The Pathless is a game with an interesting pedigree. Developed by Giant Squid, a company formed by former employees of thatgamecompany (makers of Journey) and previously responsible for 2016’s Abzu. The Pathless was also a touted PS5 launch semi-exclusive, also launching on PC and mobile (and PS4 like a lot of 9^th gen titles) but no other console at the time. It later made its way to Xbox and Switch, but for a time it was seen as a strong second-tier PlayStation console exclusive for the new generation.

Obviously as a game that can run comfortably on IOS and Switch the Pathless was not pushing the PS5’s technical capabilities but it had a reputation for great art direction, with a look reminiscent of both Journey and Abzu, and spectacular draw distances on the more powerful machines it was on. It also garnered a respectable 77 on Metacritic, driven by certain media advocates who pushed it as a must play experience and a standout launch title. I did not get a PS5 until a couple months after launch, and I was much more strongly drawn to titles like Astro’s Playroom and Bugsnax when I did, but I picked The Pathless up earlier this year and played through it to the “bad ending” roll of the credits.

The Pathless has a lot in common with Abzu and Journey but also draws heavily on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. You play a young girl with a bow and an eagle companion exploring a set of lush mountain plateaus after a great calamity. You are in pursuit of “The Pathfinder,” a powerful villain who, with his followers has attacked and slain the people and corrupted the animal gods of the realm in a zealous religious devotion to establishing a “path” for everyone to follow. The areas you explore are still teeming with plant and animal life, but with signs of corruption, and the buildings are all dilapidated and strewn with corpses, many of whom have left behind little spheres of light containing their final thoughts or memories for you to read. The game’s story is quite brutal and filled with tales of violence, betrayal, and despair, even though you don’t see any of it.

The actual gameplay mostly involves running around from place to place solving very simple puzzles to unlock collectables. Each of the four main areas has the same pattern where you have to find a certain number of lightstones in order to confront and calm the rampaging corrupted god of the area and restore peace to the area. This happens through collecting the lightstones and installing them in towers but also through encountering the god in forced stealth areas where you get separated from your eagle and have to stealth back to it so it can use its power to clear a patch of corruption. You can “die” during these sequences, which results in you losing a bit of the game’s currency (which you collect to level up ‘flaps,’ which you use to gain altitude while gliding) and those are the only parts of the game where you can be killed. Finally you confront each boss in an actual boss battle (which you can’t really die during, though you can be forced to start a phase over) which is an epic multiphased encounter where you shoot weak spots with your bow and use your eagle to purify the boss until it is pacified and friendly.

These boss encounters, somewhat mirroring Breath of the Wild’s divine beasts (quite literally in that you are fighting giant animal gods) are the only combat in the game. Otherwise your time is spent running, gliding, hitting or shooting switches, and doing other puzzle stuff. The puzzles themselves are adequate, but barely. There are a few different types but they mostly involve using spirit vision to find a false wall, shooting flames with your bow to light other fires, finding weights to put on switches, moving deflective mirrors around to make trick shots, or some combination of the above. It’s all stuff we’ve seen before and reminded me of the environmental puzzles in Immortals: Fenyx Rising, another game from the same time period that drew heavily on Breath of the Wild but one where the focus was on combat, humorous narration, character development, and much more complex independent puzzle shrines, none of which are part of The Pathless.

What is part of The Pathless is a lot of running around and gliding. Your nameless character can jog pretty slowly at her base speed but she can boost to a fast run using a spirit bar. This bar is recharged by shooting floating “talismans” that are all over the place floating in mid air. They can also be shot while gliding to give a burst of speed and height without using one of your “flaps.” Aiming in The Pathless is automatic but you need to time how long you hold and release your shot to actually hit something, and if you can charge the shot halfway you get a “skillshot” that provides even stronger benefits. So the basic locomotion in The Pathless involves running or gliding and constantly shooting Talismans to increase speed or height. It makes for a very active traversal system and when you’re doing well you move so fast and nimbly that It just “feels” extremely good.

When I played The Pathless in February I liked it fine and understood why it had its advocates but it didn’t click with me the way that Abzu and Journey did. I’m not much of a stealth guy, and the stealth sections in this game are not particularly well done, mostly involving staying still while giant vision cones sweep across the area. The boss fights had some spectacle to them and weren’t bad, but the lack of any real stakes robbed them of any sense of tension and I have never been the biggest fan of loud, fiery, demonic bosses, especially in a game that is mostly pretty chill. The puzzles ranged from extremely simple to frustrating and were not very satisfying. The traversal felt good, especially after unlocking the various upgrades you get over the course of the game, but the things you were doing were just okay. I finished the game, was glad to have experienced it, and moved on.

Then last week I went back to it. I was looking for a chill game to relax with and knew I had some more trophies to unlock and things to collect in the open world post game. I thought I’d go back, mess around a bit, and put it down again, but something unexpected happened. It sucked me in, deeper than the first time, and I quickly finished everything and got the platinum. It is rare for me to want to play a story-based game after I’ve finished the main narrative, and even rarer for me to see it through and do everything (though you don’t literally have to find everything to get the plat), especially months after completing my main playthrough.

I think that my postgame playthrough of the Pathless really showed how the “gaminess” that the developers decided to put in took away from the game’s strengths. Like Abzu and to some degree Journey the Pathless is a game that shines in its big open environments and just the feeling of going through the world. Whether floating over a massive canyon gliding towards a structure or running along the ground hitting Talismans and leaping from place to place, the journey is much more satisfying than the pretty boring things that you do when you get there. During my initial playthrough I was focused on collecting currency for flaps and completing challenges to advance the story, but when I went bac I was able to just wander around, completing objectives in a more leisurely manner that allowed me to really enjoy that movement and the game’s beauty and design. Not having to deal with the stealth or boss fights made the game’s flow much better and allowed me to get into a more zen-like relaxed state. It turned the game from a somewhat limited BOTW clone into more of an exploration experience with a few minor puzzles to break things up and give the traveling some destination. The game is littered with little puzzles for hidden lanterns (that give you flap currency) and chests (also currency, but more) so the world doesn’t feel empty, just enjoyably sparse.

I think traversal is often an underbaked mechanic in games. A lot of games are so focused on combat or story that they fail to make the experience of just moving in the game’s space engaging or enjoyable. This is something the Mario games have always focused on, from the meticulous acceleration curve in the original Super Mario Bros., to the various F.L.U.D. moves in Sunshine to the cap toss and dive in Odyssey, Mario’s designers have always known that making it fun just to run around is important, and that’s part of what makes those games so magical. Even when you’re not doing anything “important” you’re still having fun. The Pathless captures some of that in its own way, though with more of a sense of scale and momentum and fewer nimble acrobatics. The use of the talismans to give you something to do while running makes a huge difference in turning the empty potentially boring space into a place for actual gameplay.

The Pathless shows that while gameplay is king for most games, it can come in different forms. The gamiest parts of The Pathless are its most mediocre, while the empty space of the world as you explore is where its at its most free. Too many games make moving in their worlds a chore or just something to get through to find the fun parts, which is a real issue in many open world games where the open world becomes boring and exhausting and weakens the game instead of strengthening it. The Pathless shows that if you get that traversal “empty” part right then even if the rest of the game is weaker it can still be a worthwhile experience overall.

SCHLOCKTOBER ’23:This month I am playing some games with horror elements and blogging about them to determine whether they’re nasty tricks or delectable treats.

Okage: Shadow King is a game I’ve known about since it released in the US in 2001. I remember seeing reviews for it online and in magazines and I believe I even picked up a real PS2 copy at some point when I found it in a bargain bin, though I never got around to playing it. I then picked up a digital copy on PS4 for $7 in 2016. Every October since I have thought about whether this would be the year I played Okage. The reason I thought that in October was that I was convinced that it would be a good spooky season game. The premise (boy becomes enslaved by an evil king who possesses his shadow) sounded spooky. The soundtrack, which I’d heard snippets from, had spooky tracks on it. The cover most certainly looked spooky, like something lifted from a rejected poster for The Nightmare Before Christmas. I didn’t think it would be a scary game and I knew it was comedic but I thought it would have spooky themes, the same as something like Medievil, a game that is also comedic and not scary but is full of skeletons and ghosts and shadow demons that go bump in the night.

This is why I decided to play Okage as part of my Schlocktober series and it was only once I was at least 5 hours in and pretty much committed that I realized that Okage is not a spooky game at all, it’s just a schlocky comedy game from the early PS2 era.

In Okage you play a boy in a small village with a vaguely medieval level of technology but a modern social structure and bureaucracy. Your father, who has an interest in antiquities, brings home a strange bottle one day and the family opens it, unleashing a malevolent evil king who claims to be the reincarnation of the great evil king Gohma and is bent on restoring his rightful power and conquering the world. Unfortunately he is a shadow of his former self, both figuratively and literally, so he needs to recover his power before he can conquer the world. His name is Stan.

Stan immediately gets into shenanigans and puts your sister under the curse of pig latin. Because she’s worried about her romantic prospects with her cursed speech the family begs Stan to undo the curse and through a series of negotiations it is agreed that you will become his slave in exchange for his curing her. Everyone is quite cheerful about this except for you, and you don’t really get a say. This is a recurrent theme in Okage, which is one of relatively few JRPGs where you get to pick dialogue choices for your character, which in this case pretty much all result in everyone ignoring what you say and doing what they already wanted to do. So your character becomes Stan’s slave, Stan becomes your sentient shadow, and the two of you set off to destroy a bunch of rival Evil Kings who are popping up around the land and whose power Stan seeks to make his own.

If there’s one truly positive aspect to Okage it would have to be the characters and writing. Okage is mostly not a hilarious game, but it is consistently amusing, with wacky characters unlike almost any in games that have come to the West. Stan prides himself on being evil, but he’s mostly just a rude jerk and other characters find him hilarious, much to his chagrin. The only person who truly dislikes him is Rosalyn, the second person to join your party, who fashions herself as a great hero, and who constantly bickers with Stan throughout the adventure. He uses a lot of misogynistic language about her appearance but a lot of it is extremely off-beat and juvenile, using what appear to be direct translations from Japanese that come off as more goofy than offensive. Stan’s spluttering rage that people don’t fear and obey him is a real highlight.

But it’s not just the main characters in Okage who are charming. Almost every random NPC has something at least interesting if not downright funny to say and none of them are bland and boring like so many RPG NPCs. Though a few of them will actually provide hints or advice, most just rattle on about their own lives, complaining about whatever mundane issues they’re dealing with or rambling on about how the train station needs to be cleaned. Sometimes they ramble on a bit too long for my tastes, but mostly I found them amusing and they gave the world a lot more character than if they’d just provided lore dumps. There’s something strangely immersive about coming across a guy who has been fired from a research center and complains that nothing he’s tried since has worked out and he feels cursed. He’s not there to explain the rules of the world or tell you where to go next, he’s just living his sad sack life and complaining about it.

Speaking of complaining, that’s what I’m going to do about most of the rest of the game. The only other aspect of Okage that I’d call legitimately good is the music, which is not top tier RPG stuff but is above average, even in a genre known for its good music. Not every track is a winner but a lot of it is offbeat and very enjoyable.

Graphically Okage is below average even for an early PS2 title, though not abysmal. It has that “originally made for PS1 and then revamped for PS2” look that a lot of the earlier games did, and that was, in fact, its development cycle. Stan himself is a memorable creation, a grinning evil shadow who looms over the player character with leering yellow eyes. Everything else is generic JRPG, and while some of the towns have decent art direction the adventure fields and dungeons are as bare bones as possible. The fields are bland open areas with a few notable features like rivers and bridges but mostly just flat ugly ground. The dungeons are, with one exception, just a series of flat, rectangular, floors.

Gameplay wise each dungeon has a gimmick of some sort, such as entering glowing green switches to raise platforms to allow you to proceed, or having to pass through certain illusory walls. In every dungeon your ultimate goal is to defeat four magical urns (yes, urns!) per floor until you reach the boss. These urn battles vary slightly from dungeon to dungeon but they’re all basically the same, none of them are challenging, and there are dozens of them across the game’s 25ish hours. Urns are conceptually boring as enemies but that wouldn’t matter so much if the combat was good. It’s not. It’s the worst part of the game, which is not great for an RPG.

Okage’s combat seems, on the surface, like very standard JRPG fare. You have 3 active party members, pretty standard commands like attack, defend, use items etc… The game works on a Final Fantasy-like active time battle system where each of your characters has an action bar that charges over time and when it is fully charged you get to take a turn. There’s no visible time bar for enemies but they seem to have the same mechanics, and there are some abilities that can give you or your foes haste or slow effects. So far, pretty normal.

There are two major wrinkles that really hurt Okage’s combat. The first is that while there can be up to 10 enemies in the field at once there are a maximum of 3 “groups” of enemies. That means that you get a bunch of enemies (each of the same type since only enemies of the same kind can group together) lumped together as a group, and you can only target these groups, not individuals, but damage is tracked on an individual basis. This can be very frustrating, especially in boss fights. Almost every boss has a bunch of minions, and the winning strategy is to knock out the minions first and then take down the boss. However the minions are all grouped together so you can only attack the group and your characters will randomly select an individual enemy to attack, making it kind of a crapshoot as to whether you can actually winnow the numbers. There are a few attacks that target an entire group, but mana is pretty limited and the group attacks don’t do a lot of damage anyway.

The group issue is annoying but not nearly as annoying as the second major issue, which is inconsistent timing. I mentioned that this is an active time battle system, so turn order can very a little, which is fine. What’s not fine is the seemingly random gap between when you enter a command and when it actually gets executed. Sometimes your character will immediately attack or cast a shield spell or whatever and sometimes a bunch of enemies and even your own characters for whom you entered commands later will act before she does. This can be a massive issue when it comes to healing. This is a JRPG where some enemies can do massive damage, able to take down your characters in 2 or 3 hits. That’s a legitimate design decision, but it’s made much less legitimate when enemies can sometimes sneak in multiple hits between when you enter a heal command and when it actually triggers. In practice it means you have to heal much earlier than you’d think because of this seemingly random delay, and sometimes redundantly heal just to keep your characters from going down. This is especially bad because, while your companions can be revived, if the main character goes down it’s a game over, reload from save. There were multiple times when my guy would take a hit, I would queue in a heal, and then the same enemies who had previously attacked would come back and smack me, killing me and ending my game. This is extremely frustrating. Most of the time enemies will spread out their attacks across your characters and you can sort of muddle through by healing consistently, but those times when the enemies would just decide to all attack my main guy and the heals just wouldn’t go off were extremely frustrating.

There are a bunch of other issues with the combat. For example many of your best skills are assigned to your main character. He’s your primary healer, which is frustrating because he’s also the guy you absolutely have to keep alive. He has a “provoke” skill that causes enemies to attack him instead of others, which is baffling because, again, if he goes down you get an instant game over, and it’s not like he’s your tankiest character anyway. Skills can require either mana or HP to cast, and he has some devastating attacks that hit every enemy but that drain an enormous amount of HP and so can never actually be used since you may not be able to heal him before he gets attacked after spending half his hp to cast. Like in many early JRPGs spells and special attacks have long and annoying animations that can slow combat to a crawl when enemies spam them. Offensive special moves can do a little extra damage when you follow the elemental system (only explained in the manual as far as I can tell, so I didn’t understand it until the game was almost over) but generally enemies are tanky and take forever to dispatch. The only glue holding the system together is that healing items are cheap so even though you have very little mana you can max out your inventory and keep spamming “big nuts” (this game’s version of potions) and survive. It’s a system that’s sometimes functional, sometimes broken, and never fun or empowering except on those rare occasions when you wipe a whole group out with one spell.

The progression and leveling system fares a little better even if it’s not exciting. You level every 1000 experience points, but you get fewer EXP from enemies who are weaker than you so it’s a pretty standard EXP curve in the end. Every level you gain some hp and possibly some attack or defense points or even a point of mana (much rarer than you’ think; you just do not get a lot of mana in this game and something like a revive spell can cost 1/4^th of your supply, which is pooled.) Sometimes you’ll get a new skill. It’s fine for what it is but it’s very incremental and you never really feel the effects of a single level. The same is true for equipment, which tends to give a few points of attack or defend over the last iteration. It works but it’s not exciting.

The parts of Okage where you’re talking to people and following the bizarre story and charming characters are consistently entertaining, even if there are a few frustrating parts where it’s unclear what you’re supposed to do. The parts of Okage where you’re out exploring the world or doing dungeons are often a slog, except when you’re being driven by a desire to progress the plot or see the next character interaction. There are no random battles in Okage but instead ghosts will appear in the world and if they touch you a fight starts (once you’re in combat you mostly fight non-ghost enemies.) They can be avoided for awhile but as you take longer more and more appear and since they can pass through walls and box you into corners you will fight quite a bit (though weirdly interacting with any object in the world, like opening a chest or trying to open a locked door, despawns them all.) This is especially frustrating in two late game areas that are literal mazes and very annoying with the crappy camera.

The final dungeon, one of these mazes, is one of the worst dungeons I have ever played, with obstructive walls that make it hard to see anything and swing so wildly they gave me a hint of motion sickness and ghosts that ambush you through walls. There’s also a special enemy who pops up randomly here called the bad poetry golem, who is not only tough but has a move called snatch 100000 where he steals 100000 “sukel” (the game’s currency) and runs away. Using silence on him won’t stop this, you just have to hope you can kill him before he does it, which may be literally impossible because it’s not like there’s a timer or countdown. If it does happen you basically have to revert to a save because that represents the cash from at least 20 battles, which can easily take 3-5 minutes each, meaning that he’s stealing an hour’s worth of cash. Your best strategy is just to flee from combat as soon as he pops up. Fun. Good game design. Much enjoyment.

To add insult to injury after I spent like 2 hours wandering around this horrible maze dungeon the final boss himself was one of the easiest in the game and poses no threat whatsoever as long as you keep spamming those big nuts.

I played Okage because its cover and plot synopsis made it seem like a spooky game, which it definitely is not. Instead it’s a comedy/slice of life JRPG. It was clearly made on a modest budget based on the limited number of areas (there are five towns and four exploration zones) and recycled assets like all the stupid urns. It also feels like there are parts of the game that were cut during development; you get your last party member very near the end and he has basically no character development or purpose in the game whatsoever beyond his boring skillset, as far as I can tell. The combat is rough, the dungeons either frustrating (there’s one dungeon that causes like half of players to abandon the game because it’s so convoluted, based on trophy data) or stupidly simple, and the combat is boring with numerous frustration spikes.

Despite all this I kind of liked Okage, and it comes down to those characters and that writing. The direct translation of the Japanese is very clunky and there are typos and errors but it makes the game stand out as unique in a world where JRPGs can often feel like cookie cutter clones. That laid off research center worker whining about his bad luck is memorable to me in a way that so many other characters aren’t. Stan bickering with Rosalyn and calling her names was genuinely entertaining. I was constantly taking screenshots of good lines or moments. By the time the game ended I was more than ready to wrap things up, but at least it’s 25 hours and not 40. For me the charm was enough to carry my interest through to the end.

Okage is objectively the worst JRPG I have ever finished. To be fair I’ve probably finished less than 2 dozen JRPGs in my life and it’s not the worst I’ve ever started, but it lacks the mechanical or production qualities that make these games stand out. The story itself is nothing special, but the charming characters and dialog are enough to redeem it. I can’t say that I recommend Okage, but I can say that I have affection for it. It may have tricked me by appearing to be spooky, but at the end of the day it was kind of a treat.

Schlocktober Rating: Novelty Schlock

Okage is like those jelly beans where half of them are delicious flavors like green apple or black cherry and half are disgusting flavors like boogers or licorice. Part of the experience is pleasant, part of it is unpleasant, but the strangeness of the experience makes it an interesting novelty. You wouldn’t want every bag of jellybeans to be like that, but if you only try it once it’s a fun time.

Astrosmash is out on Steam, Xbox, and Switch. This is not the first game announced as an Amico exclusive and subsequently released on other platforms because those platforms are real and someone wanted to recoup some of the development costs. It was preceded by Dynablaster and Shark! Shark!, neither of which really appealed to me, but I enjoy vertical shooters and I’ve even played the original Astrosmash on Evercade and thought that was pretty good. I really wanted to get a chance to experience a piece of Amico software and see the what it was like for myself.

Then I saw footage of what it’s actually like and that desire disappeared.

Astrosmash 2023 is not a finished game. It doesn’t even have a pause feature. It is rough around the edges, with shots that are fired from the center of your ship but travel slow enough that you can see the ship move in relation to them before they leave the gun barrel, and the asteroid explosion effect looking like a shower of packing peanuts. It lacks the previously announced endless survival mode that would have somewhat replicated the gameplay of the 1981 original.

Instead you get 10 levels of uninspired horizontal shooting with powerups and what appeared to be a cursory attempt at bosses, some pretty basic multiplayer (online may or may not work depending on different reports), and that’s it. I’ve compared Amico games to early XBLA titles and this game would fit in perfectly in like 2007, except that most XBLA titles had more content. Popcap’s Heavy Weapon, a very comparable game, has 19 levels with a unique boss at the end of each of them. Intellivision’s apparent belief that 10 is the perfect number of levels for any game seems out of touch with the expectations of modern gamers. Why not 4? 4 was enough for Donkey Kong. Who needs more than 4?

But of course it’s not that Intellivision and its designers thought that 10 was the right number of levels, they just didn’t bother budgeting enough money to make more. It’s not a matter of a tightly designed replayable experience, it’s just a matter of the minimum number they thought they could get away with, even if it results in a campaign focused game with a 45 minute long campaign.

I’ve been surprised by my reaction to Astrosmash. It’s not like I expected it to be good or anything, but the fact that it’s so bare bones and so unfinished makes it feel grimy and sleazy. It was one thing to follow the Amico as a hater when it felt like a very bad idea that people were trying their best to execute even though that best wasn’t very good, and there has been a clear element of scam around the project almost from the beginning, but the more these games come out and the clearer it is that no serious attempt was ever made. Astrosmash was one of the earliest games announced, they had years to work on it, it was supposed to be a core “pack in” game, BBG, the publisher, had time to polish it up, and they still released this. This.

Nothing was ever ready, nothing was going to be finished, and it doesn’t seem like anyone was working to put things together in a final, salable, condition. The marketing for pre-orders and investment constantly pushed the idea that the system was more or less ready and just needed some extra money to polish things up and, most importantly, pay for manufacturing, but it’s become clear that was never the case.

It is impossible to really talk about the Amico without talking about the gang of promoters and shills that hung around it, constantly fluffing the egos of the people who worked at Intellivision and attacking anyone who doubted the viability or future of this little console that couldn’t. I try to avoid taking pot shots at them because they are a group of mostly pathetic and relatively harmless oddballs who attached themselves to the project for various reasons ranging from wanting attention to personal vendettas to Tommy Tallarico’s mini cult of personality. If a 60 year old man wants to brand himself as “The Amico Kid” that’s very weird but it doesn’t hurt anybody.

But something that always bothered me was their insistent proclamations that they were waiting with bated breath for games like Shark! Shark! And Astrosmash. Why? There are dozens of games just like these already available on various platforms. In some cases like with Rigid Force Redux almost the exact same game was already out, yet they would claim to be excited about it, like someone saying they really really want a PlayStation 5 Pro to be announced so they can finally play God of War III.

As silly as they were and as weird as their statements seemed…they supported the system and a lot of them gave money. Substantial amounts of money. Sometimes thousands of dollars. And this is what they got in return (or didn’t get because they’d have to buy it separately) A slapped together, cheap looking, unfinished game.

The shills deserved better. At the very least they deserved Intellivision making at least one game that if not special would at least be satisfying. They deserved an endless survival mode and shots that seem to come out of the ship’s gun. They deserved some kind of effort and they didn’t get it.

And that just drains my enthusiasm for even trying this thing. Maybe if it gets to $3 or whatever eventually I’ll pick it up the same way you might pop a quarter in an arcade machine out of curiosity, but my Amico fascination has finally turned to disgust, and Astrosmash is what did it. The whole enterprise is just grimy and gross, and the people behind it didn’t care about the games. I probably cared more about the games and I never even looked into how to put in a pre-order.

I love weird little cul-de-sacs in video game history. I can watch endless videos about the 3DO and the 32X. The difference (besides the fact that those existed) is that those systems were about selling games and the people behind them tried. Amico was never really about the games, and the sad state of Astrosmash makes that very clear.

For awhile there was discussion about how bad licensed games sort of died off or at least moved to mobile during the 7th generation, and some people said they even missed them. Now of course licensed games never went away entirely, but they mostly seemed to be higher budget and more ambitious affairs, like the Batman Arkham games or Beatles Rockband. And of course there were still occasional THQ style trash games, just not at the volume there used to be.

Well that volume seems to have returned. I started noticing it a few years ago, with games like the Hotel Transylvania titles and that Nickelodeon Kart Racer game, but it's been picking up steam, to the point where this week there were three licensed releases, only one of which (Transformers) looks like it could be any good at all.

The thing is, not only do these games look bad but they look unbelievably cheap. Say what you want about PS1 era licensed games like A Bug's Life or The Grinch, but they generally attempted to match the style and production values of the time, with varying degrees of success. These all look like cheap PS3 games, at best, and appear to have PS1 era game play. They aren't interesting in the way some of those older games were, they just seem cheap, except they cost $30-40. And they're far from alone. There's that King Kong game coming out soon, and more Paw Patrol games than you can shake a stick at. There have been a couple Fast & Furious cash grabs. The list goes on.

I don't know who is buying these. Kids I guess? Grandma's? But while I do have nostalgia for some of the licensed games of my youth, those were often at least interesting even if they were bad. They often attempted something but didn't have the budget or skill to achieve it. These seem like they're probably a lot less broken but also a lot less interesting. I played the Ice Age 3D platformer from 2019, and that one was mildly interesting just because of its bonkers story and very odd aesthetic choices, but I also bought the first Nickelodeon Kart Racer for $4, and that one is pretty competent from a technical perspective but totally soulless. I think they're doing a 4th one soon, as well as a second version of the Smash Clone.

Game Mill and a few other companies are churning this stuff out, but unlike THQ they've learned the lesson from mobile of "play it safe, don't do anything ambitious, just hit the bare minimum and shove it out to shelves." It feels sad in a way. When I was a kid we all had our licensed games that we'd defend for whatever reason even if a lot of them were bad, just because they did something weird or interesting. Cool Spot. The Cheetos games. Pepsi Man. None of these were great but they weren't much worse than other bad games. I remember ind of liking Avoid the Noid. And there's a whole cottage industry of Youtubers and other video creators dragging this stuff out of obscurity to gawk at it.

I feel like the modern versions won't get nearly as much attention and the kids who receive it will barely remember it. Even as a notable weirdo who played Balan Wonderworld I can't bring myself to have more than a passing interest when it gets really really cheap.

I am, however, kind of curious about the economics and business model here. I'm interested in how a lot of companies make money in the vast glut of games we have these days. Backwards compatibility is fantastic but it also means that all the platforms have many thousands of games available and nobody has played them all. Given 10 years or more of games at our fingertips who is choosing to play that Survivor game?

SCHLOCKTOBER ’23: This month I am playing some games with horror elements and blogging about them to determine whether they’re nasty tricks or delectable treats.

Oh boy, I’m going to get staked through the heart for this one.

Growing up I was never a Castlevania kid. I didn’t like horror much to begin with, and while I had an NES as a child I was primarily a PC gamer. I did have a copy of Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, and I had the same experience with that game as anyone else who didn’t have a guide, which is that it looked great, sounded great, and was fun to play except for the stupid invisible trap bullshit, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of where to go after awhile. This was an NES game where NPCs actually lied to you and the obscure and stupid stuff you had to do to advance seems specifically made to be undiscoverable to a seven-year-old and his dad who was helping him play. Simon’s Quest enchanted me with its looks, music, and ideas and then frustrated me beyond comprehension. I also had one of the Castlevania Game Boy games, I think the first one, and that was okay for a Game Boy game, but I was never a fan of the little pea soup screened handheld and I don’t remember much about that game except the very basics.

I did play Castlevania 1 and 3 at friends houses or as rentals at the time too. Castlevania 1 didn’t leave much of an impression on me. After the splendors of Simon’s Quest it just seemed kind of outdated and very cheap and difficult. Castlevania 3 also felt cheap and difficult but it is such a spectacular audio visual achievement (and more refined in its controls) that I always liked it anyway.

We’re not talking about Castlevania 3 here though, we’re talking about the first one. The OG. And even rampantly cheating via save states (I was playing on the Xbox version of the Castlevania Anniversay Collection Konami put out digitally in 2019, and unlike the Castlevania Advance Collection they put out in 2021 the earlier collection only has one save slot per game and no rewind, which is annoying) I found it unsatisfying and frustrating.

The basic outline of Castlevania should be familiar to all gamers now. It’s an action adventure platformer where you take Simon Belmont through Dracula’s castle, jumping, whipping, and dagger/holy water/cross/axing your way to take on the big guy himself. It is one of the first iconic horror games, featuring zombies, skeletons, and mummies instead of Goombas and Koopas. Its controls were famously stiff and deliberate compared to other games of the time.

Castlevania 1 deserves a lot of credit for being incredibly well designed for an early NES game. Originally a Famicom Disk System game it has an astonishing soundtrack, atmospheric and varied graphics as you progress through the castle, classic horror movie bosses, and a cohesion and sense of place that was very rare in games back then. As great as something like Super Mario Bros. is it just feels like a series of (very well designed) levels. Castlevania uses changes in music, tile set, and level design , combined with a map that pops up as you defeat bosses showing your progress through the castle, to really make it feel like an epic quest to clear a haunted castle and defeat the vampire king himself. To think that this came out just 1 generation after Adventure, with its maze of lines and duck-like dragons really shows the incredible evolution of gaming during the 1980s. By the end of the decade we’d have the Genesis.

But while I did play this game in the 1980s it is not the 1980s now, and there are literally hundreds of games that have been influenced by this game and built upon its legacy, including dozens of direct sequels. Taken on its own merits Castlevania is clunky and frustrating. The stiffness of Castlevania’s controls is legendary. Comparison is often made to Mega Man with his tight responsiveness and, importantly, air control. Simon Belmont, by comparison, is much more deliberate. He’s slower, he has to commit to his jumps (and his stair climbing, since he cannot jump off a staircase) and his whip has a few frames of windup, which can make timing strikes against some of the faster enemies or projectiles pretty tricky. It is worth noting that defending yourself by whipping enemy projectiles was not entirely new, but pretty unusual at that point and that kind of complexity represented part of a real evolution in game design.

The slower, stiffer, controls would be fine if not for the combination of these fast enemies and a lot of bottomless pits. Castlevania’s medusa heads and flea men are infamous because their vertical movement make them hard to target and for the flea men they move so quickly that you really only get one chance to hit them before they get to you. And when they do score a hit not only do you lose some health, but you get knocked back, often into a pit, at least in later levels. This is where Castlevania earns its reputation for frustration. You can play very well, carefully navigating past the various obstacles and taking the tougher enemies out without getting hit, and then an eagle will fly by and drop a hunchback on you sending you into a pit and back to the beginning of the stage. Fantastic.

Honestly by early NES standards it’s not particularly punishing. There’s a continue feature, full health restore after every boss, and the infamous wall chicken that lets you refill some health mid stage. This is a game that I could probably learn to beat legitimately if I put in the time, though some of the bosses are pretty brutal in their own right. Castlevania is not a game that hates you (Simon’s whip gets downgraded when he dies but you’ll get the two upgrades back within like a minute, making the whole feature kind of silly) but it’s a game that demands a lot of precision and a fair amount of luck. For the mid 1980s it’s a masterpiece, but it feels like something of a first draft of the games that were to come, especially Castlevania III (and then the various 16-bit Castlevanias.)

My personal experience with the Castlevania franchise really took off with the release of Symphony of the Night, which I bought on the strength of its incredible reviews and loved (though I have never finished the inverted castle.) I also played some of the Gameboy Advance and DS games, as well as the Lords of Shadow series. I always felt that never finishing the NES Castlevanias was a bit of a blindspot in my gaming history, though I’ve seen plenty of footage through Vinnyvania and other sources. I’m glad that I’ve sort of experienced the first game now (I did play a little bit without save scumming too) and it wasn’t an awful experience but it also wasn’t as enjoyable as Mega Man 1 and 2, which I also played this year. And I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as Circle of the Moon, which I finished in April.

Castlevania was a revolutionary game in its time and it’s not fair to call it bad. If nothing else the music still holds up, and has been remixed so many times it is embedded into the fabric not just of the series but gaming itself. But as someone who can still enjoy NES games I just didn’t find this one very satisfying, and I didn’t really like it as a kid either. I will just always prefer SOTN style Castlevania to the classic style, and I’m okay with that. I’m still impressed with how well designed the game is though. Simon had to walk so Alucard could backdash.

Schlocktober Rating: Expired Schlock

Castlevania is like an old timey gourmet chocolate bar that has gone stale and expired in the drawer. It was once a top shelf treat but at this point it's all chalky and flavorless. It won't kill you to eat it but you won't get much enjoyment either.

SCHLOCKTOBER ’23: This month I am playing some games with horror elements and blogging about them to determine whether they’re nasty tricks or delectable treats.

Medievil is a weird remake of a second tier PS1 game from 1998. I remember when that original Medievil came out, it was lauded for its graphics, soundtrack, and humor but got middling marks on gameplay because of loose and sloppy control and a frustrating camera. I played the demo and came away with the same impression. Its lovable protagonist, Sir Daniel Fortesque, became something of a second tier Sony mascot for awhile, making cameo appearances in various games, and there was a sequel on PS1 and a semi remake on PSP but as a whole the Medievil franchise remained part of the PS1 era of fondly remembered but dead franchises.

Then, in 2019, during a wave of PS1 remakes including the Crash and Spyro trilogies, Sony released a full remake of the first Medievil with detailed PS4 graphics and lots of gorgeous cinematics and other modern bells and whistles. Unlike many of the remakes Medievil was released as a single game, though for a budget price of $30. It seemed likely that if the game did well they would also remake the second, the way they did with Loco Roco, and maybe even continue the series. Those games never happened, which gives you a hint about how successful this remake was.

I was excited about this release and actually pre-ordered it. As I said I’d only ever played the demo of the original but it had style for days and I loved the idea of a modern remake that cleaned up the controls a little bit and cranked up the graphics and animations to modern standards while retaining the charm that made the original memorable. It took me 4 years to actually finish it, despite a number of attempts over the years. That gives you a hint as to how I felt about it.

Medievil tells the story of Daniel Fortesque, a long dead knight who is revered as the hero who saved the kingdom of Gallowmere from the evil sorcerer Zarok. The only problem is that Fortesque was not a hero at all, he was a loser, and only contributed to the kingdom’s salvation by accident. Now Zaroz is back and Sir Dan’s skeleton has been re-animated to save Gallowmere once more.

The remake of Medievil is an aesthetic triumph. A lot of the sounds and dialog have been recycled from the original game (CD audio has held up astonishingly well for the last 25 years) but there have been some changes in certain places. The graphics are totally redone and manage to capture the otherworldly sensibility that PS1 games did so well while bringing the level of detail up to modern standards, though the game is not pushing the power of the PS4 in any meaningful way. Gallowmere is both spooky and humorously cartoony at the same time, full of crumbling crypts and haunted asylums but also goofy enemies and sassy gargoyles. It’s a fun horror comedy vibe, expertly updated from the original.

Unfortunately what wasn’t updated nearly as much is the gameplay. This is not a case where the new graphics are running over the old game (like with the Halo remakes) and there are some substantial changes, including certain bosses having new attacks and a tweak to how things work. However there was a clear attempt to make the game as faithful to the original as they could, and that means that it has all the issues of a mediocre PlayStation game from over two decades ago. Control is loose and unsatisfying, with none of Sir Dan’s actions having any real weight and his main form of attack being running around flailing with a weapon, hopefully maintaining enough space between you and the enemy that they take damage and you don’t. It works okay, but it’s profoundly unsatisfying, with zero impact, and if you’re not careful you can find your health drained quickly. There are also projectile weapons, but ammo is rare to find and expensive to buy with the game’s stingily handed out gold so they’re bet used situationally. The one exception is the axe, which can be used to both slash and throw (the weapons have an alternate attack mode), and though it doesn’t do a lot of damage I found the best approach to many enemies was to run around in circles spamming the axe throw button. It kind of fits for Sir Dan’s cowardly nature but it’s not exactly fun.

So if the combat isn’t great how about the traversal? Medievil is sometimes referred to as a platformer but it’s more of an action adventure game with platforming elements. It’s broken up into about 20 levels, and these all adhere quite closely to the original game. As such they are PS1 era levels, which is to say that they tend to be relatively small, with a lot of annoying design decisions baked in. They’re not bad, and for PS1 levels they’re quite clever, with most of them based around finding rune keys that you use to open up new areas and lots of neat little gimmicks like a gondola type contraption that takes you up a tree to break open the eggs of a giant bird and find a rune key in one of them so you can progress, but they’re certainly not up to modern standards.

That extends to the camera and platforming elements. The game’s camera is semi on rails (though can also, at times, be controlled by the right stick) and while it’s not terrible it’s not great either. This is most an issue when you’re trying to get past an obstacle (often with questionable collision detection) or o some platforming, which isn’t a huge element of the game but does exist. Combined with the loose feeling controls it just gives that sensation of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole that you get when trying to force a character who doesn’t control great to do precise things. None of it is incredibly hard, and falling into a pit doesn’t kill you (instead it takes away one of your life bottles, which function as spare lifebars), but it just feels bad and unfair. Even platforming parts where you’re not actually at risk of damage can be annoying, especially trying to time jumps on trampoline type objects to try to get higher. None of it feels great.

The game has a pretty robust upgrade system for 1998. If you kill a certain number of enemies on a level you unlock a chalice, which has to be collected. If you collect the chalice you go to the Hall of Heroes where you can trade it in with one of the statues for an upgrade like a new weapon or life bottle. The chalices aren’t particularly hard to get, mostly requiring doubling back through already cleared potions of a level to go pick it up, but the upgrades create a decent progression system where you feel stronger as you advance. One little kick in the teeth is that you run out of new weapons to get before you collect all the chalices and so the last few rewards are things like a few vials of health (not a fresh life bottle but just…health) and a small amount of gold. Great reward for collecting the chalice on every level.

If it seems like I’m getting into the weeds here it’s because it’s in small detail where Medievil really loses a lot of its luster. For example your health does not refill between levels. Because levels have no checkpoints and you have no lives (though you save after every level and can continue from your last save) this means that if you barely finish a level you’re basically screwed unless you go back to an old level and collect some life there, but to save your progress you need to finish the level. That means that, at least if you’re like me, you’re going to be going back to Dan’s enemy free crypt to run it over and over, refilling your life and picking up gold between levels. This is incredibly boring and even annoying to get to because the overworld map is slow to navigate.

A lot of this just should have been changed for modern sensibilities. This isn’t a completely faithful remake so why be faithful to outdated design decisions like that? Why not have Dan control more like a modern protagonist? Why not improve the camera? Why not add in a new superweapon for collecting all the chalices? They added things like “lost souls” to collect and put to rest, so they weren’t adverse to adding stuff, they just added the wrong things, or at least didn’t add some very necessary things like checkpoints (not that I died more than 5-6 times, to be fair) and health recovery between levels. They left in all the frustrations and dead end design decisions from the original and it really serves to blunt the game’s considerable atmospheric charms. It’s not a terrible experience and there are certainly plenty of highlights, mostly revolving around fun character moments or a few genuinely enjoyable boss fights, but there’s a reason this took me 4 years to finish. Every time I died or couldn’t figure out where to go I set the game down for awhile and that while turned out to be months or even years. It’s just kind of annoying to play, the way that you’d expect from a sort of mediocre (at least gameplay wise) PS1 game. The flailing combat, the clunky platforming, the sometimes obtuse level design with forced backtracking at times…again none of it is awful but it’s not compelling either. When you’re exploring new areas, enjoying fresh funny cut scenes and atmosphere and unlocking new weapons it’s an okay time, but as soon as you repeat stuff it becomes a chore.

The Medievil remake feels like a game that’s hamstrung in an attempt to stay authentic to the original, without being totally authentic to the original. It’s a somewhat reasonable approach that worked very well for the Spyro and Crash games, among others. The problem is that Medievil itself was never as good as Crash or Spyro. There’s a reason that it only really had 2 games, while those other franchises have released over a dozen. The idea of remaking that original cult classic game made sense but replicating all its flaws assured that it would be a one off. It’s now 4 years later and we haven’t even seen a remake of the second game, let alone something new.

Medievil’s story is about resurrecting a flawed, dead, hero and giving him a second chance to get things right. He learns and grows and improves until he is able to stand up as a true hero and avoid repeating the mistakes of his past. Unfortunately the remake takes the opposite approach, slavishly repeating all the flaws of the original, and ultimately being unable to accomplish what that game could not. And so Sir Dan has returned to his eternal slumber, possibly to pop back up as a cameo in Sony projects in the future. The skeletal knight deserved a better fate.

Schlocktober Rating: Novelty Rerelease Schlock

Sometimes companies rerelease an old product that was discontinued years ago just for nostalgia's sake. Crystal Pepsi, New Coke, various candies and cereals. There's generally a reason these were canceled in the first place, and they never stick around too long on reissue, but the hope is to get some sales from the cult following they had, or just people who may not have liked the product but are willing to try it to remember the time in their lives when they used to drink Crystal Pepsi because that's what their mom brought home from the grocery store. Medievil is kind of like that. It's not a great taste, but it's one that isn't around anymore and so has some novelty to it. I just wish they went a step further and reimagined the whole thing, or at least ironed out some of the flaws. Instead they gave us just what we remembered, in new packaging, and gamers quickly got their fill.

SCHLOCKTOBER ’23: This month I am playing some games with horror elements and blogging about them to determine whether they’re nasty tricks or delectable treats.

I decided to start my 2023 Schlocktober horror marathon by finishing Pumpkin Jack a game I started last year in an aborted attempt to have a horror game filled October 2022. This means that I only really played the last 30 minutes of the game (I was closer to the end than I thought) for the Schlocktober but I remember the rest of the game well and there are a number of issues I want to talk about so it’s being included. You can’t stop me, you’re not my mother OR my mother’s ghost (I know that second one because my mother is alive.)

Pumpkin Jack is a 2020 game that’s firmly part of the indie 3D platformer mini boom, which has been a big part of the genre’s renaissance. Pumpkin Jack is not quite as prominent as games like Yooka-Laylee or A Hat in Time, but it’s also not quite as low budget looking or simplistic as some of the most obscure entries.

Instead Pumpkin Jack occupies something of a middle ground. It most resembles a remaster of a third tier PS2 3D platformer, like Tak and the Power of JuJu. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, since some of those third tier platformer could still be fun. Pumpkin Jack is also generally smoother playing and less janky than those games were. On the other hand Pumpkin Jack doesn’t have quite the production values or variety that those games did, which can leave the experience feeling a little empty.

The story of Pumpkin Jack is a very basic tale told with tongue firmly planted in cheek. A “good” wizard intends to take over the world and Pumpkin Jack, a departed spirit loved by the Devil, is sent out of hell to stop him. Honestly it’s kind of muddled nonsense, and that’s fine. 3D Platformers do not need some deep or meaningful story, and the framework works well enough to let your sassy crow companion deliver quips throughout the adventure.

The story also serves as a reason why Jack has to travel across various areas in pursuit of this wizard, and therein we get to one of the game’s major problems. Though there are some aesthetic differences between the levels but on the whole it all feels pretty samey. You’re going to see a lot of reused assets and textures throughout, and even the level design doesn’t feel very different. The areas are mostly linear (though there are a few more open mini-sandbox areas with multiple objectives to resolve) and involve a lot of hopping between islands and climbing towers to zipline off of. There are also plenty of enemies, and combat is a major focus of the game, with Jack collecting a number of weapons throughout his journey.

This is the second major problem the game has. The combat is kind of…bland. It’s not actively unpleasant, but it becomes tedious after awhile. Enemies have generally simple behavior and Jack’s attacks feel a little slow and loose. This can lead to the player taking a lot of damage, but that’s ameliorated by the fact that there are lots of breakable crates and barrels throughout the levels, most of which drop health (though some will catch on fire and set wooden parts of the geometry on fire too, which is irritating.) This makes combat a lot about chasing enemies down, flailing at them with a weapon until they die, and then hunting for health. It’s not quite as bad as that sounds, but it’s also not very satisfying. There are also some enemies who can only be killed by dispatching your crow companion, who acts like a magic spell, and others that spill out of monster generators that must be found and destroyed.

That’s also true of the platforming. Pumpkin Jack’s controls are fine, but they are pretty basic. Jack lacks a lot of the mobility options you’ll find even in early 3D platformers like Mario 64 or Spyro, opting instead for a more limited run and jump scheme. You’re never going to have to wall jump or swing on ropes to navigate the level. Instead it’s just about fighting, making some basic jumps, and moving on. There are a few wrinkles, including a number of minigames (most of which involve detaching Jack’s head, which is also done in a few other areas where you explore as just his pumpkin noggin) and some areas where you have to push something into position while dodging enemy fire. There are also a couple minor set pieces like riding on a boat that is spinning underneath you, requiring you to keep jumping to avoid being dunked into the water and killed.

Playing Pumpkin Jack I was consistently unsure as to why I found it so unsatisfying. The game looks decent, controls well, is not particularly frustrating and doesn’t have any major flaws that I can point to. It fits the Halloween theme very well, though it’s not trying to be scary, and it clearly made an effort to change things up with minigames and at least some variety in level structure. There are some clear issues (such as Jack’s limited move set and the lack of precision in the combat) but nothing egregious. Yooka-Laylee arguably had more jank in it and I liked that game quite a bit.

I think what it comes down to is Pumpkin Jack’s lack of ambition. It feels unfair to call the game out on this because it was clearly a small team effort and they intelligently scoped out a game they could actually make and…made it. It feels like a remastered PS2 game because it works like a finished, mostly polished, product, without all the jank you get in a lot of 3D indie games below the highest level.

With the actual PS2 era games, where the development budget tended to be higher for a game like this, they would cover up mediocre mechanics with visual and level variety as well as voice acting, music, and cinematics. Pumpkin Jack makes a few efforts to use these, with some voiced and semi animated cut scenes between levels but obviously can’t match the bigger budget major studio efforts. It doesn’t have enough assets to fully differentiate the levels, which blend together too much (there are a few small indoors areas but you stay outside for almost the whole game.) There are the aforementioned minigames and a variety of bosses, as well as collectables in the form of crow skulls and gramophones, and there are even costumes you can purchase, which is…fine. The music is good and appropriately spooky, though there are only a few tracks.

It seems harsh to say this, but there’s really not a lot of reason to play Pumpkin Jack unless you really want a Halloween themed platformer. This is one of the reasons that I like retro games so much. Because they were professional products they tended to have the bells and whistles that le[t games from feeling monotonous. There’s nothing wrong with Pumpkin Jack but in the end a game needs more than “it works” to make it really worth playing. It’s an impressive product from such a small operation but it’s too bland to recommend. You won’t have a terrible time, just a forgettable one.

Schlocktober Rating: Generic Schlock

Pumpkin Jack feels like the dollar store house brand version of a mini pumpkin pie. It does a competent job of delivering sugar but it’s so bland that it really is just empty calories. What’s the point of a baked good that just delivers sugar and calories when you could get something with a bit more flavor? I’m not sure.

Shark!Shark! is out for modern platforms. It seems unremarkable.

This game is what we all thought it was going to be. It looks like a low to moderate effort update to a somewhat obscure retro game without many attempts to modernize it or add content for longevity. It would have done okay on Xbox Live in 2006 but it's probably going to barely be a blip at a $15 price point in 2023.

It definitely has some of that Intellivision oddity to it, such as touting its music and sound design despite being generic and barely noticeable (whatever you want to say about Tommy Tallarico's 16-bit work the soundtracks with his studio's name were definitely not forgettable) and an ending so bonkers you'd normally think it was drug induced but instead here it was almost certainly a product of extreme laziness. It also seems unfinished, given that the enemy behavior patterns are simplistic and unchanging.

This game won't make a splash, pun intended. It has nothing to offer beyond a bare bones experience that's almost 20 years behind the times in terms of aesthetics and game design, even when updating a classic. If it were modern graphics running on top of an emulated copy of the old game like with the Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap remake it would at least be interesting. Instead it's just thrown together as a pale copy of the original.

Nobody would want to play this. You could probably have some fun in multiplayer because most games can be fun in multiplayer (SNAKE can be fun in multiplayer) but you'd have no reason to seek it out. It doesn't do anything interesting, it has very little content, it looks outdated, and it costs $15. Compare that to Atari's Recharged line of games, with their simple but stylized aesthetics, pounding soundtracks, and dozens of challenges with unique gameplay wrinkles at a $10 price point and this just looks silly. And those games aren't even masterpieces, they're just designed by people who at least have some idea of what they want to sell and to whom.

Amico apologists will bring up how this isn't using the specialized controller and doesn't have important functions like...showing the location of the next bonus pearl on your controller (there are ways to do something similar through rumble), but it's just transparent excuses. This game isn't very good. It might not be flat out terrible but it isn't very good. It's not something people will want at $15 and it's darn sure not something people would want to spend $150 or $320 for a console to get their hands on.

The idea of casuals and children wanting to play this is laughable. Casual gamers are not looking for simple arcade experiences. If they were they would have found them. I can name literally dozens of (better) games already available for multiplayer fun right now. Maybe they'd download it on mobile for $0.99 and enjoy it for an hour but they're not going to want to play it on console. Why would they? There's nothing new here.

None of this is surprising in any way but it's at least proof. Proof that the apparently nude emperor wasn't wearing a clever bodysuit, he actually had no clothes. Proof that can be denied but not countered. The games are starting to trickle out and they are not only nothing special but subpar. There was never anything on offer here except undelivered promises and a whole lot of grandiose claims amounting to nothing but a few sad little fish swimming repetitive paths over 35 minutes of tedium.

We may never find out details of financial shenanigans or when what deals fell through or who actually thought this thing could work, but at least we now that however it played out it was all doomed from before it was ever announced.

Rejoice Amico faithful! The prophecy of Tallarico has come to pass. Amico has spread across the globe like a pandemic of joy! The sun of Amico has risen to spread the light of happiness and the good word of the Prophet Tallarico to a population famished for family friendly co-op that only Amico can provide.

If you have paid attention to gaming at all the last week then thou knowest that the great and holy game Shark! Shark! was released to unprecedented acclaim and much rejoicing throughout the gaming world. Some haters and trolls have claimed that the release of an Amico exclusive on PC, Switch, Xbox, and Atari VCS heralds doom for the greatest console but of course nothing could be further from the truth.

The Prophet Tallarico left us with many clear and inarguable prophecies before ascending to the world of Backgammon. First among these was that Amico games could only be played on an Amico. We were gifted with this wisdom over and over, like a mantra, like the clear ring of truth sounding its clarion call above the sea of haters’ lies. That can mean only one thing. Every Xbox, every Switch, every PC that can run a game like Shark! Shark! is, in fact, an Amico. Amico has been with us all along, we just didn’t understand it. We weren’t wise enough. We got distracted by the excruciating wait for the still coming perfect Amico with its glorious controllers and brilliant LED light and did not see the Amicos that surrounded us this whole time.

All at once, with little fanfare from a humble company that has always underplayed its accomplishments and lived by the mantra of underpromising and overdelivering. The Amico doesn’t even have a release date and it has already been delivered to hundreds of millions of homes!

This also means that big companies like Nintendo, Microsoft, Ubisoft, and even Sony are making games for Amico. Since every PC is an Amico (if it can play Shark!Shark! it’s an Amico, that’s obviously true) that means that Horizon Forbidden West is coming to Amico, something that we could not have dreamed of when this project was first pitched!

Will the haters and doubters admit they were wrong? They never will. They just move the goal posts and lie about the best console that has ever been released. They complain when Amico sees a necessary price release because of the incredible technology used to make the best controller ever and a console with 40 separate LED lights to enchant gamers. Then they complain when their already owned hardware is refitted to become an Amico and provide access to the best and most popular games. They complain when a game that was being given away for free out of the goodness of Intellivision’s heart is called a best-selling premium game, and then complain when it is sold for a premium because “the price is too high.”

Haters will never be satisfied. They cannot be reasoned with, they do not respond to evidence, they are set in their hateful ways.

Now that Amico is out and in hundreds of millions of homes there will be no stopping this superconsole. Amico is the most powerful console on Earth and the most portable. Amico is built by independent mom and pop shops and also one of the biggest companies on earth. Amico is the home of Spider-Man and Starfield. It is the perfect entertainment machine.

The only question now is when Phil Spencer and Gabe Newell will start formally reporting directly to Phil Adam.

And remember, the haters will always be with us but they can be ignored. There is no time for hate when you are playing Shark! Shark! on your Amico! If a hater challenges you simply respond as brother Nick Richards would.

If a hater says “Amico wasn’t just supposed to be some games on Steam and Switch! It was supposed to be a console that people paid for!” say “Hater, I rebuke thee! Amico is the place to play the best and most popular games! Looks don’t matter! You will never be satisfied! Get thee to the Hater Dungeon!”

If a hater says “But the Amico games aren’t selling well” say “Hater, I rebuke thee! Get thee to the Hater Dungeon! You complain that the games are just a cash grab and then complain again when they do not grab cash! You will never be satisfied! Get thee to the Hater Dungeon!”

If a hater asks why people who bought the physical product NFT games can’t play them if Amico is out yet say “Hater, I rebuke thee! They can play whatever games are released! They just need to buy them again. Did you complain that you can’t play Metroid Prime on the Switch with a Gamecube disc? You will never be satisfied! Get thee to the Hater Dungeon!”

If a hater says “But if Switches are Amico doesn’t that mean that Amico has all the porn and rape games?” say “Hater, I rebuke thee! You will never be satisfied! Get thee to the Hater Dungeon!”

This is a time for joy in the Amico community and there is no space for haters or negativity! Amico has won the console war and nobody else even saw the shots fired! Now that the haters and doubters have been proved wrong we can move forward into a brave new world of entertainment. Now if you’ll excuse me I am going to play some Space Harrier in Yakuza 0 on my Xbox Amico!

When I was a kid gaming was a lot more compartmentalized than it is today. You had your Nintendo games, your Sega games, and your PC games and while there were a fair number of games that did come to multiple platforms there was generally one lead platform that the game "belonged" on. You could play Sim City on your Super Nintendo but everyone knew it was really a PC franchise.

This mostly held true through my teenage years. Yes games started coming out on more and more platforms over time and a lot of third party games started coming out on multiple platforms by the PS1/Saturn/N64 era but, again, a lot of them felt like inferior ports made for people who only had one system. Nobody would play Tony Hawk's Pro Skater on the N64 if you could play it on the PlayStation and Rayman 2 was clearly better on N64 (though Dreamcast was best of all.)

By the time the Xbox/Gamecube/PS2 generation came along there were fewer exclusives than ever and the differences between different versions were also smaller than ever. Some games ran better on Xbox (or even Gamecube) but for the most part PS2 was the lead platform and the majority of ports were pretty good. This trajectory continued (bad PS3 ports in the early 7th gen notwithstanding) and at this point most games come out on everything and most console versions are so similar that reviews don't even bother to talk about comparisons unless there are significant differences. Yes the PC version of most games runs better than console versions (and sometimes has added effects like ray tracing or other stuff but for the most part the content is the same across platforms and the experience is very similar. Cross platform multiplayer is even getting more popular with developers as there is a tacit acknowledgment that all these systems are essentially variations on PC hardware and can play very nicely together. Sony and Microsoft have even taken to putting their "exclusive" games out on PC, making that more than ever the true master platform.

The thing is, I can't quite get over my old habits of thinking that certain games "belong" on certain platforms. Sometimes this makes some kind of sense. The Ori games are published by Microsoft so even though they're available on Switch they "feel" like Xbox games to me. Devil May Cry has always been a PlayStation franchise so that's where it feels like it belongs to me.

Sometimes it's just a function of where I started playing a particular series. I first played Shadow of Mordor on Xbox so that feels like an Xbox series to me, even though the PS4 game was technically superior and the PC version better than both. Part of it is just getting muscle memory with a particular controller and part of it is just an old way of thinking. It just feels strange to me to play part 1 on one system and part 2 on another. This is especially true regarding trophies and achievements, where it's nice to have a record of your time with a whole series all in one place.

This preference is not, of course, insurmountable. If a game is much cheaper on one system than another or if it has extra content I can handle jumping across. I played most of the Assassin's Creed games on Xbox but played Syndicate on PS4 because of the extra missions. Likewise for a huge performance difference I will jump ship. Final Fantasy is a PlayStation series for me (though obviously it started on Nintendo, and that platform jump caused a LOT of kerfuffle when it happened in the '90s) but Xbox Series X is a much better place to play FF XIII (to the extent that there is a good way to play that game). So it's not that I HAVE to play all games on one platform, it's just a preference.

I don't fully understand why I care about this at all. As with Final Fantasy there were certainly series that jumped in the past and I moved along with them. But it's definitely something that influences where I buy and play games. If I can keep it all on one platform without spending much more or sacrificing quality I will. I don't know if it's a unique preference or common, but it's there.