Knack feels like a game made by some kind of emergent AI who has researched videogames on Wikipedia and Youtube but has never actually played one. All the components of a game are there, but they are put together in such an incomprehensible way that I played through the whole thing with my brow furrowed in confusion, occasionally screaming “WHAT?” at the screen. Knack rejects all foundations of conventional storytelling, such as plot and tone and context, and such basic game design concepts as progression and a comprehensible difficulty curve. Alex said, in his review, that the game seems like something bland put together by a corporate committee. I strongly disagree. The game feels like something truly weird put together by some kind of alien intelligence.

Games are hard to make and many games have good ideas but are unable to execute on them with polish for lack of time, money, or programming talent. Knack’s ideas are pure madness but it accomplishes them in a competent manner. I’ve played a lot of games that are worse than Knack but I haven’t played many that are more disturbing on an existential level. Skynet has been born and it is trying to communicate with us. Its medium of conversation is Knack.

Knack begins with a cartoony conflict between human soldiers with futuristic guns in a base and a bunch of goblins with medieval weapons who assault the human position from the treeline. The humans return fire and the goblins are scattered, but a second later they come back with modern tanks and blast their way into the base. What? How? Why do the goblins use medieval weapons to begin with if they have tanks? Why do they exist? Why are they attacking humans? The scene isn’t really played for laughs, though the cartoony look makes it seem lighthearted. The tone is weird and a little unsettling. Welcome to Knack.

Next we cut to some kind of situation room where humans are standing around trying to figure out how to respond to the goblin threat. Everyone’s very serious, but also calm. The scene drags as they discuss the various options, such as non-sentient autonomous robots, they can employ against the goblins and introduce NPCs we have no context for or interest in. Finally we get to Knack, who is described as a collection of the “relics of an ancient civilization” that humans are using to power their civilization. Knack is described as a living “breathing” (He has no lungs. He has no circulatory system. He is definitely not breathing.) being. Then you, controlling Knack, take on a bunch of challenge rooms while humans watch from behind glass, which A) makes you feel feel alienated from the humans, like an experiment and B) shows how little the humans care about Knack, because they put him in a live fire scenario and, well, I got merked.

I died during the tutorial.

It’s common knowledge at this point that Knack is more of a brawler than a 3-D platformer. There is light platforming, and it looks like a platformer, but the challenge and meat of the game play comes from engaging with enemies. It plays similarly to a stripped down God of War, with Knack having stretchy limbs that kind of resemble Kratos’ Blades of Chaos (though without the range) and the right analog stick controlling a dodge move rather than the camera. That’s right, Knack relies on preset camera angles just like God of War, which works fine for the most part but felt legitimately shocking in a 2013 release. Knack also has magic-like special attacks, in the form of “sunstone” powered super attacks, a blue health meter, and even secret rooms behind breakable walls. It lacks God of War’s QTEs and combat fluidity, but there are more similarities than differences.

One big divergence between Knack and Kratos is how fragile Knack is in his small form. Knack gets bigger and smaller at various points in the game, by absorbing or releasing the “relics” that make up his body, and size definitely matters in the world of Knack. Big Knack can take a few hits from smaller enemies and dispose of most foes with a single blow. Little Knack has to combo to do any damage, and generally dies in two or at most three hits on normal difficulty. It’s a very strange choice for a game aimed at kids and is made even stranger by the fact that Knack’s enemies are plentiful and can really come after the little guy. Beetles explode (?!) after charging, requiring a well-timed jump to dodge. Birds shoot whirlwinds. Big sword goblins do massive damage with their wide, sweeping, slashing combos, have more range than Knack, and also have a backwards roll they can use to get away from Knack if he tries to dodge their assault and punish them. One on one none of these foes presents too much of a challenge, but add a few buddies into the mix and it’s difficult to keep Knack safe and also do damage. Knack has a three-hit combo and you’re encouraged to use it, but the much more effective strategy is to hit and run, dishing out as much damage as you can before dashing out of trouble. I spammed the jump roll attack to get past a lot of guys, but I still died regularly. Especially tough are sections where you have to deal with large tough enemies who come after you and a back row of goons firing projectiles. It’s easy to get stuck in an animation or commit to a bad angle of attack and get killed. Knack is designed for the player to be careful and meticulous, learning each enemy’s attack patterns and exploiting them while also staying safe from other attackers. The visual style of Knack, on the other hand, suggests that it should be a relatively forgiving romp. The pairing of cartoony visuals and technical demanding combat continually threw me off during my playthrough, causing me to underestimate foes and assume I had a wider attack window than I actually did.

Knack also feels like his attacks should have more range and his dodge should be more effective than it is. Even on the last few levels I was trying to dash in and hit guys after they left an opening, only to whiff and get smashed into bits by the response. This is just one example of how Knack’s design elements do not fit together. The AI that made the game understood cartoony visuals and understood demanding, technical gameplay, but didn’t get that if you plan to put them together you need to communicate that to the player.

Knack isn’t an extraordinarily difficult game, but it’s a game that demands that you adapt to its rules. In many ways it feels like a mascot game from the early 2000s. It’s nowhere near as hard as Jak II, but it shares some DNA with the missions of that title (though without the variety or fighting, and with checkpoints that can be frustratingly far apart but are nowhere near Jak II levels of frustration.)

Another odd element of Knack’s difficulty curve is that it’s not a curve at all. It’s a rollercoaster. Knack gets bigger and smaller throughout his adventure, and when big the game is much easier than when he’s small. Many enemies are trivial for big Knack, and he can generally take a few hits (though there are still guys who will absolutely wreck you.) There are times where the game throws sequences of tough battles at you within the same checkpoint, and others where you’ll smash through a whole level without meeting significant resistance, and it’s impossible to tell by the placement of the chapter in the game which it will be. The final world features one level where you smash everything in your path with ease and another where you have to play almost flawlessly to advance. This serves along with the previously mentioned visuals to lull you into a sense of complacency before crushing your spirit repeatedly, and as a design decision it is as baffling as the rest of the game.

It is worth noting that the “sunstone” magic meter is consistent across lives, meaning that if you use it in a fight but die you will not have that charge when you respawn, making it more difficult the second time around, but you can also farm it up over the course of multiple lives to get past a tough area. That seems like a smart design decision to allow players to collect sunstone to cheese through a tough area, but it is undercut by tough areas where there are no sunstone spawns. Given the rest of Knack’s design choices I’m guessing the persistent sunstone as check on difficulty was a happy accident rather than intentional choice.

After the tutorial area Knack sends its player to search out the goblin fort where the tanks seen in the intro came from. Knack travels with a lot of companions, including a blond Race Bannon type, Knack’s discoverer (he was found in a relic mine) who is a husky middle aged scientist who somehow follows you not just through combat but across collapsing stone archways and past traps, the scientist’s assistant, and an obviously evil industrialist who wants to use mindless security robots to fight the Goblins instead of Knack. The evil industrialist is clearly correct here. Let the robots get destroyed fighting goblins. Knack is alive! He has a personality! He can talk! These goblins are bad news and can wipe him out in a couple hits. Sending him in to fight them is cruel when there are security robots!

At one point the security robots DO fight the robots and they do an okay job. This short section basically plays itself, as you run into rooms and watch the robots clear them. Once again, Knack’s creator rejects the very idea of a videogame, turning your protagonist into a poor alternative for a stronger, better, force.

Knack pairs a cartoony look and somewhat lighthearted tone with some very intense moments in a kind of disturbing way. After the party makes it to the goblin fort they, with the exception of Knack and the young assistant he’s assigned to protect, walk into an obvious trap, and the Goblin Chief orders the scientist shot with a tank cannon. That’s some North Korea type psychopathy. Fortunately the guy survives, but throughout its run time Knack doesn’t mess around. Most kids games don’t have their friendly scientist dude shot at by a tank at point blank range, but most games were made by people and Knack was assembled by some kind of malfunctioning neural network. Knack is a robotic game maker’s scream for help.

Characters in Knack behave in inexplicably strange ways. After Knack’s companions are kidnapped (or murdered, the game is not clear at this point) Knack and the assistant decide that the best thing to do is sneak into the goblin fort to help them. This constitutes a gross dereliction of duty (why are you not going for more help from the human military, or at least sending the boy to tell someone what you found?) but the two of them treat it like they were driving to the market and one of the streets is closed for construction. Oh bother, we’ll just go around. Keep in mind that the goblin chieftan just tried to execute someone via tank cannon.

It's worth pointing out here that Knack’s relationship to the enemies he fights is profoundly messed up. Knack is a sentient amalgamation of relics, a one of its kind creature that risks its life fighting goblins for the benefit of humans because…he’s sort of good at it I guess? The goblins, for their part, are clearly sentient as well. They mostly don’t talk to Knack but they use weapons and tools, and the boss goblin is very chatty (saying things like “You probably want to know where I got all these tanks seeing as I live in a wooden fort town from like the 1400s. I’m not going to tell you.”) Thanks. I’d like to know a lot of other things, like what the relationship between humans and goblins is in this world, why their technology levels are so disparate, why, in a world of limitless energy from the relics, goblins still have to live in wooden fortresses etc… but the game is much more focused on other things, like blocking PS4 sharing of its collectibles. There are disturbing hints about humans destroying goblin cities in the Crystal war but when the goblins bring it up the humans roll their eyes and say some variation of “oh that again” as if they expect the goblins to just get over what appears to have been some kind of genocide.

Anyway, the goblins are sentient, so is Knack, and he is killing a ton of them. Just merking groups of them over and over. It’s Nathan Drake’s ludonarrative dissonance on steroids. Yes the goblins are bad and they’re trying to hurt Knack, but that’s still a lot of murder for a cute little machine. Most 3-D platformers avoid having their enemies be obviously intelligent, opting instead for abstract monsters like goombas or robot enemies like in Sonic. Knack is not interested in such niceties, instead showing the final kill in each area in glorious slow-mo like it was Shadow of Mordor or something. It’s uncomfortable. The only exception to this is the birds who attack Knack (?! Never explained why they do this) who get to fly away after you hit them, because…they’re cute so it would be wrong to kill them? I don’t know. To me it just serves to highlight all the other dudes he’s whipping to death with his weird random-floating-object arms.

Knack and the boy he’s failing to protect go into some ice caves. The boy tells Knack he should use some ice to bulk himself up and get stronger. Knack says that he can only use relics. The boy tells him “try harder.” Knack tries harder and learns to use ice to make himself bigger. It plays out like a parody of kids movie/game “you-can-do-itism” but it’s not parodying anything in particular. Knack kind of knows what the story beats should be, but puts them together wrong, like it’s the cockroach wearing an Edgar suit from MiB. From a distance it seems sort of normal, but up close there’s something very very wrong with it.

I won’t go through the whole plot, but Knack’s story does a bunch of other strange stuff. You sneak into and destroy goblin forts in multiple separate instances, making the game feel like it’s repeating itself (and in fact chapter 8-1 is called "back to basics", wherein after you fight a bunch of high tech enemies in a city in chapter 7 you are back to strolling through caves fighting beetles and tiny goblins, which feels like a real backslide.) At one point Knack’s father-figure character finds a long-lost character from his past and tries to rescue her. She refuses to be rescued and he leaves dejected. Towards the end of the game she sends him a message asking him to come get her. He does…in a cut scene…and she continues with you to the finale. Why doesn’t she just come with you the first time instead of creating a weird, momentum breaking, interlude just prior to the finale? Perhaps an AI author who doesn’t understand narrative momentum?

In addition, though Knack starts by fighting robots and animals, he soon progresses to humans. That’s right; a good portion of Knack is spent fighting straight up people. The evil scientist with the robot army turns on you, as you know he will, and even though his whole schtick is having a robot army, he also has a lot of human goons for no apparent reason. You beat these humans down mercilessly, and while a teleport animation seems to imply maybe they’re just incapacitated, there’s no way that's actually the case. Knack gets really really big, and he is obviously killing dudes left and right. It made me very uncomfortable after a certain point. This isn’t even a situation where the bad guys are all part of Hydra or some evil organization; they’re just security for a famous inventor guy who is nominally on the side of the human government. They’re trying to do their jobs and Knack is straight up ending them. It reminded me of the scene from Clerks about the contractors on the Death Star.

Knack’s irrationalities are not limited to story and gameplay. Knack’s bonus rooms feature chests that give you collectibles that you can use to gain helpful abilities like a combo meter that powers you up if you can avoid getting hit or secret detector. These have a lot of pieces and take a very long time to get, though, so I only had a couple by the end of the game and they arrived too late to do much help. You also get crystals that can be used to give Knack different forms, but there’s no way to collect enough to activate one of these forms in a single play through. You need 15 crystals to unlock Vampire Knack. By the end of World 8 I had 3. By the end of the game, 6. I found the vast majority of the hidden chests. Knack is kind of long and I can’t imagine many having the patience to play multiple times, though the game seems to expect it since it awards a bronze trophy called “Knack beginner” upon completion on normal difficulty.

Even stranger, there is a PS share block on the collectibles which…I don’t know? The objects and alternate forms of Knack have trophies associated with them so they weren’t a secret. The designer AI had a glitch in it? Unclear.

At one point Knack transforms into what he calls “stealth Knack,” who can pass through laser beams without setting off alarms, and transform between big and small forms. That’s it. He’s not actually stealthy. Bad guys see him from across the room. Calling him “stealth” Knack implies a profound misunderstanding of human language. Like an AI might have.

There is an area in Knack where you have to sacrifice a lot of relics to pass through locked doors sealing off various rooms. Many of these doors have a bunch of relics sitting right in front of them, making it like a game where there is a locked door with a key two feet away. Why? Other doors in the game just unlock when you beat all the bad guys. Why does this area do it this way? It doesn't make any sense.

Similarly, at one point in the game you come across a bunch of people trying to brute force a door they can’t figure out. They are using all kinds of tech to try to break it open. The secret to this door? 3 switches that take about 25 seconds to find and hit. These are not primitive goblins, they are human beings. It made me wonder whether the game didn’t have me fighting the literal same few dudes over and over and causing massive brain damage in the process.

The traps in Knack are easily avoided and often destroy each other. They feel like they belong in a totally different, much much easier game from the combat. Health pickups often restore a tiny bit of your health, which isn't that great in a game where most enemies do 1/3 to half damage with a single blow. None of these decisions make sense!

The whole graphical “hook” of Knack is that he starts tiny but grows huge through incorporating relics into himself. But he doesn’t grow big just by collecting more relics. The relics themselves grow larger, much larger. This makes no sense in the world of Knack. It’s totally unexplained and not commented on. At one point the scientist guy virtually salivates at the idea of getting his hands on giant relics. Such relics obviously exist within big Knack. Nobody comments. Nobody notices. These characters don’t act like any humans ever.

I didn’t like or hate Knack. I didn’t even respond to it on that axis. I was flabbergasted by it. Who made this thing? Why? What were they trying to convey? How did this happen? It’s usually possible to figure out how disastrous video games got made. A flawed premise, a bad engine, not enough time and money to finish, whatever. That’s not the case with Knack. It does all the hard things competently and is reasonably polished in areas like controls and graphics. Where it fails spectacularly, shockingly, is understanding why people tell stories and play games. It’s the video game equivalent of one of the alien creatures from The Thing. On the outside it’s totally normal and functional, but dig a little deeper and horrors await within.

I understand that Knack was a bit of a tech demo, and some of its weirdness can be explained that way (like why a game with a mechanic around smashing walls to find secrets has its character clip through walls in ugly ways.) Maybe that explains the PS4 share block (gotta use it somewhere) and some of the weird difficulty curves (not a ton of time for tuning) but it doesn’t explain a lot. As the AI designer says in Knack’s voice at one point “I’m no human but it seems a bit more complex than that.” There’s no way that a person designed Knack. It’s far too weird and alien. Knack is the result of a very complex, disturbing, AI experiment, and I’m not sure what Sony plans to do with this gamemaking AI it built. Except make Knack II of course.

I enjoyed my time with Knack just because it was so very odd. I was constantly surprised and bemused. Do I recommend you play it? Not if you value your sanity.

Sengoku is not a great game. It's a 1991 beat 'em up with a transformation gimmick (you can transform into a dog, who I can't figure out a use for, a ninja who flippin' flips everywhere whenever he moves, and an ornate Samurai dude.) As a game it's...ok...kind of stiff and clunky but not unfun. What it does have going for it is that it is very very crazy.

Sengoku's plot is that some magical warlord is returning to Earth and trying to take it over. You play a 90s Cool Dude (tm) with yellow pants, a sweet jacket, and knee and shoulder pads, as well as fingerless gloves. Your goal is to stop the baddies by punching and kicking them. Sometimes you get a sword though. Sometimes you can shoot stuff. Sometimes you turn into a dog. It'e kind of unclear what's going on much of the time.

Beyond the incomprehensible premise, Sengoku features a bizarre cast of enemies from Japanese lore, and was clearly used as a tech demo for a bunch of Neo Geo special effects. Sprites scale in the background, get rotated squashed and stretch, and just have weird animations and effects when they die. It's very flashy compared to most beat 'em ups, but not in an impressive way, because there are very few frames of animation. It's just...weird.

In addition to all the weird effects, the game often whisks you up into the clouds to fight even weirder enemies. It is both disorienting and bizarre and it gives the levels a very strange flow. I was surprised when I defeated the first boss and was sent to stage 2. I had assumed it was just going to be one continuous left to right scrolling level because there are a lot of minibosses and the jarring transitions make it impossible for a stage to have "flow."

There's not a ton more to say about the game, except that it's available on the major consoles through the ACA series so if you're in the mood it's kind of worth checking out just for how strange it is. I wouldn't call it a great game, but at least it's different.

The impetus for my finally playing Shadow of Mordor was a bunch of people naming it in a forum thread on games they just couldn’t get into. This was an inauspicious start, but I’d always intended to play SoM (I bought it at launch from Dell only to have the shipment delayed months) and I was very much in the mood for an open world game to just run around and cause havoc in. Having finished the game now I can say that it held my attention well enough, but I have no idea how it earned the plaudits it did on release, or how it became game of the year in a year that also featured Sunset Overdrive, Forza Horizon 2, and Shovel Knight.

I think of Giant Bomb GOTYs as titans of the industry, the best of the best. Games like Uncharted 2, which was polished to a gorgeous sheen, The Last of Us, which was a haunting and intense survival journey, or Saints Row the Third, a game I played on PS3 in 2015 when we were well into the 8^th generation and had a heck of a fun time with. Shadow of Mordor is not that. It’s just okay. Nothing special. A fine game, a good even, but it is nowhere near top tier.

If I had to give it a grade it would be 7 out of 10, and on the Giant Bomb scale I would round down to 3 stars. It’s a mechanically mediocre, kind of ugly, game that barely tells a story and has a cute gimmick that it doesn’t do that much with. More on that a bit later.

Shadow of Mordor tells the story of Talion, a ranger in Mordor, which has been overrun by uruks, who is killed with his family at the beginning of the game and merged with a long-dead wraith. The pair then proceed to exact brutal revenge on the uruks who have invaded Mordor. The idea of a dual-character, half-ranger half-wraith, is a good one, and the game does a fair amount with it. Most of the time your character presents as Talion, but he switches to wraith form at various points, such as when climbing wraith towers or using his bow. The wraith also speaks to Talion throughout the game, and it works to add a companion character and a relationship to a game that’s mostly about you, alone, in a very hostile world (though there are some other, living, NPCs you interact with.) Talion can also access the wraiths powers to do things like teleport, slow time, stun enemies with the wraith’s touch, and even come back to the dead (even within the game's fiction.)

Unfortunately the game squanders this cool premise on a hum-drum story, which is boring for two reasons: 1) Talion is a boring character. 2) There are no real stakes.

The first issue is common in games, but that doesn’t make it acceptable. Talion is another brown-haired 30-something male protagonist who is mad because the bad guys killed his family. We have seen this a million times before. That’s not to say you couldn’t do something good with it, but the game doesn’t. Talion is stoic and strong and super boring. His wraith sidekick fares a little better, but has relatively few story quests focused on him, and isn’t fully fleshed out.

The second issue comes from the license itself. We already know the story of Lord of the Rings. We know who the important players are and how events will play out. Talion, not being part of the main crew, is naturally forced to the sidelines. Nothing he does really matters and I don’t think the developers could have done much to fix that. They try, by focusing much of the story on helping particular NPCs escape Mordor and trying to create stakes in the survival of Talion’s friends, but Talion’s friends are boring stock characters and I didn’t really care what happened to any of them. The game is between a rock and a hard place. It needs to introduce familiar LOTR concepts and characters, but it can’t really do anything with them. It supplements this with lore, but in the end it’s just a bunch of LOTR flavored weak tea. Also there’s an interlude with a dwarf hunter that’s very different in tone from the rest of the game and silly to the point of parody. The guy talks non-stop about how much he loves hunting, and how hunting is his mistress but doesn’t nag like his wife, and is a very cartoony comic relief character in a grimdark game. I did appreciate the lightened tone but the whole thing was out of place.

I will say that the game ends well. It doesn’t make up for the mediocre material for most of the game, but it does go out on a high note.

If Shdow of Mordor’s story is a let-down, the gameplay is at least adequate. Picture an Arkham Batman/Assassin’s Creed hybrid and you’re pretty much there. You run around and climb like Assassin’s Creed, often dispatching foes stealthily by leaping out of bushes or off ledges, and then when forced to fight you engage in a slightly clunky form of Arkham Batman combat, with combos, finishers, and all the fix ‘uns. It works for the most part. There were times Talion didn’t go where I wanted him to, and others when the camera made combat impossible, but the controls are generally solid and enjoyable.

There are also several upgrade trees and ability systems, using multiple forms of in-game ‘experience’ currency and runes. You get more health, you unlock abilities, you equip specific powers, it’s standard stuff and it’s fine, if a bit convoluted. The gameplay does change fairly radically because of this, though. When you start out you will have to be more stealth focused, since large numbers of enemies are very difficult to deal with. By the end of the game combat posed almost no challenge to me, and while early on I avoided large packs of uruk, by the end I just ignored them. It makes for an empowering progression, but it also makes things boring. My play time for the game was above average, so maybe if I had focused more on the main path it would have been different, but I was ready to be done with Shadow of Mordor well before I was. I’m glad I stuck it out, thanks to the good ending, but the game could have also scaled its challenge better. I should also note that particularly frustrating early on are large groups of uruk, who are very difficult to deal with when you don’t have a lot of powers, and fairly trivial later on. If you’re finding a combat challenge frustrating you should go power up a bit and return. A few mid to late game abilities make all the difference.

Oh, and there are forced stealth sections. I HATE forced stealth sections. Unsurprisingly the only place I got stuck in the game was a dumb forced stealth section I had to play 10-15 times to advance.

I would add that Shadow of Mordor clearly suffers from having versions for the 360 and PS3 as well as the 8^th gen consoles. I have to think that having two maps you can travel between instead of a larger, unified, area was a concession to having to cram everything into half a gig of RAM. It also meant that the game had to be playable without the gimmick of the nemesis system. I think that is the reason why the gimmick feels a little tacked on, and not essential to the SoM experience.

That’s right, the much vaunted Nemesis system was kind of a bust for me. The theory behind it is that Sauron’s army has 20 or so captains or warchiefs who struggle for power with one another, and that you participate in these struggles by killing captains you don’t like and defending those you do, and eventually you “brand” enemies, making them loyal to you, and guide them to positions of power. These named uruks exist on the map regardless of what you’re up to, and can attack you if you come within range. They have strengths and weaknesses, which you can scout out beforehand, and unique appearances, and they taunt you when you engage in combat, even remembering if they killed you the last time you fought or if you had to run away. I appreciated named enemies roaming the world to run into, at least when they weren’t trying to gank me when I was low on health and arrows after a mission,, but I’ve played MMOs and this didn’t feel very different than the named enemies that wander those zones.

I should also note that I played the Xbox One Game of the Year edition and had two fairly major bugs, once getting stuck in a wall that I was able to teleport out of after about 90 seconds of moving around within the wall so I could get a bead on an enemy for a shadow strike, and once having a slow-mo effect get stuck on and being forced to abandon the mission in order to return the game to normal. Nothing shocking, but not great for an AAA game 3 years after release.

But maybe that’s unfair, because Shadow of Mordor isn’t really an AAA game. It’s more of a solid B-tier game that got elevated because it launched early in its generation and had a neat gimmick. Its uninspired gameplay, limited gimmick, and weird structure (with its pair of similar maps making it feel like two similar games in a series rather than a cohesive whole) just aren’t quite ready for prime to time. The graphics in the game are just okay (with some admittedly brutal execution animations) The open world activities other than the main quests are limited and repetitive. Do you want to save exactly three captives over a dozen times, or find 32 hidden runes, or do 30 weapon challenges? Have fun with that, I guess.

That’s not to say it’s not fun. It is fun. You clamber over ruins, you fight ghuls in the moonlight, you torment the uruk armies like a shadow, dropping hives of insects on them from above and luring caragors into their strongholds. Some of the named uruk are really cool looking, with fun little comments and interesting combinations of strengths and weaknesses. Wading into combat with a horde of enemies only to convert a bunch of them to serve you and turn the tide of battle is satisfying the first 20 times (until it becomes boring.)

Would I recommend Shadow of Mordor for people who want to play through it before Shadow of War? Not really. This is not a game you HAVE to play. The story is lackluster and whatever other charms it has will probably be better in the sequel. I would just wait for the next game. That’s not to say I would caution against it if you’re the kind of person who just has to play everything in a series (like I am) or have it in your backlog (like I did.) It’s a good game. If you’re comfortable with a 7 out of 10, enjoy. Not every game can be a home run. But if you’re looking for a masterpiece GOTY that you just have to play before the new one comes out…nah. You’re good. Wait for Shadow of War. I kind of wish I did.

Why play through God of War: Chains of Olympus in 2017, when I have a big backlog of highly praised current generation games and not nearly enough time to play them? I’m not 100% sure. But last night the urge to finally get to the PS3 port of this 2008 PSP title struck me, and here I sit about 24 hours later, having rolled credits on the second of Kratos’ adventures I have played through. It’s hard to think of too much interesting to say about the game itself; it’s God of War and if you don’t know whether you like that at this point it’s because you’re not interested enough to find out. I enjoyed the game more than I thought I would, and I also like the fact that I was able to play through it in essentially one day. Having a play time under 6 hours is frustrating for a $60 day one purchase (see another Ready at Dawn joint, The Order 1886, for details on this) but for a digital download that cost me $8 and came with another game, 6 hours is about the perfect length. Even then the game felt padded at points, especially towards the end where it tosses lengthy arena sections in cramped quarters back to back to back, obviously re-using assets in order to ship a game that was more than 5 hours long.

What is notable about GoW:CoO is how irrelevant it feels in the culture. This was once a huge release, intended to drive the PSP to even greater heights in the West. It was heavily advertised and it’s one of the few games I’ve seen people play on their PSPs in public. 9 years later it feels like a footnote in a franchise that wants to break from its past, and there was grumbling recently when it was tossed in as a free PS+ game last year, since it’s not actually a VITA title.

9 years is not that long ago. The first Iron Man movie launched in 2008 and while it’s an older film it’s hardly forgotten. Breaking Bad first aired 9 years ago and it’s still talked about all the time. But video games age differently than most media, and playing Chains of Olympus feels like excavating an artifact of the past. Not the game experience itself, which remains competent, but its place in gaming history and culture.

It's been awhile since I spent significant time with a PS3 game, let alone a PS3 game that’s an up-rezzed version of a PSP game, and it took me a little bit of time to adjust. The first parts of the game felt very low-poly and ugly, and while I appreciated the big set-pieces they were going for and was impressed by some of the animation, I was definitely feeling some generation shock in the first hour or so.

However, in an effect not unlike eyes adjusting to a dark room and making it seem brighter, the game looked better and better as I played it, to the point where I barely noticed the blurry textures and simplified architecture in the later parts of the game. I’ve long said that PS2 era games have aged much better than PS1, and GoW:CoO definitely proved that point to me. I was able to accept the game on its own merits and even find it impressive in places, while PS1 games mostly just look like a mess. I know this was a PSP showcase at the time, and they cleaned it up for the PS3 release, but I was still surprised at how little the dated graphics bothered me just a few hours in. I also started the game over after completing it (there’s a gold trophy for starting over in a costume, and I’m enough of a trophy-whore to grab a trivial one like that) and I was shocked at how much better the beginning looked the second time. What had looked low poly and ugly 24 hours before now just looked like video game graphics to me, nothing particularly wrong with them. My expectations had adjusted to fit what I was playing and I was able to take it on its own terms. I don’t know if someone who wasn’t playing games in the PS2 era could make the same adjustment but I’m glad I can still go back.

While the graphics held up okay for me, and the gameplay was fine, there are some choices that must have felt questionable in 2008 and 9 years later are flat out cringe inducing. For example about half way through the first level you encounter some women you free from a cell, complete with low-poly digital nudity, and you go through one of God of War’s infamous QTE sex games with them. It’s weird and uncomfortable and not sexy, and even more so for a portable game presumably meant to be played in public. I would have shut my system off immediately if I had gotten to that part while playing on the train or bus. There is additional female nudity later in the game, and all of it feels gratuitous and skeezy. I have no problem with sexiness in games, but this doesn’t feel sexy, it feels cheap and obligatory. Also, I had to try the sequence like five times to get it right, and only did it for the trophy, which I guess makes that literal trophy-whoring. In addition to the silly sex and nudity, it’s worth noting that the game features basically no context for its story. It’s just like “Hey, you’re Kratos, the Ghost of Sparta, and a great general, now go fight hand to hand in this city, where everyone seems to know you!” You’d think that the game might contain a little bit of “on-boarding” for players who never played the PS2 original (maybe the PSP is their only PlayStation system) and a little bit of character building/scene setting. Stories have never been the best part of God of War games, but the beginning of this game is almost at SNES levels of simplicity and suddenness.

The story does improve later, but it curiously seems to assume the whole time that the player is a God of War fan and already knows why Kratos is in servitude to the Gods and what his sins were. It’s a strange choice and I have to wonder whether it’s because Ready at Dawn was using someone else’s IP and was restricted in what they could do with it. In addition, despite the threadbare nature of the storytelling, there are times where the game overexplains itself, like when the narrator tells the player they are standing on the chariot of Helios and then Athena manifests to explain…that you are standing on the chariot of Helios. Perhaps the game is worried that PSP players might be playing in short bursts and forget what they’re supposed to do, but having objectives repeated constantly made me feel like the game thought I was an idiot.

That’s not to say it’s a terrible game. The combat is okay, with enough magic abilities, combos, dodges, and parries to be engaging. Despite the low poly count there’s still the visceral thrill of violence that is, perhaps, the true secret to God of War’s success. The way Kratos kills the Persian king; smashing him in the head with the very chest of treasure he offered as a bribe, is both poetic and visceral. I winced at it, even though it’s far lower fidelity than the brutal killings in modern Doom or Mortal Kombat. There’s also still satisfaction to be had climbing on top of mythical beasts and mutilating them by ripping their jaws off or sinking a dagger into their eyes. Playing as Kratos has always been heavy on the power fantasy; where size or magical power can be overcome and conquered through sheer force of will and rage. That comes through in GoW:CoO, even today. And while the environments don’t feel as vast as in the main console games, that’s not to say that they don’t have anything going for them. A lot of work went into the game’s art and it shows, and there are times when the game achieves a meaningful sense of place, which is something a lot of games never do.

One thing the game is light on is true spectacle. The first boss is a giant basilisk, but most of the rest of them are about Kratos’ size and don’t really fit in with the God of War multi-stage huge boss archtype. I am guessing this was a function of budget and PSP limitations.

I can’t recommend God of War: Chains of Olympus. It’s…fine…but feels inessential. If you want to learn Kratos’ story prior to God of War 4 this doesn’t really tell you much about the character. He loves his daughter and he’s really angry and yells a lot even when it’s not appropriate to the scene. There. You have now gotten everything you need from this game story-wise.

On the other hand I won’t warn anyone away from this game either. I had fun. There were some boring parts, the puzzles are too simple and there aren’t enough enemy types, but it’s still a serviceable action game and it has its moments.

Perhaps what’s most interesting about GoW:CoO today is how it shows the disposability of certain kinds of games. This thing came out less than ten years ago and was a big blockbuster with a lot of push, and now it’s a forgotten trifle, given away for free on a dead console, its franchise looking to reboot and go in a new direction and its style hopelessly outdated. 9 years is a long time in videogame land. It’s a medium that lets its past burn away more than an other, and God of War: Chains of Olympus feels like just a little more ash on the wind. In a way that’s appropriate, but it’s also kind of sad.

I've been playing LocoRoco Remastered off and on for the last few weeks, and it's great for what it is. It's charming, cheerful, gorgeous to look at and has the catchiest soundtrack this side of Katamari Damacy. It's a great game to turn on and bounce through a few levels as a default when I don't know what I want to play. I've even had a couple "Wake and Play" sessions where I wake up, immediately grab a controller and rip through a few levels before getting ready for work, and it puts me in a great mood for the day with its cheerful charm and fun, laid back, game play.

Well, unless a Moja manages to take a chunk out of my big round butt. Then I feel guilty, angry, and vulnerable.

The world of LocoRoco is colorful and smiley, with grinning creatures and bright colorful backgrounds backed by happy nonsense music. Enter the Moja. They themselves are also smiley creatures, looking like little black whirlpools with a face not unlike that of a LocoRoco, but with jagged teeth revealing that this is not just another friendly denizen of your world, it is a predator and it is hungry for only one thing. You. Your flesh. Your body. Your self.

The first you hear about the Moja is in the intro to the game where you're informed that they've invaded what used to be your paradise and are eating all the LocoRoco. They are the impetus behind your journey across these colorful landscapes to your safe little LocoRoco house where you can have a moment's respite. In a way the entire game of LocoRoco is about bright, friendly, creatures being hunted and consumed by a relentless horde of hungry Moja. Kind of puts a different spin on things.

Your first actual encounter with the Moja is preceded by your LocoRoco squealing in distress. "Moja Moja" they scream, their usual nonsense replaced by a clear cry of fear. "Moja Moja."

"Moja Moja" replies the Moja. It's deep, ravenous, voice a counterpoint to the scared squeal of your LocoRoco, like a perverse game of Marco Polo. Then, if you're like me, the Moja appears on screen, flies up to you, and bites a chunk off your LocoRoco, chewing and swallowing. Then it comes back for another.

So you run. You flee and the Moja pursues for a bit before giving up. And from then on you're playing a different game. You're not the top of the food chain rolling through a picture book. You're a lower link. And you need to behave accordingly. Even after you figure out how to kill Moja, they're still out there hunting you.

Of course a lot of games have enemies that hunt or pursue you, and even monsters that eat you or tear you apart. Last year's Doom had post death animations of a gruesome nature, with limbs being pulled off your body and imps feasting on your entrails. But those games are about combat, and when I see a bad guy in Doom I know I have the tools to kill him. LocoRoco is about traversal, and the controls are intentionally loose and slippery. You actually tilt and flick the world rather than the LocoRoco, and movement is imprecise. That means that even after you figure out how to kill the Moja you need to be careful and pick your spots. And if you miss you just hang there in the air for a moment, a tasty snack for the pursuing Moja.

In addition, in LocoRoco your main LocoRoco is made up of a bunch of separate LocoRoco merged together into one, and you can split them apart. That means that the individual LocoRoco are independently intelligent (they smile and laugh and sing) so it's not just like the Moja is pulling a piece of you off and eating you. It is eating one of your party members, a thinking, feeling being. And it is your fault. Feels bad man.

The combination of the colorful friendly atmosphere, the loose controls and limited defenses, and the brutal nature of what the Moja do makes them scary even though they're not really a huge threat after you get the timing on the jump attack down. Every time I hear my LocoRoco start chanting "Moja Moja" I tense up and if I've split apart or am otherwise defenseless at that moment it's even tenser. I get myself together and steel myself for battle.

The Moja are not the only enemies in LocoRoco of course. There are all kinds of creatures that want to eat your LocoRoco or otherwise impede its progress. There are plenty of other enemies in the game and some of them are, at least in theory, more dangerous than the Moja. There are also spike traps that can cost you more then one individual LocoRoco at a time and there are little mole guys who try to eat you. But the Moja are the headline enemies, the first you encounter, and the only ones that make me feel uncomfortable.

The Moja are an example of how context matters in games. In most games the Moja would be adorable little critters, beloved as non-threatening enemies like the Shyguys and goombas in Mario are. But in LocoRoco, a game with a cotton candy aesthetic and where you have limited control to begin with, they come off as something more sinister. Most of the time playing LocoRoco you're completely relaxed and smiling, and the intrusion of danger into that leaves you feeling vulnerable and afraid. They join classic enemies like SiniStar and the Spelunky Ghost as video game bad guys who make me feel stressed out and want to get away from them as quickly as possible. But unlike those creatures the Moja's consumption of sentient beings for food also makes me feel a little sick and guilty when I fail. They're bad news, and one of the worst enemies I've ever encountered in video games.

I am Setsuna markets itself as a throwback but also feels like a cheaply made game; a (literally) pale simulacrum of the older games it is trying to invoke. This sense of cheapness is dispersed through every aspect of the game, with the exception of the combat system, which is complex and polished enough to feel legitimately “old-school” instead of “old-school, but shoddier.” That doesn’t mean it’s a bad game, I very much enjoyed it overall and would recommend it to others with some caveats, but it feels, in terms of production values, more like a proof of concept than a completed retail product. It’s like one of those real-estate model homes where you go in and at first it looks like a finished house but none of the plumbing works and all the fruit is wax and you realize this is just a cheap façade to try to demonstrate the idea of something more expensive and complete.

So why is it still a good game despite all that?

Because it has heart.

Tokyo RPG Factory may have a name that implies soullessness, but their first game is anything but. It is clearly a labor of love, made by people who really wanted to make a new JRPG in the old style and weren’t going to let budget limits or anything else stand in their way. They may have been restricted to one relatively small main land-mass covered in snow and been forced to recycle their assets throughout their game, but they were still making the kind of game they wanted to and it definitely shows. Not at first perhaps; the first five or ten hours of the game feel sparse to the point where I was worried I wasn’t going to like it, but as the story and the game unfurl they show a steady hand, and the moments of flash and spectacle are saved for the points in the story where they matter most. By the time I got to the end of the game I didn’t want it to be over, and characters who started off as dry clichés had become…somewhat charming clichés. It’s a JRPG. You’re not going to get Garrus Vakarian or Nadine Ross here.

I Am Setsuna may not have the budget of a fully featured RPG but damn it the developers were going to try their best regardless, and the fact that they actually care about what they’re making shows through in every aspect of the game.

Every RPG needs a premise, and I am Setsuna’s seems like a reasonably good one. The world is overrun by monsters, humans are practicing ritual sacrifice to try and keep them at bay, and you’re a mercenary hired to kill the chosen sacrifice prior to her completing the ritual. Within the opening hour you have, of course, been roped into protecting the sacrifice rather than killing her, and off you go on your great journey, fighting through monster-infested environments and meeting “colorful” NPCs along the way, as you power up your party with levels and equipment and learn the secrets behind what’s really going on in the world.

At first this seems like a legitimate throw-back to old school RPG storytelling, but if you actually think about the great RPGs that stand out from the 16 and 32 bit eras, there was always a lot more to them than this. JRPGs are known for their convoluted and silly stories, and people complained about them, but they added a lot of character and spectacle to the game. By the time the Playstation rolled around the Final Fantasy games had absolutely bonkers nutso stories involving time travel and amnesia and all kinds of weirdness. Chrono Trigger (on the SNES) is the game that I am Setsuna is explicitly trying to reference with both its marketing and its combat system and is all about time travel. It has all kinds of paradoxes and butterfly effects woven into its story, which also takes you throughout wildly different time periods and features weird characters like a damn frog knight, and many possible endings. Sure, you had your Plain Jane hero’s quest RPGs, but those tended to be more B-level games; often seen as filler between the big meaningful releases. I Am Setsuna is much simpler than the games from the heyday of JRPGs.

I am Setsuna’s simple story told in a straightforward manner feels both like a stripped back “acoustic” version of the great JRPGs of the past and a way to avoid the expense that comes with telling a super complicated crazy story. In Final Fantasy VIII, a game I detest but that may represent a high watermark in JRPG bonkers storytelling, the opening sequences take you to a “test” facility to fight a giant robot boss, a huge special forces base where you train and adventure, and then all over the place. It is bursting with diverse places, people to see, systems (including a complex trading card game scattered throughout the main game) and so very many secrets. It has lots of CG cut scenes, unique character models you don’t see again, and wild environments.

I Am Setsuna, in contrast, sets you trudging through the snow from tiny village to tiny village, fighting a dozen or so simple monsters and tossing a moderate boss out from time to time to keep things from getting too stale. It doesn’t have any stunning FMV or even big in-engine set pieces. It doesn’t have a bunch of minigames and alternate modes. It doesn’t even have a lot of areas that aren’t required for main story progression, and the ones it does have are rather small and barren. Each village has a few houses you can enter and a handful of NPCs to talk to, with maybe 2 to 3 who actually feature into the game in any meaningful way. The sidequests and exploration are concentrated at the end of the game and are very missable (which is a shame, since they do a lot to flesh out the world and the characters) and there are no minigames to play. All the merchants cluster together in each town, and they all have the same character models and names, with no unique dialog or flavor. It’s a sparse and pared back world.

That goes for the visuals and the music too. The aesthetic could be described as “high res PS2 game” with relatively low poly counts and not very detailed textures. The characters themselves are pseudo-chibi style, with big heads that verge on being ugly to me, and, for some reason, no feet. If you told me this game came out in 2003 I would believe you. The game also takes place in a snow-covered landscape so there isn’t much variety to the visuals. There’s a forest environment, a mountain environment, a beach environment, and a cave environment and they repeat throughout, with a couple more areas thrown in. The towns are somewhat visually distinct but with lots of clearly re-used assets and not a ton of character. It is a cheap looking game. Character and monster models repeat in different colored variations, and much earlier than you expect. Also, I repeat, the characters have no feet. That’s really weird and off-putting to me. At least there’s a coherent visual style that shows that whoever made this game’s visuals did have a vision and worked hard to achieve it, which does help significantly. It looks cheap, but it also looks like someone cared about it and had an aesthetic they were going for, and I can appreciate that.

The music fares better. The entire soundtrack is piano focused, as opposed to orchestrated, but it’s good, enjoyable, music and it matches the visual aesthetic well, even though the choice to focus on a single instrument was almost certainly driven by limited budget. The music gets intense during fight scenes, and wistful during emotional moments in the story, and while it’s not one of the best soundtracks in an RPG it’s not bad and is at least distinctive. The choice to set the game in a snow-covered sparsely populated world makes everything fit a bit better than if we were looking at lush green environments. Spartan works in a story about the frozen wastes.

I Am Setsuna’s writing starts out not great, but improves as the game goes, and the characters may be stereotypes but they are at least distinct and got off a few lines here and there that successfully made me chuckle or manipulated my emotions. Dialog choices aren’t meaningful but they do the trick of letting you feel like you have some agency over the main character. You go through the various RPG tropes you’ve seen a million times but they’re well-worn for a reason, and for someone who hasn’t played a JRPG in years (like me) it’s kind of nice to see the old stories retold, and there are some late twists and character shading that make I Am Setsuna’s story above average compares to the era of games it’s referencing.

In addition to a good story and some very enjoyable music, I Am Setsuna also features an excellent combat system. It’s clearly modeled after Chrono Trigger, with an active time battle system (that can pause or not as you select commands) and combo attacks, as well as some variety to character and party builds. It’s nothing super special, but it’s polished and fun and I enjoyed fights from the start of the game to the end. As in Chrono Trigger enemies are visible on the screen and can be avoided in most scenarios, which is nice when you’re low on items towards the beginning of the game.

The combat system also benefits from the game being fairly difficult. I don’t know if I’d call it a hard game (I finished it without TOO much frustration) but your characters are never more than a few blows away from death when facing an appropriately leveled enemy. Healing is essential and I never found a character build where I could reliably tank enemies for more than a turn or two. Bosses can be downright challenging, and I had to retry a few more than once before I found a strategy that worked. Having a fun combat system that also has battles that actually feel dangerous shows that the game was carefully balanced and made by people who actually cared about the players having fun. Also, grinding is unnecessary. I did a little bit of grinding (mostly in the form of tracking down optional chests or little sidequesty things) but I never felt I had to, and I definitely never spent hours fighting the same enemies over and over to get appropriately leveled. Experience is also shared with the whole party, which is both good and bad. Good because you don’t need to grind up individual characters, and bad because it means that you can more or less ignore certain characters if you want to. It’s a nod to modern game design and shows that while I Am Setsuna is a conscious throwback it isn’t always stuck in the past.

Sometimes it is, though. I am Setsuna features several annoyances that shouldn’t be in a 2016 game. There are places where there is way too much distance between save spots, moving the game from “exciting combat where you could actually die” to “feeling of dread in the pit of your stomach because you don’t want to lose your progress.” These come close to the end of the game and aren’t SO bad, but they shouldn’t exist in 2016. You simply can’t ask players to go 45 minutes or an hour between saves. It’s not okay.

There are also some unfair bits where enemies or optional bosses you’ve never fought before will just tear you up quick-like, and there’s no real way to know beforehand how to deal with these guys. You have to just watch their attacks as they smash your party up, and then figure out a new load out to bring with you next time. The game also has a bunch of cool sidequests, sort of like loyalty missions from Mass Effect, that it saves until the VERY END when you’re kind of done and just want to kill the boss and move on. The missions feature some of the best writing in the game and offer real insight into both characters and the world, but they’re both only accessible at the end AND hidden behind very specific criteria (talk to person X with person Y in your party with no hint.) This may be a reference to the secret characters and other stuff from those old PlaysStation RPGs but it is an awful decision. In a game where there isn’t a lot of optional content hiding the best of it in this manner is just the worst parts of old-school transported into the present. Thumbs down on that (though thumbs up on the quests themselves.)

So who is I Am Setsuna for? Well for an old man who used to play JRPGs in the paleolithic era like me it’s a nice retro-feeling game that features some modern conveniences and is a reasonable length (probably 20-25 hours, as opposed to the 80 hour behemoths most JRPGs are today.) You get a satisfying, digestible, not too frustrating experience and if you can deal with its kind of ugly graphics and other flaws I’d recommend it for that person if they have a particular JRPG craving. It definitely reminded me of Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger, with the victory music sounding VERY FF and the game playing like Chrono Trigger (and making a very specific reference to that game in the dialog.)

For someone who wants a lengthy game experience on the Switch (where I played; it has decent performance though I did see some screen tearing, which shouldn’t happen in an RPG and especially not an RPG with simple graphics like these) it fits the bill fine if you like JRPGs. It’s a JPRG-ass JRPG, though, and if that’s not your genre then you will not like this game.

If you’re a JRPG newcomer I’m tempted to recommend I Am Setsuna to you…but I don’t think I can. While I was playing I kept thinking of that old Final Fantasy Mystic Quest game, AKA Babby’s 1^st RPG. I Am Setsuna is linear and simple to understand, without any of the baroque bullcrap that has infested the genre. It has clear systems and a manageable length. Unlike Mystic Quest it actually is somewhat challenging and has a good story and moments that will make you smile or feel a little sad.

It would be perfect, except…It’s just a little too sparse. JRPGs have long relied on graphical spectacle and sheer amount of stuff to draw players in and I Am Setsuna just doesn’t have enough of that stuff. The map doesn’t open up until very late, and even when it does there isn’t much to do. The game never qualifies as eye candy, even in its weirder areas. Exploration isn’t rewarded and the game is a little bit inaccessible because of it. Playing I Am Setsuna as your first RPG would be like listening to Bon Iver as your first pop music. You need to know what the sparse, stripped back version is referencing to fully appreciate it.

Still, I enjoyed I Am Setsuna. It’s a cheaply made game but it was made by people who care about their craft. I can’t give it a full-throated recommendation but if it’s something you have been tempted to play but haven’t quite gotten to yet, I recommend making the time for it. It’s an enjoyable, melancholy tale and a solid new entry into a genre that’s been on life-support (or changed beyond recognition) for a long time. I’m looking forward to this studio’s recently announced second game, and I hope they can make something with just as much love but a little bit more resources behind it.

When the Switch was announced many of us had a dream of a united Nintendo platform where we could play every game the company put out on a single device, rather than having to have a handheld and a console if you want the full experience.

In addition, those of us who are not much for portable gaming wouldn't have to deal with the cramped controls and ugly screens of the 3DS, instead being able to play everything on our TV (or at least the nicer, larger Switch screen) and use a pro-controller rather than a control "disc" and a nub.

Nintendo's announcement of 3DS support beyond 2018 effectively kills that.

The new 2D Metroid is coming out on 3DS as are many RPGs and other games. The new Pikmin Platformer. That new game YOU really want to play. Yes YOU. The one from your favorite franchise. That's going to be 3DS only. Mark it down.

Why is Nintendo doing this? Why make a hybrid console/portable and then also support a separate portable, confusing the market, splitting your base, and condemning old men like me to hours squinting at an ugly low-res screen while their beautiful new Switch sits quietly in a dock a few feet away?

Because Nintendo.

More specifically, because Nintendo is conservative and not very technically proficient (outside of hardware design, where they usually make decent stuff.)

There are reasons to keep supporting the 3DS. It has a massive userbase. More importantly, it has a young userbase, and while 3DSes are pretty cheap and durable, the Switch is expensive and comparatively fragile. You can give little Billy an $80 2DS to take to school and if he breaks or loses it it's not such a big deal. If he shatters the screen on the $300 switch that's a different story. In addition, the 3DS is small and slides into pockets or little backpacks. The Switch is much larger and inconvenient for a kid. There are reasons.

But there are also potential solutions. Nintendo could have made a smaller, more durable Switch with a less expensive screen and sold it for cheaper. They probably eventually will do this, but not for a few years. That leaves a gap in the market for a small, durable, device you can give to kids.

Nintendo could also have made the Switch compatible with 3DS games. The one Switch screen is large enough to put both 3DS screens on it on the same time and the Switch is much more powerful than the 3DS and should be able to emulate it just as well as the Xbox One can emulate the 360. This would have the added benefit of making 3DS games playable on a TV, which would be cool for those of us who don't like the 3DS but do like much of its software. Nintendo has done this before, with the Super Gameboy and the Gameboy player for Gamecube, and there's no reason they couldn't do it again.

But nope. Not going to happen. Nintendo don't play that.

Nintendo doesn't want to abandon its 3DS userbase and I get that. It also doesn't want to stop making durable devices for kids, and I get that too. A more creative, less conservative company could have found a solution. One that would have made more people happy and possibly sold more games to a broader audience. That's not Nintendo's style though.

From the time Nintendo announced a hybrid console it was almost inevitable that consolidation of their software, if it ever happens, would take many many years. That obvious inevitability has come to pass.

The Nintendo 3DS is a very old piece of hardware at this point. It was underpowered when it launched. The thing has 128 megabytes of RAM in its basic configuration (though the New 3DS has more.) Yet we'll be stuck using it with its awkward analog nub (or no second analog stick at all) and low-res ugly screens of inconsistent quality for years. Beyond 2018 even.

Why?

Because Nintendo.

This weekend was supposed to be all about Zelda. I blocked off a good chunk of time to finally finish that game, after starting it on March 4^th, and figured I would need at least 15-20 hours since I still had the whole Rito divine beast quest to complete and I wanted to gear up before the final battle. On Saturday I booted the game up early, went through the divine beast much faster than expected, checked out a few last parts of the map I hadn’t explored and then set about collecting some materials for my final assault on Hyrule Castle.

Since I wandered close to the castle during the collection process I decided to peek my head in “just to get the lay of the land” and maybe collect some of the items rumored to lurk within. Unsurprisingly, I ended up plowing through and finishing the game. I was actually talking to my friend on the phone while I was playing, saying “I should leave this area to get my gear and cook some better food then come back for an actual attempt” repeatedly, up until the point I had Ganon’s lifebar depleted and realized that, yes, I really was going to finish this game.

So I found myself on Saturday evening watching the closing cut scene to Breath of the Wild and thinking “What am I going to do with all this time set aside for Zelda now that Zelda is finished?” I may dive back in to finish some more shrines and do some other stuff later, but I’ll probably wait until the DLC release, since that promises additional story content, and by that time I’ll be ready to return to Hyrule once again.

The next game in my queue is Horizon: Zero Dawn, but I don’t think starting another huge open world game with a bow as a weapon right after Zelda is a great idea (and the Bombcast crew has talked about the difficulties in switching between them) so I decided to spend some time dipping into smaller games on my backlog as “palate cleansers.” Like a dollop of sorbet between two big courses a smaller game with a very different style can help create a sense of distance between two big AAA open world releases, helping you to appreciate the bigger games better. You get to experience a smaller story, and less technically impressive graphics, which keeps you from directly comparing the big games, and the simplified mechanics and focus keeps a sense of "sameness" from developing and reducing the impact of a larger game.

And, hey, I love smaller games too, so it’s win-win.

Flinthook

I started my small game marathon by loading up Flinthook, a game I have been playing off and on since its release. I really like almost everything about Flinthook except the progression, which feels slow. The art style is great, the game controls perfectly, with responsive platforming and shooting, it’s challenging and engaging with an absolute metric ton of content, the music is exquisite and the writing is sharp and funny. The problem is that Flinthook is a rogue-like where you purchase permanent upgrades, and the currency for said upgrades takes a long time to get. If you have a run where you don’t kill the boss of the mission (Flinthook is divided up into 4 different “bounties”) you could spend half an hour and only collect 4-6 pieces of currency, with 15 needed to upgrade your health at the higher stages, and that upgrade only giving you 10 more HP on top of the 140 you already have. 1.5 hours to raise your HP by 8% is SLOWWWWW going, and it makes a game that’s fun and fresh feel a little too grindy. This is essentially the same problem I had with Enter the Gungeon, another game that I really liked playing moment to moment but where the very slow progression frustrated me. I’m not the greatest gamer in the world, and it looks like many others have beaten the game at the point where I’m just about halfway through, but regardless, Flinthook is a game that I would enjoy a lot more if it were just balanced a little less harshly. Or maybe you’re supposed to go back and grind old bosses (killing a boss means a run might net you 3x as much currency) but that’s not interesting to me either, since I’ve played those levels to death.

This time around I did manage to beat the second boss, which only 13% of players have done according to Xbox Live. This is evidence that the game probably is balanced too unforgivingly, since you’d like more than 15% of your players to make it halfway through the game, especially when it hasn’t been on Games With Gold yet. The third mission seems really tough, but I’ll probably be back to play through it someday since this is a game I like enough to want to finish.

Tentative rating: 7.5/10 (Would be 9/10 if it were balanced less punitively)

Qix++

It’s Qix. You drive a little ship around the outside of a play space and then carve into the space, trying to reduce the size of the playfield to 25% or smaller, while a central enemy tries to kill you when you move into the space and little orange sparks threaten you on the outside. This version is…fine…in that it plays well enough and looks pretty good, but I remember when this came out Jeff said that it didn’t have enough content to justify $10 and he was absolutely right. 16 levels is just ridiculous. But for $2.71 (including tax) it’s hard for me to be too upset. This is a game I’ve been curious about for a while and I’ve now satisfied my curiosity cheaply and effectively. I enjoyed it well enough and if there were more to it I would probably play more. Well, technically there is more, but 2 packs with 4 levels each for $3 a pop is just not a good value. That’s $6 for probably 20 minutes of amusement, and that’s not a price point I’m comfortable with.

Tentative rating: 5/10 (Would be 3/10 if I paid the full $10)

Retro City Rampage DX:

Next on my list was Retro City Rampage, which I played on PS4, and was the only game of this group I actually finished. This is another game I’ve been thinking about playing for a while now. I had an image in my mind of what it was like and I was…exactly right (to be fair, I’ve seen some footage.) It’s a weird little GTA parody that also parodies every other game/geek culture thing it can think of. Sometimes it’s clever, more often it’s just interesting to see how they try to mimic the style of Metal Gear or an adventure game in a GTA 1 type engine (they do a pretty good job to be honest, though they also have some cool custom modes that I don’t want to spoil here) and it’s moderately fun to play. The game looks very nice considering its simple graphics, with lots of color and sprites that pack a lot of personality into a small amount of detail. The music is sublime. I will say that the controls are kind of fiddly, especially the driving, which can be extremely fast and a little slippery at times (though you can change direction on a dime) but the game is balanced so that that mostly isn’t a problem. Mostly. There were several boss fights and difficult sequences towards the end that had me swearing at the TV. Fortunately, the game’s (mostly) very generous checkpoints made these mere frustrations and not stopping points, though if fewer of them had come so late. The difficulty spike is excusable since these sections were part of the parody aspect of the game, but ironic frustration is still frustration.

I’m excited about Shakedown Hawaii, the spiritual successor coming in June for the Switch (which is the ideal place to play this kind of game, with its bite sized missions) and think I’ll like the 16-bit style and less parody-based story more than RCR itself, but I did finish RCR in two days because it’s short and I found it kind of neat. I wanted to see what it did next, which is a pretty strong endorsement for a game like this.

Rating: 7.5/10

LocoRoco Remastered:

I never had a PSP so I never played LocoRoco, even though I was intrigued by its super colorful graphics and astoundingly weird soundtrack. Now I have played some LocoRoco and…it’s decently fun. The controls are intentionally loose, which can be annoying, and the game’s hypersaccharine style can be grating, but I enjoy the various environments and tunes, and the gameplay is just engaging enough not to be a deal-breaker. I feel like I’m more able to appreciate the game at this point in my life than when it first came out (and I was a little more invested in things that seemed “cool” and “adult”) but I like it. I’m also happy to finally understand how it plays, exactly, which is something that was never 100% clear to me, even though I understood there was tilting and rolling. It’s one of those games you need to get your hands on to fully comprehend how it plays.

LocoRoco is a mid-tier Japanese games with extreme polish and creativity that you don’t really see anymore. It reminds me of Katamari Damacy and Lumines, two games I absolutely adored (I played Lumines on XBLA, and I played a LOT of Lumines.) I don’t like LocoRoco nearly as much but I like it, and it’s very pleasant to be reminded of that great era of Japanese game design, before we entered the dark ages that we seem to finally be climbing out of.

I didn’t plow through LocoRoco, and I can’t imagine doing the work to get the platinum in it, but I think I will probably come back to it from time to time for a level or two until I eventually get to the end. It’s a solid,

Tentative rating: 7/10

That’s a lot of games to play over such a short period of time, and I’m not even counting Shinobi or Sonic the Hedgehog, which I played a bit of during a phone call just to have something to do with my hands. It felt good to dip into my back log a bit, and while none of these games will be all-time favorites (though Flinthook could have been if it were a little more forgiving) they’re all worth playing to a some degree or another (even Qix++ is not a bad game, just a very content-lacking one, released after games like Bionic Commando Rearmed, Braid, and ‘Splosion man had shown that XBLA releases could be substantial, memorable, experiences.)

As for whether the palate cleaning worked…I think it did. After playing this much, and finishing Retro City Rampage, there will be some distance between Zelda and Horizon: Zero Dawn when I start it next weekend. That, plus the fact that I got to experience all these smaller games that I’ve been meaning to play for a while, makes this weekend a definite win in my book as far as gaming goes.

I remember when I first heard the legend of the Neo Geo console. I was on a school outing to a nearby park, walking and talking about video games with another kid from my class, the kind of kid who you tolerate because he’s someone to talk to but don’t actually like. I was telling him about my hopes to get a Sega Genesis but how my dad didn’t want to spring for one because we already had an NES and a PC to play games on. The kid told me that the Genesis was fine as far as cheap consumer consoles went but that at a rich friend's house he’d recently seen a console so powerful it could had games that looked as good as actual cartoons on its screen, the true next generation in video game tech. The Neo Geo.

I had no idea what “games that looked as good as cartoons” meant or how you could even play them (since I was imagining a game that looked like an actual cartoon, with off-kilter camera angles and characters who filled the screen) but I had to admit that the name sounded unbelievably cool, and I was intrigued by the idea of this super video game system that made the mighty Genesis look like a pocket calculator by comparison. Then he told me that each game cost $250 and came in a cartridge almost as big as a VCR and I rolled my eyes and attributed the whole thing as a playground story. A video game system whose games looked like actual cartoons and cost 5 times as much as a brand new NES game? Ridiculous. Absurd.

But the Neo Geo was very real.

Of course it didn’t actually have games that looked like cartoons; they looked like arcade games, which is what they were. And if we’re being totally honest most early Neo Geo games (prior to Metal Slug) didn’t look THAT much better than what the Genesis could do. They looked better, sure, but it wasn’t some unbelievable step forwards in graphics like Genesis was over NES. I mean, have you SEEN Sonic the Hedgehog? Have you SEEN that game? It’s pretty frickin’ amazing looking.

Eventually I encountered Neo Geo games like Samurai Shodown and King of Fighters in the arcade and while I was happy to finally get a look at what the kid had been talking about, they just looked like other arcade games. The thought of taking them home unaltered was pretty appealing, but the version of World Heroes for the SNES was actually alright (though the game itself has not held up), and when Doom hit the PC it made arcade games like that a lot less impressive. I mean Samurai Shodown is cool and all, and it even has blood, but Doom is frickin’ 3D and has full on gibs! I would have taken a Neo Geo if you’d offered me one but I didn’t lust after it the way I did a Voodoo card or a SNES.

So it was that the Neo Geo went from a literally unbelievable legend, to a very real arcade platform, to something that was kind of cool but also sort of obsolete in a matter of just a few years. Life moves pretty fast my friends.

The idea of actually going back and playing Neo Geo games never really occurred to me until the Virtual Console on the Wii. Sure I knew about emulation before then, but I have never been a fan of piracy, and besides that I didn’t have a huge amount of nostalgia for a system I had barely played. King of Fighters was always kind of impenetrable to me, with its enormous roster of characters and slightly off from Street Fighter special moves, and Samurai Shodown was cool but a little off-putting with its bladed weapons that didn’t actually cut anyone. As a kid I was always bothered by games where you had a sword but it did no more damage than a punch or kick. Metal Slug was, of course, a beautiful and exciting game, but I never liked to put much money into it because of how hard it was, and because I didn’t like how the POWs all looked the same. What can I say? I was a persnickety lad.

When the Switch launched without a Virtual Console I was disappointed, since I hoped for some small retro games to play on the go, but the emergence of the Arcade Archives Neo Geo ports has helped to ease the pain. It has also resulted in me playing more Neo Geo than I have ever before. Not just the fighting games (which are not great single player experiences at this point) or Metal Slug (which is still gorgeous but not my jam. Also I have bought SO MANY VERSIONS of that game) but shooters like Blazing Star and Alpha Mission II. The games are…fine. They’re 90s arcade games, which is to say that they have very pretty 2D graphics, refined controls, and are a little bit more difficult and cheaper than I prefer my games to be. I can honestly say that exploring some of the TurboGrafx-16 library through the Wii Virtual Console was more of a revelation, since those games were designed and balanced to be played on a home console. Also, Ninja Spirit, which was originally an arcade game, but holy shit Ninja Spirit. Ninja Spirit is fantastic.

But despite the…adequacy…of the games there’s still something a little magical about having a library of Neo Geo games at my disposal. I can’t help but think back to that playground conversation a lifetime ago and the legend of this special console with $250 games and graphics so good they looked like a TV show. There's also the fact that the Neo Geo lasted from 1990, when it was released, to 2005, when the last game was released (though really it lost steam by 2000-2001.) That's an amazing run for an arcade platform, and the advances in the way games looked over that more than a decade were incredible. It was born alongside the Genesis and lived long enough to get ports to the PS2. That's damned impressive, any way you slice it.

The Neo Geo was, for me, something you don’t see a lot in gaming. A wild unbelievable rumor that turned out to be 100% true. Back then, before the Internet, you could have such things and there was no real way to easily confirm or disprove them. Just for representing that time, and for sparking my 8 year old imagination, there will always be something a little magical about Neo Geo games for me.

Except League Bowling. That game’s just lame. Bowling video games in general are lame. Why are there so many bowling video games anyway?

I was sick this weekend, with a cough, scratchy throat, and fuzzy head. I don't really enjoy 'big' 3D games when I'm feeling like that, but I felt like playing something, so I wiped the dust off my little-used 3DS and downloaded BOXBOY! for $5. It's the first game in one of those series that, with each release, has gotten a small amount of buzz from critics I trust, and a simple puzzle platformer seemed like a good fit for how I was feeling.

In less than 24 hours I'd beaten the game (though I haven't done all the extra worlds yet) and downloaded the two sequels. BOXBOY! is, simply put, a perfect puzzle platformer. Its ambitions are small but it executes on them to perfection, which makes for the gaming equivalent of your favorite childhood meal. Nothing's surprising but everything's delicious.

BOXBOY! has a beautiful, clean, whimsical aesthetic that shows, once again, that great games don't need to be detailed or "advanced" to be beautiful. Graphically it looks like it could almost have been on the original Gameboy from the 1980s (though the lack of screen resolution would interfere with some of the puzzles) and it makes no use of the 3DS' 3D function or other bells and whistles. However, what it lacks in color and complexity it make up in expressive, endearing, characters, and clean gameplay oriented visuals. The various switches, lasers, and conveyor belts in BOXBOY! all stand out as clean black and white line drawings, and their simplicity makes them easy to spot and understand.

BOXBOY!'s music is also simple but delightful. I wouldn't call the tunes particularly memorable, but they're pleasant enough, and they fit the pared down aesthetic perfectly.

The gameplay is, of course, where BOXBOY! shines. The premise is simple: you are an anthropomorphic box who can run, jump, spawn additional boxes like Tetris pieces from your body, and throw or detach from those pieces. With these simple actions BOXBOY! presents about 150 levels and manages to avoid wearing out its welcome by providing variations in the level mechanics, with each of the 22 worlds offering 6-8 levels built around a single theme, like lasers you need to protect yourself from, or magnets that you can stick yourself or the Tetris pieces you make to. Each level provides about 4-6 challenges, with collectible crowns to pick up if you can reach them using a limited number of created boxes, and then you're on to the next world and next mechanic. There are a few short cut-scenes and some items you can buy at the shop (including a few costumes that alter gameplay by, for example, letting you move faster or jump higher. The costumes are also pretty cute.)

And that's it. As I said, this game could plausibly have come out in the 1980s, except that something this polished and carerfully put together was extremely rare in that era. It's as if Nintendo has simultaneously been pursuing the latest and greatest 3D game design AND having a small group of designers continue using the same design tools from 30 years ago, and now they have mastered to those tools to the point where they can produce a game like this with classic design but none of the rough edges or design dead ends that come from designers learning new tech, or compensating for the limitations of slow processor speeds and tiny memory allotments.

Of course BOXBOY! is not the only series that feels like this. Pushmo is another series that does basically the same thing, of providing a new twist on an old design space. Rather than being stuck in the Gameboy era it feels more like an N64 era game, but it is equally polished and fun.

Both Pushmo and BOXBOY! have that special Nintendo polish. Other developers may make more technically impressive or innovative games, but nobody can create a package that so perfectly accomplishes what it sets out to do (though Nintendo obviously also has their share of misfires.) In a way it creates its own sense of immersion where, rather than getting lost in a huge detailed world, you're able to get lost in a tiny world that's perfectly internally consistent and where if you think you can do something you almost certainly can, because the rules are perfectly defined and articulated.

I can't think of a $5 game I liked as much as BOXBOY! and, honestly, I would have happily paid $15 or $20 for it. There are certainly plenty of games I've bought at those price points and had less fun with. A depressing number, actually.

The launch of the Switch has set me on a Nintendo kick for the last 6 weeks or so, and in many ways it has felt like coming home. I grew up with the NES and SNES, and BOXBOY! both plays to that nostalgia and provides a game that's up to modern standards and has all kinds of niceties like frequent checkpoints and a comprehensive hint system.

I hope that BOXBOY! and Pushmo come to the Switch (since I prefer playing on a bigger screen) but even moreso I hope that Nintendo keeps quietly producing these little downloadable gems. I may have been sick this weekend but BOXBOY! made sure I was far from miserable, and what's more Nintendo than a game you can sink into while sick, forgetting your ragged cough and painful swallowing to focus on the simple adventures of a little square protagonist in a world of perfect puzzles? Nintendo was there for me when I was sick in 1987, and 30 years later it's still there for me.

There's a reason people have such loyalty to this company.