This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

Anyone who has been following this list knows that I am a sucker for games with tactics. I could re-hash my credentials for days, but I will just say that I played through Operation Darkness to completion and found things to enjoy about it, so I clearly have a stomach for slow moving, tactical games. So, if any company wants a shortcut to my attention, they simply have to put “tactics” in the title of the game. Thus the game we are talking about today would have probably gone unnoticed if it wasn’t called “Wintermoor Tactics Club.”

Wintermoor is a turn based tactics game (who would have thought) that has you alternating between playing the games version of D&D, and walking around a university doing sidequests and learning the story of the game. However, I think we need to start with the actual plot as that kinda informs the rest of the game. You play as Alicia who is attending college at the great Wintermoor academy. Alicia is a somewhat reserved nerd who belongs to a student club where her and her two best friends play D&D. The headmaster of the school for seemingly no reason at all decides to pit all the student clubs against each other in a snowball fight tournament. Any club that loses in the tournament has to be immediately disbanded until only a single student club remains for all of campus. Your group of friends isn’t quite the snowball athletes that you would expect to do well in a tournament, but they decide to treat their snowball fights like D&D fights and thus are able to thrive on tactics alone. Eventually, shocker, it turns out that the headmaster was looking to recruit the strongest kids on campus to help save the school from something much more nefarious, but that was probably to be expected. The game is trying to be humerous and while it isn’t as in-your-face as MDK2, it also isn’t as cringeworthy. For instance some of the other student clubs range from the Psychic club (kids who think they can see into the future) to the People-pretending-they-are-animals club and the Equestrian club (that doesn’t have horses). There was nothing that made me laugh out loud, but I am sure I let out a “Ha” on more that one occasion.

The biggest aspect of the game is actually playing actual D&D. The snowball fights are essentially end of chapter bosses for each round you advance, but the in-between is you continuing your normal campaign and drafting up new campaigns for new friends that you make during the game. To be clear you aren’t really playing D&D except for the fights, there is no exploring or ad-libbing, or even any real choices that you make. It is just small setup and then straight into a battle. The battles themselves are played on a standard grid where you control three characters (even when you unlock more characters you can only place 3 on the board) and your goal is to win the fight while hitting certain goals (more on those later). Each character is given a class and plays like that in both the D&D and in the snowball fights. So, Alicia is a mage who can do some big damage from far away, but can’t take a lot of hits. Colin is a paladin and he is your tank, and the third character, whose name I am blanking on, is a rogue. Each character has their own kind of stats with how much they can move, the damage they take from either physical or magical attacks, and the damage they output. While your main goal is to just beat each mission, there are little goal targets to shoot for. I think these targets are really only important for 100% the game, as I don’t think they lock out any of the actual content, but it was easy enough to hit the targets that I ended up just full starring them all. Those goals are almost always: “Win with no characters being defeated,” “Win with taking X damage or below,” “Win in X amount of turns,” and “Win using X number of super moves.” The good news is that if you get two out of the four on one playthrough, you can do the level again and just focus on the other two goals, and they will stack.

So how does combat actually work? Well its similar to all other tactics games, you essentially get two actions for your characters mainly to either move and then attack. Each character will only possess two to three moves to use, but one of those is their special that requires the expenditure of tactics points which you accumulate in battle for multiple reasons (doing damage, boosts, equipped items.. etc.). Once you unlock the other characters, the real challenge will just be in which characters synergize with each other well. For instance Alicia has a lightning bolt spell that will chain through enemies, so pairing her with a partner who can manipulate moving enemies around the board, means you can chain together more enemies and do more damage. After all of your characters take their turn, then the enemy takes theirs and you rinse and repeat until you either win or lose the fight. The good news is that characters don’t really level up or gain XP, so you don’t have to feel like you need to spread the wealth or worry if your characters are under-leveled for the mission you are about to take on. The only buffs you can really get is by equipping different items which you get by completing side quests throughout the game. While you will eventually earn about 6 items for each character, at most you can only equip two, so you will have to decide what is the most important for you. For instance one item for Alicia allows her to chain her same lightning spell through allies (without hurting them), while another may allow her to charge the team’s tactics points faster, meaning you can use specials more frequently.

Snowball fights work in the same way, and even though its supposed to take place in the real world.. you still get to cast lightning and use whatever magic powers your character has in the D&D Campaign. I think there is a line of dialogue somewhere in there that probably just says you throw snow extra fast or extra hard like you were hitting them with a hammer, but in reality it doesn’t need to make sense.

When you aren’t taking part in battles you are walking around the school, visiting different locations, and talking to other students trying to figure out what is happening. Some other students will give you sidequests, but they are almost exclusively fetch quests that just has you walking back and forth between areas or between students until you fulfill the brief. While it may seem boring to do, these are miss-able side quests that could lead to miss-able items. Almost all of the items you get are from completing side-quests, and they are usually only available for a single chapter or two, so you don’t want to throw away a chance that can help improve your team. If you are looking up this game you will see the phrase “Visual novel” thrown around to describe this non combat aspect, and it’s not entirely wrong. You won’t get in random combat encounters during your walk around school, and you really are just having conversations until your next combat event. One interesting little aside, is that when you are welcoming new people to your D&D group, you specifically get to help write a campaign to “hook” them. It’s really just picking some multiple choice options, but it can be fun to see that play out and see the reception of the people that you are bringing into the club. It is possible to write a campaign bad enough that you have to go for a second draft (that happened to me once), but I think it’s pretty forgiving.

Wintermoor is a fairly easy completion, especially if you aren’t looking to 100% all the battles, but it does have around 50 battles and the visual novel stuff can eat up a good portion of time. Really most of my frustration came from trying to figure out how exactly to 100% certain levels, and if you are avoiding that headache then it will be a quick playthrough. While I was enjoying the game, and I like the ending fights as a final culmination (made me think of FF6 briefly), it does drag on a little longer than it should. There were some characters that I just disliked using, not because I found the character specifically annoying, but rather that I just didn’t find them useful when I was limited to 3 characters (*Ahem cough COLIN cough). I think the real question is how does this compare to other tactics games? While a fair question, this certainly skews closer to “Kid’s first tactics game” rather then something deeper. If you are coming in with some experience you will very quickly find your way and be able to stomp most missions without missing a beat by just using other lessons learned from other games. Without having the depth of worrying about levels, experience points, specializations, it doesn’t really make you stop and think about how you are going to get through a new level. It certainly isn’t going to stand up to the titans like X-com or FF Tactics, but the game is certainly polished enough that if you are craving a SRPG to play on the go, then this will hit the spot.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: Nope

Where does it rank: Wintermoor Tactics club is a solid game, but it doesn't have the nuance of games that I feel are better SRPGs. I think this is a great game to ease people into playing SRPGs or even if you want a game similar to other of the genre but without the stress, but that doesn't make it necessarily better. I want a game that challenges me more, I want a game to make me occasionally re-think my tactics, and this game doesn't do that. Once you find the three characters you like to use, you can wipe the floor with a lot of the levels. While the story is endearing and some of the characters are genuinely charming or funny, it's also not a story that I think people Need to experience. There weren't shocking twists and turns that could make the somewhat easy combat worth slogging through just to see the game to the end. All that is to say it's not a bad or broken game, and I would recommend it as a great sale game.. it's just not going to crack the upper echelon here. I have it ranked as the 110th Greatest Game of All Time out of 182 total Games.

What's it Between: Wintermoor Tactics Club sits between Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments (109th) and Simpsons Road Rage (111th)

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

Future games coming up 1) Ghostbusters (X360) 2) Golden Sun (at some point)

This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

When I was just a wee lad and owned a Dreamcast I had a fairly small game collection. I had some of the classics (Power Stone, Sonic, Dynamite Cop, etc.) and one of the games I had forever was MDK 2. I don’t really remember why or how I had the game, because I never played the first game so there was no affinity for the series. Is it possible that I got the game through a birthday or Christmas gift and the gift giver was just following the prompt of “Dreamcast game,” perhaps. However it came to be, I remember reading the manual and looking at the case and being really excited to play as the Doctor (one of the three main characters), because his levels sounded like they were the most interesting (more on that later). As a kid, I never made it to the doctor’s levels. It wasn’t really because of difficulty, but rather I would tell myself I am going to finally play MDK2, sit down and beat the first level, have some modicum of fun, see that level 2 was not the doctor, and then move on to something else. No matter how resolute my intentions were, I never made it that far in the game, and for a game that only has 10 levels, it really is an achievement to not even see what level 3 has to offer. So, I have finally righted my past and played through all of MDK2, including playing as the Doctor, but was I right as a kid to move on from this game early or did I miss out on a real gem?

I won’t leave you in suspense long… Someone is going to have to tell me what the appeal of this game actually is. I don’t normally look at review scores for a game, especially not before I have written my little piece on the game, because I don’t want it clouded with the thoughts of another person, but how the hell did this game score in the 80s. Sure it is in the low 80s, but this is not an 8 out of 10 game, by any stretch of the imagination. It wasn’t in 2000 when it released and it certainly isn’t now. I imagine the true MDK2 fans are gonna get “shoot hot” over this comment, and they will claim that its because new games have coddled me too much and I couldn’t handle the difficulty or lack of hand holding this game does (as was the style at the time). In reality, I just don’t think this game is any fun. See what you made me do MDK2? I went and spoiled the end in the second paragraph and we haven’t even talked about the game yet.

Ok… calm down Phil.. let’s be professional here. MDK2 is a hodgepodge of a game in terms of genre. You play as three different main characters who each play their levels in a semi-unique way. All of them are 3^rd person action-platformers, but if you are playing as the Dog it becomes a shooter-action-platformer, because the Dog levels play as a gun blazing, kill anything that moves kind of level. The Doctor is supposed to be more of a Puzzle-action-platformer, as you collect items like an adventure game and then combine them together to solve puzzles.. Sure one of the things you build is a nuclear toaster that acts as a gun, and then once you build that you find your levels involve a lot more shooting then puzzle solving, but it was billed as a puzzle character. And finally our main character (Kurt) is supposedly a stealth-action-platformer, because they are given a sniper rifle and items like a cloaking device… but I guess if we are being honest, the minute you fire a shot all enemies know where you are, so there isn’t much stealth and then you just use your machine gun to mow down everyone in sight… Hmmm.. I guess every character is actually just a shooter-action-platformer. Well so much for nuance.

So we established that all the levels are 3^rd person shooter levels with some light other elements. But, it’s not like you are playing the same level three different times just with each character, I don’t want to give that crazy opinion. I mean the levels are all super varied. So you have the inside of a ship for lets say 8 out of 10 levels.. I mean not always the same ship… Ok so sometimes it’s the same ship, like more than you would want with a game with only 10 levels, and then you have 2 levels where you are on an alien planet or homeworld and you go from the metallic inside of a spaceship, to the metallic… outside… homeworld. Ok, I see the problem here. I am not discussing the nuance of the corridors that you run down to get from one spot to the other, because those are so different it is going to blow your mind. So get this, one of the corridors is kinda blue, and there is one that is just like black, and then one that kinda has a green color to it.

Alright, you got me, I am still bringing that negativity in to the review.. So lets try to take it from the top again. MDK2 is a 3^rd person shooter where you run through “futuristic” levels solving puzzles and killing baddies with an assortment of guns. Each level comprises of multiple checkpoints and puzzles that are “unique” to each character. Levels with Kurt have puzzles revolving around his use of the sniper rifle, hitting certain objects at a distance or using some “wacky” shots that allow bullets to ricochet off walls or bounce to hit switches. Kurt also possess a parachute that allows him to float long distances and get caught in up drafts that allow him to get to higher areas. The Dog has multiple arms allowing him to hold up to 4 guns and fire them all at the same time. His levels are very combat focused but might require the solving of jetpack puzzles, which can sometimes be picked up in a level. The doctor uses his brain and his kleptomania to gather and combine items to solve puzzles like putting a ladder on an ‘X’ on the floor, or disarming a bomb by hitting switches in the right order. Each level alternates what character you control, and the very last level allows you to pick your favorite. Kurt has level 1, 4, 7.. Dog has level 2, 5, 8.. and Doc has levels 3, 6, 9.

The plot of the game is fairly boring sci-fi. Aliens are planning to once again blow up Earth, and our heroes are the only ones that can stop them. The game attempts a comic book aesthetic, but outside of loading screens you tend to forget that the game is going for that, as there is nothing throughout the level that screams comic book. Now I never played the first MDK, I hopefully never will (if this is the better one), so there might be some carry over story between the two, or maybe the big bad is in both games so it feels like this is a continuation of the epic story. What I can attest to is that the story is pretty bland. It is not bad, but the only reason it isn’t bad, is because it basically doesn’t exist. Each level starts with some small dialogue of your character saying something that amounts to; “I got to rescue Kurt,” or “I gotta stop these aliens on this ship,” but none of it matters, and if you skipped all the dialogue you would get the same out of the story as I did for watching them.

Now lets talk more about these levels. As established each level plays slightly differently based on the character, but Kurt and the Dog aren’t really all the different. The levels are very linear with only an offshoot here or there that might have an item, but ultimately you alternate from going into open enemy rooms with spawners where you have to do a lot of strafe dodging to kill all the enemies and their spawners and then you go into a puzzle room. For combat encounters, outside of bosses, they are fairly bland. One on one versus an enemy you can just strafe back and forth while holding down fire and you will take down every enemy without getting hit. Obviously they counter that by just throwing more enemies at you, but it seems like the enemies almost always fire at where you were, so if you stay on the move you can take down big waves of enemies without much difficulty. There are enemies that fire different weapons that you will have to look out for, but in general keep on the move and fire and you will be fine through most of the encounters. It breaks up this monotony by having puzzle rooms which are truly where the levels can feel unique, but not always in a good way. Kurt will almost always have to find a glowing orb to hit with his sniper rifle (only bullet that works). Hitting that will unlock the next room or make a bridge or something that allows you to continue the game. Since Kurt is fairly immobile while sniping (can strafe, but you only see your character in a PIP in the corner) most of the difficulty of these puzzle rooms is just an endless spammer of enemies, so you either have to be fast with your sniping, eat some damage, or utilize your few pickups to allow you to cloak, or upgrade your armor for these areas. The Dog has a lot less puzzles, but all of his puzzles rely on using a jetpack, and boy is it terrible. There are two different jetpacks that he can pickup (depends on the level you are in). One of the jetpacks recharges whenever you aren’t using it, and one that needs to be recharged at certain stations. You can probably figure out how the puzzles for both of those work. The one that recharges on its own, has you mastering a fluttering technique to travel long distances or land on small edges to charge, while the other jetpack has you trying to use as little as possible to get to the next fill up station.

What all the characters have in common is some truly awful platforming sections, as this is a game that just doesn’t lend itself well to platforming. In some earlier stages you are usually given a much bigger window to land a jump, or more jetpack juice then you need to get to where you want to go, but obviously the further along you get it just becomes a battle of your will to continue. Now that isn’t a surprise, the later the level the harder the level, I should have mastered jumping in level 10 far better then I had in level 1, and that is certainly true. The issue is that this game doesn’t do platforming particularly well at all, it’s not “blight club” bad, but it never felt good, and some of the readability of where you are supposed to land can just be chalked up to early 2000s muddiness when it comes to all video games. The amount of times my jump didn’t read (press the button and it doesn’t respond) or the ledge grab didn’t take are too numerous to count.

Good news is that this game does have multiple mid level checkpoints so you don’t have to worry about trying to knock everything out in one run. There are no lives or continues to worry about so you can die and restart at a checkpoint as much as you want without really any penalty outside of having to keep playing the game. I think the newer (2011) PC HD version comes with being able to use save states wherever you want, and that would certainly improve some of the issues with this game as you can save after beating a hard puzzle or enemy room and not have to wait until you hit the checkpoint which can be a surprisingly long hike between them. That’s the thing about checkpoints though, if they are right before a difficult room it can feel like a godsend because any deaths in that difficult room mean an easy retry, but that also usually means you will have to go a long way before another checkpoint.. meaning a stupid death later on and you have to do the difficult room again. On the contrary a checkpoint right after a difficult room means that if you don’t quite beat the room on the first go, you have to replay a big portion just to get back to it. So there isn’t much else to add, each level gets about 4-5 checkpoints and they seem like the right amount, but their placement can be suspect on some of them, but it all depends on where you struggle.

I do want to talk about the two things that came up a lot when reading up on this game after I finished it. One which is highly suggestive, but is the humor of this game. I am not going to tell anyone what is funny and what is not funny. I personally didn’t laugh, chuckle, chortle, or even smirk at a joke told in this game. Enemies dying and letting out fart noises is, dare I say, beneath me in terms of humor. Naming the common enemy a Bottrock (play on Buttrock) isn’t funny to me, and the quips the characters say after beating a boss or to each other would make even Arnold cringe. Now maybe I’m jaded and old, and maybe if I played this game 24 years ago at the tender age of 12-13, maybe I would be squirting milk out of my nose in the middle or recess or something… I don’t know what kids do anymore. Now I think some of this is a “of its time,” where video games still weren’t expected to have interesting plot, or characters, or well written jokes, so the reviewers probably should have wrote “funnier then watching paint dry.” The problem why it doesn’t work for me, is I grew up playing genuinely well written or funny games. The adventure game scene at the time actually had funny games whether it was Monkey Island, Space Quest, or the Discworld games. Don’t bring your weak jokes and fart noises and then pass your game off as a comedy. I didn’t feel that the comedy was shoved in my face, so I was able to ignore most of what it was throwing at me, but there were a couple moments where I rolled my eyes far enough back in my head that I did briefly worry that they wouldn’t come back. Who knows, maybe I’m the broken one here and this game is knee-slapping hysterical.. I mean there are so many reviews that mention it as being wacky, or funny.. that it must be me who is wrong.

The other issue that I saw come up was the discussion of difficulty. Usually it was from try hard bros, that want to comment on how games were good “back then,” because of x reasons. “The game didn’t hold your hand” or “The game was hard and you had to git good.” I don’t usually give to much thought into what a bunch of sad gamers think, but lets dissect this. The game is difficult, its not impossible by any means and I have played harder games, but it is not something that you will cake walk through, and much of that is because the game is obtuse in what it wants you to do. I talked about how individual combat is relatively easy, you hold down the button and strafe, but bosses can be far more difficult, because a very specific thing needs to be done to hurt them. That one very specific thing, is never called out and you are left throwing shit at the wall until it sticks. For one boss, you play as the doctor and you have to consume an item, turn into a monster, climb a series of boxes (something the doctor can’t do without being a monster) and then jump at the enemy when he is at a very specific spot, in order to damage him. If you jump at him too soon, or too late, nothing will happen. The boxes you also need to climb, don’t really look like any pile that stands out that signify you need to be up there, so there were endless restarts where I was trying to shoot the boss with my regular gun, hit him with grenades, find a button around the level, change into the monster and bunch him, etc. before I stumbled upon the correct answer. That isn’t a “so cool cause it doesn’t hold my hand” level, it is just bad design. There is one jetpack puzzle room where you have to follow a refill machine for at least 2-3 minutes over a lava pit, before it leads you to where you need to go. The whole time just feathering that power so you stay close enough to stay charged, but still in the air so you don’t die to the lava. I remember that part being a pain, because the checkpoint isn’t close by, so your instincts are to explore that room but after a few deaths you just get sick of replaying the early part of the checkpoint. I am not even going to talk about an entire level (level 8) that had a part that was so difficult that the Dreamcast and PC version added in a shortcut (hard to find, but still there) that allowed you to bypass a 20 minute puzzle. There is nothing more “radical” then trying to figure out what exactly the game wants me to do, so I can move forward with playing the game.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: Hahaha. No

Where does it rank: So, yeah… in case it is not obvious, I didn’t really enjoy my time with this game. I only got one ending (the last level can be played with any character, and each character has their own ending), and despite being able to just start at that level again, I never felt like really playing this game again. Somehow my kid brain at 12 years old, knew to not invest much time in the game and instead to pick up so many other Dreamcast games that actually were enjoyable to play. It’s weird now to think about it, but Bioware worked on this game between the first two Baldur’s Gates and before KOTOR or Mass Effect. Now, Bioware also made a sonic game when they were probably at their peak of their power, so I know not everything is going to be a hit, but there was a time where if it had this name on the box, I would have assumed good things. Obviously not the case. Where does that put MDK2 in the greatness list? Well some may be shocked to find out that it isn’t to high up on the list, but it also isn’t as terrible to grace the bottom of the list. It falls into what I would consider the worst area to be in, which is the, “bad, but not fun or interesting, or even SOOO bad” list. Even while I am typing this sentence, I feel like I am ranking it too low, but I keep re-examining the list and being like… “no I would rather play all those other games more.” So I have this ranked as the new 166th greatest game of all time.

What's it Between: MDK 2 sits between Lost Lands: Dark Overlord (165) and Manual Samuel (167)

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

Future games coming up 1) Wintermoor Academy 2) Ghostbusters (X360)

This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

Hey it’s been awhile and despite having a month long break to get through work craziness, see through winter break with kids, and take a small vacation with the family, you won’t believe, but I didn’t have an insane amount of extra time to play games during the month of January. You don’t really care about all those details, but I figured I needed to shed some light about why the absence and why I’m rusty when it comes to ranking games. Regardless you didn’t click this blog post to read how year end audits went at my company, you clicked it to see where TMNT Shredders Revenge ranks on the list and find out if it will top its very lofty predecessor, so let’s begin.

Shredder’s Revenge is a side scrolling beat-em up that harkens back to the old days of arcades and 32 bit systems. You play as any of the turtles, Splinter, April O’Neal, and more as you attempt to once again thwart Shredder’s evil plans. If you are familiar with Turtles in Time for the SNES or even the earlier NES TMNT games then you will know what you are in for. Each character that you pick has their own stats, but for the most part they all play roughly the same. You have basic attacks that can string into combos, a special that can be used after charging it through combos or taunts, and upgrades that can be earned by gaining enough XP. While there is a story mode and arcade mode available, the only difference is if you want to save your game or use virtual quarters to try and make it through the whole game. If you do decide to get the DLC there is a wave based mode where you need to see how long you can last in a single go.

I think the best place to start is at picking characters, because this game has a much bigger selection then previous TMNT beat-em ups. Obviously you have your turtles, but the addition of Splinter and April O’Neal are very welcome, and that is not including Casey Jones which can be earned after beating the game and two more characters that come with the DLC. Each character has points attributed to Reach, Speed, and Power and these can not be upgraded. I call these stats, but in reality these are just rankings because each character has a 1 Star in one category, a 2 star in another category, and a 3 star in the final one. There are of course some exceptions, for instance Leo (the boring one) has a 2 star ranking in everything, but surely no one would play as him. Casey Jones and the DLC characters are also exempt from this rule, but I feel that makes sense since one is gotten from beating the game, and the others are paid additions. They are technically stronger by having 7 stars amongst 3 categories, instead of 6, but in reality it is all about your playstyle. My three most used characters; Donny, April, and Splinter while all technically different in terms of stats I didn’t play a whole lot different with them. Maybe that’s sacrilege and by admitting it, I will never be the ultimate Turtles player, but I think you can make do with any character. When I play these types of games with my sons, I always try to nudge them to pick the characters that will make the game a little easier or more fun for them, but in this Turtles I felt that with all the characters being essentially equal I didn’t feel I needed to put my finger on the scale and I could let them pick whomever they liked.

The upgrades you get for each character are also the same, and while you can have a difference in levels between the characters they will all even out in the end game. For instance the level-up rewards are an additional health point, or an extra life, and eventually specials that can be activated in air. While this certainly simplifies the level-up process and doesn’t bog down the game by forcing players into a menu to spend points or assign attributes upon leveling up, I did feel a little bummed at some of the earnings. I was hoping at the very least for the final level up to be an extra star that you can assign to one of your base stats, and while that would slightly alter the balance it would at least seem like a fitting reward for maxing out a character’s level. The difference between a level 1 and level 10 character may only be an extra few hit points and a bonus continue if you die in a level, but you won’t notice a huge playing difference between the characters. (Here is where someone points out that a level 10 character can hold more specials, and do a jumping special, and how that is totally key to beating Shredder in one hit).

Moving on to the levels. As is the usual formulas, your character spends the game chasing Shredder through different areas including the news room, a zoo, the sewer, technodrome, factories and more. The levels are colorful and full of animation in the background that adds life and makes the scenes more interesting without seeming too overbearing. Most levels have traps specific to the area (a foot clan trying to hit you with a car, or a factory laser beam trying to fry you), hidden items to find, and a few pickups scattered around, but there is only so much you can do with a side scrolling beat-em up level. I wish some of the levels were a little more weird or out there, and while this game has you travelling into another world, I did find myself missing some of the time travelling levels in the Turtles in Time. The game still tries to mix it up, and we have levels where we are on hover scooters and doing the usual fare, so you know standard TMNT stuff.

There is a decent variety of standard enemy types, but…. Listen I don’t know what else I can say about this game, ok? It’s a good game, it is superior to the SNES version on almost every level and trust me I tried looking for faults. I was blinded by nostalgia and hoping that I could find ways where Turtles in Time was a better game, but that just simply isn’t the case. This game has more of everything you would want in this type of game. There are more bosses and they are more varied then other games. More characters to play as, a more robust multiplayer that allows up to 6 people to play together, and this game even has more replay ability by simply adding unlockables for each character and having different endings. I could argue that I liked the level variety better in Turtles in Time, but that is such a small gripe and I can’t pretend that it’s not. Maybe you aren’t going to play this 6-player co-op, but the option is there if you want it. Maybe you won’t unlock every ending or power-up all the characters, but it’s available to people who do want to do that stuff.

Would I have personally loved if we got something like a River City Ransom but with Turtles, where there is more RPG elements, sure… But then I am turning this game into something it is not. There aren’t a lot of complaints that I think can made about this game that I think are warranted. I saw some people bemoan that the game is short, but at 10ish hours, that feels right for this type of game. I wouldn’t want to be on my 30^th level of a beat-em-up just to pad out the length of the game. I mean there are only so many levels where I can beat up a hundred foot clan and still want to do it forever. Plus 10 hours is still roughly 3-4 sittings of playing the game. Maybe for teens that doesn’t seem like a lot, but I can tell you trying to organize that gaming night with adults for 4 straight outings is nigh impossible. And when I played with my kids they wanted to do maybe a level or two MAX each sitting before they wanted to move on. I also saw some people complaining about the game being too easy, but there are difficulty options for the career mode, and an arcade mode to boot if you feel like removing some of the career benefits.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: No.. it is a very good game, but not the greatest.

Where does it rank: So, yeah, this game is better then Turtles in Time, and it’s really freaking good, but lets talk turkey about ranking. Despite being better in nearly every way, it doesn’t actually rank that much higher than its predecessor. Is that my bias showing for the genre, or does the genre have a ceiling that might be hard to break. When I think about the list, I still think of the short-hand of “what game would I rather replay, right now?” So, Shredders Revenge is a good game, maybe even in the “great” pantheon, but it is ranked as the 16th Greatest Game of All Time. Its better then the original, and I think my love affair with Fortnite has cooled since playing it, but I would rather play through all of Mario 64 then fire up a full playthrough as Casey Jones in this game. That shouldn’t be a damning thing to say, and I would fire this game up easily if friends or my kids wanted to play it, but I think solo Phil is good for now.

What's it Between: Shredder's Revenge sits between Mario 64 (15th) and Fortnite (17th)

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

Future games coming up 1) MDK2 2) Wintermoor Academy

This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

*Warning – This writeup is going to be longer then most of previous ones.. I spent more time this year on this game than any other game [Including FFX (which I loved), and Hitman: World of Assassination (also loved)… and I have a lot more to say about it.*

Recently I hosted Thanksgiving for my family and opened up my home to family members who would normally never see my inner sanctum. One of those family members would happen to be a cousin who is “really into video games,” or at least that is what I would always hear from Aunts and Uncles whenever people are trying to get us to bond. While I was making one of the main dishes in the kitchen I was able to spy my cousin looking at my entire game collection, that covers all the shelves around my TV. To a genuine collector it is a paltry amount, but to most people, it would seem like I own every game in existence (I don’t, for the record). Later that evening I was talking to my cousin and he said and I quote, “For someone with a lot of games, you sure don’t have many good ones.” I didn’t really take offense to the comment, because obviously good or bad is somewhat subjective, but also because I knew I wouldn’t be able to convince him that there is merit in playing video games that aren’t “mainstream.” See his initial comment really meant that I didn’t have that many games that he actually plays. The last Call of Duty game I own is from the 360 generation. I have Madden 2018 back when Tom Brady was still with the patriots. I don’t own a physical edition of Fortnite (and I didn’t have him look through all my digital only games to show him, I was in fact cool), and I still don’t own a Ps5. In his eyes, I am the weirdo. I play video games, sure, but I am wasting my time and presumably money by owning games like “Pig Eat Ball,” and a CIB “Croc: Legend of the Gobbos.” Honestly, I have always been that way growing up and not just in games. It wasn’t done to be an asshole or contrarian, but I like things off the beaten path. So, it’s no surprise that I would have picked up Operation Darkness some time ago sitting on a dusty shelf in Gamestop and decided to buy that instead of a new Call of Duty, Madden, or the like. The game sat on my shelf for years, and I always wanted to play it because the idea intrigued me, but things would get in the way and I never got around to it… until NOW.

We are going to dive into every system in great detail about this game, because why the hell not, but lets just lay some groundwork. Operation Darkness is an alternate history game that re-tells the story of world war II. You take the on the role of a private who in the first level has his unit wiped out and later joins a very special unit to continue fighting. Each mission is a turn based strategic battle where, in most levels, you will attempt to kill all enemy combatants without losing one of the story critical characters under your control. There are hit points, individual experience points, a leveling system, special abilities, and a whole host of other systems bubbling under the surface that you will have to adapt to or risk an early exit in the game. If anyone remembers this game at all, it is because you aren’t simply battling generic allies vs. generic axis soldiers, but rather you will fight a slew of monsters as some monsters yourself. Your main enemy is known as the blood clan, and they are vampires. You have stumbled into your own clan that is made up of werewolves, a Frankenstein’s monster, and a witch amongst others. Also fun sidenote this game is selling for like $100 on eBay and I have to assume that it’s because it has Atlus’ name on the box and not based on the quality or review scores of this game.

Ok, where to start the deep dive? I suppose we should begin with combat as that is where you are going to spend a majority of your time. As mentioned earlier, the combat is done in turns, but not in a good guys and then bad guys turn, but rather by individual units. On the right side of the screen, on by default, is a big turn order. For the most part you will control all of the blue characters (with some exceptions). When it is one of your character’s turns you basically have two action points per turn in order to do some familiar (to the genre) things. You can move a certain distance, you can use an item, or you can attack. Those all take one action point, but you can’t double up on a single action. You won’t be able to move twice or attack twice regardless. For two points, you can go into cover mode (overwatch), that can either trigger on an enemies movement or to piggyback off of another allies attack, or you can use a special move. These special moves are different for nearly every character, but they stem from the “monster” that character is. The werewolves can use their claws to attack a certain distance, the witch can hurl a fireball, and your Dr Jekyll equivalent can cast revive, amongst other moves. Obviously the specials and the cover mode have their benefits which is why they take both turns but not being able to move is a big detriment. You can’t move first to get into range and then use a special or go into cover, so if you are planning on using either of those options it will almost always be a two turn process to execute to your vision, and a lot can happen during those two turns. When you aren’t using your specials or monster powers, all of the weaponry is “roughly” weapons from the time. I am not a historian, especially not WW2, but you aren’t going to really be using fun guns for your non specials. I do say “roughly” because there are a few weapons that I’m confident in saying were probably not used in WW2. For instance I have a dragon sword that does huge damage to dragons if used, it doesn’t shoot lightning or anything else, but I just don’t think a lot of dragon swords were used in the war. Single shot rifles will allow you to “snipe,” but are limited to a single target, while some bigger guns will require you to be up close, but can sometimes group attack two or three enemies in a single shot. Not every character, can use every weapon, and some specials require certain weapons to be equipped, so keep all that in mind.

So let’s go one layer deeper. This is an RPG in the sense that there are individual stats and you can level up, get more health, learn more abilities for each individual character. Characters not used or used seldomly, will not gain levels and be quickly obsolete and weak, while a character that is over used can, in theory, be over-leveled and really decimate enemies (I wouldn’t worry about this, because unless you pour in a crazy amount of extra hours doing power leveling, this won’t happen naturally). For instance, it won’t be surprising that your healer will be under-leveled because as far as I could tell, XP was only gained when dealing damage to enemies, or getting a kill. If you use your healer, as an actual healer.. you won’t be gaining a hell of a lot of XP. I digress, there are a lot of stats for each character that will impact them on the battlefield. ‘Speed’ determines how fast their turn comes up, while ‘movement’ impacts the range at which they can move. There are things like; Hit, attack, defense, crit chance, Hp, Ms (special power.. like MP), dodge, accuracy, etc.. There is an abundance of stats, and for the most part you are at the whim of your character’s leveling up with a few exceptions. For instance after you beat certain levels you learn an equip able skill that you can use to adjust certain stats. Each character can equip four different skills (3 really, but we will get to that later) and those skills can also level up 4 times. However, they are only useful if equipped, so once you level up a skill to level 4 (max level), you can swap it for something else that you might like, but you don’t get to carry over whatever benefit that skill originally granted you. So one skill might increase your speed, which is very useful, and you can get that to level 4 as a big boost, but those aren’t permanent upgrades and if you swap that out for an HP boost, then you can say goodbye to that speed boost. It makes it really hard to remove skills you have leveled up early, because starting over with a new skill at level 1 is a big downgrade from whatever you had previously. Do I want to sacrifice my accuracy boost for more Def, knowing I am going to go from like an 80% hit rate to a 50% hit rate? The only other stat that can be manipulated is ‘speed,’ which might be the most important stat in the game.

You see Operation Darkness also uses everyone’s favorite system, encumbrance. Each item has a weight, from the guns you use, to the medkits you carry, to the backup ammo you hold in your pouch. The more weighed down you are, you take a bigger hit on speed, and if you carrying nothing you get a big bonus. Ignoring the fact that each character does have limited item and weapon slots they can carry, the main purpose of this encumbrance is to essentially prevent the player from equipping every character with a bazooka and 15 backup rockets. In case it wasn’t obvious, your character isn’t guaranteed a turn at a certain place in line, and no matter how good of an idea you have for a character, the later levels will make it impossible for you to use characters that are not optimized in terms of their equipment. My 2^nd piece of advice if anyone decides to play this game (my first piece of advice is “don’t”), is to figure out how you are going to use each character and try to optimize their equipment to back that up. If you find that you have a character where you rarely fire their regular gun and you are using their specials or rockets for them, then don’t give them that gun and ammo. My most stubborn lesson from this game was learning that I can’t have it all. Bazooka guys and gals can’t also have a heavy machine gun or any gun for that matter. That shit might fly in early levels, but when you face off against your first vampire and they get 3 turns in a row before that person can do anything then you know you have screwed up.

Sorry these all build on each other, and speaking about one makes me think of the other things. Hey, so you remember when I said you really only get 3 equip able skills instead of 4, well that is because the first skill you learn is called “auto-restore” and that will need to be equipped on all characters, unless you are trying to ruin your real life playing this game. Auto-restore means that when your health falls below a certain % that your character will automatically use the weakest healing item they have equipped. The first less sexy reason this is important, is that it saves you an action point to heal your character. No one wants to waste an action point using a medkit when they can be shooting and hopefully killing enemies to beat a level, and while you may think you are better at knowing when to use a medkit then the computer, in reality you will need it because… This ability can still be used if a shot were to kill your player. That’s right, if you take a shot that was to bring you to zero, but you have this ability equipped, then the character will use it and still be in the fight. I shouldn’t have to explain how important that is, but there are story critical characters that if they die at all (regardless of the fact that you have a character who can revive people) the mission automatically ends. The game doesn’t give you a chance to revive them or anything, it just ends and you get to start that whole mission over again no matter how far along you were. Did you hit a mine in the early levels, because you weren't scanning the ground one square at a time? Well, start over… did a tank fire a shot into a crowd, because you havn’t gotten a turn yet and kill one of those main characters? Well, start over... All of those things can be avoided with auto-restore. Also, let’s not pretend that this is the first skill you learn for any other reason then during testing for the game they realized how vital this skill is. It only takes a few level restarts before you realize that this skill should always be equipped.

So why do the death of some people matter, but the others don’t? Well because this game wanted to do permadeath, but they also couldn’t ruin parts of the story, so they had to make some characters off-limits. People can hate or love perma-death in games, and that is a debate for another time, but there are two things to note here. First, permadeath can’t be turned off in this game, there is no character retreat and the promise they will be recovered back at camp. If a character is dead when the mission ends, that character is dead for the rest of the game. Second, just load your game when that happens. This game is poorly balanced, (and I won’t hear other people say otherwise) every named character is relatively indispensable when compared to a generic recruit. Generic recruits all start at level one regardless of where you are in the story, so have fun leveling them up on optional missions over and over again, and generic recruits have no special abilities and can’t learn them. When you get to the final levels of the game, you have long been moving away from using guns at all, unless it’s a bazooka, so having a character that can only wield guns is going to severely handicap you for a game that is already excruciatingly difficult at times. Unless you are imposing restrictions on yourself, for some dumb reason, where you aren’t going to load a save, every character is worth going back for. Sure could you convince me that you can beat the game without Jack the Ripper (yes that is a real character, and a good guy), sure.. but I would much rather have him on the team for his high speed, movement, and up close attacks, over generic character B who at best will get two bazooka shots for an entire mission. Perma-death can work in games where it is an interesting mechanic, and characters can be a big loss but replaceable in the grand scheme of things, or in a game where there are so many characters that you can pivot easily. Newer X-Com (I guess it’s the only X-com people know now), it hurts to lose a leveled up character, but the gap isn’t insurmountable to bring in a new rookie and level them up. Fire Emblem has a huge roster, where you can lose someone, and it stinks and maybe they were your marriage partner, but their skill set is replaceable. Operation Darkness does not have that.. If you can you leave one enemy on the field until you get a chance to revive the dead character do so, but otherwise it is best to just start that mission over. And that is because..

There are no mid-mission saves or checkpoints. Every mission has to be done in one sitting (I mean, I suppose you could leave the game paused for an extended break, but that wasn't realistic for me), and these missions are long. On average each individual mission would take me between an hour and an hour and a half, which may not seem that long to you, but seems like an eternity to me in terms of limiting saves. Also I should remind you that with no mid-mission saves, that any failure or death in a mission that kicks you back to camp is just full time lost while playing the game. Even losing 30 minutes can be frustrating, but it can be downright devastating to lose over an hour of progress because the game decided to be cheap at the last minute, or you made a mental lapse that cost you. I can see some of you doing the mental math to figure out how I could play this game for so long. If there are 27 main missions and even if you say each one took an hour and a half (skewing the average to the high point) that only puts you at around 40 hours, which is the length of a relatively well-oiled RPG. Well lets count in the 15 optional missions, because while they are in fact optional and not *required* for completion, you will need to use them to level up your characters to account for some difficulty spikes that happen throughout the main game, so add in another 20ish hours and we are now at a meaty 60 hours which is still less than the time I spent on FFX. Well sir or madam, that is because I also lost so much freaking progress to countless deaths that are full level restarts. While it certainly isn’t every level, I would say at least half of all the main missions I had to play twice, because I would die at some point because I was un-prepared, so now we add in another 20 hours and you start to see what I mean. I didn’t even do the super difficult bonus missions that are an additional 20 missions. I could have easily been playing this game for an additional 20-30 hours just to tackle those. Listen, I get it, if the game allows mid-mission saves then you are going to have people abuse that system so that they roll back a save every time a player get’s injured and that really ruins whatever difficulty the game wants to go for. Those people exist, and that’s fine.. but there are also people who need to put the game down because other stuff came up and can’t always game undisturbed for multiple hours at a time. I got to the point playing this, where I didn’t even fire the game up, unless I knew I had at least 2 hours of undisturbed time to play. You know how rare that is for me? It’s partially why the game took me so long to beat, because I couldn’t consent to leaving a console on pause for hours at a time, but I also wasn’t going to just hope that I could finish a long and grueling level on time or risk losing whatever progress I made. In a world where I can save in the middle of an NBA2k game, or a Madden game, it doesn’t make sense why I can’t save in the middle of a mission. I’m not even playing online.

But, Phil, you seem like a super cool, competent, handsome video game playing veteran, who loves turn-based-strategy games… how can you be so bad at this game? Well let’s talk difficulty. In general any game that relies on some sort of dice roll to affect outcomes, like % to hit, % for crit, etc., then there are going to be days when the dice rolls are just not in your favor. I remember distinctly when people bitched and moaned about the % to hit in X-Com as being unfair, well buckle up, because this game is even worse. The amount of times my sniper missed a 75% shot or better is truly disgusting, and while you don’t ever get to see what the enemies % to hit is going to be, you better believe it is a hell of a lot better than yours. You might know that a single use rocket launcher from a distance of X only has about a 20% chance to hit when you fire it, when it comes from an enemy, just chalk that shit up to landing at your feet. When a tank gets an action before your team has moved off the starting blocks, and they are all bunched up, then consider that tank shot a direct hit on multiple party members. Oh and I should mention that if a tank runs over you, it is instant death with no chance of auto-restore, so if one of your main characters even sneaks inside a tanks movement radius, they will almost certainly get squished sending you back to the menu to start again. When a main character has used the last of their health kits, then they become cat-nip for every enemy on the battlefield, no matter how improbable the route to get to them is. The game loves being difficult. Remember that whole speed conversation about not carrying too much so you can get more actions than the enemy? Well in later levels it doesn’t mean shit, a Tank or a dragon will get more actions then a character who is only equipped with a dagger and nothing else. You have to be lean just to get a turn in, and that is still after the enemy gets multiple turns in a row with what should be a heavy unit. If that wasn’t enough for difficulty, every mission comes with a “twist.” During the mission, at some point (whether you killed X amount of enemies, or X amount of turns have been taken, or any other trigger) then the twist of the mission occurs. This twist is almost always in the form of reinforcements, but you don’t know what reinforcements or where or how many are going to spawn. You better hope you are prepared, because running out of rockets when a tank battalion is the twist, or having enough medkits when a bunch of skeletons spawn right behind your main character, just means you are now looking to restart so you know what ammo to conserve or what you need to bring at the start of the mission, on attempt # 2. There is no mid-mission re-supply, and while you can harvest items from dead bodies, there is no assurance that it will have health when you need it, or a rocket to take care of a tank. So, you somehow have to be lean and bring as little equipment as possible into missions, but at the same time bring enough equipment so that you are prepared for whatever the twist is that you know is coming, but have no idea what enemy they are going to drop.

As a quick aside, there are people out there that love this game. That claim that the game is easy if you understand the “mechanics, and if you are good at strategy games.” People who claim they can beat the game without using the auto-restore ability, and can get the speed running achievement (clearing the game in under 35 hours). These people love to shout on old message boards that reviewers of this game were just bad, and that this game doesn’t pose that much of a challenge, and while this is nothing new to existing on the internet, I also believe most of these people to be liars and cheats. If you have a walkthrough open, that tells you where every enemy is going to spawn, what each dead body has on them, and exactly where to stand at every turn as if it was a chess match, then yes.. this game is easy, but that is because you are doing one step above watching someone else play the game. When you do know the twist, where the enemies spawn and you are on your second playthrough of the level, it can be easy to make sure you leave a rocket guy to stand at this exact spot so he can decimate a portion of the army immediately, or know when to conserve certain ammo. If you know that you are going to go up against a tank division, you know that you will need extra rockets, so you aren’t screwed after the halfway point, but if you play this game for the first time as it is meant to be played, where those twists are surprises, then the game is a real bastard. I was struggling on a level, the first level that introduces dragons, and I was looking for any advice as to how to get past it. The only advice from a so called “expert” (on someone else’s very similar question) was to either start the game over or from a save that was 7 missions back, because there is a super weapon that is hidden on a corpse in main mission 16, that makes fighting those dragons easier. “Ex-squeeze me?!?” Your advice is to lose over 7 hours of progress or all progress, because I missed a single chance at getting a weapon that makes a fight easier? Either you suck at the game because you don’t have any alternative strategy, or the game is incredibly poorly designed (both can be true.) If you watch the only youtube video walkthrough of the game and pause it at just the right moment, you can see that they severely over-leveled their squad before each mission. At one mission where I was at an average of level 23, they were all at 30 (each level is a pretty big deal.. not BG3 big, but still big). When I did a mission at level 30, they were all at 40.. Well shit, I too could cakewalk through the enemies if I power leveled 13 characters another 10 levels between every two missions (something that would take you an incredibly long time). Needless to say, I beat that stupid dragon level and the levels afterwards without rolling back a save or starting over, or even power-leveling. I did it by one part luck and one part strategy… oh and trying the level multiple times.

Okay aside over.. you know what else stinks, there is no real cover in this game. Yup, outside of a few buildings you can hide on the other side of during missions, your characters are not smart enough to use cover of any kind. Most guns have a range of attack, and while a tree offers the slimmest cover directly in front of you, the enemy (or you) could aim one square to the side and still hit the person in cover. Almost all enemy magic, tank attacks, and dragon abilities can hit you right through the tree or any other cover you might be posted behind (burned out tanks, even some buildings, etc.). One thing that cover does, is completely screw up your own character, because they lack the ability to lean or shoot around. Because you are a smart person, in the early game you might think I am going to shoot and hide behind this tree, or hide and then shoot. Only to realize that when you are behind the tree and you go to shoot, your dumb dummy just points the gun directly at the tree trunk and then says he can’t see any enemies. So you will have to move out into the open to take your next shot. It would make sense if this tree was the size of the Deku tree, but it can be as slim as a piece of bamboo, and your team cant figure out how to shoot around it. So you know that whole strategy aspect you have been using for other games, where you utilize cover and try to minimize risk… well it doesn’t really work here because there is no true cover. You can hide someone like a main character behind a building, and as long as there are no enemy magic users they can be safe from simple fire, but you are doing so by also removing that soldier from your attacking squad. In later levels you might as well be having every fight in the middle of a big open field, because neither you nor the enemy is relying on regular guns anymore, so trees or buildings be damned as a use of cover.

So what is an effective strategy, well it obviously depends on what enemies you are looking to fight, for basic combatants, the solution is to put 2 to 3 snipers in cover mode (two on ambush, one on attack), make sure none of your buddies are in front of the snipers (because they will get shot in the back) and hope that you can whittle down some troops over time (cover is also generally weaker than just straight up attacking). That is the basis for all of the strategy, but then you have to mix in what the other enemies are. Skeletons mean you will need melee or explosive people picking them off, tanks mean you will need bazookas and lots of them, and dragons mean you need everything under the sun. 40 + hours into the game and I still didn’t think I had a foolproof strategy for most levels.

I think that covers most of the gameplay and then some. Between missions you are at camp, here you can re-equip characters before going to the next mission, take on optional missions (if they are available) or spend some time boosting up your surplus supplies and weapons. There is a supply depot where you can turn in your in game currency, in terms of “kill money,” into purchasing items. In the early stages you are probably scavenging enough items and weapons that you don’t need to spend much time in here, but for me in between every mission since like mission 20, I was having to do full re-stocks of health and rockets for the next level. I don’t quite know what the conversion rate is for each kill that you get, it is certainly not 1 for 1, but it is possible to run out of currency and not be able to re-stock the way you would like. The supply depot also has a limit to the amount of items it is carrying, so you might be able to buy 40 medkits, but they might only have 4 rockets in stock. While I luckily never ran out of currency, you can re-do optional missions as many times as you want, so you could pop into an early mission, rack up some easy kills (for almost no XP) and then buy the items you need. My biggest gripe is that you have to buy one object at a time. Can’t select the qty and say I want 20 med kits, nope… you have to confirm 20 individual purchases of medkits. I touched on this earlier, but you can also recruit soldiers here. There are three types (Female, Male A, and Male B) they all start at level one no matter if it is the first mission of the game or the last, they won’t have any special powers and you will drop them in favor of any named character. I had one recruit that I got around the second level that I took all the way to the end, but sure enough any mission where I had to decide who to cut because I could only take a portion of my army, she was always the first cut.. so invest at your own risk. Overall the menu is a little clunky to navigate but it does enough to get the job done. (all menu time also counts towards that speedrun achievement.. so if you are going for that, you better practice).

We move on to the story, and I probably have the least to say about it. You play during a fantastical alternate history of World War II. The game does a fairly nice job of setting the game against the backdrop of real-life world events. In between most missions there is a little video that plays that shows actual clips from the way along with what was happening at the time. I did not fact check everything they showed me, but it all seemed pretty close to what I know of the history of the war. Obviously the missions your team goes out on dip into the fantastical, as you deal with all these mystical creatures that presumably exist in other battles, but are either disguised better or wipe out the allies so no one can say that a Skeleton army is attacking us. Of course the war between countries is really the backdrop for a story that is more focused on the individual characters. Hitler may be leading the Germans, but your main antagonists are two vampire generals that pop in on occasion, cause chaos, and leave before you can kill them. From them you will learn more about the Blood clan (vampires) and the Fang clan (werewolves) and will slowly piece together bits of the centuries long war between them. However, since this game has perma-death for every character except for 3-4, most of the story beats are focused on those 4. Sure you might learn that Frank is (drumroll please) actually Frankenstein’s monster and that is a fun moment, but that happens fairly late in the game and only if he is still alive when you get to that point. Other characters like Keith (werewolf) and Cynthia (just a sniper) have a few lines of dialogue here or there but don’t really have much growth as a character. In fact it seems the “interesting” aspect of this game is just who is going to appear next. At some point you get Jack the Ripper on your team, and it’s not really mentioned why you have a notorious killer on your side. Even later you get a Van Helsing, not the exact same one that fought Dracula, but still a Van Helsing. The introduction of these characters are about as much as you are going to get story wise for them, because there isn’t an option to really talk to your squad. Even the big story-point of your character getting a blood transfusion from a werewolf and thus helps give you werewolf powers is just over and handled by mission 10. Once the initial shock is over and we did our 10 minutes on the subject no one brings it up again. I saw people “praise” the story as being the draw for the game, but the elevator pitch for this game is the story.

“What if like Hitler had vampires on his side, and the Allies had like Werewolves and other monsters during World War 2?”

“Whoa, that sounds cool, I bet that would really change the whole war, right?”

“Umm, not really”

I would have loved some sort of Fire Emblem down time where I could have gotten to know the characters more, but that isn’t this game. I wanted to learn more about some ancillary characters, but you get the intro and then an aside here or there. I understand the difficulty of writing a story and including permadeath, because these characters could all be dead the same mission they are introduced, so why waste all that time making their arc deep when people might not even see it. The alternative is that these characters exist in cutscenes or presumably at camp and they add so little to the story. Yes, the story is the war and stopping the Germans from winning through any means possible, and maybe that is enough, but if I am going to put in 80 hours into a game, I want to know the companions I spent 80 hours fighting alongside. I know every characters entire story in FFX, including some non-party members and I technically spent less time playing that. I know a bunch of fire-emblem stories and that game has Permadeath and managed to still craft narratives around characters that could die. Even for the main character of Operation Darkness I know that he lost the love of his life and his family to the Germans.. which is why he joined the war, and I know that he is going to be a werewolf, oh and he really hates the Germans… that’s about it.

There are some other things I didn’t touch on, like the camera being absolutely atrocious in combat. In every battle the camera will have you turned around or make it difficult to navigate to where you want to go on the map, but as long as you don’t rush your turns you will be fine. Or how this game has an online multiplayer where each person takes control of certain units, but it isn’t much different then just handing the control to someone else in the room as you see fit. Believe it or not, I didn’t find a lot of hits online to play that mode, but uhhh… It exists. Also this game needs a speed up button during gameplay. Inevitablely there will be a point in battle where the computer gets 5-10 turns in a row before you get to act, and you have to sit and watch every action, and sometimes every long animation before you get to do anything. I don’t need to see every vampire cast the same spell, just fast forward and then sum up all the damage I got. Also you know what's a "fun" thing they did, if you want to play the bonus missions that are supposedly the super difficult ones, you have to find 12 specific items (one in each mission starting at mission 13). These items are being held by a 'random' enemy and after killing them you will have to loot their body and grab the item before the mission ends. Since you don't know who is carrying it, you will need to loot everybody until you find it, and clear out the inventory space to pick it up (because it does take an inventory slot). Should you not find it, or heaven forbid that it is on the last enemy that you kill has it, (thus ending the mission) you have lost out on that item forever. You can't replay main missions after beating them, so you either need to load a save before the mission, start the game over (if you don't have a save), or accept that you will not be able to unlock the special missions. Thank Gorp I don't care about achievements anymore, because so many are tied up into not only finding all of those items, but then completing all those missions that ONLY UNLOCK WHEN YOU FIND ALL 12.

With everything being said, and there was a lot said, the game isn’t awful. I know that doesn’t sound like a bold declaration, but when outlets gave it like 2 and 2.5 out of 10, you would think it was some of the worst stuff imaginable, but its not and that was genuinely surprising to me. Now don’t get me wrong, there were days and weeks where I hated playing this game. It felt needlessly unfair, it played fast and loose with its own dumb rules, and I lost countless hours of progress because of any number of reasons (and not one of them being failure to remember to save). Levels that I would be forced to slog through 2 or 3 times in hope that a different strategy worked, or I got lucky with dice rolls, just so I could move on to the next problem. I would never actively recommend this game to any normal human in the planet. You would have to be a sick person that loves JRPG, Turn Based Strategy games, AND (the most important part) have played all the better games out there that fit into that genre and still want more, only then I would recommend this game. I’m also thrilled to be done with this game, and will probably never play it again in my entire life.. hell I should sell while it’s hot and see if I can get a cool $100 for it.

But, there is something incredibly satisfying when this game breaks your way, which it doesn’t do often. When enemy tanks miss, and you land a crit to dismantle a big obstacle. When you have finely tuned your team's equipment to allow your swordsman to get two turns before the enemy allowing you to wipe out a good portion of enemies before they can do any damage, and when you finally beat that level that you have spent hours on without needing to revive anyone and barely re-stock them before the next mission. That stuff all gets to me. I mean my favorite two genres are rolled into one game (RPG and Turn based strategy), so I knew something was going to get me. Plus there is still a magic feeling watching a character level up and unlock a skill that you know is going to change the course of the battle immediately. Planning and pulling off a great strategy (even if it seems more luck based then skill), these are all high moments that don't happen often, but I'm still going to appreciate.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: Wouldn't it be funny if it was, but no.

Where does it rank: So is the game the greatest of all time? No of course not. It probably doesn’t even score higher than a 6 out of 10, but when my expectations were in the toilet and around level 8 of 27 I was pulling my hair out with frustration, because I didn’t “get” the game yet, that seems like an incredible turn around. But, while this game eventually grew on me, it is also a warning for other people. That warning is not that this game will grow on you too, but rather that you have to work at this game to even find the fun. The original reviewers of this game were not entirely wrong about this game. It’s camera is awful, the game looks dirty, and it’s difficulty will kick you in the teeth until you lament and try to meet at its level. It isn’t fun-difficult like people might find Dark Souls, but those reviewers also weren’t playing this game for three months straight, like me, continuing to beat my head against the game after a hidden landmine made me restart a level, or a stray tank bullet hit my main character after he used his last med-kit. Know that if you do decide to pick up or play this game, that A) Play it on an emulator so you can cheese it and avoid the $100 charge for this game, but also B) be either prepared to meet the game at it’s level or give up very early on. I have it ranked as the 96th Greatest Game of All Time. It sits between Ring Fit Adventure (95th) and Moving Out (97th) out of 179 Total Games.

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

Future games coming up 1) MDK2 2) TMNT Shredder's Revenge

This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

CategoryCompletion levelCompletedYesHours played4-6Favorite aspectInteresting concept, some of the short storiesLeast favoriteOverwhelming feeling of having to search every innocuous objectI swear on Gorp that I do not always go out in search of hidden object or spot the difference puzzles. Don’t get me wrong, I do like those puzzles, but that is because I have a bad case of “dumb brain.” Dumb brain really just means that I am bad at crossword puzzles, because I refuse to learn “facts” and I “Can’t demonstrate basic knowledge.” Sometimes I just go to the e-shop and buy a game because it looks fascinating, and then it turns out to be a darn hidden object game and you realize that you just talked about a game “It’s Kooky” and people are now going to pigeon-hole me as, “that guy who only plays finding object based games.” Maybe I’ll just lean into that and keep alluding to other games that are totally going to get write-ups real soon, and instead talk about…

I Am Dead is a short little video game that is about memories and mementos, about the people who remember you when you are gone, oh and its about finding objects in a maze of other objects. You play as a recently deceased museum curator (not that recent) who gets put in charge of trying to find a new spirit who is willing to take on an enormous task. See, the island that you and other people you talk to, are inhabiting is around a currently dormant volcano. However, the volcano will not be dormant for long as the spirit who was/is currently communicating with the island and keeping everyone safe, has been doing it for centuries and is growing weak. You need to find someone that can take over that task and become the next spirit that keeps the island safe. Of course, it can’t be you… you haven’t been dead long enough, and it has to be someone who is willing to give up going to the great beyond to instead stay and keep people safe. Off you go to the spirits that qualify for this role and do your best to convince someone to give up their afterlife to save hundreds (maybe a single thousand) of people they will never know or meet.

How do you do this, I think I saw someone way in the back ask? Well as a ghost you have a special ability where you can kinda peel back the layers of objects. I imagine that you just move your head through said object resulting in you seeing what’s on the other side. In order to even commune with a spirit you need to draw it out, so you need to invade the thoughts of people who remember the dead person, and then find the object that has some significance to said person’s life. For instance you might visit the widow of the dearly departed, dive into their thoughts and they think about the time they were separated and how they received travel letters all the time with little mementos taped to the letters to show where her future husband had been. She was particularly taken by a New Zealand coin which is the coin you need to then go out and find. As a gameplay mechanic you now investigate every item you can get your grubby ghost mitts on and then look through it to see if it holds any secrets. Now there are a lot of items in each “level” to look through, some of them hold secrets (even if they are just nods for you and not pertinent to the mission) and some are just generic objects. Want to look through a water-bottle in hopes of finding something fun? Well you can, but don’t be surprised when you realize it is just filled with water. Eventually you find the object, you find 4 more objects and then you can summon the spirit converse with them and move on to the next level to rinse and repeat but at a new scene.

Obviously the game at it’s core is a find the object game, but what is supposed to stick with you are the personal stories and moments that other characters remember about the deceased. Some memories will tie to a theme of love, loss, or regret and many others, but I would pose that the game is really questioning how do you want to be remembered. For instance one character who ran a camp site is not remembered as fondly because they weren’t a great people person. I mean a “meaningful” memory is that of a child who had items confiscated because our spirit just didn’t understand or like children. The game isn’t pointing at this person and saying “you don’t want to be like them, right?” but I would believe that if the game inspires any insightful thoughts of your own, it would be about how you will be remembered after death, and what stories will be passed down about you when that time comes.

There are some other things to find outside of the main story items but both are just collectibles that won’t add much to the story. Upon doing your first story item in each level, you will unlock, “Grenkins.” Grenkins are supposedly little spirits that have been on the island forever, but they are hidden in a shape that you will see in the bottom right corner of the screen, and your job is to find the object and inspect it to duplicate the shape in order to release the spirit. There is a form of auto-aim that will click into place if you are mostly there with the correct item and most of the shape. In addition to Grenkins there are “riddles” that can be found in each level that are timed challenges that require you to find the item that fits the riddle in order to clear it. To be clear nothing bad happens if you fail and you can attempt the riddle as many times as you like with no penalty, but this adds a little challenge into a game that really has none. I’m being a bit rude here, because the challenge in this game exists at how well can you poke and prod an environment to find a hidden object. It’s not that there is literal no challenge, but the riddles add a time element and require you to navigate quickly to a certain point, while the other searching is at your leisure and as clumsily as you want to. Now if you are like me, which hopefully not, then you aren’t tackling the riddles until you have almost fully explored the area and looked into everything the game presents. That allows you to just solve the word play that exists in the riddles instead of trying to solve the riddle and find it within the time limit. Now that I type it out, I don’t think it would be possibly to find the item you are looking for without scoping things out first.

When all is said and done the game is… okay, but it can be a lot to take in. Now, if you were only playing the story missions you could beat this game within 2 hours, easily. Finding the Grenkins or solving the riddles are not required at all, and offer mainly achievements over anything tangible. However, assuming you weren’t duped into buying this game, you actually WANT to do some item searches and that is where I think this game is too much. Think of a page from the Waldo books (yes I am going back to this well), there are so many things to look at in comparison to what you actually need to find. If you are doing the basics, there are about 5 characters to find (waldo, wizard, dog, evil waldo, girl waldo) and about 5 items ( bone, scroll, book, camera, etc.), but because it is a book you can do quick scans and you can find items by just bumbling into them. Now if we put Waldo in “I Am Dead,” and we have to find the same 10 items, but you now have to physically investigate every item on that same page. Every box has to be searched to make sure it doesn’t have the bone or scroll, every water bottle or lamp could possibly have a Grenkin or have a smaller object that is the solution to a riddle. For instance a solution to one of the first riddles requires you to investigate a head of cabbage to see there is a bug inside. In games where you can pick up and look at everything, you create shorthand for items that can be completely ignored. You don’t need every bottle in Fallout or set of cutlery in Skyrim. We can see those items exist and after one investigation we can skip those items in every house we stumble across them, but, not in “I Am Dead.” You won’t know if this bottle is the same as the last until you stick your dumb ghost head into it and see that they both have water in them, but that also doesn’t mean that the next water bottle can be skipped, because that truly might have the piece you need. So while I can make my way through this game in small doses, it still means that if I want to do it all (and for whatever reason I did), then I have to meticulously look through every item in every section until I check off all the riddles, story missions, and grenkin in an area, and it was daunting enough that I never tackled two levels in the same day.

But you are a sane person, and want to know if a sane person would like this game. To that I would say its “alright,” it can be interesting at least seeing how they had to render the inners of every object under the sun, and the stories characters tell or the mementos you find can be good, but this isn’t writing that is going to win an award and its art style can put people off, because its cartoony, but I wouldn’t want a fully realistic view of looking inside garbage anyway. It’s a relaxing puzzle game (maybe without the puzzle) and that can be 100% fine to play as you are winding down before bed or because the kids are playing better things on tv. It’s not broken, or really bad. It never made me upset that I was trying to finish it, and I never once wanted to crush the switch in my giant metal hands, but it’s also not going to get a large audience pop when this list is televised after I’m dead.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: I'm afraid not

Where does it rank: I am dead is a fairly ok and, at times, interesting hidden object game. Finding that hidden object or an in joke after checking something inconspicuous can be fun, because you can feel like you are one of the few people that found it, but those moments are few and far between as you search backpacks, lanterns, water jugs, and boots to no avail. Obviously the lack of interesting finds, make the actual finds more interesting, but if you know you need to search every object to find all the collectables and prep your brain for the riddles, then the game can seem more daunting then it should. On the flipside though a straight playthrough with none of the "bonus" content would make this game too light on content, so its a damned if you do and damned if you don't. Sure is there some magic middle where you find and solve half the items and move on to your fulfilling life and other video games, huh Tom? Is there? Probably, but I don't know how to do that. I Am Dead is the 136th Greatest Game of All Time. It sits between "When Vikings Attack" (135) and "Pictoquest: The Cursed Grids" (137th) out of a possible 178 games

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

Future games coming up 1) MDK2 2) Operation Darkness 3) TMNT: Shredders Revenge

This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

It has been awhile since these hands have ranked a game, I wonder if I still know how to do it. I wasn’t kidding when I said that Alone in the Dark: New Nightmare broke me. Playing that game alongside Operation Darkness made me wonder why I gave up being a doctor for this line of work, like are video games even worth it? (Note: I was never going to be a doctor). It’s not even that those two games I was playing are the worst games in the world, but Alone in the Dark was so incredibly boring and poorly designed that it made gaming a chore to churn through it. Operation Darkness has been more interesting but frustratingly unforgiving that has resulted in so many wasted hours playing it (more to say on that later). I needed a break from my mission statement. I did some farming with “Coral Island,” got back into playing NBA 2k (don’t worry an old version that is still decent), and played bits of games with my kids until they lost interest (a surprisingly lot of Super Mario Maker 2). Oh I also think there was some holiday that we ended up hosting that may have replaced game time with clean time leading up to it.

But we are back (kinda) baby! I won’t lie to you, I’m sure I will be derailed before end of the year, but my plan is to finish two “main” games (Operation Darkness & MDK2) before the end of the year, and perhaps one or two more small games to round out the year. I really don’t want Operation Darkness to bleed into 2024.

So, here are two recovery games that I played to help bring me back from the brink.

Up first, “It’s Kooky,” which is the equivalent of a virtual seek-and-find game (you know, Where’s Waldo, or I Spy books). The game is broken up into different stages/environments that are all full screen black and white pictures. Every level has a set number of items that are available to find (usually around the 20-30 range) and the “harder” levels have a time-limit in which you have to find those items. What you are looking for are…drum roll please… “silly or kooky things.” I know that description doesn’t help much, but essentially you are finding things that are out of place in the picture. For instance, perhaps you are looking at a beach picture and you see an image of a Polar Bear surfing, or perhaps there are three kids eating ice cream in the picture, but one of the kids is holding the cone upside down. You know, super silly stuff. For the most part, when you see something you will know if it is out of place, there isn’t really a big debate to be had if you see someone with a bee hive for hair, or a raccoon playing a guitar. Of course the pictures are big enough that you aren’t going to just be able to immediately spot all the differences from the get go, but the game provides zoom in and zoom out features that allow you to explore the space. Find enough objects in a picture and it will unlock the next one, allowing you to move onto the next level without feeling like you need to hunt and peck for every single item before you can turn the page.

Why did I play this? Well that’s a good question, with a boring answer. My kids are at the age where they are very into these kinds of books. We have numerous Waldo books, and I Spy books, and knock offs galore. They can’t quite read yet (but they are getting there) so these are books they can pick up without Mom and Dad nearby and be able to know what they need to do without reading instructions or having us parse out text. It’s Kooky is just an extension of that. Here is a game we can throw up on the big tv while someone navigates calling out weird things we see, or this game plays great in handheld as it actually uses the touch screen for you to point out objects that don’t fall in line. It is a game that a full grown adult could play from start to finish in about 2 hours, but will provide a lot more to kids who can re-visit scenes and try to find the objects again. Also a big bonus, clicking on the wrong object does not penalize you in the slightest. No time off the clock, or 5 mistakes and you lose, you can click on everything to your hearts content.. another perfect children’s tool.

Of course the game is not perfect. Like a Waldo book, it has limited replay-ability. The pictures aren’t randomly generated and the images will always be in the same spot and it can be very easy to remember the locations of half the items without even trying. Not that it is a deal breaker, but there is no incentivization to 100% the levels. Once you unlock the next level, you don’t really need to go back and sweep up any finds that you missed. There is no bonus for finding everything in a level, no extras, no achievements, nothing. It’s not that I really expected something, but it does limit the short replay even more, because there is no high score table, or even checklist that you can work towards upon completing the game. Even the Waldo books had little checklists in the back of the book for more things to try and find after you mastered the first pass.

For a <$5 game you get what you pay for. This might entertain you and the kids for a weekend, and maybe they boot it up a few times afterwards when the feeling hits them, but you aren’t going to be coming back over and over again. I know we don’t really want to root for more DLC, but this would be a perfect game where I would be willing to pay $1 here and there for more levels. The Waldo comparison is really perfect for this game, for multiple reasons, but for time investment as well. My kids don’t sit down with a Waldo book for hours on end having the time of their life. They spend 10-15 minutes flipping pages, sometimes finding what they need to and other times just looking at the pictures and moving on. Maybe they go three months without opening the book at all, and maybe they love it for a week straight. What I will say is that all Waldo books are ranked higher than this game, but I haven’t reviewed the Waldo video games yet.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: Not even close

Where does it rank: It’s Kooky is a “fine” family-friendly search game. I had fun with it for the short time I played it, but it’s not really going to stand up on this list as some beacon for other smaller games to hit. It’s most notable comp on the list is a game called “Tiny Lands” which is head and shoulders above this game. It’s not that “It’s Kooky” is even a bad game, but it’s just a non-entity. It’s not a bottom 5 game, because there was some fun to be had with the kiddos, but if my list is a big list of recommendations, it would be hard to recommend this game over some of the more flawed but interesting games. Add in some color or some relaxing music, give me more levels or some more things to find and maybe this has more staying power, but I have it ranked as the 168th Greatest game of all time. It sits between “The Mahjong Huntress” (167th) and “Harm’s Way” (169th) out of 176 total games.

How did I do?

The next little game I played was called “The Bridge.” The Bridge… I suppose I would describe it as an M.C. Escher physics based puzzle game, but even as I type that I’m not sold on the shorthand. You play as a nameless character that most of the internet believes to be M.C. Escher as they navigate puzzle rooms. If you have never played the game before, it’s fairly hard to describe how the puzzles work, but I’ll do my best. In each room/level your ultimate goal is going through the exit door. Your character can walk back and forth, but there is no jumping, running, climbing etc. to get to the door. The powers that you do have is that you can rotate the world by using the shoulder buttons on the controller, these rotations will cause your character to slide or fall based on the fact that you are moving their floor, but it might also move a ball that you need to land on a button, or a key to maneuver to your path in order to unlock the door. These levels start relatively simple enough where you are just rotating to get your character on the same plane as the exit door, but eventually the game introduces alternate dimensions, gravity altering areas, and Escher-esque levels that seeming wrap in on themselves making navigation difficult. There is a handy rewind feature that allows you to back up what you did, either to erase a mis-step or mis-rotate, or even a death, but depending on how far back you need to rewind can be a slow process.

Yes, there are deaths. Your character or an important object can fall off the level if you aren’t careful, or you can be crushed by a boulder that you need to avoid/move into place. All of these no-win states pops up text on the screen and you can rewind from that point, undoing some simple actions, but sometimes it might be easier to do a hard reset of the level. Initially I was cruising through the early levels and thinking how hard can this game really be with such a limited control set, but this game can become somewhat brutal to figure out later individual puzzles. It goes from just a game about getting in the right place, to a process of sequencing that requires you to not only get to the right place, but do the right steps in the correct order to avoid dying, get a key, avoid dying again, and then end up near the door. That isn't crazy for a puzzle game, hell adventure game puzzles are all about following that sequencing logic, but this game never clicked with my brain. While most puzzle games, I can confidently say that I can solve given enough time, there were some levels that I just brute-forced and got lucky solving. Levels that if I had to play over, I would still have no knowledge of solving and just aimlessly rotate and move the pieces like you might fidget with a Rubik’s cube, until somehow you completed 2 sides.

There is a story here, but it is heavily in the background and up for interpretation. It mainly focuses on connecting your character to Issac Newton, becoming a tortured creator and having the world literally and figuratively fall down around you. When I finished the game (including the mirrored universe, which is like the same levels but harder that you already played through), there really isn’t much of closure. In fact the game just re-starts with your character waiting to be played with again. Was it a dream, reality, a foreshadow of things to come? Who knows. There are a couple fan theories on steam about the character being M.C. Escher his view of Issac Newton being this person he looked up to, ruining his life in trying to live up to his idol, creating essentially the tesseract and then realizing that Issac Newton was also a tortured soul.. You know, like that Simpsons episode where Homer wants to be an inventor, but all of this is speculation and the developer has not weighed in, but I didn’t really dig that far. It’s not a game that really hinges too much on the story, so if your interpretation is different, or you simply didn’t have one, I don’t think it will impact much.

I mainly played the game in short bursts while sitting on the couch or a little before bedtime, but it had the great honor of making me feel like an idiot for at least a third of its levels. That can be a frustrating experience depending on how you deal with puzzles in games. I beat my head against the wall over and over in order to prevail in some levels, because I didn’t want to watch a solution video, but that was because I was stubborn. Actually navigating levels, once you know the solution, can make this a very quick game. If you played this game, while following a guide for every level, you could probably beat the game in under two hours. For me, it probably took me closer to 6-8 hours. (I don't think I would recommend either process)

Is this the greatest game of all time?: Sorry, its a no for me dawg.

Where does it rank: The Bridge is a harder game for me to rank, in comparison to “It’s Kooky.” It is a much better designed game, it has more meat on it’s bones, and certainly something I spent more time with. Those aren’t really the sole ranking systems here, but it highlights that The Bridge is on a higher level. However, I didn’t super enjoy my time with the game either. I didn’t have big smiles on my face while I solved puzzles, and I spent more time in the game making mistakes then doing things correctly. It won’t be a game that I feel I will ever need to go back to, and sometimes the dour and oppressing appearance of the game (black and white only, small cramped levels with lots of death) also impacted my enjoyment. If I was to ignore the super hard levels (mirrored world) I might rank this a little higher, it would be an easier and less frustrating game, but I feel I would be ranking a game for only the first half. Adding in the more difficult, frustrating, and time consuming levels into the mix certainly drags down a game that wasn’t going to have a huge ranking anyway. I keep bouncing back and forth as to if it should even be higher than “It’s kooky.” That game at least gave me some fun moments with the family, so does this game rank lower, despite acknowledging that it is a better made game? No, but it’s very close. I have this game ranked as the 161st greatest game of all time. It sits between “Extreme Exorcism” (160th) and “Lost Lands: Dark Overlord" (162nd) out of 177 total games.

You would think that reviewing three games in a row that all fall in the bottom 20 would actually demoralize me more, but I’m back on my horse and playing video games again.

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

Future games coming up 1) MDK2 2) Operation Darkness 3) TBD

This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

I failed my original goal to have 4 "spooky" games reviewed by Halloween by one day. I'm full of apologies, but no one was holding me to this goal and certainly no one really cares about being a day late, but here we are regardless. Today we are going to take a look at our 4th spooky game for the month "Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare." I specifically played this game on the Sega Dreamcast, but it had a nice wide release so I am sure everyone will start bargain bin hunting this game by the time they get to the end of my write-up, so without further delay here we go.

I hated this game... Sorry, I jumped the gun. This is my first experience with the Alone in the Dark series, which I know is probably very important when we talk about the survival horror genre, but has become an afterthought now, because Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Mario is Missing ate it's lunch in terms of making better versions of the same game. However, let's pretend you don't know what any of those things are and start at the beginning. Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare is a survival horror game where you explore a creepy mansion and the surrounding area, fighting monsters of the dark, and solving abstract puzzles as you fight for your life to stop the impending doom that is about to be befallen. While you will get multiple weapons during your playthrough, Ammo and Health kits are scare and you will have to make quick decisions to utilize the fight or flight response to all encounters. Attempt to fight every enemy and you will find yourself out of ammo or health kits at more important moments later on, but run from everything and you might miss some items that are tucked away in corners of rooms you need to explore.

When the game starts, you are given the choice of picking between two different characters. Each character has a "separate" story that will overlap at points, but ultimately has you achieving two different things. Aline is going to this island because she believes a scientist there is her real father. Aline's playthrough is supposedly more focused on puzzles. While Edward is going to the island to investigate the death of a good friend. His playthrough is supposedly more combat focused. Since I am all about that puzz life, I picked Aline. I was planning on doing both playthroughs, but ugh after one.

While those are some real fantastic personal plots, the overarching game plot is that a mad scientist is on this remote island looking to raise an army of shadow monsters to presumably rule the world or something. He needs to complete the process tonight, and if he does... well thats bad. For someone who normally cares a lot about story, I had a real hard time getting into this one. There is a lot of in-game documents to read from diaries to newspapers, to help flesh out the story, but it's not great.. and eventually I just started skipping all those pickups.

As for the gameplay, it follows the tank control commands of the game. Your directional keys are corresponding to the direction your character is facing, A separate button for holding your gun out, one for turning on and off the flashlight, a button to hold for running, and another for shooting. While it did take me a little while to settle back in to tank controls, overcoming those controls is the least of your worry when playing this game.

That issue for me was... everything else. Let's start with the camera. Similar to RE or other survival horror games, the camera is fixed in all rooms. Obviously this is done intentionally so you don't always know what is approaching you, or what you are approaching, but all this really accomplishes is for every camera cut you have to re-orient yourself on the controls. It also makes fighting enemies into a guessing game. Did my last shot connect? Did I kill them, stun them, or miss entirely? The best scenario is almost always to let them get on the same screen as you, or go to them so that you can make sure your attacks are doing something.

Speaking of combat, the auto aim is fairly generous which is a good thing, but even the same enemies seem to have a random assortment of hit points. Sometimes you can take out a devil dog in two shotgun blasts, other times it might be 3 or 4. I would chalk this up to placement of the shot, but I don't think this is a game about nuance, so its not about killing zombies with headshots like RE. I could be wrong, as I mainly did rely on the auto-aim but the nuance aiming controls seemed to just resort to auto-aim anyway, so I dont know. Which speaking of enemies, the most annoying thing of all is how the game can't make up its mind on a consistency of how the enemies behave to light. Early on in the game, you will meet enemies (or read in the manual) that light will make enemies turn into dust. In some rooms if you can find a lightswitch and turn it on, the enemies will instantly die, saving you ammo and prolonged fight. However the rules aren't universal, in some areas turning on a light does not impact the enemies at all, and I'm not just talking about stronger enemies, but the same hopping enemies that are early stages can sometimes die from light and sometimes they can ignore it completely. Do I maybe tank a hit to run to the lightswitch to save ammo? welp.. that didn't work this time so I took a hit and had to waste ammo to kill them. Which leads into..

Enemies respawn. I hate to keep comparing this to Resident Evil, but if my memory serves me correctly in the first RE, if you killed a zombie in room A, that zombie would not get up even if you left the room and came back to it after a save or after exploring more of the house. There was a safety in knowing that you could kill the enemies and then explore. Sure you were using more of your ammo, but it assured you some peace of mind if you had to keep travelling through that room. Alone in the Dark does not give you that relaxing time frame. If you kill an enemy in room A, leave and then come back to that room that enemy is back and walking around. Seeing as that in my Aline playthrough I would routinely have to go back and forth to solve puzzles or gather items, it meant I was doubling up ammo spend or health spent to deal with the same enemies over and over. It negated what I think the strongest part of the game is..

Exploration. I like exploring a giant spooky mansion and I like the scary vibes that exist and hunting and pecking for the few items i might need to solve puzzles. That's just a general vibe that I think the game does well, what it doesn't do well is how precise you need to be in order to interact with anything and how little there is to interact with. I don't know if some of the rooms were only used for one campaign, but I would wander into rooms that looked like they had at least part of a story to tell, only to click on every thing I could and be greeted with nothing in return. Sometimes these rooms would have enemies so it would end up being a negative sum to even enter those rooms, but it made it more preposterous that I couldn't find anything of value in them. When I would see that I am missing an item for a puzzle, I would then think to those rooms and convince myself I must have missed something because surely a room so busy had to have something.. Nope, it had nothing just enemies, and they were back and now I presumably fell into the same trap twice because of re-spawning enemies. Also don't get me wrong, this map is dense in this game. There is a lot to explore and get lost in, and should you decide to foolishly play this game without a walkthrough (like me), then you might as well make notes in a notebook so you can eliminate some back and forth. I also can't stress how frustrating it is to see something in the background that IS CLEARLY SOMETHING, but not be able to interact with it at all. For instance there are busts or bookcases that have scratch marks on the floor that in all other medium would signify that these can be pushed, pulled, or moved to reveal something, but no matter how many times you try from every angle, you can't interact with these objects.

There are some other minor nitpicks here: The save system uses an item that you can run out of if you are not careful. It is fairly generous but you won't be able to save after every room (if you are so inclined). The voice acting and dialogue are pretty atrocious, and while I didn't look too hard I did not see a Subtitle option to check either. The "puzzles" are surprisingly lite for me playing as the "puzzle" playthrough. Not that they are necessarily easy, but outside of the puzzle of navigating the map, there are like 3-4 puzzles I even remember needing to solve in the game. I don't have a comparison point to Edward's playthrough, but Aline's playthrough seemed just as much focused on combat as I would expect Edward's campaign is. Oh also, the last boss (for Aline's playthrough) is indestructible but also guarding a bridge you are supposed to cross. I don't know what the "real" solution is, but surely it can't be.. hope to glitch through him which is what I ended up doing. Why give me rocket launchers, grenade launchers, a lightning gun, etc.. if I can't even knock him back a little bit to get off the bridge.

Playing Alone in the Dark alongside Operation Darkness, really slowed down any video game playing I did for half the month of October. Alone isn't what I would call a "hard" game, but I would certainly call it an annoying game. Every aspect of that game is a chore, and while you could argue that is inherent to the genre (going slow, conserving items, solving puzzles, avoiding back tracking, etc.) it just is such a worse version then other games from the same genre. The only scare I got playing Alone in the Dark, was realizing how much more I had to keep playing after I would manage so little during a sitting. Things started to pick up once I was out of the mansion, but I can clearly say that this is not a game worth going back to. It doesn't have a strong opening 60 minutes, the story and characters aren't memorable, and the story is incredibly weak.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: Oh Heavens No!

Where does it rank: This game has made me take a break from jumping into another game right away. I left it for so long to start, because I figured it would be a quick finish, but every minute I played felt like an hour. It's not the worst game I have ever played, but it is very close. Maybe if I would have played as Edward could have made the game marginally better, but I'm certainly not going to go back and try it now. Literally everything this game is doing, RE did better.. there is no point to playing Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare. I have this ranked as the 172nd Greatest Game of all Time out of 175 games. It sits between "Buildings have feelings too" (171) and "The Wardrobe" (173).

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

Future games coming up 1) TBD 2) Operation Darkness 3) TBD

This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

I had to call an audible for spooky month because it would appear that the other two games I was planning on beating for October are going to take me a little bit longer (27 main missions!?! Are you kidding me Operation Darkness). This doesn’t mean that they are being dropped, but that they might bleed (at least one for sure) into November. The good news, is that I got to play one of my favorite childhood “Spooky” games and tell all of you nice people about it. So let’s talk about “A Nightmare on Elm Street” for the NES and rank it on our big list.

Before we can talk about this game, I feel I have to explain what it is based on, because it has been 13 years since an incredibly poor remake of the original movie came out and nearly 30 years from the release of the last movie in the original series, or 20 years since a crossover movie. (no I am not counting fan-films). While other horror villains like Jason, Jigsaw, Chucky, and Mike Myers seem to appear every 5 or so years, Freddy Kruger has not shown up in quite some time. Anyway in the 80s and early 90s, there was a horror movie icon called Freddy Kruger who existed in the dream world and would kill teenagers in their sleep, which resulted in them dying in real life. In some movies he was more menacing, but the Nightmare on Elm Street movies were certainly more pop culture fodder than the other horror villains (well maybe not Chucky). Freddy had his own TV show, action figures, would appear on MTV or talk shows, and in his own video game. The kills and set pieces in the movies were generally more creative (again in comparison to other villains), because by having a portion of the movies set in the dream world, you weren’t bound to the rules of the real world. While Jason or Mike would kill people with knives, hatchets, and their bare hands, Freddy could turn you into a roach and kill you in a bug motel, or suck you into the bed so that a geyser of blood came shooting out and coated your ceiling. While Freddy has terrible one liners and isn’t very physically imposing like other killers, what made him scary is that he could get you when you are most vulnerable (sleep) and everyone always needs to sleep.

The game comes out between the 5^th and 6^th movie and seemingly incorporates stuff from the previous movies, but is not a video game version of any specific movie. You aren’t playing as your favorite hero or heroine from the movies, but rather just generic teenagers A through D. All of the story comes exclusively from the manual which states something akin to: "Teenagers are dying in their sleep as Freddy terrorizes the town and you (and your friends) set out to stop Freddy once and for all by finding his bones and burning them in the school furnace." I’m not going to get into all the moments that tie into the film series, but for those completely in the dark I will point out some important connections as it pertains to the game. In nearly every movie, once the kids know Freddy is coming for them, they do everything they can to stay awake, since Freddy can’t kill them when they are awake. The bones plot is akin to the 3^rd movie, where people gather Freddy’s real life bones and throw holy water on them to cause him to die. Finally, in the 3^rd and 4^th movie (but carries through some others), the kids that Freddy targets use their dreams to envision themselves with super powers so that they can fight Freddy in the dream world, instead of just being regular dumb kids. Ok, I think you have enough basic knowledge for me to get to the game aspect.

Nightmare on Elm Street, hereby shortened to Noes, is a side scrolling game where you go around town looking for Freddie’s bones and fighting his minions of the undead. You start presumably on Elm Street where you wander the neighborhood as a pseudo world map looking for the one building that is unlocked. See, each building is its own level, but upon startup of the game, the building that is unlocked is randomized (almost always one of the first three houses), meaning that you might have to go up and down the street in order to find your first level. On the main street and in the levels you will be presented with lots of obstacles that will either have to be jumped over or punched into oblivion. After having beaten the game for the first time only using a single continue, I would advise you to just jump over most enemies instead of trying to deal with them. Rats, skeletons, zombies, and snakes wont really give chase to you they just go back and forth on their platform. The only enemies that really need to be killed are the flying enemies (Bats, ghosts, skeleton bats, wasps?) because those will fly around chasing you.

Once inside a level, you will now be able to start collecting Freddy’s bones. Each floor has its own set of bones and every single one of them has to be collected in order to move to either the next floor, or to fight the boss. While some are incredibly hard to miss, others are intentionally placed to be a pain in the ass. If you reach the end of the floor and don’t have all the bones, then you can’t continue and will have to backtrack to find those few missing bones and then go back to the end of each area. At the end of the final area of each house is a boss fight where upon completion of it will drop a key that allows you to attempt to locate the next house on the street that allows you to go in and do it all again.

You might notice that this game does not have a health bar, but rather a sleep bar that slowly ticks down. Yes, you can still die from taking “a couple hits” (taken from the instruction manual), and you can die from falling in pits, etc. Nowhere is it shown how many hits you have left before death which is a truly baffling decision for a UI but fine. You get 5 deaths before you have to use a continue and 3 continues before it is Game Over and you need to start all over. This may seem like a super generous amount of lives (15), but even with the ability to earn more through points, it can drain fast. I digress, the sleep meter when it reaches zero pulls you and your character into the dream world where enemies are tougher to kill, and you may come face to face with Freddy. There are coffee pickups during the real world that will re-fill your sleep meter, preventing you from falling asleep, but those are few and far between. It should also be noted that while the sleep meter drains on its own, it drains faster if you stand still or take a hit. When in the dream world, you can still progress through the level, collecting bones etc. the coffee pickups are replaced with boomboxes which allow you to wake up from the dream, but a music timer starts and if you are in the dream world for too long then you are forced into a short boss fight with Freddy that will just drain some of your hits and lives with no added benefit. The one only benefit to playing in the dream world is that assuming you picked up a weird box looking powerup during the real world section, you can press select to turn your character into one of three dream warriors. One is a track and field star, who can throw a javelin and jump super high, another is a ninja who can throw a shuriken and do a jump kick (the best ability), and the other is a wizard that can cast fireball and float for a little bit. These dream warriors can make fighting some minions easier, and make some jumping sections easier as well, but it obviously comes at the risk of having to fight Freddy. Each and every section of the game is playable with just your standard character, so you could potentially play the whole game without “needing” to transform into one of the dream warriors.

The bosses themselves automatically pull you into the dream world to do battle, but honestly, they are pretty underwhelming once you understand what they are doing. There are basically two variations of bosses, they are either tethered to one end of the screen and lunge at you at different lengths (just crouch in the opposite corner and be the dream warrior you possess with the longest ranged shot), or they bounce like a DVD screensaver image around the screen and you just have to time your attack to hit them. Even the final fight with Freddy is kind of a pushover because he just walks back and forth occasionally jumping and slashing with his glove, but I didn’t find any boss really frustrating to deal with.

So if the bosses aren’t super tough then where are you going to lose your 15 lives? Well the answer to that is mainly from pits. While the early stages are not to difficult in terms of pits, the later levels have jumps that require pinpoint accuracy in order to make the leap, or have enemies that will appear just off screen to hit you once you land and send you backwards into the pit. There is a specific pit in the 2^nd to last level where you have to jump from a moving platform to a ledge just to get a bone and then jump back. That pit alone cost me 3-4 lives because of how perfectly timed your jumps have to be in order to make it. There are other instances towards the end of the game, as they just make pits and enemies require more precise movement then in the previous levels.

It could have been because I was playing on a wireless controller on an NES, but if memory serves me correctly for playing with an OG controller, the characters always feel like they are running in the Super Mario Ice world. Characters do not stop on a dime, and the collision detection is not nearly as pinpoint accurate as you would want for both platforms or enemies as you play the game. It can make the first time you play the game, or the first time you experience a harder level a really frustrating journey, because you can quickly lose 3 lives on a single jump and the game doesn’t care. Upon death you are respawned right on the platform you were prior to dying, so you could die and repeat over and over again within 10 seconds and tank any chance you have at beating the game later on. This is by far the angriest you will become at the game. As a kid I could easily get to the Junkyard or the Cemetary (levels 4-5), but sometimes use an entire continue on a single pit.. It's not good game design, and the last level throws like 2 or 3 of these pits into one area, but that is when you are thankful most of the baddies and bosses are pushovers.

With all that being said, also noting its an LJN game (and people hate those), this game is still a guilty pleasure of mine. Part of it is certainly nostalgia, but I love how unique this game is and how it ties to the horror series. The game is built with at least a little love for Freddy Kruger and the movie series. The music when in the dream world that is counting down to when Freddy appears, is the nursery rhyme from the movies that kids say “one… two.. Freddy’s coming for you, etc.” The dream warrior abilities are all fairly fun to use and make you feel incredibly powerful the first time you bust them out. I mean the ninja power alone makes your jumps do damage. You can still get hit from something too high or too low, but it is a life savor when dealing with all the flying baddies in later levels. I also have to shout out the music in this game is absolutely fantastic. It comes from Mr. David Wise, which isn’t surprising that its good, but surprising when you think of tie in video games being fairly trash.

Also worth mentioning that this game is compatible with the 4 player NES hook-up allowing you to have 4 “ordinary teenagers” attempt to disrupt Freddy’s murderous spree. Playing the game in multiplayer can have its own challenges as that game does not alternate turns or transition to split screens, you are all forced to play on the same screen. While that could mean some people can focus on keeping the enemies in check while others grab bones, it also means that some jumps have to be timed together so the screen can move and not cost someone an extra death for getting too far ahead or behind. Each character has their own sleep bar, and if even a single one falls empty then all characters enter the dream world, so picking up coffee and powerups need to be smartly distributed otherwise you won’t make it very far. 2 players seems like the perfect spot for this game, but I’m certainly not going to downgrade the game for being more ambitious.

The game is far from perfect with floaty controls and questionable UI decisions (why not include a health bar? Why are their 4 different sleep bars, even when only 1p is selected?), but it is still good fun. The lives and continues are generous enough that even on your first playthrough you will easily make it past 50% of the game and then on future playthroughs clean up on some earlier mistakes getting you a lot farther. There are some obvious pathing issues, such as a very confusing start to the game (especially if your first house is not the one they start you in front of) as well as the last level and trying to find where you need to go to fight Freddy (just a random pit that used to have fire you probably didn’t notice). However, I can somehow ignore a lot of those issues because I think the game is still pretty fun to play once you know what’s going on. There is tension about having to fight Freddy unless you can find that boombox, or the power you feel switching to the ninja and jump kicking your way to victory the first time you get to bust it out. It also seemed to take an established franchise and build a competent game around them, without shitting the bed in every way (looking at you Friday the 13^th). While the movies were certainly not age appropriate for me or my friends when we had this game, it allowed us to get small exposure to the media, without something that was going to scare us. All the enemies are pretty harmless looking, and I even played this while my kids were in the same room and never once worried about them looking up and seeing what was on screen.

So, no, this game isn’t Mario or Zelda and it doesn’t deserve a legacy that carries it on or pushes for a remake. The movie franchise died not long after the game came out, because movies 5 and 6 were somehow even worse then the low bar that was set previously. Looking back on the franchise as a whole, I think this game might be a top 3 moment for Freddy. For this Halloween, turn the lights down low, blast the tunes of David Wise and see if you can stop Freddy in “A Nightmare on Elm Street.”

Is this the greatest game of all time?: No

Where does it rank: I never know what the consensus is on most NES games anymore. Is this a hidden gem? do people consider it trash because the AVGN yelled "poop" at it too much? I don't think this is a top 10 NES game by any means, but I also think you could play it now, even without the knowledge of the movies and still have a pretty good time. It's an easy hour and a half with save states or a rewind feature, and you are almost exclusively using that to avoid some of the jumping deaths in the game. The question is how much does nostalgia go into my ranking of the game and I don't know. The whole time I played this game, I never once got bored with it, or upset, or thought about playing something else.. That has to say something. I have it ranked as the 64th Greatest Game of All Time. It sits between "Kinect Sports" (65th) and "Abzu" (63rd) out of a grand total of 174 games.

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

Future games coming up 1) Alone in the Dark: New nightmare 2) Operation Darkness 3) TBD

This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

I am notoriously late to trends and things that are popular. Maybe “notorious” is not the right word, since no one reading this blog really knows me, but you will just have to take my word for it. I have never once felt I need to be part of the moment or participate in the current discussions. My real world job doesn’t involve playing video games, watching movies or TV, or having to be caught up to discuss what everyone is discussing. Sometimes it happens by coincidence, but when I find something I like I don’t want to rush through it just because something else is on the horizon. If a piece of media is good, it will be good the year it comes out and possibly ever year after. For instance, I can’t imagine the cost financially or even energy wise for people to keep up this year in video games. I know this year is probably an anomaly, but there have been talks of at least 10 different games being real game of the year contenders, and that doesn’t even cover the other “good” games that might fit someone’s niche or be continuous plays for months afterwards (for instance I will get into a sports sim that eats up my free time, when I should be finishing games for this series). I would say this approach to games could bite me in the butt when it comes to playing multiplayer, however I can say those days are long since past for me. The only real multiplayer I play now is the group in my house, and luckily they aren’t too concerned with release dates just yet.

This is all to say that I know Vampire Survivors was very popular in 2022 and despite all the incredibly glowing reviews by the Giant Bomb staff, I was not interested in it. Even at the $2.00 price tag, the idea of playing a game where my only control is essentially walking around, while all the attacks and everything else just happens automatically made me think of some terrible mobile game. That strength held on for nearly a year after release, but changed when I watched the Nextlander crew play it co-op and the desire to play it grew inside my belly. What’s weird is I knew, before I even bought the game, that I didn’t actually have anyone to play this game with. The thing that excited me enough to finally jump into the game, was also a thing that I would probably never experience. I still got the game, still played the game, and am going to claim I beat the game (fought the final boss, killed reapers in most levels, purchased every character, etc.).

Ok, so Vampire Survivors is a game I am sure everyone knows about already, but just in case… Vamps is a rouge-lite where you can play as minute different heroes who is tasked with surviving as long as you can in a level up to 30 minutes. Each hero has their own perks/negatives and start with a different weapon, but all weapons can be unlocked to appear regardless of what hero you play as. Once in the game, the only control you have is the moving of your character. Enemies will descend on your hero and your hero will attack automatically using the weapon(s) that they have. Walk into an enemy or get hit from the few that shoot projectiles and you take damage, too much damage and you die and your “run” is over. As you kill enemies, sometimes they will drop XP shards and if you collect enough of those you can level up and be granted a random assortment of level up powers. They are either weapons or items, and they can either be a powered up version of the weapon/item you already have, or a new weapon/item that you can equip. While this can be adjusted in the menu, you start off being able to hold 6 weapons and 6 items. If you manage to make it to the 30 minute mark, a reaper comes in and kills you.

That is the basics of the game, but there is much more nuance to it that I just don’t know how much we can get into, but let’s try. For one each level is unique in its design layout as well as having “objectives” that you can strive for during the level. There are time limits to hit, “bosses” to kill, relics to find, and even hidden characters or item pickups that exist in the level. Most of this won’t seem apparent until you find the map relic and learn how to read it. I do mean you will have to learn how to read it, because it was not intuitive at first, and I had to really play around with it, before I understood how to use it. Hitting each of those “objectives” will either unlock new levels, more weapons/or items to appear in your game, more playable characters, and more. In addition to these objectives, you will come across gold in your runs that carry over between runs and can be spent at the “store” which will give you permanent upgrades that will assist you in future runs. Some are basic like increased health, more damage, or faster movement speed, and others will improve certain items or weapons, and there is even one that will allow you to resurrect from death in a level.

One of the main things to find out is that the weapons and items you wield in a level can complement each other to the point that create evolutions of weapons that you have. While nearly all items are useful on their own, if you happen to have the hollow heart item (increase max HP) along with the whip, you will be able to evolve the whip into a stronger weapon (once it is leveled up). Every weapon in the game can be evolved through a companion item or weapon, and that will start to color your choice when you are selecting your level-up upgrades. When you start getting a real feel for the game, any weapon or item that you have that isn’t tied to an evolution can seem like a waste of a spot. Surviving to the end of the 30 minutes will require you to have a fairly leveled up set of weapons and items and preferably some evolved weapons as well, because enemies will fill the screen not allowing you space to weave between them which you can do in the early stages.

This loop will repeat for awhile as you get intermittently better either through learned evolutions or spending gold on permanent upgrades that you will probably start to wonder what else the game has to offer. There are two late stage objectives you can tackle that I think are imperative to “beating” this game. The first is that there is in fact a final boss. In order to unlock this final boss you have to locate all the relics in the game in which case their level will be unlocked and you can do battle against them. The other is that you can and will be able to beat the reapers that seem like an automatic kill at the end of levels. The second can be much more frustrating than the first, because you need a very specific set of items and weapons to even help you in your fight, and then they need to be fully leveled up and evolved for you to stand much of a chance. However the feeling of defeating your first reaper is a fairly amazing feeling, since these folks will have tormented you for all of your early runs. Beating the final boss is more of a formality at that point, as I didn’t find it too difficult.

So that’s the boring explanation of a game that really has no right to be as good as it is, but that is because it nails the loop so well that it becomes addictive. By taking the control of shooting out of the players hand, you are simplifying a game that makes it easier to jump in and play than many other games. None of the deaths feel unfair, and some of that is because you don’t have control in your shooting, but also because everything is about experimenting with the weapons and items you pick along the way. You will learn how weapons attack and be able to pick ones that compliment each other. The whip is a horizontal attack, so you might want axes for a vertical attack, etc. Sure you can chalk up some deaths to being unlucky with upgrade paths, but its all part of the learning path about what to prioritize and when. Since the runs are short too, then the commitment to give it another go seems like a no brainer as well. At most you are playing for 30 minutes on a run, but early on those runs are going to be shorter.

The music is fine, the graphics look worse than most NES games, but all of that gets washed away as you play the game. What is even more astounding is that if you get really deep into the game there are so many things to unlock and keep doing long after you have “beat” the game. Bonus levels, lots of characters to master, plenty of weapons and items to try new combinations, and DLC for those that want to keep going. It is truly amazing that a game that on paper would seemingly be an ok mobile phone game, can turn into a juggernaut that everyone knows of and has played that is still only < $5.00. For me Vampire Survivors burned very bright but not for very long, but that is the nature of having endless video games to get to. I spent two weeks playing this game everyday, for hours a day because it had no long term commitment that I needed in order to fire it up, but once I knew too much about the game, it also lost its magic. The experimentation aspect is gone as I have most of the evolutions committed to memory, and I know what combo I need to kill reapers at the end. That killed some of the excitement for me, because I couldn’t ignore those callings. Why take the whip if I’m not also taking the Hollow Heart? Gotta leave this weapon spot open until I get the clock lancet, etc. While I know that everyone has probably played Vampire Survivors already, if anyone has not taken the plunge and my write-up has pushed them over the limit, I have to strongly encourage you to go in without a guide. So much of the enjoyment I got from the game was chancing into upgrades or evolutions and then furiously scratching them into my brain so I knew for next time. However, once you get to the stage where everything is planned out in the game, then it’s time to put it down and move to another.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: No

Where does it rank: Vampire Survivors is great, more fun then I would have ever expected based on hearing so many people describe the game to me. I had a great time playing it and I played it exclusively for like two weeks every day. I imagine if I was able to play this in multiplayer I would have an even bigger fondness for the game. My only downsides with the game actually come from playing it too much. A lot of the fun I had was figuring things out (levels, evolutions, combinations), but once I knew all of those mysteries then I played the game differently and that excitement and fun were lessened. That isn't a big enough negative to sink the ship, but its not the greatest game either. I have it ranked as the 26th greatest game of all time. It sits between Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (25th) and Luigi's Mansion 3 (27th).

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

Future games coming up 1) Alone in the Dark: New nightmare 2) Operation Darkness 3) TBD

This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

It’s the start of Fall and we are fast approaching my favorite holiday (Halloween). Despite being a big Halloween fan, got married on the holiday, I don’t find myself playing a lot of “spooky” games in general. It’s not because I am scared of the horror aspects, but rather scary games *usually* fall into two categories: Survival horror games and 1^st person horror puzzle (Layers of Fear, Bequest, Sonic, etc.) and neither of those genres I find particularly enjoyable to play. Survival-horror games are mainly about resource management and doing “more with less,” which is literally one of the mottos I have to deal with at work. I don’t find it spooky or enjoyable to wonder if I have enough health or ammo to get through the next phase, and its not “spooky” to replay sections where I guessed wrong about having enough ammo or health. As for the other genre, jump scares don’t really work on me, especially not in video game form, so a whole collection of games whose only means of “scaring” you is to have a picture frame fall behind you doesn’t work to well on me

I want to be scared though, I like scary things, so I have tasked myself with playing 4 “spooky” games for the month of October (one a week), that we will then rank on our big board. Now I refuse to break my own rules of spinning my roulette wheel and playing games randomly, so I will preface ahead of time that I didn’t go through and pick the cream of the crop for spooky season, some of these games might even be bad, but I added all of my owned “spooky” games into my roulette wheel and spun. What classified a game as “spooky” was up to me and my distinctions, but I think I will be able to justify all 4 games to you, the dear reader, as to why they count as “spooky.”

I am also going to do you all a favor, and talk about the absolute worst of the 4 games first. I would not normally call my shots without finishing all games first, but I don’t see a lot of possibilities for other games to overtake this one as the worst of the worst. So, while the subject line already told you the name of this game, let’s talk about Theatre of Sorrows. Theatre of Sorrows is a little indie game that tries its best to be a Lovecraftian mystery-horror game. You start the game playing as one half of a set of twins, who received a mysterious letter saying your long lost other half is captured and being held captive on a mysterious island. When you arrive at the island you are then tasked with performing rituals and dealing with shady stuff in an effort to find and rescue your sister.

You start each day (think of each day as a chapter) tasked with 2 different objectives. One objective is to craft a talisman that will allow you to perform said ritual, and you will have to scour locations for the right ingredients to be able to craft the talisman. The other object can usually be boiled down to going to a specific place on the map, talking to someone or picking something up, and then going to the ritual location on the map. We will get into the nitty gritty about what all of that entails in a little bit, but a couple clarifying points here. The day timeframe doesn’t actually mean anything, time doesn’t pass no matter how long you take going from one location to the other. Also backgrounds or events or anything you can interact with do not signify day or night. On this island, it would appear it is always dusk. Also, there are about 8 days total in the entire game, and you do roughly the same thing on day 1 as you do on day 8. You are always tasked with crafting a different talisman, and always going here and there in order to complete the 2^nd objective.

Now lets talk what you are ACTUALLY doing in the game. This is a…. resource management game, but unlike say Resident Evil where one of the resources is ammo and you get to shoot zombies, instead you are trying to balance three different stats and do no shooting. You have a Health stat, a Sanity stat, and an Energy stat. If any of these fall to 0, you lose the game and have to start the day over again. You start every day at the hotel and after receiving your instructions you are then free to do as you see fit. On a world map screen you can move to anything that is within your characters movement radius. This radius can be improved by either certain outfits you wear or talisman’s you equip (more on these later). Every move on the world map drains some of your resources, its usually your sanity and your energy for traversal on the world map, and the farther you are going the bigger a drain.

At EVERY location on the map, you can stop and explore it. From there you are shown images of the location, usually it’s a spooky house with boarded up windows and mysterious blood on the walls, or the woods where there are glowing eyes in the background. Ultimately upon exploring a new location any combination of 3 different things can happen to you. You may stumble upon an event, stumble upon a monster, or there is nothing there and you can search the location for items. Some locations you might encounter all 3 things happen at various points, and others only 1 or 2. If you stumble upon an event (the rarest of the three), a small scene will play out that is supposed to be creepy, for instance you stumble across a little girl who is counting dead animals. You make a choice or two, could be a dialogue choice or something else, and then the scene ends and you are either rewarded or punished accordingly. In the scene with the littler girl, perhaps you ask her where her parents are, and then she smiles and runs away which “unnerves you” (at least that’s what the game says), and then you lose 10 sanity and 5 health. The good news is, that these events repeat very frequently, and the answers will always net the same negative/positive, so if you stumble across this event again, you can choose the other answer and see if that re-fills your stats instead.

You might also stumble across a monster that has taken up residence at that spot. I’m no lovecraft expert, but I think the monsters are probably all established, but I don’t really care. These monsters will block your path and force you to engage with them. Since this game has no actual combat there are only three things you can do. If you have stumbled across the spell/ward for that particular monster you can cast it to make the monster run away (this costs 20 sanity). These wards and spells can be found while investigating locations, rewards for events, or randomly pop up sometimes. If you have a talisman you can destroy it in order to fend off the monster (loss of Talisman), or you can run away. Running away costs energy, and it’s a dice roll if you actually get away or if the monster continues to block your path and attack you. Obviously if the odds aren’t in your favor, not only are you wasting energy attempting to run away, but also health as the monster attacks you each turn you don’t escape. It seems completely random whether you can run away from an enemy at any time. There were instances where I lost all 100 health in a single encounter because I just kept failing to run away, and then times where I escaped with minimum energy lost, perhaps there is some stats behind the scenes depending on what monster you are facing, but you are never privy to that information.

Finally if you survive the event and/or the monster you can explore the location. Each location is broken up into different screens you can travel between (careful, those costs resources just to go from the bedroom to the kitchen) and in each sub-screen you can “search” for valuable items. Even searching for items requires spending sanity and health (apparently to open a drawer), but every search always comes up with 3 random items with 3 random quantities assigned to them. Until you find or craft a specific talisman, you can only take one of your three findings, without having to search again. You will be doing this a lot, because the items you are going to find serve either 1 of 2 main purposes. They are either the items you need to craft your talisman, or they are items that can be used to re-fill certain stats. A bottle of Wine will re-fill 5 sanity, and some water will refill 4 energy, etc. Of course you only have so much inventory space, so you will also be balancing what you are going to carry along with you. Each location has a limit to how many times it can be searched, so you can’t stuff your pockets all from the first house you visit, but I will tell you that it behooves you to max out searching at each location, because the cost of searching is almost always less than the value of what you found.

In almost every location there is also a super-cool event you can trigger that drains a lot of your stats but offers a bigger reward should you make it through (complete all of the reading) of such a spooky tale. For instance there is one room that you stumble upon that looks like a casino of the damned, with cards made out of skin, and holes in people’s heads (or something).. and if you keep moving forward and sacrificing 30 or 40 sanity, you will be rewarded with a random talisman, a ward for defeating a random enemy, and maybe a new outfit. You can equip one outfit at a time, and it has a set amount of inventory space, as well as talisman spaces for you to equip. Some clothes even come with boosts like 20% less enemy encounter rate, or 10% less energy cost for travel. Early on I found one outfit that allowed me to carry like 4 extra items, and I never changed off of it. However, much like the random events these repeat at an incredibly alarming rate, and the rewards are always the same, so if you already have the outfit for doing the hinter story, you don’t ever need to do it again. The Talismans you can equip are all-over the place from increasing the cap you have for sanity or health, to bigger travel radius, to less enemy damage. The best talisman, should you ever get it, would be that your searches allow you to take two items instead of just one, so you can actually get a stockpile of re-fillable items without worrying about your numbers.

So ultimately you go from place to place, searching drawers and using items when your stats get too low, so you can keep moving forward. Items, clothes, and talismans all carry over from day to day, so if you stockpile on day three and have a bounty before finishing the mission, you start off day four in great shape. The game is supposed to keep you on edge by being a game where you are spinning multiple plates and don’t know how much longer you have left, but in turn ends up being a slog of stocking up on items, moving three or four spaces on the map, using items to refill, and starting again. The one thing the game is supposed to have going for it (tone and writing), it doesn’t have nearly enough to support even a small game of this size. Each event or descriptive is trying its best to invoke some sort of horror, trying to get you to think “What monsters could do such a thing,” but it comes off as the writings of a goth high-schooler in creative writing class. The mentions of blood and guts, disfigured bodies, mutants, etc. is done to a point where it’s not comical and needed an editor to find what could be scary about the prose in front of you. The writer(s) of this game, never heard of the adage “Less is more.” However the more damning piece is that there just isn’t enough to sustain the needs of the game. I played through the game once, only having to repeat a day twice, but I must have stumbled upon some stories 10 or more times during the course of a single playthrough. If the results were randomized, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, but once I learned its always the same, then I could blast through the prose and select the answer that gave me the best loot every time it came up, or avoid it altogether. The main story writing is slightly better, but there is no sustenance to the meat. Most day’s end with you not really understanding why you did what you did, except that you were told to do it. Perhaps most egregious is that there isn’t enough content for one playthrough, but the game has multiple endings based on subtle choices you make throughout the game. So if there isn’t enough content for one playthrough, I don’t know how you encourage someone to give it more than one playthrough to see other endings.

I was so intrigued by this idea, because I clearly got the bad ending ( I think), that I tried to pull up a video on youtube of other endings. Wouldn’t you know it, there isn’t a single person who posted a video outside of 20 minutes playing this game? No ending compilation, no descriptions of what other endings look like, not even someone who got to the end of the game that I could just see if they got the same ending as me. In a world where there is seemingly a deep dive and lovely community about the smallest game and/or company that exists in our world, and we as a society have all agreed that this game is not worth the time investment. I was able to find a walkthrough of every single level of Army birds or whatever the lowest ranked game on my list is, but I couldn’t find anyone who made it to day 5 in Theatre of Sorrows.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: No

Where does it rank: I won't lie to you, there isn't a lot of redeeming qualities to this game. The atmosphere is initially interesting, but the game doesn't do anything with that atmosphere. Some of the enemies are visually interesting, but every "fight" is treated the same, and whether you are dueling a giant spider or a flaming skeleton, the options available and what they cost are identical. However, the main problem is the writing, and lack of it. For every scene that feels like it stretches too long, there are countless repeats and empty hallways that meet you on the other side. I can dumb myself down to appreciate some cheesy, over-the-top writing, but not when it acts like my Mom and tells me the same story verbatim 4 times within an hour. IF this had more variable writing, and IF the overarching story made any sense or had any payoff, this could be an "o.k" game to seek out on a budget, but it does none of those things and instead should be steered clear of. I have this ranked as the 168th greatest game of all time out of 172. It is just barely better than a game with a game-breaking (unfinishable) bug, Buildings have Feelings Too (169th) , but doesn't measure up to the M.S. Paint made, Revenge of the Bird King (167th).

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

Future games coming up 1) Alone in the Dark: New Nightmare 2) Operation Darkness 3) Vampire Survivors