Why is there a remaster of the barely remembered 3DO FPS game PO'ed? I'll admit that it had an attention grabbingly insane premise of a chef fighting aliens but it is not fondly remembered. It's the kind of game that would be interesting as part of a 3DO mini-console or retrospective pack (something like the Atari 50th collection for the 3DO would be great) but doesn't seem like it would be worth playing on its own in 2024, when we have access to so many amazing games.

Except it is available as a standalone. For $20.

This is part of Nightdive studios remastering of old FPS games, which up until now has focused on games that were culturally important like Blood or Turok. Those games have a lot of nostalgic fans who want to play them again and are important to have accessible for people interested in the evolution of FPS and even gaming culture in general. But while $20 is a lot to pay for an old game like Turok you're at least getting an experience you might actually enjoy from it. PO'ed has never been considered good, and was a novelty at the time.

You can argue that there's room for remastering of novelties, and I fully agree. I think it's great when weird old stuff is resurfaced. You can play Ninja Golf on your Switch or PS5 today, legitimately. That's fantastic. Ninja Golf is kind of a bad game, but it's a cool curio, and fun for about 15 minutes. It was also sold as part of a much larger selection of games, all contextualized within a very cool documentary package, for $40. That package included actual classics like Tempest 2000 and a bunch of foundational arcade games, along with a lot of supplemental material. Ninja Golf for $20 on its own digitally would be kind of insane.

Like PO'ed is.

And it's not just PO'ed. The prices on these rereleases have been climbing for years. What used to be sold as parts of large collections are now being sold game by game, often for as much or more than a current indie.

You can argue that the game has been remastered, and it has and I'm sure they did a good job. You can argue that people don't need to buy it, or they can wait for a price drop, and that's true. Nightdive can do whatever it wants, and it's not like they'd holding a true classic hostage. We all remember when Nintendo packaged 3 Mario roms for $60 and then only sold that for 6 months. That sucked! But those were also Mario roms. That package included two of the greatest games ever made AND the only rerelease of Mario Sunshine. The games could back up the pricing.

And it's not like PO'ed is the only rerelease from that era. Quake 1 and 2 were remastered, sold for $10 each, and with online multiplayer. To say that Quake 1 and 2 are more worthy of remastering than PO'ed would be to state the glaringly obvious.

It's fun to have weird curiosities on modern platforms, and in the end PO'ed will become affordable and I might grab it for $5 for a laugh. My real concern is whether this pricing is sustainable. Are people buying PO'ed at $20? Dark Forces at $30? $30 is only $10 less than Helldivers 2, a fully modern game experience. And that's for a remaster of an ANCIENT game. At least Dark Forces is good and it's Star Wars. That's not nothing.

I guess I just miss the pricing days of the Virtual Console and even Sega Ages on the Switch, or those various compilation packs that seem to have dried up. Even I, someone who is kind of obsessed with old games and weird games, have to tap out at $20 for PO'ed. At a certain point you're paying new game money for what is, essentially, a prank on yourself.

I should start off by saying that I never played Killzone back when it was relevant. My first experience with the series was in 2014 when I played the HD PS3 version of the first game. I kind of enjoyed that game.

I then tried Killzone 2 in 2019 and...I really didn't like it. While Killzone 1 was sort of an interesting throwback shooter from the PS2 days, slow paced and not quite like anything "modern," Killzone 2, at that point, just felt like an inferior version of a standard console FPS.

I'd like to point out, as I always do when complaining about these things, that I do have recent experience with games contemporary to Killzone 2. In recent years for FPS alone I've finished The Darkness 1 and 2 and the original Bioshock. I enjoyed all of them, clunky though they were at times. If you want to expand it out to include third person shooters the list is much longer and includes generally ill-regarded games like Fuse and Inversion, along with the pretty good Shadows of the Damned (which they are now remastering.) I just finished the Switch version of Bayonetta this month and enjoyed that quite a bit. I rehash this to head off the criticism that it's not fair to compare Killzone 2 against 2024 games, and it's not. It is, however, fair to compare it to The Darkness or Bioshock, both of which are two years older and much, much better (admittedly Bioshock is considered an all-time classic, but The Darkness scored 9 points lower on Metacritic than Killzone 2 did.)

So what don't I like about Killzone 2? It's not so much the visuals, though they are ugly and desaturated like so many shooters from the era, or the story, which is "What if Gears of War was a lot more boring with characters you didn't care about at all?*" Neither are great, but they're far from unforgivable. The real problem I have with Killzone comes down to two things. The Dualshock 3 and the insane inaccuracy of the guns.

I've never liked the Dualshock 3. The Dualshock 1 was an incredible controller when it was released. I actually remember going to the store to get mine (mostly because I helped an old man who had fallen when I was on my way back home) and I will support it as a better overall controller than the The N64 trident. The Dualshock 2 was also very good for the time. I thought it was inferior to either Xbox controller (I WILL DEFEND THE DUKE) but on par with the beloved Gamecube controller and clearly better than the kind of bad Dreamcast controller.

But by the time 2006 rolled around the Dualshock design was old and outdated**. Admittedly it's better than the Wiimote for most traditional games (what isn't?) but it was thoroughly outclassed by the Xbox 360 controller, especially when it came to shooters. For a game like God of War 3 or Mortal Kombat 9 (which I played on PS3 because of Kratos) the Dualshock 3 is adequate, and I can understand why fighting gamers in particular prefer its more responsive shoulder buttons to Xbox's triggers. But for racing games the lack of good analog triggers was an issue and for FPS games those loose, stubby, analog sticks just weren't adequate. I've never understood how people could actually like them. The Dualshock 4 isn't my favorite controller by any means and I've had my issues with the Dualsense, but both those controllers at least manage to have tight enough sticks to allow precise control. Trying to aim with the Dualshock 3 makes it feel like your crosshair is sliding over a layer of butter. Every time I go back to that tiny little piece of plastic and those loose sticks I get angry all over again.

A lot of PS3 shooters compensate for this in various ways. The Infamous series (and I played Festival of Blood last October so I have fresh memories of it) gave you a lot of abilities with explosive effects meaning that precise aiming wasn't overly important. Uncharted's "stop 'n pop" style of gameplay and ability to move quickly and shoot from the hip or use stealth and melee meant that it was only a major problem when sniping. But Killzone 2 doubles down and is pretty fast paced with your character being fragile AND has incredible amounts of scatter on all the guns. Aiming in Killzone 2, even if you get the reticle dead on target, often feels like you're giving vague suggestions to the bullets as to where they might want to go. And those bullets are drunk and hard of hearing. Gunfire just sprays all over the place, everywhere but on target, and it sucks. You can sort of aim down sights by clicking in the left thumbstick (what a horrible system) but even then your accuracy is crap. Combine that with the bad controller and you have a shooter game where IT'S NOT FUN TO SHOOT. It's frustrating, even when you're not dying. Thanks, I hate it.

Booting up Killzone 2 again I remembered exactly where I was. At the end of the Salamun Bridge level where you have to take down a gunship on a rooftop. This encounter isn't super hard or anything (the trophy has a 42% completion percentage on PSN so it's something even casuals can do) but it compounds all of Killzone 2's problems. The way you do it is by shooting these blue electrodes sticking out the side of the roof to stun the gunship and then shooting it with a rocket. Repeat 4 times (at least on normal) and the boss is dead and the level passed. Sounds straightforward and there's in game dialog telling you what you should do so it's not confusing.

It's an awful experience. The first time I got to this point I tried it a few times and I just put the game and walked away. FOR FIVE YEARS. The second time I had to readjust to the controls and scenario but was immediately and viscerally reminded as to why I stopped playing. The fight requires you to grab a rocket launcher from the ground to shoot at the gunship and while I think you can use your assault rifle to shoot the electrodes and then grab the rocket launcher (you can only carry one long gun at once) to shoot it I think the better way is to use your pistol to shoot the electrodes and use the rocket to damage the gunship. The pistol is extremely inaccurate though, even aimed down sights, and things are made worse by the fact that the gunship often hovers out of range of the electrodes and also fires missiles that create smoke and particle effects that make it impossible to see them. It's a battle that leans into all the worst aspects of the game and often involves getting killed from nowhere or being in situations where you can't do anything for the smoke to clear or the gunship to swing back to where you can stun it (if you shoot a rocket at it while it's not stunned it dodges.)

It probably took me fewer than a dozen tries to finish the battle, but it felt so chaotic and random I had to grit my teeth through the whole thing. Just an awful encounter. And it's not the only example of a Killzone 2 area that annoyed me. There's another part where you have to fight endless respawns until you do something to trigger a cut scene, and that one the game does not really explain to you and it really made me miserable.

I know Killzone 2 was mostly popular for its multiplayer, which is long dead, but I can't imagine this inaccurate shooting was more fun in that mode. Killzone did some interesting multi-mode hopper stuff before most games so maybe that was part of it, but the shooting in a game has to be good for the modes to matter, and I really hate Killzone 2's shooting. I'm confident the multiplayer wouldn't have saved it.

I'm well aware that you can use a Dualshock 4 or Dualsense with a PS3 now, and that might resolve part of the issue. I'm also aware that I can just not play Killzone 2. It's a 15 year old game that Sony hasn't even bothered to remaster or, last I checked, stick on PS3 streaming. Guerilla Games has moved on to the Horizon series, which I really like. Nobody cares.

But Killzone was a major franchise and I want to understand why I don't like it. I'm also stubborn and I don't want this game to "beat" me. I like playing older games sometimes and the Hellghast are cool enemies. There are also some times, such as when you're using a shotgun where accuracy isn't necessary, where the game is okay. I don't know, I make bad gaming decisions. As many complaints as I have this is far from the first game I've ever played.

I just don't understand why it was so beloved. To me it's at most a 6.5 or 7 out of 10, not a 91/100 (the metacritic average.) It has nothing on The Darkness in any area except, perhaps, the multiplayer. And I'm not even going to bother comparing it to Halo.

I got a PS3 in 2010 but it was by far a secondary system for my HD gaming that generation. The controller was a big part of it. I did enjoy Uncharted, inFamous, God of War 3 and even Ascension. I also really enjoyed smaller Sony projects like Flower and rain, and of course Journey is an all time classic (some of those I played on PS4), so it's not like I consider PS3 a bad console. But I played the vast majority of my multi-plats on Xbox 360 and the Dualshock 3 is the main reason why. And I never tried the Killzone franchise because I thought I'd hate it with that controller. Now, 15 years later, I know I was right.

*Killzone 1 predates Gears so the setting isn't a rip off, but the storytelling in Killzone 1 was very different from 2, which is clearly heavily influenced by Gears.

**I never used the Six-Axis but everyone seems to have hated it.

Fellow Amico enthusiasts, it’s time to get excited!

For those who used to follow the intellivision Amico project the last couple years have been fallow. Tommy Tallarico has left the company and the Internet, abandoning his previous commitment to posting through every failure and disaster, and activity has died way down. Intellivision still exists as a sort of zombie company but they’re not claiming they have any looming date when a console will actually come out. Instead they’re focusing on publishing their small handful of games within the mobile app they put out that, with the power of Amico’s cutting edge engineering, allows you to play mobile phone games so long as you have at least two mobile devices (one to run the game and one to act as a controller.) Unsurprisingly this app hasn’t exactly been a raging success, seemingly only being of interest among the tiny core of Amico followers who remain part of the cult despite Intellivision’s remarkably consistent record of dishonesty and failure.

Despite the fact that the age of Amico has long passed the Amico Reddit remains robust. A lot of the conversation there reminds me of my friend who is a massive Pittsburgh Steelers fan and loves to rewatch entire old football games during the offseason just to relive the glory. They talk about years old posts and drama and relitigate old arguments with the benefit of hindsight, reveling in showing just how full of shit Tommy and his supporters/enablers were (not that it was very hard to see it at the time.)

But some of the discussion focuses on the rare updates that Intellivision continues to issue about its barely used app and the games available on it. Why does Intellivision keep running this app and its games even though it’s not commercially viable and will never be commercially viable? Nobody knows for sure. Some speculate that they think this will stave off litigation. I don’t think it has much effect there but who knows what people believe. Some think it’s a way of draining whatever resources remain in the company or avoiding triggering debt obligations that might be due if the company folds. Maybe the owners just like the attention, maybe they’re deluded enough to think this could actually become a viable business someday or that they can sell the corpse for an appreciable amount of money if they just keep pretending it’s alive in a corporate version of Weekend at Bernie’s. The ways of Amico are mysterious and not for us to know.

What is for us to know is that the updates themselves are hilarious.

Basically the updates act as a series of confessions where the people who run Intellivision, led by John Alvarado who was one of Tommy’s right hand men during the glory days, tell on themselves. Mostly what they reveal is the absolutely terrible state that Intellivision’s games were in even as the company blustered about rocket ships on launch pads and getting ready to ship the hardware on which these games would play. The most hilarious recent example is Cornhole, whose list of fixes read like something from a real game’s early alpha. These fixes address problems that were found by random clueless users of the app who actually tried to treat it as a serious thing and discovered that a lot of what was on it was flat out broken.

Intellivision somehow managed to launch Cornhole on their “service” with the campaign mode entirely broken and unable to progress, despite being almost half a decade after the game was originally supposed to come out and after over a year of alleged bug testing by volunteers. Alvarado also claimed this was his favorite of the Amico games, proving conclusively that pretty much everyone who claims to be a huge Amico fan doesn’t actually want to play the thing. This makes sense, why would you want to play crappy versions of old flash games when there are real video games to play (or you could go outside and take a walk or read a book or watch Blight Club or whatever), but I find the fake enthusiasm for the product kind of fascinating.

It's one thing to go on the Internet and talk excitedly about something you’re into, even if you do so partially for clout and attention. It’s entirely another, much sadder, thing to fake that. If you’re doing it for money I understand but at this point there’s no money left, and a lot of these people never got paid in the first place. There were nearly a dozen regularly updated Youtube channels at one point where people talked about how excited they were for Amico and yet none of them actually wanted to play these games. Some of them got “test units” (prototypes) and could play to their hearts’ content and continued to make videos about how much they loved them and how great they were and yet they didn’t even play enough in their testing to find the most basic flaws that anyone who actually liked a game would discover in less than half an hour.

People who have been keeping up with my blogging for the last few years could possibly remember that as part of my Amico hate I finished both Fox ‘N Forests (the basis of Finnigan Fox) and Rigid Force Redux because I wanted to know what Amico games would actually be like. I got those games on other platforms and I played them until I rolled the credits, and even a little beyond just to get to understand them. I can’t say I hated either game, they’re okay for modestly priced indies even if neither is exactly Hollow Knight or Andro Dunos 2. But I can’t say I loved either of them and I played them mostly out of morbid curiosity because I wanted to know what I was talking about when I said they weren’t very good and wouldn’t be able to move consoles to anyone.

Now it turns out that I, an amateur Amico hater who never took the thing that seriously and followed it pretty casually, may have spent more time with these games than the people who created entire podcasts around the games, who bought “physical products” for them. Who went on the Internet on camera and said they were super excited about them and that their jaw was hitting the floor at the amazing graphics, yet never actually bothered to play much of them?

You’ll find me doing a lot of weird things around video games. I’ve played games I didn’t really like, I’ve stopped playing games I was really enjoying for dumb reasons. I’ve put off playing games I was excited about. And I’ve written a lot about games and gaming for no money and almost no attention. Just because I had thoughts and I wanted to share them with anyone who’d listen. What I’ve never done is start a podcast about a system, claimed to be excited about it for literal years, covering up every misstep the company made and actively fighting against “haters” who tried to be honest, all the while claiming that these games were amazing and everyone would love them, and then NOT ACTUALLY PLAYED MUCH OF THOSE GAMES WHEN GIVEN THE CHANCE.

It's bizarre, pathological, behavior. For the people who were in on the financial scam and making money off the project at least I get where they’re coming from. A lot of people have claimed to like things they didn’t actually care about for money. But the volunteers? They carried water for a scam for years, made it part of their identity, spent hours every week talking it up and then they didn’t actually bother to play the games when given the chance. If I’d done something like that, which I never would, you can be damn sure I’d have finished those games. Just so I could talk about them convincingly if for no other reason. That IS why I played those games. To completion! It took me hours and nobody actually cared, but I wanted to know what I was talking about!

I’m never going to play Cornhole on the Amico app. Why would I? It’s a beanbag toss mobile game that requires at least two devices to play and is more of a pain to set up than actual beanbag toss. But the fact that it launched with these glaring issues that were only discovered because some rando tried to treat the project seriously shows how unserious the whole thing always was. Everyone involved, from the people making the system and games to the unpaid shills pretending that an obviously outdated and ill conceived system was an exciting new frontier in video games has now demonstrated that they never actually cared about playing video games on this thing. When given the opportunity they didn’t even bother. It was not an ill-conceived but well-intentioned system, it was a Potemkin console, an obvious emperor has no clothes situation where nobody even tried to feel the fabric because they knew there wasn’t any.

Nobody ever wanted this thing, at least not once the games started getting shown, and those who claimed they did were lying, which we know because when given the opportunity to play it they…didn’t.

My jaw is hitting the floor.

I want to be clear from the outset that I’m not talking about Microsoft’s involvement in games being under threat. Xbox owns Minecraft and Call of Duty. It spent almost $100 billion buying game makers over the past decade. The gaming division is now bigger than Windows. Microsoft isn’t leaving gaming, or if it does it will be by spinning off the gaming division into its own company or possibly selling it off, not by shutting it down.

But the Xbox console business is in big trouble. You can argue it always has been. Xbox launched with the expectation of losing money the first generation, which it did, and then making money during the second generation, which it may have, a little bit, but was definitely hampered from by the red ring of death, which cost the division billions.

The first half of the 360 generation was still successful in terms of selling consoles and building the brand, but the Kinect era was another massive misstep and killed a lot of that momentum, allowing Sony to catch up. Microsoft stopped investing in internal development and what it did make was for its disastrous peripheral that only worked well with a very limited number of games.

We all know the disaster that was the Xbox One launch, and while the generation as a whole wasn’t a total failure and Xbox might have been slightly profitable, the Xbox Series X was the opportunity for Microsoft to right the ship. They came out with a fine piece of hardware (The PS5 performs better at least some of the time and has the better controller, but there’s nothing wrong with the Series X) and the Series S was an interesting idea that has caused some issues but also created some opportunities. Of course the launch of the PS5 and XS consoles was thrown completely off by the pandemic, but even out of the gate the PS5 was seen as more desirable and now, probably halfway through the generation or a bit more, it has an even bigger lead over XS consoles than the PS4 did over the Xbox One. Microsoft likes to blame this on path dependency and digital libraries with backwards compatibility; if you bought a PS4 you bought a PS5 because your games would all transfer over. There’s something to that, of course, but it doesn’t really explain why Xbox has lost even more ground. People enter and exit the console market all the time, and people are willing to buy multiple consoles. If Microsoft was doing well then maybe they could move from 50% of the sales of the PS4 to 75% the next generation before catching up, even with library carry over. Instead they’re losing ground.

Why? There are a number of reasons. In addition to personal path dependency there’s friend group dependency. You might own an Xbox but you want to play games with your buddies who own PS5s so you get one of those. Xbox has also never performed well outside North America, and as the US economy’s share of the global economy continues to shrink that continues to be a bigger and bigger issue (though it’s worth noting that Japan, the region where Xbox does the worst, barely buys consoles anymore, so this is not as big an issue as it might have been.) Xbox’s decision to put all its games on PC certainly hurt console adoption, though Sony has followed suit (albeit less aggressively) so that’s a smaller factor than it once was.

I think the real issue, underlying everything, is that Microsoft can’t make hit games, and it can’t get games out in time.

I bought an Xbox Series X at launch and do you know what I played with it that first couple months? Dirt 5, Immortals: Fenyx Rising, Watch_Dogs Legion and Cyberpunk 2077. I actually like all those games, but they’re also all available on PlayStation and none are made by Microsoft. The Xbox Sereis launched with almost nothing by Microsoft. There was a new version of Forza Horizon 4, an all-time great game that was years old already. There were a couple of timed third party console exclusives of middling quality in The Medium and The Falconeer, and that was it. Everything else was a multi-plat third party game or old. Mostly both. When I got my PlayStation 5 a couple months later it came in a bundle with Demon’s Souls and Miles Morales (also available on PS4, but that hasn’t seemed to matter) and with Astro’s Playroom included. I played my Xbox Series X because it was the most advanced console I had, but I played my PS5 because it had a bunch of stuff on it that I couldn’t get elsewhere. The Xbox Series X was supposed to have Halo soon after launch and other things, but we gave it a pass because of the pandemic.

Since then Microsoft has continued to underperform in terms of getting games out on time and in good quality. When they bought Bethesda a lot of Xbox fans were excited because they thought it was only a matter of time before those games came online and changed things. That was half a decade ago and since then Bethesda’s output has been slow and anemic. Starfield was very late and disappointing. High Fi Rush was great, but failed to set the world on fire. We don’t need to talk about Redfall. We all know about Ghostwire: Tokyo and Deathloop being timed PS5 exclusives, but other than some decent remasters of old games it’s been kind of pathetic.

And Microsoft’s own studios are in many ways worse. Halo Infinite wasn’t terrible but it was incredibly late and they couldn’t keep up with the live service side. Gears 5 seemed okay but was also 5 years ago. Getting one okay game every 6-7 years is not exciting. Forza Motorsport has been spinning its wheels (pun intended) for a long time. The seeming one bright spot is Playground Games, which Microsoft bought and left alone. And even there it’s not clear that Fable is going particularly well. There have been a number of Minecraft spinoff games, which should print money but instead seem to revel in mediocrity and be quickly forgotten.

Microsoft is bad at making games. They haven’t created a hit new franchise since Forza Horizon and haven’t been able to sustain their old ones, while PlayStation’s stable of software is seen as top tier. Talking about Nintendo would just be cruel.

On the smaller game side there have been some critical bright spots like Pentiment and the aforementioned Hi-Fi Rush and even Grounded, which was in Early Access for eternity but is now out and seems well liked. Rare has done a good job of maintaining Sea of Thieves. Minecraft continues to truck along. It’s not that there’s nothing, but it’s not what you expect from a platform holder. This isn’t about exclusivity it’s about identity and core experiences that drive people to your platform. Instead Microsoft has tried to do that with Game Pass, but you can get that on PC and it’s clear that people won’t buy a system to get into that service. When the games you’re putting on Game Pass are either old, throwaways, or small titles people just aren’t that excited by it. The premise of Game Pass was always big games on day 1, and the games aren’t there.

Ultimately this comes down to Phil Spencer. Whether it’s his personal fault, or the fault of the people he hired, or his inability to handle interference from above, none of that matters. He’s been head of Microsoft for a decade and while he says all the right things and I truly believe he is passionate about games and is smart about the industry and has good ideas for services and new ways to sell games, he can’t manage game production. He has failed to do so. For a decade. He’s taken over huge publishers and built his own studios, and poured billions of dollars into making games and the games that have gotten made aren’t good enough. That’s the core of the Microsoft problem.

And now Daikatana’s biggest fan, Jeff Grubb, the news guy who has been thoroughly bitchified by John Romero for hours on end, reports that Perfect Dark is a mess. Of course it is. All Microsoft games are messes. Some of them get fixed and come out. Some don’t.

And because of that, and the recent cuts and closures, Xbox, the console business, now has the death stink on it. For a decade Xbox hasn’t been the cool place to go for games, and everyone knows it. Nobody thinks they have to get an Xbox to play anything, and people are now worried about the console and the longevity of the business. People are nervous about buying into a platform that may not last. This is how a spiral happens. You fail, people see you as a failure and don’t want to support you, you make less money and have to cut back so you fail some more, and it feeds on itself. People won’t want to go to work for Microsoft because they don’t make cool games (and they fire all their developers!) It all just weighs the business down. And eventually Microsoft will decide that the Xbox console is too expensive to invest in and while they might not discontinue it outright they will allow it to atrophy. We see this on a much smaller scale with the Atari VCS. It came out, flopped, people stopped putting games on it, and while it’s still for sale it’s not a real product anymore. I’m not saying Xbox is in anywhere near the same position now, and it’s a totally different situation, but it’s hard to get the stink off you, and Xbox has the stink.

Is it possible to turn this around? Of course. For one thing Microsoft has endlessly deep pockets and can maintain Xbox as long as it wants. The brand isn’t totally dead and other brands have recovered from worse. The death spiral gets tighter as you go but Xbox isn’t towards the center yet. It has millions of users and pulls in a lot of revenue. And it’s attached to a division that still makes money. But it needs to change and relatively soon. It needs to be desirable again.

I can see two roads forward. The first is to open up the platform. Let people put Windows on their Xboxes and thus have access to Steam and Itch.io. I don’t know how much Microsoft makes from their cut of third party software on the system, but I can’t imagine it’s a huge part of the revenue. Yes this will create piracy issues and the box will get hacked within weeks (probably a large part why they don’t do it) but if you turn the Xbox into more or less a Steam machine that might make it intriguing to a lot of people who want the best of both worlds, a console and an open platform.

The second is to make some hit games. Not just one, unless it’s a monster megahit, but a series. If the next 5 big games Microsoft puts out are huge hits people will take notice. If they can put out something at the level of a Bloodborne or The Last of Us it will draw attention. And if they can do it repeatedly it will draw sales.

I just don’t think they can. At least not under Spencer. I used to like the guy, before this year’s bloodletting, but while I think he does ‘get’ games he has a track record of not being able to get them made on time or at high quality.

But I’m not a fortune teller or even a games business guy. Maybe they’ll turn it around. Maybe consoles will die in general and it will all go PC and cloud and this won’t matter. Maybe there’s some other brilliant move I don’t even see coming that will change the industry. The Xbox Series has sold more than the Wii U and the Switch may be the biggest selling console in history. It’s not impossible to turn things around with the right series of moves. But the Switch sold on the one two punch of Zelda and Mario, not just its hardware. And Microsoft sure isn’t going to sell a bunch of Xbox Series Zs with the lineup it has now.

@zombiepie has accused me of downplaying the gravity of Microsoft, and by association Phil Spencer’s recent actions so I want to start off by acknowledging that the recent job destruction at Microsoft is a choice, made by someone at Microsoft, totally unnecessary in a company as rich and profitable as it is, and inexcusable in both their existence and execution.

But while Microsoft’s implementation of its “new direction” (if it even has a direction) has been particularly awful, I think it’s important to note that it’s part of a broader pattern. Sony has cut basically all of its smaller scale development to triple down on huge single player tentpoles and live service games as seemingly its only first party offerings going forward. Sony was once known specifically for its quirky weird experiments like Parappa The Rapper and Tokyo Jungle. Now it’s got Spider-Man, God of War, whatever Naughty Dog is working on, Gran Turismo, Destiny, and not a lot more. We’ll probably see another Ratchet & Clank some day and a few other things but the days of Puppeteer are long over.

Square Enix recently announced that it was taking over $100 million in losses to cut back on smaller games and focus on its tentpoles. Activision, long ago and well pre-merger, cut back on making almost anything that wasn’t Call of Duty or a mega Blizzard franchise, very occasionally putting out a Crash Bandicoot game or a Tony Hawk remake, often to great critical and even commercial success, before shrugging and going back to making more COD.

Take Two just gutted Private Division, its mid-sized division. Ubisoft occasionally puts out something smaller, but Ubisoft is a baffling company at this point and it just released the world’s AAAA game so who knows what its direction is.

Capcom seemingly makes Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, Street Fighter, and remasters of its old properties. Exoprimal is live service, and Dragon’s Dogma II seems like it’s AAA, though admittedly it is not a core franchise. But prior to that the last games that don’t fall into one of those categories were the weird Ghost and Goblins Resurrection game and Devil May Cry 5. That’s fewer than one game per year.

EA, of all companies, is one of the few publishers still regularly trying new things, with its EA Originals label putting out the Hazelight games and some experimental stuff like Lost in Random and Tales of Kenzera: Zau. But it too has announced that it intends to shift focus towards its core IP. Maybe we’ll see another Hazelight game in the future, and I’m sure it will take some shots at tiny games like Unravel or Fe just to generate good will, but it seems unlikely we’ll see another year with a slate of mid-size titles like Wild Hearts, Immortals of Aveum, and Deadspace ever again, after all three seemingly underperformed despite none of them being outright bad and Deadspace being very good by most standards.

Nintendo will continue being Nintendo and part of that does include making mid-sized games to fill in its schedule between tentpole releases. The Bayonetta series has gotten 2 releases on Wii U, there’s been a new Pikmin game, new 2D Metroid, new Warioware, and a host of remakes and strange one off experiments. It doesn’t seem like Nintendo is stepping away from mid-sized games because its business model requires a constant stream of games and it doesn’t have enough mega properties to fill in the schedule.

So who does that leave outside the big N, and perhaps Bandai Namco, which puts out a bunch of mid-sized licensed stuff? There are still a few mid-sized publishers who have survived the various consolidations in the industry. Koei-Tecmo comes to mind. Sega could be seen as mid-sized, though it’s almost as big as Square by market cap, and it has been focused on megaprojects and core IP over the last few years. There are also some boutique publishers who are putting out some bigger games that are larger than what traditional indies are. Annapurna, Kepler, and Focus Entertainment all come to mind. Embracer and its various appendages seemed to specialize in this kind of game, but who knows what’s going on with Embracer these days. My point is that there is some hope for the mid-sized game out there, but mostly from these smaller companies. The biggest companies are only interested in the biggest games.

Why does this matter? There are a few reasons. For one thing, mid-sized games benefit from being made in large organizations. Not only is there (or rather should there be) financial stability provided by being part of a big company that’s not a couple flops away from going out of business, but the shared resources and marketing muscle mean that these companies have traditionally been better positioned to get the mid-sized games to break through into the cultural consciousness. When Sony put out a quirky project people paid attention because it was Sony. Ubisoft got people to notice Starlink: Battle for Atlas and Immortals: Fenyx Rising despite their terrible titles because, again, they are Ubisoft. Tim Schafer talked about how when Double Fine joined Microsoft he was able to both offload a lot of overhead work like administering benefits to the parent company and was also able to use internal Microsoft resources to help develop Double Fine’s games, while bouncing ideas off other people within Microsoft Studios. That might have just been PR, but ideally that’s how it should work. Big companies have unique advantages beyond just being big.

And what they also have is a whole lot of IP. Microsoft alone is hoarding a huge chunk of gaming’s most venerable franchises, from all the Activision stuff from the 2600 days to Fallout, Elder Scrolls, the ID software stuff, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, the list goes on and on. And that’s just Microsoft. Each of these companies have a treasure trove of IP buried in their vaults. This matters for a couple reasons.

The first is that this IP can boost sales for these mid-sized projects. There are a bunch of indie extreme sports games out there right now but all of them combined probably have less attention and sales than the Tony Hawk remaster brought in. Part of that is because Activision put some budget into it, part of it is the quality of that product, but part of it is that people care about the IP so they pay attention to it and are willing to give it a chance and talk about it. Tony Hawk will always get more attention than some no name game, even if they were the same in every other way. The same can be said about Crash Bandicoot 4 and even something like Sackboy’s Big Adventure. It’s easier to launch a game that’s not going to be a blockbuster supported by 9 figures in advertising if you’re doing so with an IP people know and care about.

The second is that there needs to be a way for people to access old games without piracy. People say “emulation” a lot, but what they mean is piracy. I’m not passing a moral judgment here, but piracy is going to be something a lot of people aren’t comfortable with and that isn’t even possible in certain situations. We saw what happened with the Switch emulators and while that was for current gen stuff, Nintendo has taken down “emulation” repositories in the past. Additionally, piracy just isn’t a possibility for cultural institutions like universities or museums, which can carve out exceptions for their own academic pursuits but can’t provide ways for other people to access the material they’re talking about. For a medium to thrive people need to be able to access its past, especially its recent past, and for many games that’s very difficult to do legitimately these days. The more these companies are oriented towards only putting out mega hits the less interest they have in making their catalog available.

In addition to the promotion issue and the IP issue, there’s the issue of institutional knowledge. It’s not just about people losing their jobs and leaving the industry, or leaving the industry because they don’t want to be support staff on Call of Duty for the rest of their careers. It’s also about teams being broken up and companies losing the ability to manage projects at a reasonable scale. I think we’re seeing the fruits of this in the way that Microsoft can’t find people who can actually lead teams and get games out in good shape. And Ubisoft seems to have similar issues. When you don’t let people cut their teeth on mid sized projects and you don’t have teams that cohere and learn to work together the product suffers, regardless of the size. And while some of these teams are reconstituting in smaller studios, often enough is lost that it just isn’t the same. Parts of the Burnout team have gotten back together but the games they put out aren’t Burnout. Playtonic isn’t Rare. Even if Microsoft wanted to make a new Tony Hawk game, Vicarious Visions isn’t Vicarious Visions anymore, and that team, build over 30 years, was sacrificed to the alter of crappy Call of Duty games even though Tony Hawk 1+2 outperformed expectations.

Your team makes a game, even a great game, even a game that makes money for the company and gathers acclaim and positive press, and these companies do not care. They’ll absorb the team or disband the studio or whatever. Nothing makes people invest more in their jobs than seeing colleagues get a pink slip after crunching to put out a great piece of software that’s received well and makes the company money.

So why are these companies like this? Every company is a little bit different, and Microsoft’s current manifestation of sociopathy is clearly partially a result of overexpansion, but I think that there are two other primary causes. The first is that these companies don’t know how to do things economically. Yes they can budget a mid-sized game at mid-size but they no longer have the capacity to promote games that aren’t massive blockbusters. They may have had some mid-sized studios but they didn’t have mid-sized promotion teams so you got a lot of games that came out and tried to sell either based on the strength of their IP or review scores or, conversely, got too much money poured into promotion so they underperformed. We still get breakout mid-sized games from time to time, like Helldivers 2, but they seem to either depend on the games themselves doing something clever (Helldivers with its wholesale ripping off of the Starship Troopers movie’s tone) or being fantastic or just getting lucky. That’s not a great way to run a business. Helldivers 2 is also a live service game, which meant that Sony actually did care about it.

But the flipside is that even when the games do break through and do well, like Tony Hawk, it’s not enough to move the needle for these behemoths. Activision did call out Tony Hawk as a profit center in its financial reports, but at the end of the day having the occasional game hit every couple years is not the reliable firehose of revenue that Call of Duty is or Overwatch and WoW have been. When you have a golden goose even the very productive other animals on the farm get neglected and sacrificed to pamper it. We’ve seen this before in other ways. Valve more or less stopped making games because Steam got so big. Epic lost interested in franchises like Unreal, once its big driver and the thing its engine is named after because Fortnite blew up. Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption are now the only games Rockstar makes, and they used to make a lot of different stuff. The huge money makers come to dominate the company and everything else becomes an afterthought. Something to move off the balance sheet when things dip. Gaming has always been a hit driven business but the hits were never this big and they never lasted this long. GTA III exploded but Rockstar had to follow it up so we got Vice City, San Andreas, but also a bunch of smaller titles and other attempts at franchises. GTA V ended that because it just kept making money year after year. Now we’re going to get GTA VI, probably 12 years after the last one and with one game from a different sub-studio in between.

I don’t know if the way these companies do business is actually right economically. The fact that so many are going down this route could be group think, or it could be that it’s just how the numbers work. What I do know is that it’s frustrating for me and devastating for developers. In many ways it has broken the business of making games. A lot of other media has gone the same way. There are fewer movies from the big studios than ever before, and they take many fewer fliers on mid-budget releases. It’s mostly blockbusters and indies these days. The book publishing industry is in turmoil. Media is a complete and total mess in so many ways. But while mid-sized games are still getting made, and some are doing well, the exit of these big companies from anything but the top end of the market is a loss, primarily for the developers affected but also for the art of game making and the consumer.

None of this is to take the spotlight off how badly Microsoft has handled its cuts and its business in general. I’ve got more to say about that in another post, but it’s not just Microsoft. It’s most of the huge legacy publishers at this point.

It's 2024 and we're all used to constantly being cheated, manipulated, scammed, and nickeled and dimed in our real lives. It's just part of living in modern society, especially in the U.S. Whether it's grocery store shrinkage labeled as "new and improved," printers that have chips to avoid you using after market ink replacements AND that refuse to print in black and white after emptying their own magenta cartridges while "cleaning" themselves, or the constant barrage of robocalls for various scams even on cellphones, modern life just involves a bunch of predatory companies and people trying to take advantage of us.

It was always this way to some extent but the Internet has made it worse, as has consolidation of companies. When Amazon has driven most of its competitors out of business and damaged local retail in a lot of places it can afford to ship you the wrong products (or clearly used products sold as 'new' for 'new' prices) and what are you going to do about it? Go to the local department store that closed in 2012? Get mad about the cheap print on demand books and order your books from ebay, only to end up with a print on demand cheap copy?

When you can set up a new company with a few clicks of a mouse and be exposed to tens of millions of new suckers customers there's just no reason not to cheat people, besides morality and scruples but who cares about those? And conversely when you're a huge monolith and the only game in town there's also no reason not to cheat and steal. What are your customers going to do? Go to a fly by night Internet only operation that will cheat them even worse?

Health insurance denies valid claims. Telecomm companies tack on hidden fees. Online ticket sellers charge more than the cost of the ticket for "convenience" fees. It's a non-stop barrage of bullshit that insults your intelligence and plunders your wallets.

And it's in games too and only getting worse.

I think that this is behind a lot of the outrage over seemingly smaller issues when it comes to live service games. People play games to escape the bullshit of life. They play games to go into a fantasy world where they're a wizard or the First Baseman for the Yankees or a Race Car Driver or a college senior with a bunch of hot suitors or whatever fantasy a particular game is selling. It's escapism because we all need to escape sometimes.

But now when you escape to a fantasy world the bullshit follows you. When you bought a copy of Final Fantasy VII in 1997 you got to go to Midgar and be ex-SOLDIER Cloud fighting to free the people and the planet. And for some games, including the FF VII Remake games, this is still mostly true (though those games do have DLC.) But when you buy a copy of Suicide Squad you do not get to be King Shark bounding over the rooftops of Metropolis fighting Superman with a gun (for some reason.) I mean you do, but you also get a virtual used car salesman trying to get you to buy cosmetics that 25 years ago would have been unlocked through in game achievements or cheat codes. And when you buy a copy of The Crew Motorfest you get a virtual used car salesman trying to sell you virtual cars for real money.

And it sucks. It's one of the worst things about modern life transported into games in a REAL WAY. It's as if Gran Turismo found a way to really injure you when you crashed your car. Or if Spider-Man's subway based fast travel system forced you into 30 minute delays like the real subway does. Or if you could marry a girl in Fable only to have her cheat on you with the milkman and take your house in the divorce.

We don't play games to experience the shitty parts of life unless they're very specific games and those shitty parts are presented in very specific, generally, cathartic, ways. We play games to experience some kind of curated, enjoyable, experience. If I wanted to experience sunburn from going outside I could just go outside without sunscreen. Games don't make you worry about high UV index days because that stuff' not fun.

And neither is the hard sell. But games DO make you experience that. And they reshape their worlds to make it more appealing. Whether it's lowering XP curves to make the booster more appealing or making the free costumes boring to inspire you to spend real cash on the "premium" ones, games make your fantasy worse so they can upcharge you. Like a car company intentionally nerfing its software so you'll buy a more expensive package. More nickel and diming, more manipulation, and even more scams.

Helldivers II recently added a PSN login requirement for PC players. And people will say it's free, it's just to get you into the PSN eco system and to be able to spy on you a little. It's just to sell your information to data brokers and track you and that kind of thing. No biggie. We all deal with it constantly. But that's for now. Who's to say what the future will hold. And this is a game people already bought and paid for and were playing. They were already in the fantasy world of Super Earth spreading Managed Democracy and here comes real world Sony wanting to pry into their data and maybe their wallets in the future having already gotten $40 plus microtransactions for their game. Here comes the greedy real world business guy sneering with his hand out wanting more and more and more.

It's not fun. And it ruins a lot of what IS fun in games. Because it adds predatory bullshit to a fantasy world that you already paid for.

This is one of the big reasons modern gaming feels less fun. It isn't every game, of course. If you buy Penny's Big Breakaway you just get a fun little platformer adventure. And Tears of the Kingdom just sent you off to save Hyrule the same way the original game did, just with more bells and whistles. Super Mario Bros. Wonder partially helped keep its wonder by NOT turning the Mushroom Kingdom into a big scammy mess where you log in to see advertising and a bunch of bullshit currencies with "best value" plastered all over. It's not every game.

But it's more and more games, and it goes against what makes gaming valuable and fun. It goes against the spirit of escapism. It's like a reverse version of The Ring, where the horrors of the real world crawl through the TV into the virtual world to stalk you and take your money. And it sucks.

I went into Tales of Kenzera: Zau with high expectations. The New York Times called it “a gem of human experience made all the more profound because of its self-assured heart.” Other publications hyped it up as a polished game with a lot to say and an excellent way of saying it. I was ready to be pulled into another world and maybe even shed a few tears at a story about love and loss. I came away from it thinking “well, that was a decent game. What’s next?”

Tales of Kenzera: Zau is, at its heart, a very straightforward exploration platformer (I’d call it a Metroidvania if @Mento wouldn’t ban me for it.) You play the titular Zau (except for brief future segments where you play a very similar character named Zuberi in an afrofuturist framing element where you walk around doing nothing like an Assassin’s Creed game but less annoying). Zau is a young shaman who has inherited the masks, and thus powers, of his father, who has recently died, and wants to use those powers to bargain with death, named Kalunga in this game, for the return of his beloved “Baba” (father), who he thinks was taken unjustly and far too soon.

Kalunga agrees to return Zau’s Baba if Zau can help him bring three powerful spirits across the veil to the land of the dead, as is the role of a shaman, and so you set off on your journey to find and defeat them so they can rest.

I don’t normally start talking about games by focusing on the story, but here the story and aesthetics are obviously the standout elements. This is far from the the first game to draw on African myths and culture for its story and setting but compared to European or Asian traditions it’s a less common source of inspiration. Here, specifically, the game is drawing on Swahili language and culture, though without a lot of specificity, more using it as set dressing than deeply diving into the stories or mythology. It does freshen up what is otherwise a pretty rote game in an overdone genre, and the African setting is both beautiful and a refreshing change, managing to keep the game from feeling like just a copy of a literally hundreds of other games. The music is also influenced by traditional African music, though I wish the soundtrack had gone further in this direction instead of including a lot of more overused tropes in its primarily orchestral score. It’s generally good music, but it’s not very memorable, and I think an entirely traditional African soundtrack would have stood out more.

Unfortunately the story and characters do not elevate the material as much as the world building and locations. This game is supposedly a deeply personal story about loss, and it certainly does explore themes around losing a loved one, but aside from a few moments where some of the cultural inspiration influences character or story it’s all pretty rote. Kalunga is very chill for a god of death, and shines in quieter moments when he shows true empathy towards Zau, but Zau himself is a pretty standard grieving young man trying to take a stand against the inherent injustice of the universe. It’s not bad at all, but it feels competent and satisfactory rather than enthralling, and doesn’t do much to elevate the game.

The gameplay similarly offers mostly competent versions of well-worn concepts. You can run, double jump, air dash, and fight. The “hook” is your ability to switch between sun and moon masks. The sun mask focuses on powerful melee attacks and close in damage while the moon mask has ranged attacks (with an active reload, which is weird in a game where you wield magic). Eventually you’ll get different utility powers for the different masks and they each feature special ultimate attacks but we’ve all seen these gameplay concepts before. Eventually enemies get elemental shields that are only vulnerable to one of the masks, which is really annoying when one particular enemy who has an invulnerable dash gets a sun shield, since the shields regenerate and tracking them down to do enough melee damage before they dash around invincible and recharge is frustrating. But in general it’s all old hat at this point. Enemy variety is also quite limited, with about a dozen foes showing up, and the game has quite a lot of combat, including locking off progression until you finish multi wave combat arenas and also having multiple optional combat arenas you can fight in to get extra goodies like an extended spirit power bar or a slot for your “trinkets,” which are essentially charms that give Zau abilities like gaining more health when he heals or taking less damage from projectiles.

If the combat is just passable the platforming at least feels good most of the time…but has more significant issues in the later game. Zau is very quick and responsive and his jumps and dashes feel good to control. This is important because the game has a lot of negative space; large stretches of map where there aren’t many obstacles or all that much to do. It’s not a problem your first time through when you’re taking in sights and Kalunga may be talking with Zau, but it makes backtracking annoying, especially with the game’s somewhat limited fast travel system that only has a couple spots even in very large areas (and the game’s map is quite big and sparse compared to more tightly designed entries in the genre.) There are plenty of one hit death kills on spikes and other traps but checkpointing is generous and the game is generally pretty easy. The two exceptions are platforming gauntlets that are specially marked and that require you to pass a series of tougher than normal obstacles in order to get rewarded with a trinket, and two boss-related chase sequences that are extremely annoying and frustrating because of…

The camera. Even though Tales of Kenzera: Zau is a 2024 2D game it has serious camera issues. Mainly the camera just doesn’t move fast enough to keep up with Zau, which can lead to unearned deaths when you fall into spikes you literally could not see because the camera didn’t pan down until it was too late, or run head on into an obstacle for the same reason. In the chase sequences this is very pronounced because you need to move fast, and while you are being chased from behind hazards will appear from the front. The game also sometimes has readability issues with a lot happening on screen and Zau sometimes being pretty small (this is an issue in combat where I lost track of Zau pretty frequently given that the enemies can look like him and there can be a lot going on) but in the chases it can mean that a slow camera and difficult to read screen elements lead to a lot of frustration. The second chase I finished angrily and mostly out of spite, and it has a pretty low completion rate even on Xbox (that will rise over time because the game is new, but it does seem like a potential chokepoint for some players.) But the camera is generally a problem in a game where it shouldn’t be.

Also a problem, especially in the second chase, is some inconsistency in how moves register. You eventually get an enhanced air dash that can punch you through certain obstacles, but it doesn’t always trigger, at least on PS5, and when it does it doesn’t always break the obstacle, and it’s supremely frustrating. There’s nothing worse than something unresponsive in a generally responsive game. To make matters worse, even when the move does register it sometimes doesn’t break the barriers that it should. And while other moves are more reliable there are things that don’t feel quite right where it seems like a couple additional weeks or months of polish might have really helped things.

Boss battles are another area where some additional polish might have helped. While I didn’t experience any technical issues during them they are extremely unbalanced. Essentially the battles seem to be designed as normal wars of attrition, where you do small bits of damage over time and try to avoid taking too much damage from the boss, but in practice what I found was that it was extremely easy to damage the boss using Zau’s ultra moves, and the only real danger was from moves they have that can push you off the platform and cause a falling death, which forces you to restart the battle. So the battles actually play out as charging up spirit power for an ultra move and learning to read and avoid the moves that push you off the platform, with everything else being pretty irrelevant. They’re not the worst bosses I’ve faced in a game, and none of them are too difficult, but they aren’t very satisfying either.

The last issue I’d like to bring up is the backtracking. It’s weirdly limited. In exploration platformers one of the most common design elements is to include a bunch of goodies that you can see but can’t quite get yet because you don’t have the right ability. This game does have a bunch of collectables such as the aforementioned trinkets as well as various XP boosts and health upgrades etc… but almost all of them are attainable with that area’s movement ability. So in the area where you get the grapple hook there will be XP boosts to grapple hook to, and they may also be in subsequent areas, but none of the prior areas will have them. This is…unusual as a design choice. There are a couple exceptions where you do need to backtrack to get everything, but very limited. I don’t even know that I’m complaining about this, since being able to get everything your first time through if you’re vigilant is nice in a game where the fast travel is bad, but it did surprise me.

Tales of Kenzera: Zau is not a bad game, it’s just unambitious and kind of average for a 2D exploration platformer with a significant budget. The African setting does make it interesting enough to be worth playing, and it’s competent enough that I saw it through to the end and even got the platinum (though tracking down those last collectibles really showed me how big and empty the map is.) It’s enjoyable enough to recommend to people who like the genre and dig the game’s look, and it’s on the higher tier of PlayStation Plus so it might not even cost you anything. But while playing it I couldn’t help but think of how many other games in the genre are more ambitious and interesting in so many ways. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night with its absolutely insane powers and systems that you can break in so many ways. Shadow Complex with its foam gun and shooting into the background. The recent and fascinating Ultros with its storytelling and weird gameplay. Even something like Forgotton Anne with its deeper focus on story and elaborate animated cut scenes. I would recommend all those games over Tales of Kenzera: Zau for anyone with any familiarity with the genre, except perhaps Forgotton Anne, which is not that fun to play.

Tales of Kenzera: Zau is not a bad game but it is a victim of its own hype. As a $20 game from a new studio it’s a fine and competent game in an oversaturated genre that does enough aesthetically and is enjoyable enough to play to justify a look. But it’s not particularly special, and I hope that whatever the studio does next tries to focus on at least some aspect to make that project stand out more.

I wasn't going to play Helldivers 2, and I didn't until well after the hype cycle had died down. That might be part of the problem. Ultimately what pulled me in was a friend who rarely gets into games saying he loved it and wanted to play with me. I don't trust his taste in games at all, and he tends to be fickle, but I do like playing online with him just because I so rarely play with friends these days (I'm OLD) so I took the plunge.

He and I have played together all of once since then but I've put in a significant amount of time on my own, about 12 hours total. There are things I really like about the game. I think the shooting feels good. I think the "strategems" (essentially special equipment or attacks you can call in from orbit like a heavy weapon, airstrike, or sentry gun) are a very fun idea and feel great to use. I think the levels are atmospheric, the objectives generally varied and interesting, and the enemies are well designed both aesthetically and from a gameplay perspective. I think the world building is grimly amusing.

I also really like how the game is harsh, with lots of things that can kill you quickly, but gives you enough tools and respawns to survive. Friendly fire is essential for maintaining the feeling of danger and chaos that envelops the battlefield and so while I normally don't like it I think it's pretty core to the Helldivers 2 experience (though I wouldn't be against it being turned off at the lowest difficulties.) The feeling of vulnerability also encourages randos to play pretty well together. People do go off and do their own things sometimes but most of the players I've been grouped with are pretty focused on objectives and naturally tend to work together in order to survive. This is a sign of good game design that channels players into the desired playstyle without forcing them. Helldivers 2 has a lot of impressive small decisions that get people to play together and play the objectives. Other developers should take notes.

But as well made as the game is I find myself starting to suffer the same live service burnout that I always do.

• Helldivers 2 encourages you to play every day, with one personal objective every day and community wide objectives every few days that reward you with points for the battlepasses, which are not just cosmetic in this game but feature basic loadout components.
• The battlepasses themselves are structured in a way where you HAVE to buy cosmetics in order to advance to the next "page" of the pass and get equipment. And the cosmetics in this game are very boring. So in terms of progression you're often grinding for stuff you may not care about in order to get that piece of crucial equipment you need for your loadout.
• Paid battlepasses in a $40 game still bother me, especially when they contain real equipment and not just cosmetics. You can get at least some premium currency through play, but each battlepass costs 1000 of this currency and you find the currency in units of 10 (distributed to everyone in the group so at least you don't have to worry about competing for it) so you'd need to find 100 such units to get a battlepass and on average you probably find some every 2-3 missions. You can do the math there. You get more on higher difficulties, and the battlepasses themselves do contain some currency, but you're clearly being channeled towards spending.
• There are too many currencies. Yes, only one is paid, but you have XP (for levels, which unlock access to being able to buy more advanced strategems), requisition points (which you use to purchase strategem unlocks), war medals (used to unlock portions of the battlepass), the paid currency used to buy battlepasses or cosmetics independent of the battlepass, and at least 3 to 4 types of "samples," which are used to unlock permanent buffs that improve your strategems or reduce their reload times. It's not unmanageable but it's a lot, and it feels restrictive as you can't really control how you develop your loadouts. Also some of the sample types are restricted to higher difficulties, which skill caps your access to certain things and means people just play an easier experience if they want to advance, which is an accessibility issue.
• There's just the general sense of doing the same thing over and over with no story advancement or progression. I get how this is just what these games are, but for me I like some kind of narrative progression in games like this. You can call it a commentary on the nature of war and all that, and there's validity there, but after awhile you're still just running the same maps doing the same things. This is probably my biggest issue.

I'll probably keep playing Helldivers 2 off and on for a while and come back when they add new interesting things, but I'm already feeling the grind setting in when playing on my own. If my friend wants to play I'll join him, and I can definitely see why it'd be a good hangout game if you have a consistent squad, but I just can't vibe with the live service model. Even in a really good game like Helldivers 2 where a lot of the "game" stuff is extremely my vibe it just starts to feel like a tedious grind after a while. I had the same experience with Diablo 4 after finishing the main story. You're just playing to progress and to...play. Philosophically I'm fine with that (it's not like you actually accomplish anything real in story-based games) but it just doesn't work for me psychologically. The seams are too obvious.

I can see how if you have a regular friend group it would work better, but you can also play through a lot of games with more story progression and variety in co-op. I had a ton of fun playing the Halo and Gears campaigns in co-op, and I played It Takes Two a few years ago online with a friend and that was really great. Even something like EDF has a campaign and set pieces that increase variety and a sense of progression and accomplishment.

I'm glad I played Helldivers 2, I enjoyed it, and I have played enough that it doesn't really feel like a waste of money because there are plenty of campaign based games I've gotten less time out of (especially since I'm not done and will probably be at 20 hours or so before I am.) But it's shown me pretty definitively that live service games just aren't for me. I may play another if a friend wants to or if one comes out that seems REALLY up my alley in other ways, but in some ways it's good to find a game that fires on a lot of cylinders and where I can say "they made this kind of thing about as well as it could be made for my tastes" and still not fully jive with it. At least now I know, it's not really the game, it's me.

ETA:

And....now Steam players are suddenly required to link PlayStation accounts if they want to keep playing. A requirement added well after launch. This may get repealed eventually (don't know yet) but what a completely player unfriendly decision. Again, this is software people already paid for and now they have to do something new (it's free but it's something a lot of people don't want to do) to use it. LIVE SERVICES!

I regret to inform you that Nintendo has gotten into the Acclaim N64 catalog. Reggie help us all.

Iggy's Reckin' Balls is not the worst N64 game ever made (Lauren Fielder gave it a 6.7) but I think that young people today will never really understand what games like that meant back in the day and specifically on the N64. Today Iggy's Reckin' Balls would be a $10 downloadable game, maybe launch on Game Pass or something, and would quickly fade into obscurity.

But in 2000 releasing a game on the N64 meant printing cartridges, and that meant that this game had to retail for at least close to as much as one of Nintendo's first party offerings (though cartridge games did vary in price a bit.) It meant that there was a big or at least medium sized publisher behind it, which meant magazine and Internet ads. They didn't just quietly make a weird puzzle racing game and put it out in the hopes of finding a niche audience. They tried to make Iggy's Reckin' Balls an actual THING. They wanted gamers to KNOW about Iggy's Reckin' Balls. They wanted gamers to spend at least dozens of dollars buying Iggy's Reckin' Balls or at the very least go rent it from Blockbuster. This was big business!

There's a reason Acclaim doesn't exist anymore.

I think that when I look back on the video games of the past that's one of the reasons that games like Iggy's Reckin' Balls, which I barely played if at all at the time (I MIGHT have rented it at some point just because of the weird cover) stand out to me more than their modern equivalents. Today a game like this would be quickly buried and forgotten. Back then there were ads, reviews, articles, everyone who followed N64 knew about it. And it was just this weird thing we all kind of laughed at together. Again, it's not a bad game, it's just a game that you're never going to convince hundreds of thousands of people to pay $50 or more in 2000s money for.

I think kids today fundamentally can't understand that. They never lived in a world where physical media was pretty much everything, and understand the barrier to entry that created. Even if they were born in the late 2000s they grew up at a time where digital distribution of everything from movies and music to games and books was extremely normal. They will NEVER get the full Iggy's Reckin' Balls experience.

But you can!

You remember the ads and the reviews and all of it. And now you can play it in glorious Switch emulation. I played a little of it! It controls like a second tier N64 game, which is to say, kind of okay but not like you'd want it to. It's pretty ugly because it has four race courses at any one time (you play a ball with a grapple tongue competing with other balls to climb to the top of some towers in a puzzle racing game that also has a battle mode) but it's an N64 game so.... The sound is all crushed with short music loops because N64. It would have made an okay rental while waiting on Gamecube to release!

As for Extreme-G...that game's okay but we have Wipeout at home.

Wayforward is making another 2D platformer starring a young female protagonist. As news goes this is the equivalent to "today is Thursday." It doesn't happen every day, but it happens quite a lot. What's semi notable about this particular 2D platformer from the company that seems to churn them out as frequently as Nintendo churns out takedown notices for emulators is that it's based in the "Yars" series.

What is the "Yars" series you might ask if you're not in your mid 40s or later? It's a "series" of video games that started with a legitimate classic of the 2600, Yars' Revenge. Yars' Revenge is a 1982 shooter game that's important mostly because it was a high watermark for mechanical complexity and innovation in a console video game at the time. Most 2600 games were incredibly simple affairs where you did one or maybe two things in a pretty straightforward manner, like driving around and shooting in a tank or...playing blackjack. By the 80s even as the 2600 aged things were getting more complex and we saw a bunch of games that pushed design forward with more complex ideas. Games like Pitfall! or Adventure (from 1979) where the player was given more to do and more depth to the action.

Yars' Revenge was part of this wave of later software. At its heart it's a shooter but it's a very weird one, where you chip away at a wall of blocks to expose the enemy's core and then use a separate weapon with time limited shots to actually destroy it. There's also a couple floating pixels to avoid and a neutral zone where you can't hurt or be hurt. It's very interesting and innovative and it works well, with later levels having variations to keep things fresh, but it's so weird it was a big of an evolutionary dead end for the genre, more influential in the way it showed that games could be very outside the box and still work than in having any direct imitators. It also had a bit of an inside baseball appeal, with the name "Yar" being a reversal of "Ray," a former Atari employee, and Howard Scott Warshaw hiding his initials in the game if you performed just the right series of actions.

Yars' Revenge was also notable for its story, which is total early 80s sci-fi gibberish about alien species and unexplained concepts and entities. It was enough to give a little context to the game, and quite good by the standards of early 80s video game stories, but there was no deep lore there and it was more cool in how it set this tone of a truly alien conflict than presenting any kind of coherent story.

Like most early 80s games not named Pac-Man or Donkey Kong Yars' Revenge didn't really develop much of an IP presence. I think there might have been some comic books and there was a sequel released many, many, years later but it's not like Yars' Revenge was a presence on later platforms like the NES or even the ill-fated Atari 7800. Older gamers may have had some nostalgia for the game, but it wasn't even on the level of something like Centipede or Missile Command, which would get halfhearted low budget revivals from time to time. Eventually there was a very weird Panzer Dragoon style game that came out in 2011 for...some reason and it did make its way into Atari's "Recharged" lineup of reimagined early 80s games for modern platforms.

The Recharged title makes a lot of sense because of what that series is and how it actually tries to iterate on and evolve the concepts from the 2600 game, but the other releases in the Yars series just seem...completely random. The 2011 game isn't terrible (I've played it) and does have some semi-interesting attempts to incorporate elements from a very early single screen shooter into a polygonal rail shooter game, but it totally reimagines the Yars from their original concept as evolved Earth house flies who got into space aboard a human ship into a race of humanoid creatures with wings. It mostly just used the "Yars" concept as window dressing for a totally different game.

And now it seems like that's happening again. Now apparently Yars creator Howard Scott Warshaw is consulting on the new game, so he presumably approves of it, but did we really need a 2D platformer "based" on this ancient 2600 game? It's another repurposing of some of the words and concepts into something entirely different.

I'm not offended by the existence of this game, I'm more perplexed by it. Who is it for? You can say "Hey, you're talking about it, so it did its job," but this is a Wayforward game and I pay attention to basically everything they do. They're the Shantae and River City Girls team. They just made a Contra game. They're not exactly an obscure developer that desperately needs to cash in on some ancient nostalgia.

It's also possible that someone at Wayforward is just a fan of the old game and wanted to work with Howard Scott Warshaw, a true gaming pioneer, but there I'd say...why a platformer? When Housemarque wanted to work with Eugene Jarvis they made a twin stick shooter, and Nex Machina is a hell of a game. It really shows how Robotron might have evolved over time. Yars Rising might be great too (it's a platformer from Wayforward so it's at least going to be competent) but it won't show how Yars Revenge might have evolved. We already got the Recharged game for that.

I don't really know why I wrote all this up except that I just think it's strange and maybe a little sad that this thing exists. This constant recycling of IP with vague ties to something older that some people might remember or a name you might have heard feels like it stifles creativity and innovation. Granted Yars Rising hardly seems wedded to the old concepts (the protagonist is decidedly not an evolved house fly) and if Warshaw and Wayforward really wanted to make this...fine, if it's good I may play it and I wish them the best, but what's wrong with new stuff? The gaming scene is just full of these ancient franchises. The biggest platformer is Mario. The biggest fighting games are Street Fighter, Tekken and Mortal Kombat. Fortnite is newish (kind of) but a lot of its appeal is pulling in old IP. It's just our childhoods being remixed and sold to us over and over, except in the case of Yars' Revenge most of us weren't even cognizant when it was actually released.

Jeff Gerstmann recently has been talking about how Call of Duty added Cheech and Chong and how HE'S too young for Cheech and Chong, and he's firmly entrenched in middle age. There was also a Ninja Turtles game revealed in the indie Direct yesterday.

I've been playing Dave the Diver and that game is pretty good, but has some issues. However none of those issues are that it doesn't call back to some property from the 1980s for a hit of nostalgia. There's nothing wrong with presenting something wholly new. The Yars have had their revenge. Do they really need to rise, too, 40 years later?