I liked Final Fantasy XVI and said I would buy the DLC when released. True to my word I did, and I played the first pack. I came away remembering why I don't really like most DLC.

Echoes of the Fallen costs $10 or is $25 as part of a dual pack with more DLC coming later. For that money you get a 2-3 hour quest line only accessible if you've unlocked the final mission and done some other stuff (which I had) and involving venturing into a tower to investigate the source of some new crystals that are making their way out into the world and worrying Clive and his band of morose buddies. So you go to investigate and...it goes how you'd expect. A little bit of unspectacular sides story stuff, a whole lot of fighting including some new bosses, and some very unexciting loot because it's FF XVI and all loot is unexciting.

While I will admit that some of the boss fights are well designed here, the base FF XVI gameplay is mediocre and this doesn't fix that. The story stuff is medium tier sidequest level and there's nothing visually spectacular or exciting here. There are no set pieces anywhere near as cool as the big moments from the main campaign. Meanwhile they want $10 for this, which is 1/7th the price of the full game. For that money you get no new abilities, a very short run time on a dollar per hour basis, and just not much beyond...more of an already overlong game.

This is the value problem of DLC. It's more expensive per hour than the main game (usually) but it also doesn't add anything significant to the mechanics or the rest of it (usually.) There are, of course, exceptions (Torna The Golden Country got spun off into its own game as well as being DLC for a reason) but they are relatively rare.

And yet as someone who tends to have FOMO when it comes to games I buy a lot of this stuff, play some of it, and am almost always disappointed. This stuff is almost always made by younger teams learning how to design smaller projects, and it's good for them to get the opportunity to get their feet wet, but it should be a better value for players. The Horizon: Zero Dawn DLC is an example of a compromise between the "Whole new game" approach of Torna and the "short and mediocre" Final Fantasy XVI approach.

Echoes of the Fallen is not a miserable experience to play and it has some decent bosses for a game with generally mediocre combat, but it's just not worth the money and it doesn't feel essential.

I got a lot more out of the Final Fantasy VII Remake expansion, which had new characters to play, a much more compelling story, and some interesting new mechanics. Something at that level would have felt worth the money. Maybe the second DLC will be better.

As I played through the battle-wizard FPS campaign of Immortals of Aveum I kept having a recurrent thought. “This is okay, but I can’t believe I paid $70 for it.” I didn’t. I paid $8, and that was for the deluxe edition with a bunch of game breaking equipment I never used. But I’d briefly considered buying it at $70 when it launched just a few months ago and that price was stuck in my brain as I played for some reason.

Immortals of Aveum is an okay game. It’s not broken or half baked like Golum and Skull Island. Its shooting mechanics work well and there’s a novelty to the various magical spell weapons, which seem patterned after the more exotic sci-fi arsenal of a game like Halo rather than straightforward analogs to modern guns. Some of the ancillary powers, like a beam that overloads and stuns enemies and a temporary shield you can summon and shoot through, are pretty fun and original. The progression and equipment systems are well implemented for RPG-light systems (Immortals of Aveum has more and better RPG mechanics than Final Fantasy XVI!) and there are optional puzzles and side areas to search for more loot and extra challenges. The game looks decent, if unspectacular, with aesthetics that seem to crib a lot from games like the modern God of War (specifically Alfheim) but are pleasant enough, even if performance is iffy (especially during cut scenes.) You can tell that there were budgetary limitations based on the sheer number of repeating objects and some mediocre animations, but there are moments where you are manipulating giant statutes or facing giant beasts where it can feel like a true AAA game. Writing and dialog are average, while voice acting performances are above average, especially Gina Torres hamming it up as a Field Marshal. The story is full of too many made up lore terms and really falls apart at the end, but it has its moments. The music is the one notable area where the game is actually downright bad, with short, simple, irritating repeating loops, especially while exploring out of combat. Disappointing considering how many games with absolutely tiny budgets still have amazing soundtracks these days.

Nothing went horribly wrong during the development of Immortals of Aveum. Even the music is just below average, not experience ruining. The game is pretty much what it advertises itself to be and there’s nothing particularly wrong with its conception or design either. People have criticized it for being bland and derivative, and it is a little, but there are some original ideas too. The world building pulls in concepts from high fantasy and some steampunk along with some Lovecraftian elements, and most of the characters are charming enough. The combat has been called “call of duty with spells” but it’s not. There’s no regenerating health (instead you have health crystals you break), and abilities like shield and blink encourage high mobility frenetic combat with liberal use of special abilities and resources. It’s closer to “battlemage Doom (2016)” than anything else, but even that doesn’t quite capture it because it has more puzzles, significant numbers of NPCs to chat with and non-combat areas to explore, and a less brutal difficulty curve (though there are definitely some spikes.) None of it represents a paradigm shift from what came before but it’s competently executed and it feels like a lot of mid-tier games; a remix of tried and true concepts with some unique story, aesthetic, and mechanical concepts integrated to prevent it from being a carbon copy. Immortals of Aveum scored a 69 on Metacritic, which is not a great score by any means but is just one point below a somewhat respectable 7/10. 69 is a nice score, is what I’m saying.

I don't want to downplay the game's flaws. There are a limited number of weapons and though you keep getting new ones throughout the campaign, you've seen all the different types pretty early in the campaign and the tiny range of the red mana weapons is frustrating and makes 2 out of 3 pretty worthless. Enemy variety is also limited and way too many of the bad guys are super tanky, requiring a frustatingly long time to kill. The game isn't very hard because it is liberal with health crystals but it can definitely be annoying, and though I probably died something like 20 times during the course of the campaign and never more than 3-4 times on any one encounter there were lots of times when encounters felt draining and unsatisfying because of how long it took to kill the last enemies. The story is silly and incoherent much of the time, though often in kind of a fun way. Some of the exploration and puzzle elements are frustrating because you don't always know that you lack the tools to solve a puzzle and have to go back later (The game is a semi-Metroidvania in that you can revisit old areas and use new tools to unlock additional loot chests and side content like challenge levels called Shroudfanes.) The use of three colors of magic and coding certain enemies to them is restrictive and annoying, especially because it forces you to spec your character to being able to handle a threat of any color, preventing you from specializing.

On the plus side the pacing between story, exploration, puzzles, and combat isn't bad, and the base combat is fun and satisfying. The upgrades tend to be substantial and go beyond the basic "more damage" "more armor" stuff to more interesting bonuses like making your shield regenerate your health when it takes damage. You get a decent variety of "fury" spells that take up mana and the game gives you enough mana crystals to consistently use them, making combat much more interesting than it would be if you could only rely on your base "sigil" attacks. The game held my attention and the world of Aveum is original enough that I was able to get absorbed in it for long stretches, which is something that I've been having trouble with recently for most games.

So the game is fine, if not spectacular, and it was promoted by EA with a decent advertising campaign in the standard gaming outlets. Immortals of Aveum didn’t slip under the radar from lack of attention. But it still flopped, hard, to the point where half the studio was laid off almost immediately. It was a commercial disaster. 3.5 months after launch it’s half off pretty much everywhere and 90% off on Xbox. It’ll probably be on PS+ or Game Pass within a couple more months, and while it may find an audience there to some degree it won’t be enough to turn things around meaningfully. It’s all time peak on Steam was 751 players. Compare that to High on Life, a game that was probably cheaper to make, and peaked at over 11,000, and which also premiered on Game Pass, which would likely have significantly reduced that number because you don’t use Steam to play the subscription version.

Why did Immortals of Aveum fail so badly that it crushed its studio then? Because the market has changed. Not only are there more games than ever but the best of those games are getting longer and longer, and the B-tier games have gotten much cheaper. Even ignoring extreme outliers like Baldur’s Gate, most AAA games are now well over 20 hours. According to howlongtobeat.com Far Cry 6 is almost 24 hours long, while Far Cry 3 is just over 15. That’s a big jump. The days of the 8-10 hour campaign are long gone for single player focused games and when something like Assassin’s Creed Mirage comes out with a 15 hour campaign it’s often priced at a discount (Mirage was $50). This is before we even get into live service games or other multiplayer experiences that can last hundreds of hours and soak up all a player’s time.

And from the other end of the spectrum you have lots of cheaper but still incredible experiences. Astonishingly good indie games with really nice production values, like Neon White or Death’s Door. Those slightly smaller AAA quality games like Hi-Fi Rush, Miles Morales, or big DLCs like Phantom Liberty. The aforementioned High on Life was a $50 game. And with backwards compatibility and better PC compatibility maintenance you have a massive library of older games in your backlog or available at huge discounts to explore. That’s before we get into subscriptions like Game Pass and PS+, which offer hundreds of games in a rotating library, often including some very big heavy hitters you might not have played. The days of “Well I finished my last 10 hour retail disc game, let me see what’s coming out next week” are gone.

So where does that leave games like Immortals of Aveum? As a giant flop. Asking for the same price as Baldur’s Gate 3, Spider-Man 2 or Tears of the Kingdom was never going to work, likely not even if Immortals of Aveum were a better game. Occasionally games like it (relatively short AA single player campaign) do seem to find an audience, but those seem like the exception instead of the rule, to the point where those games are getting rare. A license can help (High on Life didn’t have a license but it did have Justin Rowland pushing it, prior to his downfall) as can being part of a popular franchise, like the Dead Space remake (getting an 89 Metacritic like that game helps too, so quality can help if a game is exceptional.) Launching into Game Pass or PS+ can help but unless you’re owned by Microsoft you can’t exactly guarantee that.

It’s a shame because Immortals of Aveum isn’t really a bad game. It has some good ideas that could have been expanded on in a sequel or just another game from a now more experienced studio (this was Ascendant Studios’ first game; they may make another in their scaled down state but it won’t be at the production level of Immortals of Aveum.) I don’t think I’d be happy to have bough it at $70, but at $8 it satisfied my desire for a linear, mid-length, campaign I could sink my teeth into for a few longer play sessions and then set aside, probably never to play again. I reminded me a lot of Outriders, another game I mostly enjoyed while it lasted.

But even as someone who likes these kinds of games I don’t have a solution for their commercial failings. “Make them better,” “sell them cheaper and hope that helps,” “try to get on Game Pass or PS+” are all ideas it is impossible to reliably execute on. As a customer I’m as guilty as anyone else. I have a friend who was playing through Aveum and we sometimes like to play games in parallel so we can discuss them, but in this case I balked even at $30 when it was previously discounted. It was only when it got under $10 that I was willing to take the plunge, and even though I got it very cheap I couldn’t help but be almost offended by the original price.

In the olden days a studio that put out a game like Immortals of Aveum would probably get at least one or two more chances. The game would sell better, the publisher would be more understanding (though we are talking about EA) and the next game or the one after that would likely be much better and have a better chance of being a hit. Now the studio is not yet shuttered but is crippled, and a lot more studios have suffered similar fates for delivering one game that failed to meet expectations. It’s one thing when you put out a garbage fire like Gollum, but games like Immortals of Aveum have value. Just not enough value in the modern market. Games are too expensive to make and take too long, and the market is too competitive. There’s room for the great, sometimes room for the good, and almost no room for the average, at least without the support of a valuable IP of some sort.

But most games that new studios put out are going to be average. A lot of games are going to be average. It’s bad for the industry when average means not just that the product fails but that the studio fails too. If the average result is failure how many people are going to want to try?

New Super Mario Bros U Deluxe has a stupid name and I don't like it. Either the name or the game itself.

I got vaccinated Sunday and it knocked me flat on my back so I decided to finally finish Tears of the Kingdom, a game I played obsessively upon release but had to set down when life got too hectic.

That took longer than I thought (and I think that the back end of that game's main quest is not great, which is a separate issue) but after I finished I still had a couple hours before bed so I decided that since I was in a game finishing mood I might as well finally finish New Super Mario Bros U Deluxe, a game that I bought near launch and quickly lost interest in. I've picked it up briefly a few times over the years and was on the last level of the second to last world, so not too far from defeating Bowser and getting Mario and Peach, those crazy kids, together to see if they could finally make it work.

The level I was on turned out to be pretty infuriating because of all the reasons I don't really like that game (slippery controls and imprecise movement being the chief issues, mixed with some very frustrating level design and enemy placement) and I died a bunch but finally finished it. From there on it was pretty smooth sailing to the end of the game, with a couple levels testing my patience and a few others that were total cakewalks.

I finally defeated Bowser, watched the boring cut scene, and after the credits rolled I was offered my rewards for winning. A little star on my save file to indicate my victory (fine), access to a "secret" island that isn't secret at all but contains a hut where you can view game stats like number of coins collected and number of Goombas stomped. Neat but unexciting. Access to Star Road, which I may mess around with at some point but have no interest in right now. Fair enough.

And...the ability to save at any time on the world map.

This instantly put me in a bad mood. The entire time I was playing New Super Mario Bros U I chaffed at the fact that you couldn't save whenever you wanted. It irritated me greatly. Not just because you can't save scum your stored power up items but more importantly because I generally only wanted to play a few levels at a time, meaning that I was relying on the "interrupt save" feature to make progress. This allows you to save anywhere, but it's not a true save and it gets erased whenever you load it, acting like a temporary bookmark. Beyond preventing save scumming the main problem with this system is that if the Switch or game crashes, or you accidentally close it while it's suspended, you lose your place and get reverted to the last permanent save, which only happens after defeating a boss or miniboss. This happened to me a couple times during my playthrough and I found it enraging. This is a 2019 game (a port of a 2012 title but they could have added saving anywhere) and limiting saves like that in a Mario game of all things just seemed insane to me.

Now I find out that the game actually features the ability to permanently save between levels, they just withhold it until you’ve beaten the game.

Why? Why?

I think I know why. After you beat the game there is still a fair amount to do (collect star coins, finish levels that you bypassed on the world map, Star Road etc…) but you are unlikely to hit one of those arbitrary save points and having to replay a specific level just to save would be extremely irritating. But this is a “you came so close to getting it” situation. If it’s too much of a pain to have to go to a specific level to save in the post game then…why restrict it in the normal game? This is a Mario game, not Dark Souls. It’s not really about grinding the player down and forcing repetition.

Again I think I have the answer, and that is lives.

Like every major 2D Mario game New Super Mario Bros U Deluxe (again, horrible name) has a “lives” mechanic. Every time you die you lose a life and lose them all and you get a game over and have to revert to your last save. We’re all familiar with this mechanic, it’s a holdover from the arcades and the early console days when forced repetition was how games provided “value,” and the vast majority of games have long since abandoned it.

Mario hasn’t, but instead seriously undermines it by handing out lives like they’re discount flyers at a supermarket. In NSMBUD the world map is littered with green toad houses that allow you to play a pretty boring minigame to build lives. There is at least one of these per world and they respawn, so if you are willing to do a circuit of the world map you can easily refill your life stock. I lost significant numbers of lives on some of the harder levels later in the game but as long as I went to these houses I never actually saw my stock go down. There are also, of course, some easier levels you can grind for lives if you want, including the typical Mario life grinding spots where you can use a koopa shell to kill a bunch of enemies resulting in a shower of lives, or other similar techniques. Finally the game gives you special items (if you want them, I never did) if you die a bunch of times, so it is designed to stop you from losing too many lives.

So you have a life mechanic that’s more of a minor irritation than any kind of obstruction forcing a save system that’s legitimately annoying, until the end of the game where the designers shrug and toss out the bad save system, calling it a reward.

And yet either nobody thought to just do away with the whole restriction, or worse someone did think of that and someone else stopped them.

This is in some ways the essence of the worst parts of Nintendo. A needless clinging to old outdated ideas just out of habit and tradition. Super Mario Wonder does improve this with a save anywhere on the overworld map feature and no time limit in levels (that one at least has plusses and minuses) but it still has lives for some reason, even though they are further trivialized.

I’m glad to have finished NSMBUD because I did buy it and now I can officially say it’s my least favorite Mario game, but that “hey you know that thing that’s been annoying you all game? It’s gone now that you’re done with it” moment really put an exclamation point on my dislike for NSMBUD. It’s not a terrible game and I don’t hate it but as a Mario game it just leaves me feeling annoyed and dissatisfied. Fortunately Super Mario Bros. Wonder has me optimistic for the series’ future, but I think I can leave this one in the dust bin. Metaphorically. I bought it digitally so there’s no real way to throw it out and I wouldn’t even if I had the physical. But metaphorically it goes right in the bin.

This year I picked two games (Nier Replicant and Yakuza 0) that I’d taken multi-year pauses from back up and finished them. I remember why I put Nier down, and the reason was incredibly stupid. There’s a set of side quests, entirely unnecessary to complete the game or even get achievements, that require you to go between locations in the game without jumping, diving, or getting hit by an enemy. I had done one of them, got the second, didn’t want to do it just then because I thought it would be frustrating, and put the game down to play later when I was up to gritting my teeth through the quest, even though I was otherwise enjoying it quite a bit. Again, this is a totally optional quest that is absolutely not required to progress in the game.

When I picked the game back up two years later I managed to complete the quest in about 5 minutes on my first try, showing that even though I was a bit rusty with the controls this was not at all a difficult challenge and there was no reason to stop playing the game because of it. I then completed the game in less than a week, absolutely loving it, and even did a second loop to get the second ending. I still have some endings left to get but am taking a conscious break now because I was a bit burned out, but I thoroughly enjoyed the game and while it may not be in my top 10 of all time it would probably be floating around somewhere in my top 50, if I had a list like that.

Yakuza 0 I have put down and picked up several times over the years, and I couldn’t exactly explain why. I love the characters, the story, the writing, and especially the game’s incredible sense of style. The gameplay isn’t the best but it’s serviceable enough given everything else the game has going for it. I have no specific memory why I put it down last time; I just took a break and ended up leaving it half finished for, again, years. This time, though, I picked it up a little less than halfway through and played pretty steadily through the end, including doing a fair amount of the very engaging side stuff. I even went back to Yakuza 0 for about a dozen hours just to clean up side stuff even after finishing the main story, which is very rare for me. I would also probably put it somewhere in my top 50, though I’m not sure that’s a useful metric. I don’t even know how to compare something like Yakuza 0 to a game like Lumines or NBA Street 2.

On the one hand you have two games that I took significant, multi-year, breaks from even though they are not particularly difficult. On the other hand you have two games that I have spent a lot of time with (by my standards) and went back to do more stuff in after finishing, which is rare for me. Usually when I hit the credits on a game I drop it immediately, even if I intended to mop up some side content. I might spend another 1-2 hours but I’m on to the next quickly. With Nier I did a whole second (mini) loop and intend to do the additional loops after another break (this time because I’m burned out on repeated content.) With Yakuza 0 I have been going back to polish off questlines and finish side material that most players don’t bother with, even after beating Yakuza Kiwami (which I also liked a lot but did not love quite as much as 0.)

To me this raises questions about what it means for a game to “click” with me. Does it matter if it happens late? What if I need to be in a different place in my life to really appreciate it? Do your favorite games have to pull you in immediately without letting go? How much time can they take to sink their hooks in?

I never stopped intending to go back and finish Yakuza 0 and Nier. They remained on installed on my Xbox and I even made a few attempts with Yakuza (a game I was positive I would love, and eventually did.) I never had a point where I really didn’t enjoy them. Nier’s soundtrack is permanently embedded in my brain in a way that very few games can manage. These were not games that I ever consciously abandoned, but thy also were clearly not games that compelled me to play them above all others until, eventually, they did.

There’s an old joke in the gaming community about games that take “20 hours to get good” and how that’s totally unacceptable. I agree with that; a game should be engaging from the moment it starts, and if it can’t do that for some reason (such as The Last of Us setting up its tone with its prologue, or Armored Core 6 having to teach you its complex controls) then it should get to “good” status as soon as it can. Wasting a player’s time by slow rolling mechanics or story is almost never worth the payoff. No other entertainment asks you to have a bad time for an entire full day of your life just so you can enjoy yourself after. That’s the time cost of flying away to an exotic vacation, not to play Xenoblade Chronicles.

But I do think there are games that unfurl slowly, hide their hand a little bit, and then payoff big time in the late game or the climax, and that can be an exhilarating experience. Yakuza 0 is a lot of fun for the first 20 hours when you’re learning its systems and its cities and getting introduced to its characters, soaking in that 80s style, but it doesn’t really get cooking until the back half of the game when the pace becomes frantic and you have access to so much to see and do that it really feels like a virtual playground competing with a pulse pounding plot. Som of the slower moments are used for character development, so you can come to understand Kiryu and Majima as people and then understand why they each develop in the way they do and make the choices they make. A good game becomes great because of the seeds laid early. That’s somewhat true of the mechanics too, though there I think they peak at about the halfway point and become boring before the game ends. But that’s an issue that a lot of games deal with, especially games as long as Yakuza.

Nier, on the other hand, hints at what it’s actually about during its prologue and then buries that for the vast majority of the game. In terms of storytelling it’s almost all set up to a grand payoff. The game is still fun to play during that set up period, at least the newer version with the Platinum games developed combat, and it tells a lot of interesting stories in innovative ways, so it’s mostly not a slog (though there are some sloggy, grindy, parts) but it’s much more focused on the big finale than it is on a slow consistent build. Nonetheless it also has the issue of feeding you set up material that’s not necessarily super engaging until you understand what it’s actual purpose is.

The question I think all this raises is how do you evaluate the subjective quality of a game when that quality varies over time, as it does for most games, and do you base your ultimate view on how you feel about it at the end or also how you felt while you were playing? Obviously there were points when I was playing these games where I liked them but I didn’t love them. I let a slightly annoying side quest halt my playthrough of Nier, which I wouldn’t do with a game I loved (and in my later playthrough I was willing to put up with the much more annoying fact that you have to repeat big stretches of game just to get to a small amount of new stuff.) I stopped playing Yakuza 0 because I got distracted by something else, which, again, is not how I behave when I love a game. It’s clear that for a big chunk of my time playing these games I was just not that into them. And yet when they ended I was so enchanted that I couldn’t help but play more.

My own take is that both aspects matter. You can’t judge a game just by how it leaves you feeling at the end because the experiences you have while playing are when you are most engaged with and focused on the game, and just like a great game with an ending that leaves a bad taste in your mouth doesn’t negate all the good stuff that comes before, a game that only really comes together in the last act still forced you to slog through to get to that point, and that time matters. On the other hand there are certain ideas and systems that need time to develop and breathe, and games need the room to sacrifice immediate thrills for long term payoff. A great ending can recontextualize what came before and give it more meaning and impact in retrospect.

I also think it’s important to remember that how you feel about a game can depend a lot on the context of when you played it. We think a lot about nostalgia and playing games as kids but there are other things that can influence how we feel about games as adults. Were you under tremendous stress at the time? Did you play it on staycation when you could devote hours a day to it? Did a theme of the game resonate with something you were going through like the loss of a loved one or a newly blossoming romance? Did you play it with a friend or family member? Even whether there were other games competing for your time or attention can have a big impact on whether you stick with a game and how much you enjoy it. Sometimes coming back to a game can be a very different experience depending on those factors and that’s why I don’t think having put down a game means you didn’t like it or even that it wasn’t one of your favorites. Heck some games may not be a favorite the first time you play it but might become one if you run through it again at a later date. Experiences are subjective and that’s true within a single individual’s experience, not just when reading or hearing about other people’s.

All told I had a better and more meaningful time with Nier and Yakuza 0 than I have with the vast majority of games I’ve played. Both games have music permanently embedded in my brain, numerous memorable moments that stand out as some of the highest highs I can experience in gaming, and satisfying overall narratives married to gameplay enjoyable enough that I kept coming back for more. The fact that they did not suck me in the first time I tried them just means I wasn’t in the right space to fully appreciate them at that point, but I came back and I loved my time with them and in the end that’s what matters.

I posted a month ago about all the bad licensed games that were coming out this year and how in some ways it seemed like we had returned to the "glory" of the 90s, when it seemed like a third of all games were licensed and 80% of those were terrible. Since then things have only continued, with a late contender taking the scene in the form of The Walking Dead Destinies, a game that combines a lukewam license, a decent premise (Play through the early seasons of The Walking Dead TV show but make different choices about who lives and dies, changing the course of events), and production values and gameplay from Wii shovelware you'd find for sale in a discount drugstore in 2009 to stand out as a particularly notable piece of trash in the Great Pacific Gaming Garbage Patch of 2023.

No sane person who respects their time and leisure would ever want to play this. But I do! I played Balan Wonderworld through to the credits after writing that nothing could dissuade me from wanting to do so. That same year I played Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood. I am currently kind of picking my way through Redfall. My history of playing terrible games is unassailable!

The thing is, if you just like horrible games then there are more available than you could ever hope to play (if you ever hope to play bad games.) The Switch eshop alone has seemingly dozens of shovelware games launching every week. This wek alone has seen the release of things like Guns & Spurs 2 and The Trotties Adventure. I haven't played those games, maybe they're fantastic, but I'm pretty sure ASMR Slicing is not. Please feel free to come for me if you're a fan of Virtual Families 3: Our Country Home or Furniture Flipper Simulator 2023. And of course there's even more of this stuff on Steam and mobile. Fans of crap games can eternally gorge themselves at these electronic garbage buffets.

But while I have sampled some of this stuff in my time it's not really what I'm talking about here. These asset flips and cheap student projects all kind of blend together and you can see basically everything one of them has to offer. Some of them seem like they were never really intended to be played at all. They seem to spring out of nowhere like mushrooms, hundreds of them, with no discernable purpose or market.

What interests me are bad games that have at least some money and marketing behind them; a team of people spending significant time to churn out something that's...bad. Often these are licensed games, which tend to at least have teams of professional developers behind them even if they are vastly under-resourced. Sometimes they are games like Redfall or Balan, which come from larger studios backed by major publishers and still end up very bad for whatever reason. These games are interesting, and seeing why they're bad can help you appreciate why good games are good.

This year has had a ton of these interesting bad games. Gollum. Redfall. Skull Island: Rise of Kong. Forespoken. Walking Dead: Destinies. And then there's a plethora of other random licensed stuff that looks at least a little interesting, like the new Grinch game or Smurfs Kart (why in 2023? WHY?) I find these kinds of games fascinating because of the ways that some production values are high while others are skipped, or how you can see what the designers were going for but couldn't quite get right.

Sometimes, like in Redfall, you see that they did have something of a budget but you have no idea what they were going for and it makes the game surprising in a way that most games aren't. "Wait it works like this?" "The mission is over? I literally just got here and shot one guy!" "Who possibly thought this was a good idea?" Some games do this intentionally by changing up mechanics or introducing something totally off the wall (Super Mario Wonder recently did a version of it with the Wonder seeds radically changing levels and mechanics) but when it happens organically it is sometimes even more interesting. Balan Wonderworld will forever remain fascinating for me because some of its decisions are obviously the result of a singular, very stupid, vision. Many of them are infuriating and make it unfun to play much of the time, but at least they aren't boring.

And that's the ultimate attraction of these bad games. They aren't boring. Okay, Redfall is often boring, but that boredom is at least punctuated with weird memorable moments when you encounter something that doesn't make any sense.

And in addition to not being boring, the games often feel freeing in a way. When I play good games I try to play well, to catch every line of dialog and really appreciate the experience. When I play bad games I don't care about any of that. I can die and it doesn't bother me (unless the game gets really frustrating) I know I'm not missing anything if I pop on a podcast and ignore the soundtrack, I can bail permanently when I get bored. I can do all those things with good games too, but it feels like a waste because I generally only play each game once, and even if you replay something you never have that experience of discovery you do the first time. I don't want to cheese and half-ass my way through Tears of the Kingdom, but Forespoken? Hell yeah.

The one thing I don't want to do with these games is pay for them. At least a lot. Because I often don't finish these titles and even if I do they're often short I have no interest in paying full price. Free on Game Pass or PS+ is ideal, but I don't feel too bad of spending less than $10, or especially less than $5. Time is more valuable than money, of course, but it feels bad to hand over a bunch of cash for a game that a publisher shat out as a cash grab anyway (Game Mill I am looking at you.) Gollum has been as low as $10 physical but even that seems like a lot for an unfinished mess of a stealth game. Besides, it's been memed so much there's probably not a lot of juice left in that lime.

So I've put a bunch of these games on my watchlist for when they go free with subscription or super cheap. Even that feels like giving money to publishers who don't really deserve it, but there's no ethical consumption in capitalism and $5 for a dumb Walking Dead game where you can shoot Rick Grimes in the face with a shotgun 20 times is not the most unethical purchase I will ever have made. And I'm looking forward to seeing all the ways they messed their good idea up and laughing at the off brand voice acting.

This year will be remembered for its bumper crop of huge, beloved, games like Baldur's Gate 3, Tears of the Kingdom, Spider-Man 2, CyberPunk 2077: Phantom Liberty and Super Mario Wonder. But it's a bumper crop for fans of interesting trash too. It's just going to take a little bit longer for me to actually harvest them.

Don Mattrick fully earned his place in the bad video game executive hall of fame. People remember the various ways in which the Xbox One launch was botched, ranging from the confusing and ahead of its time in a bad way DRM, compounded by Mattrick’s condescending “if you don’t have reliable Internet just play your 360” comments, and, of course, the Kinect. Microsoft built the system and its marketing around a mandatory peripheral that didn’t work and that it never had any compelling software for. And one that spied on you to boot! It was an ill considered approach worthy of Sega at its peak 32X stupidity.

What people don’t remember as much is that the back half of the Xbox 360, when it lost its advantage to Sony and ended up in close to a dead heat after dominating the first half of the generation, was almost as bad. The Kinect was a cool idea but it was expensive and never worked outside a few very specific applications. It was the kind of thing that looked amazing in commercials and was extremely disappointing for everyone who used it outside a small core of tech obsessives who are willing to put up with extreme jank. And yet Microsoft focused on this thing almost exclusively in the back half of its best generation, pushing it relentlessly with massive marketing campaigns and focusing most software development on it. The Xbox 360 almost abandoned exclusives at the time that third parties came to understand the PS3 architecture and were putting out equal ports (nullifying the 360’s chief advantage) and Sony’s exclusive output had evolved from Heavenly Sword to The Last of Us.

Then Xbox took that crappy peripheral and built their next system around it, jacking up the price $100 and cutting corners on the hardware that people would use to play the games they actually liked and wanted to play, which Xbox compensated for by not making many games that anyone actually liked and wanted to play.

What people also forget is that in addition to the Kinect the Xbox One was built around TV. Not streaming integration but actual cable TV. The Xbox had a port for an HDMI in, an IR blaster to control your cable box, and the OS featured a “snap” function that let you pin a small TV feed into a vertical bar on the side of your screen so you could have a postage stamp sized picture in picture going as you played. This snap feature came at the cost of using a bunch of Xbox One’s already behind the curve processing power and unlike the Wii U’s ability to toss TV to a tablet it didn’t actually do anything you couldn’t already with the picture in picture function most TVs already have, let alone the plethora of secondary screens people already had in late 2013, well into the age of universal smart phone adoption.

It was an idiotic idea that only someone who profoundly misunderstood entertainment and where it was going could come up with, and Microsoft’s whole team deserves condemnation for pursuing it. The Xbox One was seemingly designed by people who did not like video games and wanted to make their black VCR shaped box do everything under the sun but play them.

So the Xbox One launched at a high price point with a bunch of games with crappy Kinect integration and a reputation for being underpowered and riddled with DRM. Despite a respectable launch lineup that included graphical showpiece Ryse: Son of Rome and the exclusive Dead Rising 3 along with the interesting seasonal fighting game Killer Instinct and a bunch of ports of Madden and COD, it landed in the market crippled. It sold well at first to people hungry for new hardware but soon fell behind PS4 and never threatened to catch up again.

Cleaning up this mess would not be easy and Mattrick would not be the guy to do it. He was quickly moved on to Zynga, a company that made more of the types of games he seemed to like, and the admired Phil Spencer moved up to take his place. Over the next seven years he would unwind all of Mattrick’ big decisions. The Kinect would soon be debundled and then discontinued, a humiliating admission that it had been a terrible idea to begin with, and an experiment that would end without even the suite of fun party software that the 360 version got. Snapping TV onto the screen would be removed from the OS to free up power for games and eventually all TV function including on screen guides would be stripped from the OS. Spencer would oversee a new revision of the console into the Xbox One X, which was very specifically marketed as more powerful than Sony’s PS4 Pro, targeting gamers who wanted performance without buying a PC. Microsoft would triple down on games, adding backwards compatibility for a huge swath of old 360 and original Xbox games, and purchasing new studios to replace the one that Mattrick let atrophy or closed during the Kinect era, when exclusive games had become an afterthought.

Spencer would also pursue a strategy trying to play to Microsoft’s strengths, saving Xbox by moving beyond the Xbox hardware. He would make all Xbox games available on PC, Microsoft’s home platform, pursuing players wherever they were and making Xbox development more economically viable despite a smaller install base. He would also create Game Pass, a service that would attract players to the platform without exclusives by giving them access to the “Netflix of games.” He would oversee close integration of the Xbox controller into the Windows environment, establishing it as the base controller for PC players and making sure that Xbox peripherals remained relevant for players even if they didn’t want to buy an Xbox One. He bought Minecraft and maintained its ubiquitous presence on all platforms instead of killing it by restricting it to Xbox only. He stepped boldly into game streaming before it was really ready, hoping to establish Microsoft in that market before it matured and pursuing entertainment in the direction it was actually going instead of chasing cable TV like it was still 1998.

These steps were all pretty radical and have their critics, but it’s worth noting that Sony has followed almost every part of this plan (though its streaming plans were in place earlier than Xbox’s.) Sony’s games are on PC now, years after Xbox started. Sony has subscription tiers to PlayStation Plus, clearly chasing Game Pass though without Microsoft’s commitment to putting first party games there. The PlayStaiton 5 is backwards compatible, unlike PS4, because the feature was very popular on Xbox One, even if not that many actually used it. PlayStation is still the dominant high powered console but its clear that in some ways Microsoft is the strategic leader, making smart moves that even arrogant Sony feels the need to emulate.

The one area that Microsoft has not managed to turn thins around is in its game production, which remains a mixed bag at best. Despite all of Microsoft’s acquisitions it would continue to struggle putting out top tier games that people wanted to play, where Sony would ascend to the Nintendo tier where every first party game felt like an event. Even Microsoft’s huge older franchises would languish, with Halo going from absolutely dominant shooter to just another franchise putting out games with a mixed reputation. Gears of War would become the last franchise standing in a genre that was well out of fashion. Microsoft would fail to build new big series with games like Recore and Quantum Break being middling successes at best. The only major new franchise established during the Xbox One era would be Forza Horizon, the first of which was a late 360 game, though Microsoft would have a bit more luck with smaller games like the Ori series and its funding of Cuphead, though neither would end up as exclusives. Microsoft’s disastrous performance in Japan would continue to be a massive problem, with the biggest Japanese releases coming to Xbox if there was no deal with Sony, but smaller Japanese games skipping the platform to focus on PlayStation and Switch.

Ultimately you can argue that Xbox has still not recovered from the Xbox One era. Spencer himself has said this, calling the 8^th gen the “worst generation to lose” because of the switch to digital libraries carried over with backwards compatibility. Xbox has also failed to create new must play games despite its massive expansion via studio purchases. Xbox Series continues to languish behind PS5 and you can argue that launching the vastly underpowered Xbox Series S was a strategic mistake, though unlike Kinect and TV integration it was at least a reasonable idea (cheap things remain popular, unlike cable TV.)

But 10 years after the Xbox One launch Xbox continues to be relevant in the industry, having survived one of the worst major company launches in history. This is probably only because of the deep pockets of the parent company, which could bail Xbox out with financial support and studio purchases that a company like Sega didn’t have. Still, there were rumblings of Microsoft abandoning games and spinning off Xbox in the 360 era and coming out of the Xbox One era it has instead doubled down, buying Bethesda and Activision through painful and expensive mergers. Xbox now owns Elder Scrolls and Call of Duty, along with Doom and, of course, Blinx the Time Sweeper.

It's worth noting as well that Xbox One remains a relevant platform in 2023. 10 years after launch it continues to get new games and not just sports games or the cheapest licensed stuff but big new releases. This is primarily because of how easy it is to port games between platforms in 2023, and backwards compatibility meaning that an Xbox One version will run on the Series system, but it’s still impressive. 10 years is an enormous lifespan and when you look at something like the 32X or the Saturn, which barely survived a few years of relevance, having Armored Core and Street Fighter coming out on Xbox One 10 years after its terrible launch definitely shows something. The Xbox One has an astonishingly good library. Not an astonishingly good library of exclusives, but if it was your only console for the last 10 years you’ve had a ton of amazing stuff to play.

Personally the Xbox One is one of my favorite consoles of all time. I bought both Xbox One and PS4 at launch but ended up more of an Xbox gamer. This was both because I had been primarily a 360 gamer (I owned a PS3 but vastly preferred the Xbox 360 controller to the tiny Dual Shock 3) and because my best friend got an Xbox One because PS4s were hard to obtain near launch, so we ended up playing a bunch on Xbox Live together. I also loved the Xbox One X as the most powerful console, and appreciated backwards compatibility. I have a lot of affection for Xbox One and I still use mine to this day. I think the OS is unfairly maligned and the controller somewhat unappreciated. I think the incredible backwards compatibility function that upscales and smooths framerates is almost miraculous. I think Sunset Overdrive is great. But the most impressive thing about Xbox One is how well it has moved on from one of the worst launches in history to become a console that isn’t seen as a disaster. Only the 3DS has ever recovered more successfully. I don’t know what the future holds for Xbox, but the present could be much, much, worse if not for the radical attempts to turn the Xbox One into something that people would actually want to play, as opposed to the KinecTV box it was intended to be.

The Intellivision Amico, a proposed console whose pitch never made any sense but that managed to raise over $15,000,000 and never got to market, has been an obsession of mine for years now. I'm an old school gamer and I miss the old days of strange and misguided hardware, like the Virtual Boy or the 32X. Amico promised to bring that back by providing an incredibly underpowered system with complex and expensive controllers that never had a use case that made them seem like anything but an albatross around the system's neck. The comedy factor was amplified by Tommy Tallarico, a somewhat famous 90s game composer (or, more accurately, seller of music made by other composers who worked for him) and TV host who headed up the project. He spent much of his time arguing with critics on Internet message boards (and yes I realize the irony of my shading others for posting on message boards, but this is just a hobby for me) and appearing on Youtube shows with miniscule audiences to "promote" the machine. He made grandiose boasts and predictions and cultivated a group of 40-60 year old fanboys, ranging from the hopelessly naive to the seriously unsavory, who acted like a cult, praising everything he did and viciously attacking his critics. Intellivision spent lavishly on unnecessary office space and other frills while they constantly pushed off their ship date and Tommy continued to make grandiose boasts about how every game would be an NFT and they had tens of millions of dollars in manufacturing credit. They even sold game boxes with no games in them, in a truly hilarious example of focusing on all the wrong things. Meanwhile the ship date of the system got pushed back further and further until it became clear that we're never actually going to see the thing beyond a few prototype units sent to small time Youtubers for "testing."

Tallarico has long ago stepped back from the company and we are no longer getting hilarious comedy like "deep dive" videos that have to be re-edited four times because of repeated use of stolen assets. Instead the company has shifted into a maintenance mode where it occasionally releases statements or makes small moves to indicate that it is still a going concern, albeit with a tiny fraction of the staff and resources that it once commanded to achieve...basically nothing. If Tommy Tallarico was a brash romance scammer trying to blind the objects of his affection with grandiose, obviously false, claims and declarations then new CEO Phil Adam is more like an absent husband, spending all his time at work or with his girlfriend on the side and occasionally offering platitudes about how he'll be cutting back on work and home more soon. He made a lot of promises of statements and plans to be announced in the near future and then regularly blew through his own deadlines without saying anything more. Anyone who believed him was left looking like Charlie Brown repeatedly trying to kick the football Lucy was holding for him.

Despite these repeated failed promises the last few months have seen some actual movement. Intellivision sold off some of its games and IP to a company that had previously been one of its developers, leading to the publication on Steam and other platforms of Shark! Shark! and Astrosmash (Along with BBG's own Dynablaster) to the resounding sound of crickets. Now they've finally released the long ago promised "Amico Home" application, a cellphone app that is intended to act as a storefront for people to buy Amico games to play on their phones, because just selling the games as individual apps like they are on console and PC would be far too simple.

Amico Home should be hilarious. Fo one thing this is an Android app despite the fact that Tommy Tallarico repeatedly stressed that Amico games could not be played on a cell phone. To be fair, he was correct in that. They require two or more cell phones. Amico Home turns one phone or other Android device into a home base that interlinks with a display and at least one other device, which acts as a controller. There is no way to play the games on a single phone. In 2023 this is truly a deranged idea, though to be fair it's a result of lazily porting the Android app that ran the console on the original Amico to work on a normal phone and attach other phones to control them (the original Amico could also use phones as extra controllers.) You also need to download a separate app to use a phone as a controller, and that app launched a few days after the core Home app, meaning that it was utterly useless (except for some emulation work around shenanigans) for that period. Some might say that it is still utterly useless today. Also apparently you can make your fake console "grandpa brown" because all the colors need to start with g. We're dealing with some real big brained development here.

All of this should be hilarious but the thrill is gone, at least for me. What once was a glitzy start up bragging about its juice bar and trumpeting an Earthworm Jim revival and the hiring of J Allard is now selling its core IP and putting out bottom of the barrel mobile apps. And that's after its flamboyant former president was sued personally because a furniture loan he personally guaranteed never got repaid.

I understand why some people can still revel in schadenfreude here. This company and these people fleeced millions from small time investors with a series of lies and misrepresentations. The house of cards may not be fully collapsed but it's close, and nobody deserves it more.

But for me its gotten so pathetic that it's not amusing anymore. I can't look away because of all the time I've already invested, but I can't laugh either. Why is this still happening? Delusion? Some sort of weird pride? An attempt to stave off law suits or investigations by claiming that work is still being done? Who knows. But apparently Intelliision is going to keep playing out the string, running around like a beheaded chicken in a state of doomed semi-animation. And I can't look away. At least not yet.

Statement by Phil Adam

The PlayStation 4 launched 10 years ago. I got mine on launch day and proceeded to play a little bit of Resogun before turning to the true star of the launch lineup, Contrast, which I ended up getting all the trophies for.

I kid a little bit (I actually did get all the Contrast trophies) but the PS4 launch lineup wasn’t great. Some of the multi generation games like Assassin’s Creed IV were good versions of great games, but the marquee PS4 only games (outside the smaller Resogun) were Knack and Killzone: Shadow Fall, one of which is a meme and the other of which more or less killed a major franchise. Despite Sony’s reputation for killer IP the PS4 had kind of a slow launch when it came to exclusives and didn’t really start to bring the heat until the middle of its cycle, though Bloodborne and Until Dawn came in 2015 and arguably mark the beginning of the PS4 heyday.

Despite not having a ton of great exclusive software at first what the PS4 did have was momentum from the back half of the PS3 era and a competitor, in Microsoft, that was dedicated to shooting itself in the foot over and over again to the point where 10 years later it still walks with a limp. Nintendo wasn’t doing much better, having just launched the disastrous Wii U, so it was Sony’s game to lose, and they didn’t.

The PS4 was the most powerful console at a time when PC optimization was still pretty iffy, it was cheaper than the Xbox and it wasn’t burdened with Kinect. It was unabashedly game first, with an interface that put media stuff off in its own little menu. It had a new controller that was much more comfortable than prior Sony Dualshocks and had some fancy new tech like a touchpad and speaker that few games used but at least made it feel newer. That controller also had a glowing light that was very annoying but was also forward thinking by allowing for motion controls that would become important during Sony’s VR push. The PS4 was a games first powerhouse of a system and it won the generation despite launching with Knack and never looked back.

Despite this I think that the PS4 doesn’t quite get its due just because of its era. The 8^th generation was when the idea of a non first-party console exclusive became mostly a thing of the past. There was still a smattering of Japanese developed games that skipped Xbox (and even PC) but those would show up on Nintendo systems if they were capable of running it, or maybe get ported after a time. When you think of the SNES or the PS1 you can remember hundreds of console exclusives that defined it. Most of the best PS4 games not made by Sony were playable on other machines.

The PS4 has also been somewhat overshadowed by the phenomenon of the Switch. The Switch is a Nintendo system, which always means it gets more attention, at least among those who were raised on NES and SNES, it was a comeback story, and it was a hybrid that changed how a lot of people played games. The biggest Zelda ever and its portable…as a launch game! A lot of games that were better on PS4 were treated as Switch releases because of the novelty of portable play and because Nintendo getting big third party releases was a big freaking deal. The Switch outsold the PS4 and Mario Odyssey was so good that nobody even mentioned that it did not have Knack.

But PS4 quietly racked up very impressive sales for a home only console and did a few interesting things of its own. Chief among these was PSVR, bringing full on modern VR to the console space and bringing back the proud tradition of the console add on, like a Sega CD you could strap to your head. It was a bit of a kludge, using the old PS3 move controllers as an imperfect solution, but it had a lot of fantastic hybrid titles like Resident Evil 7, and some pretty good exclusives. It was one of the most popular VR headsets of its time and helped push forward the new medium. There were some other notable hardware integrations, like remote play through the Vita, that made the PS4 a bit more than just a boring games box. And of course the PS4 Pro added 4K support (kind of) and a whole new level of power, without splitting the player base too badly.

PS4 was also the generation when Sony fully embraced digital downloads. It was the first PlayStation to fully embrace non physical games, which were important on PS3 but were added late in development and a little clunky to use. PS4 had a much better store and library system, and Sony’s use of cross buy and cross play to promote digital sales was refreshing in s system that otherwise did not have any backwards compatibility.

There was famously a dark side to this embrace of the digital, in the form of shovelware, which has at times overwhelmed the PS4 store with absolute garbage. There was a time when most PS4 sales were just garbage platinum games like the infamous I Am Mayo and a bunch of background themes, though Sony has pruned some of that stuff from the store and the sales. Still this is the platform that gave us Life of Black Tiger and other games that would never have made it on to prior Sony machines.

Perhaps the greatest feat of the PS4 has been its longevity and the breadth and depth of its library. The last time I played my launch PS4 was yesterday, and while I play most new releases on PS5 these days it’s not like the PS4 is lacking for new releases. Most indies still come to it and many of the major releases do too. It’s slowing down and Sony has mostly abandoned the PS4 for its first party games, but this year alone games like Armored Core VI and Like a Dragon Gaiden have launched on it, so we’re not talking minor release that are scraping for whatever attention and sales they can get. The PS4 has had a true 10 year life cycle even excluding late sports and licensed releases. It has been relevant in the market for a long time.

I think the PS4’s legacy then is as the ‘default’ machine during a very important time in the growth of the console market. It managed to thrive despite competition from the Switch and the ascendence of mobile. It experimented with add ons and new concepts. It adapted and grew, and while it has been pretty much obsoleted by the machine that replaced it and its near 100% backwards compatibility it still has a strong legacy in the market. And that’s before we really discuss its suite of killer exclusives like Horizon Zero Dawn, Spider-Man, and the Naughty Dog games. Sony didn’t miss often during the PS4 era and it may not have the breadth of exclusives that prior systems did but its library is stacked with a lot of all times great.

I mean it’s got Knack AND Knack II. What more is there to say beyond that?

Insomniac's Spider-Man series does not know what to do with Mary Jane Watson. The first game updated her from the actress in peril to a plucky reporter who was able to help Peter Parker by investigating the various villains he was facing. This worked well when she served as a radio presence driving the plot and less well when you controlled her in slow, boring, stealth actually doing the investigations. Miles Morales sent her off to Symkaria to research a book. In Spider-Man 2 she is back in New York and working for Jonah Jameson as a reporter again. As a character in the game she's fine, serving as a support and balance to Peter and helping hold their households together as he proves unable to manage being Spider-Man and a productive employee. It's 2023 and she's a partner, not an object to be saved.

The problem really comes when the game feels compelled to insert her into the gameplay again. This time we get a series of different gameplay styles with her and they're all bad. The stealth is back only this time Mary Jane has a stun gun from Silver Sable. This makes the stealth moderately easier but also much more ridiculous. She can take down Kraven's hunters with ease, making them seem much less like a fierce mercenary force that could threaten a superhero and more like a bunch of bumbling idiots who can't handle a reporter with 2 weeks of self-defense training and a stun gun. At one point the hunters frantically talk about how she took out all their comrades in Aunt May's house and it does the "the predator has become prey" thing and it definitely made them seem like Spider-Man should be able to crush them all with minimal effort.

Later Mary Jane has to flee from symbiote Peter, which is effective in showing the threat of the symbiote but really goes against the grain of even their re-imagined relationship. In these games Mary Jane is the person who tethers Peter Parker to his humanity, and while having him threaten her serves to show how the symbiote can rob that humanity it, in my opinion, goes too far. The extreme violence of symbiote Peter against others does enough to show this and this sequence left me wondering how their relationship could recover from that kind of trauma.

But the game isn't done with Mary Jane. She then transforms briefly into symbiote enemy Scream, a multi-colored femme-Venom who fights Peter claw and nail as he tries to rescue her. She looks fantastic in symbiote form and this could be a cool sequence except...it's only barely mentioned again. Spider-Man pummels his domestic partner mercilessly throwing things at her head and kicking her in the face and it's uncomfortable. I would have preferred they never actually had to fight (a sequence where he had to flee in order to find a bell to disrupt and save her or something would have been better) but the fact that they do and the game never reckons with it makes it feel like a throw away attempt to, again, present her as a threat for...some reason. It's a cool sequence in its own but bad in the context of the game and its story.

But again Mary Jane isn't done. She surfaces later now in a third person shooter, gunning down symbiotes with her weapon modified into a sonic gun. This, again, serves to radically reduce the game's stakes, turning the symbiotes from a threat to the city to a force that can't stand up to a totally untrained civilian with a jerry-rigged weapon. There's also the glaring plot hole that Miles and Peter find this incredible weapon that can stop the symbiotes without harming the humans inside and then NEVER TELL ANYONE ABOUT IT! THEY MAKE ONE OF THEM AND KEEP IT TO THEMSELVES! You'd think that you'd want to share this scientific discovery with the police and army, who could make short work of the threat (the fact that neither S.H.I.E.L.D. nor the army show up after New York is overrun would be another plot hole if New York didn't have a single reporter with a makeshift gun to keep it safe.)

Finally Mary Jane is recast as a podcaster at the end of the game, a role that at least isn't ridiculous but only serves to drive home that they keep trying to fit her into new roles. I understand that they want to make her more than just Peter's girlfriend, and that's great, but bad stealth, an incongruous boss fight, and a ludicrous shooting sequence are not the way to do this. The gameplay isn't fun, the narrative elements don't work, and who are they really serving? If they had just had her flee from Venom that might not have had quite the feminist message of empowerment (which I support if it's done well) but it would have fit in better. Or if they had gone all in and given her powers of some kind that could have fit as well. I'd be fine with a superpowered Mary Jane that really mixed things up as long as her gameplay sequences were...fun. Or at least not bad. Or at least not MORE mandatory stealth gosh darn it!

I like Insomniac's rendition of Mary Jane as a character and her place in Peter's life, but they're just floundering in trying to shoehorn her into the gameplay. Miles' love interest's sequence isn't particularly fun but at least it doesn't undermine the main villains of the story. If they're going to keep forcing us to play as her they need to figure out how she fits in and maybe focus on one gameplay style (please not stealth) and actually make it work. If Peter's going to do random stupid puzzles then Mary Jane could have hacking sequences or something. I don't know, there are limitless possibilities. A third person shooter shouldn't be one of them.

When Insomniac started its new Spider-Man series in 2018 I remember having mixed feelings about it. I’m a big Insomniac fan and especially love their creativity in weapons and mechanics in games like the Ratchet & Clank Series or Sunset Overdrive. Having them restricted to the more tried and true powers of Spider-Man and constrained by Disney’s overbearing licensing division seemed like it would shackle the things that made their game special. I ended up liking the game, but not loving it like so many did. The story was great, swinging though New York was a joy, but the stealth came in multiple flavors ranging from okay to bad and the combat system felt shallow and grindy by the time I was done with the game, let alone when I had platinumed it. I did end up getting that plat eventually and also playing through the stories of the DLC, though not 100%ing those.

The next game of the series was Miles Morales, and it promised a bit of a change of pace. Not only did it bring in a character who felt fresher than the Peter Parker I’ve been reading and watching media about since childhood but Miles has some different powers and a whole new supporting cast. The shorter and more focused and personal story of that game also helped it, and while I did not platinum it I think I came away liking it a bit more than the first game. It seemed like the series had found a way to move forward despite telling a story that had been interpreted dozens of times before with a style of gameplay that was essentially a modified version of Arkham’s Batman formula.

So now we get to Spider-Man 2, a game that had the potential to take the best parts of Miles Morales and expand them into a new, bigger, city and do more. This was the game that would show whether the Spider-Man series could ascent to being one of my favorites or just remain very good. It got fantastic reviews and the hype was pretty strong. I dove in right away.

Now, having finished and platinumed, the game, I am left again with mixed feelings. Spider-Man 2 is bigger and bolder than the games that came before it, with even stronger storytelling and some real attempts to improve the game play and add more variety, but it is also very much an iterative sequel that doesn’t really address the prior games’ problems and tries to paper over its issues with high production values.

That approach mostly works. The game opens with a truly spectacular sequence that flexes just how great AAA games can look these days. It has strong storytelling, for the most part, with a great cast of actors and lots of dynamic cut scenes that match up well against modern animated series. The city is big and impressive and still a joy to swing through. Most of the side stuff has been beefed up with actual story beats and the random crimes are more varied than ever. You can go to Brooklyn and Queens, though the game doesn’t spend a ton of time there. Everything feels so polished and handmade that it’s hard to get bored, at least until the end when you’re mopping up the last of the side stuff. Swapping between the two Spider-Man is quick and fast travel feels like some kind of technomagic.

And yet the problems also mostly remain. Three games in the stealth still feels perfunctory and at this point I’ve done so many perch takedowns I’d be happy never doing another. For all the pleasures of the story there is still too much time spent playing as not Spider-Man, whether that’s Peter, Miles, or someone else. For a game built on the joy of swinging from buildings, now supplemented with nonsensical web wing gliding, there’s way too many sequences where you just slowly plod around on the ground, talking to people. It’s neat that you get to walk around an amusement park with functional rides and games, and a museum with real life exhibits, but these are nothing more than interactive cutscenes and bog the pace down after awhile. It’s the kind of expensive fancy show off stuff that is impressive but doesn’t really add to the game. In both cases a cut scene would have sufficed.

There’s also the issue of too much repetition with the side activities, which is compounded because now you have to do at least some side stuff in every area if you want to unlock fast travel. One of these activities even has you flying through rings in what is probably an unintentional homage to Superman 64. At least Spider-Man 2 controls well. There are a variety of these side activities and none of them is terrible but for people who have played the previous games (and especially platinumed them) you’re beating up street thugs, again, or doing optional stealth bases, again, and the new abilities don’t do enough to freshen things up. It’s also worth noting that this game has some puzzles like the first game did, and they are yet another pace killer and honestly pretty bad. You can skip them if you want, but putting a bad gameplay goal in isn’t better just because it’s skippable.

I have some other nitpicks. The introduction of all the old villains as being back part of normal society just a few years after they committed truly heinous acts that led to the deaths of at least hundreds seems pretty tone deaf. I think the way that Mister Negative is used in the game is effective from a narrative perspective but others come off almost as parody. I also disliked the podcast updates. I thought Jonah's were a highlight of the first game but they've worn out their welcome and I actively hate the Dannikast and her toxic positivity and utter falseness as a character. I hated her more than any of the villains in the game, perhaps because she's more grounded in reality. Jonah's just a bummer because he's usually a highlight of Spider-Man media.

I would also say that the progression systems are pretty boring at this point. You get a ton of different in game currencies to spend on new moves, stat upgrades, and your special spider-gadgets. None of it is terrible per se, but it's unexciting and grindy. If you like earning City Tokens, Hero Tokens, two varieties of tech tokens, and also XP then boy is this the game for you. It's like a mobile game but without microtransations.

But despite these quibbles the game is still very very good. It looks great, it’s quick and responsive to play, and despite some missteps the story is captivating and the performances all excellent. This is a fantastic linear action game bolted on to a pretty good open world experience and elevated with best in class production values and traversal that makes even commuting enjoyable.

The boss battles are epic and thrilling, while still feeling true to the scale of Spider-Man, which is a bit more restrained than that of most other avengers. The set pieces feel like they have real stakes, with innocents in peril and big scale disasters happening throughout the game’s runtime. And there are enough new wrinkles to the gameplay that it doesn’t feel entirely like a rehash, especially in the bespoke boss battles that introduce new ideas and strategies.

So if it’s a more than competent sequel why do I seem so lukewarm on it? I think it’s because I was hoping for more out of Insomniac. Rocksteady ran into the same issue in the third Batman game they made, and they tried to address it with the addition of the Batmobile, to somewhat mixed results. Arkham Knight may not be everyone’s favorite Arkham game, but it feels distinct from Arkham City in a lot of ways, in part because of the Batmobile and the way it changes movement through the city (and, for better or worse, combat.)

Spider-Man 2’s changes just don’t do enough to alter the core loop. It’s neat when Miles or Peter (or someone else) swoops in to help you clear out some thugs and then you can do the Spider-Man pointing pose with him, but otherwise it’s just swapping between two similar move sets and some different dialog prompts. It doesn’t help that they took out the suit powers from the first game, though there remain a truly ludicrous number of Spider-Suits you can buy for in game currency. They just don’t come with any special attacks attached.

So you’re left with a series that in the end has the same core problem that each game does. Too much repetition and open world stuff. Not quite enough depth or evolution in gameplay to carry it. Sky high production values layered over a game core that is solid but maybe not quite solid enough to sustain three whole games in five years.

I really liked Spider-Man 2 but if Spider-Man 3 (or the next interstitial Miles Morales type game) comes out and is basically the same I’m not sure I’ll feel as warmly towards it. I’m ready for a significant change. Insomniac is talking about a Venom game, and that could be a real change of pace, with a new suite of powers and maybe a fresher, more brutal, tone. There are other things that they could do as well, though many of them might cut across the grain of the Spider-Man character. It’s also worth noting that this game was a massive sales success, so I’m not sure there’s a lot of pressure to rock the boat at this point. I’m also moderately worried about the Wolverine game. If it has the same Arkham derived gameplay even the addition of blood and a somewhat different power suite won’t keep it from feeling similar. And I really hope we aren’t stuck doing shallow stealth as Logan. Or sheathing our claws to walk around a museum politely without breaking anything.

With great power comes great responsibility. A corollary is that with great success comes great opportunity. Insomniac has turned the Spider-Man series into a genuine phenomenon and a pillar of PlayStation. It has also produced three really good games. But there’s the opportunity to do more with the franchise, to maybe not spend quite so much time creating random one off gameplay segments that are conceptually neat but pretty boring and instead doing more to make the systems interesting and vary up the moment to moment gameplay more than just the slight shift from swinging to gliding. Of course with great success can also come great complacency and the incentive to stay a course that is providing spectacular returns. Perhaps an interstitial game or DLC would be a better place to introduce and explore some more variation. Or perhaps we’ll just get another big bombastic Spider-Man game with a great story and a lot of money up there on the screen. That wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world but it wouldn’t be the best either.