New Years Resolutions are lame and New Years Resolutions about video games are even lamer, but I can't sleep right now and I've been thinking a fair amount about gaming and what I want out of it in the new year. These resolutions are mostly for me to check in on at the end of next year to see whether I stuck to them or deviated and figure out why (did I get undisciplined or did I have good reasons) but if people want to list their own and use this post to sort through their own thoughts about gaming in the futuristic year of 2021 they are, of course, welcome.

1) Play more, spend less.

This is the same resolution I make every year, and last year I did better than I have in the past. My game spending was way down, and I hope to get it down further. Gamepass has been pretty useful for that; giving me stuff I'm interested in for a low subscription price so that I can get through games like Carrion and Monster Train without buying them, and of course all of Microsoft's first party output, which admittedly wasn't a large savings in 2020. I want to continue this trend. I have so many games already that I really don't need to buy new ones unless there's a specific reason.

2) Play more current year games.

My best gaming experiences in 2020 were with 2020 games. I like being part of the zeitgeist a little bit and talking about the newer stuff, and newer games tend to have lots of quality of life improvements that I enjoy. Since 2021 will be the year the new consoles really start to flourish I'd like to play the new stuff that comes out for them, which will also involve getting a PS5 whenever that's a thing that's actually possible to do. This is, of course, somewhat in conflict with item #1 on my list, but with Game Pass on my Xbox and the fact that I have a few hundred dollars in Sony Rewards stuff I can use for PlayStation I should be able to keep up with the newer games without spending much actual cash, which will be even easier if I follow resolution #3

3) Be more selective in the 'big' games I play.

Some of my favorite games of the year were big AAA experiences like Final Fantasy VII Remake and even the much maligned Cyberpunk 2077. But I also played a bunch of middling open world stuff from Ubisoft and some other time sinks that just weren't worth the time I put into them. I get a lot more out of a short but fun smaller game than I do putting endless grindy hours into these huge open world experiences unless those experiences are truly great. This year I played stuff like Marvel's The Avengers and Assassin's Creed III and they just weren't worth the time and effort. I definitely want to play a bunch of AAA stuff in 2021 because I really love some of those games, but I need to choose my spots better and commit to games I really like. If a game like Carrion is a flawed but interesting experience that's only a couple sessions of playing invested. Watch Dogs Legion lasted about 10-12 hours after the point it was no longer fun. That's not good math.

4) Continue doing series marathons.

I've done some series marathons over the last couple years, including God of War, Ratchet & Clank, and Assassin's Creed. Each has been rewarding in its own way, and since I tend to collect all the games from a series when I am interested in the new one I have plenty of series left to play. I haven't even finished Ratchet & Clank or Assassin's Creed. It's easy to burn out playing series games back to back, but there's also a sense of accomplishment and the chance to follow a story and gameplay development closely. I like that.

5) Finish games left over from 2020

I have a few games I did not finish from 2020, including Inversion, which is not a good game but where I am at the final boss so I should just buckle down and beat his face in. I also have some DLC and other stuff to clean up. Since the first couple months of 2021 are looking pretty sparse this is a good time to get through that stuff, and maybe do a couple games in some series I'd like to clear out.

6) Play more games on my treadmill

One good trend of 2020 (one of the few) is that I got an Xbox Series X and hooked up my old Xbox to my treadmill. Most games require too much dexterity to play on it, but turn-based games like Monster Train or adventure/Visual Novel games like Coffee Talk can be played as long as I'm not running, which I mostly avoid to preserve my old man knees. Since I tend to spend over an hour a day on the thing that opens up plenty of time for additional gaming, and I want to experiment more and get through more. It will allow me both to play more games without having to find extra time for them (since using my treadmill is a higher priority) and to be less bored on the treadmill, since a good game can really engage me and make me lose track of time. Win/Win. Not every game works on it but I want to keep experimenting and find the ones that do, then play them that way.

7) Play less overall

I played way too many games in 2020. I finished nearly 20 games released that year alone and an even larger number from my backlog. I played through 8 full JRPGs. I hope that 2021 has a lot more varied activity in store for me and more opportunities to leave the heckin' house. I love video games but 2020 was too much of a good thing. And way too many bad things as well!

That's it for me. Remember to start writing 2021 on your checks if you still write checks. Feel free to write your own resolutions or say mean things about mine, I don't care. And thanks to all you forumites for arguing about The Last Of Us Part II, Cyberpunk 2077, and the weird and messed up Grandia side story I posted about.

You made 2020 a little less horrible and isolated, so, you know, much appreciated. Except for the forum bots. You guys suck!

The first Watch Dogs game is one of my least favorite games I’ve ever finished. I hated the protagonist, the story, the setting, and thought the gameplay was barely adequate. I only saw it through to the credits out of some sort of twisted combination of spite and the hope that something cool would happen. There were a couple decent sequences, including a fun battle in a junkyard, and I thought the soundtrack was okay, but overall I thoroughly disliked that game.

Watch Dogs 2 made substantial improvements. Marcus Holloway and crew were appealing protagonists, the story, while far from great, was at least engaging and had interesting moments, and I really liked the version of San Francisco the game presented; one of the most colorful and lively open world cities in any video game. The gameplay also saw improvements, with a focus not just on rote stealth and combat but on the use of two drones that Marcus could employ to get into certain areas and take out enemies. The game ultimately buckled under the weight of repetitive open world mission design and the ludonarrative dissonance of its light and frothy story and characters being involved in way too much brutal violence, but on balance it was a pretty fun time.

Watch Dogs Legion feels like an amplification of some of the best parts of the second game, mashed up with some of the worst parts of the first. It leans into the gameplay improvements from Watch Dogs 2, further explores the idea of Dedsec as a rag tag group of wacky operatives, and then ties all of that into an incredibly predictable and weirdly dark plot set in a version of London that is both incredibly detailed and lifelessly dull. It is probably the best of the Watch Dogs games just because it is so fun to play much of the time, but feels like a real step back in storytelling and sense of place.

Watch Dogs Legion starts with a big terrorist attack and its aftermath, which wipes out Dedsec and puts London under explicit fascist control. The only Dedsec survivors are one operative who managed to escape to the countryside, named Sabine, and a hacked version of an AI named Bagley. After the brief prologue you start the game as a randomly generated character (chosen from about a dozen options) inducted into Dedsec and set forth with the task of freeing London from its domestic occupation and discovering the identity of the Zero Day group that destroyed the prior version of your group.

From there you are set free in the city to do missions, explore, pick up collectables, and all the rest of the open world game design we’ve gotten used to. The game’s big gimmick is that every character in London, from random pedestrians to enemies to bartenders is a randomly generated character with various skills and traits who you can recruit to join your Dedsec team. If you see someone on the street you can play as them. There’s not huge differentiation between characters; most have between 1 and 4 traits that can be positive (e.g. owns a gun and/or a car, fast hack cooldowns, can get your teammates out of jail more quickly) or negative (e.g. suffers permadeath even if you don’t have it turned on, can’t sprint or take cover, takes extra damage). Each is fitted with one of twenty voices, which are further modulated to provide some differentiation between characters with the same VO performer, even if they will say the same things and sound roughly similar. They all have randomly generated faces (though you will see some who look more or less the same) and hairstyle and clothing, though you can change their wardrobe though sadly not their hair or anything else about them.

Despite all the characters roughly playing the same and having a disappointing similarity in appearance (there are no fat or particularly buff or skinny people in London, nor short or tall people or people with long hair, though there is a good mix of ethnicities) building your team is one of the most fun and addictive parts of the game. Every character has a randomly generated story and relationships to go with their traits, there are some nice unique classes with special skills and even clothing, and it’s just a lot of fun to see a random person on the street and decide “yes, I will play as her.” Unfortunately, the team building eventually loses its luster for a number of reasons. You’ve got a cap on the number of teammates you can acquire, every character plays roughly the same, and the recruitment missions are a little too long and repetitive. You will settle on a list of favorites and just use them because new people wouldn’t add much (oh joy, this guy has a different weapon than this girl) and because each recruitment involves multiple locations and doing a few of the same things (Steal a vehicle, hack something, kill someone, whatever) and can take half an hour. Ironically there’s a bit more variety to the missions you have to do for some characters to make them recruitable, or to make amends if you screwed up their recruitment (like by accidentally killing their friend you were supposed to rescue) and you can woo some characters by beating them in darts or beating down someone who’s harassing them, and I ended up wishing that more characters could be recruited quickly, or at least there was more variety to how you get them on the team, because for the last 10-15 hours of the game I just rolled with the same squad and really the same two characters for every mission. This is made worse by the fact that so many of the character voices are unlikable; which meant that I picked my main (a 38-year-old Romanian woman) based on her sarcastic personality and rather than her skillset, and did not feel like trying to freshen up my group with more people I couldn’t stand listening to. In addition, the actual upgrades that matter (drone hacking, improved weapons and gadgets) are handled through collecting "technical points" and investing in upgrades that go across characters, meaning that as the game goes on there's even less differentiation across operatives as they all gain access to the enhanced suite of powers and equipment. Despite these issues, assembling the squad was a lot of fun and it’s a system I’d definitely like to see again but implemented even more thoroughly.

The other innovation that Watch Dogs Legion brings in gameplay is its use of drones. While Marcus had only two types of drones he could use there are close to a dozen in Legion, and they are everywhere. You can use a Spiderbot infiltrator that can cloak and double jump to do many missions without exposing your character to any harm. You can use cargo drones to get yourself on to roof tops to avoid enemies or grab collectables hidden up there. You can scout with hacked cargo drones and fight using hacked military drones, and there’s even a mission where you’re on a tiny walkway in pitch darkness lit only by a drone with a light on it, which you have to maneuver into place to show the path in front of you. The game also has the same hacking and sneaking and gunplay systems as the prior titles, and it also adds a hand to hand combat system that you use a lot because it’s Britain and not everyone is strapped. Those range from adequate to surprisingly bad for the fist fighting, which only has a simple button mash combo, a dodge, and a guard break despite being emphasized in much of the combat. The drones are really where the game gets interesting and it presents a new way to interact with an open world and do stealth. Of course there have been games where you used drones before, but I can’t remember one where you used a cargo drone to airlift a spiderbot into a building through an open window to open doors so you could fly a news done in and take a picture, while fending off attackers with combat bots, all while your operative stayed safe across the street. Watch Dogs Legion is ostensibly a game about hacking, but all the hacking is done through a single button press or tiresome “pipe” puzzles we’ve seen hundreds of times. The drone stuff is new and gives the game a gameplay identity in a crowded genre.

While the character recruitment and drone elements made the game more fun to play than previous Watch Dogs titles, there are a number of areas where Watch Dogs Legion is a step back from Watch Dogs 2. Chief among these is story and tone. Randomly generated characters were never going to be as charismatic or deep as Marcus Holloway, but Watch Dogs Legion ameliorates this a little by making at least some of them even more ludicrous than Wrench and his emoji mask. Freeing one of the boroughs from occupation nets you a cybernetic beekeeper who can use her bees as a weapon. I recruited a protest leader who always wears a cardboard pig mask. One of my main characters was a 49-year-old hitwoman who had the same grandma voice as my 75-year-old drone expert (who also had a red mohawk and face paint) If you think that means the game leans into the frothy lighthearted tone that Watch Dogs 2 mostly had, you’re very wrong. Instead Watch Dogs Legion’s story is almost entirely po faced serious, with themes like organ harvesting, human trafficking, terrorism, and fascism. It handles all these themes very badly, and features sequences where you discover dismembered body parts of people whose organs have been harvested and then a few minutes later are chatting with your wisecracking AI companion while you fly through the air in the rain on a cargo drone dressed in a bra and bright blue leggings.

Because the game has essentially twenty different possible protagonists and the script cannot account for the specifics of their backgrounds and what they’ve done in the game (since you might have been using different operatives for different missions) the story and character development are all shunted off to supporting NPCs, none of which are very good. Bagley, the AI, is the character you talk to the most and while he had the potential to be extremely annoying he was mostly just…fine. I neither liked or disliked him, though I wished he had done more to parody Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and the other AI voices we have in our modern society. There are no such gags, he never accidentally turns music on or tells you that he’s secretly listening in on you, he’s just a helpful if sarcastic AI guy. The human NPCs are all much worse. None are as bad as the NPCs of Watch Dogs 1, but they’re all bland wet blankets and because there are 20 different potential responses to everything they say (player characters actually do have a ton of situation specific dialog, which would be impressive if it weren’t for the fact that so many of them are awful) all the conversations are vague and non-specific, with lots of data dumps and very few back and forths. Unlike the villains of Watch Dogs 2 the bad guys in Legion don’t seem to be parodying anything in particular. They’re just toothless versions of the same fascists and insane idealists we’ve seen in a million works of fiction and each is as forgettable as all the others. While Watch Dogs 2 sent up Silicon Valley in interesting ways, Watch Dogs Legion just constructs its antagonists from a book of clichés.

Watch Dogs Legion’s London is an incredibly detailed city filled with people that somehow manages to feel bland and dreary, especially in comparison to Watch Dogs 2’s San Francisco. London is a famously gray and dreary town so it’s not surprising that there’s less color than there was in SF, but the issues go further than that. There’s not much to do in Legion, with most of the side activities being either variations on the main game (there’s an underground fight club of course) or very simple diversions like darts, juggling a soccer ball, or having one beer at various pubs. The game has lots of collectables scattered through restricted areas and on rooftops and you can shop at stores, though you can’t go in them, your character just stands outside and changes their clothes.

The biggest issue with Watch Dogs Legion’s London is ultimately the game’s largest strength; the NPCs. The streets of London are full of interesting looking people doing boring things. In theory the game should be teeming with street life because every character has a schedule and activities that they do. Once you unlock the “deep profiler” you can see where characters work, what they do for fun, who they spend time with etc… Unfortunately the system is a mile wide and an inch deep, and it ends up with the vast majority of characters walking to a place they’re supposed to go, loitering at that location, or engaging in a static activity like playing the guitar or “going on a date” or playing darts. Sometimes the cops or private military will be harassing people or beating them up, but nothing feels organic. In Watch Dogs 2 you had tourists taking pictures, unique NPCs representing San Francisco’s local color, and lots of stuff going on as you walked or drove past. Fascist London feels much more muted and boring. I rarely fast travel in games (I beat Cyberpunk without doing it once) but I was constantly using the feature in Watch Dogs Legion, partially because the game loves to assign different objectives in a mission to opposite corners of the map and partially because the streets of London felt so boring to drive through. The only time I was able to really enjoy the carefully detailed city was soaring above it on the back of a cargo drone away from the boring street life and just able to enjoy the exquisite digital architecture and nice draw distance.

Watch Dogs Legion is far from a perfect game, but it sets the foundation for a better version of the series. If they can expand the procedural generation of characters to give them more life, provide a lighter story more in line with the crazy aesthetics and hijinx you can get up to, give the game more mission variety (some of the main missions do change things up but many of them and almost all the side stuff are just about breaking into a succession of buildings and hitting a button next to a computer of some kind) and liven the city back up then they could have a really great and unique series that doesn’t just play like “Assassin’s Creed but with guns.” If the game could also leverage its team concept to create missions that only certain characters could complete or have you work with a team of operators all functioning in tandem in different places to accomplish goals, it could be something really special. I assume Legion’s focus on having you play one character at a time is a function of its development time, since you can’t even have operators you’re not using run missions on your behalf like you could with Assassins back in Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood in 2010. It would be great if you could have your operatives handle some of the recruitment grunt work, or at least go out and find you good people to recruit (something that Bagley does from time to time once you liberate some boroughs.)

I enjoyed Watch Dogs Legion. Towards the beginning of my play through I even had some moments that were exhilarating and immersive, such as when a gang kidnapped my constructor worker, the only operative who can summon the cargo drones you use to get to the tops of buildings, and after I got her location from the kidnapper I took over a turret and turned a riot drone to my side, killing all the kidnappers from the safety of the street below. Over time the repetitive missions (including at least one procedurally generated mission that was literally impossible to finish because it tasked me with stealing an ambulance that could not be driven out of the auto shop where it was parked) and bad world and story wore me down, but I feel like this is a good example of a game that’s worth buying cheap, playing until you’ve had your fill, and putting aside. It ends exactly how you’d expect anyway. It looks decent, runs well on the Series X, has an adequate soundtrack, and does a few things that no other games have done as well. Just stick to the women operators and stay away from the men. Bunch of tossers they are, eh Guv?

Homefront is a famously mediocre Call of Duty Clone from 2011. I know this. I’ve known it since the game was released and the buzz was almost entirely negative. I knew this in late 2011 when I apparently ordered the game off Amazon for $20, which seems like an outrageous amount to have spent. I knew this when I popped the disc last night and started playing through the game. Now, having finished it, I still know it. Homefront is bad in all the ways people said it was. It’s boring, predictable, short, a little clunky, ugly in graphics and story, and made with production values that aren’t good enough to be impressive or shoddy enough to be interesting. It’s a generic product that does not come close to the standards of the games it’s trying to copy. It is to Call of Duty what Baron Von Chockster is to Count Chocula. It’s a pair of $15 sneakers with the Nykey Swish on the side. It has big McDowell’s energy, for those of you old enough to remember Coming to America.

The game starts with a reasonably competent blend of real news footage, fake live action material, and CG. It goes through an alternate history where Kim Jong Un takes control of North Korea after the death of his father (an event that had not happened yet when the game was released) and America tears itself apart through a series of foreign wars and domestic disasters, including a pandemic. Given where we are right now in 2020 this alternate history is a bit jarring and depressing, even if the idea of North Korea, a country so dysfunctional it has basically no International trade right now, taking over even a weakened and humbled United States is beyond absurd. Of course North Korea is a stand in for China here, which is kind of perfect because even the enemies in this game are off brand.

After the intro cinematic you are thrust into the boots of a generic ex-military pilot with no personality or characteristics. He’s quickly abducted from his apartment by an angry Korean military guy spouting a bunch of propaganda and put on a prison bus where another prisoner yammers at him for a bit before freedom fighters crash a car into it and he’s freed in a daring rescue that starts with you staring at a giant sign for White Castle. The White Castle sign is, by far, the most interesting character in this opening chapter, though you are exposed to significant brutality in the streets during the bus ride, including a crying child running to the corpses of its parents who have just been summarily executed and a nice splotch of someone’s blood on the bus window. You will later get to go into a White Castle to fight North Koreans and also a TigerDirect store. Going to Hooters is optional, but there’s a collectable inside. That is not a joke.

Homefront is a game that revels in ugliness. Shooters of the era were frequently criticized for using a color palette that consisted of brown and grey with a little bit of green, and Homefront is guilty of that, but it also avoids putting the player in interesting or impressive environments. Modern Warfare 2, a game with a similar premise that tried to shock the player with the image of tanks rolling through an American suburb, also offered a globe trotting adventure that took you from Brazilian Favelas to the frozen depths of Russia. Homefront just shuttles you through the wreckage of the ‘burbs, past endless shot up houses and piles of debris. Later you go through a farm strewn with wreckage and then to a big finale on the Golden Gate Bridge that is probably the game’s best level. The environments are not exciting, they’re mostly just depressing, and while it could work to establish atmosphere in a game with characters you cared about or an interesting story this is not that game. Instead it’s just a bunch of ugly samey environments you travel through while shouty McWhiteguy screams at you, and inspiring Black leader guy tries to inspire. At the beginning of the second chapter you’re in a makeshift base in someone’s back yard. Later you go into a labor camp on a baseball field, where the game’s famous “hide in a mass grave” scene plays out, to no emotional effect. None of this is new. The TigerDirect store catches on fire at one point and that’s as close as the game gets to a set piece. I will give them credit for the fact that most of the civilians you meet hate you and want you to just stop making trouble for them, but having Shouty McWhiteguy tell a 10 year old to piss off when he begs for food seems a bit over the top.

After your bus crash and rescue, you’re escorted by three freedom fighters through one of these burning suburb while various Korean soldiers mill about and occasionally shoot at you, while staying conveniently still enough for you to draw a bead on them or throw a grenade into a clump of them or whatever. Homefront is sort of a mix between FPS and cover shooter. If you try to run and gun you will run and die, and the game instead wants you to pop into the open and kill a few dudes before going back into hiding, like in third person shooters of the time. The guns are very generic. The shooting feels okay but not as smooth as the contemporary Call of Duty games. Enemy AI is just slightly better than braindead You can go prone if you want to. There are grenades. Lots of grenades. The indicator of an enemy grenade is kind of confusing and it’s hard to know where you need to escape to before you get blown up. The game definitely suffers from “who is shooting me and from where?” syndrome, which can make certain sequences where you’re surrounded by enemies pretty frustrating. Your character is very fragile and it’s easy to die without knowing what happened, but that’s pretty standard for the genre at this time.

Occasionally Homefront tries to mix things up by giving you something slightly different to do. Use some C4 to blow up an enemy APC. Use a targeting system to send a weird autonomous vehicle with rockets after some enemy vehicles. There are turret sequences. There’s an incredibly boring stealth sequence where you have a silenced sniper rifle and take out the targets when the giant arrows over their heads change from “wait” to “eliminate.” There are text based collectables that flesh out the events prior to the occupation through some very boring faux newspapers. Standard FPS variety stuff. It’s a little odd that your companions insist you do all these things even though they’re resistance soldiers and you’re just a pilot, but such is the burden of the protagonist in an early 2010s FPS game. At least they do pitch in from time to time by actually killing some enemies, which is sweet of them.

The 6^th level (out of a total of 7) consists entirely of a mission where your pilot guy actually gets to fly a helicopter. This section shoddy in a lot of ways, including being touchy about how far you get from the convoy you’re guarding, having lousy controls for increasing and decreasing altitude, and having laughably bad PS2-quality animations when your compatriots leap out of the chopper to hijack the trucks. Despite these issues the core control is pretty responsive and there’s a decent amount of arcadey fun to be had maneuvering the chopper around in the first person perspective and raining rockets and bullets down on the ant-sized troops and vehicles below, and I’d even go so far as to say that it’s one of the better vehicle sections I’ve played in a military FPS. In a way this level encapsulates much of what Homefront is. Many parts of it are pleasant enough to play, but it never reaches the heights of a big budget thrill ride and it’s incredibly short. Devoting an entire 7^th to the game to this short chopper section seems an odd development priority when the game desperately needed more content.

Homefront is not an aggressively bad game. It looks okay for a 360 game, though it has extreme screen tearing. The sound quality is fine. Voice acting is not notably bad, even if the script seems to have been written by someone with all the creativity and ambition of a piece of wet cardboard. Checkpointing is fair. The soundtrack is actually quite good for a military shooter, even if the sound mix is sometimes overly aggressive. I might go so far as to say that the soundtrack is the game’s strongest element, which is a weird thing to say about a military shooter. The licensed music is nothing special but the original compositions feel like they would be at home in a Hollywood war movie or…a better video game. Homefront is the kind of game I would normally listen to a podcast while playing, but I didn’t because I liked the music so much. It was consistently surprising and impressive.

The Xbox 360 actually had a lot of exciting and creative shooters. In addition to the big budget spectacle of the Call of Duty series, it also featured games like Bioshock, 2006’s Prey, 4 Halo games (if you count ODST), Singularity, The Darkness I and II, Borderlands, Bulletstorm, and a bunch of other fun stuff. Those games all had interesting weapons, appealing environments, and better stories. Call of Duty was and remains a sales phenomenon, which is why so many companies tried to copy it, but there really was no market need for third tier shooters on a system that had so many of them. Zool for the Atari Jaguar is fondly remembered by some because it was kind of a competent platformer on a system with very few good games. If you’d put it on the Super Nintendo nobody would have liked it. Homefront on the 360 is Zool on the Super Nintendo.

So why did I buy it? I have no excuse for plonking down $20 for this game in 2011. I like collecting games and I was kind of interested in these kinds of ill-conceived generic shooters at the time, but $20 is too much to pay for a game I knew was bad. I also played both Medal of Honor games on the 360, which means that I have now played as many bad Call of Duty clones on that system as I did actual Call of Duty games. Sometimes these forgotten misfires are more interesting than the polished gems. Sometimes they’re Homefront. I picked this up this week because I was in a bad mood and just wanted a game that would let me turn my brain off and shoot stuff in a linear forward crawl. This game did that fine, I guess, but I have a bunch of COD games I could have played instead. I was also curious about the decline and fall of THQ, which put a lot of money into this thing in the hopes that it would be a big hit. I can’t imagine why anyone thought that would happen.

These are the types of games that get lost to history. Homefront is destined to be remembered because it played a significant role in taking down a major publisher (though it was not the primary cause) and because of its particularly stupid plot and incredible poor taste with the mass grave scene, but nobody is playing it. The online mode, which was apparently respectable, is of course completely offline at this point.

Homefront reminds me of a TV movie. It’s a disposable pale imitation of a better thing. Not necessarily an unpleasant way to pass the time, but utterly inessential. The big difference between Homefront and an actual TV movie is price. TV movies are either free or provided as part of a subscription. $60 for a mediocre 4 hour campaign and a multiplayer that was competent but underpopulated and done better in other places was just absurd. It’s on sale right now on Steam for $4, which sounds about right, and if it ever hits Game Pass (though it’s not backwards compatible so it seems unlikely) it is arguably worth downloading if you find yourself in the mood for something short and workmanlike. There are still lots of bad games being made, of course, but these days very few as downright unambitious as Homefront are sold for anywhere near its price. In that way it reflects an aspect of the prior generation that is definitely not missed and deserves to be forgotten.

It is clear from playing Binary Domain that it is a game of from early 2012. It’s a linear third person shooter heavily influenced by Gears of War and Uncharted, with a pinch of Vanquish for good measure. Playing it is a bit more awkward than any of those games, with cover-based shooting that never really feels great and clunky enemy movement and patterns. The environments are pretty small and limited by modern standards, the bosses are predictable to the point of seeming semi-scripted, and the weapons are mostly boring and repetitive (two assault rifles and a light machine gun that shoots like an assault rifle? You spoil me.) It has a tacked on multiplayer survival “horde” mode that nobody seemed to like. You know, cover shooters in early 2012.

However, Binary Domain has some things going for it that make it an interesting and enjoyable experience despite its dated playstyle and various flaws. The first is the story. Binary Domain tells the story of an international force of operatives, called a dust crew, going into Japan to investigate a robotics company that may be producing “Hollow Children,” or illegal robots that are indistinguishable from human beings. It goes some interesting places from there, but though the script can be clunky and the characters are pretty predictable, it’s a fun and interesting story with lots of twists and turns and a heavy supply of long cut scenes that never bored me. It’s not Uncharted 4 or Last of Us quality but it makes for a fun B-movie tale that compliments the action well. If you ever wanted a mix of Terminator, Blade Runner, and Metal Gear Solid complete with people ripping off their faces to reveal the robot underneath and nanomachines, well, it’s right here. The game also allows you to choose your squadmates, and in-mission dialog and actions vary depending on who you choose, which means both that there was a lot of writing done for this game and that you can get some variety on subsequent playthroughs.

The second thing Binary Domain has going for it is its mechanical experiments. There are two major areas where Binary Domain attempts to innovate. The first is a voice-communication system that has you issuing verbal commands to squadmates through a microphone and also responding verbally in conversations. The commands are simple things like “fire,” “charge” and “regroup” like we’ve seen in many games, and the conversations are also pretty simple, though they play into an affinity system that makes squadmates more likely to follow your commands if you please them during conversation. Actually speaking into the mic feels a little silly, and the mic is mis-calibrated, at least with my surround speaker set up, often hearing characters’ own responses to your statements as your character saying something (usually the f-word) and then responding to that. This system doesn’t really work and thankfully can be turned off in favor of controller commands, but it is at least an attempt to make you feel more connected to the game characters while also echoing the game’s themes about robots vs. humans and simulated consciousness.

A system that does work is Binary Domain’s body part target system, where you can blow parts of a robot off to cripple them. You can shoot off legs and have the robot fall on the ground and start crawling towards you. You can shoot their arms off and they will drop their weapon. If you manage to get enough head shots to disable their sensors they can no longer tell friend from foe and you can make them attack one another. It’s a ton of fun and makes combat encounters much more engaging than in most games of this style because you’re constantly trying to pick enemies apart and also getting to see the effects as their armor and body parts are shredded by your gunfire.

The game still looks nice almost a decade after release, even though the levels aren’t very detailed. The soundtrack is unobjectionable, repetitive techno music. It has a surprisingly large and diverse cast of potential party members, all of whom have distinct personalities and special abilities. You can tell that a fair amount of money and, more importantly, thought and creativity went into making Binary Domain and it stands out in lots of little ways, like the fact that every time you make a purchase from one of the vending machines (you earn currency as you destroy robots and their limbs) you play a little slot machine game that has a chance of spitting out something useful for free, like a health pack or ammo.

As is often the case with games that are a little older, parts of Binary Domain have aged poorly. In addition to somewhat clunky controls and the primitive and not quite functional voice recognition the game’s frame rate plummets during encounters with large bosses, and the camera is pulled in too tight to allow you to understand your surroundings during these encounters, making the battles kind of annoying and frustrating, even though they aren’t difficult thanks to the game’s generous down but not out system. Your NPC companions often wander right in front of your line of fire while you’re shooting and then get mad because you shot them, and the whole relationship system kind of sucks in its implementation, encouraging you to give repetitive and pointless commands to grind affinity with your companions. In addition, the game shoehorns in a bunch of shoddy change of pace moments. There’s a point where you slide down a long water slide, dodging obstacles on the way, and it’s something you’ve seen and done a million times in video games, generally in a more enjoyable form. There’s also a jet ski level that’s clunky and annoying to control. There are way too many turret sequences. The game even has some quiet moments when you walk around talking to random people with the voice recognition system, but they’re slow and clunky and not good. The voice acting for the main characters is passable, but side NPC voice acting is amateurish at best and often features weird accents that don’t really match the characters’ backgrounds. Even the game’s character upgrade stuff feels primitive and tacked on, with purchasable or findable nanomachine upgrades tied to each character and offering boring bonuses like +10% base health. Why bother?

But none of these issues detract from the core strengths of Binary Domain. This is a game that actually cares about its weird anime story and treats it seriously. It’s also a game where combat actually feels different than in the billion other cover shooters from that generation because of its emphasis on aiming at body parts. It doesn’t have great visual design even compared to contemporaries like Remember Me, but it has a certain 90s cyber anime charm that gives it a real sense of place even if it does not spend nearly enough time exploring its city and far too much traipsing through sewers and manufacturing plants. A lot of B-tier shooters raise the question “why does this exist? Why did this get made?” Binary Domain had a clear vision behind it, and offers things that no other game has done in quite the same way.

I don’t know why Binary Domain wasn’t made backwards compatible on Xbox. There’s a Cup Noodle in one scene, and a Timex in another, but I didn’t see any other licensing issues, and Sega has made a lot of its games backward compatible so it’s probably not the publisher that’s the hold up. It may be that it was judged too obscure or there’s some technical issue around the voice recognition that would make it tough to implement (this seems like the most likely culprit.) I don’t think that a remaster would really work because it was janky in 2012 and is even jankier by modern standard. There are a lot of sequences that just aren’t very fun to play and there aren’t a lot of people who have nostalgia for this weird old flop from the early 2010s. I’d honestly rather see a full remake using the same plot and characters but with refined gameplay and revamped level design and gameplay, or even better, a sequel. The audience for either approach is probably too small to make it financially viable, but this is a universe that doesn’t deserve to be forgotten.

Binary Domain reminds me a lot of Spec-Ops: The Line, another squad-based shooter released a few months later. They are both a little clunky to play, though I’d say Spec-Ops is actually smoother even though the creators say the clunkiness was intentional, they’re both story-focused with something meaningful to say, and they both feature a scene where you fight an evil chandelier and then one of your squadmates bails on the next battle to go take a crap. Wait, that last part was only in Binary Domain. But both games were interesting and fun experiences despite being flawed in a number of ways. They both come from the dying days of the linear 10 hour campaign, which is a time that I kind of miss now that every game is a live service constantly changing thing that expects to soak up all your time. I miss having a game that you could plow through in a weekend, experience some fun mechanics, a cool world, and an intriguing story, and then set it aside and go on with your life. These types of games arguably weren’t worth the $60 price tag, but on something like Gamepass they make a lot of sense, just like a short Netflix series or made for TV movie.

I think that at this point Binary Domain is a dead property, but if you have a copy or can get one for reasonably cheap (I’d say anything under $20 is probably a good deal) I recommend you play it. I’ve played a lot of 360 and PS3 games this year and this is one of my favorites. It’s a clunky, imperfect, game with a lot of heart, and those are the kinds of games that develop cult followings for a reason.

Need For Speed The Run got mediocre reviews at the time of its release, which is why I never played it at the time. I picked it up for $10 in a digital sale in 2015, and just shoved it into my backlog, but remained curious about the game’s concept of playing through a car chase movie like Cannonball run. Loading it up in 2020 for the first time I wasn’t expecting to love it but thought it might be interesting.

Instead I found that it alternated between mediocre and infuriating, with the infuriating portions sucking much of the fun out of the ‘better’ parts.

Need For Speed The Run starts with your character duct taped to the steering wheel a very expensive car that’s being dropped into a car crusher. It’s a very dramatic and cinematic, though not particularly good, sequence with close ups of the character’s face as he recognizes his predicament, intense music, and of course a series of QTEs as you escape, jump into another car, and drive off into the night, frantically trying to obey the game’s command to “Escape the Mob.” The escape itself features a bunch of mob cars chasing you and blasting your car with what seem to be uzis as you swerve to avoid them and get to the goal. It doesn’t really work. It’s very weird to get shot at in a racing game where you have no health or means of defending yourself, and the tone seems to be setting up for some kind of open world action game with racing components instead of what the game is, at least in structure, which is a pure arcade racer. After your character escapes the mob he meets up with a woman who appears to be a childhood friend and she fronts him the money to participate in “The Run” which is a race from “San Fran” to New York featuring hundreds of racers and an 8 figure prize. You then pick a car and the game drops you into the first stage of the race. Each stage is broken up into individual levels with various goals, generally to overtake a number of cars on a section of track (basically to come in first), or a checkpoint race against time, or a battle race where you need to be in front of your opponent when time expires. The woman character from the restaurant will occasionally chime in to tell you the objective but there’s very little story in the majority of the stages. You do get a lot of very dramatic music that’s unusual in a racing game, but it’s usually the same track over and over with only a few stages featuring different songs (none of which fit in a racing game), and one wonders if they just forgot to license a full soundtrack for this thing. It feels off for something that plays like a throwback arcade racer to be wrapped up in this hyper dramatic plot and trappings, especially because they don’t really factor in to most levels in any way.

The game itself plays…not great. It’s serviceable for 2011, but considering that it came out after 2010’s Need for Speed Hot Pursuit and just one year before the outstanding Forza Horizon and the very good Need for Speed: Most Wanted 2012, it feels even older than it is. Hot Pursuit and Most Wanted both ran on Criterion’s own engine while The Run is on Frostbite 2, and you can tell. The game looks mostly okay, though there’s a low resolution to graphics further down the track that can sometimes make it hard to tell what exactly is coming up, but the handling feels off. Cars slip and skid out too easily, and while the game encourages drifting it never feels good to do so and is far too easy to swing into oversteering. For a game that often requires you to weave and dodge through traffic while chasing down opponents this can produce a kind of out of control feeling that isn’t enjoyable. The races have checkpoints and if you crash you get reset, but you only get 5 resets per race and the game also has an XP system that gives you a bonus for finishing with no resets. Of course if you lose a race you can retry as many times as you want, but the game pushes you to be perfect and to get your time down, including through its leaderboard system, and then often leaves you feeling like your performance was due to random whims of traffic or quirks of the handling system. It’s also incredibly easy to wreck, including against obstacles that it seems like you should bounce off of or plow over, and small obstacles about fender height that are hard to see with the default camera angle. The whole thing feels like something from the late 90s or early 2000s. Not unplayable, but very unpolished from a time before racing games had perfected their handling and collision models. It also has very long load times even when installed to a hard drive, meaning you’re going to be sitting through 30-45 second loads every 5-9 minutes, and 10 second loads whenever you crash (you get 5 checkpoint restarts per race on normal difficulty), which is annoying.

Need For Speed: The Run is marketed as an intense story driven experience but leans harder into standard racing game tropes than it does into its premise. While you upgrade into new “classes” of cars through QTE laden cut scenes, you can also switch cars within a class by driving through gas stations that appear beside the track at random points in some levels. It’s both immersion breaking (the race “pauses” while you switch cars) and frustrating, because while the game tells you what kind of car you should use for each kind of track (high top speed for levels with straightaways, more maneuverable cars for twistier tracks) there’s no forewarning about what kinds of tracks you’ve got coming up and no way to know the best car to switch to. It’s as if you were playing an RPG where certain elements were more effective against different types of enemies, but you had to pick your load out before the game showed you what enemies you would be facing. In addition, the game unlocks challenges as you beat stages and features heavy leaderboard integration and online multiplayer racing. It’s not the first Need for Speed game to feature an overwrought story that it doesn’t do much with, but it is, to my knowledge, the only one that offers a totally linear story experience and QTEs, let alone tracks that have you being shot at. Given how much racing game stuff is missing from the game (no open world or car collection or tuning) it would have been nice to see that replaced with something else, or at least an attempt at a really strong story. Nope. Instead you get a few medium length QTE sequences between some of the stages, which are animated pretty well for 2011 but have a pretty short window for hitting the buttons (leaving you staring at the area where the button prompt appears instead of the fancy graphics) and should have just been cut scenes.

The real problems with Need For Speed the Run become apparent as you play deeper into the game. Racing games should aim for one of two things. Being fair, by which I mean being a true test of skill where the player’s performance is dictated by how good they are, or being exciting, by which I mean using tricks like rubber band AI to make every race come down to a thrilling finish, even if it means that the player’s performance early in the race isn’t very meaningful. Need For Speed The Run tries a mix of both, but ends up creating something distinct from either. It feels unfair and random.

The main problem the game has is its random traffic, which combines with its other issues like bad handling to create a game where your performance often feels like it is dictated by how lucky you are with traffic patterns. Sometimes the cars ahead of you will slam into, or have to swerve to avoid, oncoming traffic and you can easily blow by them. More often you will find yourself pinned into impossible situations. Need For Speed The Run isn’t a very hard game, but it’s far from easy, and you really can’t make many mistakes if you want to advance past your current level. It also heavily penalizes going off road, slowing you down significantly at the best of times and resetting your car on the track with a penalty if you go outside the thin permissible off road area surrounding the intended track. This means you will often find yourself on thin two lane roads, racing at the edge of control to try and catch up to the leader or hit the next checkpoint within time, only to find the road in front of you filled with two cars passing one another in opposite directions and no winning choices on how to respond. If you brake hard you lose more time than you can afford to. If you try to swerve off road onto the shoulder you get bounced around out of control and may crash or get reset. If you love being faced with unwinnable situations in a driving game then this game is for you. If you enjoy slowing down because one of your wheels is slightly up on the shoulder of the road and even though there’s no rumble or audio feedback for this you will find yourself decelerating, this will be a game you treasure. If you also love things like sliding around a hairpin turn only to smash into an oncoming truck, or cresting a hill after a turn only to whack right into the back of an RV you will also love this title. I can’t tell you how many times I found myself in a neck and neck battle against the last car in the level with the end of level gates approaching only to lose, or even sometimes win, because of random traffic rather than my own skill or even a move by the opposing car. I won the second to last race, where I was playing badly, because a random car t-boned my opponent towards the finish. That also happened in the final race but the opponent caught up to me because the last race is heavily scripted. I can’t list the number of times I got taken out by a random car while in the lead racing towards the finish, many of which I either couldn’t see or couldn’t avoid. It’s not exciting, it’s not fun, it’s just frustrating as hell. There are also other difficulty spikes in the form of very tight windows on some of the checkpoint races and overpowered opposing cars as level bosses, but at least with those you can practice and get better and learn the track and eventually prevail. The random traffic issue just feels grossly unfair and intended to artificially extend the length of a short and linear game.

The game also features aggressive cops who, to the game’s credit, try to stop both you and your opponents. These don’t appear on every stage, but when they do they’re kind of annoying but not as frustrating as the random traffic because their appearance and behavior is predictable, allowing you to either compensate in the moment or at least learn track well enough that you can avoid them. You can execute takedowns on the cops, but this is not advisable because the game switches to a Burnout style “takedown” cam while taking control of your car and you run the risk of losing time or, worse, being given control back in a situation where the random traffic is about to screw you over. You’re much better off just avoiding the police and focusing on the other racers. Taking down cops does, however, give you XP, which feeds into a stupid leveling system that walls off necessary mechanics like nitro boost or the ability to gain more nitro by driving dangerously behind arbitrary levels. The game tips screen even suggests you grind to unlock bonuses if you want to take on the hardest challenges, which…no. Just no. Hard no.

Need For Speed the Run isn’t without good elements. Some of the tracks, especially those that focus on broader highways where you can duck and weave through the traffic (though the handling makes that harder than it should be) can be entertaining. You can adjust to the handling quirks and learn to time your nitro out of corners and when the game is not being blatantly unfair it can be a pretty okay time. In 2020 this 2010 release obviously does not have “good” graphics, but it has competent art design and some of the tracks in the Colorado and Plains areas look good and are of a style that isn’t done much anymore, with long highways stretching out to the horizon or twisty mountain passes. The East Coast autumnal forests with bright golden leaves are another highlight and reminded me of one of my favorite tracks from the PSX version of Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit. There are even a few gimmick levels, like racing through an avalanche, that aren’t classics or anything but offer a certain arcadey charm that modern racers could learn from. There’s also a lot of content in the game, with 10 stages each made up of half a dozen or so races on unique tracks, many of which are 10 kilometers long or more. The campaign itself is short, but since it doesn’t recycle tracks there’s a whole lot to do if, for some reason, you want to focus on perfecting your times. The game tried to encourage this through leaderboards but of course nobody’s really messing with this in 2020.

The difficulty spikes in NFSTR get worse and worse as you advance, and the highs do not compensate for the lows. As I played the game I kept getting mad at the designers for the way the various design choices (such as not letting you switch out your car at the beginning of each track, the handling model, the traffic and the tight windows for victory) clash with one another. Need for Speed The Run was never going to be worth its $60 asking price during the 7^th generation, where both the PS3 and Xbox 360 were stacked with far superior games, including from the Need for Speed series itself, but it could have been a fun bargain bin diversion. Instead it is sometimes that and sometimes a frustrating slog. I would say that it was a missed attempt at inserting a real narrative into a racing game, except that they didn’t even really try. It seems like the game should have a lot more cut scenes, introducing some of the rival racers or showing your character traveling between cities, but instead it has very brief text descriptions in the loading screens. This could have been a playable car chase movie. It’s not. It’s just a mediocre old game that’s best forgotten. Which it mostly has been.

This weekend I stripped all the data off the hard drive of my original Xbox 360 and put the machine in my closet for good. This wasn’t a launch 360, but it was the first one I owned; an elite I bought in early 2008 when there were finally enough good games to convince me to scrape together the money. It had an RROD not long after I purchased it, but Microsoft fixed (or maybe replaced) it for free, and since then it worked flawlessly for over a decade. Unfortunately when I turned it on earlier this year to play something I found that the DVD drive was no longer working and trying to use a cleaning disc didn’t help it any. I could get it repaired, but I actually bought a spare right when the Xbox One was released, and this machine is so old it doesn’t have internal WIFI. I have to run an Ethernet cable from my TV into the other room if I want to download something or cloud synch my saves. It’s time to retire it and replace it with a different one.

To that end I spent some time digging through the hard drive and moving everything I could either to the cloud (for saved games) or to an external drive (for digital games and title updates.) It was a bit of an odd experience digging through so much digital detritus. I already moved most of the saves for backwards compatible games to the cloud a few years ago when the BC program was in full swing so much of what was left were either obscure games nobody cares about or early games I hadn’t played in over a decade.

In truth I could have let the vast majority of it go. Do I need the demo for Xbox Live Arcade Dig Dug when I have Namco Museum on my Switch, which has a perfectly serviceable version of Dig Dug? One could argue that I do not. Am I likely to revisit my save from Penny Arcade: On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness Episode 1 where I got like 20 minutes into the game and lost interest in 2008? Probably not. I will likely never play the game again but if I do I might just roll fresh because I don’t remember everything I did in it over 12 years ago. This 360 hasn’t been my primary console for a very long time and though I did, in fact, load up my old save from The Darkness last year and completed the campaign for that game, that save was “only” 4 years old at the time. Most of the saves I found this time were much, much older. I had a lot of fun with Tropico 3 back in 2011 but if I play a Tropico game again it will be a newer one, and even if I wanted to play 3 I would start fresh because it’s 9 years later.

Instead of feeling like a useful act of digital salvage this ended up being like returning to your parents’ house 10 years after you’ve left and going through the stuff you left in their garage. None of it is particularly important or useful, because you’d have gotten it by now if it was, but a lot of it holds weirdly sentimental memories. I was reminded of how after I first got the elite with its seemingly unfillable 120 gigabyte hard drive I downloaded every XBLA trial I could find and tried basically all of them, leaving me with copies of the trial version of such incredible gems as Cloning Clyde and Mutant Storm Reloaded just bouncing around the hard drive. I loved those trials; they reminded me of the joys of demo discs in the 90s (as memorialized on the Demo Derby series) and I have a fondness of some of those games I never actually bought. Shout out to TiQal, a game nobody else has thought about in a decade but whose demo I played a bunch of times and really enjoyed but never got around to buying. It’s still available for sale on the marketplace, and if it were backwards compatible I might actually get it for nostalgia’s sake, but I’m not going to switch on my 360 to play it.

I remember the time I got to school a week before the semester started and blazed through Dead to Rights: Retribution and the Medal of Honor reboot. Those were some really mediocre games! I enjoyed them though. I ended up playing Medal of Honor: Warfighter in 2014 after I already had a PS4 and Xbox One because that’s the kind of person I am. Ask me anything about Medal of Honor: Warfighter. I dimly remember kind of liking the multiplayer in both games in the franchise. Warfighter’s had an interesting Fire Team concept that paired you with another player on your team and let you respawn on them. The whole thing was pointless in a world where Call of Duty and Battlefield both exist, but it wasn’t the least fun game I ever played. Dead to Rights: Retribution let you bite people in the nuts when playing as the dog. Where does time go? How can it already be nearly a decade? It feels like just a couple years ago.

I bought a full copy of Wik & the Fable of Souls and I never played it. It got decent reviews. That one went straight to the external. At some point, hopefully this year, I’m going to sit down and make myself play Wik and Swarm and a bunch of other XBLA games that aren’t backwards compatible but that I bought at some point or another. I did play Eets: Chowdown but I never finished it. Screw it. Put it on the list. XBLA marathon.

After Burner: Climax is the first game I ever got all the achievements for. What an incredible game. It got delisted, and though it was relisted for IOS and Android there’s no console or PC release available. My 360 copy still works.

I never got around to playing Alan Wake on my 360…but I did play it earlier this year on my Xbox One. It was pretty good! I haven’t played either DLC episode yet, nor American Nightmare. I should get around to those. I still play Xbox 360 games pretty regularly. I played Enslaved: Odyssey to the West this year, along with Assassin’s Creed. Last year I played both Star Wars: The Force Unleashed games and, as mentioned, The Darkness. 360 games are still a lot of fun and backwards compatibility is an incredible feature on Xbox.

I finished transferring my data off my old Xbox and swapped it out for the new one. It’s blue. For now that’s not a problem but after the pandemic is over when I start having people to my apartment again it may go in the box when it’s not in use. That’s okay. I booted it up, set it up and signed in. All my games were there, and my ‘Splosion Man theme too. I booted up Frogger: Hyper Arcade Edition and played a round. I don’t remember buying that but apparently I did at some point. It has an incredible soundtrack, as many XBLA games did back in the day. I have a copy of FIFA Street, too, bought for $5 in 2015 according to my email receipt. I have no memory of that. I booted up Gauntlet but that was just a demo. For a flicker of a moment I considered buying a full copy before realizing that it was probably delisted (it is) and that buying an Xbox 360 non backward compatible copy of Gauntlet in 2020 is a bridge too far even for me. Instead I logged on to the store and downloaded a copy of Midway Arcade Origins, which I bought a few years back for backwards compatibility on my Xbox One, and which now works on the last three generations of Xbox. It includes Gauntlet and Gauntlet II. That is how I found myself having spent hours shuffling data only to play a very old arcade game emulated in a compilation I already owned on another system that was already hooked up to the same TV.

Generations are weird now. Solo Gauntlet is fun for about 4 minutes.

I know that I can’t recapture the time in my life when the Xbox 360 was relevant. I’m never going to spend hours playing Oasis songs with my roommate on Rock Band or have a 100 day streak going in Brain Challenge or do much more than go back to clear up a few games that I never got around to. I’ll probably never play FIFA Street. But the 360 was my main gaming machine for a very long time and it’s sad to see my original retire, and good to have one still sitting there, under my TV, just waiting for the day that I might want to finally pop in that copy of El Shaddai and see what it’s all about, or go bowling with Cousin Roman in GTA IV one last time (I’m never going to want that.)

Gaming is media, of course, but it’s also a set of experiences. It’s hours spent exploring new worlds alone or with friends. It’s nostalgic for me, even when it’s a system that I got after I was an adult. With the Xbox Series X and the Playstation 5 the idea of generations seems well and truly dead. I’m not considering trying to pick up a spare Xbox One because over 99% of its games play as well or better on the Series X and what’s the point. If my Xbox One X dies I’ll just sell it for parts or something. It’s obsolete in a way that the 360 will never be, even though many of its best games are playable elsewhere.

We’ll always have Poker Smash. Wasn’t Poker Smash great?

Watch_Dogs is one of my least favorite games I ever finished. I hated almost everything about that game, from Aiden Pierce and his terrible attitude to the lame story to the stiff combat and bland driving to the boring open world. There were a few minor highlights. I thought the Ubisoft tower climbs were moderately entertaining, liked the voyeuristic aspect of profiling people with your phone, and enjoyed a couple missions like the one where you fight a gang in a junkyard full of traps. Overall it was a bust, though, and even though I bought the sequel in a sale before I played the first one I figured I would never actually play it.

But once Watch_Dogs: Legion was announced and then became one of the major multi-plat games for the new console generation I decided I might as well try Watch_Dogs 2, since I owned it. If I liked it I might be able to convince myself to pick up Legion. I gave it a try, bounced off it, and then forced myself to get back to it a few weeks later and actually finish the game. After spending a bunch more time with it I can say that Watch_Dogs 2 fixes a lot of the problems with Watch_Dogs, but only enough to make it a decent, rather than terrible, game.

WD2’s San Francisco is a major upgrade over the first game’s Chicago, with a much brighter and more cheerful vibe and lots of fun local color and stuff to see. It’s one of the best “realistic” modern open world cities I’ve played in a long time and makes exploration and driving a lot more fun, especially with the ScoutX objectives that have you taking pictures of famous landmarks and really exploring the city.

WD2’s cast of characters is many times more engaging than WD’s. The first game had Aiden Pearce, his family, and a bunch of other people who were either villains or just boring non-characters. It was grimy and unpleasant to spend time with those people. WD2’s cast of young whiz kid hackers are fun and diverse, with main character Marcus being a lighthearted kind of goofy leader and the other NPCs all being reasonably well-written and acting. Supporting characters outside the main team tend to be a bit thinly characterized but are still far better than those in the first game.

The story is a bit more fragmented than Watch_Dogs 1, made up of a large number of short arcs with 1-4 missions each. These small story arcs range from silly to serious and differ broadly in quality. Some have fun moments of schadenfreude where a rich jerk of a CEO is given his comeuppance. Others end with an air of menace, where the game’s big bad threatens Marcus in various ways. A few try for actual pathos, including one where a character Marcus has spent time with is killed and Marcus must find his killers and avenge him. None of this is great, but it’s an improvement over Watch_Dogs 1 and it works reasonably well for a video game story.

Where Watch_Dogs 2 falls apart for me is in the gameplay and mission design. It’s just not a very fun game to play, and the things you do in it are incredibly similar from mission to mission. This is an open world GTA style action game with a bit of a stealth/hacking gloss. You drive around the city and most of your objectives involve going into a building full of heavily armed goons, pressing the triangle button at a couple locations to “hack” something or other, and then escaping. You have guns, but the shooting is not great and Marcus is very fragile, often dying in just a few hits, because it’s not really meant to be played as a shooter. Instead it’s mostly a stealth game, but one where you’re not just limited to sneaking around and avoiding people or taking them down with the game’s single button press takedowns. The tools you’re actually supposed to use are hacking, which basically amounts to hitting L1 to target a person or some environmental object, and your drones, one of which flies but can’t interact with physical objects and the other of which can only roll around on the ground and jump but can pick things up or circumvent security on some physical switches.

The hacking stuff is pretty similar to the first game, allowing you to draw enemies towards environmental hazards that you can then detonate, or sometimes distract an enemy or detonate explosives she has (though that won’t always kill her.) Other than the drones, which can be used to distract enemies and eventually can carry weapons themselves, the big addition this time is the ability to call the cops or a gang to attack enemies, once you unlock that ability. It’s a real change over the prior game, and once you get the highest tiers in the skill tree you can actually take down a lot of enemies from a safe distance this way. At first it can be pretty fun to summon high level gang members and help them lay waste to your enemies, by cancelling calls for reinforcement or distracting enemies at critical moments with blasts of sound through their headsets. It almost feels like a very basic action RTS, like a much more limited version of Brutal Legend or something. Eventually it wears thin because of its limited interactivity and how long it takes, though.

The drones can also be fun to use, especially the copter which you can use to scope areas while remaining undetected and steal data keys to let you unlock doors and progress. The best missions of the game are those that can be completed only through hacking and drones, like a mission where you need to steal some data and an item from an FBI safehouse and can do it just by sneaking in your copter and “jumper” wheeled drone to bypass security and grab the item.

The problem is that the vast majority of the game’s missions are not like that. Instead they’re missions where Marcus has to physically infiltrate facilities and do stuff, and they’re substantially less fun. For a game that’s supposed to be built around hacking and the environment, the game actually offers relatively few environmental hazards to hack, and taking out enemies that way is boring and laborious. Instead, other than hiding somewhere and chaining together gang hits, the best way to clear out enemies is often just to shoot them, in a game where shooting is far from the game’s main strength. Because Marcus is so fragile the cover shooting system is often very frustrating, and the environments are open enough that enemies can often flank and kill Marcus before you even really know where they’re coming from. Almost every time I got killed in the game it was from someone I didn’t see or hear before they opened up on me. The best strategy, then, is often to find a defensible area like a dead end room or hallway, and lure enemies towards you, while you shoot them in the head with an assault rifle. The enemies can call reinforcements and often do so from cover, so this can take a long time and be pretty boring, but I almost always succeeded when I did this, and almost always failed when I tried to be more aggressive, or even tried to use stealth and hacking more (since Marcus can be discovered while hacking and enemies are pretty good about checking even out of the way areas.) I tried to use stealth in the game’s infamous Alcatraz missions, which many people found frustrating, and got killed almost immediately. I then tried the “lure them into a funnel” method and cleared the area without any trouble at all. This was my experience with most of the game through the end. Try to use the game’s more interesting systems and get frustrated. Shoot everyone (or have a gang do it) and the whole thing is a bit of a cake walk.

This wouldn’t be a problem if the game’s missions were more diverse, but as mentioned above, they aren’t. There are a few types of missions besides the “go to a place, get in, do something, get out” type, but they are a relatively small part of the game. There is one mission where you drive a car in a point to point race through San Francisco, and that was alright because the game has okay driving, though it is primarily used for a few side activities and just to get around the city when you’re not using the generous fast travel system. There are a number of missions where you have to “hack” things, which involves playing a pretty bad pipe rotation puzzle minigame that’s spread throughout the environment. This looks cool but makes the hacking kind of annoying because you’re running back and forth or using your drone or cameras to switch perspective and actually see the puzzle, leading to it all taking longer than it feels like it should. There are a few missions where you are not physically present and hack in to a security camera where you can jump to other security cameras, interact with a few objects in the world, or control a generic version of one of your drones. These amount to pretty simple puzzle rooms and are fine for what they are but have very limited interactivity.

A lot could have been done to improve Watch_Dogs 2. More creative missions. More/better hacking abilities or opportunities. Better combat could have helped. The melee takedown is especially frustrating because it is a series of canned KO animations, and if you get stuck in one of the longer ones it’s perfectly possible to get spotted and shot to death while the animation of you choking someone out with a yo-yo is still slowly playing. None of those things exist. The game has a lot of clothes you can buy or get as mission rewards, which is cool, but in general it’s not easy to make a lot of cash so buying vehicles or new guns can be prohibitively expensive. Simple Riddler-Trophy style traversal or puzzle challenges are rewarded with upgrade points, which is fine. There’s a taxi minigame. It’s all very basic. The non-mission stuff to do in the world is mostly boring, so even if it’s fun to explore there’s not much to find.

The game also features an integrated in world multi-player suite that I found so annoying that I turned it off a few hours in. It tries to be kind of like a Destiny style game, with other players randomly appearing in your game, but all they do is create chaos in a game where the scripting already isn’t great. I once went into the hobby shop that leads into the gang’s “hackerspace” only to find everyone dead because some rando had spawned into my world and slaughtered them. Talk about immersion breaking. The online multiplayer seems okay for what it is, and I may mess around with it at some point, but having it intrude into the single player game while you’re trying to do missions is just incredibly annoying and frustrating as a default setting. If it hadn’t been possible to turn that stuff I would never have stuck through the game. It’s not just the intentional griefers, it’s the game constantly bugging you with alerts to go do shitty multiplayer stuff.

Outside the default on multiplayer issue Watch_Dogs 2 has serious ludonarrative dissonance problems. The tone of the game is mostly upbeat plucky “gang of young adults get in way over their head and find a conspiracy” but there’s a lot of killing in the game, and a lot of downer stuff. There’s a random side mission where you hack into a home’s security system only to see a guy committing suicide using fumes from his car, and if you don’t save him fast enough he dies and the mission ends and you are rewarded with a few thousand “followers” (the game’s version of XP) which I guess means you broadcast a snuff film to the Internet and a bunch of people really liked it and wanted to see more. The body count for missions can be huge (though most can be finished with no lethality if you’re much more patient than I am) and it makes the stakes for some of this stuff just seem not worth it. It’s great that you exposed the evil CEO of Haum was spying on his customers, but not so great that you killed a few dozen innocent security guards and cops along the way. You take a lot of risks that might make sense in a game where nobody died, but seem really absurd considering the number of bodies you are likely to pile up. Is this really worth murdering dozens of people? Mostly no. You also have a problem when, as previously mentioned, your friend gets killed but everyone stays cheery and upbeat and never mentions him again after they get revenge. Aiden Pearce, the character from the first game, appears in a side mission and you kill some people alongside him and then get all giddy like you just hung out with your favorite celebrity rather than helping a vigilante brutally slaughter some people who might be bad guys but are still, you know, people. As the game goes on the plucky young adults all start to come off as a bunch of psychopaths.

I think that Watch_Dogs 2 could have been something special if it weren’t an Ubisoft open world game. The story of these plucky hackers and even the hacking mechanics seem shoehorned into the framework of a GTA III clone. Although I enjoyed the open world itself, there’s not really a lot of opportunity for fun mayhem in it, especially since Watch_Dogs cops tend to be much more annoying than fun to fight. The game’s unique mechanics just aren’t well integrated into its structure. Watch_Dogs 2 even tones down the ability to use hacking during car chases from the first game. It adds the ability to use hacking to steer enemy cars remotely, which is cool, but the button prompts to use steam pipes or traffic lights to disable enemy cars have a very tight window, and enemy cars are aggressive and can spawn right in front of you. I died in one mission because it forced me to drive a very slow vehicle, and even when I would evade the vehicles behind me it would just spawn additional enemies right in front of me.

If instead Watch_Dogs 2 had been much less violent and really leaned into the hacking gameplay, and maybe even ditched the open world, it would have better matched the narrative themes to what you do in the game. Fewer enemies or even just having enemies who weren’t prone to shooting Marcus on sight when all he’s doing is sneaking into a tech company would have made stealth more manageable. A greater variety of tools and gizmos would have been more fun than the game’s two dozen or so guns, most of which are relatively useless once you get your hands on a decent assault rifle, which Marcus keeps conveniently stuffed down his pants when he’s not shooting. There’s a point towards the end where Marcus gets angry and indignant that he’s been placed on a terrorist watch list, fuming that it’s so unfair what they’re doing to try and stop him. Given that Marcus killed a couple hundred people over the course of my game he came off as snotty and entitled in that moment, but I would have rather played the game where what he said made sense, and where the mission right before that hadn’t encouraged me to lay waste to dozens of security guards in a big violent set piece.

Despite its flaws Watch_Dogs 2 is much better than the prior game. It has good characters (if you ignore the dissonance), serviceable gameplay, an okay story, and a really good world with a nice soundtrack. It would be fair to call it an average game but I think even more fair to call it very uneven. Overall I’m positive on the game, but I also stopped playing for almost a week before tackling the last 2 mini-arcs because the game just felt tedious by the end. If it had committed to being more lighthearted and focused more on hacking and drones and less on guns and violence it could have been a very interesting and original game. As it is it’s just another open world game with a few interesting twists and an above average story and cast. That’s not a terrible thing to be, but there’s a lot of missed potential.

I am on record as buying an Xbox Series X despite not being very hyped for it. I spent most of the day with one eye on my FedEx tracking information to see as soon as it would get dropped off, but the guy brought it up to my apartment door and rang the bell after he dropped it off, which was nice of him.

The packaging was smaller than I expected, and the console is actually pretty compact. I am used to launch Xboxes being these giant unwieldy things, but this is quite reasonably sized and not very heavy. It is probably the best form factor for an Xbox ever. It fits perfectly beneath a small side table I have next to my TV for my PSVR and has lots of room to breathe there, so there it will remain.

The controller is a very lightly modified Xbox One controller, though the textured grips give it a slightly different feel, and the disc based D-pad is probably the best one they’ve ever made. It is also, I think, a very little bit smaller and denser than the Xbox One controller. Regardless, it’s very comfortable and responsive. Given how innovative the PS5 controller apparently is they may end up wishing they’d been more ambitious, but the Xbox One controller was very well designed so it’s hard to complain. There’s a reason the Switch Pro controller is modeled on it.

Installation and set up was…mostly painless, though it did try to get me to use an Xbox app on my phone that I installed but couldn’t get to work so I had to set it up manually. Took about 10-15 minutes with no problems. The UI is literally the same UI I have on my Xbox One X, and honestly while I don’t dislike the Xbox UI as much as a lot of people I kind of wish they’d done something else with it. It’s snappier on the Series X than it is on the One, but buying a new console only to be using basically the same controller and the same UI as you were using before takes a little bit of the “new hardware” excitement out of it. The controller and UI are so similar that it’s hard to feel like I’m actually using a new box, and if I hadn’t unhooked my Xbox One X and moved it into another room I would believe that I had accidently turned on the wrong console.

Speaking of turning on the console, I’ve had a couple issues with the power on this thing. I have it set to power save mode and it seems to turn itself off so thoroughly that I have to physically press the button to get it to switch back on and cannot use a controller to do it. This is not a massive problem but it’s slightly annoying. More annoying is the fact that the system turns itself off after 10 minutes idle. It stays on fine if it’s actively doing something like streaming a video or playing a game but if I just leave it idle it turns itself all the way off. It also doesn’t download stuff when it’s off (I’m sure it does if it’s set to instant on rather than power save mode) so I am going to have to switch to “instant on” mode and off power save for now because I have a lot of software to download right now. I especially want to try Forza Horizon 4 on this thing. It’s kind of annoying that I have to be actively doing something to keep the system on and downloading stuff. And yes I checked the settings and it’s set to dim the screen after 10 minutes inactive and turn off after an hour, so it may be turning off when it’s supposed to dim the screen.

I’m sure these are issues that will get ironed out in future patches, though they weren’t problems I had with my Xbox One X, which uses the same UI.

Having my full library of digital Xbox games available immediately is almost overwhelming. I’ve collected a ton of games over the 13 years since I got an Xbox 360, and my library is full of stuff that ranges from spectacular to terrible. It’s a little daunting to see just how much there is, but you can easily organize and filter the list so this is not so much a complaint as an emotional reaction. For me each console generation has been a chance to start fresh and kind of leave the last generation behind, at least for a while, and that just doesn’t feel like the case here. Even your save games follow you to the new box because they’re all in the cloud. I could download Killer Instinct, which I played on the Xbox One’s launch day, and it would still have all my unlocks and statistics stored and ready to go. It’s just another way in which the Series X is a continuation of what came before.

So how does it play? I’ve only tried one game so far, Dirt 5. It looks very nice. I’m not sure if I’d say it looks better than every game on Xbox One X, but there seems to be no draw in, a very solid frame rate, no resolution drops etc… The loading is not quite as snappy as I expected, but I’m also downloading a bunch of stuff in the background so that might have slowed things down. I did get an audio glitch where the sound broke up and then dropped out altogether, but it only happened once and was fixed when I restarted the game so it’s hard to know if that’s an issue with the console, Dirt 5 in particular, or some combination of things. I would say that what’s most impressive about Dirt 5 on the series X is not so much how it looks but how cleanly it runs, which is not surprising when you crank up the power on a piece of software that’s also designed to run on less powerful systems.

My first impression of the Xbox Series X is…respect. It seems like a well put-together system and there’s nothing bad about it per se. I like the Xbox One X so I like this. It’s really that simple, especially because outside of the power level and the quick resume feature it basically is an Xbox One X. More or less the same controller and same UI. This feels like a half step console in many ways. That doesn’t mean it’s bad. It’s a very powerful machine and it doesn’t fix the things that weren’t broken. It’s just not exciting. There’s no thrill here.

That’s okay though because for now I’ll enjoy having great versions of a lot of games, new and old, to play, and the new games will come when they come. Just cutting loading times significantly will be a serious value upgrade. Being able to play games with rock solid frame rates, better image quality, and no resolution dips is also a big plus. We’re never going to see that mind blowing PS1 to PS2 or even PS2 to PS3 upgrade again. It’s all about a slightly better, smoother, faster, experience.

It’s a neat and functional box with a ton of potential. With Gamepass and the Games with Gold I’ve accrued I will never run out of stuff to play. I feel good about my purchase so far. Not everything needs to be exciting. Sometimes an incremental improvement is enough. But if you haven’t been able to snag one out you’re not really missing anything. This baby’s just getting started.

It's new console day today (and Thursday) for those lucky enough to snag one, and that means some discussion about launch libraries. Leaving aside comparisons between the two (for the record I think PS5 wins easily, even though I did not manage to get one) one thing that's interesting about them is how little filler/shovelware there seems to be.

Launch exclusive games generally fall into one, or more, of three, or four, depending on how you look at it, categories:

System sellers: Great games meant to make the system incredibly desirable from day one. Your Halos, your Soul Caliburs, your Super Mario Worlds.

Tech demos: Games meant to show off the power or features of the new system. Your Resoguns, your Astro Bot Playrooms, your Ryse: Son of Romes.

Filler/Shovelware: Basically everything else; from the pretty good (Dead Rising 3) to some of the worst games ever made (Fighter Within was also a tech demo, but was very much in the shovelware category too.)

It used to be that basically every game on launch day was a tech demo. The jump between NES and SNES, or PS2 and PS3, was so massive that any game that even made an attempt to use the new hardware's features would look much more technically impressive than games on prior hardware. This stopped being true in the move from 7th to 8th generation, where the upgrades were more subtle than in prior gens, and is even less true in the move from 8th gen to 9th gen, where a lot of the benefits seem to be in frame rates and resolution rather than poly count or fancy new effects (though ray tracing is a thing.)

In addition, because most systems did not feature backwards compatibility, there was a lot of room for library "filler" so people would have things to play on their new systems after they finished with the few big guns and messing around with the tech demos. Not all the "filler" games were bad. Condemned: Criminal Origins was definitely a "filler" title for the Xbox 360, but is very well regarded to this day. But a lot of these games were short or kind of janky and clearly just existed to fill out that library a little and take advantage of the new system hype. And plenty of them were actual shovelware, and flat out stank. Launch software is famous for its low quality.

This year there seem to be a few of those games (like Bright Memories and the Falconeer) but none of them have much budget behind them and aren't getting much attention. And this makes sense, because these machines are launching with massive libraries full of stuff to play. Backwards compatibility means that there are literally thousands of games available on both consoles from day one, and many of them will run better on the new hardware and already look and play great. There's no need for Killzone: Shadow Fall on a system that has Doom Eternal, Titanfall 2, and Overwatch. There's no room for something like Knack (which was also a tech demo) on a system that has...well...Knack!

Of course these systems are launching with a bunch of cross-gen stuff, as all systems since the Xbox 360 era have, but Assassin's Creed Valhalla isn't really a launch game per se, it's just a game that was going to come out anyway that is launching at the same time. And you see that with the number of these games that launched before the systems on other platforms, like Watch Dogs: Legion and Dirt 5.

We're just not getting anything along the lines of Amped 3 this time. A game that clearly existed to fill a niche on a new box. All those niches are coming pre-filled thanks to backwards compatibility.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I'm certainly not sad that there isn't going to be a LocoCycle or Crimson Dragon for the Xbox Series X. Those games just aren't necessary and are often a big waste of money. On the other hand these "filler" titles could sometimes be experimental in a fun way. The Xbox One Killer Instinct is a really good game that also showed an interesting model for fighting games with a very small roster that built over time. Amped 3 is nuts in a good way. Smuggler's Run and Motorstorm were solid racers that led to even better games down the line (not a direct sequel for Smuggler's Run, but its influence on the studio.)

The lines between generations have never been blurrier. Xbox Series X is launching with zero exclusives, and PS5 is only launching with a few. Every great game from the prior generation will be playable on the new one, fresh out of the box, often with enhancements. It's a weird time. And part of that weirdness is the lack of the traditional filler launch game. So let's pour one out for Summoner, Fantavision, Fuzion Frenzy, and Bloodwake. We'll probably never see your like again. For better or worse.

Xenoblade Chronicles was always a game that I meant to play but never got around to. It came out towards the end of the Wii’s period of dominance, and was only sold at Gamestop in the US. The price never dropped much below full retail, and I moved on to the new generation before I ever got around to picking it up.

When Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition was announced I resolved to actually play what had by then come to be considered one of the essential RPGs of the 7^th generation, and since it came out during quarantine in late spring I had plenty of time to download a digital copy and make my way through the main campaign. I liked the game but thought the last third was kind of boring and repetitive, so though I started a game in the new separate epilogue chapter as soon as I got through the main game I quickly decided to put it down and play it later.

Last weekend later arrived, and I loaded into my old save and finished the epilogue, clocking in at a little over 12 hours, during the course of the week.

Xenoblade Chronicles Future Connected starts about a year after the main game with Shulk and Melia flying around the shoulder of the Bionis in the Junks. The ship crashes and they discover they had two stowaways with them; Nene and Kino, both Nopon children of Riki, the mighty heropon of legend who joined Shulk and friends during the main game. Shulk, Melia, Nene and Kino make up the entire party during the epilogue, with older sister Nene playing almost exactly like Reyn and Kino being a reskin of Sharla. All characters start at level 60 and with all their arts, and there are no skill trees or relationship webs in the game though you can level up the characters to the cap of 80 and you can upgrade their arts with AP. Shulk has also lost his ability to see the future so there are no premonition events in the game, and there are no Mechon opponents so there’s no need to use the Monado to allow Mechon to be hit. A new combat mechanic is introduced to replace chain attacks, and I’ll talk about that addition bit later.

The first thing I noticed about the Xenoblade Chronicles epilogue is how little I recall from the main game, which I’d played only a few months earlier. I remembered the main characters, of course, and the basic sweep of the plot, but there’s so much detail and so many characters and races in a game packed with lore that I found it all quickly faded. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t able to follow the story of the epilogue, which is mostly independent of the main game and only features one major recurring character other than Shulk and Melia, but rather that a lot of the background details were hazy and unclear. I don’t think this is because Xenoblade Chronicles has a bad story, it’s just that it has a ton of story, and the epilogue draws more on the background details than the main thrust of the plot.

The second thing I noticed playing the epilogue is that I don’t really like the Xenoblade Chronicles combat. The autoattacking and skills real-time but menu driven battling just doesn’t resonate for me. I don’t hate it and it isn’t super hard or anything, but I’ve played a lot of RPGs this year and I prefer something to be turn based (like FF IX) or just a straight up action RPG rather than this weird in-between system. I really loved the combat in the FF 7 remake, which was action based with the ability to pause, but it’s not really fair to compare Xenoblade Chronicles to a game that came out 10 years later. I have played some FF XIII this year and I think Xenoblade Chronciles’ combat has a lot in common with that game, which I’m also not very fond of. I played Melia exclusively during the epilogue because I hadn’t used her much during the main game and while I sort of came to understand how she works by the end (she summons elements that act as buffs and then discharges them to do damage) I never really enjoyed it. Part of the issue is that everything in Xenoblade Chronicles has a ton of HP so battles take a long time and no one action seems like it really matters that much. At least if you’re playing as a healer you can feel good about well-timed heals that save a party member, or as a tank you can use breaks and topples to interrupt enemies and disable them. As a DPS/Support character, Melia’s individual abilities just don’t feel impactful, even though she’s not underpowered when you measure the overall effects of her abilities. It’s not enough to ruin the game or anything, but I really prefer action or turn based combat, and not this tweener style.

The new mechanic that the epilogue adds is…strange. During your journey you meet members of the Ponspector’s Union, basically Nopon surveyors who are on the shoulder of the Bionis to try and map it out. You do sidequests for each one you meet and recruit them, after which they follow you around as sort of NPC party members. They really do follow you too. They’re positioned just behind the camera so you don’t see them most of the time, but if you ever turn the camera to face your party there they are. You can get up to a dozen of them, so it can make for kind of a jarring visual as this line of little Nopons just follows you everywhere.

During combat the Nopon crew is outside your control but pitches in with heals and damage against enemies from time to time, which is sort of helpful but also means that the auto combat feels even more random and outside your control than it did in the main game, since you not only have no control over them but can’t even set their equipment or skill load outs like you can with your main party NPCs. If you get three segments of the team meter charges you can unleash an ultimate attack with your Nopon crew, choosing between damage, healing, and a stun attack. These attacks do an enormous amount of damage, killing most non-boss enemies and substantially damaging even bosses, but since they drain the meter they remove your ability to revive characters if they fall (until you get the meter back up) which means that they hasten the end of battles you were already winning but can be too risky in battles against enemies who have instant death attacks or other ways of taking down your party members. The Nopon crew also makes battle incredibly visually confusing, especially if you’re using two Nopon party members. Even though the ponspectors are yellow and Nene and Kino are pink and green respectively, in a hectic battle with multiple enemies it can be hard to keep your eyes on Nene and Kino and help them up if they get topped, dazed, or knocked out. Overall the whole ponspector thing is kind of cute, but too random and chaotic to actually be of benefit to the game.

The epilogue makes another weird and minor change to the game’s mechanics. There are a number of sidequests beyond the ponspectors, and it’s necessary to complete at least some of them if you want to upgrade your equipment because they are by far the best source of money in the epilogue and while enemies drop weapons from time to time they don’t really drop armor at any appreciable rate. The quests are pretty similar to the main game’s in format except that a number of them require that you talk to the quest giver with the right main character. A quest for a mechanic might require you use Shulk, or a quest for a child might require you use Kino, who is just a kid himself. This just means you need to swap out the party member to talk to the person and then you can go back to your old set up, so it literally just creates 20 seconds of busy work and while it’s hardly a problem I have no idea why they thought it was a necessary or good idea. It just represents how half baked a lot of the changes in the game feel.

The Bionis shoulder is a fine Xenoblade setting, though I understand why it was cut from the main game because it feels very redundant to the Gaur plain, consisting of a large, albeit segmented, grassy area with some vertically raised areas like highways and a few caves or mines to explore. It’s pretty large by Xenoblade standards, though maybe not as big as Gaur itself, and it’s somewhat visually varied though far from spectacular. Being restricted to just one area gives a different feel to the quest, and you end up doing a lot of backtracking and revisiting sub areas for various quests. For Xenoblade Chronicles fanatics who have played the game multiple times and just want to see this mythical cut section of the Bionis in playable form I’m sure it’s thrilling, but for someone who just played this game for the first time (like me) it feels like just another Bionis area in a game that arguably had too many areas to begin with. It also recycles enemy models from the main game, which is to be expected in an add on like this, and there a couple unique boss battles to add a little bit of freshness.

As for the story, it’s…okay if unimpactful. This is a 12 hour segment of RPG so there’s quite a lot of story mixed in, but the only substantial new characters are Nene and Kino, who admittedly make for great new Nopon companions. None of the other NPCs register in the way that some of the main game characters, such as various villains or the Nopon village chief, did. Melia and Shulk get some additional character development through the Quiet Moments (the epilogue’s equivalent of Heart to Hearts) but not enough to really build on what you already know about the characters, and there isn’t a ton of development on what has happened in the year since the end of the first game. Future Connected is mostly stand alone, and feels in many ways like a side story instead of a true epilogue. The actual self-contained plot of the epilogue is very straight forward and both kind of boring and a little confusing in that it raises a lot of questions that it doesn’t even attempt to answer. As a side story it’s fine but as an epilogue it feels lacking.

In the end it’s hard to complain too much about Future Connected. Its origins as repurposed cut content prevent it from being truly great, but as a mostly self-contained side story it amounts to more or less a free piece of expansion DLC. For Xenoblade Chronicles fanatics it offers a chance to revisit two characters and meet two new ones, and for everyone else it’s like a cute little mini RPG. If it had cost $20 I would perhaps be mildly disappointed, but as a free extra I mostly enjoyed my time with it. I just don’t understand why it spends so little time reflecting on the events of the main game, and why all the mechanical changes amount to stripping out complexity and adding in the half-baked ponspector mechanic. When given the opportunity to add a coda to a game that many consider a classic they just…kind of made some more of it, but a little different. Perhaps it’s just the result of having to work with cut content and a limited budget, but regardless the end product is both inoffensive and inessential, which is an odd thing to say about a Xenoblade release.