ITT BL reminisces over his entire game library

February 1, 2021

ZombiU

Never content to let Nintendo hog the tech demo spotlight, Ubisoft would pull the same Red Steel stunt they did with the Wii and went forward with this - but quite contrary to what was otherwise an utterly generic FPS with motion controls and barely functioning swordplay in Red Steel, here the system's gimmick is used mostly for its second screen, acting as a radar that you usually have to manually ping and then functioning as inventory management whenever you open your backpack up. In that light, ZombiU is a survival horror game, and the horror element comes from the potential for the game to catch you by surprise whenever you're distracted by the touchscreen, which doesn't pause the game whenever it's in use. Anywhere else this might have been a really fucking awful mechanic, but if there was ever a right place to use it, it would absolutely be right here, where you have to be paranoid about your surroundings and make sure the coast is clear before you fumble around through your belongings - or sometimes, you might even have to run around a corner to switch weapons after running out of ammo with zombies bearing down on you, leaving precious little time to pull another gun out to save your skin. Horror games are often defined best by the player's vulnerabilities rather than their strengths, and it's in this sense that the gamepad utilization shines greatest. What I find baffling is that other features of the WiiU pad are only used selectively when they should be used in an all-encompassing fashion, probably best exemplified by the fact that gyroscopic aiming is only available on scoped weapons. Ammo tends to be VERY scarce in this game, as is the tradition for survival horror games of old, and being able to land shots on specific parts of a target (usually headshots) is incredibly important, especially on stronger or more armoured zombies - so the lack of an ability to fine tune your aim with gyro is incredibly strange, even this early on as a launch title. It wasn't like they didn't know how to - they quite literally did, just refused to use it on anything besides sniper rifles and crossbows.

And that brings me to melee fighting, which is incredibly barebones and often the only real option you have for significant stretches of the game, either because you're out of ammo or have to save it for much more difficult situations. Again, horror games are defined by vulnerability, and I don't have an issue with the appearance of a character not being on the same tier as Duke Nukem, but ZombiU approaches it in a way that becomes absolute tedium instead. You have exactly one attack which is affected by an invisible stamina system, making attacks become slower to recover from with each swing - but even at the lowest stamina you still attack quickly enough to stunlock a single zombie, so you never have any actual reason to stop for a breather, just that you have to put up with the voice actor going absolutely ham with their "exhausted desperate swing" lines, which gets old REALLY quickly but because the game actually incentivizes playing the game this way you don't really have any choice but to whip out the cricket bat whenever you're in a one on one confrontation. This is made all the worse by the fact that zombies take a LOT of fucking whacks to take down completely - I swear some of them take twenty actual hits to bring down, like two solid minutes of bashing ONE zombie's brain in with a cricket bat. This is fucking stupid by any standard. You can make a quicker way of dealing with zombies than that while still decentivizing you from trying it in a crowd.

Most of ZombiU's remaining mechanics are based around its permadeath system - all the survivors of this game are expendable, and whenever one dies, a fresh face appears to take his place with a fresh kit. But you can also find your old corpse to get your original gear back from it, but if you died from a zombie bite you have to kill your zombie self first. This will probably happen a lot while you're still getting used to the game's mechanics, because any zombie bite in this game is an instant kill, and for whatever reason a zombie's chances of attempting it are based on... your own health? And anything less than full will give them a chance of attempting it? Apparently later versions patched this threshhold to be somewhat lower, but it's still weird to me either way that the game doesn't indicate to you that it functions this way at all - I only learnt about it myself through fucking Miiverse of all things. Once you realize that's a thing, it actually gets pretty easy all things considered. Most of my deaths after that point were attributed mostly to the incredibly dumb detection radius on land mines, which instantly activates the moment it leaves your hand and for some reason detonates on zombies in that radius even if they're on the other side of a wall where the explosion wouldn't damage them anyway. I lost a hardcore run to this fucking stupid mechanic and I'm still pretty mad about it.

For a time, ZombiU had something of a Dark Souls esque ecosystem - not insofar as other players being able to invade other player's games, but if they died their corpse or zombie could show up in another player's sessions, and they could spraypaint messages onto walls that other players could pick up with their black light. There's just one tiny little problem with that - those things require servers. Specifically, servers that are still online. Which Ubisoft shut down because they didn't like that ZombiU didn't sell Assassin's Creed numbers, and never brought them back online even when they ported the whole game to other systems as just Zombi. Honestly though, although I like the concept they could have designed it a lot better - the game is largely linear and you don't really have an excuse to look for shit at your own pace, so it wasn't uncommon for player zombies you just encountered along the way, not something you had to go out of your way to look for. I was hoping for a sequel to fix all this and add some more investment into a thriving world of zombie survival, but again, Ubisoft won't sequelize anything unless it knocks it out of the park right out of the fucking door, so I can only assume they took the lessons learnt from it and dumped them into The Division instead - by all accounts utterly generic live service trash, and a complete waste of the concepts that ZombiU was building up to.

February 2, 2021

Perspective

Okay, hear me out on this one. You know that thing you did as a kid on long car trips, where you'd look out the side window and imagine a little guy jumping over all the obstacles that were passing by?

Yeah, that's basically what Perspective is in a nutshell. You switch between two modes, one where you walk your character around in first person and the other where the little man unfreezes and you can move and platform with them from the perspective your character is viewing them from. Your goal of every stage is simply to get the little guy to a goal, and it forms the basis of a puzzle game simply in that it appears impossible unless you view the scenery from a very specific angle and/or position. For example, see that tiny gap on the left? You can actually go through that if you move VERY close to it, because the little guy never changes size on your screen from any perspective. Tricks like this are pretty common throughout the game, and it isn't long until it starts getting brain bending. As usual, I'm being coy about it - not because it has any plot significance to spoil, but because like most puzzle games, it stops being special once you know solutions to it in advance. And unfortunately that's going to make this writeup pretty short, because the game itself is too.

See, it's hard not to think of Portal whenever this game comes up. Or rather Narbacular Drop specifically, which was the game that led to the creation of Portal. While I like Perspective, it's hard not to shake the feeling that there's not a great deal of substance or long term goal to it - you're just clearing levels that get progressively harder, and then the game just suddenly ends without warning, no climax or anything. Perspective feels like it should have been the Narbacular Drop to something much bigger that never actually happened, I guess because Valve didn't happen to drop in that day. And that sucks because I really want more of it, but nothing else like it has ever really been made to my knowledge. One could maybe argue Superliminal, which was all about grabbing objects and fucking with their size through point of view shenanigans, but it still didn't integrate platforming in the same way Perspective did which was probably my favourite part of it. So I guess this will just remain as an experiment between students. Real shame, that.

February 3, 2021

Lagiacrus (Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate)

Monster Hunter has so much shit in common with MMOs that it consistently weirds me out that they don't just make an MMO game proper - or at least one that is available in more than one somewhat obscure market. It has padding and grinding out the ass, a quest system that is either gather x amount of y or kill x of monster y whenever it's not about the hunting itself, and largely simplistic fighting based around whacking a giant monster consistently and dodging out of the way whenever it winds up one of its often heavily telegraphed attacks. In MH3U, though, there was something that I found strangely compelling about it, because there was an overarching, if simple, goal to work towards - there's a stupid powerful monster causing earthquakes on the island, and you need to gradually work your way up to its level by hunting lesser monsters and crafting their remains into weapons and armour, and therein is where the MMO comparison reaches its closest equivalent - the core gameplay loop is hunting monsters and making them into better gear in order to hunt stronger monsters which in turn form even better gear. Even though the game is clearly intended to be played with a party of four (probably best indicated by the fact that monsters deal INSANE amounts of damage later in the game), I really appreciate what they did with the story in this game nonetheless, because it kept me invested enough to later be able to play it just out of pride - I later played MH Generations, and without the context it just felt like I was playing more MH3U and hunting just for hunting's sake, and it just didn't have any way to grip me for a whole playthrough of it.

Monster Hunter has ample opportunity for a LOT of different playstyles, and I don't just mean the myriad of different weapon classes on offer, even though there are plenty of those too - sets of armour, in addition to the simple defence stats and elemental strengths / weaknesses, have a number of perks that can further refine your playstyle to something of your suiting, like getting hungry less quickly, seeing monsters on the minimap or sharpen your weapon in just a stroke or two - and yes, if it isn't an indication of how long it can take to hunt just one monster, you CAN go hungry and have to re-sharpen weapons throughout the fight, which has a very real effect on your ability to actually fight them. Anyway, one thing I've never really been on board with is that despite what just having the armour equipped might suggest, you don't gain any benefit just by having points in a perk at all - most require at least 10 to activate, and some go up to something like fucking 25, when an individual piece of armour might have something like 4 points in an individual perk at most, which means you're heavily incentivized to wear a matching suit of armour to gain absolutely any benefit out of it at all, and by that point, why not just make it a fucking set bonus and take all the guesswork out of it? Well, partly because MH also uses "charms", randomly generated trinkets that act as a buffer to the points system, allowing you to enable some perks out of nothing and strengthen others that your armour already gives you - but the exact abilities that charms can grant you is based on a seeded table that is generated the moment you create a character and cannot be fucking changed - and worse still, some of them are intentionally underpowered to such an extent that it even fucks with your ability to play in other areas, such as lowering the drops you get from monsters, so sometimes you might be given an even more tedious version of an already debatably tedious game and have no fucking way of knowing as such without incredibly obscure exploits to observe how your RNG functions. Who the fuck in Capcom thought this was okay???

Those drops are arguably the most important part of the game, because in addition to crafting gear you're often upgrading shit you already have over very long stretches of game, and the way you're assigned those materials is essentially random. You can obtain additional drops by wounding monsters in certain areas, but unless you manage to lop their tail clean off they usually don't have unique drops of their own, which is something I feel like the franchise needs to lean deeper into? Because attacking a specific part of a monster repeatedly without killing it is actually already a challenge in its own right, and it would be nice to have an objective to accomplish if your weapon happens to need an otherwise ridiculously fucking rare ruby to upgrade, but what will usually happen instead is that you will refight a specific monster because you see value in either the weapons or armour that can be made out of it, hunt them without issue, fall short of what you need to build it and then do it again, over and fucking over until RNG decides to stop being fucking stingy with you. Were it just this it would be bad enough, but some weapon classes fall almost exclusively into a support role just because of this. For some, like the Hunting Horn, that goes without saying, but it really is a complete and utter pisstake that many Hammer weapons require a tail to upgrade, which you can't fucking obtain because Hammers are blunt weapons that can't cut the fucking thing off in the first place, and most ranged weapons aren't that much better at it, in addition to forcing you to wear ranger equivalent armour that is only half as strong and WILL result in you taking cheap one hit deaths whether you like it or not. I'm fine with the idea that the game's design - and some of the weapons, by proxy - are built with the idea that you have a full party of four. I just think it's a little silly that there are this many of them that are just incapable of pulling their own weight.

Am I being hard on this game? Probably. I played long enough to get a full set of Gold Rath armour, which is a fucking huge investment considering it's one of the last possible monsters you can encounter, so being able to play a game that long probably has to mean something. I just think there are ways that it could be better (and has BEEN better, if I'm hearing right? Apparently they dialed charm tables back, which is a relief). I definitely welcome the chance of giving RIse a shot, after the LONG ass break I've had from the franchise because of the mediocrity of Generations.

February 4, 2021

Chase McCain (Lego City Undercover)

As I've said before, you've more or less played every Traveller's Tales Lego game if you ever play one of them, such formulaic sludge that the entire subseries has devolved into - revelling such in the sheer bloat of licensing money that they never feel a pressing need to innovate on anything that isn't broken. Lego City Undercover is very much the exception to this rule, It still holds onto certain tenents of the tried and overdone TT style, such as its obssessive-bordering-on-mental-illness focus on collectibles that don't in any way affect your progression or the outcome of the story, but the distinction here is that it isn't based on any license but Lego itself, so it has to stand out on its own merits instead of depending on brand names to sell. And wouldn't you know it, TT can still make a decent game when they don't have an excuse to be ridiculously lazy about it. Not only does it boast a mixture of vast open world and more focused traditional levels, it also boasts fully voice acted writing in a series usally better known for silent retellings of its licenses, and credit where credit's due, actually does a really good job of it coming from a game expected to be played by kids. It's a game of standards, diversity and originality I really wish the rest of the Lego games would show - and I guess we never will now, considering this was a WiiU title, which famously tended to undersell, probably leaving idiots higher up to believe its design had something to do with that.

Most Lego games are known for having a truly ridiculous amount of characters that are usually just small variations of each other, covering even the most minor, irrelevant characters of any given property and forcing them into some arbitary niche for the purpose of acting as a solution to a puzzle that might as well be just "you need a keycard, this character is the keycard, switch to this character to solve the puzzle". This issue still remains in a sense, but because Chase is the only playable character, Lego City gets around it by having Chase switch costumes constantly - hence the Undercover moniker - and these costumes all have abilities unique to them, usually for the same practical application the other characters in any other Lego game would occupy. What this also means, however, is that because Chase is the only playable character, the drop in / drop out coop that has long been a signature of other Lego games is just flat out gone. To SOME extent I can understand this because managing a second player on a big open world title is already kind of unprecedented and difficult, but one of the biggest appeals of Lego games is that anyone can play them at any time, and to skip out on this completely seems like kind of a monumental fuck up. Surely they could have still implemented same screen coop with one player as the lead, ala Sonic and Tails?

Lego City does use gamepad features, and not always in the most intelligent manner they could have. On one hand, the minimap usage is great, not just because you can view and adjust it independently of gameplay but also that you can even use the touchscreen to set waypoints without pausing, although it does have that signature WiiU problem in that you have to keep a stylus tucked under one of your fingers all the time while you're playing. On the other hand, the gamepad screen is overwritten by another character's face whenever you're given plot specific video calls between missions, and it also has that stupid "physically hold the gamepad upright to use it as a scanning device" gimmick that plagued games like ZombiU among many others, and not even in a particularly witty context - its application is almost always scripted and only useful in the exact context you're allowed to enable it, and even then I seem to recall it only ever came up in side missions? Regardless, if I had to recommend just one game from the entire TT Lego catalogue, it would probably be this game - just keep The Complete Saga handy somewhere, in case you have a sibling that wants to play too.

February 4, 2021

2 hours ago, Blacklightning said:

What this also means, however, is that because Chase is the only playable character, the drop in / drop out coop that has long been a signature of other Lego games is just flat out gone. To SOME extent I can understand this because managing a second player on a big open world title is already kind of unprecedented and difficult, but one of the biggest appeals of Lego games is that anyone can play them at any time, and to skip out on this completely seems like kind of a monumental fuck up. Surely they could have still implemented same screen coop with one player as the lead, ala Sonic and Tails?

[...]

Regardless, if I had to recommend just one game from the entire TT Lego catalogue, it would probably be this game - just keep The Complete Saga handy somewhere, in case you have a sibling that wants to play too.

Luckily, the re-release on PS4/Switch/Xbox added co-op into the game, so there is a way to play Lego City with a buddy.

But since the story plays out exactly the same as the original, Player 2 just ends up playing as a second Chase instead of another character. That may or may not be an issue, but considering how many other Lego games make excuses to have two different characters around, a part of me feels just a tad disappointed.

Despite that, though, I agree that LCU is probably the best post-Star Wars Lego game to get.

February 5, 2021

ME! (Deadpool)

Hey everyone, it's me, your deadly neighbourhood Deadpool! And I'm gonna be covering my own writeup today. What, who else do you think's gonna do it, some random shmuck behind a keyboard? Pfft, fuck that! Nobody does Deadpool like Deadpool, baby!

So I bet you're expecting me to say "this game is playable sex, go throw money at your nearest Gamestop until they give you a copy and beg you to stop", right? And if only it was that simple! My game is pretty good - it would have to be because I dunno, I'M IN IT - but High Moon are a bunch of cheap bastards who made my game on a pretty low budget and then tried to play it for laughs! Imagine me, Deadpool, hilarious wisecracker, healing factor extraordinare and irresistable chick magnet, on the same tier as Arclight. Who the fuck is Arclight? Put me up there with Magneto or Doctor Octopus and I'd show these pansies how it's done. Shit, gimmie a round with my pal Wolverine, I'm sure he won't mind! Point is, I'm A-list material, and the sooner industries start treating me like one the sooner they'll realize they got a bonafide fucking hit on their hands! I get more fans, you guys get some entertainment and Activision gets rich! It's win-win!

I guess another part of the problem is that I'm kinda hard to write for outside of a comic? It's like Lovecraft - you gotta be crazy to get my way of thinking, and it definitely doesn't help when the game is generic as shit otherwise! Seriously, if you thought grey pallettes were bad, try it when like half the game is fucking sewer levels! You realize how much material that leaves me with!? I gotta lower myself to dropping quips at random based on my weapons! And I swear if I have to say SNIKT one more time I'm gonna shoot myself again, so I can only imagine how bad it was for you guys! You've already heard most of my lines in the first half hour or so, and this game is about five hours long! Trust me though, whenever I get to wrestle control away from you guys and do my own thing, I'm a fucking class act. Not gonna spoil any surprises though - they're easily the best part!

Alright, so this's gonna seem a bit outta left field, so hear me out on this one, okay? You ever tried treating a melee weapon like a gun? Give it a bipod, iron sights, pump it to chamber a round, go bang bang? No?

Cos that's what it feels like whenever dipshits try to put both shooty bangbang and slashy stabstab into one game and treat them like separate playstyles! One moment you're making people into chimichanga filling with these sweet-ass katanas, then you gotta pull a gun out to deal with these fuckers with machineguns on the catwalks and then bam, janky-ass 3rd person shooter town. You don't just MIX different flavours of gameplay like that man, that's really basic square peg / round hole bullshit that we should've gotten over by now! That Bayonetta chick had all the right ideas - shooting a gun was just as simple as trying to whack something, just hold down the attack button while looking in someone's general direction and bullets fly out, no flow lost at all. I'd say I'd kill for something that sweet, but in case you haven't heard that's kinda my schtick, y'know? The best High Moon could do was let me pull a gun out mid-combo and shoot it instantly like it was a melee move all by itself, which IS kinda cool but it's hard to tell whether it'll trigger the attack or put me into lame-ass gun mode again. Can't you just let me do the sweet ass gun attacks whenever I want?

Whatever the case, it's still the best game I've been in so far, and you should get it because it's me anyway. Go on, look it up on Steam, I'll wait... what do you mean it's "not there"? WHAT DO YOU MEAN THEY LET THE LICENSE RUN OUT AGAIN??? See kids, this is why you don't make licensed games with EA or Activision! You know what, fuck this shit, I'm out. I'm gonna go send them a few choice words. And maybe a few packages of C4, cos I'm such a nice guy.

February 6, 2021

Dendygar (Crypt Worlds)

If I had to sum this game up in two words, it would be "mesmerizingly weird". By all rights, it should be an absolute shitshow, between its cramped map design, ridiculously grainy sprites and textures, basically nothing gameplay and a core premise of "collect five mcguffins to be able to take down the main villain" drudged up from the deepest depths of writing cliche, games of a feather that seem to come out once a day in the indie world and are quickly forgotten amongst similar sludge on the internet. Crypt Worlds on the other hand, seems entirely aware of its faults and even seems to encourage some of them in a way I can't help but liken to Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff sometimes, becoming a stream of absolute, intentional nonsense from start to finish. To put into perspective - the game only uses two mouse buttons, and your right click is pissing. The ability to piss on things is given almost equal billing to the ability to initiate dialogue. And the dialogue is already incredibly strange, between the guy that watches you piss and rates it out of 100, the merchant outside your house that apparently REALLY wants to kill people with literally everything you sell them, and the underground skeletons that religiously worship fast food. As usual, being somewhat coy about this, because discovering the sheer absurdity of it all is most of the fun of this game.

Half of the gameplay loop of this game is just trying to figure out what the gameplay loop is - all you know is that you have five mcguffins to collect, but not a good idea of what to do for them because the world isn't structured in a way that it has levels or dungeons or any kind of signposting like a game with sensible design philosophies would have. It quickly becomes apparent though that you need specific resources for some of them, and that's when it turns out this is a rudimentary farming game in disguise - you have several patches of dirt you can plant stuff in around your back yard, some of which need to be watered first through the only means the game gives you, and over a few ingame days it grows into shit you can sell for gold or trade for some of the mcguffins you need to complete it. This is honestly the worst aspect of the game, because the shit you find on the ground takes several ingame days to respawn and you might sell the overpriced bones for cash before you realize you need them to beat the game and that they're the most obnoxious thing to grow, and even the bone pickups in the map initially have a modest chance to give you nothing so if you're unlucky you might have to wait most of the fucking week to even make any progress. The system is very exploitable once you realize how it works, especially once you learn that the fast food place also gives you stuff to grow and sell when you eat from there, but it still feels like needless padding in a game that could already hold itself up just fine with its eccentricity.

Honestly, part of the fun of Crypt Worlds is seeing what silly shit the developers put into it and the kinds of things they knew full well you would try. It feels like a lost art in most videogames these days - designers don't seem to understand the limits of their own design anymore, either that or they're forced to shove everything into corridors by people who clearly aren't playing it and don't get a chance to have fun with it as a result. And sure, it absolutely could have been bigger and longer, but I think it's better that a game is short and sweet rather than padding out to meet a quota and overstaying its welcome as a result. Whatever the case, like most games of its type it's completely free, so even if you can't stomach playing it to the end it's well worth giving the world a tour to experience the weirdness for yourself. Or you could just watch Vinny's video on it, which is how I originally discovered it in the first place:

February 7, 2021

Technician (DoomRL Arsenal)

As the name might imply, this is a Doom mod known more for its weapons than anything else - mostly by way of its "assembly" system, which allows you to mod weapons into completely new variants of themselves and padding its weapon count into the dozens if not hundreds as a result. Like many Doom mods, it's also based off a completely separate game - DRL, a Doom-themed roguelike in its purest sense right down to the ASCII style graphics, and cribs many of its mechanics from that game, notably not just the assemblies but a class-based system too wherein separate classes specialize in different areas and weapons, such as a gunner that only spends ammo once every 4 shots with full auto weapons or the demolitionist who is completely immune to all splash damage. There is also a separate pack that adds unique monster variants that spawn in to replace ones that already exist on the map to spice things up even further, even to the extent that they're also programmed with DoomRLA's complex system of resistances and armour types in mind. You would think then, that this adds up to an amazing mod overall, right? Hell the fuck no. This one's on the list mostly because I have a fucking bone to pick with it. This is one of the most popular mods in the Doom modding scene - by some accounts, second only to Brutal Doom - and I honestly can't fathom why, for the mind-numbing tedium that it inspires.

Let's start with the basics and work our way up. For starters, you have a hard limit on how many weapons you can carry at a time. This is actually fine for the most part, a necessary evil to avoid clutter with the absurd amount of weapons you can potentially accumulate otherwise (seriously, use the give all cheat and tell me how long it takes to scroll through the whole fucking thing). What really gets on my tits is that nearly all of them need to reload now, but are balanced as if they don't - so what used to be a game of high octane weaving and circle strafing through enemy fire becomes a game of camping around corners and taking potshots at people in ~3 second bursts, without the excuse that Hideous Destructor had in that your character is physically too weak to play any other way. Shit, many of the normal weapons are objectively weaker than their vanilla counterparts almost exclusively because of this, such as the rocket launcher that now requires a 3-5 second reload FOR EVERY SINGLE SHOT without even doing any more damage than a regular one. And that still isn't even the worst part - for that, we gotta talk about assemblies themselves.

DoomRL Arsenal spawns items called "Mod Packs" into levels at random. When plugged into a weapon, they upgrade a single stat on the weapon you're holding at the time, such as damage, clip size, accuracy / projectile speed and a few quirkier ones such as giving your gun the ability to self-generate ammo. If you insert specific mods into specific weapons in a very specific order, you get the opportunity to transform the gun into a new assembly. To put into context how much content this represents in DoomRLA, there are at best maybe 15 weapons in the mod that aren't assemblies, not counting the ones that are stupid rare to spawn and guess what, also have their own fucking assembly combinations. Most weapons can accept up to four mods and assemblies can take anywhere from 2 to the full 4 slots, and if you're unlucky you might not find ANY in a single level. The real kicker here is three factors. One, those upgrades are fucking permanent and can't be removed. Two, the mod doesn't TELL you what the assemblies are, so you have no idea if you're wasting mods by attempting an assembly at all. And three, you have a limited carrying capacity for mods - four at a time, unless you're playing Technician here who can carry eight. What this basically means is that in order to access like 80% of the content of this mod, you HAVE to play Technician, you HAVE to get lucky and hope the game drops you rarer weapons in the first place, and then you HAVE to savescum for like 10-20 minutes at a time playing fucking Mastermind with your weapons trying to figure out if the mods on your person are actually fucking worth anything.

This is absolutely atrocious design, even with the more modern concessions that have been made later into the mod's life such as the fact that it now saves assembly recipes once you DO eventually learn them. Why was it designed this way? Because "that's the way it was in DRL". FUCK. RIGHT. OFF. I KNOW that's how the original game did things, and it was total fucking shit even in context. Doom mods are usually all about adapting things to the engine and making concessions for it to function competently within its restrictions, and for a mod to play to arguably the worst part of DRL's design so strictly to the point that it becomes absolutely draconian to play is fucking pretentious and asinine, and I can't believe that after all these years all the same fucking flaws still remain in its design, and despite that it's still beloved as a classic in the Doom modding community. At least a totally bog standard randomizer filled with Realm667 asset flips is straightforward, even if it lacks any semblance of balance.

February 8, 2021

Zazz (Sonic: Lost World)

No matter which way I look at it, I struggle to understand the mindset behind Lost World. The boost formula had already well and truly exhausted itself by this point, yes, this much is true - but this seems like the worst possible route any Sonic game could have taken in its absence. Right from the outset, this game billed itself as a focus on parkour, more specifically in its ability to run up and along walls, which was... something that Sonic could already do from the start?????? Much better than he could in this particular game in fact, which is a ridiculous own goal if I've ever seen one. I wouldn't mind if it wasn't already janky as shit to play in the first place - lord knows after over a fucking decade of boost games we could stand to have game where your pace is earnt rather than given to you with a single button press. But Lost World does it by way of a button that toggles your ability to run, and Sonic can only perform the parkour moves while running. Do you people just not know what the fuck analogue sticks are anymore? You tilt them a little to go slow and tilt them all the way to go fast, what the fuck is this two tier bullshit you need to hold down a separate trigger for? Why do games EVER do this? And worse still, LW in particular seems to have accomplished this perfect fucking balance of uselessly slow and uncomfortably fast between the two modes, so either you careen wildly off platforms to your death, and are unable to make critical jumps otherwise because your standard movement speed is fucking pathetic without it and fall into deathpits regardless.

I think worst of all is that Lost World just has no concept of momentum, both in building it and conserving it. I'm not saying that just to be a fucking purist - it genuinely makes this game incredibly jerky and inconsistent with its movement in ways it genuinely had no right to be. Much like Sonic 4, you'll drop to a complete stop the moment you release the control stick, but often you'll lose speed even if you never let go of it, particularly when you're trying to turn because you'll drop speed every single time you change course like a fucked up version of Snake's Nikitia launcher in Smash. And the handling in the air, already fucking mangled from the completely arbitary, restrictive air friction they've been forcing onto Sonic since Unleashed, somehow manages to do be even worse still by all but locking your fucking controls the moment your feet leave the ground - so unlike almost any fucking platforming game in history worth a legacy as great as Sonic's, you're committed to that jump and have almost no ability to correct course, leading to a number of frankly embarrasing deaths whenever the game decides it actually wants to test your platforming chops rather than largely featureless tubes that lack any of the finesse or intelligent design of the Mario game they were CLEARLY ripping off for this. It's a game that was made with the clear intention of reinventing the wheel and somehow reemerged from it holding a fucking triangle.

And of course, as is the style for Sonic games of the modern era, it's not enough for Sega to just make a competent game and have that sell itself - they have to make it gimmicky as shit, too. I already mentioned the tube based level design, but the Wisps made a return from Sonic Colours too, for... some reason. When the game first launched they were easily the worst part of the game because you were forced to use motion controls to use them in complete defiance of all fucking common sense, like using gyroscope tilting to control the flying on the Eagle wisp or the angle of the Laster wisp instead of just using the control stick your left thumb was already hovering over, and that's not even getting into the mega fucking budget Ouedan shit that the Rhythm wisp clearly intended to be and was for the most part unable to be opted out of. Honestly, if your powerups are so convoluted and at odds with the rest of the game that you have to outright pause it to make sure its mechanics are explained and the player has readjusted themselves every single time you pick one up, something has gone, horribly, horribly fucking wrong. It truly is a blessing that they later patched it to enable normal fucking controls for the wisps, but I really don't understand what was going through their heads that made them think this was acceptable in the first place. People were already complaining about forced motion controls when the Wii did it - the system that intentionally handicapped its own controls to incentivise people to use the gyroscope as a crutch. The hell made them think that shit would sail on the WiiU? And the less said about that Miiverse item sharing thing, the better - I feel like most people just saw it as an excuse to dump those utterly useless black bombs they kept getting.

In the end, Lost World was clearly made for want of an alternative to boost games that they already fucking had all along, but it feels like Sega's execs would rather brain themselves with keyboards and leave the keys lodged in their eye sockets than admit the games of old were onto something and actually be genuine about it. It really is embarrasing how many times we have to go over this same goddamn tired song and dance every time Sonic is concerned, and once again it really is emblematic of the need for people who actually know what the fuck they're doing to be in charge of the decision making for these games. If it was literally any other IP, Sonic would have probably already died about a decade ago because of this shit.

February 9, 2021

Shoggoth (Eldritch)

Not going to lie, the trailer alone caught my attention:

Eldritch styles itself as a... well, eldritch themed roguelite, in which you have to escape what seems to be a lovecraftian library you seem to have found yourself in with no recollection of how or why. It's not particularly heavy on the plot, nor does it really need to be, and most of the lore the game could really need is spread about the library itself anyway, which is something of a hub for all the other areas you can visit in any playthrough and can be explored at your own pace. The people who want to get engaged in the world can seek it out, and the people who just want to play a game can jump right into a world and get on with it, leaving what is pretty much the best of both worlds. A lot of games feel like they need to tell a story and just drown the player in exposition every chance they get, and honestly I feel like I will be equally guilty of this in the end, so it's nice to know there's always a way to make both parties satisfied by making people actively seek out their respective angles to exploring their favourite elements of a game.

Speaking of which, if the eagle eyed among you deduced from the trailer that there's a Minecraft-esque aesthetic going on, there's a good reason for that - the game world is similarly built out of blocks, and you can breach the walls between randomly generated chunks if you really need to. It's not to say you can do it as readily as you can in Minecraft and completely break the game - TNT is risky and single use, pickaxes have a random chance to fall apart on every swing, and any magical means you find costs currency to cast, so you generally won't be able to just cheat your way around the level design for long. This is probably where the roguelike elements of the game are focused most. It's certainly not to make you any better at the combat - the dagger is already arguably the best weapon in the game because it can stunlock almost anything within reach and it's usually one of the first weapons you find, and your second inventory slot usually alternates between either a grapple hook for mobility, a pickaxe or a gun to shoot floating enemies as your needs change.

And unfortunately I think this really takes a hit on the game's replay value, which is normally where roguelikes and roguelites excel best as a genre. I can appreciate that the mechanics are more distilled than normal, but when all runs seem to play and end in virtually the same way (dagger for 80% of the game, passive equips are irrelevant because you have to ditch them for something else for the true ending anyway) it really does discourage playing it over and over in the way say, Binding of Isaac would otherwise. It's just desperately crying for a much larger pool of items - certainly more that are viable than the same fucking starting dagger every run, anyway. And if you were hoping for the kind of eldritch theming that fucks with your head, you're going to be disappointed - its influence only stretches as far as the overarching theme that all of its mobs are based off of and the lore it takes place in. It's still a neat little title, but it was only ever destined for cult status at best... which is sort of ironic considering its subject matter.

February 10, 2021

Depths of Boatmurdered

Yes, THAT Boatmurdered. For those unfamiliar, Boatmurdered is a particularly famous Let's Play of other indie game Dwarf Fortress played by multiple people concurrently - one player would manage a fortress and its denizens for one ingame year however they pleased, then hand the save file off to the next person in line, usually for them to deal with whatever mess had accumulated up to that point. Predictably - and hilariously - it frequently devolved into death, disaster and destruction. Representing that kind of chaos in a fangame all its own was always going to be a tall order, so wisely, the author decided to skip right to the end and set this game in the derelict ruins after the fort was inevitably abandoned, using its setting for varying flavours of horror in the shoes of some random nameless dwarf who just happened to be lost and need a place to stay the night. Despite its lo-fi, RPGmaker-esque setup, it's actually pretty good at building its suspsense up and paying it off, and it's amazing what something as simple as changing the pitch of the music can do to completely change the mood of the scene when it needs to.

Of course, that "RPGmaker-esque setup" also forms a bulk of the game's flaws, too. Although I don't think it's literally the engine this game was made in RPGmaker, it's still nonetheless built out of blocks, and your movement is also tile based instead of smoothed out, which can often make the game feel a lot jankier than it needs to. Careful movement is a pretty common part of navigating Boatmurdered's many traps, and it isn't uncommon to for example, just run right into a bear trap like an idiot because your character took one step further than you intended. Later into the game you get a crossbow that can temporarily stun enemies, but you can only aim it in the four cardinal directions and they don't always approach you from head on, so if you don't catch them off guard you usually have to wait until they're right in your face to get a shot off on them. It is awkward as shit, and in some ways it seems like it would be less trouble just to use a melee weapon for all the fucking difference that it makes sometimes.

There's also one especially obnoxious checkpoint during a section with enemies that can instakill you, who wake up after a pretty lengthy establishing tour of their area. The checkpoint is before the setup, not after - so every single time you die in this area you have to repeat the same goddamn puzzles over and over leading up to them, which I might not mind so much if this section weren't already a weird difficulty spike compared to the rest of the game. It's probably the one section I can bring myself to genuinely dislike in what is otherwise a pretty good, albiet short, fangame. I DO kinda wish it leant more into the lore of the original LP more than it did rather than try to hint at a story that has almost no real relation to it, but for what it's worth I still had fun with it. As usual it's free, so if you have a day to spare you can always give it a shot yourself.

February 11, 2021

Douchebag (South Park: The Stick of Truth / Fractured But Whole)

I'll admit that I kinda ended up leaving South Park behind when I stopped watching pay TV, so some of the humour of these games was inevitably going to be lost on me no matter what mindset I approached it with. There's no doubting there's still plenty of it that's still funny in its own right, but there's also little denying that it relies on self-referential humour a lot, which doesn't work so well sometimes because they're punchlines to jokes told on the show told rather than being told entirely within their own medium. I guess what I'm trying to say here is that it'll appeal to you better if you never stopped watching the show in the first place, which I guess is true of almost literally any licensed game ever made. I just know that I'm far from alone in having been out for a while by the time Stick of Truth came out, did the franchise as a whole just kinda sag leading up to it or something? What makes it and FBW different from the other games in the series, though, is that Matt and Trey had a direct role in creating it and the writing of the game pretty much directly improved as a result, whereas most licenced games of any franchise are made by outsiders trying to emulate their license without the original creator's thought process so whether or not they actually do a good job of it is often a total crapshoot.

Of all things, the South Parks under Ubisoft are turn based RPGs, and star a character of your creation rather than the star kids from the show, which I'm sure was a nerdier take than a lot of people were expecting but for what it's worth they played around with the medium good enough, but humour wise it's hard not to feel like they're playing catch up with a lot of basic parodies that had already been done before, like the idea of a silent protagonist being socially awkward. Every now and then, as I'm sure is custom for South Park, they throw subtlety to the wall and go right to shock value, which actually got Stick of Truth censored in many countries including mine, skipping the entire thing and instead showing a text description of the scene over a picture of a crying koala and didgeridoos. And I wouldn't bring this up if not for the fact that this creates a gameplay issue in the process. There's a section in the middle of the game where you have to perform an abortion through a combination of stick and button inputs, and they later play that for laughs by using the same minigame to "abort" a bomb that's about to blow up the town. The first scene was censored, but the second wasn't - so putting the player under a strict time limit into a minigame they haven't seen before and which can immediately cause a game over if done incorrectly is kind of a massive dick move? I know it was always going to be a band-aid fix, but it genuinely would have been less trouble to just censor and skip both occurances of the minigame for the game design faux pax it represents.

Gameplay wise, I think it kinda just drags on. It's not particularly well balanced, and all of the sidequests in Stick of Truth are designed around a fresh character who only just got the ability to explore the town proper, so no matter how you approach them they all come out feeling kind of unsatisfying cos you'll steamroll them all no matter what point you choose to tick them all off. I can't actually remember a single instance in which I got a game over from combat in either game, and even if you don't do all that well in a fight the game showers you in enough healing items that you'll recover from virtually any setback the game can throw at you and still allows you the option to buy more. It's definitely lucky that it has the writing to carry it, because while it's not particularly awful like the rest of the games are it's still pretty bland and forgettable in most other respects, although if you have any investment in Ubisoft properties to begin with you're probably used to that by now.

February 12, 2021

Carol and Lilac (Freedom Planet)

This I believe started life as a Sonic fangame, and I think can be credited for starting the movement of "games that are clearly inspired by Sonic the Hedgehog but are legally distinct enough to be sold for actual currency" occupied by other games like Spark the Electric Jester. That being said, even without the threat of legal action, Freedom Planet always seemed kind of terrified to be likened to a paid fangame. Which I guess is sort of understandable for its time when this kind of approach didn't really have much precedent yet, but if you ask me they went a bit too far in erasing their likeness to their inspiration when they removed the spindash, arguably the main thing that made Sonic gameplay work as well as it did. What Freedom Planet does in its stead is something of a beat-em-up focus that works less well with Sonic's slippery physics than they probably imagined - you'll either run right into enemies or hazards without much warning that they're there, or struggle nonetheless with the positioning needed for mostly melee fighting. Lilac at least has a Rocket Knight esque directional boost that can serve to build speed back up quickly, but it operates on a cooldown that other moves in her arsenal can draw from so you might not always have it as readily as you need it - Carol meanwhile needs to find a motorbike in the level in order to be able to self generate speed at all, and the less said about Milla's approach to it the better. I still think Freedom Planet is alright in spite of these things, I just think it could have been a lot better by either going all in on being a Sonic game in all but name or committing all the way into being a beat-em-up, not making an awkward mish-mash that later becomes some of the worse parts of both approaches.

This is more on the list though, because it's the first - and only - game I've donated on a Kickstarter for, and it's taught me some valuable lessons on the nature of Kickstarters in a manner most people get a ruder awakening from. Kickstarters can promise a lot of things, but you only ever have their word for that, nothing more, and you have no guarantee that you'll ever see parts or wholes of it happen. The personal example here is that I paid for an incentive to have a character of mine added to the game as an NPC, but later down the line the game was scaled back to remove hubs from the game, and NPCs along with them. All I ever got was a sprite done in the game's artstyle, and I don't even have that anymore because it was sent via PM on their message board and the boards moved at one point. Anyway, the point is, sometimes you don't get shit you paid for and sometimes that isn't even out of malice, which is more than could be said of people less lucky than me - at least the game actually came out in the end. Some people have put up Kickstarters on the on the simple promise of putting a game out at all and quite often backers don't even get that, because the "developer" just takes the money and runs off never to update again, and never to face material consequences for scamming people this way. I got this lesson in the gentlest way it could have been given, and still got to play a pretty decent game in the end regardless.

Honestly, it's made me kind of apprehensive about the prospect of crowdfunding anything myself, because I already don't like the idea of promising something I don't know won't change without the idea of betraying people who have already paid actual money for it before I can deliver it, and much of the benefit of crowdfunding on the side of the consumer seems to be to tack extra stuff onto an already complete game for their own personal benefit, enjoyment or recognition. It's certainly not to say that a game shouldn't be made for the benefit of its intended audience, but being able to buy your way into influencing a game's development kinda rubs me the wrong way these days, you know what I'm saying? It bothers me less when it's a backer rather than say, a stockholder or executive, but it still bothers me nonetheless, and I think in the end I would value the ability to do things how I want to in the interests of people I want to entertain than to have people rub fifty bucks in my face and tell me how they want it done. Maybe that's part of why I took up spriting - because I want to lessen the amount of money I have to put out to get everything else done on comission, which is still a pretty scary amount of money no matter how much of it I can take out of the equation.

Where was I? Oh right, Freedom Planet. It's good. Fucking hard in the late game though. And its fanbase had some of the most toxic human beings I have ever interacted with, all manner THAT kind of asshole who would claim they were sticking it to Sega by showing them how it's done - but that's not something I can really blame GalaxyTrail for. They did what they could, and I'm still curious to see if the upcoming sequel irons out all the flaws the first game had by being so disjointed in design.

February 13, 2021

Reaper Leviathan (Subnautica)

Subnautica deserves points right off the bat for capitalizing on the massive base building survival sandbox craze that Minecraft and co inspired AND doing it in a way not a single other competitor could ever dream of, setting its world almost entirely in the ocean and making its difficulty curve mostly about adapting to a lifestyle almost entirely underwater. It's an atmosphere that comes off as brutal and unforgiving without actually being obnoxiously difficult in the process, through its wild and diverse ecosystem and the pressing need to keep oxygen, hunger and thirst topped up whereever you go, packing for long trips while keeping enough room to take spoils back with you and constantly building on your means to getting further and further into the world. When I went back for a second playthrough - yes, it IS worth multiple full playthroughs - I was genuinely surprised to find that the world isn't procedurally generated. It's the same map every time, just that your starting escape pod lands in a different position every playthrough, and part of me feels like that's kind of a missed opportunity? I usually prefer a world that's hand built, but honestly there isn't much about the world of Subnautica that felt like it had been built by hand besides the various alien structures you occasionally bump into, and it feels kinda like the surface and cave systems could have been randomly generated with almost no consequence and left every subsequent playthrough even more fresh than it does here.

Subnautica is also somewhat streamlined compared to most of its survival brethren, in that there's almost no combat and absolutely no digging or terraforming involved. Any precious metals and materials you need for building are conveniently attached to walls and floors as exposed ore veins you can just slap a few times to get stuff out of, and I feel like the claustrophobia combined with the limited air supply wouldn't have quite the same effect if you could just dig a clean and safe tunnel in and out of any conceivable place you could want to venture to, so I'd say this game works with its limitations quite well. I just wish Titanium and Copper came from separate ores - the specific material you get from any ore is random based on the tier of the ore itself, and you'll consistently find yourself short on copper no matter what you do while you accumulate massive amounts of titanium that just sits around occupying space for most of the game, which would probably matter less if you could just decompress them back from ingots after you've compressed them into one. You're already putting yourselves ahead with building technology that can be best described as "magical space lasers" and you're telling me I can't just carve little chunks of ingot back out into clumps whenever I need them more?

These are all pretty petty complaints though, compared to the fetch quest the game gives you just moments before the definitive end of the game, a laundry list of plants that are spread over literally the opposite corners of the map, have had no reason to believe were needed until now and of which you have literally no indication of where the actual fuck to look for them, which was the one time I had to turn to the wiki to actually see the game to completion because holy shit how the fuck did they think this was okay to put into the game at the very last minute. I would be less mad about it if those plants had literally any application before, enough to justify keeping a few in storage for when you need to make something out of them, but by all indication you get prior these fucking things only existed to waste space and waste a fucking lot of it to boot, four times as much as most other resources you find in the game. And it's a real shame, because the lore and writing leading up to that point was actually pretty good, rivalling the Metroid Prime style of worldbuilding in its own style and debatably even doing a better job of it than Prime did. Honestly I would be pretty disappointed if it didn't - it had to leverage itself on something if it didn't have combat to back up on.

I haven't looked into Below Zero yet - waiting for it to get out of early access first. The first game is still good enough that I don't mind giving it a replay whenever I've run out of other things to play anyway.

February 14, 2021

The Talos Principle

This game seems to get comparisons to Portal a lot, and I feel the need to say first of all that those comparisons are really only skin deep - they're both very well made puzzle games in a sci-fi-ish setting, but that's about where the similarities end. Where Portal uses black humour to drive its narrative between puzzles, Talos Principle instead chooses to get deeply philosophical about it. The definition of a human conciousness plays a central theme throughout most of the game's plot as it develops, but there's also themes of religion, post-human civilization and AI learning scattered throughout its story, either directly told or implied through the various records left behind by humans before you. And honestly, I find it every bit as compelling, just for different reasons - it's definitely not the kind of story you could tell with GLadOS's snark, and honestly, it goes hand in hand with its puzzle design so well that I honestly feel like the two are absolutely inseparable, an incredibly rare example of a game that can sacrifice the simple fun that most of videogaming as a whole strives for, and still be better as an experience because of it.

You probably wonder what the hell I could possibly mean by that. Who would ever play a game NOT to have fun? Long story short, The Talos Principle is a game that will abuse the shit out of you. You'll groan, you'll get fed up, you'll want to bash your head against a fucking wall when a puzzle just doesn't seem to work out for you, and yet it's all the better a game for it because it feeds into the narrative that the puzzles themselves are a means of suffering that everyone before you and everyone after you will have to endure as some kind of rite of passage. Even though you directly see almost nobody else in the game, it's always intriguing to see the QR messages everybody else leaves behind and how the develop in response to the puzzles and each other, just as much as they'll almost certainly leave an impression on the player the deeper in they go. It's a very carefully considered and implemented approach to design that for usually good reason, most developers don't go for, but it's something I deeply appreciate when it's done reasonably well, like I did for Mystery Dungeon where I felt the adventuring wouldn't have had as much of an effect if there weren't any difficulty to it. It's not to say there aren't any failsafes - The Talos Principle allows and encourages people to tackles puzzles in just about any order at their own pace, so if one gets particularly grating or confusing you can just walk out and dwell on it while you're doing something else. If ever you got stuck on a puzzle in Portal, tough shit, you were stuck there until you figured out how it worked.

Speaking of Portal, another distinction this game has from it is that it... doesn't really have a particular overarching, defining gimmick to it? Rather it's a collection of mostly generic, tried and true puzzle design you tend to see in a lot of specifically non puzzle dedicated games, like holding down buttons, redirecting laser beams into receivers, simple and predictable enemies and goddamn single use keys, which is why it impresses me all the more that The Talos Principle seems to get so much more milage out of them than even the best individual case scenarios of any of those examples in most other games. It occasionally gets a little tedious when certain solutions require a lot of precise setup work that have to be redone almost from scratch if you make a wrong move someplace, but it's hard to get so mad at the game that you want to abandon it because once again, it ties right back into the narrative and the reasons the omnipotent voice in the sky is testing you in the first place. If there's a specific puzzle I truly did despise with every fiber of my being, though, it was one of the optional ones:

Spoiler

So for starters, there's really not much indication of where to look for the star in this hub in the first place, which is kind of a running theme with the optional stars in the first place. This is obnoxious to begin with, but let's just look past it. Apon closer inspection, there's a series of buttons spread out across numbered pillars organized in a circular pattern about the hub, and a clock on the back of a tombstone. You would think then, that the solution is to treat the numbers on the pillars as clock numbers and punch them in on the according buttons, right? Nope - that clock is a red herring that has no bearing on the puzzle or anything in fact, to do with anything in the game besides showing your system's current time, which is already a massive dick move in any puzzle game. It's one thing not to give a puzzle any sign posting whatsoever, it's quite another to intentionally mislead the player and expect them not to tear their fucking hair out over it, and we're still not even done yet.

The actual hint for that solution is on the opposite side of the aformentioned tombstone, in a QR code that unlike the other ones in the game, isn't automatically translated for the player's benefit, which means you need to get a smartphone out to solve it. Even then, it STILL doesn't spell it out for you, rather it makes a cryptic reference to the first moon landing with a series of hex numbers that you then have to further translate, culminating in typing in the date - not the time, the fucking date - that the first astronauts landed on the moon. From WHAT strain of logic was any player supposed to leap to in order to join all that shit together???

This goes back to something I said in the Fez writeup, and not just because of those fucking QR codes - if a game forces you to look outside of its own means to solve a puzzle, most people aren't going to take the intended route, they're just going to look up a fucking walkthrough instead. It's much worse in this case because it's an outlier and the only time you're expected to do something this ridiculous - say what you will about Fez, at least it's consistently fucking pretentious. It's the ones sour note I have against a game that's otherwise excellent at what it does, and honestly as long as you don't get any investment in the stars you'll be fine anyway. Trust me, just ignore them - they are NOT fucking worth it.

February 15, 2021

Lea (CrossCode)

Right from the start I'll say that I really love CrossCode's premise, but I also think this game kinda wasted it. Long story short, There's this MMO that's so immersive that people control physical avatars on actual distant lands with buildings physically constructed on them, and for reasons she can't remember, Lea is physically trapped in it with only a limited ability to speak, unable to physically log out of it like any other player on the server. The writing is at its strongest when dealing in this directly with the few support characters that are wholly aware of it and trying to unravel what is effectively an isekai plot, but they almost entirely abandon it right after the tutorial up until something like the lattermost third of the game. And I might not mind it so much, except the game part of the game suffers from of the most embarrasingly generic cliches of videogame writing ever conceived, right down to the collection of multiple elemental mcguffins situated in similarly troped locales, and then has the fucking nerve to have characters actively commentate on how cliche'd the writing is. NO. STOP THAT. THAT'S BAD. IT'S FUCKING AWFUL. YOU DON'T SOLVE CLICHE'D WRITING BY POINTING OUT HOW CLICHE'D IT IS AND PLAYING IT COMPLETELY STRAIGHT, YOU SOLVE IT BY RECOGNIZING IT'S CLICHE'D AND WRITING SOMETHING FUCKING ELSE. THIS GAME COULD HAVE BEEN SO MUCH BETTER IF THE WASN'T INTENTONALLY OVERPLAYED TRIPE AND IT MAKE SO FUCKING MAD THAT ANYONE EVER PULLS THIS SHIT ON PURPOSE BECAUSE IT'S SO GOD DAMNED BORING.

Alright, now that I've got that out of my system, let's talk about how it actually plays. Because it's styled after an MMO, it has a bad habit of playing the worst parts of that genre completely straight too, with all the standard fetch quests and "kill x of enemy y" shit that most MMO games like to abuse the shit out of for nothing more than basic padding, as well as having to grind for materials to obtain certain kinds of gear rather than just finding or buying that shit outright like just about any sane RPG would do. It's not like you can just skip any of it, because Crosscode is already a REALLY fucking hard game and it gets all the worse when you simply just don't have the stats or equipment to deal with a given situation, often forcing you to clear EVERY generic-ass side quest they give to you in order to be properly kitted out for the intended path through the game. I guess what I'm trying to say here is that the progression in this game is just as boring as the writing whenever it's centralized around the game-within-a-game that CrossCode is set in. Crosscode is lucky that the high points of the game are REALLY fucking high, otherwise I would not have given it a second thought. "Boring and frustrating" are the two worst things a videogame can be at the same time, and I've raked games over the fucking coals for a lot less than this.

Which is why then, it weirds me the hell out that core gameplay mechanics of Crosscode are on the exact opposite end of the spectrum - they are so unconventional that they come off as alien and honestly, even a bit more obtuse than they needed to be. For starters, it plays from a top down Chrono Trigger perspective, but controls something more like a shooter game instead. Your left click throws projectiles towards the cursor, except they're hurled WAY off course unless you stand still for several seconds or use a charged shot and it goes back to being inaccurate again if you move at all? What was wrong with just clicking a mouse and having your character throw a thing at the cursor? And then there's melee attacks, which are ALSO bound to the left mouse button but only trigger if your cursor is physically close to your character, and the exact area that constitutes as "close" enough for melee attacks to trigger is never outright shown to you which often leads to throwing useless projectile attacks at close range when you meant to just whack them. Again, why overcomplicate this? Just give your character a dedicated fucking melee button instead of forcing wildly disparate functions onto one keybind. This is embarrasingly basic shit that I'm surprised wasn't caught early on, but at the very least I can still say it works decently despite its unnecessary clunkiness. Which is more than what I can say for the platforming.

If you ever want a concise reason why top down games never have a platforming focus, just try obtaining all the wild chests in CrossCode. Without the benefit of perspective you have no fucking way of knowing how high a plateau is in reference to the one you're currently standing on, and the routes around the various high grounds in this game is already fucking labyrinthine as it is without having to second, third AND fourth guess whether two stretches of land that visibly look within jumping distance of each other are actually within direct reach of each other. CrossCode goes the extra dick move mile by SEVERELY restricting your opportunities to actually ascend anywhere in the game world, which means a lot of backtracking - often SEVERAL ENTIRE GOD DAMN FUCKING SCREENS AWAY - to get back up to the height you were once at and to retrace your steps back, assuming you can even fucking remember how you got there anymore because once again, trying to navigate across high ground is ALREADY a fucking maze even when you DO know for a fact that a jump is completely possible. And don't even get me started on the fact that there are several sections throughout the game that expect you to do all this WITH FUCKING ICE PHYSICS.

I feel bad for ripping into this game the way I do - it's a clear labour of love and demonstrates a passion for its own development unlike almost anything else I see in the entire industry, but it hurts even more to see that kind of passion so misguided. And the main thing I took away from it when I finally saw it through to its current end is that I was absolutely EXHAUSTED with its bullshit, not keen on the idea of ever going back to it. No game with this kind of energy should inspire such apathy and frustration, but here we are.

February 16, 2021

The Old Pro (The Magic Circle)

It's tempting to say I got roped into talking about an isekai right after talking about another one, but The Magic Circle is a little different in that respect - you're a playtester for a game that's in development hell for at least a decade, you meet something that's been trapped in there since almost that long, and your only way of getting him out of there is forcing the game to release. Credit where credit's due, it's a very original premise and one that's played around with pretty well in narrative and gameplay both, and progression through the incomplete, greyscale world is often seen as exploiting unbalanced mechanics as puzzle design rather than anything the ingame developers actually intended. I enjoy the dialogue here too, it's usually either engaging or amusing whenever it isn't both, and it's a rare, meta kind of look at what can go wrong behind the scenes of a game in development - egotistic leads that will cut already developed mechanics as crucial as combat at the drop of a hat and force passionless, burnt out developers to start over essentially from scratch, while stringing along impassioned fans with promises of "it's done when it's done" all the while. Having been in at least one such project myself once apon a time, it was hard not to identify with it on a pretty personal level.

That being said, that "cut combat" comment was absolutely not hyperbole - so the Magic Circle has to find some other thing to build its progression around. And The Magic Circle's answer to that is "just make everything else do it for you". Either by catching a monster in a specially casted void or by having it killed through intended means and resurrecting it later like a protagonist Archvile, you can edit that monster's traits - how it moves, how it attacks, who it's allied to, and so on. Besides the allegiance variable, most of these traits are treated as finite resource and can be added, removed or mixed and matched as your supplies of them dictate. It isn't quite Baba Is You, but you are often still required to make some pretty exotic combinations in order to solve some puzzles or access some specific areas. Unfortunately - and ironically - the solutions to some problems are still good ol' fashioned brute force, piling up as many monsters that can both move and attack as possible and then directing them all into a room with enemies in it to clear out the threats inside. It means having a veritable horde of monsters everywhere you go, obstructing tight hallways, making shitloads of noise and flooding the place with visual effects. It does fit the theme of using mechanics in ways the ingame developers clearly didn't intend, but after a time it still gets pretty goddamn obnoxious.

This next part is a HUGE spoiler so I'm going to tag it accordingly, but I think it deserves special mention as the defining moment of the game for me:

Spoiler

Remember how I said that getting the game released is your end goal? Well, the penultimate confrontation of the game results in the lead designer of the game quitting right on the stage of their E3 expy and handing control over to the community, which leads to you essentially having to actually make the game yourself. Now I'll be honest, this is an extra mile that the game absolutely did not have to go to and I was shocked that it was in the game at all, and while it's obviously much more streamlined and user friendly than any actual game dev tool would be - even the SIMPLEST ones like Construct or Click Team Fusion - I can honestly say I actually learned some fundementals of game design from it, thanks in large part to the fact that The Old Pro even playtests your "game" when you think it's ready to go (which for brevity's sake is a single level with only one path through it made from premade rooms, but details details, right?). Stuff like being able to put a health pickup not just for the convenience of the typical player, but being able to react to their feedback and place it RIGHT where they need it the most after a particularly difficult encounter. Stuff like being able to identify obscure niches in the level design and hiding goodies there, rather than just anticlimactically dropping it out in the open. Stuff like minimizing downtime as much as possible so they don't get bored of just walking through an empty level, but not putting TOO MUCH of one specific thing so they start getting tired of it. That shit might sound incredibly simple in hindsight, but it's REALLY easy to take for granted until you're forced to do that shit yourself, and I really appreciate The Magic Circle for being a neat interactive reference for those kinds of tenents in a way just about no other guide on the internet will ever do.

Whatever the case, I think The Magic Circle is a nice game to get into if you ever intend to make videogames yourself. It's hardly game of the year material, but it's one of the few games I've experienced where the perspectives of player and developer meet in the middle and inform each other, and in that respect, it's unique.

February 17, 2021

Darius (Party Hard)

Party Hard is a game with a very simple, almost arcade-y premise - you're a guy who can't get any sleep with the constant bass thumping of party music in the background, so you resolve to gatecrash the party itself to murder literally everybody there. Rather than a Dead by Daylight esque frenzy of chasing and stabbing, though, it's a decidedly more Assassin's Creed flavoured affair wherein you have to blend with the partygoers and find ways to murder them without any witnesses so you don't end up getting pinned for it. Now that being said, thank fucking christ the AI in this game is incredibly dumb - almost none of them are capable of any kind of deductive reasoning, they never flee the party outright even as it becomes the scene of a crime and most get right back to partying even when the cops are called for the 6th time in a row to inspect and bag a body. Even if you DO get caught red handed and the cops are called, if you somehow manage to escape capture all that really changes is that they'll try to beat you up if they see you again, which is usually only a minor setback when anyone besides a bouncer does it.

That probably makes it sound easy - it really isn't. It can be sorta relaxing once you get a feel for the game's mechanics, but you still have to kill an entire party of 30+ people all by yourself, and getting caught even once is usually a death sentence, so actually killing the entire party is usually a question of being incredibly consistent, thorough and above all else, patient. While there are context sensitive gizmos scattered all over the map that can wipe out multiple people at a time when used cleverly, and inventory items can be used to help you with strategic kills or getting out of trouble, much of the later parts of a party are spent just waiting for partygoers to split up or trying to coerce them into dispersing, and it gets dreadfully dull sometimes when you have to deal with this much downtime before being able to do anything of actual substance. It would probably have helped a lot if certain resources weren't quite as finite and limited as they were here, because it would have meant being able to make otherwise riskier plays a lot more often and not having to fish for quick stabs all the time. It certainly doesn't help that the character sprites are goddamn microscopic, so you often can't tell which direction somebody is actually facing and consequently whether you can get away with a second stab before the guy next to the one you just stabbed notices.

That all being said, there is a somewhat surprising amount of replay value to all this. The actual story might be honestly god awful in its attempts to play its incredibly silly premise 100% seriously, but the stages themselves are already pretty fun to play on their own, have elements of them that shuffle around between attempts for some pseudo random mixing up, have an assortment of unlockable characters with drastically different approaches to murder between each other (although the methods for actually unlocking them could stand to be a lot clearer), and even a stage editor that allows you to put together whatever the fuck you want and see the shit other people come up with on the Steam Workshop, so it can take quite a while to get completely tired of and it can be a good game to boot up when you only have like half an hour to kill. What's the sequel like? I remember being put off by it a while ago because it had pretty mixed reviews at the time.

February 18, 2021

Frisk and Sans (Undertale)

I've probably said it before, but I'm not a big fan of JRPGs. Even the better ones carry themselves on the shoulders of their writing, because otherwise they're often incredibly shallow, streamlined gameplay loops exploited and milked for every drop of padding that they're worth. Undertale may not be a JRPG in the most literal sense, but it definitely has the great writing down-pat. I'd actually go as far as to say there aren't many games written better than it, period. Just the sheer breadth of emotions it can express for a game of its size is astonishing, as is the pace it can whiplash between them without coming off as inconsistent for it, flipflopping from serious to genuinely hilarious and back again in the span of minutes without batting a fucking eyelid. It's fantastic at its lore and worldbuilding, its characters are brilliantly diverse and well written (though you probably already know that much by now if you've visited literally any fanart page in the past five years), and it's fantastic at building up anticipation and holding it for however long it needs to, whether it's for events that are seconds away or for penultimate encounters that are hours away or all the way at the very end of the game. It's a narrative that I honestly cannot find a single flaw in, no matter how pessimistic an outlook I force onto this. And this is on top of the fact that unlike nearly any other game in its genre, Undertale legitimately does have engaging core mechanics that can hold their own weight.

See, most RPG style games strip the player of all engagement or agency the moment they commit to any choice in a fight, letting nothing more than RNG determine the outcome of any individual turn. And while there is still a place for games like that, it's hard not to feel like you're just standing in one place tanking shit and throwing generic attacks back until you need to bring out healing items to top yourself back off again. Undertale's best known exception to that rule is that on enemy turns, you have to physically avoid attacks thrown at you in a pseudo-schmup format, and all attacks in the game are themed after the enemies you bump into on random encounters. The creativity of these from a theming standpoint is honestly legendary to the point that it has inspired countless fangames and knockoffs in its style. Even besides this battles have loads of really nice little quirks that are huge breaths of fresh air in a genre that was in HUGE fucking need of it, such as the fact that enemies will talk and posture to you between or during turns and lending characterization to even the most minor, insignificant mooks of the game, or lest we forget that one of the game's biggest intended selling points was the ability to solve confrontations without any kind of violence and for once did so in a way that was equally if not more engaging than just fighting everything normally, not just tediously avoiding interacting with anyone or anything at ALL. Yes, I'm talking about you back there, Iji - don't think for a second that what you did was actually profound in any way.

Most of all though, Undertale is a game where the fourth wall is a lot thinner than it would be in most other games. This isn't necessarily because some characters will address the player directly (although some still do), but in the way that it effortlessly manages to introduce gameplay mechanics as actual plot points, to the point that some characters in the game are almost entirely defined by them. And this integration is a work of genius that can play with your investment in a situation much better than most other games in memory - it's difficult to explain without spoiling some plot points outright, but things can feel pretty personal pretty fucking quickly when Undertale turns basic mechanics you've taken for granted all game against you, fucking with your expectations and damaging you in ways you didn't even think were possible. And that's BEFORE we get into the way the genocide run, which can take things to a whole new level entirely once you finally get towards the end of it. Who'd have thought that the best way to draw a player into your game was to suspend disbelief so much that the lines between videogame and reality start to blur? It's a brilliant touch and really needs to be seen to be believed.

Now, I know someone's thinking it so I'm just going to come right out - at least one person reading this thread, right now, has put off experiencing this game for themselves because something about the fandom puts them off. And I really have to be blunt about this, because I can't stand the thought of someone wilfully avoiding a genuine game of the year contender - shit, debatably and unironically a potential game of the decade - over this bullshit.

You're in a Sonic forum.

Surrounded by Sonic fans.

These are people who have demonstrated just about every instance of furry weirdness known to man. These are people who have engaged in half-decade long crusades over the colour of Sonic's fucking eyes. These are people who have fed wholesale into the franchise division that Sega themselves have encouraged and will debate nobody in good faith if they don't conveniently align with their own views. These are people responsible for some of the worst fucking fanfiction mankind has ever concocted. Even at their absolute worst, these are people that have a lot more in common with the Undertale fandom than you would ever care to admit - and even then, both are at worst just unusually loud voices in a largely sensible void like literally any other fandom that has ever existed.

This was never about the fanbase for you - you never planned to interact with them in the first place. Shut your fucking mouth, just get the fucking game and stop being a fucking hypocrite, for christ's sake.

February 19, 2021

Tracer (Overwatch)

I've never had a particularly high opinion of Blizzard. Not particularly sure why - maybe I just thought the Warcraft verse was completely overrated and I was really tired of hearing about it, especially when WoW came out and nobody would ever fucking shut up about it. So you can probably imagine my surprise when I saw footage of Overwatch for the first time and thought it looked... actually kind of good? I think like most people I was drawn to the characters above all else and how absurdly varied they were for what was essentially FPS King of the Hill by any other name. Guys with bog standard rifles, cyber monks who threw balls at people, a robot that can transform into a turret, a guy with a grappling hook and a shotgun, a guy who didn't even have a gun, and it just goes on and on - almost no two characters shared the same focus even when they could be placed into similar archetypes, and it felt like Overwatch had a character for literally any kind of person who could ever play it. So why is it, then, that I dread ever picking it back up?

The first answer is that Overwatch is HYPER focused on competitive play, and takes every aspect of itself way too god damned seriously. It's a game that is constantly over-tweaked in response to a meta that constantly shifts and sways all over the place, and more often than not this fixation leaks into the community, who can't stand losing and can't stand having to rely on teammates to get anything done. This is made all the worse by the Play of the Game, a mechanic that picks a single player's biggest moment of the match and broadcasts it to the entire lobby apon a match's end without crediting anyone else who contributed to it. Not only does this encourage people to stupidly split from the team and leave their allies to die in the hopes of getting a lucky Ultimate off and being recognized for it after the match, it means that players who actually carry teams rarely get any actual recognition for it, for example in the case of Zarya who can create shields around herself and others that briefely make them COMPLETELY INVULNERABLE to tank otherwise devastating damage and has an ult that clumps enemies together in a fucking black hole that her teammates will usually steal kills from. I understand that highlighting an individual killing spree is a lot easier to program - I just think it can't be fucking understated just how much this shapes the behaviour of everyone who plays Overwatch. Even well coordinated, constantly communicating teams will still fish for dumb, risky plays if it means a chance of broadcasting how cool they think they are to everyone else, and it almost always comes at the expense of people who are trying to cooperate and have fun with it.

And then we have to talk about lootboxes.

Listen, microtransactions are already pretty evil. Let's not mince words about that - paying actual money to paint yourself blue or some shit is a fucking stupid business practice, and originally existed only as digital panhandling because the indie market needed a way to make money and still have people invested in their game at all. Microtransactions in games you already pay an entry fee to access are even worse, because they're already guaranteed to make money off base game sales and are just milking players for further profit at this stage. When you do this, and then give people only a chance of getting the items they actually want, you're basically just a casino in all but name - again, no point in mincing words about it, you're paying money for a chance outcome and psychologically abusing players into spending money for more spins of the wheel in the hopes that one of them will pay of, despite the bread crumbs they'll toss at you occasionally just for playing the game. Even while the lootbox controvesy built up to actual political intervention - in a political landscape so behind the digital times that doesn't seem to understand what the fuck net neutrality is, no less - and other publishers wisely moved on to fresher waters, the lootbox still remains Overwatch's most iconic gimmick, and that is just fucking appalling. It made more sense in hindsight once I learnt that Activision took over Blizzard at one point, but even with their influence I think everyone expected a lot better from Blizzard than this. Let me reiterate, in case the point hasn't sunk in yet - microtransactions and lootboxes are digital panhandling turned into a business practice. It's fucking pathetic, and a publisher of videogames this big should be above this kind of scum - although I guess one doesn't get as big as EA or Activision without being overtly thrifty and greedy in the process.

February 19, 2021

On 2/18/2021 at 1:12 AM, Blacklightning said:

Now, I know someone's thinking it so I'm just going to come right out - at least one person reading this thread, right now, has put off experiencing this game for themselves because something about the fandom puts them off. And I really have to be blunt about this, because I can't stand the thought of someone wilfully avoiding a genuine game of the year contender - shit, debatably and unironically a potential game of the decade - over this bullshit.

You're in a Sonic forum.

Surrounded by Sonic fans.

These are people who have demonstrated just about every instance of furry weirdness known to man. These are people who have engaged in half-decade long crusades over the colour of Sonic's fucking eyes. These are people who have fed wholesale into the franchise division that Sega themselves have encouraged and will debate nobody in good faith if they don't conveniently align with their own views. These are people responsible for some of the worst fucking fanfiction mankind has ever concocted. Even at their absolute worst, these are people that have a lot more in common with the Undertale fandom than you would ever care to admit - and even then, both are at worst just unusually loud voices in a largely sensible void like literally any other fandom that has ever existed.

This was never about the fanbase for you - you never planned to interact with them in the first place. Shut your fucking mouth, just get the fucking game and stop being a fucking hypocrite, for christ's sake.

Damn you read me like a book. Maybe I should try it.

February 20, 2021

Superhot

I think if there's just one thing I appreciate about Superhot, it's that it's shown us that a game can make you feel like a sharp shooting badass without going as far as making it actual twitch gameplay that requires a does of Adderall between sessions. In case you've somehow been oblivious to the how and why of that so far - the passage of time in Superhot is directly relative to your own movements. When completely motionless and not looking around, everything slows to a crawl, usually allowing you to take stock of all enemies nearby and any bullets that are wizzing towards you before committing to anything. Not that I've tried it, but this is supposedly one of the few games that are objectively better to play in VR because you can physically shift your body out of the way of enemy shots - but even without it, a lot of scenes in this game play out just like a scene from the Matrix as a result of this cleverly thought out mechanic. It's just kind of a shame that it looks sort of janky when played back in real time and doesn't always follow exactly where your aim went ingame, not to mention you have to deal with the constant repetition of SUPER. HOT. SUPER. HOT. SUPER. HOT. OVER AND FUCKING OVER WHILE TRYING TO WATCH YOUR BADASSERY UNFOLD, unless you open the replay editor which seems to have a propensity to accidentally send you to the main menu instead? It seems like it should have been pretty difficult to fuck this part of the game up, and yet they somehow found ways to.

What really sucks is that Superhot really is a one trick pony - once you've gotten into and understood its core gameplay loop, it doesn't really have any way to impress you anymore, just shooting the same faceless mooks over and over again and occasionally camping their respawn points because apparently just dealing with all the enemies in the level isn't good enough??? Even Mind Control Delete, a side game that came for free if you owned the original game, could only do as good as enemies that were armoured in certain body parts or would explode into a storm of bullets when shot, which doesn't really feed into any impulse you weren't already doing in the base game. It's a tech demo that people have attempted to flesh out into a full game worth paying for, and honestly haven't done a particularly good job of it because it honestly isn't all that different from the actual tech demos I played of it before moving onto Steam for actual currency was ever a point of consideration. I actually preferred it that way, in some respects - because at least that way it wasn't taking itself seriously as much more than a gameplay vehicle.

Good lord, the writing in the final game is some dire ass shit. It tries to play off like there's no fourth wall and that the game is in fact a sinister device for actually murdering people IRL, but doesn't really do so consistently, convincingly or immersively, in no way deserving of the incredibly fucking smug attitude it gives you whenever it decides it's fucking clever for whatever narrative twist it decides to throw you for. There are intriguing ideas in its premise, but there's only so much you can do with it when choice is only an illusion and you don't even do THAT particularly well like was the case in say, Spec Ops: The Line. At the end of the day, Superhot has exactly one really cool gimmick which is expected to hold the entire game's weight from beginning to end, and while I don't doubt that it's more than enough for some people, it really doesn't give this game much staying power in hindsight, especially when most of the replay value comes in the form of "okay, now replay the entire game except with an arbitary self imposed restriction". Superhot is more valuable for the precedent it set rather than the influence it had over the industry of its own merits, and there is definitely another such game that I'll cover later that not only benefits from Superhot's inspiration, it's objectively a much better game in its own right...

February 21, 2021

Kaho (Momodora: Revierie Under the Moonlight)

This is one of a few games that are on the list for mostly personal reasons more than anything else. How I even came across it is kind of a blur - I think I happened to glimpse it briefely in amongst a compilation of other game clips I think themed around speedrunning? And I don't know what it was, but something about this game's looks simply captivates me in a way I don't think ANY other game has ever done. I don't think that's to say necessarily because it looks pretty, though I'd hardly suggest it's a bad looking game - no, because it's a particular kind of minimalism that makes pixel art look so easy. I think it's the first game I've ever looked long and hard at and decided "yeah, I could actually do this". I think in that light, it's one of the first real pushes I was given to start actively pursuing game making personally, but more pertinently to this list in particular, it is THE game that directly inspired my current artstyle - tightly packed sprites with mostly flat shading unless it's absolutely necessary to distinguish other shapes of the same colour. And although I'm still mostly happy with how it's turned out, with some exceptions (seriously what the hell did I do to Larry in Fighting Masters on page one?), Momodora gets away with it by being slick as fuck in its animation, and it's something I don't know if I could match no matter what shortcuts I invented for it.

As far as the actual game goes. well, it goes by most of the tenants I already liked about platforming games that are designed this way - the fighting is deceptively simple, so much of the game's difficulty revolves more around positioning and mobility rather than trying to get to grips with some obtuse combo system. However, there are elements of it that I feel could have been emphasized a lot better than they were, probably best emphasized by the Derelict Frida boss. Rolling is almost indispensible for most boss fights, but Momodora does a really bad job at incentivizing it because most regular enemies and even the first and second bosses are entirely possible to do without even realizing it's there. But Derelict Frida absolutely fucks you up if you try to fight him without rolling, because most of his attacks are virtually unavoidable without it. The biggest clue you get that it's even a thing is a tiny button prompt that you can miss completely if you're busy dealing with the mooks of the area whenever it pops up and little goblin shits with shields that are probably intended to be outmanuevered with rolls but often turn around too quickly for it to work as a counter whereas simply jumping over them usually works better, so you can go through the first third or so of the game and completely forget it's there. This might seem like a stupid mistake to make, especially in hindsight or without prior knowledge of the way the game works, but this actually seems to be a surprisingly common mistake with new players so I don't think I'm alone in believing there's a learning curve faux pax involved here.

Even once you know most of this game's tricks, Momodora is goddamn hard, exactly the kind of game you'd think about whenever someone throws the tOuGh BuT fAiR label about the place. With the exception of the final boss of all fucking things, most boss patterns are very difficult to read without having already died to them repeatedly beforehand, and I really don't believe that's the right approach to designing any videogame, much less an intentionally challenging one. Regular enemies are usually a lot better in this regard - it's almost universally punishing to take any kind of hit from one, but they telegraph most attacks in a way that makes it hard to feel like taking damage was anybody's fault bar your own. And although Momodora is technically a metroidvania, I don't remember feeling rewarded often for going out of my way to explore places because most of the ability upgrades are already plot critical anyway. In fact, backtracking often feels like a pain in the ass in a way that the game never actually resolves. It doesn't necessarily have to be a fast travel system, or movement abilities that start to approach downright gamebreaking like Super Metroid's Screw Attack and Shine Spark, but Revierie Under the Moonlight doesn't really give you anything more than a double jump and a morph ball expy, which really sucks sometimes because you REALLY have to commit to most pathways through the world and it would have been nice to have tools that trivialize them only after you've been through them already.

In spite of all that, though, I really hesitate to recommend against Momodora or suggest that it's a bad game outright. Obviously I could be biased as hell considering the influence it has over my work, but the atmosphere is still unlike anything else I've ever played. I'm not talking about just the spritework here - the music is purpose built for a world that is profoundly cursed and pulls it off to amazing effect, even if it won't always make for a memorable jingle like most pixel art platformers are best known for. And despite whatever frustrations I have with the game's balance, it's the kind of adversity that I felt motivated me more to finish it, not to throw it away, which is exactly the kind of mindset that a difficult game should be encouraging. What came as a surprise to me is that Revierie Under the Moonlight is in fact one game in a series of Momodora titles, and is in fact the fourth title in the franchise, so part of me is still morbidly curious how it developed to this point and remained so unknown to me all the while. For now, I'll just close out with some of that music to emphasize the mood it pulls off.

February 22, 2021

Ori (Ori and the Blind Forest)

A story driven game can take tens of hours to draw tears out of its players, usually brought on by a sense of familiarity and attachment you build up over the course of a lengthy adventure. Ori is special in this regard, in that it becomes a tear jerker within the first ten minutes, and as far as most people are concerned it still would have an incredible display of presentation and story telling if it ended right there. If there was an award for best prologue in all of fucking gaming, it would EASILY go to Ori's, plain and simple. That might seem like a weirdly specific boast, but I think it shines a light on how limited videogames have been as a storytelling medium, and how much investment the simple need to manually control a character through what would otherwise be a completely scripted scene can create. Most other games only do this to act as gates between areas and conceal loading transitions, which on top of being kind of a pisstake is also the best case scenario for most games, whereas others are perfectly content to segregate all narrative and gameplay apart into dialogue or cutscenes rather than allowing the player to have a direct, even if linear, hand in it. Of course, if you're in any way familiar with Ori, you'll know there's still a lot more to it than that, and it's still a pretty decent game even when you do separate it from its narrative.

The first thing I have to say about it is that while Ori does have combat, it really doesn't feel all that weighty, thanks in large part to the fact that you're not even physically connected to your means of dealing damage. All of your attacking is done via this ball of light that follows you around and shoots at things completely independently of your movement. First of all, pretty much any attacks are going to feel week if you don't have to commit to them in literally any way, but even in that regard this wisp thing feels especially lazy because you don't even have to aim it either, even though you still have to manually trigger it with a button press. If the game already handles all THAT shit for you, why is the player even involved? Just make it attack automatically so the player can focus on dodging and positioning. On a similar but much more petty and obsessive note, why does it only fire in three shot bursts? Just make it either a steady stream of projectiles or one big shot at a time, it feels so inconsistent and it drives me fucking nuts aaaaaaugh. That being said, the fighting has clearly never been the focus in Ori, so I'm at least willing to handwave it to some degree. I just think it could have helped to commit all the way to either involving the player or doing its own thing without ending up in some mediocre middle ground.

Ori's focus lies in more of a metroidvania way of doing things - a large map that opens up more and more as you gain new abilities, and in that respect most of the progression is mobility based, which I think are always some of my favourite ways to see characters evolve. A lot of them are pretty standard doublejump / walljump affair, but my favourite ones would have to be the combination of Bash and Light Burst, the former of which lets you bounce off of any light source (including most projectiles!) in any direction and launch it in the opposite direction, making it a mobility, attacking and puzzle tool all in one, and the latter of which is an aimable projectile which is itself a light source and subsequently Bash food. For how good the narrative itself plays out though, I feel like the progression through the Blind Forest is weirdly phoned in for a game like this? Three main dungeons with heavily dissonant tropes and mucguffins split between them, and an ability you unlock within each of them so that the dungeon serves as its own self contained tutorial for them. Yup, definitely not gonna win any points for originality there.

Now this all being said, Ori also gets REALLY fucking hard, to the point that the latter parts of the game just stop being fun in any way. There are certain pretty big stretches of game which mostly devolve into dying on the same thing over and goddamn over again, which is why it then baffles me that the game then implements a fucking permadeath mode in spite of it. Some of the worst parts of the game are the chase scenes that every dungeon culminates in, most of which to my memory expect you to redo the entire thing from scratch if you screw them up, which is a lot to expect of something like five entire minutes of trial and error without trying to tear your fucking hair out over it. All my goodwill for this game was well and truly dried up by the time I got through the final boss, which is itself a a fucking chase sequence and easily the worst one out of any of them, and I do really hate that it turned out like that after the incredibly strong start it had.

Haven't gotten around to Will of the Wisps yet. Prolly should. Even from a glance the combat looks a lot more engaging, so I'd like to see if the platforming followed suit.

February 23, 2021

Andross (Star Fox Zero)

God, I bet Kamiya really regrets casually letting slip that he wanted to work on a Starfox game now. The worst thing is, I really don't actually know whether to blame him or Nintendo for how it ultimately turned out, because there are mistakes that are pretty typical of both sides. Let's start with the obvious one - its propensity to shovel gimmicky shit onto you without regard for whether it's actually comfortable, nevermind fun. Even in straightforward Arwing sections you're still expected to use your gamepad to aim your shots by tilting the gyroscope instead of just physically turning your ship towards your target like in literally any other Starfox game. I might not mind so much if this were a neat bonus and much of the fighting was still that, but many enemies in the game are designed to be undamagable if you fly at them head on, requiring you to tilt the gamepad some godawful 45-90 degrees to hit their exposed spots as you're flying over them. You can't see the motherfucking gamepad screen that shows you where you're aiming if you have to tilt it that far, lurching over the top of it or twisting your spine trying to chase your own screen around to keep up with how demanding the gyro aiming is in this game. I'm usually a strong proponent of gyro aim assistance on systems that allow it, but Zero's overreliance on it is just monkey fuck bonkers. And that's JUST the Arwings, which are still against all odds the game's strongest point.

The Arwings also have a transformation gimmick where they turn into a ground based walker, which I believe was cribbed entirely from an unreleased sequel to the SNES original, and honestly I actually kinda like this? I wanted more Starfox along the lines of Assault where grounded and flying combat have importance all to their own, and swapping the Arwings themselves between different modes felt like a great compromise that only could have been better if you had a means of strafing that didn't involve barrel rolling repeatedly. The Landmaster returned in this game, and honestly I don't even know why they used it in Starfox 64 because it's always been objectively worse than Arwings? It too has a transforming mode that allows it to fly temporarily, but if you're bringing a tank into a mission that expects you to need that much ground to accomplish anything why not just bring in a fucking Arwing that doesn't have any energy restrictions in either mode and are equally competent in both of them? And then there's the Gyrowing, a VTOL copter whose defining characteristics are that it's slow as fuck, objectively weaker than the other vehicles, and has to accomplish objectives through a drone attached to you by cable which also happens to be where all your shots originate from. Did anyone - even one person - ever think to themselves "bombing runs are fun and all, but you know what I wanna do in a Starfox game? Slowly lower a drone onto a platform and make them bump into screens to hack them"??? It's about as entertaining as operating construction equipment, taken to its biggest extreme when your ability to bomb isn't on command, but rather to physically find explosive crates in the environment, make the drone latch on to them and drop them on a target below you like some kind of flying crane. What the fuck were you people thinking?

Pile on top of that bosses that are usually tedious to fight and create a lot of downtime while waiting for an opportunity to deal actual damage, teammates that are somehow STILL fucking useless after all these years and contribute almost nothing to skirmishes despite their obnoxiously patronizing hints, and a level progression that is entirely linear despite its CLEAR inspiration from Starfox 64, and you have what is honestly one of the worst games in the franchise, beaten out by Starfox Command and depending on who you ask, Starfox Adventures. All it ever had to be was another Starfox 64 in all but name, and people would have been fine with it - it's almost all that any fan of the series ever fucking asks for. Which is why it kills me then that in the aftermath of Zero's release, people high up in Nintendo came right out and claimed that this gimmick-laden bullshit was absolutely not out of character for the franchise. That has a LOT of really nasty implications, key among them that Starfox has only ever existed as a testing bed for gimmicks they don't want to risk other franchises on, and that the critical and commercial success of the first two games was a total fucking accident. Most fans rightly took a statement like this as if they had just been spat in the fucking eye because it was all but an admission that their favourite franchise was second class, and I don't have any illusions that it killed the series outright for a lot of people. Next time just cut the bullshit, alright Nintendo? Nobody's interested, and you've had since 2002 to realize that - you really have no excuse anymore.

ITT BL reminisces over his entire game library

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