Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done, five games at a time. Be sure to check out the Case File Repository for more details and a full list of games/links!
I'll admit to buying this BCV: Battle Construction Vehicles on a lark after watching an LP of it. It is, essentially, a fighting game with construction vehicles. My intent was to at some point ship it to the Giant Bomb boys as part of a package of bizarre PAL games that never saw an American release (there's a few more of those coming down the wire, by the by). The game both is, and assuredly not, great. The presentation is incredible, as are the British dubbed voices in the European version - it has the kind of over the top dramatic anime exclamations that could only make a game about fighting diggers and bulldozers work. On the other hand, the actual combat is slow, awkward and a little arbitrary. What's weird is that it didn't come from some high-concept budget title assembly line like the Simple 2000 series: it was originally developed and published by Artdink, a respectable Japanese developer that created the A-Train series, The Atlas series and many other contemplative strategy/sim games. It's a showpiece of sorts, but not one I'm going to put on the shelf. Eliminated.
Don't let the numeral fool you: this was the first ever Musou game as we understand the term. The first Dynasty Warriors was a fighting game, and the Japanese naming of the series makes the distinction clearer: Sangokumusou for the fighter, Shinsangokumusou for the crowd-combat brawlers to follow. I can be forgiven for being curious about this series and picking up the first for cheap to check it out: it definitely wasn't the type of game you'd see regularly, as the tech to display that many opponents on-screen didn't exist before the PS2 era. Yet, as you might imagine, a combination of the game's repetitiveness and the history-dense Three Kingdoms subject matter meant apathy set in quick. It's odd to think that someone who isn't a collector might own a game for its historical value only: it's not like these are antiques to be displayed with reverence, especially not where Dynasty Warriors is concerned, but this was the progenitor of a particularly popular series among weirdos and significant in that respect at least. I'd rather not play it again, but I can't bring myself to get rid of it either. At any rate, it's certainly not shelf material. Eliminated.
Even the intro seems to take hours. It's aged surprisingly well, though.
Ephemeral Fantasia is novel for being a JRPG where time is of the essence. Not just in the sense that quests will eventually fail themselves if you leave them alone for too long, but that it presents a living world that operates on a strict schedule. If you weren't in the right place at the right time, you'd end up missing treasures or side-quests or important information. The game was built like Majora's Mask where you could simply rewind time and give it another shot, but it still didn't give you a whole lot of direction and I'd always worry I'd wasted that particular cycle not finding the critical piece of information to move on. It's fair to say I didn't give Ephemeral Fantasia a chance back in the day because there was something about how easy it was to miss anything that triggered anxiety every few moments. I don't like using guides, but what I hate more is getting several dozen hours into a game and realizing I'd missed something important and/or integral to 100% completion, even in this case I could theoretically go back and get it. I'd never have the time to save-scum it and try to be everywhere at once to learn the optimal route, but I did think that I would come back one day and use a walkthrough to get a guided tour of the game's content. It's not like games of this type are particularly common, even now (though saying that I do have two other PS2 games with a similar structure). It's another game I don't like but can't bear to part with: a common theme with this week's batch. Eliminated.
The finest what? Did you accidentally a word?Perfectly reasonable guard uniform.
The 26th of October was the launch date for the North American PlayStation 2, and I have a couple of games that were created specifically for that launch (the other launch games I've covered so far, like Tekken Tag or Fantavision, saw Japanese releases prior to the North American PS2 debut). Summoner's the first, and it's a game I have to constantly remind myself was not from some obscure Japanese RPG developer but rather one of the earliest projects of Saints Row and Red Faction developer Volition Inc. The game does feel very Japanese in its construction though, with a plethora of unusual RPG systems and surface-level characterization that tends to be the product of that genre. It was also one of the first PS2 RPGs I remembered actually enjoying, once I'd figured it out, and managed to ride that wave of gratitude all the way to its conclusion, whereupon you get the post-credits lunacy of a blooper reel and a recreation of that Dead Alewives D&D skit (originally written by Dan Harmon, I recently learned) with the game's character models. Honestly, that should've tipped me off that it wasn't a Japanese game then and there. Summoner is, however, the only game I'm reviewing today that isn't a PS2 exclusive: it saw a PC port soon after this, and has recently been published on Steam and GOG after THQ Nordic bought the licensing rights from the THQ IP auction. You know what? There's still a lot of goodwill floating around this one, so Summoner's going to be my first "Considered" of this feature. Considered.
This is the other North American launch game. You can track the early progress of the FPS genre on consoles pretty definitively if you go through SNES Doom, Jaguar's Alien vs. Predator, GoldenEye 007, Perfect Dark, TimeSplitters (and its sequel), and then Halo: Combat Evolved soon after that. After Halo and the Call of Duty games from that era, it become harder to ignore the fact that the consoles had their own legitimate FPS industry going on irrespective of the Quakes and Unreal Tournaments of their PC cousins. TimeSplitters was significant for being the first shooter, to my knowledge, to use the DualShock 2's analog sticks for aiming and movement respectively, or at least the first to normalize it (that is, it wasn't hidden away in menus somewhere as an alternative control scheme). It took a long time to adjust to it - I think double analog-stick control is still one of the big hurdles for gaming neophytes, and that the Wii performed as well as it did by mostly side-stepping that issue - but it's fair to say that particular control style has managed to endure. The game itself is kind of neat also: the story mode has players jumping into various time eras with different objectives to complete and the whole game had a pace to it that allowed players to glide through once they knew where everything was, and completing each stage's time trials would unlock new cheats and features in the same way as GoldenEye 007. While I liked TimeSplitters plenty, I liked TimeSplitters 2 a whole lot more. If anything from this series has a shot at being on the shelf, it'll be the sequel. Eliminated.
It's not Quake Live, but...
Results
Four more eliminations, and our first game to be considered for the second round: Volition's rough but endearing RPG Summoner. That makes us 1 for 10.
What I intend to do with the second round survivors is to play them all a little more thoroughly (though probably not to completion) so I can make a more informed judgement when it's time to narrow them down again. That won't happen for quite a while though, and we may just fill up the shelf with the instant-qualifying "Approved" games before we get there. Having lots of rules is always fun.
In our next edition of The Top Shelf: We're breaking this streak of launch game misery with at least one genuinely great game, and two backlog games I've been meaning to play for years. Expect to see the flow of Considereds and Approveds rise precipitously over the next few entries. (Wait, can you use "precipitously" for something going up?)
Hey peeps, this is just a little feature I'm going to throw together every so often. If I'm being serious about writing more frequently, I figured I'd best set aside some time every week to devour some literature. This will absolutely not be a regular thing, unlike the other new features I started this week, but I do want to make an effort to get more reading done this year. Consider it a New Year's resolution.
For the time being, I'm catching up with a lot of classic speculative sci-fi novels; playing SOMA, Axiom Verge and The Talos Principle last year awoke in me a desire to read more intelligent discussion about what it means to be human in an ever technologically-expanding universe that continues to blur the lines between machine and man. It's not all going to be transhumanism and robotic consciousness type material, but sci-fi has been dealing with those themes for many decades and I'd like to have the same base that many of those above games' writers did. Likewise, by reading some classic sci-fi, I'll start to see more parallels and influences in many games from the same genre.
These little book reports won't get too deep into the themes and events of each novel they cover, given this isn't really a forum for book talk, but I did want to critique them with a few recurring metrics. So far I've got: a general synopsis for those who don't feel like checking Wikipedia for the same few paragraphs of summarized plot, followed by what I knew about the book prior to reading it through cultural osmosis, then what I recognize of the book's influence in contemporary games after I've read it, and finally my overall interest level in pursuing more books from the same author/series.
The first book of the Giant Bomb Book Club is Orson Scott Card's 1985 novel Ender's Game.
Synopsis
Essentially, the book covers the childhood of one Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, a prodigy who is recruited by Earth's military to become their greatest military commander. Due to the required amount of fast thinking speeds and tactical innovation, it became necessary to seek out children who could learn how to become master strategists at a young age and lead massive spaceship battles, retaining the capacity for the enhanced learning speed that adults lack. Ender rises quickly through the ranks of each learning institution he is enrolled in, adopting heretofore unseen strategies along the way, eventually becoming the savior of mankind when it is revealed that his final examination was actually a real-time battle against the homeworld of the hostile insectoid alien "buggers".
There's a lot more than just that going on, however. Throughout the story Ender is concerned about his barely-contained psychopathy and how close he is to becoming his older brother Peter, a sociopath of equal intelligence who was passed over by the military for the same role due to his lack of compassion, a necessity for earning the trust of subordinates. Conversely, Ender's similarly genius sister Valentine was passed over for being too kind and conciliatory, lacking the sort of killer instinct necessary for a military officer. Ender's fear that he is closer to his brother than he realizes coupled with the magnitude of what's expected of him and his very young age paints a troubled portrait who pushes onward out of an obstinacy borne from his desire to not be controlled or coerced, especially by the untrustworthy adults in his life. If he is to be a tool of the military, he intends for it to be on his own terms.
Despite all the major characters being geniuses of varying degrees, the book's written in a straightforward manner that suggests something of a Young Adult reading age. I've got nothing against YA fiction, of course, but I anticipated that a lot more of the strategic stuff would fly over my head. Not to spoil too much, but Ender basically wins through a combination of recklessness - a result of being pushed too hard and wanting to break an incredibly unfair simulation with an outrageous feint, not knowing that the unfair simulation was actually an unwinnable real battle against the alien homeworld - and a deus ex machina matter disintegration weapon he discovered a unique application for. Likewise, a scheme concocted by his two siblings to engineer public outcry via two anonymous, charismatic and ostensibly contrasting internet personalities in order to rally many adults to causes intended to assure a global peace among the Cold War-esque Earth nations, is equally surface-level. We don't see much of what they debate, only the intended effects that their dialogue is creating among the populace. (Though kudos to Card for calling out how powerful a tool the internet would become for anonymous propaganda and rabble-rousing. Dude basically outlined Twitter three decades before it existed.)
Even so, there's something to be said for accessibility, and Card doesn't necessarily need to get into details to keep the story moving, instead focusing on Ender's increasing instability and apparent tactical brilliance. At the start of each chapter we overhear conversations about the plot and what's happening to Ender that we later discover to be audio tapes brought as evidence to incriminate a major character, learning that the adults in Ender's life had been manipulating and mentally torturing him throughout his education in order to ensure he was the correct candidate for the military invasion of the buggers' homeworld, and it is information the reader is privy to that Ender can only assume through his intuitive ability to read people. As he is forced into unjustly weighted simulated battles and artificially-created interpersonal quandaries, he is observed closely at all times for the choices he ultimately makes. Because he manages to retain both his compassion and his capacity for great violence when pressed, he becomes the hero the world needs, even if he can barely look at himself in the mirror any more. And all this before he reaches his teenage years. It can be a tough read at times, though one that - like most YA - tends to feature children who are forced to grow up fast.
What I Knew
Well, there's a whole lot about Orson Scott Card that's come to light in recent years, and very little of it good. We'll put that aside for the moment, since I try to separate the artist from the art whenever possible (though, yeah, there's no escaping some of the politics within the book itself). His most overt connection to the gaming industry would be penning the story for Shadow Complex, a SpaceWhipper concerning an oddly well-financed domestic terrorist cell within US soil that did some neat things with 3D perspective in an otherwise 2D game. I recently acquired the remastered Steam version in a bundle, so I'm considering another playthrough.
Beyond that, my understanding of Ender's Game was that it concerned some kid who becomes a genius tactician and wins a star war with a bold play or several. Nothing too in-depth, though, and certainly nothing of the torturous soul-searching and the slightly creepy relationships between Ender and his brother and sister. I haven't seen the recent movie featuring Harrison Ford and Asa Butterfield, but I'd heard enough to give it a miss. Maybe now that I've read the book, I could see how it was adapted.
What I Know Now
As for Ender's influence, well, I now recognize that there are snippets of it in many places. I recognized the trope of using a simulation to direct an actual space battle, which is something I did back with Mission Critical semi-recently, and that of a sympathetic insectoid race with whom humanity fought because of a mutual distrust and inability to understand each other. The rachni of Mass Effect are obvious allusions to the buggers of Ender's War, right down to Commander Shepard being the only hope that race has of starting anew with its last queen, after the latter is able to communicate with the former and help her understand what the rachni were and why they were initially hostile: the rachni, like the buggers, didn't consider the other sapient alien races in the galaxy to be intelligent because they lacked the same sophisticated hivemind telepathic communication, and so they were treated like mindless animals to be subjugated and consumed. This sympathetic facet of insectoid alien races might've come earlier in the universe of science fiction literature, but there were distinct parallels between how a benevolent Shepard might handle the discovery of a living rachni queen after the supposed extinction of her race, and how a slightly older Ender did at the end of the novel when the final bugger queen egg communicates their race's legacy to him telepathically.
I don't play nearly enough interplanetary strategy games to know the full brunt of the influence of Ender's Game on that particular genre, and there's been plenty of other forms of science-fiction that concerns military strategy between giant fleets of ships that those games might've also pulled from regardless. The anime Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu (or Legend of the Galactic Heroes) for instance, is pretty much all exquisitely-detailed strategic space battles between two equally brilliant opposed commanders while classical music plays in the background, and the first volume of its manga was published three years earlier than Ender's Game. If it has nothing else in common with Card's novel, it de-emphasizes the immense loss of human life with its detached perspective, presenting the battles as little more than "games" its protagonists play. But again, that's hardly exclusive to space warfare.
Further Reading
I checked out the first few pages of the next in the series, The Speaker of the Dead, and it seems to jump at least a hundred years into the future. Ender is historically reviled for destroying an entire sapient species, despite the necessity at the time, and humans have used that lesson to adjust how they present themselves to other intelligent alien races. I'm not sure how much of that is just the intro or what, or if Ender and Valentine are still alive somewhere (because of the relativistic oddities of faster than light travel, it's possible to live a few years on a moving ship and have many decades pass for everyone else), but it's certainly a departure. I might check out the rest of the "Ender Saga" - a collection of six books, from my understanding - but I'm torn between wanting to reading further and wanting to move onto something new. Anyone familiar with the series think I should stick with it?
(Feel free to add some of your own recommendations too, by the way. Sticking to (mostly) classic sci-fi cornerstones for now this year, unless The Winds of Winter finally comes out, but if you have any other genre fare I'll add it to the list.)
As you may or may not recall, I dramatically concluded 2016's Sunday Summaries feature on Xmas Day (as in, the last Sunday of last year) but the intent was really to shorten it considerably and publish it on Saturdays instead. I lost the plot with that feature, stuffing it to beyond bursting point every week with pithy rundowns of new releases - most of which I've still yet to purchase and play - and some elaboration on what I've been working on wiki-wise. From now on, it's just going to be these intros, a list of links to the week's blogs, and a paragraph or six on whatever I happen to be playing.
First, some housekeeping:
I do like Eternal Ring, warts and all, but not nearly enough to call it one of my PS2 favorites.
I began two features this week that I intend to continue throughout most of 2017. The first of these is The Top Shelf: a feature wherein I try to determine which of my PS2 games deserves to be proudly displayed upon a solitary row on my bookshelf, with the rest going into storage and disc wallets (or the trash, in some cases. Don't grieve for them; they almost certainly don't deserve your sympathy). This week featured the first batch of five case files (a number that might vary in the weeks to come): FromSoftware's Eternal Ring, SCEJ's Fantavision, Team Ninja's Dead or Alive 2, Namco's Tekken Tag Tournament and FromSoftware's Evergrace. Essentially, a half-OK first-person FromSoftware RPG, a tech demo that's fun for an hour, two fighter games I never much cared for and another early FromSoftware RPG that I never completed because it was bad and dumb and strange. Not necessarily the most auspicious of starts, but we will have some bangers on the way eventually. Not next week, though. That's going to be another rough one.
The second feature is my Indie Game of the Week review, an attempt to force myself to get through this ridiculous Steam backlog I've accrued. I'll also be highlighting the occasional PS3/PS4 Indie game also, since the performance is a lot better over there. The first week covers the mostly excellent Flywrench (Messhof, 2015), a distinctive action game that sits somewhere between a shoot 'em up and a platformer that comes from the stylishly minimalist minds behind Nidhogg. It's hard as hell too, but I did go back and complete it eventually. (I have proof, even!)
I also covered the Awesome Games Done Quick event with my selection of must-watch picks pulled from the event's schedule. Even in spite of all these extra blogging goals I've given myself, I'll probably veg out and watch an unhealthy number of those speedruns. There's certainly a few I don't want to miss.
Next week will include some more PS2 games to scrutinize, another Indie game to review (an easier one, this time) and hopefully the finishing tweaks to this "GOTY 2014 (Adjusted)" list I've been working on. Maybe I'll even have time to play some games.
Uncharted 4: A Thief's End
I feel like I'm not too far from the end in Uncharted 4, but I keep getting distracted this week from catching up with the site's GOTY content and conceiving all these new features. Once I settle back into a rhythm, I'll hopefully find a few hours to knock out the last few chapters of this excellent game and move onto some other pressing recently-added backlog items.
Uncharted 4 hasn't offered a whole lot new so far. I denigrated Uncharted 3 for a similar inability to deliver anything like the change of pace that Uncharted 2 was. That's not to say it couldn't keep up, simply that the difference between 2 and 3 was negligible compared to the difference between 1 and 2. Same old cinematic deathtraps, lengthy shoot-outs and quips with nearby companions. Yet, there's something about Uncharted 4 that feels very different, and it's more than just the incredible visual upgrade - surpassing what was already a very photogenic series. The backdrops look amazing, the characters are rendered in a very believable way both in terms of face rigging tech and the way they emote with each other, and there are times when I'll just wander around looking at the world Naughty Dog created instead of getting on with the plot and finding the nearest overtly-shaded set of handholds to climb.
I also appreciate that the combat's been de-emphasized, but only in the sense that you can avoid fighting enemies with equally difficult stealth sections as the alternative. What you then have is one of three choices: immediately open fire, possibly after stealthing your way to a vantage point or a convenient means to remove deadly snipers or multiple enemies with one explosive before triggering the battle. You could also ghost the entire encounter, reaching a specific point where enemies are no longer able to reach you and you can move on to the next part of the game. You can also half-and-half it, using stealth and cover to quietly assassinate as many guards as possible before you eventually get spotted and a firefight breaks out. There's a handful of trophies for staying stealthy during specific sections of the game, but there's also a lot of trophies for various combat feats like headshots and killing multiple enemies with one explosion: the game's not particularly bothered what you to choose to do, as it anticipates that you'll want to go through it all again with a different approach anyway. (Also cute? There's a trophy for killing 1000 people called "Ludonarrative Dissonance". Way to give it to those eggheads, Naughty Dog.)
This game looks spectacular. Credit where credit's due. Not that they're particularly modest about it: you'll often have the camera dramatically pull out like this for the impressive vistas.
I've enjoyed the story too. Without spoiling too much, Nathan's heretofore unmentioned older brother Sam suddenly comes back into his life, and leads him on another adventure when Sam reveals that a scary South American druglord has given him an ultimatum to find a legendary pirate's treasure haul or face a fate worse than death. Nathan pretends that he's doing all this climbing and puzzle-solving for Sam - even neglecting to tell his now-wife Elena about his latest treasure hunt - but it's clear he's every bit as invested as Sam is. There's a lot of interplay between the two brothers, and the game largely focuses on the pair with Sully and Elena in supporting roles as well as a couple new villains I don't particularly care for (the main one, Rafe, is a little too close to the smarmy rival Harry Flynn from Uncharted 2, up to and including an early flashback level where he and Nate are working together. The actor does some good work displaying the guy's barely contained psychopathy beneath his crocodile smiles, though). What's curious about this interplay is how Sam's exactly as dexterous and knowledgeable as his brother, leading to this sense of rivalry that never turns bitter or adversarial: the two enjoy each other's company for the most part, especially after so long apart, and the game does a great job of depicting them and their relationship at various stages of their life, including their childhoods. I feel that there is a little bit of retconning going on, but it's also possible that they've been cleverly and carefully filling in gaps in Nathan's backstory that just so happen to include this brother we've never heard about previously.
I left a half-complete observation dangling earlier, about how the game feels different. I think it's a greater degree of dramatic tension, presumably brought over from Naughty Dog's work with the dour The Last of Us. it's not quite Oscar material, but between the more personal story and the more realistic faces, it's been less the usual genre-fare treasure-hunting action movie with quips and explosions (plenty of both though) and more about the quiet contemplation and examination of its characters. I dunno. The pace feels a little weird, but not in a bad way. More in a "hey, there's nothing shooting us and we aren't sliding down a mud bank to our deaths right now, let's talk about our feelings a little" sense, though not nearly as melodramatically trite as I'm making it sound. There's a point where you reach a certain location and you can just sit and chew the fat with Sam Drake for a while, discussing the future and how things might've shaken out differently had the duo not become treasure hunters. Scenes like that add a lot, certainly more than spending ten minutes running around trying to find cover while dealing with waves of armored, shotgun-wielding goons.
Neither of the brothers can identify this pirate. Ron Gilbert would be so disappointed.
I'm dying to found out how it ends - literally, since the gunfights haven't been a walk in the park even on the medium difficulty setting - and I'll be carving out some time this weekend to see it through. After that, I've got some prep work for my recurring features and then it's onto either Deus Ex: Mankind Divided or Dishonored 2. Of course, I might be so utterly sick of sneaking my way past potential gunfights that I'll play something else entirely, like any of the dozen JRPGs I've been meaning to get around to. Have a good weekend, folks.
As is customary, we - that is to say, the general internet gaming discussion scene to which I tenuously belong - begin every year with the Awesome Games Done Quick charity livestream event. The 2017 event will begin very shortly, around midday on Sunday the 8th. Also customary is how I'll prepare for each event beforehand by running down their week-long schedules and work to ensure we have presentable wiki pages for every featured game, since the event will be broadcast on Twitch which in turn uses our wiki for its meta information. Besides a few exceptions when it comes to fan-games and free browser stuff that our wiki doesn't support, we're once again covered this year. Feel free to stop by if there's a game being played you want to learn more about.
Performing this task also gives me insight to the more curious and esoteric games we can expect to see between the usual Castlevania and Metroid races, or watching Ocarina of Time get obliterated with its various warp glitches. Watching the streams is a great means to wile away a few unfocused days, but at the same time a lot of it can get awfully familiar. That's where the following list comes in.
I've picked ten games that will be covered in next week's event that, in some small way, reflect both what the event is about and the depths of obscurity that these streamers plumb for their next speedrun challenge. The streamers are keenly aware that the event should balance old favorites and new material to keep both casual stream visitors and long-time donors happy, and calling some of these games esoteric is an understatement. Here's just a small sampling of just how bizarre this event can be, especially in the wee hours when no-one's paying much attention.
(All included scheduled air times are in GMT. Just subtract five hours for EST and eight for PST. Keep in mind the schedules will likely shift around a lot.)
Hydra Castle Labyrinth
In some ways, Hydra Castle Labyrinth is the perfect obscure AGDQ game: a doujin freeware homage to a Japan-only action RPG that few in the west remember. That RPG would be Knightmare II: Maze of Galious, which is also what the infamously obtuse SpaceWhipper La-Mulana was roughly based on (La-Mulana, or the recent Steam remake of it, is also getting a speedrun this year). It's worth remembering that AGDQ doesn't discriminate between major AAA releases, some of which came out as recently as last year, or Indie games, or free browser and fan games. Sometimes it's neat to see a game you've never seen before get a speedrun and then realize you're only a few free (legal) clicks away from trying it out yourself. Case in point: try the (English patched) game here.
(Scheduled air time: 11:30 AM, Monday 9th.)
Tetris with Cardcaptor Sakura: Eternal Heart
Tetris is an evergreen presence in this industry, and has been ever since its invention in the mid-80s and the messy string of attempts to commercialize it for consoles and home computers that soon followed. At this point, everyone's played the game enough to know it works, though possibly not to the extent that they can "Tetris Grand Master" it with the instant-drop T-spins and what have you. So it's cases like the PS1 game Tetris with Cardcaptor Sakura: Eternal Heart, which more or less resembles Tetris 2's Puzzle Mode but with awkwardly cut-out Cardcaptor Sakura characters in short looped animations standing around on the side, that make an impression amidst the many traditional takes on the Soviet block-stacking game. It's a creatively bankrupt concept, especially compared to site favorite Tetris Battle Gaiden, but one that should make for some interesting voiceover commentary. Specifically, why the runner chose this cheap license tie-in to run instead of any of the more serious Tetris games out there.
(Scheduled air time: 3:00 AM, Tuesday 10th.)
Shippuu! Iron Leaguer
GDQ started running games for the original Game Boy semi-recently, with last Summer's Bubble Ghost run by Protomagicalgirl being a highlight, and that meant a whole new library of bizarre Japan-only license games to draw from. The benefit of running a game like Shippuu! Iron Leaguer, a platformer based on an anime about sports-themed mecha, is that I can't imagine there's a huge amount of competition for the world record. Besides the fact that you can play as either a baseball mecha or a karate mecha, the game has very little to distinguish it from the thousand other anime-licensed platformers for the Game Boy.
I'll mock the SNES library whenever I have the opportunity, but I think the Game Boy saw even more zero-effort licensed platformers.
(Scheduled air time: 8:00 AM, Tuesday 10th.)
Dark Messiah of Might and Magic
This one's not particularly obscure, but I don't recall seeing a speedrun for it in years. Anyone who's played Dark Messiah of Might and Magic has a fairly good idea what the runner will use to quickly dispatch most of the enemy encounters in the game, simply because the weapon in question is so devastatingly effective: the player character's "Duke Boot" of a kick. One of the game's selling points at launch was the introduction of "environment kills": using the game's physics engine, the player could launch enemies at conveniently located wall spikes or down cliffs to their immediate death rather than wearing them down with a more conventional offensive, and no weapon generated more knockback than the not-so-modest kick. A player could feasibly run through the game punting enemies into all these traps and never touch the elaborate systems for upgraded weapons and magic at all. It's a speedrun I'm looking forward to watching, at any rate.
(Scheduled air time: 7:50 PM, Tuesday 10th.)
Cobra Triangle
Cobra Triangle sits within a substantial "NES block" this year, which also features the likes of Kabuki Quantum Fighter, which Jeff recently streamed for his Home Game show, priceless obscurity Little Samson and perennial favorite River City Ransom. I picked Cobra Triangle for this slot for two reasons. The first is that this little isometric boat racing/action game is a truly unusual one, in that the game is built around missions that feel completely independent from each other in a gameplay sense: besides the fact that you're always driving a speedboat around, the objective can be anything from a race to an arena full of enemies to escorting mines around to disarm them to a battle with a sea serpent. The second reason is that it's another favorite of Jeff's, and I always like when a treasured game from the duders' pasts suddenly rises in the public consciousness (see also: Windjammers).
(Scheduled air time: 9:30 AM, Wednesday 11th.)
Castlevania: Rondo of Blood
Naturally, Castlevania: Rondo of Blood is well known by premium members of this site at least, as it was one of the pleasant surprises to come from Vinny's "VinnyVania" series. Vinny never got around to playing much of Maria's route, however: the pint-sized deuteragonist plays a lot differently than the traditional Belmont hero Richter, and a truly gifted player can really break the game wide open with Maria's array of summoned creatures to call upon. This run should be a great way to revisit that game and enjoy its music while watching a twelve-year old girl absolutely annihilate the worst the netherworld has to offer.
(Scheduled air time: 8:40 PM, Wednesday 11th.)
Town & Country 2: Thrilla's Surfari
Town & Country 2: Thrilla's Surfari is one of those games that I had no idea existed, and was shocked to discover is actually a sequel to Town & Country Surf Designs: Wood & Water Rage. Wood & Water Rage was a barely competent tie-in game using the mascots of the titular surfboard and clothing manufacturer, a Skate or Die also-ran that managed to be even harder to control. That it saw a sequel featuring a proto-Funky Kong gorilla hero "Thrilla" who chases after a random witch doctor after he kidnaps his (human) girlfriend is some mildly disturbing Adventure Island nonsense that leads to even more impossible-to-navigate skateboarding/surfboarding-based action stages across the dark continent. If anything, I'm curious to see how anyone can actually beat the game, let alone do so in a timely fashion.
(Scheduled air time: 8:50 AM, Thursday 12th.)
Catechumen
Every year, we get a few runners that reach deep into the (ironically) godforsaken market of shoddily constructed Christian video games. Some, like the notorious The Zoo Race, are so rough that you sit and marvel at how something so amateurish could possibly make it to retail... or at least you might before Steam threw out anything approaching quality control and started publishing a hundred janky asset flips per hour. Conversely, Catechumen is a surprisingly competent (at least comparatively speaking) FPS game in the Hexen mold: you have a lot of weaponry from the antiquity age, many of which can shoot holy energy that instantly converts demon-worshipping heathens into penitent believers, as per that Flanders-approved gag video game from The Simpsons. It might not be particularly remarkable outside of its Christian messaging, but at this point anything's going to be better than The Zoo Race...
(Scheduled air time: 10:20 AM, Thursday 12th.)
Refunct
Refunct is a Steam game I'd never heard of before working on this list, but immediately went and bought for next to nothing in the Steam sale once I'd done a little research for its wiki page. It's a first-person platformer that presents itself as a no-stress, no-enemies type of chill out game where you simply have to navigate around a world of monolithic blocks rising from the sea to reach the very top, occasionally solving puzzles. My intent is to play it for my new "Indie Game of the Week" feature before the speedrun begins early Friday morning. Whether on here or on the AGDQ streams, anticipate seeing more of the game in due time.
(Scheduled air time: 6:40 AM, Friday 13th.)
Contra Block
Konami's Contra games were, once upon a time, the go-to series for balls-hard run-and-gun action. The NES original was challenging enough without the thirty lives cheat, and every subsequent game seems to have built on that original's "not for babies" reputation and made itself even more difficult. This block features Contra, Super C and Contra 4 (though apparently not the third game, Contra III: The Alien Wars, though there is a set-up block afterwards into which it might feasibly sneak in) and it could be worth sticking around to watch some world-class Contra speedruns. There's Metal Slug 3 directly preceding it too, if you wanted a warm-up.
If there's a few great recurring elements across many Indie games, it's doing a lot with a little in graphical terms. No shade meant to Messhof, the developer pair behind Flywrench (and also the similarly stylish Nidhogg!); if anything, the game's abstract look ends up being just as visually arresting as anything more aesthetically elaborate. As the inimitable Austin Walker might say, the game's got a look. From what I've been able to gather from the story, the player is moving through the solar system re-establishing satellite signals by completing some hacker-ish computing, visually represented in-game as a little rectangle flying through a lot of colored barriers. You start at Pluto and make your way inwards, stopping at every planet for a bit of amusing new-age psychobabble from your mysterious companion/boss/partner and a whole new set of courses to complete.
I accidentally screencapped the one time this guy made any sense.
The player can change into three colors based on pressing two buttons: red, which provides a small thrust upwards, successive taps of which generate the primary means of propulsion; green, which causes the shape to spin wildly but offers some invulnerability; and white, the shape's neutral state. By quickly changing one's color to match the barriers, Ikaruga-style, the player will pass harmlessly through. It's all very intuitive, and the game moves at a clip with the type of rewarding cyclical flow clearly inspired by a game like Super Meat Boy - which, once upon a time, featured an early example of Flywrench's quadrilateral hacker (not that one) as a hidden character. You jump into a level, die a few times until you figure out the trick or the precise timing to fling yourself towards the exit, and continue to the next without a moment's pause and without the trippy background EDM skipping a beat. As you pass by each planet in the solar system, new obstacle types are introduced from new different colored lasers to moving hazards, but it doesn't take long for the player to take them in stride. For the first eight planets, the music and the gameplay flow combine together to create this wonderful instinctual stream of obstacle, experimentation, resolution.
And then you get to the planet Mercury.
I won't denigrate Flywrench's developer too much - this design flaw is hardly unique to this game, and it's always super difficult to get a flow like this right due to the wildly varying skill levels of the players, myself sitting somewhere in the middle - but whenever I play a masocore game like Super Meat Boy or Flywrench or countless others, the harsh difficulty is mitigated by the short size of the levels and how they can bolster positive reinforcement by ensuring each roadblock is only transitory until the player can intuit the right timing. However, you will eventually hit a wall that completely interrupts that flow and betrays what made the rest of the game so appealing. In almost every case, it's when the levels become too large and the previously irrelevant lack of checkpoints instead becomes a major detriment. A perfectly designed Flywrench level should require the player to surpass four or five challenging obstacles at most: I pulled that number out of nowhere, but I'd estimate it as the rough average for most of Flywrench's bite-size courses. Because the game requires a lot of precision, often under the duress of a timed switch or a quickly-moving lethal barrier bearing down on you, a player is only likely to have the concentration to perfectly nail a small number of obstacles before reaching the exit and having a new batch of precision challenges to overcome.
You can turn down the 'VFX' - those little puffs of cloud you leave behind - to compensate a laggy framerate, but that seemed to speed everything up too. How is my PC so bad it can't even get colored lines right?
I ought to point out that it's distressingly easy, due to how precise the player needs to be with the game's floaty momentum-based physics and shape-switching timing involved, to crash and burn in even the most innocuous situations. If you need to build a little speed by tapping the red "flap" button, you might end up pressing the button twice in too quick a succession, launching you directly into the ceiling. Usually whenever this happens, it's never a big deal: you automatically respawn back at the beginning of the course with only seconds of progress lost, and you can spend the next few moments getting the timing perfect until you're right back in the flow again and moving along to the next challenge.
Yet, when I reached Mercury's eighteenth level and even before then, the number of these consecutive precision challenges in a single stage rose from four or five to something closer to eleven or twelve. It might not sound like much, but getting the timing down to move past all of those barriers in quick succession begins to come down to luck or muscle memory, rather than skill. When you reach this point, you're either a godlike player who has been sleepwalking through the game so far, or you've been moving at a reassuringly steady pace and have suddenly hit this wall at full speed. I spent more time on this single course than I did for the previous eight planets combined. I eventually decided that nothing was worth the aggravation and wasted time, and turned the game off. I got shit to do, y'all.
Eventually, one day, a masocore action game that relies this much on creating a pleasurable flow of small obstacle courses completed in moderately quick succession won't fall at the last hurdle by arbitrarily spiking the difficulty level by several magnitudes by gluing together what would normally be two or three courses into one gigantic metaphorical fallen tree trunk in the middle of the road. The type of metaphorical flora that causes you to brake violently and dedicate the next hour of your once-pleasant journey to find a way around it. Until that time, when that acme of a masocore game finally transpires, I'm done with any game that fits the description.
Rating: 5 out of 5 (Just Pluto to Venus). 2 out of 5 (+ Mercury). (Yes, I am being a baby about this.) (Yes, I will probably suck it up and return to Mercury-18 because goshdangit was I so close to the end.) (This game is great, though, for reals. Worth checking out. But, you know, maybe quit before Mercury.)
Stay the hell away from Mercury. Earth's better. They have pizza here.
Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done, five games at a time. Be sure to check out the Case File Repositoryfor more details and a full list of games/links!
The "From Small Beginnings" subtitle is me being cute, because there's actually two games in this first batch of five that were developed by FromSoftware: the company behind everyone's favorite masochism simulators, Souls. The first of these two games, and the oldest PS2 title I own, is Eternal Ring.
Eternal Ring feels like a streamlined variant of From's "King's Field"; a series of first-person dungeon crawlers with a real-time combat system and a whole lot of animation priority to get used to. Of note is Eternal Ring's magic and stat progression systems, which rely on an immense number of rings that the player can find and equip. Ring effects run the gamut of fireball spells and the like to various passive stat boosts. Many of the rings need to be crafted first, combining blank rings with elemental gems you acquire from enemies and chests.
Of the many pre-Souls From RPGs, Eternal Ring's one of the more accessible. It's short and not particularly complex - the suspicion is that FromSoftware built it as a tech demo for future projects, and rushed it out of the door as a Japanese PS2 launch title - but it's not plagued by the horrific difficulty, lack of explanation or intensely slow pace that inflicts some of From's other early games. I have some affection for it, as a slightly strange and unconventional RPG that hinted at From's future brilliance in that (king's) field, but it doesn't hang with the many more competent games in my PS2 library. Eliminated.
Of course, if we're talking about the king of PS2 tech demos sold as retail games, we have to give that accolade to the firework-popping Fantavision. Fantavision, like Rez or Star Fox 64, is a high score-chasing shoot 'em up that relies a lot on marking several targets in quick succession and detonating them simultaneously, creating chains of combos. It's easy enough to start playing the game, using the then-unfamiliar analog stick to cycle the cursor around clockwise or anticlockwise to the next available target and triggering a series of colorful explosions, but it takes a little while longer to used to the game's pace and the way its scoring system racks up multipliers.
That said, Fantavision is incredibly short and, while a chill-ass game to unwind with, is the traditional underwhelming launch game that really only exists to get people in game stores to marvel at its graphics and sound quality and convince them to invest in the new platform. It's showy and brief, much like the fireworks it features. Eliminated.
Man, that weird intro with the nuclear family sitting around the ol' radiation box to play Fantavision. The game had a look.
Relying on tactics that helped launch the original PlayStation, the PS2 launched with a couple of fighter games that would show off the tech and give players something to hammer away at until the more substantial games showed up. No disrespect to the genre, of course: at this time it was well into its heyday, and the Dead or Alive series in particular has plenty of fans. I just don't even remember where I picked this up. I've never been much of a fighter guy - they require a certain amount of dedication and memorization, and I got enough of that in school.
I will say that DOA2 still looks great, even now. PS2 games can look a bit rough these days because they weren't in that process of finding their way in a brand new polygonal world, like many PS1 games were during that generation. Instead, most PS2 games just kind of look like PS3 and PS4 games, only way worse. None of that awkward charm, let's say. There are exceptions though, should the player find some way to up-rez them, and DOA2 is among those. Yet, we are talking about a game that looked just as good on the Dreamcast (debatably) and looked even better in the Arcade and in DOA: Ultimate for the OG Xbox, the latter of which cheated a little by remaking the game in the DOA3 engine. Even if I held a lot of affection for this particular entry in Itagaki's long-running showcase of state-of-the-art boob tech, there are better versions out there. Eliminated.
Something sinister about making underdressed women fight in the snow. Also, the real thing isn't this blurry, I'm just getting hella motion blur on these screenshots.
Likewise, Tekken Tag was one of those tentpoles meant to support the rest of the PS2 launch library. If none of the new properties failed to ignite a spark, then a high-quality arcade conversion of the most recent Tekken would suffice. It introduces two-on-two combat, usually a SNK staple, and the ridiculous "Tekken Bowling" mode.
I care even less about Tekken than I do about Dead or Alive, and this is another game that seems to have found its way into my collection through no effort on my part. Eliminated.
Evergrace is more Souls-ian than most early From RPGs, being a third-person action game, but where I credited Eternal Ring with not being stupid difficult, stupid obtuse and stupid slow, Evergrace is all of the above. My initial interest in the PS2 was motivated by the impressive assortment of RPGs for the PlayStation 1 - games like Final Fantasy VII-IX and Tactics, Grandia, Vagrant Story, Suikoden 1 & 2 and many others. In contrast, the early PS2 RPGs were generally garbage on wheels, and yet I kept snatching them up whenever I saw them.
Still, Evergrace did exhibit a few hints at future Souls greatness. For one, you could equip your character - either the male lead Darius or the female lead Sharline - with armor and weapons and have them appear on the character model, which wasn't common at the time. Another aspect was how upgradeable armor and weapons determined your character's strength rather than stat upgrades from leveling up. Even so, it's a game I gave up relatively early even during a time when I had little else to play. I've yet to properly revisit it. Eliminated.
The game is actually pretty ugly even without my help.
Results
After reviewing this initial batch of five PlayStation 2 games, we're 0 for 5 for potential Top Shelf entries. Huh, and I thought it would be difficult to narrow this list down. I suppose it will be once we're past the dodgy launch games.
Welcome to The Top Shelf, a new feature I'm starting this year that will - if I've done my math right - persist throughout the first eight months of 2017.
What a PS2 looks like. Hey, it's been a while.
Like many of you, I've managed to accrue a video game collection over the years and have reached the point where the quantity of plastic cases has far outpaced the amount of available shelf space. As I stare at the disheveled niche in question, and how I'll probably need to do something with all these DVD cases too, my goal for the present is to pull down what is currently five entire rows dedicated to the Sony PlayStation 2 alone and place the majority of those in plastic bin storage, in the tried and true Gerstmann style. However, I'd like for there to remain a single row on the shelf dedicated to the PS2 games that have and will continue to mean the most to me. I can then start surrounding it with all the fair-to-middling PS3, 360, Wii, Wii U and PS4 games I own, thus perpetuating the cycle for another generation or two.
Artist's impression of 'the shelf'. This wasn't necessary, was it?
Even though we're talking about a single shelf in a cluttered room, I'm not going to half-ass this process. I'm going to use this feature to run down every PS2 game I own and attempt to narrow down what is presently close to two hundred titles to a much slimmer 44: the number of cases I can reliably fit on a single row of my bookshelf, according to this tape measure I found that uses colors instead of inches and centimeters. Wait, I guess this is a fruit roll-up. At any rate, as I reminisce on each game, occasionally booting them up for a refresher course, I'll finish each appraisal with one of three "fates":
Approved games are those rare few that are automatically added to the final 44, no questions asked. They'll get their due process like any other game, but there's no way in Hell that they aren't one of my forty-four favorites.
Considered games get entered into the second round of eliminations, as they are games that I have fond memories of or haven't played sufficiently to render a fair verdict. I'll be coming back around to narrow this selection down further.
Eliminated games are those that I've determined are not top shelf material. Whether they were crap games to begin with, or didn't age well, or are simply games that don't mean a whole lot to me, they've been kicked to the curb and will either enter storage or permanent removal from my collection tout de suite. Turns out my storage space is limited too. As is my patience.
There's an additional modifier as well: the Exclusivity Tilt. PlayStation 2 games that were exclusive to the platform will be given a little extra weight when it comes time to choose whether to move them forward or eliminate them. Hard to make the argument that a certain PS2 game is essential when, chances are, there's a graphically superior OG Xbox, Dreamcast or PC equivalent out there. Ditto for later enhanced remakes or remasters of games. However, this tilt does apply to games which have since been added to the online "PS2 Classics" range for PS3/4/Vita, as those were left untouched but for trophy support and the occasional framerate tweak.
The First Round
You can see how the first, and longest, round is getting on by consulting the table below. (Bold entries are those that have moved on to the second round, while italicized games have been eliminated.)
This table is for those that made their way to the second round. Rather than five or ten games to a single blog, each of the second round qualifiers receives its own spotlight entry. (Bold entries are those that have moved on to the final round, while italicized games were eliminated in this stage of intense scrutiny):
For the sake of keeping this collection of games somewhat varied, I'm only choosing one game per franchise. Therefore, with this round, I'm taking every series that has two or more games in close contention for my favorite and paring it down to a single choice for the shelf. There'll be some hard decisions to make here, as I compare and contrast the multiple PS2 entries in franchises like Final Fantasy, Silent Hill, Onimusha, Ratchet & Clank, and more.
Currently, you can see all the first and second round qualifiers in this ever-updated list of finalists. Once the third round has been concluded, the remaining shelf spaces will be taken by whatever tops this list.
The Top Shelf
And finally, we have the forty-four victors that earned spaces on the shelf, in alphabetical order (bold entries are those that were immediately approved from the first round of eliminations):
Hey paisanos, and merry non-denominational holiday or regular-ass Sunday to you all, or what's left of it. Just because this is Christmas Day - or equivalent - doesn't mean that the Sunday Summaries ever stops. Except, maybe it does. Before I get into that though, please know that I've uploaded both my 2016 Game of the Year top ten list over here, and my usual comics-heavy awards blog over yonder. It was a joy to do the latter especially; I kind of feel like my stickpeople joke comics became a little played out, but it's fun to get back into the cartoonist mindset on occasion.
Anyway, to news: This will be the final Sunday Summaries. When I first conceived this feature, it was simply a means to force myself to write something, anything, that week, preferably on the games I'd played. Other recurring sections, like discussing the week's new releases or what I'd been up to on the wiki, were experiments that I intended to change up throughout the year but... well, inertia's a hell of a thing, it turns out. After fifty-two episodes of this lil' zine of mine, it's time to put it away and consider new alternative writing exercises for 2017 and beyond. My features generally don't last an entire year, so I'm making this sound way more mournful than I mean to. Folk weren't really into it - it can be a bit self-obsessed, if I'm being frank - and so it's naturally run its course.
Instead, let's talk about what features I'll have next year to replace it:
The first is a weekly article on an Indie game I've been playing that week, as a means to do something about this ridiculous Steam backlog of mine. This isn't intended to replace the May Madness/Mastery month-long feature, which will still happen, but a means to push me to play more games next year and continue writing about them. It's been a bad habit of mine since diaper times to start some ridiculously long RPG and put the blinders on until it is eventually complete, and that left very little to discuss in these weekly round-ups as I entered the fourth or fifth week with the same game. I don't expect these "Indie of the Week" blogs to be particularly long - probably around 500-1000 words, like the game-specific round-ups below - but if I can just take fifty-two games off my "Backlog" folder in my Steam library, I'll consider it a success. They don't have to be good Indie games even. In fact, it'd probably be easier if they weren't; that way I won't still be playing them the following week.
The second is a fun little project I've been devising inspired by TheAVClub's "Binge and Purge" feature by Josh Modell. In that series, Josh scanned through his entire record collection looking for areas where he could prune it down for the sake of his diminished storage space. He discussed each band that is represented in his collection, his memories and/or relationship with their music, and his decision to purge some or all of their albums from his music library. I'm also looking to free up some shelf space, Gerstmann style, by putting away my ludicrous number of PlayStation 2 games, but I'd like to leave a solitary row on my gameshelf for what I consider to be my all-time favorites for that system. I want that row to represent the best of the PS2, and what that system meant to me, and that means putting aside a hell of a lot of PS2 games that - in the grand scheme of things - don't really mean a whole lot to me at all, especially years after the fact. I'm still tinkering around with the name - "The PlayStation 2 Ark" or "The Top-Shelf" - but the goal is to make that weekly as well, and perhaps process anywhere between five and ten games depending on whether I decide to build each entry around a theme or stick to a fixed order, like chronological by release or alphabetical by name.
The third is... well, I'm just calling it the "All-New Saturday Summaries" for the time being. Like this Sunday version, but nowhere near as long. Just going to pare it down to a few links to my week's writing and maybe a few words about other games I've played that week. You know, brief, like this feature was always supposed to be. I'm switching it to Saturday to time it with ZombiePie's Community Spotlights.
Despite this vast increase in the amount of weekly writing, I hope to still continue with one-offs, lists and reviews as the fancy takes me. I'm also taking a few lessons to heart from some prominent critics who have had some strong words to say about the current state of games criticism, and working on increasing how much I read next year as well. I can't really consider myself a writer without taking in far more literature than I do presently. Headlander and SOMA have awoken in me in a peculiar curiosity in classic speculative sci-fi, especially the genre-defining cornerstones, so that'll be my focus for a while. Maybe I can turn all that into a feature too. Going all "Giant Bomb Book Club" might put me out of my depth a little, critically-speaking, but it couldn't hurt to try at least. Who knows, reading up on dystopian fiction like 1984, Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 might help prepare me for the next four years.
And on that optimistic note, let's move onto the final iterations of the New Games! and Wiki! segments:
New Games!
Turns out people don't release games on Christmas Day too often, nor during the lead up to New Year's. There's nothing scheduled on consoles for this week (though of course Steam has like a thousand) so instead I'm going to briefly talk about all the 2017 games I'm looking forward to. Release dates subject (and very likely) to change:
January's going to be insanely busy, dropping a gigantic pile of games that didn't quite make it out in time this year. The international versions of Tales of Berseria, Yakuza 0 and the 3DS port of Dragon Quest VIII. We'll also finally see what Gravity Rush 2 looks like, and I might take a long hard glare at Kingdom Hearts HD II.8 Final Chapter Prologue to figure out what's even going on with that title.
February will give us another localization in the demonic guise of Berserk and the Band of the Hawk, a product that flies in the face of all convention by making me excited for a new licensed Musou game. We also have: the online Ubisoft brawler For Honor; Nioh, the Souls-like game from Team Ninja that's been in development forever; and, right at the end of the month if there's any hope, the E3 darling open-world robot hunting sim Horizon: Zero Dawn and the long-awaited Planescape successor Torment: Tides of Numenera. Those two are out on the same day even, so that'll be fun for reviewer outlets.
March opens with a bang, giving us NieR: Automata. I've yet to try the demo - I'm all in regardless, so I'll just wait for the full game - but it's easily one of the top three games I'm looking forward to next year. The rest of that month seems relatively sedate, but there is a Danganronpa compilation for PS4 that I might consider getting, since I've yet to fork out for either on Steam.
The rest of the year's releases are a bit cloudy right now, at least according to Wikipedia's page on 2017 in Video Gaming, so here's a quick list of some other big targets:
The Bard's Tale IV: One of two games I Kickstarted that will be released next year, so here's hoping it manages to prop up the classic series with enough modern quality of life concessions. I hope to play inXile's earlier reboot, Wasteland 2, sometime next year before Bard's Tale IV is due out in what they're anticipating will be an October release.
Yooka-Laylee: This would be the other Kickstarter recipient of mine. I won't be getting the Wii U version, to perhaps no-one's surprise but my own, but I think I'll be just fine with a PS4 version instead. I'm very excited for this one, as evinced by the fact that I "bought" it eighteen months early.
Persona 5: Holy shit you guys, Persona 5 is coming out in America and Europe next year. It has to, right? No more delays, it's been out in Japan for months already. I've been jamming out to the soundtrack, rewatching the trailers, trying to pull myself away from any spoilers coming from the Japanese-fluent crowd. That's going to be a hard one to top next year.
Dragon Quest Heroes II: DQH surprised me by how much I enjoyed it. Turns out that Musou games make perfectly decent action RPGs if you bother to add the RPG part. I've always liked the world of Dragon Quest in general too; even if I'm not the biggest Toriyama mark, that series' affinity with puns makes me look like a humorless prig.
A Hat in Time: Before Yooka-Laylee, A Hat in Time promised to be the vanguard of a new wave of Indie throwback projects which would finally take on the 3D platformers of the N64 era, rather than sticking with the 2D puzzle-platformers forever. It's had enough time in the oven, so I'm hoping it gives the self-proclaimed "Rare-vival platformer" above a run (and jump) for its money.
Divinity: Original Sin II: I get occasional updates on this one from former GameSpot EiC Kevin VanOrd, and I'm looking forward to an even bigger and better version of one of 2014's best CRPGs. That is, if it gets completed in 2017.
Mass Effect: Andromeda: We know almost nothing about it, but the gameplay trailers are starting to show up. I hope that means a release soon, maybe even in the first half of next year. I always loved the planet exploration of Mass Effect, even as they reduced that aspect to a mini-game and then an even weaker mini-game. Here's hoping it turns out to be the second coming of Star Control 2 I've always wanted from the series.
Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom: I liked the first enough to realize that, while it had room to grow and a lot of unnecessary padding to take out, the idea of merging a Level-5 open-world RPG with Studio Ghibli level production work is an entirely sound one. I don't care for the monster raising though, so if there's even more of that this time I might be out.
No wiki work this week. I intend to get a huge amount done very soon, with all the GOTY podcasts, and have that Awesome Games Done Quick project in the bag before it begins on the 7th. Even if I don't make it before then, I'll keep working on it as it's airing.
I've already pretty much outlined what's to come wiki-wise next year in other recent Sunday Summaries, but in a nutshell I'm looking to fully complete the Super Nintendo Entertainment System library on this site's wiki, including all Super Famicom-only and Europe-only releases, all Satellaview releases (that I can dig up), all SNES Virtual Console releases and any other outliers. I'm also planning to do the same for the NES up to 1990: I've been working on pages up to late 1989 already, but there's a lot that still need the right release info, header images, etc. I also want to go back and give the Master System pages a quick touch-up, and maybe also the first few years of Genesis up to 1990 to match where I'm at with the NES.
As for less concrete plans, I've got designs on completing the rest of the PC Engine CD-ROM library at some point, working on all the pages for the Arcade Archive ports that Jeff is in the process of cataloguing via Quick Looks and - maybe, just maybe if I get everything else done - I'll start on the Super Nintendo's successor: everyone's favorite box o' fog that is the Nintendo 64.
It's going to be a packed year for wiki editing, yet all the same I'm scaling back how often I discuss the wiki considerably. From now on, it'll just be the big round-ups I put together whenever I complete a project. I realize a lot of these old games are only interesting to me, but that doesn't mean I can't keep reaching for the site to adopt a stronger game historian bent. I know Jeff's with me on this, if no-one else.
Doom!
I jumped the (big) (fucking) gun on my discussion on Doom due to all this GOTY business, so my views on this excellent reboot/remake from id Software are already out there for you to peruse. Essentially, what I like most about Doom is how it incorporates a huge number of distinct mechanics and features with the sole purpose of making this Doom feel more like the original. As I said in my GOTY list, it's like investing millions in modern technology to get Coca Cola to taste like it did when you were a kid.
Sometimes a reboot/remake/modernized throwback will find a happy bridge between the old and new, as was the case with Legend of Grimrock 2, Lumo and Wolfenstein: The New Order, the latter of which definitely felt like a precursor to this game. They do this by focusing on what worked best from those games and reintroduce them in the reboot, but in a way that mitigates or removes entirely the problematic archaic design decisions that accompanied them. People's memories of the favorite games of their youth seem strong, but what tends to persist is only the good and very little of the bad. To honor those rose-tinted memories, modern designers have to work their asses off to ensure that only the good is carried forward through time and the rest of the chaff abandoned to history. Fortunately, we have years of game design evolution and more than a few talented designers who know how to apply it, and that's how we end up with games like this 2016 version of Doom.
Doom has the countenance of a modern shooter. It has a sort of grimy, lived-in feel, even among the UAC's pearl-white corridors. Mars is particularly brown-red, and Hell a different shade of red-brown. Yet in some ways its visual design is still stuck in the 90s, purposefully and happily so, by the way its many power-ups, ammo types and health items all glow with distinct binary colors to highlight what they are and what purpose they serve even if you happen to be several dozen feet away. The enemies initially have a sort of disappointing generic alien look to them - the Hell Knights in particular look like beefy boys with xenomorph heads - but others, like the Revenants, Mancubuses (Macubi?) and Cacodemons, look almost exactly how you'd want them to in 3D, retaining the cartoonish malice of their MS-DOS forebears as well the gratuitous way they violently explode upon death.
It has jumping and scaling platforms, which isn't something the old Doom technically did but is used here to get around how old Doom would still resort to a lot of "platforming" type sequences, like maneuvering across a narrow walkway or running fast enough to clear small gaps between podiums rising from lava (or less wholesome fluids). It's a means of hiding items and secrets across a level that's more naturalistic than having everything at ground floor behind secret walls, or stopping the player moving upwards unless they're on an elevator, staircase or incline.
It has NPCs and NPC chatter, but all except the pragmatic and morally ambiguous UAC chairborg Samuel Hayden are as one-note as you'd hope. The station's AI is an unfailingly polite supergenius, the UAC's head scientist is a devil-worshipping crackpot, the Doom Marine is entirely silent except for his growls (and also a millennia-old warrior avenger kept in stasis for Hell's own protection? Way to write a fitting backstory, id) and everyone else might well be fodder for the demons or yourself, and were treated as much by UAC even before they were turned into undead peons or demon food.
The game's combat feels modern in the sense that you'll rarely see an enemy until you reach an "arena room", at which point you'll be attacked by waves upon waves of them. Yet, the Doom feel is still here by how you'll often be required to crowd control and strafe around from chokepoint to chokepoint, shooting enemies as they close the distance and snaking around their slow-moving fire. There are eight weapon types (though really only five, as there are three weapon pairs that share an ammo type) that the player will switch between as their ammo runs out or distance becomes a factor, and both the player and the demons move at such a fast clip that it practically requires you to be constantly in motion while shooting lest any of them get too close. There's a few powerful alternative firing modes that require you slow down or stand still, and they feel so limiting that the extra firepower scarcely seems worth it.
Most brilliant are how the chainsaw and the BFG work, since the game couldn't exactly leave either of them out. The BFG draws from a special and very finite ammo pool, and has the same effect it did in the original of instantly destroying everything weaker than a boss that is only vaguely near its trajectory. The chainsaw, however, also uses a very finite ammo source but gives you a huge stack of every ammo type in the game once you kill something with it, the intent being to use it as a last ditch effort once you've run out of everything else. The chainsaw has the draw of instantly killing any foe, but the downside that stronger foes take up more of the ammo source. A strategically savvy player might save it for weak opponents which don't cost as much chainsaw fuel to use, but still give out an equivalent amount of regular weapon ammo, though it might be the case that they might really need to take out a Baron of Hell in a hurry too and extra ammo's more of a secondary need.
Likewise, the game introduces a very modern video game concept - showy "glory kill" execution moves, which requires the player get in close and use the melee skill when an enemy is stunned - and uses that to enhance the game's flow by causing enemies to spit out health items after it "gloriously" dies. This helps mitigate the problem that is health pick-ups in a modern shooter context, as Doom tosses out regenerating health entirely (it wouldn't work anyway, since there's no cover system to hide behind either as your bar refills), and presents an instinctive risk vs reward system that encourages the player to involve themselves with the game's gore and more gore aesthetic.
Another modern concession is the great idea to bring back the "skill missions" from Wolfenstein: The New Order, where the player could upgrade their weapons with found collectibles, but could only upgrade them to their peak by completing milestone achievements which are related in some way to what you want to improve. Likewise, the player can acquire runes from difficult little timed challenges - like those in Bayonetta, say - that provide various passive boosts like longer stagger time for foes or armor boosts dropping alongside health after a glory kill. These, too, had little milestone achievements to pursue that would make them more effective. In having these challenges, the player can enter a regular encounter with a room full of enemies with a particular goal in mind, setting up combo kills or headshots or what have you as the milestones require. While it might seem limiting to force the player to pursue certain strategies while playing, rather than go fully freestyle every time, the variation involved with these milestone challenges actually forces the player to train with different guns and different alternative firing modes and give players more of a focus for the otherwise overwhelming fast and wild free-for-all combat, whereas conversely the freestyle approach might lead to more indecision and dithering.
I'm not sure I could fully enumerate, or even fully grasp, how many smart ways Doom merges together the old and new and still feel like classic Doom with none of the downsides. I think that, like the original Doom, a lot of very intelligent people worked on this to make the seemingly impossible possible. Along with Hitman, it's one of the more impressive game design feats to come out of 2016, and one I'll still be scratching my head about in years to come.
[Images to come later. This update was a late one, y'all. Happy holidays, once again.]
Welcome, all, to the 2016 Mento VGAs! I'm always trying to one-up my competition, Geoff Keighley's The Game Awards, but my attempts to hire an actor to cosplay a shaving product fell through at the last moment due to insufficient funding. However, I'm happy to report that Shavey Davey the Shaving Cream Dollop has a whole series of ice cream kiosk promos lined up next Summer to compensate. I suppose I wouldn't be able to tell the difference either.
Instead, what I do have is a whole bunch of video game awards and a few special cameo appearances as we celebrate 2016's many worthy games in the most reverential manner possible: crude MS Paint depictions and terrible wordplay. It's more than this year deserves, frankly.
I start every GOTY blog by making some dig at my parsimony, but there's no escaping the fact I spent most of 2016 playing 2015 games. That actually makes this category one of the most contentious this year, more so than the Best Game of 2016. While I'm naturally inclined to settle with one of my beloved RPGs, I have to give credit where credit's due and award Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain for running a clinic of incredible open-world design. Back when I played Vanquish a few years ago, I marveled at how - despite being a genre dominated by Western developers - a Japanese studio had marched into what was for them a heretofore unexplored space and completely dominated it. Likewise, where every other Western AAA game is an open-world driving/shooter action game and I play approximately five of them a year, MGSV stands head and shoulders above them all with its combination of cleverly open-ended mission design, logical enemy AI, in-depth base-building and equipment-developing features and a wonderful presentation that combines MGS's typical industrial-military global conspiracy insanity with a host of memorable new characters and a glorious licensed 80s soundtrack. That I played more than a hundred hours and was still having fun is a testament to its staying power. (Kudos also goes to the visceral gothic brutality of Bloodborne and the incredible scope and well-conceived world of The Witcher 3, both of which would be game of the year had the circumstances been different.)
Entirely conjecture, I added this category last year to highlight just how much I tend to miss from any given year's bumper stock of fantastic games. It's unlikely 2016 will be remembered as anything but a twelve-month-long multi-vehicle collision watched in horrifying slow motion, but at least it was a hell of a year for video games on top of being a year of hell in general. Since I have a pretty good bead on all the contenders before Giant Bomb's GOTY is even due to air, here's a smattering of games I'm inclined to enjoy based on what I've already heard and where my own interests tend to lie. Final Fantasy XV takes the top spot, as someone who was able to tolerate even lesser Final Fantasies like X-2 and XIII-3, and hearing that regular non-JRPG folk who haven't played an FF since 7 had a whale of a time with it - at least initially - is definitely promising. It might not out-Xenoblade Xenoblade, but I suspect it'll still rate highly in my estimations. I also can't wait to get stuck into a new Uncharted - one that almost everyone agrees is better than the disappointing third game - and I've got that Picross 3D sequel sitting next to me calling out my name.
Generally speaking, the bucket list tick-off is only supposed to consider old games - like, "over ten years old" old - that I've been waiting to play for almost as long and finally did. I often claim to be a proponent of the classics, yet there's many cases like 2016 where I barely dabbled in the old-school at all. Ys: The Oath in Felghana originally came out in 2005 and is one of the cornerstones of the Ys series, being a remake of the first SNES Ys game, Ys III: Wanderers of Ys. It's hard to pick a favorite from the "Napishtim era" Ys games - Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim, Ys: The Oath in Felghana and Ys Origin were all made with the same engine - but I'm glad to have knocked out another one this year after last year's Ys Origin playthrough. My love of Ys remains kindled, and I hope to try out Ys VIII as soon as possible. Tales of Xillia, an entry in another long-running JRPG franchise I have a lot of affection for, is a similar case where I was happy to do some catching up with a series that seems to put out a new game every other year. While I'm always going to love the less-complicated 2D Tales games, Xillia's probably my favorite 3D one - even pipping Vesperia - due to its open-world design and companion-linking combat mechanics. And hey, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor was Giant Bomb's 2014 GOTY with good reason, so it was better late than never for that one.
I honestly thought one of Hitman's gaggle of disposable jerks was going to take it, but then Let It Die ollied in out of nowhere and brought us a fresh selection of Suda51 eccentrics to complicate matters. Uncle Death is the cream of that particular crop, if only because he's the character that gets the most screen time. A gregarious skeleton man (or skeleton costume aficionado) who warmly welcomes the player to the game and then graciously decapitates the evil overpowered Hater who murders you in the game's prologue, Uncle Death sits around the periphery as a constant source of encouragement. Despite first seeming like your average mercurial omnipotent host, he genuinely wants you to do well, and pops up with moral support whenever you pull off one of the game's gory finishers or defeat one of its many mid-bosses. Since I have serious doubts I'll ever hit the fortieth floor, I read ahead to see how the game ends and... well, Uncle Death's role in that made me love him even more. Speaking of gothic bald types who are friendlier than they look, Helmut Kruger is first introduced in Hitman's initial Paris map by his "so hot right now" reputation, and then you discover that he's a pretty-boy patsy for the spy ring you're there to brutally dismantle. He also looks exactly like Agent 47, so I'm hoping he turns out to be another clone who picked a different course in life. Meanwhile, though I like the Cockney-accented and recently out Tracer of Overwatch, I can't just say no to a sapient robotic sphere that keeps saying its own name in a macho movie trailer voice. Him and Handibot are perhaps the only saving graces VR has presently.
I will say that, with the number of incredible artists who passed away this year, it does feel a little insensitive to award this to someone who greatly resembles a famous psychopomp from a game called Let It Die. But hey, maybe Prince, David Bowie and Leonard Cohen shouldn't have been in the Tower of Barbs in the first place.
One of my favorite recurring categories, this award both highlights those games that make bold, bizarre choices and those who offer something previously unseen. Innovation is like a unicorn: it seems like a rare and precious commodity, but all too often is either an angry horse with its own unique issues or a donkey with a carrot tied around its head in a crude mockery. That analogy's a little broken, but what I'm trying to say is that innovation doesn't always lead to a good game, nor is it always necessarily true that a game highlighted as innovative by the press is exactly so. To me, innovation is best represented when a game takes chances that might not necessarily pan out, and that's why "Weirdest F'n Game" is an evergreen award category.
All that said, it does feel a bit cheap to award it to a Suda51 game. Yet, for the paradox that is its expected weirdness, the game's very structure - a third-person action RPG in the vein of Souls with a maze-like procedurally generated tower to climb and a whole bunch of uncommon progression and equipment creation systems - is the most distinct package I've seen yet from Grasshopper, at least since Killer7. Roguelikes/lites are definitely nothing new, but a Grasshopper Roguelite? What would that even look like? I guess we know now. Conversely, Headlander gets weird early with its disembodied head shenanigans and 70s retro-futuristic feel, but it doesn't take too long to acclimate. Inside's weirdness, meanwhile, takes a while to manifest and only occasionally makes itself known until the game's insane conclusion.
This was a tough category this year, not just because there was a lot of competition but because I had to strongly consider the "rules" of these awards. Final Fantasy XV's soundtrack is a lot more sedate and thoughtful than the J-Pop that the series has more recently embraced, adapting Yoko Shimomura's affinity for violins for a series of tracks that go for an evocative, dramatic feel. It also takes a page from Xenoblade, its inspiration in a lot of ways, by bringing in many different composers to give the world's huge variance of regions an equally expansive variance in music. I've yet to play Final Fantasy XV, but that there's over five hours of music recorded for the game is impressive enough before getting the chance to breathe in the goodness. You know, breathe it in aurally. I think I need to work on my music critique next year. Doom's soundtrack is both reverential and grimly industrial in a way that's perfect for the reboot, but I knocked it points for sounding too much like Wolfenstein: The New Order's. I realize it's the same musician, but there were a few tracks I could've sworn were brought over wholesale. Honestly, I kind of miss the MIDI versions of classic metal tracks too, but I suppose that wasn't something you could bring back for a modern sequel. Let It Die's punk/metal/pop soundtrack is as eclectic as the game itself, but there were a few tracks that I found myself enjoying, not least of which is Survive Said the Prophet's song that introduces the game's no-nonsense, no-prisoners Jackals.
But man, this year saw the release of both a new Persona soundtrack and a new Ys soundtrack. In Japan only, mind, and both of those games are due for localization in 2017 when they'll be eligible for award consideration. Yet it's still hard to ignore that two of the JRPG franchises which regularly have some of the best music in the biz completely clowned the competition this year with the likes of Last Surprise and Sunshine Coastline, especially since I can go over to YouTube right now and jam out. Watch (listen?) out for those two in next year's GOTY awards blog, I suppose.
Giant Bomb Moment of 2016
Nominees: "Fire Boylt" , Vinny Flips a Truck, Will Smith Leaves Cyberspace, Fire Extinguisher Surprise.
I owe a lot to this site for being my blogging home for many years, and so this and the following award are for the wonderful content created regularly by its staff and community. Between Giant Bomb's obsession with VR and Hitman, we've seen a parade of complete nonsense that can either be contributed to poor motor skills, fucking around or both, and the year's inestimable number of released games has given them ample fuel for their monkeyshines. That my favorite moment, if you can judge almost an hour as a "moment", actually came from a playthrough of a 1999 game: Sega's ambitious but flawed Shenmue. Vinny's attempt to recall the name of a minor villain from the Arnold Schwarzenegger motion picture The Running Man - which depicts a dystopian police state USA under the thrall of a misanthropic TV con-man set in 2017, I ought to point out - goes from a comedic brainfart to something approaching performance art, as Vinny spends an extremely long time desperately attempting to zero in on the correct name from the close-but-not-quite-there "Fire Bolt" and manages to draw incredulous apoplexy from Dan and sheer tortured anguish from Alex, both of whom could probably quote the entire movie verbatim. Other highlights include Vinny's taking of the wheel during the American Truck Driver Quick Look, FOO's Will Smith's departure from virtual reality as his Money For Nothing virtual avatar distressingly folds and distorts into a broken doll of a man, and both Vinny and Jeff getting in some yuks from throwing fire extinguishers at people in Hitman. In fact, here's a top ten:
(Thanks go to @turboman/Derek Stone for his Best Of Giant Bomb series, now officially supported by the site, and to @szlifier for creating QLCrew.com with its list of user-defined highlights. Both super helpful in making the above list happen.)
I do also want to give a special shout-out to @thatpinguino/Gino Grieco's Final Fantasy IX-inspired articles as part of the site's paid freelancer output. As the only other freelancer besides TurboMan/Derek Stone (he of the "Best Of Giant Bomb" series, linked above) to actually come from the Giant Bomb content-creator community, having posted his entertaining "Deep Listens" podcasts and thoughtful retrospectives on his blog here for years, I'm both stoked and proud that he managed to land a front page spot and hope to see more from him.
And so we come to the final award: my Game of the Year. As of posting, my official Game of the Year list should be available for your reading pleasure, but suffice it to say that even with the small handful of contemporary games I managed to play in 2016 it was still very difficult to narrow them down to ten and rank them. I've always appreciated mechanics and features over art styles and narratives, with my tumultuous and all-too-frequently referenced history in game design, and my top four represent games that are the masters of that craft in various ways. Stardew Valley's near-endless discoveries and symbiotic gameplay modes, Doom's impressive myriad of innovative FPS mechanics designed to let this new Doom be every bit the frantic, gory power fantasy that its trailblazing forebear was, Dark Souls 3's many smart tweaks and refinements to an already stellar and oft-imitated action RPG series, and Hitman's mindboggling mechanical versatility that allows its players to assassinate their targets in as many ways as they can imagine. The rest of that list include six very good games I had the fortune of playing this year, but they're clearly only the tip of the iceberg. When I come back to the "adjusted" version of that GOTY list to include all the 2016 games I played in 2017 and beyond, it's going to be one hell of a struggle for dominance. I can't wait.
That's going to do it for this year, so all that's left is to wish you all some happy holidays and a shared hope that 2017 will be even better - for this site, for the game industry, and for the troubled world we inhabit. I'll see you when the site's GOTY content starts showing up.
[I've been doing these comic GOTY awards for five years now! Please feel free to check out 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015.]
Welcome, all, to the penultimate Sunday Summaries of 2016, and possibly ever. I've got ideas for long-form blogging features next year; in particular, I hope to try a few familiar formats to buoy the week with content that's easy to plan out, much like this feature, and pepper in a few less conventional ideas in the gaps.
This was a belated birthday present, so I might have to get knee-deep in the dead later this week. Before GOTY, at the very least.
But before we get into that, we should broach the topic of GOTY. I will be creating a list and awards blog some time in the following week, since I can't continue putting it off much longer. I particularly want to get in before the official GOTY content starts showing up, at least. I've pared down the usual award categories a little - I haven't played a single 2016 Nintendo game, so that's one of my recurring awards out - but I've got enough to move forward with. I'm going to do the weird thing of creating both the "static" GOTY 2016 (which won't be changed after December) and the "adjusted" GOTY 2016 (which will be rearranged at the end of each subsequent year to include new entries) at the same time too.
My family and I celebrated Xmas already - some of us work in retail, and can't exactly take next weekend off - so I've got a few late entries for my GOTY list to try out. There's this dilemma right now of either rushing through those games this week to fit them into my various GOTY materials, or to actually take my time with them to fully appreciate their quality. I think the sensible course of action is to figure out how long an average playthrough takes via HowLongToBeat.com and then order them by shortest to longest. I'm excited to play all four of them at any rate, and hopefully have more to report later this week.
New Games!
Doesn't look too different. Eh. Not that I mind.
There's only one new release that I'm interested in over the next seven days and it's WayForward's Kickstarted Shantae sequel, Shantae: Half-Genie Hero. Given the extra budget, it makes me wonder what this one will look like compared to its slightly more modest predecessors. I love the Shantae series, but there's no denying that they tend to be a bit samey, not unlike the IGAvanias they evidently venerate. Even if WayForward used that extra cash to turn out a luxuriously-styled 2D platformer, like a Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze or Rayman Legends, I think I'd be entirely OK with that.
There's other games too, of course. I guess that Wild Guns Reloaded got pushed back to this week? That's a little awkward, since I already wrote about it last time. We also have the new Telltale Walking Dead season, if anyone still cares about those, and there's like twenty new games on Steam because there's always a whole bunch of new Steam games. That sluice gate broke a long time ago. Also, there's some hacking game for Wii U called Radiantflux: Hyperfractal, which... I didn't even know there were new Wii U games coming out still, let alone ones about hacking with rad names.
Wiki!
I was concerned that I'd get nowhere with this list of games that'll feature in Awesome Games Done Quick 2017 - due to start on the 7th of January, letting what might be an even shittier year at least begin with an ounce of promise - but it's actually moving at a clip. I've completed three of the seven days of scheduled speedruns, with a significant chunk taken out of the fourth. What's more, a lot of the longer speedruns tend to show up towards the end, so I'm probably well past the halfway point. The final two weeks of wiki editing work this year should see the project through to its end. Especially with all those extra Giant Bomb podcasts to listen to.
Guess what showed up again? Kabuki Quantum Fighter's getting a lot of play of late.
However, I've noticed I'm letting myself get a little sidetracked by this AGDQ's disproportionately large selection of NES games. I've just ended a mid-sized NES wiki project which involved adding a large number of Virtual Console releases, and many of the preferred speedrun games are also popular enough to have been made available on Virtual Console as well. Hard to avoid the habit of adding all those VC releases as I come across them. It's also getting depressingly real just how often Nintendo has tried to sell us the same game over and over: if I were to pick a major game, like The Legend of Zelda or Castlevania, that saw an FDS (Famicom Disk System) debut and included all three modern Nintendo systems that each support their own distinct variant of the Virtual Console service, that's five platforms that Nintendo has sold that game on. In fact, if we just look at Metroid, it's been released a total of seven times: FDS in Japan, NES in NA/EU, as part of the inexplicably full-priced "Classic NES Series" GBA range, on the Wii Virtual Console, on the 3DS Virtual Console, on the Wii U Virtual Console and most recently via the NES Classic Mini's built-in selection. And folk were worried that Nintendo would somehow lose their "purity" if they started selling Android games? Point is, I keep wanting to stop and add all those extra releases so I won't have to do it later, but if I did that then I'd never get this project done in time.
Anyhoo, 2017 will belong to the SNES, like most years. The European SNES will celebrate its 25th anniversary next April, to join the North American SNES's 25th this August and the Super Famicom's back in November 2015. While it's not really a huge deal outside of Europe itself, I'm hoping this one last "25th Anniversary" date will give Nintendo an excuse to put out the SNES Classic Mini, or maybe even the first "SNES Remix". My goal in 2017, then, will be the completion of any outstanding SNES projects. Not just 1996's full release schedule, which is up next, but all the remaining years of the console's lifespan and every one of its miscellaneous releases, including all the SNES Virtual Console releases (that's been a thing of late) and those of the Japan-only Nintendo Power disk writer service, which is not to be confused with the American magazine. The notoriously poorly-archived Satellaview line-up too, I'm hoping.
SOMA
After the disappointing Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, I sorely wanted to check out Frictional Games's SOMA to see if the problem lied in that developer's increasingly hoary "hide from monsters" survival horror approach, or if Machine for Pigs' developer TheChineseRoom simply misjudged how Frictional is able to make such suspenseful horror games. Frictional did, of course, create the original Amnesia: The Dark Descent, a game I "enjoyed" to the extent that anyone might enjoy a horror game. It's such an odd genre, in that the more effective it is at its intended goal the harder and less fun it is to play, but then you don't necessarily play those games for a psychological sensation as straightforward as "fun". Like horror movies and other horror fiction, the goal is to invoke an uncommonly pursued emotional state in its consumer - fear - and the quality of the product is determined by how effectively it manages to convey those scares and spooks. If you create a terrifying game with a deliberately-paced mystery at its core that slowly reveals more of the game's plot and the player character's role in it, and a player quits early out of pure fright before learning anything, have you succeeded or failed in your objective? Which one takes precedence: the horror or the story that generates it?
Mechanically, SOMA greatly resembles Frictional's other games. It's probably far more like their Penumbra series than Amnesia, since there's almost zero emphasis on creating and chasing light sources with a finite means of creating them. They're still banging that "don't look at the monsters" drum too. For each of their games, they've implemented a frankly contrived reason for never looking at the game's antagonistic creatures: in Penumbra, it was to avoid panic attacks; in Amnesia, it followed a very Lovecraftian approach where's one sanity naturally starts to crumble when forced to countenance creatures that simply should not be; in SOMA, it's more that there's something about the nature of the monsters and the player character's relation to them that causes the player's vision to glitch out and blur. I'll have to get into more plot details to expound on that further, but while it makes more sense than the previous two cases, it still feels a bit... convenient? I guess? Like the idea that looking at the monster would somehow have a deleterious effect on the protagonist is one that works in an abstract gameplay-sense, because it then makes the creatures in question far more terrifying if you aren't allowed to look at them, but at the same time it's hard to implement that as a game mechanic when there's no sufficiently sound explanation why you can't check out the monsters skulking around, especially since it's important to know where they are so you can avoid them. Frictional keeps trying to make that idea work with different rationalizations for why you can't "stare into the abyss", though, so bless them for that.
Talking of not working. Gimme my dang miso, Mr Munchprint. (I'm so looking forward to the age of 3D printed food, though.)
SOMA switches narrative genres from the 19th century to sci-fi, which is both a necessary and welcome switch because there was no way to directly follow up Amnesia: The Dark Descent (as TheChineseRoom discovered). SOMA's narrative structure is an unusual one in terms of twists: there's a few huge ones right near the beginning which are used to contextualize SOMA's core "mission", and the rest of the game's plot has a fairly conventional progression in pursuing that mission to a semi-predictable outcome. Like Inside, the game's flow is a major part of its appeal and so is the way the game explores major themes of identity and consciousness that are tied directly to those aforementioned twists, and I can't really be as skittish as I usually am about spoilers if I intend to get as deep into it as I would like. Keep in mind that it will be spoiler city from here on out - you may have gleaned the major ones already from promotional materials or the Quick Look, since they arrive early, but that's your warning.
The player is a regular Torontonian store-owner from 2015 named Simon who, after suffering brain damage in a traffic collision, goes to receive an experimental brain scan from a new medical device with the intent of helping his doctors determine how he can be cured. Instead, Simon suddenly awakes in the future on a derelict research station. You learn a number of shocking revelations in quick succession: it's a hundred years into the future, something happened to wipe out 99% of the Earth's population, the station is at the bottom of the ocean and part of a larger facility of Greek-lettered stations named PATHOS-II, the entire facility's been taken over by a virus-like AI infestation that manifests as a lot of gungy black pipes and orifices, if there's any people around they're in robot bodies, and that Simon himself is one of those robots. By following a friendly voice to a different research station, walking along the bottom of the ocean to close the distance, the player encounters Catherine. She's another fellow human mind trapped in a machine who knows what's going on and asks Simon to help her complete her life's work of The Ark: a computer server that contains the brain scans of humanity's last few survivors in a virtual utopian environment which will preserve whatever remnants of mankind remain, and needs to be launched into space to ensure its solar collectors can continue to power the device for thousands of years. At the bottom of the ocean, where it is currently, the power consumption won't last nearly as long, and it threatens to be swallowed up by the rogue AI "WAU" that is taking over the base like a malignant cancer. The game then has the player move from one station to the next, often because of unforeseen mishaps, until they can find the Ark and then move it to an underwater high-tech electromagnetic cannon to be launched into space with Simon and Catherine's consciousnesses on board.
The underwater sections are breathtaking. I'm glad I opted for the PS4 version; I really doubt my PC would've been able to handle this.
After that series of initial reveals, the game simply has the player pursue the Ark and figure out how to launch it. While you're trying to complete those few specific long-term goals, each new wrinkle introduces a detour or an additional task to resolve before you can move on. These naturally put you in harm's way of the WAU: a machine intelligence that is wholly distinct from a human being's thought processes. Rather than treated as a human-like intelligence that has gone insane, say a HAL or a SHODAN or a Skynet, this AI is instead more like a virus or some other simple organism that perhaps best exemplifies where artificial intelligence is at presently. Its core programming is intent on saving humanity, but it doesn't have the same lofty ideals about individualism and freedom that a human might, and so the way it is preserving humans is by turning them into biomechanical creatures that - while no longer sapient - are at least built to last. Other humans are placed in a nightmarish form of stasis that keeps them alive and aware even while their bodies wither away to nothing. It's an impressive twist for the game; before you come to understand what the WAU is or how it thinks, it resembles some kind of alien infestation, like the oily black Giger biomechanical goop that the xenomorphs call home. The actual explanation turns out to be even scarier, because an inscrutable machine has determined the future course of humanity and there's no-one really left to stop it. That human civilization was wiped out by a comet, which made the planet's surface unsurvivable, or that Simon was brought back because his mind scan was built into later models of the same machine as one of the "defaults", is a little less impactful. I do like that, as the guinea pig for this new technology, Simon's consciousness has been used for the sake of advancing medical science for who knows how many different attempts to recreate a human mind from a computer reading: there's little explanation given for why Simon woke up this time in the modified body of a human corpse in a diving suit, just that this happens to be the Simon consciousness that the player assumes.
This is the major metaphysical quandary that the game presents: Simon's consciousness isn't so much a unique occurrence than one that has been copied endlessly. At one momentous juncture in the game, Simon needs to transfer his consciousness to a hardier "power suit" in order to travel to the abyssal parts of the PATHOS-II facility; those stations situated so far beneath the surface that the pressure would crush his original suit like a soda can. Catherine begins the process, then nonchalantly lets it slip that Simon didn't so much transfer his consciousness but copy it, leaving his original consciousness in the old suit. Simon's understandably livid about this, leading to the first of many heated verbal spats with the more pragmatic scientist, and the player is given the option - with no explicit repercussions - of either letting his original "body" eventually wake up later on his own with no hope of making it to the Ark, or shutting it down while it sleeps and effectively killing that Simon. The player, meanwhile, has jumped from Simon's original consciousness to this new one, and the in-game Simon sees this as a "coin-flip": a specious attempt to explain why the player has switched over, even if the truth is that there are now two concurrent Simons. The player also finds out what happened to the original Simon of the 21st century, as if to further reiterate that the player character is merely a copy, or a copy of a copy, or a copy of a copy of a copy.
Datamining an unlucky stiff. This one didn't quite make it out of the way of a sudden depressurization.
One of my favorite elements, and one that I wished the game could've expanded on via a menu page or codex even though it wouldn't have added much, is following the often context-only subplots of the station's other employees to their eventual fates. You're driven to figure out what happened to Catherine at least - the Catherine consciousness that's with you was one of the first to be scanned and uploaded, so while she's knowledgeable about PATHOS-II and its employees she learns along with you what eventually happened to the Ark, her team and her own physical self - but there's also a large number of secondary characters that you learn about from personal keepsakes and log entries and you find yourself invested in figuring out what happened to them too. The player has the ability to "datamine" computer recordings of voices and dialogue, drawing from intercoms and the "black boxes" inside the heads of employees, which were used to track their whereabouts and current medical status. When you reach a station full of headless corpses, you get nothing but static from your datamines and have to rely on more conventional information-gathering methods to figure out what happened: it turns out one employee learned what the WAU was trying to do and endeavored to help another scientist shut down its core, and before she could move out the WAU "shrieked" - the result being the simultaneous destruction of everyone's black box implants, which in turn 'sploded their heads as well. It's grisly, but it's one of the game's fun many little mysteries that you can figure out with some probing. While I was always focused on whatever my current objective was - the game does a fine job of ensuring you always know what to do or where to go, usually via Catherine and her instructions - I was always more interested in what happened to each of the stations, and what resulted to the various named characters that I've been listening to and reading about. One example is a gregarious dispatch operator named Strasky who was introduced early on - he's heard speaking to the two mechanics you meet at the initial Upsilon station - and half the game goes by before you finally find him.
There's much the game doesn't tell you, also, and I think a lot of that is deliberately kept unclear. Almost all of it concerns how the WAU operates, and how its horrific "post-humans" mutants created to preserve humanity work. It's not clear if these post-human mutants are completely mindless, or their original minds have turned irrevocably insane by the WAU's genetic tampering, or if they're animated corpses controlled by the WAU directly and used to ensure that it can resume the imperative it was programmed to complete. Or maybe any of the above on a case-by-case basis. That inscrutability is a major element of the game's sense of horror, and is also the slightly spurious explanation given for why the player can't stare at the monsters too long: the WAU has infected the player's suit as well, to some minor extent, and by looking at the monsters, the WAU is able to exert greater control over the player and cause them to glitch out. It also means the monsters know where you are if you look at them for too long, because the WAU is relaying that information back to them in some hivemind-like sense. Something about the WAU creatures' limited conventional sensory functions means that you can often effectively "hide" in the same room as the monster in plain sight, just as long as you don't look at them or make too much noise. Each monster is slightly different though, based on the mutation, so there's never a guarantee that it doesn't know where you are. I used to run into rooms and shut the doors behind me, but that stopped working when the monsters figured out how to open them (or the WAU just did it for them remotely). Cleverly, the game sets up in the prologue that Simon starts getting headaches and vision deterioration whenever he's stressed due to his brain damage, but given that ceases to be a factor as soon as he's given a robot mind/body it's probably more of an elaborate red herring. Or maybe it's psychosomatic? The title of the game is in that word somewhere, so I guess I can't discount it.
This was about as close as I was willing to get to one of the monsters. It doesn't even have arms, so who knows why it's so dangerous.
I really liked SOMA. I might mirror the sentiment others had, including horror-aficionado Patrick Klepek, that the game didn't really need its monster encounters. Occasionally a game will feel compelled to include more elaborate gameplay for the sake of it, as was also the case with Murdered: Soul Suspect's wraith encounters or Deadly Premonition's "otherworld" dungeons, but I didn't feel that it was too distracting here. Without those sequences, you run into the danger of making the facility feel too safe when it's very emphatically made out to be anything but. The peril has to be real, and Frictional likes its little games of hide and seek too much to quit them. At the same time, they're definitely not the highlight of the game, and I can understand the frustration of having one's exploration of this amazing setting and the little investigations of what went on in any given station, reading through computer logs and datamining the nearby intercoms, interrupted by these sequences that comparatively add very little to the game's overarching narrative. There were also times where the game went for a more action movie pacing, where you were required to run away as parts of the level were imploding or a monster was chasing you, and they felt a little incongruous to the leisurely-paced and suspenseful atmosphere that 90% of the game operated under.
It's very well-written and I liked that it played around with questions about transhumanism and the nature of consciousness in a format that can make those thoughtful philosophical predicaments feel more immediate and pressing to the viewer, using the game's first-person perspective and how the player's never quite sure which "Simon" they currently are. Or even if it matters much. Definitely a thinker, this one.
Let It Die
I'm not sure what it is about Grasshopper's Let It Die, but I decided to resume from where I left off after the Go! Go! GOTY! series earlier this month and have played several more hours of it since then. I had died and lost my current Fighter after exploring three floors without finding a single elevator and felt a little ticked off by it, but it's gleaning on me now how this game works. The tower is built with multiple floors, the goal being to defeat the boss at each tenth floor until you reach the top at floor 40 (and I want to believe the game has plans to add extra sets of ten at regular intervals). However, there are also multiple "stations" per floor: many of these "stations" - what I call them because they all have subway-style Japanese names - have multiple branching exits leading off to different wings of the tower. The central column contains the main elevator: this is the one that takes you back to the "waiting room" hub area, as well as to all the mid-bosses I've fought so far, and is situated in the middle of the tower as it appears on the world map. However, this central column abruptly stops around the 4th floor. The key is to explore these side stations for an exit that leads back to the central column, where more elevator stops await. You end up moving up and down floors going through these side stations looking for the right path to reach that central column again and return home to unload your treasure/materials, hand in quests and restock your equipment.
Much like the course of true love, the course of Let It Die never does run smooth. The deep purple line is the elevator, while the blue and pink lines represent exits. You have to take a detour to reach Niko-Senzoku at the top.
What was an irritating journey into the unknown before has now become another facet that I've come to appreciate about the game. Let It Die is full of these instances, which is why it's been such a slow burn for me. I hated the focus on item durability, but learned to appreciate it because it forced you to jump between different weapons and study each one's role in combat: even the humble fireworks gun is a serious ranged weapon if you buy an upgraded version from the store and have enough mastery levels, and there's a few enemies you'll want to fight at a distance. I hated the music, but turned around on it fairly quickly once I realized how well it fits the metal/punk aesthetic the game's going for - like a post-apocalyptic roguelike version of The Warriors - and there's a few tracks, like Survive Said the Prophet's "Let It Die" (a lot of the band music has songs named for the game's title for whatever reason; I'm hoping these are all Indie acts commissioned to make music for the game, possibly by Suda directly) a.k.a. the theme for the Jackals, that are now among my front-runners for this year's "best soundtrack" considerations. I hated the game's antagonistic online and its always-on PvP features, but then began to accept how that too is part of the game's central coda of letting things go: money and "SPlithium", the game's shop currency and upgrade currency respectively, are so quickly gained and spent that it's no huge deal if someone robs your waiting room while you're away. It's not nearly as irritating as getting cleaned out in MGSV would be, though I've yet to reach the point where I need a huge amount of jealously-guarded resources to upgrade. I hated the easily-reached low level cap for Fighters, but relented after learning that the caps get raised after every boss and this is simply a way of making the game's challenge level stay stable.
After activating the online mode, this has become a common sight after signing in. Still, nothing of value is ever lost. (Sorry Momoko.)
As a result of these epiphanies, and after spending more time with the game, Let It Die has been slowly climbing my GOTY ranking list. I don't know how much more of it I'll play this year - as stated in the intro, I've got a few new games to check out tout de suite - but it's definitely grown on me. And all this from a F2P game, no less. I've presently left the game at the penultimate floor before the first major boss of the game, so that's going to be the one remaining goal for Let It Die I intend to complete. If nothing else, I'll want to hop back in occasionally to see what they've added: if a crazy new Suda51 character shows up in the waiting room to enable a whole suite of features, I'll definitely want to meet them.
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