut off right where enemies are most able to entrench themselves, especially around outposts. It seems to be there for the spectacle of it all, and not a whole lot else.

As just sneaking and shooting games, though, they function just fine. They each have issues unique to them, though. Farcry 2's enemy AI is really good, arguably even among the best in the industry - and that forms a testament to just how fucking annoying it can be from the player's end when it doesn't leave concessions for the player's abilities, not just with the aformentioned hiding from out of control fires but the fact that they'll flank, kite you out when you're trying to attack in close range, and if they notice any sign of being sniped from afar it's pretty much a sure thing they'll figure out exactly where they're being shot from and you'll never see them fucking emerge from cover again. I don't have a problem with this kind of behaviour being in the game at all, but it feels some of it should have been saved for a higher difficulty. Farcry 3 has these absolutely retarded chainstab perks that can make actual stealth barely a consideration as long as you can catch ONE guard unaware, zipping right from one enemy to another and stealth killing them whether or not they're actually unaware of you. Depending on the location I've seen over half an outpost die to ONE chainstab, which honestly feels like it's going a bit too far in the opposite direction. And as much as I will sing praises of Farcry Blood Dragon as one of the single best games Ubisoft has ever put out, that's mainly because it's just Farcry 3 with most of the fat cut out - it's a much better game overall for it, but it feels like it ends too soon even for the fact that it's clearly a budget title by comparison. Not that it helps that the ending parts of the game are a complete pisstake, for both good and bad, but more notably because there isn't even a final boss and all the loose ends are tied up entirely in cutscene, which is a massive fucking anticlimax compared to everything that happened just minutes prior.

In closing, the games themselves are fine. If I seem grumpy about them, it's more for the precedent they set than anything else. Why is it so hard just to add unique side missions into these games?

December 2, 2020

Jet Brody (Fracture)

Don't feel bad if you've forgotten about this game. It's exactly what Lucasarts would have wanted, too.

Fracture is a gimmick shooter the likes of which we haven't had on the list since Psi Ops back on page 5. The gimmick this time? Terrain deformation. The game features a system in which the ground can change in shape in real time, thanks not just to explosions but a module in Jet's suit that allows you to create craters and hills directly, usually to create cover and solve puzzles. And even for the standards of gimmick shooters, this game is tech-demoy as fuck in the most pretentious way possible, as if to say "oh look at all this cool shit you can do with dynamic terrain that other games can't do!", and the thing is, I don't think this tech was even all that advanced at the time? It doesn't really carve shapes into the terrain so much as cause it to rise and fall in depth wherever a terrain-altering effect goes off, which is so basic that we've had games as early as the N64 that have pulled it off, just with less verts. And honestly, maybe this is just me looking back in hindsight, but it looks absolutely ridiculous in action - it's hard to sell the impressiveness of carving the earth itself when it basically turns into fucking putty whenever you play around with it. Okay, but a gimmick doesn't have to be complicated, right? As long as it's fun and unique, that's all it needs to be, right? And that's just the thing - Fracture has this utterly bizarre fixation with limiting just what you can do with the terrain manipulation, and consequently, preventing you from just having simple fun with it.

The first limitation is that the deformation effect can only be used on soft soil. This was already fucking annoying when Red Faction did it, because it feels like a crutch for the fact that they didn't know how to consistently design levels around their own tech - but fine, for sake of argument, we'll consider that a necessary evil. The second limitation is that there are hard limits to how far you can make a given piece of terrain rise or sink, and those limits are specific to every surface in the game that CAN be manipulated, AND those limits are often defined seemingly arbitarily rather than a consistent, say, 5 metre range in either direction. Way too often you'll be given a ledge that's out of reach of a normal jump or a Half Life 2-esque physics puzzle in which simply raising the ground should be an obvious solution to the problem, but the game defines invisible limits to how far you can push the terrain deformation that keeps you from solving them that way, WHICH IS THE LITERAL FUCKING REASON THE GAMEPLAY MECHANICS WERE DESIGNED, forcing you to take a needlessly roundabout way to solve problems like this - if not through literally running around through an arbitarily longer route, through use of these "spike grenades" which only exist to shoot tall spikes out of the ground to lift physics objects up and have no apparent application in a fight unlike the other grenades, which makes me wonder why the fuck it wasn't just made a part of Jet's terrain tools in the first fucking place.

The arsenal in this game can be a highlight, but it feels like for lack of better description the naming conventions are just wrong and don't at all match the weapon's actual functionality. Black Widow? Remote detonation grenade launcher. Bangalore? It's a rocket launcher. ST-4? A genuinely cool torpedo gun in which the bombs travel UNDER the ground and can be detonated at any time. Dragon's Breath? Just a big turret that can make terrain shorter. Raptor? What are you, stupid, it's just a regular ass fucking rifle. Honestly, the writing in general in this game is just fucking atrocious, which genuinely baffles me coming from a former pillar of videogame writing like Lucasarts. Hey, when you play a warring third person shooter, what do you expect to find? Pretentious global warming scaremongering? Borderline 80s naming conventions like Jet fucking Brody? Exposition so clumsily integrated that they keep giving it to you in big info dumps like the lead character doesn't actually know what the fuck is going on instead of weaving into the narrative like I dunno, any other competent writer ever? Honestly, the most unrealistic thing about it is the insinuation that America literally fractures in two based on who advocates for genetic manipulation - and the west side of America is the one that is pro genetics.

Honestly, I never actually finished this game, and given the opportunity I don't think I'd care to. It only had one job - let the player make craters to hide from enemy fire, and it can't even do THAT consistently. What a joke.

December 3, 2020

Johnny Gat (Saints Row series)

Though GTA ruled the roost when it came to open world games (and debatably still does), over time it would lose sight of the over-the-top criminal carnage that was originally an integral part of their iconography compared to their many, many posers, aiming for several measures of realism that would, to be perfectly frank, come at the expense of responsivity and simple fun. Though the first Saints Row was originally one such poser, when they saw the direction that GTA was taking they struck like a dirty camping sniper, immediately filling the void that GTA had left behind and arguably doing elements of it even better than Rockstar ever did. We're talking "hit pedestrians with a supercar and watch their ragdoll achieve orbit" kinds of fun. "Drive down the wrong side of the road and the game keeps score of how long you can hold it without stopping or crashing" kinds of fun. "Drive down the wrong side of the road except this time in a customized blinged out bus with nitrous boost installed so hitting a car head on at full speed absolutely positively wipes it the fuck out" kinds of fun. The worlds of Saints Row always have loads to do even when you've completely cleared the game and every side activity, which are themselves some of the absolute highlights of the series - my favourite to this day still being FUZZ from Saints 2, a COPS-alike programme where you take down criminals with excessive force, often with over-the-top weapons given by the cameraman. Honestly, you can have a lot of fun just by going on a rampage for no real reason, and that's exactly the kind of thing that crime sandboxes really should be striving for, to be fun even in a complete vaccuum.

Saints Row would own that brand of fun the longer it went on, and if we're being totally honest with ourselves, kinda became a caricature of itself - or in the immortal words of Yahtzee, "drinks wackozade from a clown shoe". I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing personally, but when it comes to a point that you're blowing up cars with weaponized dubstep it's hard not to miss the comparitively modest silliness that Saints Row 2 offered, and this constant escalation of one-upmanship from game to game is something that has caused Saints to abandon many of its roots in the exact same way that GTA did and become a completely different beast altogether. Still a complete polar opposite to what GTA is now, but still a drastic change nonetheless, and one that's increasingly been writing them into a corner the more ludicruous they try to be. Honestly, after the shit that Saints IV and Gat out of Hell pulled, I don't even know how they could pull anything even equally as absurd as that, more less a cut above. Be that as it may, Saints Row still entertains the player for performing acts of recklessness and sadism, and as long as it continue to do so, I feel like the series will still have enough of their mojo to justify being a series all the same.

Honestly, it may be the bias talking here, but I'm struggling to find anything genuinely bad to bring up throughout the series beyond that the first game is an indistinguishable GTA clone with a boring mute protaganist. SR3 for some reason introduced QTEs into its fighting? I mean, I SHOULD be more annoyed about it, but you don't really encounter them much unless you use a move that specifically triggers them, and they only really become problematic and annoying whenever you're fighting Killbane. SR4 doesn't give you a reason to use vehicles because you can now physically outrun anything with wheels? It's hard to consider this a bad thing, because leaping from building to building and treating the city as your own playground is a LOT more fun and the only thing you miss out on for it is that setting background music becomes a lot more inconvenient without a radio in ready reach. They recycled the same fucking city three times between SR3, 4 and Gat? Okay yeah, even I can't defend that, especially when none of them were the district that the series was fucking NAMED after.

Regardless, if you played even one game between Saints Row 2, 3 and 4, you'll have already gotten your money's worth. They may be juvenile at many times, but they're still bloody brilliant games, and my one lament is that we may never get games like it again now that Deep Silver owns the IP.

December 4, 2020

Banjo and Kazooie (Banjo: Nuts and Bolts)

Okay, this is the part where I'd normally give the "I only played this game in the series so I can only speak for this game's merits alone" spiel, but frankly the distance that Nuts and Bolts has put between itself and its predecessors is so self-evident you don't even need to have played previous games in the series to notice. The game wouldn't let it escape notice even if you had, because Rare's style of writing constantly tries to handwave the drastic disrepancy between games in a way that comes off as smug, self-loathing and to be perfectly frank, totally tone deaf - which is strange to think about in hindsight, because contrary to popular belief, the whole thing was Rare's idea and they weren't coerced by Microsoft at all. To put this into perspective, fans had been waiting for a sequel to Tooie for eight years at this point, and Rare had yet to prove themselves under MS's wing, so if there was ever a time to play things safe and familiar with their headline franchise it would've been right the fuck now. Instead, right when faith in them was at a then-all time low and they had yet to really knock it out of the park under their new ownership, they farted out a completely irrelevant game that literally nobody asked for, and then acted surprised when their loyal fans were rightly fucking pissed off over the bait and switch they had pulled that made the game appear to be a completely normal B&K game:

To be honest, the only place in the entire game that feels developed is the hub world, where you drive to the other worlds on this dinky trolley that you can't actually customize, and hunt down boxes that you deliver to Mumbo to unlock more parts to build with once you're in the subworlds proper. It's also the only place you have any incentive to dismount from your vehicle for any reason besides to load cargo into it, because some crates and mechanics are located places you can't drive your trolley into, forcing you to climb for it. The subworlds themselves on the other hand are wide open, but seemingly for no reason than "just because" - like GTA Vice City, the world only exists in its entirety to be used as a backdrop for missions that give you jiggy pieces, and they don't even exist on the map at the same time like they would in previous games. Every world has like five variations of the same map that share exactly the same level geometry, just changing the time of day and swapping the quest giving NPCs for different ones, which is an approach that makes the worlds feel a lot fucking emptier than they have any right to be. The only reason you ever have to seek anything else out in the game worlds is to look for Jinjos, optional side missions that can eventually unlock more exotic parts to build with, but not too far into the game you unlock a radar that pinpoints their exact location in the level anyway. It's a mascot platformer with no actual platforming and an exploration collectathon with no actual exploring. Frankly it's a fucking miracle they still had Grant Kirkhope onboard by this time, otherwise we could've called out the musical stylings too and made it a hat trick.

I think what annoys me the most about it all though, is that as a grid-based building game, it's fine. The ground based vehicles are frustratingly slippery, it has a tendency to drop frames a lot in the later stages, and vehicles start getting really clunky to use once you have more than three manual button press gadgets on your vehicle at a time, but these kinds of growing pains would have been expected in the first stage of a brand new franchise. WHICH IS WHAT NUTS AND BOLTS SHOULD HAVE BEEN IN THE FIRST FUCKING PLACE. And honestly? The UI for the actual building parts is the single best out of any grid-based builder out there - there, I said it. A LOT of other games with similar approaches, especially nowadays, tend to be clunky and frustrating to control for their approaches to it, and because a lot of them account for somewhat realistic physics it really limits the kinds of things you can build in them and still perform competently with. And honestly, vehicle customization should always be about expression first and practicality second if you ask me, as long as there's measures for achieving both. As far as Nuts and Bolts is concerned, I just wish there was a reason to use hull blocks more, because in the later stage of the game vehicles kinda just transform into gigantic blocks of engine and fuel, and by that stage you physically don't have room for a whole lot else without compromising your vehicle's weight or balance.

So I can't fucking believe I'm saying this, but I want MORE games like Nuts and Bolts. Just not necessarily with Banjo in them, because despite the fuax pax it committed by involving them, it's still the closest balance of aesthetics and utility I've seen yet in a grid builder, and I've yet to see a game truly match it in that regard, where most require a high level of technical knowhow that really bogs the game down as a result. For the longest time, the closest subsitute I could recommend was Robocraft, but I can honestly no longer recommend it at all for the F2P hell it's transformed into since.

December 5, 2020

Francis and Nick (Left 4 Dead 1/2)

Left 4 Dead is that one coop game that everyone and their fucking mother seemed to have at one point, and I think that immediately speaks to one of the most challenging necessities of any multiplayer-centric game, competitive or not - to be able to attract a steady community right out of the starting gate and to hold it for the majority of its natural life. I think it's fair to say this game passed that milestone with flying colours, considering people TODAY are still playing it and there's a pretty robust modding community keeping the game alive past the scant 5-6 campaigns both games released with. Even WITH the short length of the overall game though, it's AMAZINGLY replayable thanks in large part to its signature AI Director, a system that dynamically controls when and where zombies can spawn and in what amounts, and doing so intelligently and on the fly in a way that isn't overbearing to the point of fatigue and irritation or sparse to the point of boredom, all without ever keeping any encounter in the same place twice. Which honestly, is an approach to survival horror that even these days tends to get forgotten a lot, in that you can almost never truly predict when you're going to face opposition until just moments before it hits.

Which ties into another aspect of L4D's brilliance - the sound design. Unless the action is really intense, most of the backing track is largely sparse with occasional interludes. But nearly every musical sting in the game is tied into an actual, usually unseen event somewhere on the game map, such as the early warning of an incoming horde or the spawning of one of the game's "special infected" somewhere around the map, and I don't think there's anything more terrifying than the haunting chanting playing over the top of the instant-killing Witch's loud sobbing and either carefully trying to tiptoe around them or not knowing where they are at all. It's very much a continuation of what I suggested back on the writeup for Rez - the soundtracks of any given game really ought to be reactive to elements of the gameplay, not just a single track that plays over the top of it to add background noise. Of course, it helps that the sound design is loud and punchy exactly where it needs to be, particularly where guns and explosions are concerned.

Left 4 Dead would already have been a masterpiece if left at just that, but it also sports a competitive 4v4 mode in which one team plays the part of the special infected and tries to kill the survivors before they make it to the end of the map. And this is just fucking amazingly well designed, far and above what could honestly have been just a throwaway mode where they let people control zombies and call it a day. Knowing that there are actual human beings trying to hunt you down ups the ante of any given map considerably, forcing you to think on the fly a lot more and keep your downtimes minimal before a significantly more coordinated and aggressive enemy can wear you down. And honestly, though there's no polite way to say it, it's just an amazing catheric feeling to be a zombie and ruin everyone else's fun, to the point that you can bear being made out of paper mache and put up with 20-30 second respawn times to get another chance at it. I sort of hate how it's gone out of style these days honestly, though I guess part of it is that nobody makes a game short and structured enough to accomodate this kind of side game anymore.

Either way, both L4D games are titles on the absolute verge of perfection, and if it's within your power to get a party of four together long enough for a run through the full campaign it's absolutely worth playing through at least once. The worst I can say about it is that the lack of a mode where a human player gains control over the AI Director is kind of a missed opportunity, but like I said, the game was already brilliant as it is, and Valve has plenty to be proud of regardless.

December 6, 2020

Chip, Infinite and Wisp (basically every main Sonic game from Unleashed onwards)

Despite the wildly disparate themes and mechanics between modern Sonic games, they all have a mechanic in common that allows me to lump them together under one label - the ability to influence one's own speed with a single button press. On a surface level, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this - even the spindash was originally just down and crouch, and a little streamlining in that department could take the guesswork out of whether or not they're at the complete standstill otherwise necessary for it to register as a spindash and not a really short and useless roll, as it happened to whenever it was applicable in Generations and Forces. However, the key word here is speed, not momentum - boosting instantly sets your character's speed to a maximum possible level and holds it there as long as you continue to hold the button down and against any effect the level geometry can have on you, not functioning as an ability to gain speed quicker than you might ordinarily be able to. And this is the true essense of the problems all modern Sonic games have, even as a part of this one shared core they all have - going fast is no longer a considered and measured practice, rather it just dumps the player into big flat levels and leaves the player to just run straight lines through it all. I didn't even mention the fact that it doubles as an attack too, so you don't even need to make considerations for enemies along the way, to the point that in some setpieces they effectively just become projectiles to launch at other normally unreachable enemies by running through them.

And to say the least, it projects an aura of Sonic games that are obnoxiously basic and simple - yes, more simple than the Sonic games of old that literally only functioned on a single button and a Dpad. And more than that, it projects an aura of developers and publishers alike that have completely lost touch with what originally made these games function, much less what made them fun to play, leaving them with no other outlet to milk the brand for recognition value and to use it as a vehicle for irrelevant gimmicks that they are presumably only saddling it with because they have no idea how to launch them as separate IPs anymore. Unleashed shoved in a bland God of War clone and forced people to use it whether they wanted to or not, Colours split previously character-specific abilities into powerups, Generations and Forces for some reason insists that the Sonic of old is a separate character completely from the one we have today and gives them different movesets as such, and Forces introduced a custom character that to be totally honest, didn't benefit from being customizable in a way that genuinely mattered because all custom characters used guns and grapple hooks regardless. It's a franchise that has incredibly obvious routes back towards success, but chooses to flail incomprehensibly instead and reinvent their wheel every single game in the hope that something - anything- will stick, as long as it's not exactly what they already worked on and what originally gave them the fame and success the series had in the first place. To the point that it's kind of concerning, honestly, because it gives the impression that neither Sega or Sonic Team want anything to do with Sonic anymore despite being the face of their brands, and are only continuing to do so because money is involved.

So as of the making of this list, this is where our tale with Sonic ends - not with a climactic finish and a neat tying up of all loose ends, nor even a cataclysmic failure that drags down everyone who worked on it to an early grave, but a pathetic, mewling whimper. A desperate, hopelessly lost cry for attention from a developer and publisher that has lost its way and no longer has any idea what to do with itself, while just about everything else in its orbit - your Yakuzas, your Personas, your Puyos and what have you - continue to fly free without a care in the world, many of whom are considered better than they've ever been in their lifespans. It's tempting to ask why this is ever the case when Sega themselves are the best they've ever been since losing the hardware race, but I feel like the answer is very simple in the end: the numbers speak louder than the acclaim, and as long as people continue to pay them for any old crap that Sonic puts out, they will not have any incentive to better themselves. Sonic Forces in particular has been a much needed life lesson for me, where once I considered owning titles a necessity to be informed of the ongoing state of the franchise - but I have to be honest with myself and say enough is enough. If you love something, you should be able to acknowledge that it can do better, and if you're one of those quote unquote "true Sonic fans" that buys everything in the franchise that has monetary value and defends every decision they make like your fandom makes you honourbound to stick by it through everything, let me be the first to inform you that you're a total fuckwit and you are exactly the reason Sonic as a series remains as stale and broken as it is now.

Do I hold out hope that things can improve? A little. They've surely noticed that Mania is the most critically acclaimed Sonic game in decades, and I would not be surprised to find them draw some insight from it - lord knows they found enough time to hastily port the Drop Dash from Mania into Sonic Forces while both were in development despite the fact that they were never under any obligation to. But if Sega still intends to make the west their main market for Sonic, then they have to start taking us fucking seriously, and they have to get fresh talent into the game regardless of which approach they take because it's become pretty clear over the years that everyone still in Sonic Team is either massively burnt out, inexperienced, a combination thereof, or Takashi Iizuka. And honestly, it's another sobering story of what can happen when executives make key decisions in a game's core design, not the people they actually pay them to do it and the few people qualified to tell them what is fun and what actually functions in a videogame. Simply put, everyone's priorities are absolutely shot to fuck, and it's time for an overhaul - not of the games themselves, but of the people working on them.

December 7, 2020

Zee Tee (Eversion)

Eversion is a cute NES-style platformer that does not defy any expectations whatsoever. But uhh... do be sure to try the game out for yourself before reading further, okay?

Spoiler

So yeah, from the first impression Eversion appears to be a totally bog standard NES platformer, with one notable gimmick to its name - the ability to "evert". This can only be done in specific places in the level - places that mind you, are completely invisible, only barely hinted at and only apparent at all by a slight screen tint and a music overlap once you're standing in them. What everting actually does is transport you to an alternate version of the level you're already playing on, where the tiles can change in opacity, collision or function depending on your destination. But more importantly, the eversion mechanic reveals a robust descent of tiers that can only access other worlds immediately adjacent to them in these tiers, and if you've been paying any attention to the way that sprite's been flickering out of the corner of your vision, you've probably already picked up on the fact that they become steadily creepier and deadlier the deeper you delve into them, belying an ultimate objective that isn't just getting to the end of the level in one piece.

To wit, the true ending of the game requires that you collect every single gem scattered throughout the levels like rings or coins, and this is where eversion itself shines as a game mechanic. Levels themselves are carefully and cleverly constructed in such a way that the majority of gems can never be completed with just one version of the level, requiring you to strategically flip between them to find the right combination of opaque, collision-disabled, breakable and hazardous objects to open a path to a handful that have been evading your grasp up to that point. In the interests of honesty, though, as a system it works best when you only have to deal with at most 3-4 different layers for all the different variables that can change between them, and the later levels in the game can have as many as seven, and to be honest combined with the backtracking you have to do to be able to evert on command - which I remind can only be done in select locations on the map that are fucking invisible - it can be genuinely headache inducing to try to figure out some of the solutions of later levels.

While the game is still a nice memory and alright while it lasts, but the collision detection is kind of annoying whenever you need to jump upwards through a one block wide space. And honestly? There just isn't enough of it. Eight levels might have worked for a free game like it originally released as, but the game goes for $7.50 on Steam nowadays, which is absolute robbery for the amount of actual game you get out of it. Eversion stands as a neat proof of concept and a great use of shock value, but I feel like it could have honestly gone bigger than that.

December 8, 2020

Seto (Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon)

Fragile Dreams is a game that seems to suffer from suboptimal translation and awkward voice direction more than anything else, which is kind of a shame because I think I can see what they were going for here. The game is very much just a vehicle for its dialogue and its narrative, to sell its circumstances and its atmosphere for the deluge of cutscenes it showers you with. We know this can work, because there are games today that have pulled it off with flying colours now that people have started taking videogame seriously as a storytelling medium, and I'm sure in its original Japanese release it was exactly as poignant as it set out to be. But good lord, this localization is a joke. Most of the lines read like they're transliterated directly from their Japenese originals instead of translated into contexts that better suit the English language, resulting in a lot of frivilous lines that really didn't need to be there, and it's so flagrantly half-assed at even that that the signs aren't even retextured to display English text, forcing you to walk right up to them point blank and open a first person camera to see what they actually say. Gunning for Miyazaki vibes in a videogame is one thing, but you CANNOT do localization as just an afterthought, because it will definitely show, and the game will suffer abroad because of it.

So needless to say, without the narrative to bear the weight of the rest of the game's flaws, the under-developed combat stands out a lot more than it should. Now let's be clear about this, as I have many times before - a basic combat system is fine, sometimes even desirable, if it does exactly the job it was made to do and does it well. Some of my favourite games ever made have exactly one method of attack and manage to make it interesting all by itself. Fragile Dreams on the other hand, comes off as incredibly clunky and clumsy, trying to break molds and conventions of attacking simply just for the sake of saying they were different. There are multiple classes of weapon in this game - probably the most striking one is the sword-esque ones which all attack in 3-hit combos, but the strength of your individual strikes depends on how much delay you can leave between hits and still hit within a very specific timing window that isn't in any way revealed to you beforehand. Most of the other weapons function on some kind of charging mechanic, but one in which the highest level of charge isn't even necessarily the weapon's strongest attack - a distinction that also isn't hinted at particularly well, causing you mainly to flail a lot when you first use them, and sometimes even when you know what the timing windows are like with hammers and mallets. This wouldn't be so bad if you had ANY defensive or mobility options, but it's literally just walk up to think > whack thing, which can make later encounters in the game genuinely fucking unfair. Especially these fucking doll mannequin things that will tear you apart in seconds if you let them.

If nothing else, though, the atmosphere of this game is still top notch, and part of it is down to elements unique to the Wii. For the most part, Fragile Dreams has no backing music until a fight occurs, playing in total silence that is punctuated with just the sounds of your footsteps and occasionally some area specific ambience. Enemies in this game are normally invisible and don't manifest until you shine your torchlight on them, but you can hear them in advance - just not through your TV. Your Wiimote has a speaker on it, and pointing your cursor in the direction of an enemy can cause you to hear noises from them based on what kind of enemy it is - which can give you genuine pause if you hear a noise that's completely unfamiliar to you, especially if it's vicious snarling like you start to experience from the subway onwards. It might not make TOTAL sense from a logical perspective, but it's still a very clever integration of the Wiimote's tech and I have to give credit where credit is due there, because for all of its success, clever and unique applications of the Wii's hardware is VERY few and far between.

On one last note, this game really doesn't have much respect for the player's time. Just about everything of note you do that isn't exploring or fighting is done at campfires, which are essentially this game's version of a save point. And the game knows exactly how frequently you'll need to backtrack to them, because I swear there's one every two or three fucking rooms. Even on the most basic level most of the animations are slow and can't be interrupted, which is a pain in the ass when you have to move items into and out of storage one at a time, from your ingame "on hand" inventory to a "briefcase" where you store everything else. You can't access this briefcase during normal gameplay, so if a weapon breaks - and you better believe they break often, even if not quite to Breath of the Wild extremes - you have to drop EVERYTHING to go back to a fireplace to restock your inventory with weapons. There are also "mystery items" that can't be identified unless under the light of a campfire (but the light of a flashlight isn't fucking good enough???), but they continue to occupy inventory space regardless, so if you packed for the offchance that your weapon breaks or for getting wounded enough to justify healing before you can reach another campfire, you're forced to just leave it there, go back to a campfire, unload all the shit you don't need, walk all the way back and - oh wait the item isn't there anymore, but all the motherfuckers that dropped it respawn even if the campfire is in the same room you found them so you have to beat them up all over again and pray that they're kind enough to drop an item the second time, which they might not even do.

This is the kind of game you'll probably play once for the story, and then never touch again because getting there is a pain. Which is a shame honestly, because if it weren't for the lacklustre translation I probably could have recommended this game regardless.

December 8, 2020

Arbiter Ripa (Halo Wars)

As usual, I gotta say that I don't exactly have the most storied history with RTS games, but I don't think it takes an expert to realize that RTSs on consoles have it really rough. For the longest time it wasn't even really possible to do proper multiplayer on them, because an RTS game between multiple players depends on being able to conceal your movements with the fog of war until right around the moment you strike, and a splitscreen game doesn't really do much in the way of preventing you from just watching exactly what your opponent is up to. Even when consoles were finally given the benefit of network play, it didn't change the fact that consoles lacked both the precision of a mouse and the sheer amount of hotkeys of a keyboard to work with, so whenever they were graced with a port there usually needed to be some kind of unholy concession made to boil them down to the extent that they could function on a gamepad, like limited control groups or the inability to jump around the map via the minimap. And therein lies the problem - that the majority of console RTSs were ports, of games that were explicitly not designed with a gamepad's limitations in mind. Halo Wars stands as one of the first - and very few - exceptions to that rule, and is a game that I think can appeal to newbies and vets alike in their own ways.

Many of HW's optimizations are contextual in nature - though you can't click on the minimap to quickly jump anywhere on the map you want, you can quickly zip to the action whenever you get a notification that something under your control is being attacked, and if you have multiple bases you can cycle through them with the dpad, which might not be as quick as setting a control group to them but it still works within the confines of what's available on the gamepad. Speaking of control groups, I honestly can't remember if this game even has any? I don't say that in a bad way, because honestly I don't think I ever really need them - Halo Wars has dedicated buttons for selecting every unit on the map and for selecting every unit currently onscreen, and once you have that selection you can further refine it down to a specific class of unit. So in a way, unit types ARE the control groups. For example, you can have a group of tanks performing the primary "fucking shit up" work load and a group of air units as a rapid response squad for stuff they can't reach in time. Which is a situation that can and probably will happen, because ground units, especially mobile armour, have a tendency to get confused when too many of them occupy one specific area, consequently making it much harder to get them through anything that isn't a wide open field.

One element of Halo Wars I DON'T agree with is that you're very limited in where you can actually build in this game - bases can only be built in predetermined locations on any given map, which themselves have a predetermined number of buildings you can place around them and a predetermined amount of turrets you can place on their borders. And once you get past the idea that you're severely limited in how much resources you can gather and how many units you can create in a given span of time, you also have to contend with the fact that you have hard limits on the amount of units you can have on the map at any one time. Skirmishes can often feel like an endless war of attrition for how limited your options can be for outperforming the enemy, especially if your opponent is a Covenent faction, because if they tech up enough to open up the ability to build Scarabs you can bet they will build absolutely nothing BUT them and overwhelm most opposition that is thrown at them. Honestly, most of the remaining problems I have with Halo Wars could have been solved just by letting you place buildings fucking wherever and ditching the arbitary unit cap.

That just leaves the campaign. Most of it is fine, with one HUGE outlier - a mission where you don't start with any bases or even enough units to advance, but an assortment of Elephants, basically mobile bases which can only produce infantry. While you're trying to make enough units to advance, Brutes are rushing you CONSTANTLY, whittling down what little progress you can make in a way I'm still not sure how you're supposed to overcome consistently, but it can take something like 5-10 minutes of CONSTANTLY producing units to beat back the encroaching hordes with the very, very, VERY limited resources you're given to do it with. When you finally manage to break through and get a base established, the Flood shows up, forcing you to beat THEM back too while you're desperately trying to establish a hold on your little corner of the map. And then when you finally get the resources to branch out and work the objective - which is to find a bunch of units stranded all over the map and bring them back to base - the mission abruptly ends with a fail state, because it turns out THE MISSION HAS A FUCKING TIME LIMIT THAT ISN'T EXPRESSED TO YOU BEFOREHAND, FORCING YOU TO RESTART THE ENTIRE 20 MINUTES ALL OVER AGAIN FOR A GROUP OF FACELESS SOLDIERS YOU HAD PRODUCED 30 TIMES OVER JUST DEFENDING THE FIRST CHOKEPOINT IN THAT MISSION. WHAT THE HELL, BUNGIE???

Besides that, Halo Wars is a pretty good game. Even better with mates. It has a Steam port now, which uh... I guess sorta defeats the point of mechanics built for limited console controls, but more availability is never a bad thing. =V

December 10, 2020

Sheva and Chris (Resident Evil 5)

In what has been a somewhat concerning trend the past few pages, here's another sequel that's considered a step down from its predecessors. And it's tempting to say that stigma is somewhat unfair, but it's fair to mention I had the benefit of actually having another human being to play this with, which I think speaks to one of the flaws in this game's decision making process - fans have never, ever bought a Resident Evil game for its multiplayer component, and trying to force it onto players that predominantly wanted singleplayer horror and nothing else was never going to go over smoothly. In that regard, Resident Evil 5 is neither - you're forced to have a partner regardless of whether you're playing with another player or not, and Capcom have apparently seen RE4's success as an indication that they need more action focus and less thrills, and what's left is a game that's predomantly just shooting up crowds of brown dudes as you jump from one place to the next.

Oh don't give me that look. Setting the game in Africa was always going to be a decision that really needed some kind of delicacy and finesse - and if you think Capcom handled it with any kind of respect, you should know the middle of the game has you fighting tribal motherfuckers with bows, clubs, spears and skirts that literally shout OLOLOLOLOLO before lunging at you. I genuinely wish I was making that shit up. And the less said about Sheva's costume options, the better.

Even when played as intended, RE5 still has some flaws I can't ignore, such as the inventory system. This has never been perfect in a Resident Evil game, but we're using RE4 as an example because that's what much of RE5 is built on anyway: which had a system that made different items different sizes, and you often had to Tetris your way into making them fit in your attache case, and you had to pause the game to access it anyway. To say the least, it was flowbreaking even in context, and you can't exactly move it onto a coop focused game anyway because opening your menu repeatedly would piss your partner off really fucking quickly if it paused their game too. RE5 attempts to solve this by making a menu that still keeps you from playing normally but doesn't pause the game at all, and you are given a scant nine inventory slots in which all items occupy the same amount of space. That would be bad enough, if not for the fact that ammo, healing items and armour all occupy inventory spaces too, greatly limiting the amount of actual practical gear you can carry at any one time. Of course, you don't want to be manually navigating a menu with dozens of zombies bearing down on you. You can access items in the cardinal directions by using the Dpad, but the game does not fucking tell you that you can do this. Why? Fucked if I know, but this game has a habit of not telling the player about a lot of useful mechanics in general, like the ability to juggle enemies between both players with melee moves, and I honestly can't fathom why.

Needless to say, most of RE5's complaints come from people who have had to play it with the AI controlling the partner - and having done entire playthroughs both coop and alone, I can definitely see why people take issue with it. Like, just put aside how dumb the AI is on their own and needs to be babysat through the whole game like just about every other gamelong escort quest ever concocted - we already covered that with RE4, so I'm sure I don't need to go through it again. The bigger problem is that you really don't have a great deal of control over their behaviour. For some mystifying reason, the programmers made AI partners stubbornly stick to pistols by default, even when their ammo is cripplingly low or completely gone, and even when they're facing enemies that are clearly not designed to be taken down with small arms. The only exception to this is when they're told to attack rather than follow - the one command you CAN give to them actively - which causes them to break away and hunt down enemies of their own initiative, which will usually get them downed or killed instead far and away from any hope of you getting back to them in time and reviving them. So you have a choice between a bot that plays relatively safe but will get almost nothing done, or a bot that will Leeroy Jenkins it right into the nearest horde of zombies but will actually bother using the SMG or sniper rifle you gave to them because you physically cannot fucking carry them yourself. Wow, what an engaging choice. Was it REALLY too much fucking trouble not to just make them use weapons based on their situation and their ammo count?

Most of the issues beyond that are kind of petty, but I can't do a writeup without addressing them. Most of the game has this godawful fucking ugly green filter over it like it's supposed to be fucking kryptonite fog or something. Which isn't to say it looks spectacular besides, but the filter genuinely does turn this game into absolute dogshit from an artistic perspective. The writing is pretty crap too, if the second paragraph didn't already tip you off to that, but it comes with none of the camp that RE4's narrative did and expects to be taken completely seriously for it. Later into the game they introduce these four armed beetle things that just kill you instantly without recourse and doesn't do a good job explaining that this is actually avoidable - it does a decent job signposting the obvious weakpoints that are needed to kill it completely, but not the fact that it will only intstakill you if it has all four arms still attached. And naturally this game still has the same QTEs that RE4 did, mid cutscene ones included, but are just so much more obnoxious for it - and frankly, the novelty of entire encounters and boss fights playing out in QTE only had already long since worn off by this stage, to the point that it comes off as incredibly fucking lazy from a game design perspective. And really, that just brings me back to the moral of RE4's story - everyone learnt all the wrong lessons from its success, and that INCLUDES Capcom and the very people that made it a fucking success in the first place, which is absolutely mind boggling to think of and honestly, makes me believe that it was all just an incredible fluke in much the same way Eternal Darkness was for Silicon Knights.

If you still want to give this game a shot, I'm not stopping you, but please for the love of god make sure you have another actual human being to play it with, because the game is at its absolute worse when your AI partner is basically just Ashley with a gun.

December 11, 2020

Commander Geary (Stormrise)

Christ on a fucking pancake, I have no idea what I was expecting when I booted this game up for the first time. Even from a glance, it was clear it was made with the same mindset that Halo Wars was - that console RTSs suffer overwhelmingly from being ported from PC almost verbatim rather than being designed with the platform's limitations in mind. What separates Stormrise from Halo Wars though, is that Stormrise is absolute dogshit. Not just any ordinary absolute dogshit - its qualities make it genuinely one of the worst RTS games ever made, and certainly the one of the worst I've ever played personally (only JUST losing out to Maelstrom, another equally gimmicky RTS that would probably be on this list too if I could bear to actually play enough of it to form a concise writeup). What came as a surprise to me was that this game was made by Creative Assembly, champions of the Total War series and later eventual developers of the sequel to the aformentioned Halo Wars, so if anyone should have known how to make a great console RTS it should have been these guys. How in the everloving fuck did they ever screw it up THIS badly?

Much of it can be summed up by its trademark Whip Select system. You always have a unit or structure selected, and you change that selection by holding down your right stick in the direction of one of your units and release to "whip" over to that specific unit. It sounds simple in theory, and I'm sure in a desolate world on some distant solar system it might be considered simple in practice too - but your angle can change on the way back from the "whip", causing you to select a unit just adjacent to the one you thought you were selecting, and even when working as intended the fact remains that RTS games involve hoarding a LOT of units in small spaces at any given time, causing them to near-overlap and preventing you from aiming at the one you really need to move in that group. Even finding the right angle to point towards can be disorienting, because your viewpoint is more or less horizontal from the ground but the Whip Select interface is aligned directly upright on a completely different axis. and this is before we get to the fact that this method of control only lets you command ONE fucking unit at a time, or at most a command group of a scant three units, and it isn't even until the third mission that the game informs you how to give commands to units OTHER than the one you're hovering directly over. It can only be something that trancends sheer negligence if you make a system like Whip Select with the intent of streamlining the experience for console users and end up being LESS responsive and enjoyable than verbatim ports, and if you're wondering why I keep capitalizing it, it's because I wasn't kidding about that trademark - it's right there on the back of the box, an ACTUAL trademark for Whip Select, which might be the single most idiotic corporate OC DONUT STEEL moment ever because it implies that these people were so proud of what they'd designed that they genuinely believed it had enough value to be licensed and used by other fucking companies.

Even when you put Whip Select and look at its other mechanics, they're still a complete joke. I could talk all day about artificial stupidity and pathfinding problems all day, as well as the inability to actually command units into an area beyond line of sight because of the fact that you can't move your fucking camera away from anything you don't own, but one thing I want to bring up in particular is a mechanic they call "crossfire" because I simply cannot fucking believe it escaped QA unscathed. Simply put, if an enemy unit is being fired apon from two different positions at once, it establishes a crossfire and that unit takes a lot more damage. Because units have to come to a complete stop to fire back, though, and because the AI is exceptionally bad at it (and sometimes might not even fucking bother, choosing to interpret your command to fire apon distant units as "walk right fucking up to point blank first"), the defending side in any skirmish will always have a near-unassailable advantage. It enforces an overwhelming focus on camping that really sucks the joy and strategic depth out of any battle, and that's just with battles that concern infantry only - by the time the game introduced vehicles there were simply just too many fucking variables to keep track of, and after two damn near impossible base assaults in a row I genuinely could not stomach a single moment more of this game's campaign anyway.

It is a genuine embarrasment that this game was ever released. Not just in the state it was in, I mean at all - any sane developer would have taken one look at the shitshow that was unfolding and shitcanned the whole project then and there, because there is not a single good idea in the whole fucking game that would have averted a catastrophy like this with just more polish.

December 12, 2020

Jack Cayman (Madworld)

On the surface, Madworld seems like everything that an arcade brawler on consoles should be. That's not to say there's anything wrong with making an arcade style brawler almost exactly how actual arcades would have designed it - Streets of Rage 4 is proof positive that you can release an arcade game virtually verbatim even today and it will still perform spectacularly with the right attention to detail. Arcade games were originally all about score whenever the thrill of simply beating them wore off, and in Madworld the two go hand in hand. Every level still has the ultimate objective of fighting a boss to complete it, but they require a certain amount of points to unlock. And to that end, the levels of Madworld aren't actually linear, but rather open-ended playgrounds for hunting down goons and abusing the absolute shit out of them to raise points not just towards the boss, but for other means of raising score like weapons, hazards and even minigames that all follow a similarly abusive theme. And to be totally honest? This fixation on sadism can actually work a lot against the game rather than in its favour, because a lot of these actions aren't centred around actually FIGHTING people.

See, while killing enemies is worth points no matter what you do, just beating them up isn't worth much. And this is where I point out that I was really not fucking kidding about abuse and sadism - this game wants you to milk mooks for their points and only finish them off when you've run out of ways to torture them with the scenery. And I might not have so much of a problem with it if it weren't the SAME GOD DAMN THREE PUNISHMENTS EVERY SINGLE TIME. Impale them through the neck with a long foreign object, shove a tire or a bin over their heads, then dump them onto a stage hazard to finish them off, usually a row of spikes to impale them on. The game tries to play it off as though points are earnt by being stylish and creative about dealing with enemies, but what the fuck is so creative about doing the exact same thing to every single enemy to farm them for points? Why wouldn't you work it into variation with combos like Devil May Cry does, and leave just the environmental kills as a finishing bonus? It's made all the worse by the fact that Jack's signature chainsaw will kill most enemies instantly without much in the way of actual points for having to spend a gauge for it, so unless you're fighting a boss it tends to just sit there unused because you're effectively punished for trying to use it to get out of a bad situation, which in turn is a very frustrating bad habit in Platnium's design philosphy that plagues a LOT of games they make - to actually punish the player for using all the resources at their disposal.

In terms of actual fighting, Madworld is simple in a lot of the areas that matter, but is weighed down by its platform of choice - this being a Wii game, of course it has to wedge motion controls into the mix whether or not they even work to the game's benefit. Using waggle in place of button presses and nothing more is already bad enough, considering motion control will never be as responsive for this purpose as a simple on-or-off state button - but Madworld uses QTEs too, and almost all the QTEs are fucking motion controlled. God, as if pressing X 60 times to not die in Unleashed wasn't bad enough, now you have to flail remotes and nunchuks around like a total spastic and pray you have enough space in your room to avoid breaking something. The basics work just fine - A to punch, B to chainsaw, hold A to grab, what on earth is there in this game that couldn't have been condensed into just these three mechanics? Madworld is a game that absolutely did not need to be motion controlled and seems to have felt obligated to use them simply because they were there and nothing more, which is absolutely the most wrong stance to have on motion controls you can possibly have. A motion controlled game should be designed around them from the get-go, not used as a crutch because you can't figure out how to separate other functions into independant buttons.

I still think the core concept of Madworld is a good idea - a playground you have a limited amount of time to gain score out of strictly for progression's sake, but it really should have been geared towards fighting things well rather than finding sticks and bins to stick through people. If nothing else, though, its presentation is really on fucking point - using a scant three colours without elements of the action blending into each other is a huge feat, and Platnium makes it seem so easy. Not to mention almost the entire game is live commentated by two casters the whole way, and while they have a propensity to repeat lines sometimes - ESPECIALLY in the bloodbath minigames - they're genuinely well written and hilarious in their own right, which is something the industry nowadays could use a lot more of. An actual battle royale game would be so much more enticing to me with these two guys around.

December 13, 2020

It's like a law of the internet - any community online, given enough time, popularity and passion, will eventually attempt make a game based specifically around said community. To no surprise, this will most commonly occur in the orbit of fansites, mainly because they already have plenty of material to derive from. Doom modders have tried it, to varying levels of success. So have Sonic fangamers. Even our very own SSMB has taken a stab at it at least once. However, this ends in disaster the overwhelming majority of the time, because these kinds of impromptu projects consistently overestimate how demanding it is to make a functioning videogame, and most never assemble a functional design plan, or a cast of characters, or even a single person that can competently program the whole thing. And while what results can be a labour of love if it ever finishes, it certainly may not resemble anything like a labour of talent, like it often can be for games made exclusively for the benefit of a small group friends like Sword of the Black Stone.

I'm not setting this up for anticipation of an equally terrible game, though - far from it. This game actually stands as one of the only exceptions to the rule:

Trestkon (The Nameless Mod)

The Nameless Mod, or TNM for short, is a total conversion for Deus Ex set inside a realm called Forum City, which itself is a representation of an actual message board of its day, Planet Deux Ex. Right from the get go it shows no pretentions of taking itself completely seriously bar what's needed to keep the plot moving along, satisfied merely with emulating the DX vibe and adding some silly internet humour and injokes for flavour. What results is what could honestly have been a single map joke campaign and nobody would have complained, like Unreal Revolution or The Malkavian Mod. Instead, TNM goes as far as to essentially create a brand new game of its own and become its own universe entirely, complete with genuinely branching story arcs, an absolutely ridiculous amount of maps to play through it, a few brand new weapons and items all its own and a shitton of dialogue that is fully voiced, between a cast of something like 59 voice actors and many people who are playing their own roles as their own avatars within Forum City's community. That something of this calibre can exist, for free, and not only refuse to suck but even stand up to Deux Ex itself is postiively fucking mindblowing, even if it has some totally understandable rough edges as a result of people who don't design, code, animate or voice for an actual living.

Much like Deux Ex, the plot starts with a simple premise and branches out into something else entirely as it develops - Forum City has three invulnerable, demigod-like Moderators that keep the peace and defend it from the threat of spam and flame wars, but one of them, Deus Diablo, suddenly goes missing. And because it would make their jobs much worse if they announced a gap in their defences like that, they call apon Trestkon, just returning from a year long break from the forums, to investigate Diablo's disappearance discreetly. And to be totally honest, if there's any one area that TNM exceeds the original Deux Ex, the way this narrative unfolds and branches would probably be it - because you can pick one of two story branches practically right at this point, and although they have many shared missions from both sides seeking the same thing, even those shared missions are given completely different optics by the people you are working under, to say nothing of the actual branches in missions and rewards that result from siding with Scara over the moderators. Even though Deus Ex's own storyline is equal parts engaging and horrifying, Ion Storm simply weren't given the time to split the entire midgame onwards into two, whereas TNM would clearly have nothing but time on their side.

The new additions to TNM's arsenal are appreciated most where they fill gaps in Deus Ex's original design. For example, you never really had much reason to drop points into the Pistols skill because there were like three weapons that benefitted from it, and most of them are really mediocre and only specialize in organic targets. Not only do you have Trestkon's signature dual wielded .45s that can actually hold their own in a firefight, TNM also introduces an EMP pistol relatively early on in the game if you care to look for it, making a pistol-only run genuinely viable for once, not to mention offering genuine upgrades to existing pistol tier weapons like the blowpipe over the minicrossbow. However, some of these skill changes feel a bit redundant. TNM realizes that nobody will put points into the Demolitions skill because a single LAM will destroy almost any target and the window for disarming wall mines is already adequete, so they try to incentive putting points into the skill with... the ability to make molotovs. Which take fucking forever to throw, are designed only to set one enemy on fire and sometimes might not even do THAT because a direct hit won't set them ablaze, only the individual little flames it spawns. Likewise, TNM recognizes the Swimming skill is completely fucking useless with the presence of Rebreathers and removed the skill in its entirety, replacing it with an Unarmed skill that... never seems to approach any kind of usefulness relative to the Low Tech skill, which already has its own projectile weapons as well as some new TNM specific ones like Throwing Sporks (don't ask) and even still has the Dragon's Tooth sword in the game which can be obtained pretty early if you save up the credits, which is still as borderline gamebreaking as it was in the original Deus Ex. Why would you want to introduce two melee skills when one is objectively better in virtually every way? Why not just fold the Unarmed skill into the Low Tech skill so you don't have the same dead weight that the Swimming skill was?

Above all else though, I just appreciate that a project like this was more or less able to unite an entire community into a single project like this without turning into a total clusterfuck. There are games made by actual development studios that have turned out much worse than this, and anyone who's played Deus Ex and has even the slightest appreciation for it should also give this a shot. It's genuinely funny, generally solid in design and honestly surpasses its influences in some areas, and it's completely free to see it for yourself. It's absolutely worth the rough edges and inconsistent microphone qualities that inevitably result from these kinds of fan projects.

December 14, 2020

Momohime and Kisuke (Muramasa: The Demon Blade)

Muramasa has a really strong, if abrupt, start going for it. For starters, it's a Wii game that is entirely aware that their platform of choice has limitations and that trying to awkwardly wedge in motion controls is NOT a good solution, and yet still manages a combat system that is fast, combo-y, flows well and is still satisfying and fun to play around with, largely with just one button. That alone is already impressive in its own right, but it's amazing from a presentation standpoint too, with amazing hand-drawn backgrounds, silky smooth animation and a phenominal Japan themed soundtrack that would stand up even completely in a vaccuum - but let me tell you, hearing that first boss theme in context was an amazing experience the first time around, beckoning you to take what you've learned in the short time you've had with the opening level and use it to kick some serious ass:

And then you gain the ability to leave the level from the boss you just slayed - but the exit is at the start of the level. And when you backtrack through about 2-3 minutes of completely empty level and make your way into the game world proper, you'll find this really sets the tone for the rest of the game, because almost all of it is just more of the same - doing literally nothing besides holding left or right across often identical landscapes, occasionally stopping to deal with a random encounter that often plays out the same way almost every time. And for Muramasa to achieve virtual perfection in almost every other aspect of its being only to stumble this hard on its pacing is honestly nothing short of tragic. Everything else about this game feels carefully considered and measured, but this style of pacing only reads like padding cynically put into the game to avoid being four hours long. And I hate that this is what games have come down to in recent day - titles that are long only because they obessively recycle content, not titles that last a long time because the player actually has a reason to play them repeatedly - even if that reason is just because it's a fucking fun game. I don't think I've EVER seen a game ruin such a strong first impression as Muramasa has. Not one.

Despite having RPG-esque stylings, Muramasa doesn't really do anything interesting with them. When you make a game with RPG elements, at the very least they should serve a style of progression that's more than just a numbers game, but that's really all it amounts to in this game - numbers going up. More health, items that heal more health, and swords that do more damage. And for all the style and conciseness of the moveset you experience in the opening level, it's all you really ever use. You're not given anything to develop into or specialize with, just using souls to develop weapons that have an easier time killing people for more souls. You do get a selection of sub-abilities, but they are WEAPON SPECIFIC, and drain your sword's durability to use, which is a resource you desperately need for blocking attacks whenever you can't avoid them, and well, actually attacking back. Neither of which you can do if all three of the swords you bring to a fight snap, forcing you to wait something like 20-30 seconds for one of them to regenerate back into a usable form again. It's almost the worst possible way they could have approached special abilities in this game, where they could have functioned as a selection of abilities entirely separate from the swords they're bound to in this game and work on their own meter to use. You generally won't even have a specific ability in your posession long enough to figure out ways to weave it into combos like the rest of your character's kit, because you go through swords like fucking copy paper in this game and its RPG design is as such that you have absolutely no reason to hang on to a sword for the ability attached to it so much as the damage it can do on the regular.

Lastly, maybe it's entitled as fuck to complain about, but the game is subs only. Yeah, I know the whole "dubs vs subs" shit, but I feel it takes a whole different light when it enters the realm of videogames - to hear dialogue voiced over in a different language than the subtitles is just distracting as all hell, to the point that I genuinely would have preferred they be silent otherwise if they couldn't just hire an English voice cast. Especially when the onus is on the player to advance the dialogue manually, and they have no way of understanding the sequence or emphasis in everyone's lines to know when it's a good idea to skip ahead. It can't be just me that has a problem with this, right?

ITT BL reminisces over his entire game library

Recommended Posts

Blacklightning

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Top Posters In This Topic

Popular Days

Top Posters In This Topic

Popular Days

Popular Posts

Blacklightning

Blacklightning

Blacklightning

Blacklightning

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Blacklightning

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Blacklightning

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Blacklightning

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Blacklightning

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Blacklightning

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Blacklightning

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Blacklightning

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Blacklightning

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Blacklightning

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Blacklightning

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Blacklightning

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Blacklightning

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Blacklightning

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Blacklightning

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Blacklightning

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Blacklightning

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Blacklightning

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Blacklightning

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Blacklightning

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Blacklightning

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Blacklightning

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Blacklightning