Presenting, Viking Strike 01

I’ve been tutoring people for about a year now. These folks have come from different walks of life, have been in different parts of their academic journey, and I’ve done my best to improve my craft along the way. Something I wind up telling clients a lot is, “The best assignment is the one that’s turned in.” We can work with ugly, we can grade a compromised assignment, we can incorporate negative feedback and come back better next time. But the unsubmitted assignment is a zero, and a zero isn’t useful for anybody. Can’t figure out what we need to do to improve, can’t pass the class, can’t finish school, etc.

I’m going to listen to myself. I’m going to have a go at putting together a messy paragraph (or two, if necessary) on every game I’ve played recently. The single paragraph constraint is a nod to having been to an honest to goodness English class recently, and being told to work on brevity and clarity.

Grabbed by the Ghoulies (Finished)

Nintendo got off of Rare just in time. The most interesting thing about this little grotesquerie is that, being included in Rare Replay, it is the only “native” Xbox game to have achievements on Xbox Live. I earned most of them that don’t involve the most obnoxious hunting for hidden books in levels. The game is a dual stick brawler with the left stick controlling movement and right stick moves deploying melee attacks in a given direction. It feels loose at the best of times, and downright sloppy at worst. It also contains some nascent quick time events, fat jokes, pun-laden English humour, and a farty Grant Kirkhope soundtrack, all of which ding the experience. I’m not surprised the standalone version of this game was pulled from the current Xbox digital marketplace; it stinks.

Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengeance of the Slayer (Finished)

Jay Tholen and Tendershoot have managed something really impressive in this, a tie-in game to the masterful Hypnospace Outlaw: they’ve found a way to make a good bad game. Humour in games is extremely difficult, considering how much of it comes down to timing. The cutscenes in this game are genuinely funny, only made more so by the full context of its parent game. But the conceit here – Slayers X is a revived project of a Quake-esque shooter put together by an Idaho teenager in the late 1990s – is so well handled. The levels are garish, amateurish, filled with bullshit design choices that would have seemed cool as hell to a Surge-fueled KoRn fan of the era. The unlockable bonus levels being in-universe “prototypes” is a very cute bit, as they sure play like “babby’s first Quake map” attempts and are just horrible. In practice playing this game isn’t great, but a certain amount of kayfabe is needed to square up to this game. I like it as a companion piece to one of the greatest games of all time, just fine.

Jusant (Finished)

A few end-of-year roundup-type podcasts brought this game up and it was on Game Pass so I gave it a whirl. What I found was an Ico-inflicted game that shares some mechanical features with Grow Home, being mostly focused around climbing a single mountain covered in abandoned buildings and ruins. I enjoyed the climbing on a tactile, mechanical level. I wish I could say the same for the endless reams of text in this game. Not since BioForge has a game included so much superfluous text that nobody has willingly read. I’m assuming there was some plot embedded in the thousands of words in these collectibles, but after the first few did nothing to grab me I just thumbed through these without a second thought. That would have been that, but then the game did A Thing. If you don’t want to know about A Thing, I’ll just say this gets a soft recommendation from me.

Jusant ends with a segment where your companion cute animal blob creature falls deathly ill and you need to let it float up into the afterlife. This happened to me not long after my neighbour’s beloved dog had died, and as one of my cats continues to slowly decline. I cried the instant I tried to explain Jusant to my wife. I think this sort of move is a little cheap, as it plays on a real disenfranchised grief that many people carry. But given that this might have been forecasted in the heaps of reading I skipped, I don’t want to state definitively that this came out of nowhere.

Betrayal at Club Low (Finished)

Cosmo D has been making weird adventure games for about a decade now, and Betrayal at Club Low has him introducing some light role-playing elements via dice rolls. I’ll admit I had some skepticism about this addition, as I enjoyed his prior work as absurdist art puzzle book things, not games about rolling and manipulating dice. As you all know, dice are the first step on the road to cards, and games with cards are all bad (except Final Fantasy VIII). Competing dice rolls introduces the possibility of failure, and I don’t want the funhouse to stop the show to tell me that I lost something outside my control. Cosmo D tackles this by putting multiple possible endings into the game, so even while you’re losing you’re working towards unique content. And if that’s not enough, you can also play on difficulties that heavily bias things in your favour… or the opposite. Ultimately it doesn’t reach the absurdist heights of The Norwood Suite, but I wound up enjoying rolling dice to fake my way through DJing in a club so well that I could commit espionage.

Call of Duty: World at War and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Runbacks)

Gather around and hear my tale of woe. Once upon a time, my college roommate bought an Xbox 360. I created an Xbox account, and thinking I was very smart, decided to put in personal information that was not accurate to myself under the misguided notion that it would better protect my digital privacy. A decade later, having bought an Xbox One S, I was unable to recover this old account due to this fool decision. Dozens of delisted Rock Band tracks and about 7000 Very Real And Cool And Important Achievements Points™ were lost. I’ve got a soft goal this year of clawing some of those points back, and so I have now cruised through both of these games once again. World at War is a mean-spirited game, reflecting the basest natures of individuals on the frontlines of the Second World War and casting those natures into intimate, unflinching, M-rated, 720p high definition violence. As to Modern Warfare ‘07, I was really teleported back to the dorm room shift that happened at my college. One day, everybody was playing Halo 3 with its primary colors and aliens and shit (I was not into Halo at all, no sir). The next day, everybody was playing the game that looked like Iraq War footage but louder, louder, so much louder. It’s an “important” game and remains impressive as spectacle, even if the plot veers from “almost plausible SpecOps tale” to “a blushing Jack Bauer's spankbank” by the end.

Portal 2 (Runback)

Speaking of funny games. This was one of the last Games With Gold freebies Microsoft deigned give away, and it was a hell of a note to end that program with. Portal 2, and the first game, are the Rosetta Stones of comedy in video games. Portal 2 may not have had the sheer memetic weight of Cakes Being Lies, companion cube merchandise, etc., but it did give us J.K. Simmons losing his mind about lemons, and I think that's worth something. I do think P2 is a little worse than its predecessor as the introductions of various coloured goops strays into gimmick territory (something Portal's "real" followup, Quantum Conundrum, wound up doing as well). But as a quick double dip for some tasty 360 cheevo poids, this was a grand time.

****

Well, I hope that wasn't so bad because I'm going to do it again next week. Probably.