ITT BL reminisces over his entire game library

December 15, 2020

Rad Spencer (Bionic Commando '09)

A bad reboot almost always fulfills the same unholy trinity of design decisions - dark and / or edgy, laden with unnecessary retcons and gameplay diversions, and a name that is identical to the original media it's based off of so fans will forever be forced to refer to the game with some kind of asterisk even if it somehow turns out to be good. Obviously us Sonic fans have the most infamous example of the bunch, but I wouldn't be bringing it up it if it didn't apply just as much here. Is it edgy? You bet your F-bombs it is. Does it retcon shit for no reason? God, do I have a wife related story for you. Does it share names for no other reason than to invoke nostalgia? Read the title I gave it again and note that I have to distinguish it by the year it was released. Of course, comparing this game to Sonic 06 is maybe a bit unfair for anything besides an extreme point of reference - because directly comparing them would imply that this game didn't do anything right, and I still have to begrudgingly admit it has its high points.

On a strictly mechanical level, swinging from point to point works pretty great, with a few unusual points of jank involved. One would think latching onto a small handhold precicely would be pretty fucking difficult while flying or falling through the air at high speeds, especially with twin stick controls, but Bionic Commando '09 has a surprisingly simple and elegant solution - simply hold the grappling button down, and Spencer will latch onto the first thing your crosshair passes over within its reach while you're holding the button down. And chaining these into swings is a genuinely satisfying experience right up until the moment the path ends and you run out of things to grapple, at which point your speed inexplicably slows to a crawl and you drop like a rock because apparently conserving momentum and actually having fun is too much to ask? Of course, when you actually look at it in context it makes a bit more sense - because these guys couldn't be fucked to make genuinely open ended levels that are actually capable of handling the full range of motion Spencer is capable of, so what they did instead is scatter fatal "radiation zones" around the map that keep you from interacting from anything bar the intended scope of the mission. These radiation zones kill you REALLY fucking quickly, often too quickly to correct course by the time you realize you're getting hurt by them even with your existing mobility, nevermind what you could have achieved if this game didn't pull a Sonic 4 on your ass - but the radiation zones are also completely fucking invisible, so often you have no way of knowing what the exact boundaries of a map are until you die several times to them, and I swear they sometimes have the nerve to place them between areas you need to get to so sometimes it's not even as consistent as placing a gigantic cylinder of radioactive death around the whole level.

The combat is... okay. Most of it is at its best when you don't rely on guns to get work done. Even on a really basic level you can grapple right onto an enemy and zip directly into them in Homing Attack-esque fashion, complete with the same unnecessary airtime flip at the end, but you can also use both the grappling hook and a specific combo move to launch physics objects and enemies at other enemies, which is a similar kind of gratification I liked Psi Ops for all those years ago. Actual firearms seem to be present in this game more as a fallback than anything else, but compared to grappling options they're weirdly inconsistent and difficult to actually hit with. If I had to hazard a guess, this is probably the actual reason you essentially airbrake immediately whenever you release your grappling hook, because hitting shit with a firearm while moving through the air at high speed - again, especially with a gamepad - would be an incredibly difficult task otherwise, but it seems like they could save a lot of trouble just by giving guns the same aim assistance that the grappling hook benefits from so either can be either equally viable or have their own benefits depending on the situation.

But good god, the writing is absolutely ridiculous, and probably the biggest reason this game gets the ridicule it does. It isn't enough to say "this dude nuked a city and invaded it and we can't get anyone else inside, we need you to fuck this guy up cos you're the only one good at it" - they have to invent this dumb backstory where people grow "distrustful" of cyborgs, that Spencer is a military convict and he has an aformentioned case of a missing wife that is somehow supposed to be his only motivation for getting involved at all. And the already bloated writing is emphasized by actors who seem physically incapable of reading a line without hamming it up in the process, but if you know of this game you already know what I'm leading up to here so I'm just going to blurt it right out:

Spoiler

SPENCER'S BIONIC ARM IS HIS WIFE. THEY EXPECT US TO BELIEVE EVEN FOR A SECOND THAT SOMETHING AS SIMPLE AS A FUCKING BIONIC ARM NEEDS HIS WIFE TO FUNCTION. WHO THOUGHT THIS UP AND EXPECTED PEOPLE TO BELIEVE IT'S A GOOD IDEA.

If there's only one thing to take away from Bionic Commando '09, it's that its mechanics WERE onto something - it just needed to be less restrictive with its air friction and level design, and if a level absolutely needed boundaries it should've been done with something more organic than volumes of invisible fucking radiation all over the place. I would have been perfectly fine with the shitty writing and acting if it just let me be basically Spiderman with a gun, but I guess it just wasn't to be.

December 16, 2020

Alec Mason (Red Faction Guerilla)

I'm just going to say it straight - the original Red Faction games were crap. As shooting games they were overwhelmingly mediocre, so their quality was always going to hinge overwhelmingly on how fun its signature brand of destruction would fare, but you didn't get to play with it much because most of the game was set in cast steel corridors that couldn't really be damaged and you usually didn't have a reason to engage it it even when you could because it depends on you knowing exactly where a breach in a wall will actually lead you anywhere, which they don't always signpost and don't give you enough explosives to just blow shit up experimentally. Guerilla on the other hand, rather than trying to expand a terrain destruction system that arguably didn't actually do anything of worth in the first place, wisely decided instead to focus destruction towards an element that COULD be limited within reason - entire structures. Yup, you're just a straight up demoman in this game - the only thing that changes is that you're refocused towards wrecking government property instead of condemned and abandoned shit.

And honestly? I cannot recall any other game, even today, that does it in such a detailed fashion. I'm talking "these buildings were designed by actual architects" kind of detailed. You can plunge a sledgehammer into a wall and see all the supporting structure beneath, and watch parts of it fly loose when you let loose a detpack or a rocket launcher on it. It's the kind of thing that tickles the most primal sense of catharsis in your brain. It doesn't matter if you're using just a sledgehammer slowly chipping away at a reinforced wall, it's still incredibly satisfying all the same, and it's honestly incredible that they could pull off a system like this on a 360. There's only one real flaw with the destruction in this game, and it reads like something right out of an ACME skit - it usually doesn't account for a weight bearing limit on any specific part of a structure, only whether it has a clear connection to the ground, so an entire building can be held up by the equivalent of a single 2x4 and somehow not collapse until the moment you walk underneath it like a complete idiot. Honestly though? I totally don't care that it's not completely true to life, because it works exactly where it needs you and is just really fucking fun in its own right, which is a LOT more than what I can say for any attempt previous in the series.

However, it does share a similar issue in that you might not always have enough resources to finish a job. Sometimes this is just in challenge missions where you have to demolish a structure in a unique way, such as setting a string of anti personnel mines to take the exterior of a building out, or knocking over a smoke stack with a single propane canister or even just sticking detpacks to debris and chucking it down a slide to get them to a distant building you can't otherwise reach. These are fine. But when you're just out and about in the game world looking for a building to knock over, I'd like to think it should be capable to physically hold enough ammo to demolish it, regardless of the size, and sometimes you just can't, even if you're carrying a demolition specific weapon in literally every weapon slot possible. There's this one bridge you have to knock over at one point and I swear you have to make FIVE SEPARATE TRIPS back and forth between it and your base to restock on ammo because those supports Just. Won't. Fucking. Die. And this is assuming you manage to get away from the cops every time too, lest we forget that this is an open world game at its core and breaking shit IS against the law.

So long story short, sometimes this game has a habit of cockblocking you - but when you have your way with it, it's fun. I would definitely recommend it over any other game in the series, including its sequel Armageddon - which while it's still better than the originals as a shooter, treats its destruction system as purely an afterthought and tends to get rightly mocked for it.

December 17, 2020

The Joker (Batman: Arkham Asylum / Arkham City)

Before Rocksteady came into the fray, it was kind of hard to imagine a good Batman game, as weird as that seems today. Although we covered The Adventures of Batman and Robin earlier, it was very much the exception rather than the rule - and to be totally honest, it was only really Batman in the barest possible sense, bearing faces and names but not having much else in common. Arkham Asylum, it would seem, was made specifically with the fanservice in mind, boasting a rogues gallery of familiar faces from all manner of the franchise's history, even if most of them would never get top billing. As usual, Joker gets favourable treatment, whereas most of the other villains are built up for a single boss fight and are never heard from again, and some even don't get anything more than a cameo. Regardless, what was more important to a Batman game in this day and age was how it played, and THIS is where Rocksteady struck gold, with mechanics that are incredibly simple and accessible and yet consistently make you feel like a badass when you start adapting to its rhythm.

Probably the best known among them is its brawling system. There isn't really much in the way of complex fighting to speak of - you press a button, Batman lunges at the nearest enemy you're holding the control stick towards. The more people you hit in a row without missing or getting hit yourself, the higher your combo rises, which in turn boosts how hard you hit, how far you can lunge and gives you one-time access to special moves that can help further keep the tide in your favour. And all the enemies are cowardly little fucks that never attack you more than once or twice at a time, signified with bright blue sparks above their head you have a dedicated button to counter with, turning it into yet another opportunity to keep your combo going. Stealth sections are a little more complicated, but still pretty simple at heart and equally cathartic, as you get to see goons steadily losing their minds as you pick them off one by one in environments purpose built for players to use their own AI against them. My only real complaint with this system is that the level design is horribly typecasted depending on the exact gameplay you're expected to perform there. In much the same way chest high walls signals for a third person shooter, encounters become incredibly predictable VERY quickly - you can't walk into a wide open arena or a large, multi-tiered room with gargoyles strewn about without expecting a brawl or a stealth section to break out respectively, if not immediately then the next time you're forced to backtrack through it.

So it needs to be said that these two elements, brilliant though they are, are for the most part diamonds in the rough. Scarecrow is very much a highlight all his own, with hallucinations that very much prey on the player's expectations as much as the character's, but there's a few design missteps that tend to drag things down between sections. Such as the fact that you're in detective vision constantly because everything you absolutely need to see is only visible when it's on, rendering like 80% of the game through a fucking blue filter instead of just integrating its features into your standard viewpoint and/or only showing them when it's relevant, such as when a goon is otherwise obscured by a wall. And frankly, Rocksteady can't design a fucking boss fight to save their life most of the time, with something like half of them being some variation of "dodge roll out of the way of a charging enemy and make them hit a wall", which was an INCREDIBLY tired trope even at the time this game was made, and the one and only time you encounter Killer Croc in the flesh you don't even fight him so much as throw a single batarang at him whenever he shows up to interrupt a tedious maze puzzle. The only time it feels like anyone put genuine effort to design a boss fight like an actual boss is Poison Ivy, and even she's chock full of massive design cliches, right down to "unmoving statue of a boss that runs through attacks like a checklist before exposing its own weak point intentionally. And while Arkham City is still a great game in its own right, these kinds of cliches and snafus are only amplified in addition to putting a LOT more distance between key areas, giving them even more time to worm their way into the gameplay loop at the expense of the brawling and sneaking, to the point that I genuinely can't comprehend that people consider it the better game out of the two.

If a game has genuinely convinced me to 100% it, though, it must have done something right, and there's really not many games I can say that about. Even all time classics like Super Metroid and Doom can get tiring after a point of trying to play for completionist's sake, and the Riddler Trophies of Arkham fame seem to balance delicately between signposting and secrecy in a way I don't think any other game has really come close to matching thus far, and it helps that it's still fun in a vacuum so even just self-contained challenges that plop you and a bunch of enemies into a pre-existing room can play out for quite some hours. Shame about Arkham Knight, though.

December 18, 2020

Alex Mercer (Prototype)

It's... okay. Honestly, Prototype at best was only ever really just... there for me. It didn't really do enough well for me to give it acclaim, yet didn't do anything spectacularly wrong to justify shitting on it. Which makes doing a writeup on this very difficult because a lot of it is just going to amount to a general synopsis of the game itself. Prototype is a sandbox sort of game set in Manhattan (as a LOT of sandboxy games seem to be for some reason) where you play as a shapeshifting bioweapon throughout an increasing epidemic caused by similar bioweapons and... okay yeah, this plot doesn't make any fucking sense honestly. You can absolutely tell they designed the game as a sandbox title first and then only realized later that videogames generally need some semblance of structure in order to coerce players into going through it to the end so they just slapped together any old narrative to old it together. In that respect it can be fun, but it's horrendously bloated, and a lot of upgrades and even entire categories of abilities seem to exist only to fill space and keep designers at work.

Key among them is Alex's ability to morph his arms into weapons, several of which are just straight up redundant and don't really serve any purpose the others do. You have Hammerfists, which trade speed and mobility for the ability to hit hard enough to destroy vehicles, but why the fuck would you ever use them anymore when you have a sword arm that can reliably kill a tank with a single divebomb on TOP of being servicable in a regular fight? Why would you augment your ability to fight hand to hand when you can form claws and go Wolverine on people's asses, and why would you pick either option when you have a whip option that can cleave an entire crowd in half with two moves and can grapple onto and hijack the attack choppers they keep sending at you? And then you have like 3-5 different attacks that are essentially just homing attacks and/or divebombs, and some of them even have some truly absurd button combinations on top of it. Do you have any idea how hard it is to hold down both B and X on an Xbox controller without touching anything else? You have to release your index finger from the comfy position it usually has over the right trigger for it, and it never felt natural to me no matter how many times I tried to use it.

One thing I think Prototype can't really be criticized much for though, is its mobility, which is probably Alex's biggest strength in this game by a huge margin. A lot of other games make climbing buildings seem like a gruelling task, even other games intended to streamline it like Crackdown where you normally at least have to hunt down ledges to grip onto and jump from. Alex can just straight up freerun vertically along the entire height of a skyscraper and then use that height to glide something like halfway across the entire city to wherever you need to go - or as the case may be, to just jump off and elbow drop the local monstrosity of that day, as you often need to gain height quickly to reliably attack certain kinds of enemies. There are a few occasions where that kind of mobility can work against you, because it's kind of hard to turn around when freerunning, but it's structured in such a way that you can move and turn just fine when you let go of the trigger so you can alternate between fast and loose or slower but tighter whenever the situation asks for it, which is something that I wish Boost era Sonic would steal notes from because it's EXACTLY the kind of control everything after Unleashed has really needed to be anything besides a straight line.

So yeah, it's just... fine. You won't regret playing it, but there's probably better things you can do with the money.

December 19, 2020

Maxwell (Scribblenauts series)

I remember Scribblenauts caused quite a stir when it was first released. It had some of the worst controls of any DS title I can recall, but in place of that was a mechanic that allowed you to summon almost literally any object or entity in the game - of which there are thousands - by way of a magic notebook you type words into. This by consequence, enables you to solve a series of puzzles with little limitation bar your own imagination, and sometimes some inconsistent phrasings of some objects. Now, mileage will vary for some people on this concept. Some will continue to explore the limitations as the game progresses, as one NeoGAFer famously did out of frustration in an E3 booth and discovered he could Time Machine to the past, ride a dinosaur and bring it back to the present to wipe out a horde of zombie robots. Others will focus on a smaller number of all-encompassing solutions, like rocket launchers, jetpacks, grappling hooks and the Grim Reaper. Either way, it facinates me that the original Scribblenauts can give you this much choice and still be a genuine challenge at times, and even without that still offer a ridiculous number of ways to solve a single puzzle, probably best emphasized by its iconic starting puzzle of simply getting a Starite out of a tree. I think the only real missed opportunity besides the crap controls is an infinite mode where you can re-solve a single puzzle as many times as possible without re-using words - the original Scribblenauts has a mode where you do this three times and no more, and for some reason later games abandoned it entirely for reasons I just cannot comprehend because it would have added so much replay value to them.

Super Scribblenauts, on top of a lot of quality of life changes (including the controls, and thank fuck for that!), addressed one of the most common complaints with the first game's vocabulary by introducing adjectives, which could for example, summon boulders of varous sizes without having to guess the exact terminology the developers used for a very specific size of boulder you need at that specific time. And as much as I hate to say it, adjectives are the one thing that would prove to be the undoing of Scribblenauts as a whole, because while many puzzles could already be trivial with the options the game gave you, adjectives simply broke the game wide open to the point that you often didn't even have to make separate objects for typical puzzles anymore. I can't even begin to describe how many puzzles I solved just by typing "Burning Explosive Baby" and placing them conveniently within reach of a problem that needed solving, even puzzles that were clearly NOT designed to be solved with it. So rather than daring to temper the outcomes one could make with adjectives to reasonable levels or bothering with level design that could actually accomodate their open ended design, instead started sneaking in levels that were essentially just glorified quizzes - the game asks for a particular kind of item or adjective, you supply it, the game consumes it and the level proceeds in a scripted fashion independently of your actions.

These levels fucking SUCK. They're incredibly boring and lazy for the sheer amount of options you're given, and had I any input on the direction this series was taking I would have nipped them in the bud right then and there. Instead, Scribblenauts Unlimited made them the standard, which is the most fucking hare-brained approach they could have taken with the ever-increasing options they insisted on giving to the player instead of excercising even the slightest fucking modicum of restraint. What the fuck is going through the minds of developers that they'd let you just straight up create brand new objects, and then making levels and challenges that don't even in a single fucking way benefit from them? A series that was once all about using your imagination to solve esoteric puzzles for collectable stars has been reduced to just a long string of one word quizzes, and let me tell you now, if I was ever in any mood for more of those I would just fucking go back to school, because at least then there would be some small chance that I'd pick up a new craft in the process. Who the fuck designed games like this and decided it was fun? Did anyone working on the game even PLAY it before release?

And that's Scribblenauts in a nutshell - a once great game idea, undone by a lack of restraint and an aversion to letting the player actually express themselves with the tools they're given. I would say better luck next time, but this is Warner Bros we're talking about - fun was almost certainly never the objective, at most just a byproduct.

December 20, 2020

Rubi Malone (WET)

Look, nobody likes QTEs. For the most part they only exist as a crutch to avoid designing actual gameplay mechanics that can handle the kind of spectacle the developers clearly intend for a game of this type. So you would think that, if a game absolutely insists on using them, that they be for the kind of action that would otherwise be incredibly messy and complicated to implement any other way. There's good and bad in this in WET - the second level has you jumping from car to car during a high speed chase whilst simultaneously shooting at mobsters in other cars all around you and causing spectacular crashes in your wake, to the point that there are several trucks along the way that serve as convenient wallrunning leaps. It's not to say I wouldn't have preferred some level of control over when and where I lept, but this level was fucking breathtaking regardless of the fact that it was mostly just QTEs with brief shooting segments in between, which is really the only actual reason you should ever be sacrificing any level of player control for them. On the other hand, WET also sports the opposite problem and makes stuff QTES that really had no right to be, and nowhere is this more glaring that the fact that this game does not have a single fucking boss fight - much-hyped encounters with all of the game's big bads are resolved in QTE only, which is an absolutely gobsmacking show of laziness that to this day I still can't comprehend. Do these people have no shame?

When playing normally, WET relies way too much on its slow motion to get anything done. It's a very similar problem to the one Bloodrayne had, in that doesn't have any real limitation so you don't have any reason to not be using it whenever a fight breaks out, but because it saturates so much of the game for this reason, any thrill it has wears off in the first 30 minutes. It's not like you even get to see your exploits later in real time like say, Superhot, because I guess that's a mechanic that would have actually made sense??? Worse still is that WET doesn't just enable the player to spam slow motion moves, it actively encourages it - because you gain more points based on whether you're diving, sliding or wallrunning when you kill someone and get almost nothing for shooting somebody normally, and good fucking luck even getting a kill that way anyway because Rubi for some reason only fires one of her two weapons whenever she's running, effectively halving your fire rate. It isn't like you can just choose not to play for score, because you need the points to pay for upgrades, and the game forces you to run time trials and target shoots whether the fuck you asked to or not, made all the worse by the fact that they're easily the worst parts of this game. Yes, worse than an overreliance on QTEs. At least those look nice.

WET kinda just does way too much way too often in general. Too much of the fucking arenas with infinitely respawning enemies you have to close off, too much of the fucking slow motion dives, too much fucking QTEs, too much fucking button mashing to lever open locked doors with your sword, and too much of hearing that same fucking stock pistol sound effect over and over and over and goddamned over again. It isn't like it acts as padding or anything - even WITH all of that, the game isn't even four hours long. And I really hate how it ended up like that, because on some level I do like the concept, designed as a love letter to grindhouse and John Woo alike. But something seems to have gone wrong with this game conceptually, and nobody seems to have had the heart to tell them that maybe playing a game in 80% slow motion can actually get really fucking boring. I don't know how you could have fixed a game like WET without more or less a complete gameplay overhaul - you could MAYBE excercise some goddamn restraint with the slowmo dives and make them act on a resource like Enter The Matrix does, but even that wouldn't be so simple because of just how much of this game depends on being in constant bullet time, so the only real alternative would've been to just burn everything down and start over.

December 21, 2020

Bayonetta

God, this is what female character design has come to. It was already hard enough in these days to have a female lead character without fetishizing some significant part of it, but Bayonetta goes out of its way to fetishize as much of its design as humanly possible, to the point it even works its way into several gameplay mechanics - finishing moves are often a mixture of dominatrix shit and medieval torture, Bayonetta will perform even basic actions like moving levers and spinning on poles with a sensual flair, and she'll bare skin whenever she performs her biggest moves because she's effectively clothed in her own hair, which also doubles as a resource for projecting gigantic projections of fists and feet to flatten things with. And yet in spite of all that, people continue to uphold Bayonetta as a great female gaming character. The scary thing is, compared to everything else, I believe them, for almost no other reason than the fact that Bayo is a dom instead of a sub, and that nearly all of the alternatives - even HUGELY popular ones like Samus Aran - have ultimately depended on a man for some significant part of their journey, if not wholeheartedly relied on them. It doesn't seem like it should be much to ask that a powerful woman be able to see their own adventures through to the end, but it took a game like Bayonetta to realize just how much I had taken that for granted, even though game designers in modern day have for the most part grown the fuck up and stopped typecasting the entire gender based on incredibly dated stereotypes.

As a game, Bayonetta has the most in common with Devil May Cry, which is no surprise because the same guy directed both franchises at one point or another - but the former has a few key mechanics that distinguish it as its own entity from the latter, and probably the most influencial of them is Witch Time. In a nutshell, if you dodge an attack within a certain few frames before getting hit, not only do you avoid the attack, you also trigger a slow motion effect that allows you to punish the motherfucker that tried to hit you with extreme prejudice. It's become a staple of many Platnium games since, and even expanded outside of their sphere of influence into similar equivalents in games like Killer Is Dead and Breath of the Wild, and it's not hard to see why - it's both the most effective and most satisfying way of dealing with just about any enemy in the game, regardless of threat or build, and it condenses a lot of otherwise redundant defensive mechanics into one concise and elegant one. I just hate that some enemies seem to be built specifically to exploit the player's tendency to immediately dodgeroll with intentionally delayed animations that punish you for whiffing it, especially these ABSOLUTE CUNTS with claws that always appear in pairs and I swear are absolutely fucking impossible to dodge, and part you with something like an entire third of your health bar every time you fail to.

Another unique quirk of Bayonetta is the ability to quad wield weapons - two mounted on her feet, and two in her hands (or one between them, in special cases such as the sword weapon). On one hand, this can be a genuinely intriguing application of gun fu in a brawling moveset, because holding down any given button will cause Bayonetta to open fire with her guns in the pose her last attack animation ended in, which is an elegant compromise between close range and projectile fighting that I don't think I've ever seen any other game nail, even games built specifically to balance the two. On the other hand, this feels like a dated relic of Devil May Cry's design in that weapons - and new movesets associated with them - seem to be introduced for no particular reason other than bloat, and it's hard to know which one you should be dropping your currency into until it's WAY the fuck too late and you discover that quad wielding shotguns isn't actually anywhere near as awesome as it sounds. By that point you're a good two thirds into the game, don't have enough money to respec and won't get enough to do so before the final boss. Bayonetta is clearly a game designed to be played multiple times in order to get all of these weapons in top shape, to say nothing of other stuff like trinkets and items and weapon neutral techniques and individual ranks not just for levels but the individual fucking skirmishes within them, but this stance will inevitable cause your first playthrough to suck hardcore unless you use nothing but Scarborough Fair for the entire first run, which I personally feel is kind of a misstep. A game and its unlock tree shouldn't feel this unfulfilling until after you've already played it at least once - we personally have Unleashed to thank for pointing that one out.

Bayonetta's games are still pretty great all the same, but it's hard not to say they're gatekeeping to some significant extent, not just because of the aformentioned obsession with ranking just about fucking everything that happens but with its insistence on showering you in items that restore health or give you buffs to help in fights and then giving you a fucking score penalty for using them, which is an awful lot of bluster for a game that sprinkles in quick time events for everything from scripted events in boss fights to incredibly basic platforming sequences. If you're already judging players for every hit they take in a fight, why the fuck do you care if they have to top their health up every now and then? And if you hate players so much for using items, why are you just GIVING it to them? It's a truly bizarre contradiction I've never been able to get over in Platnium's train of thought - even fucking Ninja Gaiden completely expects the player to use every tool they're given to survive, healing items included.

December 22, 2020

Lilith (Borderlands)

Borderlands is very much the Diablo of first person shooters. Though there's still plenty of merit to which character you choose and how you choose to spec their skills as they level up, but the real meat of the game is in inventory management - murdering mooks by the dozens, pilfering them and their chests for guns, shields and class mods, swapping them into your rotation if they're a slight upgrade over what you're currently using and hoarding them to sell later if they're not. My first complain with it is that it's just a numbers game and usually not much more, which is absolutely the most fucking boring way to design progression in a videogame - some guns have unique and interesting effects, but are either event or quest specific items that quickly fade into irrelevance as the raw stats fail to keep pace with the increasing health and shields of your opposition, or it's legendary tier stuff that has less than a single digit percentage chance of spawning and are so rare that you might do an entire loop of the game AND its New Game Plus mode without seeing even one of the fuckers. It feels like Borderlands should have put more of its focus on these interesting weapon behaviours and scaled back its focus on raw stats a LOT, but I still recognize that Borderlands's type of game still has a place in the industry - one that is overwhelmingly just busywork to keep your levels and equipment up to date with what the main game can throw at you. Frankly, that kind of mundanity isn't why I'm covering Borderlands. To get into the why of that, we have to talk about a seemingly completely irrelevant game - Aliens: Colonial Marines.

I haven't actually played it personally, otherwise it may very well have ended up on the list itself. So why am I bringing this up here? Because its mismanagement and the success of Borderlands are essentially one in the same. See, Sega had farmed the title out to developer Gearbox on hopes of making bank on the movie license, and were funding them to see it through to its completion. Now it's hard to say for certain what exactly happened, but it seems like Sega here were naieve and neglectful where Gearbox were malicious and manipulative, because development repeatedly stalled on Gearbox's side but Sega kept funelling more money into them regardless, perhaps blinded by sunk cost fallacy. Do you wanna know where that money was ACTUALLY going? That's right - directly into the development of Borderlands. Sega even caught them in the act and let them off with just a stern warning, giving them ample opportunity to go right back to their old tricks and release a fucking SEQUEL with Sega's money that they weren't seeing any return for. And when Sega finally decided to put their foot down, Gearbox in turn farmed it out to some nobody studio in the hopes that it would shut everybody up - but if you're in any way familiar with the eventual release of the game, you probably alredy know how that story ends. How they got out of legal culpability for everything that happened, I STILL don't fucking know.

So in the end, I think this game has created an interesting moral dillemma that it clearly didn't intend to. Do you see a game for its circumstances, or its end result? Should being a debatably good game be worth any price in human pain and suffering, and should we as players stand for actual crimes being committed for their sake? And frankly, I think the answer is no. I can't deny I played the first two games start to finish before I heard about Gearbox literally laundering money into its development, but in truth learning about it has forever poisoned my perception of the series and its developer in particular to the point that I can't support anything they do in good conscience anymore. And I feel like players all around have an obligation to do the same, because given the opportunity they would absolutely pull something like this again. It's not like they've gotten much better since - in the wake of Borderlands 3 it's come out that CEO Randy Pitchford is abusive to the point of physically assaulting his own employees if he doesn't get his way. So yes, I think people absolutely SHOULD turn down games they might otherwise enjoy if their money is funding human misery in the process of developing it. And Gearbox is far from an outlier in that respect - just the most obvious example. Just ask yourself how many studios EA has closed down, and then ask yourself why your money should go towards putting people out of a fucking job and treating them as completely disposable even while they still have one.

December 23, 2020

Eddie Riggs (Brütal Legend)

Brütal Legend is a game made as a tribute to Metal music in all of its forms, and one need only glance at it to know that it certainly had all the right ingredients for it - boasting not just boasting a licensed soundtrack from all over the landscape of the genre with only a few notable exclusions, but boasting caricatures of many of its biggest names which are often even voiced over by the very people that inspired them, like Lemmy, Ozzy Ozbourne and Jack Black. And the lore and worldbuilding of Brütal Legend's setting is absolutely phenomenal, setting out to create a whole shared universe themed around Metal and fucking nailing it, to the point that even the wildlife wouldn't look out of place on an Iron Maiden album cover. So riddle me this, SSMB - how does Double Fine have the insight to make such an endearing love letter to an entire musical genre, and still read the room badly enough to believe the best fit for it was a fucking real time strategy game???

This would be bad enough, if not for the fact that it's an absurd, Metal Gear Solid 2 esque bait and switch from what previews had clearly portrayed the game as - and indeed, how the game itself plays for the first half hour or so. All first impressions seemed to indicate that Brütal Legend was basically just a Zelda clone with a lot more gore, an electric guitar instead of an ocarina and a fucking muscle car instead of a horse. And people were completely fine with that. That's all it really needed to be - just a simple slashing game with heavy metal themes and atmosphere. The fact that people didn't know about this abrupt genre switch until AFTER the game released can only mean someone high up already knew it wouldn't be received well, and that really does beg the question of how the fuck did it persist all the way up until the point the game went gold if they already knew this wasn't going to go over well with its target audience??? Not to mention a simple third person slasher would have been a lot simpler to make anyway, because you have to remember this was absolutely NOT a PC title and by definition had to make large compromises to function in a console environment.

And the compromise that Brütal Legend makes is that your player character effectively serves the same purpose a cursor would in a traditional RTS. You can only give orders to units within earshot when you issue them. On the plus side, this means you can personally take part in fights alongside your own army and assist them with axe and melody alike, which is something very rarely seen in the genre let alone done competently. On the other hand, it prevents you from working well with specific selections of units, or accomplishing anything with a level of strategic finesse of even the likes of Halo Wars. Most matches will essentially boil down to gradually snowballing a little skirmishing force into an army while pingponging it between fixed resource points with rally points to slow the enemy down long enough to deploy a fundemental I WIN button that depends on the faction - Ironheade's Rock Crusher, Drowning Doom's Encompassing Gloom, and Tainted Coil's Bleeding Death. It's not to say that it isn't fun in its own right, just that it's not particularly deep. I know I've voiced gripes about RTS games before, but this is a bit too far in the opposite direction.

That being said, I have to acknowledge that Brütal Legend could have turned out SO MUCH WORSE. It's a rare example of two things in the gaming world - firstly, one of the only titles that have been through both Activision and EA's clutches and still escape relatively unscathed. And secondly, Activision wanted this to be a bog standard Guitar Hero clone before Double Fine abandoned them for EA, and EA then actually protected them from a spurious lawsuit from Activision once the game actually released, which leaves me begrudgingly admitting that for once, EA was actually the good guy in this story. So in the end, I guess I'm just greatful for what we have, even if it could have been so much better.

December 24, 2020

Little Red Riding Hood (Fairytale Fights)

God damn it. I really wanted to skip over this game, you know, just forget I had ever laid eyes on it - but Fairytale Fights is a special kind of atrocious. The worst kind of atrocious, the kind that I can't ignore in good concience: the kind that thinks it's brilliant, and is all the worse for it because its ego has clearly not been accepting of any criticism. I can't believe I still need to say this after the awfulness of Too Human, but no, using the right stick to attack is STILL a really fucking awful idea and doesn't accomplish any purpose that can't already be done with buttons, on top of doing a worse job at it. Really, it's not just that it's inherently less responsive than an on-or-off-state button, even though that's equally applicable here - it's uniquely unresponsive in ways it has no right to be, and the game will often just eat inputs for no apparent reason other than it expects you to input a very specific angle in order for it to register as an attack, which is an absolutely insane requirement for an otherwise basic basher/slasher where being able to attack on command is of the absolute fucking importance. God, if only its problems were as simple as just that though.

Fairytale Fights's points of pride seem to be in mechanics that don't seem to serve any purpose but bog the framerate down into an embarrasing, screen-tearing mess whenever the action picks up. For example, it boasts something called "volumetric blood", in which blood will pool and spread semi realistically along the floor whenever it's spilt from an enemy. This is a feature listed on the back of the box, and the closest it ever gets to being relevant to gameplay is being able to slide along it whenever it becomes dense enough, which I'm not entirely sure even makes you any faster. Another mechanic from the tech-demoy side of things is the ability to dynamically slice apart enemies, rending them in half wholly depending on the angle of your slice and not from a predetermined separation of one body part and another like would be the case in a Mortal Kombat game of its time. That being said, what the fuck was the point of this if you can still only swing in one of four different directions despite using the control stick as an attack input, and even with THAT caveat in mind why would you put blunt weapons into the game at all when it takes absolutely no advantage of the dismemberment system they clearly spent most of their effort on? It's like making a smell-based peripheral and then making your character wear a mask for half the time - it well and truly defeats the point.

So once you get past the idea that this game's gimmicks are pointless at best and downright counterintuitive to gameplay at worst, what's left? An arcade slash-em-up that would be painfully bad even if you disregarded all of the above completely. It's impossible to attack without moving, which fucks you over more than it has any right to unless you're at just the perfect angle to rub right up against an enemy while you're trying to beat them senseless. In the best case scenario, you'll fly right past the enemy you're trying to hit mid-combo and attack air for about 3-4 swings because between all the samey architecture and all the mangled body parts flying about it can genuinely be hard to make your character out and realize you're not hitting anyone anymore. Worst case, you'll just straight up die for missing, because the level design in Fairytale Fights is absolute bullshit that's always just gleefully waiting for a chance to throw you into another instant kill beginner's trap that can't be acted on appropriately without prior knowledge - and are stometimes just needlessly daunting regardless, such as these fucking beartraps in the first few levels that have a hitbox MUCH larger than their actual model. The cherry on top of all this is the boss fights, while thankfully few and far between, are about 50% waiting for an opportunity to actually fucking hit them and about another 30% dying instantly for misidentifying your chance to do any real damage because their vulnerabilities and attacks usually aren't telegraphed properly.

It's a game that's overall either fucking boring or really frustrating, both the worst things a videogame can ever be separately, nevermind together, and tries - unsuccessfully - to pave over its crap design with stupid gimmicks under the guise of being witty and revolutionary. And it certainly doesn't help that once you brush the graphical tech aside, it really does look like a low budget bootleg that probably wouldn't have looked out of place as a PS2 title.

December 25, 2020

Sean Devlin (The Saboteur)

This is the kind of game that really makes me wish stealth sandboxes were a thing outside the obligatory annual Assassin's Creed installment, because I genuinely appreciate what The Saboteur was going for here. Set in Nazi-occupied France, it boasts a really simple and compelling gameplay loop: find an important piece of Nazi infrastructure, plant a bomb on it and don't be around when it goes off, making sure the krauts don't see you doing anything suspicious all the while. It's debatably the simplest part of the game, and yet it's arguably at its best when it's just this, where bombings go off without a hitch and you use the chaos as a distraction for your next target. It just kinda falls apart when it comes to actually fighting openly though. I don't have so much of an issue of this when it's entirely my fault, as it's still a stealth game by heart and trying to actively start fights with better armed, armoured and trained Nazis absolutely should be a punishment in its own right - but sometimes the game just doesn't give you a choice in the matter, whether it's a story mission where the alarm sounds independently of your own actions or a sensitive target in the overworld guarded in such a way that both approaching it or trying to clean out enough guards to do so silently is literally impossible without triggering an alarm. And that's just taking the shooting into account - god fucking help you if you decide to try and get anything done in hand to hand.

Besides its focus on demolition, The Saboteur is most striking for its stylistic touches, one of which form an actually really clever way of distinguishing Nazi territory from the resistance's - Nazi occupied districts are signified with a noir-esque black and white filter, with red highlights that serve to signpost Nazi buildings and NPCs, and freeing that area from the Nazis will restore it back to colour again. It's a fantastic artstyle touch, but it can honestly make the game less playable for it because this game really loves its shades of black to the point that it can make certain shapes really fucking hard to make out against one another, and that can quite literally be the difference between life and death at some points. It's already a huge fucking pain in the ass to run into otherwise avoidable car crashes because cobble walls and certain cars are virtually indistinguishable in kraut territory, but plunging 2-3 stories to your death because you can't make out where the roof of a building starts or ends is infuriating - especially because The Saboteur in its infinite wisdom decided that making an open world game without autosaves is somehow a good idea, which means you can easily be set back about half an hour's worth of progress if you go on a leisurely extended bombing spree and clip and fall right through a simple zipline before you have a chance to actually record all of that progress.

I think the biggest problem I have with The Saboteur, though, is the same problem I've had with Ubisoft sandboxes since Farcry 3 - it just spreads too much of the exact same shit over a big map and pretends that's actual content. Sneaking up to a guard tower, slapping a bundle of TNT on it and walking off before they're any the wiser is genuinely fun, but not fun enough that it can singlehandedly bear the weight of hundreds if not thousands of buildings spread across the world by itself. And I don't often complain about a game that enforces manual saving as a mechanic physically located in the game world (as it would be for say, a Metroid game), but losing lots of progress to a single death is fucking annoying and forcing yourself to backtrack to a safehouse to save every 10 minutes or so is incredibly fucking tedious, and both approaches suck the joy out of blowing shit up even more when you come to the realization that one fuckup can potentially invalidate your entire fucking play session. Honestly, it's the one thing that prevents me from either replaying it to story completion or attempting to 100% it. Yup, that's a lot of good ideas and mechanics squandered by one misstep - that's why it's always important to remember that a game is a sum of its parts while you're designing it.

December 26, 2020

Steve (Minecraft)

Minecraft in this day in age is so famous it almost defies the need to introduce it, but it stands as one of the greatest rags to riches stories of the whole industry - starting from humble indie beginnings before soaring to heights even most AAA titles don't reach, thanks to its very simple premise - which is to say, it doesn't really have one. There was a long period of time where Minecraft didn't even have an ending, much less an established long term goal, so players had to make their own, and Minecraft gives you the tools to handle just about anything you could want to do. Want to find a nice cozy spot and settle down? There's plenty you can do to live in one spot and survive, even farming and fishing, and you'll generally only have to dig in a downward direction to find all the stuff that REALLY benefits you. Want to explore the world? You're almost guaranteed to never run out of world to find, because it procedurally generates as you go up to a world border you will probably never reach legitimately. Want to just fight things? Even in the standard game, there's still plenty of opposition if you dare to go out at night, and unless you're playing in creative mode you'll generally have to handle some amount of it whatever you're doing. Even completionists, without the leisure of self imposed goals, can find find simple joy in collecting all of the game's objects and resources, which isn't always as simple as punching it until it gives. Minecraft is a game that allows people to make their own fun, and when the boundaries of the game no longer allow for that, players are still afforded plenty of opportunity to stretch those boundaries even further.

Which is to say, the game became moddable, and doesn't depend on centralized servers so much as communty run ones that anyone can start up, which is something that has become bafflingly absent throughout modern gaming eras. All in all, it means there really aren't many WRONG ways to play Minecraft, unless the server owner is a greedy little shit who wants money for standard gameplay features and resources. Some of these servers have created entire subgenres of their own, and were debatably even the origin of the battle royale genre before The Culling and PUBG thrust it into the limelight. There really aren't many games out there with this kind of sheer versatility, in almost every sense of the word, and to some people it's less of a game and more of an engine for how much you can do with it. All of this, from a game that started out as glorified lego with zombies in it. It's a game that's left one hell of a legacy in its wake - and unfortunately, like Resident Evil 4, most other sources took entirely the wrong lessons from its design.

Executives don't see good game design and satisfied costumers, they see trends and gimmicks and act off of those instead. All those games with forced item crafting mechancs you'll start seeing for a few years after this? Yup, all based on this game, where it was only a smaller part of its success - not just that you had to throw tools together with whatever the fuck you found in the land, but that you had to tame the land itself and cultivate it to your liking, which is an incredibly strange focal point to miss if you want to try and replicate Minecraft's success. And honestly, I've always found it incredibly bizarre that Microsoft bought the whole company and IP to split it into two forks - predictably, to milk the everloving shit out of it - but somehow manage to make the newer version the worse one. Not just because Bedrock edition has incredibly arbitary new restrictions and is less moddable overall, but because it's also loaded to the fucking gills with microtransactions that serve only to make the game worse. Custom skins were already another big part of MC's success, and making new skins was practically already a new artform in of itself for how prevalent they are, but Bedrock's answer to that is a series of predetermined skins that you need to pay actual fucking money for. Worse still is that the Bedrock edition now has its own character editor, but you need to pay premium currency for every fucking element of it. Can you fathom paying 1-2 bucks for the ability to attach a 1 pixel wide line to your face and calling it glasses? That's absolutely absurd, and a perfect encapsulation of why microtransactions suck, much less why they suck in games you already have to pay an entry fee for. It's bad enough when publishers sell pallette swaps for actual cash, but here have to pay money to shove an MSpaint line on your face, that you can already add entirely by yourself in Java edition in a span of five minutes for completely free. Un fucking believable.

Long story short, just avoid Bedrock Edition like the fucking plague, and you're good.

December 27, 2020

William Grey (Dark Void)

Dark Void is a game that tries to be a jack of all trades, and it isn't to say it's a master of none, but it feels like it loses something for an overall lack of focus. There's elements of Gears of War, Uncharted and Lylat Wars in there, and for sake of simplicity I'm going to start with the formermost part first - mainly because it's the worst part. Look, I hate it when shooter games bloat their arsenals for no other sake than being able to boast that they have a lot of weapons, especially if most are just slight variations of each other and especially if most of them are just machineguns by any other name - but when I did my research and remembered that this game has a grand total of four weapons, I honestly had to do a double take. Two machineguns, a sniper rifle and a rocket launcher expy. That's it. Most enemies are more or less just the same goddamn droids over and over again too, so overall it leaves Dark Void feeling like it doesn't have a whole lot of variety to offer. You have a jetpack that can sometimes help for getting you to vantage points, but for the most part it's used just for platforming segments and vertical cover-based shooting, which i think is the one truly original gimmick that this game can boast. There IS good in this game, but the standard shooting really just drags on and on to the point that it's a genuine barrier to enjoying or replaying it as a whole.

That just leaves the flying sections, which can be likened to the all range mode in Lylat Wars. And THESE sections are actually pretty fun, even if sometimes they drag on a bit longer than they should. You have a jetpack with an inbuilt machinegun, so you're always able to contribute to a dogfight in any state, but you can also hijack an enemy ship for the extra firepower and survivability.It's just that every time you do, you have to play a lengthy - and boy do I fucking mean lengthy - minigame of trying to force the cockpit open and then wrestle the pilot out of the craft to commandeer it, and I dunno, it fucks with my suspension of disbelief that all of this is happening while the craft is clearly not actively being piloted, somehow steering around and away from obstacles all the while. There's also a little inconsistency with the way the flying handles, and it seems like rather than fixing it they've instead implemented this strange lockon system which forces your target to always be center screen regardless of which way you're facing, which is functional but it feels like a few more extra steps than is necessary. We know this because Lylat Wars already did it.

If there's any design lessons one SHOULD take from Dark Void, it's that it never actually forcefully restricts the player's options for its shifts in playstyle. Games tend to hate giving the player that kind of power of choice, as we've seen previously in Sonic 06 only allowing you to go machspeed in certain areas, and even earlier still in Superman which only allowed you to fly in places the game specifically designed for it. And although many areas of Dark Void are clearly designed predominantly for one or the other, it doesn't outright disable your ability to fly. You can enable free flight anywhere as long as you have a jetpack, landing you with the benefits - and consequences - of doing so entirely at your discretion. Which honestly, I feel is exactly the right way to impliment a mobility based mechanic, and honestly even a lot of non mobility ones that are often relegated to sudden genre roulette switches instead of being available to you at the touch of a button.

I think the worst thing about Dark Void is that it's just not particularly compelling, and I don't mean that just because it's so goddamn repetitive, even though that's pretty fucking hard to accomplish by accident when both jetpacks and aliens are concerned. The writing isn't all that inspiring either, and doesn't really leave me in anticipation of what comes next so much as just leaving me wanting to get the level over with so I can move on. It feels like just another B-rate attempt to chase trends, and it doesn't even feel finished in some facets. Had they stuck with just the flying areas and fleshed them out more instead of padding the game out with derivative Gears of War tripe, I feel like Dark Void could have done so much better.

December 28, 2020

Darwinians (Darwinia+)

If I had to describe Darwinia+ in a nutshell, it would probably be "Real Time Strategy Lemmings". Most of the game revolves around these little green stick figures that you can't directly control - at most you can usually only sacrifice one to create an Officer, which from that point on only exists to stay in one place and order the others to a specific location, effectively becoming a pathfinding node. The bulk of the game is spent trying to make safe passage for the Darwinians to reach a given objective, and while you can eventually weaponize the Darwinians themselves through upgrades, you'll spend the bulk of the earlier parts of the game trying to clear places out with Squads, a small group of soldiers you manually control Geometry Wars style. And honestly, the game is at its weakest when you have to rely on these to get anything done, because without the ability to place your character directly overhead you don't have a clear idea of where your shots are going to land, much less where your grenades will - which are affected by gravity and slopes, and are sometimes your only means of damaging specific enemies. So sometimes what should be otherwise simple encounters turn into battles of fucking attrition because it's much harder to actually HIT anything than it has any right to be. In fact most of the difficulty in the game IS just attrition, because there's no real fail state in the campaign - at worst you'll lose squads or engineers and maybe some Darwinians, but the former two can be summoned on command with no cost besides a cooldown and Darwinians usually have at LEAST one point in the map that they respawn infinitely from even if you don't gather their souls to respawn them.

So effectively, it's a strategy game with not much actual strategy to behold. And yet, I struggle to consider it a bad thing, if only because it satisfies an entirely different niche - to be a relaxing experience as opposed to a challenging or stressful one. It's absolutely the kind of game that'll let your mind wander - I just wish so much of it wasn't trying over and over to clear the same stretch of land with enemies that are goddamn impossible to hit. That being said, there is a place for strategy here, because Darwinia+ is effectively a compilation of two games - the latter being Multiwinia, which as the name might suggest is a multiplayer focused competitive game as opposed to Darwinia's slow, chill campaign focus. You have all the tools of the existing campaign and a few others, such as the ability to issue move commands directly and collect single use powers you can inflict on the map, and you use them to either gather more Multiwinians in the time limit than all other players or just wipe them from the map entirely. This is good too, even without other human players to play with, although sometimes it's hard not to feel like it has that Super Smash Bros problem of "randomly spawning items can favour one player over all others simply by spawning right next to them and on the opposite side of the map to you", which seems like it could have been fixed with predetermined locations you can exert control over. Come to think of it, Smash could benefit from that too. Huh. Food for thought.

I don't know if I have a lot to say about it beyond that. It might appeal more than usual to people who don't play RTS games religiously, but it's still something you'll need a great deal of patience for. Some levels in the campaign can take over an hour to complete, and I would have held this game in MUCH lower regard if not for the incredibly generous mid-match saving it has, because having to do it all over from scratch definitely would have ticked me off. You'll come to this game more for the setting than its substance, and you'll more than likely struggle to find a reason to play it again once you've completed it. Which is a shame, because it's neat while it lasts.

December 29, 2020

Alien Vs Predator 2010

Let's just be blunt about this right off the bat - the singleplayer campaigns in this game are a complete afterthought. Some might even suggest they're just glorified tutorials for the multiplayer, but for one large distinction - the stealth characters of this game, the titular Aliens and Predators, can be gunned down pretty quickly by marines that are entirely aware of their presence, and often appear in numbers too great to simply approach them from behind and decapitate them one by one, so they instead abuse their AI by creating noises that somehow only a single enemy hears at a time to isolate them from an otherwise completely safe position. I already thought this mechanic was really fucking dumb even in context, but it enforces some really bad habits in the multiplayer that don't really have any reason to be there - for the Alien it only exists as a glorified taunt button, and iirc the Predator doesn't even have access to it at all online? I feel like the focus should have been more about Predator's ability to jump real high and cloak to sneak into otherwise safe spaces, and the Alien's ability to crawl up any surface and strike from almost literally any angle, which is a LOT more important to getting the edge in a fight otherwise. The campaigns are incredibly lopsided anyway - despite being the least inspired and fun out of all three classes, the marine gets the longest and most involved campaign out of all of them, with the Alien getting the shortest. Which feels like a personal slap in the face considering I like Alien the most, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that it's hard to write a story for an instinct-driven creature that just wants to make more Aliens.

So because the multiplayer is where the real meat of this game is - and because it's one of the few multiplayer centric videogames I've actually played with multiple human players - that's where I'm going to focus most of my remaining attention. Most of the game's mechanics are pretty simple, but in the best kind of way, with rules that are consistent across almost every class - light attacks still hit hard but are countered by blocking and parrying with a light attack of your own, and blocks can be broken through with heavy attacks but are slow enough to be countered by light attacks. The only real distinction is that Marines have a fucking gun instead of a heavy attack, so they only need to engage in melee at all to stagger a cocky Alien or Predator. From there, the Alien specializes in being able to pick their fights because they can see enemies through walls, whilst the Predator is a happy medium between the other two classes in that he is stealthy and mobile like Aliens, but can still use their own selection of weapons and self heal like Marines if they need to (so naturally, it's the one fucking everyone plays). Honestly, the Marines are a little underpowered, and the glory kills take so fucking long to complete that anyone around you can use that time to casually move behind you, resulting in a hilariously janky train of executions that tended to result in the death of all but one of the players in the game. But the classes are still quite well balanced, and I'll be honest, this is some of the most fun I've ever had in a multiplayer game once I began to pick up on everyone's strengths and weaknesses. It's just a shame that the same can't be said of people overseas.

See, AVP '10 has a huge, crippling flaw that kept it from being a big critical success, and it's actually quite simple when you get right down to it - the netcode is just plain garbage. That blow I feel was softened here in Australia somewhat by the fact that we've always had shitty internet architecture and laggy online games were very much the norm here, but to hear people in America tell it they had very much the same experience as I did despite having much better internet connections to show for it. And that's especially important in a game like this, because much of the gameplay loop depends on being able to react in a timely manner, and the window of opportunity to punish a slower heavy attack or to parry an enemy staggered by your block is lower than your actual fucking ping most of the time, so a lot of otherwise obvious and predictable options go completely unpunished simply because enemies literally cannot react to them as they happen. You pretty much have to press buttons BEFORE an attack connects with your guard and hope that the server registers an attack hitting you during that time. Nobody fucking knows why the game does this, and it seems to completely defy explanation in a market that didn't seem to struggle with connecting basic stealth kills in the way that AVP does.

There have been missions to space where a million dollar launch fails because a single part worth less than a dollar doesn't do its job, and in some way it's hard not to think of AVP as a similar metaphor. It honestly feels like it had everything else going for it, but these unexplained latency issues well and truly killed anything else it could have hoped to accomplish. Especially nowadays, where netcode can seem to accomodate for nearly ANY goddamn kind of latency, I think it's important not to take for granted just how much worse things could be if your very controls and reactions are server side, which used to be the case for WAY too many multiplayer centric games, even the heaviest hitters of its day like your Unreal Tournaments and your Quakes. You kids these days have it really easy with TF2, I swear.

December 30, 2020

Rico Rodriguez (Just Cause 2)

This is it. As far as I'm personally concerned, the straw that broke the camel's back in whatever appreciation for wide open sandboxes I had left. Just Cause 2's biggest selling point isn't hard to find - it boasts a world 1036 square kilometers in size, a product of an industry that treated world sizes as some kind of fucked up arms race and to some extent, still does. Developers want the player to believe they're just being let loose in a gigantic playground to do whatever they want with it, but there's a few fundemental problems that went unchallenged way too long leading up to JC2:

- Sandboxes are worthless if you can only express yourself through gunfire

- The only side objectives in JC2 are generic collectibles and destructible objects

- This wasn't even the biggest map of its generation

- Even that map size is misleading because most of it is fucking water

- Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall still far and away holds the record of non-procedurally-generated map size, at one hundred and sixty one thousand and six hundred square kilometers. This is a game that released on a fucking floppy disk. Having a pissing contest over map sizes was always pointless because nobody will ever beat Daggerfall, but more importantly because:

- MAP SIZES ARE NOT FUCKING CONTENT

What actual benefit did making the world bigger in Just Cause 2? Fucking nothing, that's what. Worse than nothing, in fact - it works AGAINST the game, because now your destinations - the actual content - physically take longer to get to, and anything that isn't outright marked on the map becomes an order of fucking magnitude harder to find because you physically have to sift through, once again, 1036km squared of fucking empty map space to find them all. It also means that the ability to drive cars serves no purpose anymore because they have to obey the laws of gravity, so either you get a plane ( or just buy one and have it delivered - yes, seriously), fly around on a parchute by hookshotting the ground...?????????? Or just riding the delivery helicopter to your destination as a fast travel mechanic. Isn't that just fucking splendid? A developer that makes a world quadruple digits in size, only fills it with generic busywork, doesn't even do that densely enough to be considered a full blanket of the map, and then actively disincentivizes people from exploring it all by just allowing you to drop almost literally anywhere on the god damned map. This is the fallacy of the open world sandbox laid bare: a big world with fucking nothing in it, and no reason to go looking around in it. Just open space, for space's own sake.

That much I could excuse if the scant little content this gigantic world actually provides was fun, but believe it or not, there's a very definite extent that you can push blowing shit up simply for destruction's own sake, and the thrill doesn't even last long enough to get you through everything the game has to offer, much less turn it into a franchise of just more of the fucking same again. The one gimmick Just Cause 2 has to call its own is the ability to grapple onto one object, and then hook it onto another object to link the two together, which... actually, what the heck was this even added to the game for? You can use it to topple statues, but you can already do that with a shotgun. You can use it to attach soldiers to the scenery and immobilize them so you have free reign to just shoot them with a shotgun... or you could just shoot them with a shotgun. You could attach one end to a car chasing you and another one to the road to bring them to a full stop, but you have to be on the roof of a car to use your grappling hook, which means you're not steering it, and by that point you might as well just shoot them with a shotgun. But honestly if you're using a car you're already playing the game wrong anyway, because achieving actual flight in this game is somehow as simple as unfolding your parachute and grappling towards the ground. The point I'm making is that neither of these mechanics can bear the weight of the sheer amount of shit the game gives you to find and destroy, and it easily would have been a much better game if they'd just exercised some fucking restraint and made the game about as big as Vice City's world instead.

You know what the scariest thing is, though? This game is a genuine improvement over Just Cause 1. At least in JC2 the compounds and destructibles vary in layout - in JC1 it was just the same compound, in the same layout, in the same takeover sequence, over and fucking over again. Frankly I'm surprised that game didn't kill the series right fucking there and then.

December 31, 2020

Alan Wake

We've had games so far that have had good writing as an incidental part of their design, and games that have had writing as a core focus of their design - but to my knowledge, Alan Wake is so far the first game on the list in which the protagonist themselves is a novel writer. You would think one would only make a decision like that if they actually knew how to write themselves, but I personally find that the only thing that this narrative angle actually changes from the norm is that Alan Wake incredibly pretentious about its writing, not that it's any better at it than the competition of its day. And this is the best chance I think I'm going to get to talk about one of my biggest pet peeves in writing - writers who conciously recognize flaws and cliches in their own narrative, write characters to actively COMMENT on said flaws and cliches, and then proceed to play those flaws and cliches completely straight anyway instead of correcting themselves or using it as an opportunity to play with the audience's expectations. It's ESPECIALLY fucking annoying in this game, because one of the mechanics in this game are collectible pages of Alan's novel, in which Alan narrates over a page of text that outlines an event later in the game that has yet to happen - and usually is ABOUT to happen. Not only does this in no uncertain terms completely spoil huge plot twists and ruin any kind of suspense they were trying to build up before it climaxes, but Alan never actually acts on the advance knowledge of events that are yet to occur either. It's not like this was a frivilous collectible added to the game just for padding and replay value, they are themselves huge plot points that are for some reason completely ignored until they come up in cutscene only. How do you make a game about writing and not catch something as fucking basic as that?

Speaking of cliches, the gameplay is equally as cliched as the writing, stealing a fucking cornucopia of tried and true stuff like the "fight mobs of people with sharp objects" focus from Resident Evil 4, the "shine light on an enemy until they're suddenly shootable" mechanic from ObScure, the "hold out from a fixed position against hordes of enemies until an arbitary timer runs out" setpiece from Left 4 Dead and the "react to the windup animation of an enemy's attack to dodge out of the way and avoid damage" gameplay loop from what seems like every fucking action game ever. It's not to say it doesn't work coherently or badly together, but it's all been fucking done before, and most of it was already tired even by the time Alan Wake came out. At least in RE4's case though, there were plenty of permutations of enemies that cycled in and out as the plot and location went on - in Alan Wake it's mostly just the same guys with sickles and axes, and the only real interesting diversion from this is inanimate objects that start levitating up to ram into you poltergeist style. And it's really hard to get surprised by any of this when the camera zooms in on a threat and the music picks up whenever one of them spawns, which is really what you want to NOT do in a horror game of all things. Alan Wake as a whole has just no fucking respect for the player's intelligence and attention span, not just spoiling itself and any threat it could hope to pose to you, but even going as far as to straight up explain references it steals from much better writers, usually by directly namedropping them, such as it was for somebody plunging an axe into a door to recreate the iconic scene from The Shining.

Of course, if it did have any respect for its players, Alan Wake probably wouldn't have engaged in the kinds of product placement that it did. Normally I wouldn't even give this kind of thing a mention, but this is the most shameless product placement of any game I've ever fucking played, cutting so many deals that frankly I'm surprised in some ways that this game isn't just a playable billboard. The cars are Toyotas, the phones are Verizons, the flashlights are Energizers, it just goes on and on. And although it's a little fun to giggle about Energizer batteries that can only power a torch for all of ten seconds, but there's something particularly insidious about the fact that you have to hunt down a TV set and watch an entire Verizon ad to unlock an achievement for the game, which is the kind of stomach wrenching lack of shame I don't think I've ever seen before or since in this regard. And if you're going to take me out of the immersion to make a quick buck from sponsors thare are going to look incredibly fucking dated a year from now, couldn't you at least do it with something more relevant to the source material instead of trying to haphazardly cram it in? Alan Wake already fellates Stephen King enough that it could have used its influence to shout out other popular or up and coming authors without batting an eyelid, or shit, even a stationary company like Biro because it's a game about writing after all, but fuck me right?

I think what bugs me most is that people consider Alan Wake a well written game for no other reason than it features a writer as a character and the game wants you to believe that means something. Come on guys, you can do better than that.

January 1, 2021

Sissel (Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective)

I only have like two bad things to say about Ghost Trick, so I'm going to get the most obvious one out of the way early - it's one of those puzzle games which you can only really solve once, because having even the faintest recollection of the solution almost completely ruins any hope it has of challenging you. Much like it would in a game like Phoenix Wright, which is certainly no coincidence because the same director is behind both games. Don't let the name fool you though, because the detective element only has a faint narrative relevance compared to the true core of this game's gameplay loop - working with the limitations of being a ghost to explore the world, finding bodies of the recently dead and going back to the time of their death to prevent it in something of a reverse Final Destination. And to tell the truth, it's kind of remarkable how much mileage this game gets out of manipulating objects in the world that usually have at most two different applications depending on context, especially when time is of the essence and acting in a timely manner can change the outcome of the whole sequence. This is really difficult to talk about without spoiling some of the puzzles, and as I said, they're basically forever ruined once you know how to do them, so the only real reason to replay the game after that fact is for the characters and writing.

And you know what? In that regard, Ghost Trick is brilliant. Out of all the characters in this game I can recall I don't think there's a single unmemorable one among them - even the unnamed police chief, otherwise stoic and serious in temperment, clearly has a case of itchy feet he's trying to hide from everyone else under his desk. Just about everyone in the game has a unique quirk like this that is unlike anything else in the game and makes them stand out all on their own, which feels like a lost art as far as character based writing goes. This isn't to say you don't see this kind of thing in Phoenix Wright - even there it's still easily a highlight all its own. But Ghost Trick is pretty much the absolute peak of it by comparison, and part of the joy of progressing through the story is finding out what quirky shit the game is going to throw at you next. Once again, difficult to talk about without spoiling it, but I WILL say a second playthrough will shine light on subtle tells you missed out on the first time around on the biggest plot twist right at the very end of the game, when you finally find out for certain what happened leading up to your own death.

And I haven't even gotten to talking about the game's graphical style yet, which is among the best the DS has to offer:

For the longest time, I was at a loss for fucking words how a handheld game managed to pull a look this fluid off. It's an artstyle that well and truly blurs the line between hand-animated spritework and 3D modelling in a way that no other game has pulled off since - no, not even Blazblue. I see what you're doing there guys, and no, limiting the framerate does not make it more authentic. Anyway, my point is that it plays the the system's limitations brilliantly. There's really not much actual tech going on behind this look, no cel shading or sprite tweening or anything like - just simple, low poly 3D models, and very clever texure work. And it all adds up to a game that is a real treat on the eyes and lets its diverse roster shine all the brighter. I've said it before, I'll say it again, and I'll continue saying it until the end of fucking time: in a videogame's graphical work, artstyle will always trump raw technical power, every god damned time.

Though Ghost Trick is admittedly kind of a short game, it's incredibly memorable as a whole, and it's a game you should absolutely play if you have the opportunity to - which most people will nowdays because there's a smartphone port of it now. And I think most of all, I appreciate that it did its thing, tied up all its loose ends and ended with proper closure on the first and only title, because I feel like some of the magic would definitely be lost if it ended up becoming a sequel machine like the likes of Phoenix Wright did.

January 2, 2021

Naughty Bear

What we have here is a game that can be generously described as a serial killer sim. Probably the closest equivalent it has today is the recent Friday the 13th game, but even that doesn't really do the game's concept justice because there's much more to it than simply hunting down people and murdering them. At its core, Naughty Bear is playing for score more than body count, which you can milk out of enemies by scaring the everloving shit out of them beforehand, creating a cascade of fear that spreads through the map and feeds off each other, driving people crazy before finally finishing them off once they've served their purpose. Now this was back in 2010, so to say the least this wouldn't have flown over well with the utterly juvenile reactions to sociopathy and gore in videogames that the media and public of the day tended to garner, so as you can plainly see, they took a Happy Tree Friends approach and made all the characters in the game cute fuzzy bears instead, leaving everyone bleeding fluff instead of blood and masking all the violence in this sort of ironic undertone as if being cast as an episode of a Tellytubby-esque children's show, complete with a friendly English announcer. Even though I like this game, it still needs to be said that it's incredibly low budget and obviously won't appeal to everyone, and even with the best intentions can be frustrating to complete at times, so it's definitely a "your mileage may vary" kind of game.

The scoring system can be a little difficult to grasp at first, because I don't think the game really impresses apon you the importance of its intricacies so much as inform you that you can take an opportunity to stealth kill somebody and sacrifice it to instead jumpscare the shit out of them - but much like actual jumpscares, other bears become numb to it the more you abuse it. So you have to not just be violent and scary, but do so in a way that people witness the results of your handiwork - screw with them by smashing shit and making sure they hear it, attack bears right in front of other bears, drive one completely crazy and have them unnerve other people for you, and even make them kill themselves right in front of their friends. Over the course of progressing through the game, it very much conditions you from a simple murderer right into an actual monster to be envied by many of its inspirations, fucking with people's heads, toying with your food and taking a particular glee in it all the while like the antagonists of most horror movies tend to. Some people might say it's too many extra steps in the way of the actual fighting and killing, and honestly they have good reason to - but personally, I like it. The fighting is incredibly basic in this game anyway, so I feel it's an extra sprinkle of flavour that does a good job distracting from that fact.

This all being said, even I have to acknowledge that Naughty Bear expects you to put a lot of investment into scenarios that can fall apart in seconds if you're careless and unlucky. Yup, it's that time again - this is another game that follows the Hitman school of game design, throwing you long levels you're expected to play to near flawlessness, if not just to complete them then to attain the high scores needed to unlock more levels and progress further into the game. And many of these levels require you to play challenge levels, which are essentially just the story levels but with much stricter requirements such as requiring you to kill everyone or drive everyone completely insane, finish the whole stage under a time limit or without being seen at all. And honestly, it gets really hard to put a plan into action when other bears immediately flee in fight or fright at the first sight of you even when you haven't done anything wrong yet, and there's often a point where they will just barricade themselves in a building and refuse to come out, forcing you to climb in through the window and risk being mobbed by 4-5 of the fuckers at once without providing you an alternative for breaking them up, which the game is usually good at providing otherwise. When Naughty Bear starts becoming problematic, you can count on being stuck on one level for DAYS because the stars just refuse to align in your favour, and this can prove to be tiring, especially if you're like me and want to clear every possible level before moving onto another story mission.

At the end of the day, this game is very much an acquired taste, and I don't blame anyone for hating it at all. If you're just in the market for a reverse horror game and nothing else, I'll freely admit there are better games to choose from (I hear the recently released Carrion is pretty good in that respect), but if you were turned off this game originally because of its critical reception, well, you could yet be surprised. There are definitely much worse games I can think of.

January 3, 2021

Limbo

Limbo is pretty much the textbook definition of a pretentious art game, and marks off pretty much every item on that checklist I can think of. Completely anonymous protagonist? Check. Unnecessary artstyle limitations - in this case, setting the entire game in black and white? Check. An unspoken narrative left so open to interpretation that an actual storyline no longer remains? Check. Extremely simple gameplay taught by example rather than explanation. Check - though in Limbo's case, the "example" is usually death. More on that later. What I want to stress for now is that despite any misgivings I seem to be giving, I genuinely liked Limbo, even if not quite loved, and a lot of the observations I'm making right now are only in hindsight. Because once again: I feel like the best measure of love and value in a game is to be able to look at something you like, admit it isn't perfect and to figure out why, because even better games can ultimately emerge as a result. My biggest problem with Limbo is that nothing is explained - the only context you're ever given until about halfway through the game is just that you're a little kid going left to right and trying to not die. Apparently you're looking for your sister or something? But even that you don't know if you haven't seen the synopsis of the game beforehand, which wouldn't you know it, only appears in the store page and not the actual game itself. There's leaving a game open to interpretation, and then there's just plonking a character into a hazardous world and making people figure out your own plot for you because you can't be fucked to actually write one.

Actually playing it, I think you'll find that this game is loaded to the fucking brim with beginner's traps - in fact, it's almost the only method this game has of expressing difficulty, because there's absolutely no combat and your only interaction with the world otherwise is grabbing or pushing things. This is partly a result of the game's artstyle, as you'll discover early on when you find out the hard way that a series of shapes on the ground is not in fact more grass, but a fatal, limb-shearing beartrap concealed within it, and it really does beg the question of how the fuck the player is supposed to know that before they bumbled into it like an idiot because there really isn't much indication beforehand. Seriously, what the fuck is this supposed to look like on first glance besides grass?

Another part of the problem is that this absolutely isn't an oversight - the developers intentionally make level design decisions with the understanding that most players will die to the overwhelming majority of them at least once, to the point that they almost seem to bask in this sadism at times. For example: later on, there's a tremendous slab above and a protrusion sticking out from below. This seems like an incredibly obvious crushing trap with that protrusion being a button to activate it, right? Nope - that protrusion is in fact the only safe space to stand, and there are virtually invisible buttons either side of it. And just in case they weren't already taking the piss enough, they repeat the exact same trap moments later, but with the buttons inverted to catch you off guard again. The only game that should be employing this kind of trickery unironically is I Wanna Be The Guy, and even then only because it's a fucking parody of games that are designed this way. The entire learning curve is designed around the expectation that you will die to incredibly dumb deathtraps at least once, probably most evident in the fact that Limbo expects you to weaponize those aformentioned bear traps against other threats later on, to say nothing of these slug things that stick into your head and force you to move only in one direction into stupid deaths you had no way of seeing or measuring up beforehand.

Later on in the game Limbo shifts gears and starts shoving you into puzzles based around inertia - which is to say you find a physics object, push it up a hill and do something else in the time it takes for that object to slide down the hill. It feels like it's taking a Half Life 2 esque smugness in its physics system, but it still doesn't change the fact that it becomes something like 75% of the solutions to your problems after a certain point and it STILL somehow doesn't quite occur to me to try it. And I'm more than willing to accept that as my own fault, but part of me does wonder if that's partially because Limbo spends too much of its early learning curve throwing beginner's trap bullshit at you and not enough time teaching you the importance of inertia that you'll need to abuse the absolute shit out of later, which is itself a trap of designing difficulty curves that I see a bit of in other games - our own personal example would probably be Sonic Unleashed, which conditions the player into abusing the boost scot free and then abruptly starts punishing them for boosting recklessly later into the game rather than teaching them to show any kind of restraint.

In the end, it's no surprise Limbo has the sheer number of copycats it does nowadays - it's not perfect, but it definitely set the groundwork for a whole subgenre of creepy, defenseless platformers like Inside and Little Nightmares. The ending is an absolute pisstake of an anticlimax, though, and if there's any specific reason I sound grumpy about the game as a whole that probably plays a big part in it.

January 4, 2021

Masamune Date (Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes)

Sengoku Basara is a series that will draw immediate comparisons to Samurai Warriors, and for pretty good reason. Both are set in the same time period, both feature the likenesses of many of the same warriors from the feudal Japan era, and both feature a focus of singlehandely wiping out hundreds of mooks, an absolutely silly assortment of weapons and a very loose, over-the-top envisioning of those historic events. And being totally honest, I kinda wish they were both just the same series altogether, because there are definitely important lessons they can stand to learn from each other. I'll start first with what SB did better. Short point, but I just like the weapons in general a lot more than SW's. Samurai Warriors sometimes had weapon choices that were a little esoteric, like Oichi using a kendama and Shingen using a war fan, but most were otherwise somewhat grounded in reality. Sengoku Basara on the other hand, goes absolutely fucking nuts with it. Date here, otherwise a down to earth swordsman, is the only character I've ever known with the ability to sextuple wield swords, three in each hand. And that really sets the tone for the kind of lunacy that follows in the rest of the roster, like drill lances, electrified chainsaws, a prisoner's ball and chain, and there's even a character that wields an assortment of modern day firearms as a part of their kit. It's a game that knows full well that its distinctions from actual history are absurd and leans further into it, hamming it up in almost every sense of the word.

And to be perfectly honest, its mechanics are just a lot better than Samurai Warrior's too. One of the biggest problems I have with SW is that every character in the game has a small selection of moves that benefit specific situations, such as juggling or crowd clearing or comboing, but its dumb combo system arbitarily requires you to execute your standard string of attacks up to a certain point before you gain the ability to use them, which is time enough for a competent enemy to scratch you once and interrupt the entire chain. Basara on the other hand, not only allows you to execute any of your special moves completely on command it even allows you to cancel any part of your standard string with one of your choice, providing the perfect happy medium between comboing enemies for effect and still having total access to any part of your moveset you could conceivably want at any given time. If there's even a SINGLE thing the entirety of the Warriors franchise could really benefit from, from its inception to the modern day, this is absolutely it. It truthfully, genuinely fucking annoys me that they haven't just stolen this yet, because it makes Sengoku Basara an order of magnitude more fluid to play and makes designing freeform combos SO fucking easy compared to all the janky bullshit a Warriors game makes you go through.

And this is the part where I have to make a point in favour of Samurai Warriors, because believe me it has a big one: the campaign design. Even though Samurai Warriors will recycle entire maps verbatim a LOT by design, most characters will play through maps through an entirely different perspective and often with completely different objectives, sometimes even going as far as changing the very makeup of both armies to suit your character's objectitives. This is good. Great, even, and does a great deal of good milking and padding out much needed playtime and replay value across its steadily growing roster of playable characters. Though I'll sing praises of Sengoku Basara in every other aspect, any time a character plays through the same map as another character 95% of the time it will be the exact same layouts with the exact same objectives and the exact same twists and the exact same key paths between objectives. All that ever changes is the order you're assigned certain missions and the order you can choose to clear them in. With every character. Over and over again. And most of them are overwhelmingly linear and arcadey by design, in stark contrast to the relatively open ended nature of SW's battlefields, and to be perfectly honest Sengoku Basara loses a lot for choosing to follow this design focus over the power of choice that SW can allow you to express.

Even still, I consider the Sengoku Basara series better overall, and I find it kind of a shame that Capcom abandoned what I feel was a very effective competitor to Koei's Warriors - partly because even SB still had plenty of room to improve, and partly because to be honest, most Warriors games besides the Hyrule Warriors series have been stagnating badly without a direct competitor to motivate them to better themselves.

January 5, 2021

Demon Chef Waffnuffly (EXU2: Batshit Insane)

Forget turning it up to 11 - EXU2 is a mod/singleplayer campaign for Unreal Tournament that turns it up to fucking 300. It turns shit up so much that it genuinely stretches Unreal Engine 1 to its absolute fucking limit, and has to do constant battle with limitations both soft and hard coded just to be able to exist in the form that it does. Did you know that under normal circumstances, the HUD in Unreal Tournament can only display health as high as 200 and armour as high as 150? I sure didn't! And it's one such inconvenience that this mod had to contest with, because your health can go all the way up to fucking 999 and armour up to... fuck. I don't even know what the limit is, just that it can go into the tens of thousands, up to the point that all but the most ridiculous of attacks just don't even phase you anymore. You might think, then, that these kinds of numbers add up to a power trip and not much more, and well... sometimes it is. Despite being largely edits of the original maps from Unreal 1, though, the arrangements and the enemy design are absolute unrestrained LUNACY, easily capable of taking your new default health cap of 300-600 and fucking you sideways regardless if you're not careful, and then throwing massive hordes of them into every conceivable nook and cranny possible. And I mean EVERY conceivable nook and cranny, even ones that you never would have thought of. I don't think any other interactive medium of any kind has ever made me check every fucking torch sconce I pass by for fear of the fact that Waffnuffly sometimes hides minature, partially invisible Brutes in them.

So yeah, in case I haven't projected the impression strongly enough yet, EXU2 doesn't take itself seriously at ALL. I could even go as far as to call it the I Wanna Be The Guy of first person shooters if it had more pop culture references - but it still has a similar penchant for traps and playing them for laughs. The very first level is an obvious reskin of Vortex Rikers from the first game, which originally only existed to build tension and atmosphere and didn't give you an opportunity to kill anything at all - you only needed to fire a Dispersion Pistol once to break the glass for an emergency exit release. Conversely in EXU2, you're armed within moments of leaving your cell and you're mobbed mere minutes afterwards. There's one particularly hilarious bit after the famous locked door Skaarj encounter where you turn a corner and are met with a horde of ridiculously fast Fucker Brutes (no seriously, that's their actual name) who don't have projectiles and exist only zoom up at lightning speed and beat the shit out of you. Hell, this level has several variations of Alien Queens, ordinarily the final boss of Unreal, which you're expected to take out before the escape and which explode into a fucking mountain of Pupae once defeated that are debatably harder to wipe out than the Queen itself was. It's moments like this that truly form the spirit and essence of EXU2 - being dumped into absurd odds and praying you have the health, firepower and appropriate save scumming to make it through alive. Though as a direct result of EXU2's sheer absurdity of enemy and entity count, saves can spontaneously corrupt and leave you completely up shit creek, often forcing you to make several backups and hope they don't fuck up too. That shit sucks.

If there's anything I truly don't like about the mod, it would probably be its arsenal. Granted, standing up to the legendary synergy and punchiness of the original game's weapons was always going to be a big ask, but good god are some of these weapons just fucking boring to use. The highlight of the arsenal would probably be the Shitgun. No, that's not a typo - it's essentially a varation of the Biorifle, but fires exploding excrement instead of generic biowaste. The secondary fire, rather than being the same charge shot of the vanilla version, launches an entire canister of compressed shit that explodes violently, positively shredding crowds of weaker enemies (and yourself if you're close enough, cos honestly you're not that much stronger than them) and launching everything that survives into the fucking stratosphere. And I really wish any of the other weapons could express even that amount of imagination.

Many of them are just "primary fire shoot projectile, secondary fire shoot other projectile", like the Energy AR, which has the same problem I had with Doom's pistol in that its firerate is JUST on the awkward butterzone between too fast and too slow that it never feels right in either respect, despite being clearly intended as a reliable fallback weapon between all the other wacky over the top bullshit like the Hyper Flakker. Its secondary fire lobs a ball that splits into three other balls which then burst into a spectacular supernova of splash damage shots that deal an absolutely insane amount of damage. Sometimes it feels like the only reliable way to make sure something actually fucking dies, but just being in the same room as it leaves you with like a 50/50 chance of surviving every time you fire it, much less within Redeemer distance. And then there's the Hellgun, which SHOULD be an amazing weapon because the secondary fire makes a gigantic blast around you that wrecks shit similar to the Shitgun at absolutely no risk to yourself, but over half the enemies in this game are some variation of Demon which are not only immune to the specific damage type this gun deals, they're actually HEALED by the fucking thing well above their ordinary health cap, so there are entire levels in a row you don't have any reason to bring the fucking thing out because it actively harms your progress more then helps it.

I think the saddest thing is that EXU2 was never finished, and despite the years of work that Waffnuffly put into it almost singlehandedly, it probably never will be. It definitely ended on a high note regardless, for what it's worth, with the combination of a super-powered chargable Shock Rifle already capable of singlehandedly ruining boss tier enemies, a pickup that multiplies your damage by seven and a long stretch of several of the aformentioned boss tier enemies with many lackeys in tow, giving you a limited amount of time to blast your way through all of them before your incredibly generous buffs expire. But for it to end there on the suggestion that there's more coming and it never arrives is still kind of disappointing. If you happen to have a copy of Unreal Tournament, I still suggest giving it a shot regardless. Just don't expect to find it fair.

January 6, 2021

Scott Pilgrim (Scott Pilgrim Vs The World)

Honestly, on first glance, it was a struggle to say anything about this game I hadn't already said about Streets of Rage. That's a compliment, by the way. Mechanically it's sound, it's well presented both visually and audibly, the enemy design is varied in both looks and behaviour, and to top it all off it's about as faithful to its source material as a 4 player arcade beat-em-up can be. So while it might still sound like most of what I have to say after this point is negative, understand that most of these are ultimately just nitpicks - an analytical look at how an already great Scott Pilgrim game could have been even better, as many of these writeups have been. And I think it's best to start with Scott Pilgrim's incredibly loose definiton of an arcade genre game, and concessions made to make longer and more playable from an on-and-off standpoint have, if anything, worked against it as a whole.

Unlike most traditional arcade genre games, this game isn't designed to be beaten in a single sitting. On its own, that's absolutely fine. But much of the game's progression is built around that idea, and to be perfectly honest, I feel the notion that arcade games need a progression system at all beyond advancing from one level to the next is incredibly misguided. It's already kind of silly that an arcade game - which by definition is typically designed with the intention of being able to pick it up and play it at any skill level - intentionally gates off integeral parts of your moveset like the ability to fucking BLOCK behind some arbitary level up system. But levelling up also changes raw stats like the amount of damage you can deal, and enemies absolutely scale upwards over time with the expectation that you will too - faster than the amount of XP you can get from the enemies they give you. So what will inevitably happen is that you will eventually lose all of your lives at some point regardless of your skill level and be stuck on one level farming more, just for the base stats needed to progress. This isn't just unfun, it's also just plain dumb. Even when playing the game in hindsight with all the levels needed to beat a stage in one sitting, you'll find yourself MUCH more powerful than the stage was designed for and steamroll through every possible threat instead. All this level system accomplished was to make a decently balanced experience virtually impossible, and had Scott Pilgrim been designed around having all his abilities from the start and an unchanging set of base stats like just about any other arcade classic this never would have happened.

Let's talk about lives, actually. A lot of people like to suggest lives themselves are an outdated concept outside of literal arcade machines, and I'll always be the first to say that's complete and utter bullshit. The real problem has never been lives as a concept, but in their application - and it's the application of them that I take issue with in Scott Pilgrim. Simply put, all of your resources carry over between levels, including health and lives, but running out of them doesn't really even result in a fail state - you just return to the map screen with another three lives to try again. What this means in effect that not only are they meaningless, they also represent another disadvantage in that your resources are never restocked until you lose all of them - so finishing a level anything less than perfectly leaves you in a worse state - often even a doomed one - as opposed to just dying and getting all your shit back again. Why not just set everything back to the default values every time you clear a level? It would save a hell of a lot of time, and honestly just makes a whole lot more sense than inviting a game over literally every single time you accomplish anything of note.

Alright, nitpicks over, because now I have a REAL problem to discuss. Let's be clear, I appreciate the XBLA and digital storefronts in general for giving smaller, indie studios a platform that would otherwise be extortionately expensive and virtually unattainable for them, and including this one it has brought forth a lot of games that never would have seen the light of day otherwise. But the problem with digital games is that they only exist as long as the storefront does. The reason we can still play Super Mario Bros relatively hassle free at almost any point in history is because the physical media of the game still exists, will continue to exist for a ridiculous amount of time long past the inevitable death of anyone who ever had a hand in it, and which then can be backed up to other mediums to further its longetivity and accessibility to other platforms long after its original one ceases to be relevant. But if it only exists in digital form, and its listing vanishes from its storefront, that's it - it's gone. And this was a very real problem for Scott Pilgrim Vs The World for years, because licensed games are particularly vulnerable and are often left in complete limbo when the original publisher's license expires. That this has the capacity to happen at all is completely fucked up. It leaves the only remaining option of playing a game to pirate it, the prevention thereof of which is usually the specific purpose of a digital storefront these days when they come laden with DRM for the convenience. Surely there's a better way to handle abandonware than this?

January 7, 2021

Ridley (Metroid: Other M)

Oh, boy, it's another one of those titles, isn't it? You know the type - a franchise that has lost most of the trust it once had in the golden days of gaming, and most people can point to THAT game as a singluar reason why. Other M, however, holds a distinction that's unique among all the '06 tier failures of this list. Most developers and publishers exhibit some level of shame or regret when they push something this bad to market, but to Sakamoto he was proud of the end result and claimed it was exactly the game he set out to make, and he wouldn't change a thing. This was the same guy behind Super Metroid, the namesake of the Metroidvania genre and one of the most beloved games of all goddamn time, and it leaves me scratching my head wondering what the fuck happened to him that he considered any part of Other M fine. It's a game with incredibly stupid controls, laughably bad plothole-ridden narrative, crap dialogue, stupid and contradictary gameplay mechanics and honestly, a complete butchering of Samus as a character where they had originally set out to expand her outwards from a stoic and quiet space hunter, furthering the senseless, dated narrative that silent protagonists should never be made to speak. Instead of, you know, that it should be handle with care and consideration of all the adventures they've been through to that point.

In spite of the fact that Other M is a game made with full 3D movement in mind, it only works with a single Wiimote held sideways - you know, the only control method that doesn't grant you access to an analog stick. Already we're off to a really bad start, but it gets worse. There's a first person mode which requires you to physically shift your grip on the Wiimote and aim the pointer end at the screen, and you have to do this frequently because this is the only fucking way to fire missiles. This is a game that expects you to be quick on your feet, but also expects you to be able to physically juggle your controller into two completely different grips to be able to act on openings in a timely manner, which is the kind of clumsiness not even the N64 controller - the pad specifically designed with three different grips - ever had to deal with. It's like it was trying to be Metroid Prime and Super Metroid at the same time, and ended up becoming the absolute worst of both worlds instead. There isn't really a simple problem and alternative I can suggest to any of this, because most of them are concessions to make a sideways wiimote work in this form - in effect you would have to work with a nunchuck and basically do the whole gameplay loop from scratch again, which is a can of worms that would ripple through the whole game's design for how interweaved it is with everything else.

One of the things Other M is best known for is both a gameplay and narrative element. Because Metroid games - even the more linear ones, like Metroid Fusion - are built to be a gradual escalation of abilities and upgrades over the course of the game, and because most Metroid games are built with the acknowledgement of a previous game's events, they need to contrive some kind of reason for Samus to not have any of the gear she was using in the previous game. Because Samus is working alongside an old CO in this game, they weave the two together and rather than destroying her gear in catastrophic damages like usual, they simply don't allow her to use it unless authorized to. On its face, it's actually a great idea and a nice change of pace from the norm, and restricts them on the basis that her abilities can potentially be hazardous to other squadmates and survivors on the station - which they are. But many ommissions don't make a single bit of sense and seem to be there only to test you. For example, there's a section of the station that's so hot you receive shield damage just for being there, and you have to make it to the other side while battling off monsters all the while before your shields run out. It's only AFTER you've made a pass through that room that it turns out Samus had an upgrade to negate heat damage all along and that you're suddenly authorized to use it. What the fuck was the point of that??? It's not like they didn't know well in advance the kinds of threats they were dealing with either, and this comes into play with a lot of Samus's other abilities too, albiet in not nearly as ridiculous a form as this.

And then there's the writing itself. I'll be honest guys, I don't usually like writing about narrative and characterization and honestly I'm convinced I'm kinda bad at it, but for Other M I absolutely have to because what it did to Samus as a character is a fucking travesty. There's plenty you can still garner from a character that hasn't had a chance to speak - Samus largely works alone and doesn't depend on anybody to get a job done, and in the face of any adversity she's unflinchingly brave and stoic. Outside of a fight, she's analytical and thorough, like she's applying a scientific method to every train of thought. Other M likes to portray that analytical-ness through internal monologues that are spoken so woodenly that you could have replaced her with with a Vocaloid and probably have been better off, to say nothing of the fact that most of it is really just stating the obvious rather than a deeper insight not immediately available to most players with a functioning brain. As for "brave and stoic"? Apon seeing Ridley she throws a hissyfit so massive that it causes her armour to dematerialize from around her, which is a reaction one might have expected from an up and coming rookie seeing an imposing space dragon for the first time, not after having been on several galactic adventures to this point and having already killed this exact dragon multiple times before. Did Sakamoto just have a total brainfart and forget he made other games before this one?

It's not like the writing is any better once you focus on elements of it besides Samus. It keeps trying to force in this ridiculously out of place motherhood motif that serves only to weaken Samus's character. The station this all takes place on is called the Bottle Ship, she constantly refers to the Metroid from Super Metroid as "the baby", she's only drawn to the Bottle Ship in the first place because of a distress signal named "Baby's Cry", and fuck, why even refer to the events of the game itself when THE TITLE OF THE FUCKING GAME LITERALLY ABBREVIATES TO M:OM. There's also this subplot of one of your friendly squadmates going around and murdering the other squadmates, but it's abruptly forgotten about before there's so much as a hint of who it is and why, which is like... what is even the point then? Just establish the squad as redshirts to be killed off one by one by the station's threats and hazards if you can't be bothered to keep them around for the entire game. Christ.

Needless to say, Other M has really put a wrench in the staying power of Metroid - everything that has happened since has been either a remake, a port or a spinoff. With the exception of Metroid Prime 4, which for all accounts seems to be in some kind of development hell. For how influential Super Metroid still remains even today, the franchise deserves a lot fucking better than this.

January 8, 2021

Bind (Legend of Princess)

And now to wash out the taste of Other M, today we're doing something different. A Zelda fangame, and a really short one too - it'll probably take less time to complete a runthrough of it than it'll take me to write about it. You would think then, that I'd hold it against a game like this, right? Well... a little. I'd be lying if I said I didn't want an entire game of just this, rather than the single 10 minute long level that Legend of Princess provides. But that 10 minutes? Fucking sublime. It will never cease to be incredible to me that a single person can put together the amazing spritework, barely-copyright-safe leitmotifs and simple, punchy gameplay design that makes this game enthralling to play over and over again, and it certainly helps that it's great as a parody too. Bind's animations are friggin' hilarious, and so are most of the boss fights in their own little ways. One of the things I like most about Legend of Princess, though, is that you can pick a selection of 6 tools across two different categories before starting, and the game somehow has concessions ready for EVERY possible combination, leaving an almost completely different playstyle between each of them. It's exactly the kind of thing I miss from the Sonic games of old, and honestly, a LOT of games that used to have multiple characters, compressed into just a selection of tools. I love it, even if some of them are by design objectively than others.

The real reason I kept this game on the list, though, is a human element I've really struggled to quantify anywhere else. I hate that I don't have a concise way of putting it to words, but even with the short time you spend with Legend of Princess it's clear that this game was made because the creator wanted to make it, and they had just as much fun making it as the player does when playing it. And in broad swathes of the industry - ESPECIALLY today, in the era of crunch, executive meddling and milking franchises based on profit - I think you'll find that this mutual fun and respect between developer and player is conspicuously absent. It's obviously not super practicaly if you're in the business to make money, especially at the pace Konjak makes games, but it's still an example I wish the industry at large would adapt more. Executives probably like to think it doesn't show when they drive their workers half to death to get a game out before an unreasonable deadline, but believe me, it does - and not always because voice performances are flat, or the code is full of bugs they're still patching after the game goes gold, or graphic designers trying to emulate realism by slapping a boring sepia filter over everything instead of intentionally designing everything with purpose. Shit, sometimes it's a lot more freudian than that.

It's the same reason a lot of group reanimated projects on Youtube look so much more expressive than the original animation they're based off of - every individual animator has a lot less responsibility and a much looser deadline than they normally would, lending them the time and inspiration to go nuts with it. And that's really the essense of Legend of Princess when you boil it down to its basics - time and inspiration, with simple fun for all parties involved being the first priority over literally anything else. And I really wanna see more of that from the industry at large, not just Konjak (though they HAVE made a decent amount of commercial games since). If you wanna try it yourself, it's free on their own site, and it definitely won't take you long to decide whether you like what you're seeing.

ITT BL reminisces over his entire game library

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