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?

As someone who complains a fair amount about the state of "AAA" gaming, one of the solutions that I often hear is to play more indie games. Indie games are not plagued with a lot of the issues that infest the big company games these days. They're reasonably priced, often single player focused, and rarely riddled with microtransactions or other unsavory practices like always online DRM. If you like gaming the way it used to be then indie games provide a limitless supply of new games to play, and while a lot of them are mediocre, or even trash, enough are sublime that you'll never run out of good things to play.

On its face this is definitely true. I play my share of indie games, both new and old, and some of them are among my all-time favorites. Hades and Neon White on Switch can stand toe to toe with all but the very best that Nintendo puts out. Limbo and especially Inside were spectacular. Sea of Stars manages to capture a lot of the magic of old school JRPGs while not being dragged down by outdated design conventions. Indie games are fantastic.

And right now I'm playing a few indie games that I really enjoy.

Agent Intercept is a throwback to those PS2 3D Spyhunter games, with graphics that use a flat-shaded type look (though they actually are textured) to create a bold and stylish aesthetic. It's got solid gameplay and presentation and feels like a remake of a B-tier Dreamcast game, which is not at all an insult.

Anomaly Agent is a 2D game that's part platformer, part 2D beat 'em up (more like Kung-Fu Master than Streets of Rage), part platformer, and part Rolling Thunder but with powers. It's got surprisingly good level design, a fun story, and a pretty deep combat system including parries and special powers.

Ultros is a gorgeous and trippy 2D Metroidvania with an absolutely gorgeous art style and some unique game play ideas and mechanics, as well as an abstract and weird story that manages to be intriguing rather than annoying. I played through to the "bad" ending within a few days of getting it, even though it's a 10+ hour long game.

And of course Balatro is one of the best deckbuilders of all time.

So that's a number of great indies, three of which are from 2024 (Agent Intercept is from 2021) that I can say I really enjoy and have played at least some of within the last week. The indie hater has emphatically not logged on.

And yet there are things that I just cannot get from indie games. Polish is perhaps the most debatable one, and varies from game to game. I would say that Balatro is exactly as polished as it needs to be, with a simple presentation that works perfectly for the kind of game it is. Anomaly Agent also feels pretty polished, though its presentation is pretty scaled back and it sets its sights towards very achievable goals, with graphics that are fine for what they are, but other than resolution and the speed at which they move wouldn't really feel out of place in a mid 90s PC game.

Agent Intercept is the only game of the lot with voice acting, and it's fine, but it doesn't have cut scenes (other than quick in engine action shots) just talking heads, and it definitely takes away from the presentation when compared to what it would have been like on Dreamcast or PS2, with some cool CG action or even live action actors hamming it up. It's not game ruining by any means, but it makes it feel a little bit like an imitation of the real thing rather than a "real" game from that era. The controls are also a bit janky, especially in flight mode, and could have used another pass or two. Neither of those issues are game ruining, but they are detriments to the experience.

Ultros has lush and gorgeous graphics, but again the controls can be a little wonky, some of the level design is very inconvenient to navigate (though I think that was intentional, even though the game's combat is ludicrously easy so it's not meant to be a super challenging game) and there's a major mechanic I don't want to spoil that could have used significant polish work to make it less of a giant PITA, which did reduce my enjoyment of the game. It also has semi roguelike elements, but poorly implemented, so they just amount to you replaying the exact same sequences a half dozen times, and while those fit into the narrative very well they add nothing to the gameplay and should have been streamlined.

Now of course you can point out that many AAA games these days ship not just unpolished but completely falling apart, and you'd be right. Most of them do eventually get to a fairly polished state, but it's ridiculous how happy companies are to take people's money in exchange for a game that barely works. But I'm not really comparing indies to the bad AAA games of today. I'm more saying that at the top end of polish, something like Super Mario Bros. Wonder, you're almost never going to get that from an indie. The sheer aesthetic ambition and the time Nintendo, specifically, takes to make sure everything works properly doesn't seem possible at the smaller scale. There are some exceptions, like Hades, which went through extensive early access revisions, but even there we're talking about a 2D action game with relatively simple interactions, and it's notable for the sheer level of polish applied.

Then there's spectacle. I think this is a clearer argument. For big bombastic sequences you need big budgets. Of the games I'm directly discussing here, the 2D titles don't even really try. They're not spectacle games, and that's fine. They have fun moments and big reveals but they're not aiming to make you say "whoa" in the way that FF VII did all those years ago with its fancy CG. Agent Intercept does have some big explosions and the like, but because it kind of looks like a Dreamcast game from almost 25 years ago and it does everything in engine none of it comes off as spectacular, even if some of it is kind of cool. Spectacle requires budget, and when you play Spider-Man 2 with that opening Sandman fight it feels like something no indie can provide. It had a huge budget but at least it put it up on the screen for you in this spectacular and immersive way that is really unique to AAA gaming, and is something I do enjoy.

Finally there's discourse. And this is perhaps the most unfair because it occurs outside of development itself. Almost every AAA game will have some interesting discourse about it. Whether it's posts on this forum, articles on websites, videos on major Youtube channels, discussion on the Bombcast, Quicklooks (less so these days I guess), there will be plenty of places to read or watch thought provoking stuff and have conversations.

With indie games its a crap shoot. Yes, if something breaks through like Balatro or Hades there will be plenty to mull over, but for other games it's much harder to find. I picked up Ultros on a whim because it was released this year and was half off on a PSN sale with great graphics and good reviews. I did enjoy it, but I haven't seen a lot of discussion in my normal outlets. I suppose I could seek stuff out, and I will, but for the most part I am left alone with my own thoughts about what is a really thought provoking game, mechanically, narratively, and artistically. That's frustrating! The same is pretty much true of Anomaly Agent and Agent Intercept. Some of these may get a Bombcast mention or whatever, but the fun part of comparing your impression of a game to other people's and talking about it muted when so few people have played something. And these are all good games that deserve to be played.

In Stars and Time still doesn't have a Wiki page on this site (I should fix that) and if you look at trophy tracking sites basically nobody played it, and that game was fantastic in the first half, and fascinating throughout. For someone who likes talking about games, that's frustrating. Heck even Penny's Big Breakaway seems like it's mostly slipped under the radar and that was from the Sonic Mania guys. Sonic Mania was a big deal. Penny's Big Breakaway is really interesting! Everyone's talking about Dragon's Dogma 2 and Helldivers 2 instead.

And of course I get it. Those games are huge, have more players by a factor of probably at least a thousand, and in some ways have a lot more to them. But if the future of games for people who like more single player experiences is mostly in indie games, with a few Nintendo releases and a couple bones thrown by big publishers a year, then the discourse is going to fracture even further. Part of the reason that I loved Giant Bomb in the first place was getting to hear people I admired talking about the games I was playing, whether it was contemporaneously or after the fact. Getting to compare my opinion to those of numerous Jeffs. And now that's getting harder and harder because while there's still stuff I love to play, a lot of it is kind of at the periphery of the industry.

There was more discussion of Gollum, an awful game, than of all these games combined (even Balatro) and that's because the game had a license and a budget to put it on the radar. And most indie games can't do that.

So while I do love indies, I miss being closer to the mainstream discourse. I know this happens in almost every medium as you get older, but with something like movies they haven't really changed. Dune and Oppenheimer are the same kinds of movies I liked when I was younger, just newer. And even the movies for the kids are basically the same. Movies themselves are less culturally important than they were in 2000, but the movies haven't changed. AAA games have, and indies can't replace everything that the older single player titles used to deliver.

There's a story making the rounds (originally from a place called Newzoo) that market research shows that 60% of console and PC game time is being spent on live service games that have been around for more than half a decade, and in general gametime has consolidated around a small number of releases, making the gaming industry even more of a feast or famine proposition than it ever was before. Only 8% of game time is being spent on non-annualized (i.e. not Madden or Call of Duty) new release games, meaning that companies making the kinds of games that I'm excited to play are competing for a relatively tiny slice of an already stagnating pie.

Now game time doesn't translate directly to revenue, so it's probably true that your average Fortnite player spends much less per hour than someone who picked up Alan Wake II, so the numbers aren't quite as gloomy as they look, but it's clear that the gaming model has shifted substantially and that to some degree publishers are right that the future is in live services, even if their approach to the style of game is often terrible and counterproductive. There's a certain logic that it makes sense to make 10 live service games hoping that 1 will hit big and provide revenue for the next decade, vs 10 single player games where even if you get 6 hits you might make less money than a single Apex Legends or Destiny 2 might throw off.

From my perspective...these just aren't the games I want to play. I don't really like multiplayer games, I often don't like playing games at release, and barring my time with EverQuest and to some extent WoW, I almost never want to play the same game exclusively for months on end. I like variety and exploration and new worlds. I like playing both Spider-Man 2 and Tears of the Kingdom, and having them be extremely different experiences. I played a lot of Destiny and at the end hated my time with it because of how grindy and repetitive it was. I want to play stuff and move on to the next.

Of course single player games will keep being made. If nothing else there are hundreds of incredibly talented indie teams out there making great stuff. And you can still make money in the single player space. But the big publishers have seen the writing on the wall and the times are changing. To some extent they have changed. Gaming is my main media hobby and like a lot of aging people I'm starting to see my tastes a little marginalized. It'll be fine; my backlog will last longer than my lifetime anyway at this point (especially if you count games I want to play but don't own), but a lot of my favorite games of all time have come out recently and I like playing new stuff.

At least Nintendo seems to continue to have success with the older model. It has relatively few live service games (I guess Splatoon sort of counts?) and it is still doing fantastically, though of course a lot of Switch playtime is spent in Minecraft and Fortnite. I do love some Nintendo games. But I love other games too and to see their numbers dwindle is a little upsetting.

What I'm saying is...THE KIDS PLAY TOO MUCH DAMN FORTNITE!

Contra: Operation Galuga has garnered mixed reviews upon release, and seems to have been disappointing for a Wayforward project, though not out of character for a modern Konami game. Personally I think the graphics are pretty ugly and the gameplay looks a little...off for lack of a better word. It's a wait for sale for me.

But I'll be waiting a long time because the game launched at $40 (with a small launch window discount.) This seems pretty high for a 2D game without outstanding production values or anything else to drive up the costs. I thought that Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown was priced high at launch (and it is already seeing discounts) but that game, at least, has excellent production values and clearly had money put into it. Operation Galuga doesn't look much better than an XBLA game from 2011, and in fact it looks worse than the Contra game released on XBLA in 2011, Hard Corps: Uprising.

That would be fine if the game played excellently (it seems like it doesn't) but accounting for inflation Hard Corps: Uprising, which launched at $15 in 2011 dollars and $20 in 2024 dollars cost about half as much for a game with a similar amount of content and more polish. And Operation Galuga is far from the only "XBLA sized" game that has launched much higher than games did back then. Almost all the recent Konami games of this size, like Super Bomberman R2, have launched at $40 or higher (Bomberman was $50 but includes more content) and most recent Wayforward games, like River City Girls 2, also seem to launch at a similar price (though Shantae and the Seven Sirens is $30.) Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night remains at $40 base price, albeit with frequent discounts. Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator, a recently released game that got poor reviews and has not gotten any attention also launched at $40. It seems to be a pretty common price point for a new tier of games that sees itself as a cut above most indies and closer to AA games.

Of course there are still lots of true indies that are still launching at $15 (Balatro, a recent GOTY candidate, is an example) and in general there is much more price diversity than ever before, especially among digital games. Games launch at $10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 40, or 50 pretty regularly, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that when there are games of so many different sizes and budgets these days, but in my view a lot of games seem to be pricing themselves high for what they offer and what they cost to make. The rise from $60 to $70 for "AAA" games was justified by the increased production costs with more powerful hardware, but that's not applicable for something like Operation Galuga, which if anything should be cheaper to make (in inflation adjusted terms) because tools are much better than they were in 2011.

I don't really know how the economics of all this works because I am not privy to internal revenue reports for game companies, and maybe starting higher allows for deeper sales while extracting maximum revenue from your hardcore fan base, but at a time when there are more ways to get games cheaply than ever before I don't understand these big price increases. It certainly puts me off from buying a lot of games at launch that I might otherwise try, and just generally seems like a poor value proposition. Hi-Fi Rush came out at $30, and that game has incredible production values including licensed music and clearly cost a lot to make. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge came out at $25, and that's both a major license and a polished and excellent game. Helldivers 2 is $40 and, well, we can see that hasn't stopped anyone there.

I'm not claiming every 2D or smaller 3D game has to stay at XBLA prices forever, but some of the pricing seems totally out of whack with what's being offered, and as someone who likes to try a lot of games and likes to play games when they're new for "zeitgeist" purposes at least some of the time, it's scaring me off a lot of titles. I have to think I'm not alone here. I just don't understand the strategy. A lot of people will say "if you don't like the price just don't buy it" and...of course I don't. And a lot of other people aren't. But it keeps happening and more than complaining about it (I don't care that much about Operation Galuga, which looks very mid at best) I would like to understand the reasoning behind it.

The Crew is kind of a bad game with one great gimmick. The map.

The Crew is a (mostly) racing game that takes place on a compressed map of the contiguous United States, covering everything from Florida to Oregon, albeit shrunk down to a manageable size. You play Alex, a car guy who watches in horror as his benevolent gang leader brother is gunned down in front of him and he is framed for the murder, only to be pulled out of jail by the FBI to help them take down a corrupt agent and the evil gang leader who murdered, and has now replaced, your brother.

If this sounds incredibly stupid, I am, if anything, underselling just how bad the story and writing in this game are. Every mission, and there are about 60 of them, starts with some kind of story intro and many have post mission cut scenes too. You travel from region to region, working your way up the ranks of the gang to get at the leader, and meeting various baddies you have to take down on the way. That’s okay, though, because you’re also building your own “crew” of allies to help you, including a mechanic, a hacker, and a stunt man.

It's all shallow and stupid. You basically talk to a single ally in each region, who provides such helpful advice as “stay in first place during a race” while you do your missions, and a bunch of dumb and cliché game stuff happens. A bad guy tells you to meet him at a certain location, you show up, and oh noes it was a betrayal and now you have to escape his minions. Packages get air dropped into the desert and you have to run over 80 of them within the time limit to damage the operations of a rival gang. You could write most of this stuff yourself and it would be better.

Now of course most racing games are not known for their stories, so I don’t really think that this hurts The Crew, but it is worth noting because it reaches levels of stupidity rarely seen in the history of gaming. At one point the hacker character informs you that she’s smart, really really smart. At another point the stunt man, who you’ve known for all of 12 hours in game, tells you to abandon your quest for justice for your brother because your “crew” is your family now. Dire stuff.

While the bad story doesn’t really hurt the game much there are some deeper flaws that cause a lot more damage. I should note here that there are technical issues (I had several crashes playing on my Xbox Series X, which shouldn't happen at all, let alone in a game this old). There are also issues with microtransactions. I didn't really notice those because I wasn't interested in collecting cars in a game that will be unplayable at the end of the month, and you can upgrade the "free" car to be good enough to do all the single player stuff pretty easily, but they bothered a lot of people, and hampered the game. I'm not going to defend them except to say they weren't a factor for me, personally.

The mission design is also all over the place. Most of the missions are fine, if a little boring. Win a race against other cars, finish a checkpoint course before time runs out, things we’ve done a billion times in racing games. The course design is pretty mediocre, probably because the map seems to have been built to be a cool map of the US first and as a fun racing playground second, but these types of missions mostly work (a little more on that later.) However there are also missions where you have to chase and smash up an enemy car, and these are among the most frustrating experiences I can remember in recent gaming. Everything about them is inconsistent, from the damage you inflict from collisions to the other car’s speed and maneuverability, to the fact that the other car can crash into things and even get hung up on them but takes zero damage from doing so, so forcing it into oncoming traffic is actually a bad thing as it harmlessly and safely pinballs away from you. They’re terrible missions, I had to replay most of them several times to learn the route and get lucky on some of the hits, and I had no fun. There’s maybe nothing in gaming less fun than lining up behind a car to deliver a big hit with your nitro, only for it to accelerate away from you even though it was already going at top speed. Unless that’s trying for a big sideswipe only to get dodged at the last second and end up hung up on some piece of geometry as your quarry speeds away.

And those are not the only bad missions in the game. There are also races against rivals that require hairpin turns and shortcuts that seem literally impossible to win without the right car stats. Which means you end up grinding. In a racing game. That’s right, The Crew, despite being a gritty crime story, is also actually kind of a CaRPG, where your cars have stats that you can raise both by leveling up in general and by collecting loot that you equip for stat bonuses. Unlike most car games, like Forza or Gran Turismo, we’re not talking semi-realistic car loot like “racing tires vs street tires” that give some kind of semi-realistic performance boosts to your car but rather randomized stuff with actual stats attached, so you could get a new “gold” level 33 motorcore that somehow improves your car’s grip by 14. It’s an incredibly strange system that seems to be designed to encourage microtransactions but for me just made me go do random ‘challenges’ dotted around the environment. These are repetitive Ubisoft map vomit tasks like a slalom course that appears on a stretch of highway, or trying to drive as far away from the start of the challenge as you can in a time limit, or staying on the road and above a certain speed for as long as possible. They’re…mostly kind of fun, and after every successful run where you get at least a bronze medal (they go from bronze to gold, and then up to platinum after you reach level 50 near the end of the campaign) you get a car part for your current ride. So if you have an event that requires a dirt car and your dirt car isn’t high enough level you can grind it up until it meets spec. That was the only way I was able to get past certain missions and for a driving game it feels cheap and stupid. You don’t feel accomplished for raising your car’s level to the point where you can win easily, and frankly this would have stopped me from playing any more of the game if it weren’t for the fact that the grinding activities themselves are fairly enjoyable.

They also encourage you to engage with the one thing the Crew really has going for it. That map. You start out in the Midwest before moving to the East Coast, down to the South, and then making your way West through the Mountain States and to the West coast, doing a dozen missions in each region as you go. The Midwest kind of sucks, mostly being bland and flat, but once you get to the more urbanized East with some additional variety and then especially the South onwards you end up with a lot of great environmental variety, from salt flats to bayous. The road trips between the regions are perhaps the best thing in the entire game, these long stretches of highway where you just drive and soak in the environments as they change around you and do the challenges doting your route. It’s Zen-like gaming that you rarely get in a racing game, much more grounded than something like Forza Horizon (which encourages you to plow across fields and through obstacles) and thus much more chill. I even used the cockpit view for some of these drives and they reminded me of actual long drives I’ve been on in my life, and the feeling of calm you can get on the open road.

The layout of the map and the number of environments is great but as an actual reflection of the United States it is, of course, quite limited. There’s something charming about its various fake roadside businesses and generic advertising, but of course the game only had so much budget behind it so regional differences in architecture and building style all get erased in favor of reusing assets. There are “landmarks” dotted throughout the map that you can go on for a small XP and cash bonus, but they’re unimpressive, as are the cities, which feel closer to small regional cities like Stamford Connecticut than sprawling metropolises like Vegas or New York. It’s an impressive map and can be fun to explore, but the game’s roots in the 360/PS3 generation are clear in its limitations.

The true limitation, however, is in the gameplay. I’ve already mentioned the hit or miss mission design and the RPG elements, but the base racing is mediocre at best. I played Need for Speed The Run, a game with a similar tone and story, a few years ago, and while I probably liked The Crew better overall I think even that game had better handling. There are five types of “tuning” in the game, ranging from circuit cars to dirt specialists, and most vehicles can have at least a couple different types applied to them. The upgrades mean the cars feel different but not distinct because their stats area constantly changing. Couple that with the parts that upgrade individual stats and you end up with a handling model that has way too many variables, with sometimes disastrous results. While you can play through the whole game in just your initial car (which can be tuned in all five styles) I decided to get an SUV for the dirt courses just to have a little variety. This was a disaster. It steered like a boat. On one optional mission the race course went over a wooden bridge and my car would spin out and flip whenever I drove over it at speed, even going completely straight. This made the race unwinnable and was…not fun. The same thing happened in a different car in the desert where I crashed on a small rock I never even saw, but at least there I could just steer around it. Finally, the random traffic on the roads is a huge pain in the butt and can ruin races or challenges by creating severely disruptive obstacles at random. When everything is working well the Crew is a passable racer, but I’d say that only happens 70% of the time, and it’s very frustrating the other 30%. Additionally, it can be hard to tell what obstacles are destructible at first glance (bus shelters yes, some roadside railings no) and cop chases can be very frustrating because like the cars you need to chase down and crash the cops can do ludicrous things, like easily keep up with your dirt tuned racer while driving their street tuned interceptors cross country. They have helicopters too, and we all know how villainous video game helicopters are.

So as a single player experience The Crew has a bad story and below average racing that’s partially redeemed by an excellent map and an engaging challenge system. There are other niggling problems too, like how if you have the DLC your FBI handler will call you up to tell you to go do DLC races and forcibly change your waypoint to direct you to them even if you’ve set another destination. You can change it back, but it’s impossible to overstate how much I loathe this kind of thing. Developers who decide that they know what you want to do better than you do should stop making games and go do something else with their lives. The game also has EXP and perk systems, but they offer disappointing benefits like making your nitro 2% faster or slightly increasing the radius of the map your car uncovers around it as you travel.

Maybe it’s unfair to focus on these single player issues, though, because The Crew is, in some ways, intended primarily as a multiplayer experience. Coming to the game so late I wasn’t able to get into a PVP race, let alone find a “crew” of fellow enthusiasts to co-op with (and the whole main story can be played in co-op) but I’ve played enough racing games to know that this one’s handling issues and progression systems would make it a very mediocre choice compared to better handling games. The base issues with the racing wouldn’t be solved by having a “crew” and if I wanted to roam around a map with some bros I’d just play Forza Horizon. It’s worth noting that even in its prime this doesn’t seem to be a game that people primarily played in multiplayer. The most basic multiplayer trophy for completing a mission in a “Crew” has a 26% completion rate on PlayStation. Other multiplayer trophy and achievement rates show that the majority of people played this game as a single player experience. This is true for a lot of these games that claim they need to be always online in order to facilitate player interaction. The only real interaction I had was when I stepped away from the game to pee and a griefer drove up behind me and pushed my car down the road quite a way just to mess with me. Thanks for the always online fun, Ubisoft!

The Crew received poor reviews at launch and has now been delisted in anticipation of being shut down at the end of the month. That’s why I played it when I did. Ironically, if not for the shut down I may never have pulled it out of my backlog. The thing is, divorced from its initial price and context it’s not an awful game from the early XBONE/PS4 era. The map gives it a unique hook even if it could have been better and had more interesting things to find and do. The challenge system makes it a decent game to just drive around in playing little snippets of gameplay for CaRPG rewards. The awful story can be amusing at times. It’s the kind of game that’s ideal for booting up when you just want something to grind away at or a virtual space to spend a little time in. Since finishing the story I’ve gone back to polish off some achievements and in 30 minute sessions just trying to finish off some random objective it can be enjoyable despite its problems. Are there better racing games out there? Lots. But The Crew isn’t awful, and it is unique. It deserves to be discovered by people delving into the games of the past or hunting through bargain bins for random games to have a little fun with. It deserves to be inaccurately labeled as a hidden gem by someone who just really likes the admittedly cool map. It deserves to still be a game after the end of this month, and it won’t be.

I’m glad I played the Crew before it shut down. I put over 25 hours into it all told, and even though it’s not a great game it scratched that arcade open world racing game itch I get from time to time. It’s not as good as any of the Forza Horizon games, or even the modern Need for Speeds (we don’t have to discuss Burnout Paradise here because…well…) but it’s doing something a little bit different. If the multiplayer servers nobody really used were shut down and the game was stripped back to its single player missions, challenges, and that map it would probably be something I at least think about going back to from time to time. Instead I won’t be able to. It’s getting shut down for good and it will become lost media. All those cute little art assets and carefully constructed map areas will just be gone. No kid will find a copy at a flea market and pick it up for $10 and enjoy laughing at its dumb story or wring some enjoyment out of polishing off all its Ubisoft map vomit content because they’re bored one summer. No old person, like me, will be able to look back it because they were always curious, or because it holds good memories. It will just be gone, and it didn’t have to be. It will be gone because Ubisoft doesn’t care about games except as products, and built in an expiration date. Come March 31 we’re all going to be kicked out of the Crew, and the whole world they built will be lost like tears in the digital rain.

Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle is one of those delightful experiments that seem to happen most often at the beginning of a console’s lifecycle. The pitch of “Mario with guns in an Xcom-lite game” was so insane that it seemed hard to believe when it was announced. Here was Ubisoft, which had already transitioned into its “open world factory” phase and was well on the way towards its “everything is a live service you have to pay for constantly” final(?) form, making a contained, level based, tactics game unlike basically anything else in their contemporary catalog, using Nintendo characters in a way they not only weren’t often used but seemed like they shouldn’t be allowed to be used. It called back to the CD-I Mario and Zelda games, except this was for Nintendo’s own system and, as it turned out, was quite good.

The early days of the Switch were not quite a software desert, but were pretty sparse before the Eshop floodgates fully opened and everyone started porting everything to the handheld. After the Wii U nobody was quite sure how well the Switch would perform, so while Zelda was a massive, industry defining, hit and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Splatoon 2 added some depth (along with smaller games like Snipperclips and Fast RMX) some of the early whiffs like 1-2 Switch and Arms left room for other games to get some attention. Kingdom Battle was one such game that slotted comfortably into the gap, providing a tactics experience unlike anything on the console (and in some ways unique for all of gaming) with an appealing aesthetic and some nice visual humor. It was a modest hit, and I was one of the people who bought it. I really enjoyed playing through the first few worlds, culminating in the incredible spectacle of the third world boss fight, but lost steam in the fourth world, where I was too much in a groove to change my team but not really enjoying grinding through the fights or solving the overworld puzzles that started to repeat. I put the game down and didn’t pick it back up, thinking I might eventually finish it but not overly concerned since I’d gotten about 15 hours and had other stuff to play. Some games are neat for awhile but wear out their welcome and that’s better than being a bummer to begin with.

I did pick up the game a couple times over the years, playing a chapter or two before falling off, but slowly moved it to the “permanently retired” bench and moved on. That was until a sequel was unexpectedly announced.

Sparks of Hope came out in October 2022, five years after the first game, and earned a solid 85 in Metacritic. I instantly put it on my wishlist to pick up when it dropped to a lower price, and I think a lot of other people did the same. Five years in the Switch had more games than anyone could play, and a fun but slight little tactics game just wasn’t a priority. The first game stood out because it was a unique premise nobody had seen before and was released on a console still finding its footing and lacking a strong library beyond the heaviest hitters. The second game had neither going for it, and it bombed.

One nice thing about Sparks of Hope not being Nintendo developed, though, is that Ubisoft games do eventually get cheap. I snagged the second game with all the dlc for $20, which is about the price I was looking for, and that reminded me of the unfinished business I had with the first one. To my memory I wasn’t that far from the end and even in a series with only the most basic of stories my preference is always to finish a game before playing its sequel. So I decided to pick up the old game and see how long it would take me to roll credits, and I instantly remembered why I’d put it down.

Kingdom Battle has some serious quality of life issues that get worse towards the back end of the game. The game is divided into chapters and there are multiple battles per chapter. This is fine, but for some insane reason if you leave in the middle of a chapter it resets things (you can save and shut the game down you just can’t leave.) In a 2017 game it just seems deranged for it not to keep your progress. I quit out of a battle I couldn’t win in the wrong way and had to refight one I’d already cleared, and solve a puzzle I’d already done years earlier (and one I’d done upon booting the game up.) Good times. There are also multi-phase battles where you defeat one wave of enemies and then have to face another wave without healing and on the same battlefield with some cover destroyed. This is…fine in theory, if tedious, but it turns out there’s no checkpoint in between the sub battles so when I tried to reset after botching an opening I was back to the front of the line again. Friends, I had to walk away for a bit and do something else.

After more attempts than it should have taken (including one where I lost due to terrible luck on a series of 50-50 chances that went bad four in a row) I defeated the sub boss through shameless cheesing (I have little shame when I just want to move forward) and found out that I was actually one puzzle away from the final battle. I’d been even closer than I thought. The final boss battle was mechanically pretty sound but annoyed me with too many minions added and the old “boss heals itself” trick. I beat it my first try, but wasn’t able to fully enjoy it despite the decent mechanics because of how annoyed I was with the sequence beforehand (which might have been less frustrating if I’d known it was the final sequence before the last boss and so the hardest in the game.)

Overall I think that Mario+Rabbids Kingdom Battle is a good, though flawed, game. I actually think the overworld puzzles add a lot to it, some of the world themes are a lot of fun, the tactics are deep but approachable, and it’s charming and well made. One of those 8 out of 10 experiences that won’t blow your mind but is still a solid and polished experience. As an early Switch game you can see why it was a hit, and I can also see why nobody was really clamoring for a direct sequel, even a good one. In Jeff's review of the first game he said it wore out its welcome by the end, and in Dan's more positive review of the second he also thought the first game became "rote" before it was over. I understand why I stopped playing before I hit the credits.

But I’m also glad that I finally beat it. Not because the ending was good (it was…okay) or because I had some deep need to complete it (I did not) but because I no longer have to look at the icon on my Switch and remember I have unfinished business and all my curiosity about how much longer the game is and what, exactly, the final boss is like has been sated. It also made me reflect on the Switch and gaming and my own life over these past seven years. A lot of people have talked about that experience of finding an old cartridge in a dusty box and plugging it in to finally beat it, and while this was not some childhood white whale there’s some of the same satisfaction.

I still haven’t played the Donkey Kong DLC for Mario+Rabbids: Kingdom Battle, so I’m not quite done with the game yet (though I plan to take a break) but just knowing I’ve rolled the credits gives a nice little feeling of satisfaction. It also enables me to think about where it fits in the overall Switch library (somewhere between 10-20 of the games I’ve played) and in the history of the two companies it belongs to. For Nintendo it represents a willingness to license out its characters and experiment that was not realized as much as I’d have liked during the Switch’s lifetime but did lead to some other interesting projects like Cadence of Hyrule and Star Fox showing up in Starlink: Battle for Atlas (remember that one?). For Ubisoft it represented one of the last examples of a game outside their formulaic wheelhouse, though Sparks of Hope and the Prince of Persia Metroidvania show that they haven’t fully given up on games that aren’t just Tom Clancy’s Assassin’s Farcry. Ultimately Kingdom Battle represents the kind of game that I wish there were more of today. An interesting experiment with a lot of love and polish intended for broad appeal and mass popularity, without microtransaction or live service mechanics. A dying breed I sorely miss. That’s another reason I’m glad I finally finished it. It deserves respect for taking the kind of risk I wish we saw more of. Eventually I’ll check out the (somewhat unnecessary) sequel too. But first that DLC.

The Nintendo Switch is poised to become the highest selling console of all time. I honestly didn’t think that anything would dethrone the Nintendo DS or the PS2, both of which achieved their sales at a very different time, before the rise of cellphone gaming and, for the PS2, at a time when DVD adoption was in some ways more important than games.

But on the Switch’s 7^th anniversary it has slowed down but has not stopped selling and with at least a year left as Nintendo’s primary machine and undoubtably some long tail years after that, it looks like it will get there. It’s a remarkable achievement, especially coming off the Wii U, and it reflects a system perfectly designed for the time when it was released and supported with some of the best software gaming has ever seen.

So why doesn’t it seem like a bigger deal to me?

I’ve had a Switch since launch. The fan has burned out on my unit so unless it’s cold out I have to direct an external fan to prevent it from overheating but the unit still works, and so does the pro controller I picked up with it and have played almost everything with since then, spending only minimal time in portable mode.

I’ve played at least some games on the Switch every year since its release, and generally it has had a couple titles that have been favorites in all my top 10s. Breath of the Wild remains my favorite game of all time. Tears of the Kingdom was my favorite game of last year, and Mario Wonder was my third favorite; an impressive showing. Just last month I fell briefly in love with Kirby’s Return to Dreamland Deluxe, so it’s not like the system has been gathering dust for me in its latter years (though I didn’t turn it on for about a month before then.) There are lots of other games I’ve really loved on the Switch, like the entire Xenoblade Chronicles series, Mario Odyssey and 3D World + Bowser’s Fury, and the Animal Crossing game that took the world by storm. I’ve also loved some classic emulated stuff like Mario Galaxy and the fantastic Sega Ages ports, and some (temporarily) exclusive indies like Hades and Neon White (both played on the Switch and absolute top games in the years they were released.) There are a number of Switch games I still really want to play, some of which I already own, so it’s impossible for me to argue that the Switch is lacking in software.

The Switch has also had a decent cultural impact in my circles. I have three close friends who own Switches, at least if you count one who bought it for his son, and from anecdotal evidence it seems to be the console most relevant among kids. On the other hand, I don’t really see Switches played in public the way I did PSPs or DS/3DS systems, but that may be a function of its size. I know that the 3DS and Vita were much more manageable on the train for me than the Switch has been. However, it’s clear that Nintendo has not lost any of its cultural cache, as demonstrated by the incredible success of the Mario movie and the various Nintendo merchandise and apparel you see out and about. Video games are bigger than ever, and the Switch is part of that.

However, I think that part of why the Switch doesn’t ‘feel’ huge can be seen in the ways in which gaming has evolved. Among young people Fortnite and Roblox and Minecraft are ascendant. Minecraft and Fortnite are on the Switch, of course, but they don’t “live” there. The same is true for the vast majority of the Switch’s third party support. If you count indies (or even if you don’t) the Switch has enjoyed more third party support than any Nintendo home console since the SNES, but almost all of those games are on other platforms and perform better there. Yeah they put Mortal Kombat 1 on the Switch, but who would ever play it there if they didn’t have to?

And this non-exclusivity also defined the Switch’s early years, which were driven largely by Wii U ports. Of course there were some amazing exclusives, like Super Mario Odyssey or Xenoblade Chronicles 2, but without the Wii U’s software lineup the Switch’s early library looks very different, with games like Arms failing to make anything like the impact that something like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (the Switch’s most successful game) did. Even though I never had a Wii U and I played those ports, this impacted my perception of the Switch’s identity.

On a similar note, the Switch hasn’t spawned a single major Nintendo IP, and is the first system not to do so, despite its long lifecycle (it will be 8 years, the longest home console cycle ever for the big N.) The Switch has a lot of big games and great games, and they’re almost all ports or sequels. To some degree that’s just where gaming is these days, but the PS4 at least spawned IP like Ghost of Tsushima and Horizon Zero Dawn. The Switch? Nintendo has barely tried.

And all that adds up to the ways in which the Switch feels more like a handheld than a home console in a lot of ways. Developers have worked miracles with it but it has been underpowered since the day it launched. It has often been a compliment to other systems rather than a primary platform for hardcore gamers, most of which have praised it mostly for the ability to play on plane flights and in hotel rooms. Nintendo has focused on it as a place to put games from its already successful franchises rather than a place to grow new IP and experiences. And it’s impossible to blame them, considering the incredible success it has had.

Part of my perception of the Switch is undoubtably that I’m getting older and no console will ever wow me the way the systems of my youth did, especially since technological innovation in games has slowed to a crawl. Part of it is my own personal indifference to the idea of handheld gaming. But I think that the Switch also represents Nintendo fully giving up on competing with “AAA” gaming and focusing on a difference slice of the market; one that I can appreciate and enjoy but that just doesn’t feel as “big” to me, for lack of a better term. Arguably they started this with the Wii, but the Switch is the culmination of that very successful strategy. And so for me it will go down as a system that I enjoyed a lot of games on and was well worth owning but that fundamentally wasn’t “for” me.

When the dust has settled the Switch will have carved out a very important niche in video game history. It will be the biggest selling console ever (probably.) It will be the home of some of the biggest games of its time. It will represent the childhood console and object of nostalgia for a generation of kids. 15 years from now the Internet (if it still exists as it does today) will be full of “hey, remember how great the Switch was?” articles and videos. But right now, I can’t ‘feel’ that, and it makes me feel a little bit out of touch. Oh well. We all get old. At least I had Zelda.

I didn’t think it would be Kirby.

When I wrote last month about how I’ve been in a gaming doldrums for some time now I was confident that something would pull me out of it. I thought it might be Final Fantasy VII Rebirth or perhaps some random indie or shadow drop that would jolt me back into being excited about games again. What I did not expect was that it would be an enhanced remaster of a decade+ old Wii game starring everybody’s favorite piece of place-holder art made mascot, the pink puffball himself, Kirby.

I’ve never been a Kirby fan. I don’t hate the character, and he’s pretty fun in Smash because of his transformations, but the combination of the cutesy world and the slightly weird way that he controls when he’s doing his floating thing has always made me lukewarm at best on his games. I’ve dabbled in them throughout the years, playing them at friends’ houses and renting a few, but the only two I’ve owned were Kirby 64, which was an interesting but not very compelling title, and Kirby Star Allies, which is fun in short bursts but too chaotic to be an actually good platformer, especially solo.

I’m not really sure why I picked up Kirby’s Return to Dreamland Deluxe for my Switch. It was $40, which counts as being on sale but definitely not cheap. I played the Forgotten Land demo recently and that game has me intrigued about the idea of Kirby as a 3D platformer, a genre I tend to prefer over 2D. But something drew me not to Forgotten Land but to Return to Dreamland. I think it was a combination of that game’s more recent reviews and the fact that I’m going through a stressful period of life right now and I wanted something simple and easy and cheerful and pleasant. I’m getting a little burned out on apocalypses and misery and the thought of spending some time in a world of Waddle Dees and really good music had a lot of appeal. There’s also the fact that Super Mario Bros. Wonder somewhat reignited my love of 2D platformers even to the point where I went back and finished Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe, a game I am lukewarm on at best.

The thing that made Return to Dreamland click for me is how easy it is to get into. Minimal story, minimal tutorial, few controls to master (especially if you’re already familiar with the basics of Kirby) and a very low level of challenge with a gentle curve. I don’t dislike difficult or complicated games, and even love some of them, but there’s something so comforting about playing something simple and friendly where the developers just wanted you to see and hear some fun things and have a good time. I guess that’s much of Kirby’s appeal, and Nintendo’s appeal in general, though while I wouldn’t call something like Tears of the Kingdom particularly difficult, I also definitely wouldn’t call it simple and easy to learn.

The other part of Nintendo’s appeal is polish. Return to Dreamland Deluxe has plenty of that. Despite being an upgraded version of a Wii game, it looks absolutely fantastic, with bright and colorful visuals that have a timeless appeal. The music is excellent, and I’ve tried to listen to podcasts multiple times while playing, only to find myself turning them off so I can crank up the game’s tunes. There are a lot of extra modes and unlockables, including the patented Kirby multiplayer minigames, which seem pretty quaint by 2023 standards. Is anyone actually going to invite friends over to play these simple party games that were already starting to be outdated when the Wii was relevant? Maybe they make sense for very young kids. They are, however, presented in both a cute little theme park you can roam around completing challenges and collecting stamps to be rewarded with consumables and cosmetics, and also in the game’s flying ship hub, where you can unlock challenge levels as well. It’s a lot of material to supplement a relatively short main game, and there’s even a new epilogue in the Deluxe version, which might secretly be the best part of the entire package.

While Return to Dreamland is not nearly as good as Super Mario Bros. Wonder, I do think it might have served as a bit of inspiration for that game. Just like in Mario Wonder the stages are often built around gimmicks, like a water stage with a strong current or a couple sections of stages where you use a boot that resembles Kuribo’s shoe. That’s not uncommon in platformers, but in certain levels in Return to Dreamland you encounter enemies with powered up abilities that, once absorbed, allow Kirby to unleash screen covering attacks that can break apart pieces of the environment, opening up new paths. This ends up functioning a lot like the Wonder Seeds in SMBW, though in a more predictable and less transformative way. Despite not being at the level of Wonder, Return to Dreamland does manage to capture some of the novelty and delight that drives that game, and that helped remind me what I love so much about gaming. The sense of discovery and possibility within a game while you explore its levels, while you also take in the creativity and craftsmanship of the people who made the game. The clever level design, whimsical graphics, and gorgeous music drew me in and instead of struggling to engage with the game I found myself scouring the levels and playing longer than I intended because I was excited to see what was next.

My enjoyment of Return to Dreamland led me to pick up some other games and I found myself enjoying those too. I never finished the original Bayonetta, which I started in 2022, and I played through a couple more levels of that, enjoying the over-the-top presentation and brawling action. Then I picked up Crisis Core, which I also laid aside last year and want to finish before Rebirth next week, and I enjoyed diving back into that a little. I found myself mapping out the games I want to get through this year in my head, which is generally a good sign that I’m getting absorbed in the hobby again. I’m not constantly playing in every spare moment like I was with Tears of the Kingdom, but I’m able to play a couple hours here and there without finding myself struggling to engage or enjoy myself, and that feels good.

I wish more games like Return to Dreamland were being made today. I don’t necessarily mean 2D platformers, which there are many of, but these higher budget straightforward polished experiences, almost regardless of genre. I guess this is just partially more nostalgia for the days when major publisher games put out games with 8-12 hour linear campaigns. But it’s also partially a desire for more games that want the player to enjoy themselves without falling into the “cozy” trap of being boring and repetitive. More games that want to encourage and cheer players on instead of challenging and grading them. Of course those games still exist; Mario Wonder being a prime example, but they seem fewer and further between in an industry where big budget games seem to favor either bloat or challenge as a way to extend play time and justify their existence. I think a lot of us agree that one of the best things in gaming is to play through a tightly designed linear experience that doesn’t overstay its welcome, it’s just that the economic model for those games seems to have broken down outside the indie space.

I wouldn’t say Return to Dreamland is a particularly great game. If I had played it last year I don’t think it would have made my top 10 (though it would have supplanted Immortals of Aveum in position 11, and there’s a much bigger gap between Kirby and that game than between Kirby and Mario RPG, my #10.) It’s a solid 8 out of 10, but while I enjoy the breezy difficulty it’s a little bit too easy to fully engage me. Sometimes a game comes around at the right time and it doesn’t have to be anything spectacular, it just has to be good in the right ways that you need at that moment. Kirby’s good in the right ways.

I knew that at some point I’d get back into gaming, but this was a long drought of interest for me and I never thought that Kirby would be the game to pull me back in. I’m still not 100% sure why I picked it up. Nonetheless I did, and it’s a lesson for me that when I’m feeling unengaged maybe I should lower the barrier to entry and go back to basics with something that’s just some simple fun. And it’s a small thing but I’ll never think of the Kirby franchise in the same way. I think I want to explore some more of the games, many of which are on the Switch Online service and some others of which I have on 3DS, just as a way to get familiar with this franchise that now matters to me a little more. And that excites me a little bit. Kirby will never be up there with Mario or Zelda for me, but I now understand better why he has so many fans, and I think I’m one of them.

There are a lot of terrible games out there. Most are forgotten quickly, some have a cult following, but a few become legend. Often you can identify the reasons behind those legends. E.T. for the Atari 2600 helped cause the game crash of the early 80s and changed the industry forever. The Zelda CD-I games took a franchise that was big then and has only gotten bigger and made these weird, terrible, games, in the most un-Nintendo like way ever. Shaq Fu is a fighting game based on a basketball legend at the height of his popularity, a truly ridiculous premise.

Superman 64 shares a couple attributes with these games, chiefly a recognizable license and the fact that it came out at a time when there were fewer games on the market so we all knew about most of them, but it's hardly unique in that. There is an almost endless river of licensed trash, with plenty of bad superhero games cluttering shelves. There are multiple awful Batman games on the PlayStation, and almost every major hero has had his or her share of trash software. Yet Superman 64 seems more recognized and important than those other games, despite not having the industry impact of an E.T. or the novelty of the Zelda CD-I games or Shaq Fu. After all while a basketball player fighting game is absurd, superhero games have been around for almost as long as there have been video games.

So what makes it special? Why is it that it was inevitable that Blight Club would eventually get to this particular game?

I think there are a few factors. For one, while there are tons of superhero games there are not that many Superman games specifically. He has not been nearly as prolific as contemporaries like Spider-Man or Batman, and if you don't count appearances in franchises like Injustice or Suicide Squad we haven't seen a Superman game in a long time. For another, it was an N64 game. The N64 was a console a lot of people had during their impressionable childhoods and it was a console without nearly as many games as something like the PlayStation, so it was easier to be aware of more of them. Almost every N64 kid rented Superman 64 or played it at a friend's house or at least saw it on the shelves and read about it in magazines or on the web.

Finally there's the premise of the first few levels. Superman 64 is not actually a game about flying through rings, but that's how it starts and that's how it's remembered. The sheer stupidity of taking the Superman character, a god among men, and reducing him to flying through the rings shows such a lack of interest in the character and a paucity of imagination that it stands out in the mind. The Catwoman game on Gamecube is terrible, but that's at least a game about doing Catwoman things like stealing and fighting goons. Flying Superman through rings is a Shaq-Fu level of dumb that resonates with people.

There's something fascinating about how the makers of Superman 64 managed to create a terrible game that has somehow endured with a lot more visibility than many better games made at the same time. Most of the N64 library has faded into the background. When's the last time you thought about Excitebike 64, a top 25 seller on the system and a pretty good game? But Superman 64 comes up again and again. The developers managed to capture something special by creating a game that's not just bad but also ill conceived, with a character who is not well suited to games and doesn't get a lot of them. They made a hallmark of the N64 library by being so bad at their jobs they transcended dreck and ascended into camp.

Sony recently announced that the PS5 was entering the latter half of its lifespan. Microsoft, meanwhile, promised that new hardware is being developed and it will be the biggest power leap we've ever seen. Meanwhile I'm over here questioning whether the Series X and PS5 will ever justify their existence let alone their price points.

Whatever you want to say about the current generation of games, I think it's hard to argue that it's a quantum leap over the last one. It's true that something like Spider-Man 2 looks enough better than its predecessor that you wouldn't necessarily mistake it for a PS4 game, but how much did we really gain from that slight improvement? Insomniac themselves have questioning the amount of money that was spent making Spider-Man 2 and especially making it look as polished and bombastic as it is. If getting the most out of the new hardware is so expensive that it's impractical even for a sure fire hit like that, then how many games are actually going to utilize its potential?

Meanwhile Tears of the Kingdom showed that in terms of gameplay and physics, we've reached a point where software development is a much bigger limitation than hardware. Yes, ToK would have benefitted from being on a more powerful system, but it was on the Switch, a platform that's nearly 7 years old and was underpowered when it released. Switch 2 is probably necessary at this point, but even that is going to be weaker than the PS5 is, and the platform it's replacing has a power level not much greater than Xbox 360, which is coming up on 20 years old.

What I'm saying is that yes, power matters, but we've definitely reached the point of diminished returns. When I look at my favorite games from last year, they are dominated by Switch games and indie experiences, with AAA games mostly failing to make much of an impression on me. I did play God of War: Ragnarok last year, and really enjoyed it, but there's a PS4 version of that game. Same with Horizon Forbidden West. I've seen the comparison videos showing the PS4 vs PS5 versions and there are differences, but they're not differences that I'd pay $500 for.

AAA gaming is currently in something of a software crisis, not really a hardware one. Games have gotten incredibly expensive to make and market, and game design has moved more and more towards an unsustainable "live services" model that gamers are starting to reject. AAA games used to be able to somewhat rely on a "wow" factor to sell themselves, with production values carrying a lot of the load, but that's getting harder and harder and we see situations where something like Suicide Squad compares unfavorably on just a visual level to the same studio's last game, which came out almost a decade ago. The same could be said for Skull and Bones, which does look better than Black Flag in most ways but certainly not enough to make up for its deficits, and looks worse in certain key areas.

Sony is a little disappointed by the recent performance of the PS5, but they're also giving us a year where there are no new first party games for it. Microsoft is coming off a year where it released a string of games that ranged from disappointing (Forza, Starfield) to downright awful (Redfall.) Last year has been deemed an incredible year for games, and in many ways it was, but if you look at the actual games that made up that list you see a lot of indies, Switch games, and games that ran okay on Xbox One and PS4 (like Armored Core and Street Fighter 6.) You see many fewer games that attempted to fully utilize the hardware of the new machines, and many that were "next gen only" seem to have been that way because they didn't bother to develop versions for the old systems, not because it was impossible to do so.

So what is the problem that new hardware is going to fix? If fully tapping the current hardware is impractically expensive and difficult, and if the games that do make use of that hardware aren't tending to hit any harder than games built for older machines what is the pitch for investing in yet another expensive box to put under the TV only to serve up the same experiences in a slightly shinier format, while the software side of development continues to flounder at the high end? Is Spider-Man 3 going to come out for PS6 and cost $500 million to make, or be cut back in ambition and scope because development is unsustainable?

As an old head gamer who has been around since the days of the NES I have always been excited about new hardware. I have fond memories of playing Resogun when the PS4 launched and Dirt 5 when I got my Xbox Series X. But right now I want the platform holders to actually finish justifying the current generation rather than looking on to the next one. I want to see Microsoft actually put out some special first party games for the Series X. I want to see Sony give the PS5 a lineup that can compete with the PS4's, which it absolutely does not have at this point. I don't want to see budgets get even bigger leading to even more microtransactions and live services and fewer games I actually care about.

Console generations have gotten longer over time for various reasons (economic crash extending 7th generation, half step consoles extending 8th) but now it seems the manufacturers want to shorten this one and...there's no reason to. Fix the problems with the software first. Then you can sell us new boxes. Nintendo may be pushing the Switch 2 to 2025, which would give the Switch a full 8 years as an underpowered system, and one of the most successful platforms of all time. Meanwhile last year had some of the best software that platform has ever seen, and it remains relevant. You'd think that others would learn from this but instead it seems like they're going to take the Tim the Tool Man Taylor route of More Power.

Personally I'd be happier with less power and a better suite of games.