Prepare all your best Xbox Series X hardware jokes because we're gonna get vaporous this week. Vaporum: Lockdown is a sequel (or prequel, or interquel, or something) of 2017's Vaporum by Slovakian studio Fatbot Games, which I covered a couple of years back (IGotW #155). A steampunk-themed, first-person, single-character dungeon-crawler with real-time combat and movement and an emphasis on using weapons and cooldown-based gadgets to defeat a bunch of mutated drones and lab rats all hopped up on some uncanny alien substance fished up from the bottom of the ocean by now-dead scientists and engineers who should've known better. It's some BioShock by way of Legend of Grimrock, if you were looking for the reductive elevator pitch. Vaporum also happened to be one of my favorites in a very packed year of instant classics, so I've been itching to play this 2020 follow-up for some time.
The story of Vaporum: Lockdown is straightforward enough, though it might require some familiarity with the first game. The Arx Vaporum is a towering state-of-the-art research facility built on a remote island close to something called the "fumium core": an underwater depository of an unknown mineral that has proven very adaptive to the current era's steam-powered technology. The first game follows Marcus Rike, the director of the facility who was called back to government HQ to answer for some unorthodox experiments performed under his watch, as he returns to find Arx Vaporum in complete pandemonium and fights his way through legions of hostile creatures to uncover the truth of what happened and rescue any survivors. Lockdown is set between his departure and return (thus technically a prequel) and follows a new character: Ellie Teller, an idealistic post-grad prodigy poached by Lora Rike, the facility's head scientist and wife of Marcus, to work on her team's inchoate teleportation technology division. Teller quickly finds herself trapped by the sudden disaster and works to find a way off the island.
The BioShock comparison is really only skin-deep. Or so I thought before this bulky customer showed up.
The most striking difference between the game and its predecessor is the slightly more open level structure. Whereas Vaporum had you moving steadily from one floor to the next without any reason to return to earlier zones, Vaporum: Lockdown has Ellie running all over the place in order to fix Arx Vaporum's sole remaining submersible craft. Being in an advanced state of disrepair, however, means Ellie has to visit several areas of the facility to track down the materials required to fix it up. It plays a little more like Dead Space in practice: it's a linear if circuitous course, directed by the story and a dripfeed of acquired key items and tech, that has you zipping from one area to the next and occasionally backtracking to previous locations that may have changed in the interim. Enemies are constantly becoming stronger to meet your own experience and equipment gains, presenting distinct challenges depending on their types.
This ties into Vaporum: Lockdown's second most significant evolution: a heavier prominence of elemental traits and abilities. The existence of burning, freezing, shocking, acid, and bleeding effects can significantly alter the way you approach certain enemies who can hit you with those debuffs, and likewise the player's combat strategies become subtly different when using these same debilitations against enemies. This is best demonstrated with the opposing burning and bleeding effects: fire does more damage over time if the recipient is standing still, though they can end the burning effect faster by moving around; conversely, bleeding damage is exaggerated when moving around, so you're encouraged to stand still and ride its duration out if possible. If you happen to have a weapon with a bleeding effect, then, you're best off adopting a "hit and run" tactic where your enemies bleed out pursuing you. The game still has that Dungeon Master duck-and-weave aspect to its combat, sometimes known as the "combat waltz," where constantly moving around enemies to avoid facing them and receiving their attacks is the ideal way to avoid damage while also providing ample opportunity to get in your own strikes. Both the player and certain enemies can also use firearms to attack from a distance and over pits, though with limited ammo this isn't a tactic you can rely upon for every encounter. Many enemies require special tactics to defeat: the laser cutter drones, for instance, have a persistent laser beam that can kill you in seconds if you're in constant contact, with the idea being that you keep maneuvering to their flank or around walls to avoid the beam at all costs. Many of the new enemies are also experts at controlling the environment, dropping pools of acid or fire everywhere to limit your movement and prevent the usual tactic of finding a square room and running around them in circles.
An unconventional layout means never being quite sure where you're herded to next, though that long list of tasks on the right at least gives you plenty to go on.
The game's various trap and puzzle rooms are equally deadly, and the game will occasionally (but not always) do you the solid of auto-saving before you attempt to tackle anything with insta-death pitfalls or gas chambers. To mitigate the difficulty of both these trap rooms and the enemy encounters, the player can optionally switch to a "turn-based" mode that freezes time whenever the player isn't moving or attacking, similar to a classic roguelike or the game Superhot. This especially helps with puzzle rooms that demand very strict timing - running between a stream of fireballs shooting down a hallway, for instance - which is difficult enough with mouse and keyboard controls and perhaps tougher still with the Switch's otherwise acceptably intuitive button controls. The player is well-rewarded for exploration though, not only acquiring improved gear on a regular basis but also many consumables that offer permanent stat boosts. I'm not sure if the game increases the drop rate of healing consumables if you start to run low but I half suspect it does because I've regularly found myself with the same reserve supply of around five or six, picking up new ones as I use them, while playing on the game's default difficulty. As a result, I would say that the standard challenge level, while high, is far from insurmountable. Per contra, I've also been dying a lot; the quicksave button has seen quite a workout since I started.
Vaporum: Lockdown's more dynamic progression structure and new combat complexities does elevate it a little over the original, but at the same time it feels very much beholden to that first game's framework. The similarities far outweigh new additions - almost everything mentioned above, including the turn-based mode, returns from Vaporum and its UI is almost identical - which robs Lockdown of much of its own personality and distinctiveness, often leading to it feeling more like a DLC expansion than a full sequel. One aspect that has benefitted from this sequel process however is the series' focus on epistolary storytelling, giving you the perspective of a dozen or so NPCs via their abandoned audio logs and written missives. It's been too long since my Vaporum playthrough to recall how many of these names were featured in both games, besides major characters like the Rikes, but they do an interesting job in delivering backstory in a mostly achronological fashion. You'll often find the journals of characters staring imminent death in the face with panicked notes about noises in the vents, only to find another article from the same party complaining about the overly restrictive safety protocols enacted by the director and how impatient they are to tinker around with forces beyond their control. The notes aren't necessarily meant to be read in a specific order, I think, since many are only found off the beaten path in optional chests and lockers, but you do start to see arcs evolve with specific characters as you go on. Discovering that a colleague had been relegated to being a guinea pig after a mishap, emotionally and physically altered by their continued exposure to fumium, and then encountering that same insane, superpowered NPC in the flesh as he psychically taunts you was an effective evolution of that character, though with most NPCs they're long-dead by the time you find their records.
One odd thing the game does is offer these more powerful unique loot items with the trademark Diablo purple font color. However, this isn't a loot game and since there's only one character that means there's only one of every type of equipment, so really it's all unique.
I am definitely enjoying my time with Vaporum: Lockdown, as I suspected I would after a similarly positive experience with its predecessor. That it feels very similar isn't wholly a negative if it means replicating the same high degree of quality for its exploration, storytelling, and the meaningful (and often spooky) encounters with its intelligent, vicious foes. Having you backtrack to older areas with new progress-enabling gear or key items isn't so much a detriment but a way to give this facility a little more internal logic and consistency - even if it goes unexplained why such a place filled with scientists has so many pits and fireball traps - as does giving the protagonist a very clear directive (escape!) early on and spending the majority of the game slowly working towards completing it, one resolved issue at a time. I'm feeling like I probably should've picked a class that better exploits the newer elemental mechanics - you have a choice early on between four "exo-rigs" that determine stat growth and areas of expertise, effectively working like class builds - but my zippy, dual-dagger-wielding fighter with her "offense is the best defense" philosophy has been eking her way through just fine so far, as would the various other build choices offered by the many weapon and gadget types I keep finding. The new energy guns, which draw directly from the player's mana pool rather than finite bullets, might've also been a wise choice for a more tech-focused character too. The grass is always greener, huh? Either way, I'm looking forward to finishing it off sometime this weekend, provided they stop throwing those darn laser cutter drones at me. If I've learned anything about lasers over the past couple of days, it's that they hurt. A lot.
Spring is finally here and what better way to celebrate the season's promise of renewal and brighter days than spending hours cooped up in one's room playing twenty-year-old also-rans? That's just one aspect of what we do here on 64 in 64, an episodic exploration of the library of the Nintendo 64, but one that's particularly relevant today with its two clunkers.
After all, if I don't evaluate these games for their longevity and suitability for the Nintendo Switch Online service, who will? Expert consultants specifically paid by Nintendo to do exactly that? Those people don't actually exist; Nintendo just has a big dartboard somewhere with every N64 game written on it.
Speaking of holes caused by missile weapons, here are the rules of 64 in 64 in bulletpoint form:
I play two N64 games. One selected by me, another selected by fate from a pool that includes every N64 game ever released. Yep, including the Neon Genesis Evangelion game. I will get in the damn robot if that's what it takes.
The two N64 games will then be played for sixty-four minutes apiece. I've thrown in some sixteen minute status updates so you can see my mind snap in as close to real-time as the written format allows.
I'll summarize each game based on how it's held up over the years and its probability of being included on the NSO service any time soon. Not well and not likely are the usual answers.
This feature is not to go anywhere near a game that is already available on the NSO service. It's received no new N64 additions since last week, so we're still hovering at thirteen of the system's best and brightest that are off the table and, I guess, hidden in a drawer somewhere behind a faded ticket stub for The Matrix and a bunch of dead Tamagotchis.
I'm not entirely sure who Infinite Ventures are, but they appear to have picked up ICOM's IPs after the latter went defunct just prior to 1999 after being purchased by Viacom. Now with new ownership, Infinite Ventures worked with Kemco to create both this Shadowgate sequel and a Game Boy Color port of the NES original. Other sites also credit a TNS Co. for co-development in Shadowgate 64, though I've no idea who they are either. Truly, a franchise fond of its mysteries.
As someone who played a lot of Shadowgate for Atari ST (more or less indistinguishable from the original Mac version, except with color) I have been fascinated by this first-person 3D incarnation of this brutally unfair series for a long while. Much like how I was fascinated by the more action-oriented Beyond Shadowgate, in fact, and in the 2014 reboot, both of which I covered in blogs many years back. I imagine a similar degree of disappointment lies in store too but, hey, I gotta know.
16 Minutes In
Well, at least he didn't kill me. How am I supposed to learn the language of ghosts? Boo-belfish?
After an animated intro which sees the protagonist - a halfling named Del - captured by bandits during a routine caravan journey and deposited in the prisons beneath Castle Shadowgate, the game starts with you familiarizing yourself with the controls as you look for a way to escape. Fortunately, it's as simple as finding a hatch underneath the pile of straw that constitutes a bed and using a leftover bone as a means to lift the grate that covers it. The bone comes after a meal, which is triggered by talking to the NPC in the adjoining cell: a wizard named Agaar who claims Castle Shadowgate is filled with magical items belonging to the archwizard that once occupied it, though they're all kept behind four towers bound by impenetrable magic barriers. Shortly after entering the sewers I died - I figured I'd be able to swim a five-foot-wide trench, but I guess that was a lot to ask - and had to start the game over. I've since decided to rely on save states before trying anything risky, though I'm hoping there aren't any puzzles on a game-wide timer that I might fail without realizing. I wouldn't put it past Shadowgate, honestly.
As if to present its insidiousness front and center, Shadowgate 64 has inverted controls by default (they even define them as "flight" setting, which makes me intensely curious why they thought flight simulator controls would be the natural fit for a first-person adventure game) and uses the oft-ignored C-buttons for movement. The analog stick, meanwhile, is used for the camera. Z crouches while R lets you access the map, with Start instead taking you to the main menu for saving, loading, and options. B and A are used for your inventory and interacting with the environment. The interface has been generally intuitive so far, which I wasn't expecting, and something about the languid pace of your hero, the dingy environments, and the constant threat of death remind me a lot of From's older dungeon-crawlers: the early King's Fields, or Shadow Tower. I'm guessing that, like those games, this isn't going to be a walk in the park. Hell, I'm not sure yet if there's going to be combat. (One note about the protagonist: as a halfling, I'm expecting the environments to feel a little too big, with perhaps the height difference becoming a concern for reaching specific items. That's not really been the case so far, but then I've only seen the inside of a prison cell and the sewers: neither of them traditionally known for being spacious locations. Maybe in this world "halfling" just means half-elf?)
32 Minutes In
My inventory. I'm hoping to fill the whole thing with trash eventually. Gotta have hobbies down here.
After a few puzzles in the sewers - mostly involving destroying things, which I'm always on board for - I found myself in the first of the game's four towers: the Disciples' Tower, which looks to be mostly wooden living quarters so far. The game has been suspiciously peril-free since that early watery deathtrap, so I'm wondering when the other shoe will drop. Speaking of, I found a loose slipper in one of the rooms that was mysteriously stuck to the table with magic, sort of like the titular uncooperative flask of Thy Dungeonman. Why I can't take it now is anyone's guess, but I wonder if I'm not supposed to find its twin and reunite them to trigger a flag of some sort. Like a ghost that will eat my face (though granted, that is more of an Uninvited thing).
Progress continues to be slow with the game's leisurely gait and its many empty environments, but there's something to be said for establishing an atmosphere of anticipation and dread. Castle Shadowgate isn't supposed to be the sort of place you'd want to gallivant through, not when a spike trap can open up under your feet at any moment (though I'm starting to suspect I'm unduly hyping up the level of danger involved based only on past Shadowgate experiences - you can die about five different ways in the first five minutes of Classic Shadowgate, after all). I've mostly explored the downstairs of this first tower and will climb it shortly after this update, so who knows what I might find. More inert skeletons, probably. I'll tell them you guys said hi.
48 Minutes In
Ah, a case of the old staircase behind a bookcase, in case you needed to hide your secret case files from a worst case scenario.
As I dreaded, there was something terrifying on the third floor of the Disciples' Tower: optional reading material! This tower belonged to Lakmir the Sorcerer, whose shade I met just before ascending to the library area where he explained that this tower was where he taught his disciples (and here I thought the name was ironic) and that he'll meet me in the next one, provided I have the wits to get there. Floors three and four consisted of a library and classrooms, with many books to collect. There's no apparent encumbrance limit so I grabbed any loose book I could but stopped reading them after the first couple: I only have sixty-four minutes here, and none of them were related to any puzzles yet. The one puzzle I did solve involved all these statuettes I kept picking up: by creating an "evolution of man" for a fantasy world, that is to say that men descended from elves which in turn descended from fairies (or maybe it was just describing humanity's connection to fairies via the humanoid elves as a bridge), I was able to place the statues in the right order to reveal the secret staircase in the screenshot above.
I'm beginning to believe the primary cause of death for any adventurer in this version of Castle Shadowgate is acute boredom. That's not to say I don't appreciate an immersive adventure game that's geared towards quietly exploring rooms and solving puzzles, but it's an odd fit for a console like the N64 with its many action, FPS, and sports games. I can guarantee I won't be playing anything quite this laid-back in entries to come, excepting perhaps the original N64 Animal Crossing if it comes up.
64 Minutes In
The first floor of the Disciples' Tower. No fireplaces, but some wonderful tapestries at least. They won't let me steal them though.
After reaching the top floor where the student dorms were kept and running out of places to go, I decided to read the rest of the books I'd found for any clues. One gave me a pretty big hint for the statue puzzle I'd already solved. Another talked about a fireplace and how students were forbidden to go near it: the author noted that the tower didn't have a chimney, which made the fireplace fishy and might explain its verboten status. Since the other books were mostly backstory and exposition related, I decided to go hunt for this fireplace. After sweeping the first few floors and uncovering nothing, the final timer sounded and I was done.
I wasn't anticipating this playthrough to be quite so... gentle. Anodyne, even. With the exception of the brief drowning detour at the skeleton sewers, I've spent most of this hour reading books and looking at well-preserved wooden furniture. To put it in the context of television programming, it's been far more Antiques Roadshow than Game of Thrones. That said, it's made me curious about what the rest of the game might be like: is it all similar, or do later towers ramp up the danger and pacing? Since I'm presently stuck here, I'm not in any rush to find out.
How Well Has It Aged?: Fine. Oddly enough, I could actually see a market for a retro first-person adventure game like this. First-person adventure gaming has continued to blossom in the present, thanks to immersive fare such as What Remains of Edith Finch and Gone Home, and likewise developers are producing more Indies with 32-bit polygonal graphical styles to keep up with what would most likely invoke childhood nostalgia among the age range buying the most games right now. With a better interface, better pacing, and no death penalty (not that I've met much that could trigger one) it could almost be something you might expect to see released on modern systems as a deliberate throwback. An example: Lunacid, which appeared on Steam just last week, is heavily influenced by those aforementioned early FromSoft games and has a similar inchoate polygonal aesthetic.
Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Slim but not impossible. Kemco are still around (they mostly make mobile JRPGs like Asdivine and visual novels like Raging Loop) as are the current Shadowgate IP owners Zojoi: a company founded by former ICOM employees David Marsh and Karl Roelofs who bought back the Shadowgate rights for that 2014 reboot. The Shadowgate license is still pretty active too: Zojoi put out an Oculus Quest-exclusive VR sequel just last year, Shadowgate VR: The Mines of Mythrok. If both companies sign off and Nintendo are interested - we might be talking years down the line, once they've run out of headliners - I could see it happening.
Retro Achievements Earned: 4 (out of 42). Most are story progression, though there's a few fun ones I might've never thought of trying. One involves attempting to read all the blank books found in the library.
History: Acclaim cast a long shadow over the N64, being its primary purveyor of low-quality licensed games, and this FPS based on an obscure comic line that Acclaim had picked up somewhere is typical of how comic book and video games tended to intersect during the 1990s. It wasn't all Marvel and DC: so many independent comic creators ended up in the hands of larger game, animation, and toy publishers hoping to spin a buck with tie-ins. Valiant Comics, the comic line in question, also included Shadow Man and Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, both of which also saw N64 adaptations that are generally better regarded than the mostly forgotten Armorines. As for the Armorines themselves, they were first introduced as US government attack dogs in power-suits trained to take down X-O Manowar, another Valiant Comics character similar to Iron Man, but after they switched their commanding officer with a nicer one they became heroes of their own comic arc.
Acclaim Studios London is the erstwhile Probe Entertainment, a UK-based studio prominent throughout the 16-bit era. This is one of the few games in which they were credited by their new Acclaim branding, shortly before they were dissolved along with Acclaim itself. Probe is perhaps best known for the Extreme-G franchise, at least as far as the N64 is concerned.
I've never heard of either this game nor the IP it draws from, so this should be... enlightening? The system had a fair many FPS games but very few that have stood the test of time. I actually bought several of them back in the day: Duke Nukem 64, Doom 64, Hexen 64, GoldenEye 007, and Perfect Dark (and, uh, South Park). No guarantees we'll see any of them, though.
16 Minutes In
Is this going to be a stand-up fight, sir, or another bug hunt? (The latter.)
After selecting between two protagonists - the grizzled loose cannon vet who is one insubordination report away from a court martial or the feisty by-the-books rookie determined to prove herself in a man's world - we get a bunch of exposition told to us via talking heads in text crawl form, ably demonstrating that the developers are sparing no expense with this adaptation. It turns out that the Armorines are special military operatives decked out in nigh-impenetrable power armor and state of the art laser weaponry sent in to clean up alien messes that Earth's regular armed forces are powerless to handle. When did Halo come out, again?
This controls like ass. Could this be our first true kusoge of 64 in 64? Even those F1 games seemed competent at what they were doing. Like Shadowgate 64, Armorines uses the analog stick for the camera and the C-buttons to move, which works out far worse for a shooter where you're expected to run and strafe around a lot. Did any of the Turoks or Rare FPS games do this? I honestly don't recall, but I want to say GoldenEye 007 had you alternate between an aiming mode and a movement mode by holding the R-button down, since each used the stick. Also, like Shadowgate 64, the game uses inverted camera controls by default; however, the difference here is that there doesn't seem to be any way to switch back over to camera movement a normal person would want. I can modify the sensitivity and that's about it. There's also alternative control schemes but the game won't tell you how they change the button layouts. I guess that's what the manual is for?
32 Minutes In
Even Armorines need to go to the bathroom. I don't think I can get out of my suit, though, so... lil' help?
The first level has you running around the surface of Siberia while the second and third go underground into a subterranean missile base. I neglected to mention but the game's enemies are giant alien insects without exception. Insects that look very much like the Klendathu bugs from Starship Troopers in fact, which I guess means we can add more to the list of people who didn't get the point of that movie. (This isn't even the only shooter with giant alien bugs on the system: DMA Design's Body Harvest is still out there waiting for us, and let's not forget how Perfect Dark ended.) The second level mercifully provided a turret sequence onboard a monorail, which meant I didn't have to worry about C-button movement for a while and could just 'splode alien arachnids with the cannon someone installed on this thing.
I'm getting used to the controls but the game's other big flaw is that it's kinda dull. You run around shooting bugs and taking very little damage if they should ever get close, and you occasionally hit a switch (or rescue an NPC who hits a switch for you) to open the way forward. No color-coded keys, no data logs, no awkward 3D platforming (maybe for the best), and the weapons you have are whatever you brought with you; they're all built into the Armorines suit regardless so I don't think you can switch them out. Mission debriefs are exclusively along the lines of "shoot everything" or "shoot everything quickly" (I sincerely hope there aren't any actual time limits). Hopefully I can finish up this Siberian cave system before I'm all done here. I'd like more level environments that aren't just grey or darker grey.
48 Minutes In
I would've boosted the brightness if there was anything to see down here. It's just corridors and the occasional dead scientist. Why did so many late-'90s FPS games have dead scientists, anyway?
I've been running around these creepy-ass tunnels trying to figure out what to do next. The goal here is to disable as many of the missiles as possible before the bugs launch them god-knows-where with a bunch of their eggs, presumably because these are cockroaches that can survive nuclear blasts at close range (I don't think that's what entomologists mean about cockroaches out-surviving humans in a nuclear apocalypse; it's more to do with their resistance to radioactive fallout rather than a resistance to 100 million degree explosions). Having disabled all the missiles I could, I need to find out where the few that launched are going. The fate of the world is at stake, or at least the fate of knowing where to go next once we're done here.
I mentioned the easy difficulty earlier. Turns out there are these big burrowing bugs (I know it's 1999 but watch other movies, guys) that hit real hard if you're not constantly evading, and that put my limited C-button strafing skills to the test. One fortunate twist is that the game has a very generous auto-aim function which elevates it from unplayable to just about serviceable. I'll also retract my statement that there aren't any weapon alternatives: I found a laser rifle on one of the bodies, and unlike your main SMG weapon it has limited ammo and thus best saved for tougher enemies.
64 Minutes In
Everything does chip damage besides these big boys, who can drain your HP gauge in seconds. I wonder if that's a bug and not a feature? Nope, definitely a bug.
I figured it out. There was an iron fence that separated me and the rest of the level, and the only thing in its antechamber were C4 bombs. I honestly didn't anticipate that the game would be sophisticated enough to introduce barriers that I would have to manually remove with explosives, but that's on me for not picking up on the obvious hints. The level ended soon after, as did the one that followed where I was tasked with escaping the launch facility and returning to the entrance of the first level to where my gunship awaited for extraction. Wasn't quite the exciting Super Metroid enemy base self-destruct ending you'd hope for, but I'll give it credit for the excellent timing corresponding with the end of its little spotlight here. The above screenshot was taken while fighting against one of those big burrowing bugs, and right behind it was the exit.
Tinkering with the controls, I figured out you can switch the analog stick and C-buttons for character movement and camera movement, but if it anything that makes it worse. Using face buttons for any kind of directional movement is just no bueno. It's not like anyone had figured out 3D FPS movement for a controller quite yet though, so I'll give it some slack. Albeit, not so much slack that I won't complain about it in every single one of these updates.
How Well Has It Aged?: Not Great. The aggressively '90s comic book energy combined with being stuck in that early console FPS dead zone before shit got codified with twin-analog sticks on every controller meant that this is very much a time capsule of a game, and perhaps not one anyone needs to dig up unless they have some very particular nostalgic yearnings. Even if everything worked like it was supposed to, it's just too darn tedious to be worth the trouble. Maybe future levels won't feel like EDF-lite, but I somehow doubt it.
Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Highly unlikely. First issue is that no-one is asking for it, at least I can't imagine anyone would. Second is that if the current rights holders wanted to rerelease it they wouldn't have to do so through Nintendo. They can just hand the reins to Nightdive Studios, who have already published modern remasters of Acclaim shooters Turok, Shadow Man, and Forsaken on several platforms. Apparently they got their mitts on some tech that allows them to reverse engineer N64 games, so they'd be the ones to handle something like this. That is, again, if anyone wanted it to happen.
I'd like to think I'm a video game polymath here at the Indie Game of the Week Institute for Weekly Indie Game Examinations but truth be told I have my handful of pet genres and the Indie industry, dutifully, never seems to stop working within them. This week the not-so-dubious-wheel has moved back around to "'90s humorous point-and-click adventure game" and, with it, Kelvin and the Infamous Machine: a 2016 release by Argentian studio Blyts. Kelvin, a not particularly intelligent research assistant, witnesses his mad inventor boss Professor Lupin lose the last of his sanity over a poor review of his new shower-based time machine - the "infamous machine" of the title - and go on a tear changing history and weakening the fabric of spacetime as a result. Sent out into the field by Lise, the professor's more competent research assistant, Kelvin flits between several time periods to re-inspire the geniuses that Lupin enviously resented enough to sabotage. Kelvin, unsurprisingly, does this by collecting random objects and using them on other random objects.
Right off the bat, Kelvin and the Infamous Machine ticks all the boxes I check for when starting a new adventure game: there's a "highlight all hotspots" button (it's on F, which took me a while to find... oh, "find"! I get it now!), you can double-click screen exits to immediately warp to that area rather than wait for the hero to slink all the way over there, and the puzzle difficulty is once again kept in check by an episodic structure that eliminates the natural accumulation of screens, hotspots, and inventory items that often make the late-game of these types too cumbersome to manage. Each of the game's chapters is wholly separate: you carry nothing over from the previous chapter, and each is treated as its own distinct adventure on the main menu screen (which makes me wonder if more chapters (or DLC) were intended at some point). That also means that you can slip back into any one of them and start it over if you've decided to hunt for the game's achievements, most of which can be easily missed if you aren't paying attention to their hintful descriptions. That said, there's not a whole lot of longevity, between the linear course of solving its one-solution puzzles and the game's relatively brisk pace and brief size. I'd say each chapter is likely to take about an hour, with the exception of the fourth and final which is more like a five minute finale.
There are times when you wonder how Kelvin managed to become a scientist in the first place. Maybe it's the hair?
Kelvin and the Infamous Machine's sense of humor is... well, I would define it as "genial." It's not overly gross, offensively bad, beholden to memes, deals only in rough chuckles, nor particularly cringeworthy. It's the perfectly tolerable type of situational comedy fare adventure games of this sort have enjoyed dating back to the genre's early days; a customary bedrock of occasional jokes and asides that is pretty much expected of any point-and-click from its era that wasn't trying to be grim and/or cinematic. The type of humor the word "levity" was created to embody. That is to say, that the game's jokes are occasionally amusing and are certainly better than the low bar video games have set for themselves over the years, if otherwise unremarkable. They got me a few times and that's seriously more than I can ask for one of these throwback homages. Kudos. (I'm damning it with faint praise like I'm some hilarious jokes wizard, but... well, it can be real hard to objectively judge any piece of media's humor quotient. It's fine. It won't annoy you, probably.)
Gameplay-wise the game is about what you'd expect. You have an inventory that can be accessed at any time in the top corner - you never have so many items that you need a separate screen - and most can be examined closer, which might offer a hint as to how they are to be used. Since each chapter takes place in their own self-contained areas, you're only ever looking at about seven or eight screens and about thirty hotspots total, so if you decide to pull the old brute force method of using everything on everything you should hit pay dirt before too long. That said, the puzzles aren't too oblique and with a few exceptions you should always have a fairly decent idea of what you ought to be doing, beyond the primary goal of inspiring the local genius of that time era and geographical region. Clearly you need to drop an apple on Isaac Newton's head, but with the protagonist's unexplained phobia of apples - presumably a riff on Guybrush's strong aversion to porcelain - he'll need a roundabout way to make it happen, and some experimentation gives you enough clues to get started. Otherwise, the standard pattern of talking to every NPC and taking everything that isn't nailed down ought to be enough to get the lateral thinking ball rolling.
Doesn't get more villainous than this. To be fair, the book's racial stereotypes probably hit better in the 17th century.
Kelvin and the Infamous Machine is as brazen in its stated intent as most any throwback Indie homage, doing its darndest to live up to the storied legacy it's chosen to invoke, and for the most part succeeds. On a technical/feature level it gets everything right, barring perhaps a fast travel system (though the individual chapters are short enough to not really need them). Graphically, it has a distinct art style that works well enough for the LucasFilm madcap adventure game tone it establishes, even if there's always that distracting feeling that many of its more normal-looking background characters are probably Kickstarter backers who had no qualms about affecting immersion if it meant they got to appear in a video game, albeit in likeness only. Regarding the story and puzzles though, it can err a little on the simple side with a narrative that wraps up too quickly and neatly and not nearly enough is done with the time-travel conceit beyond this Mario's Time Machine-tier historic figure pep talk jamboree. After all, Day of the Tentacle explored the potential of solving puzzles in four dimensions with its timeline-scattered cast; Kelvin and the Infamous Machine had an opportunity to do something similar, and almost does so with its finale, but opted to keep things overly simple. Perhaps that's for the best - I like the episodic format too much to want to tinker with it too much - though it's always rough when you can't compete with the complexity of a game turning thirty next year. Maybe that's a recurring issue with these homages though: they venerate those that came before so much they can scarcely conceive of trying to out-do them in any meaningful way. Besides that triviality though, Kelvin and the Infamous Machine hits the target it aims for with few significant drawbacks and comes recommended if you were as enthralled by the output of Gilbert, Schafer, Grossman, et al as this game's developers evidently were.
Let's blow on some cartridges and hunt around for rumble paks as we once again revisit the Nintendo 64 and its library via what is probably one of the least flattering methods imaginable. As always with this feature we're giving these old games another spin to see if they're ready for Prime Time, which in this case means inclusion on the Nintendo Switch Online service and its special N64-enriched tier. If you're dropping serious cheddar on that service you should expect the best of the best.
Episode 6's another freebie for me, with an excellent pre-select I've been waiting forever to bust out followed by a lottery pick for a genre I've not have the privilege of encountering so far. Of course, every time I eliminate two tolerable games from the pool, it becomes that little bit more stagnant and fetid. As we say around here, that's a problem for Future Mento.
Meanwhile, Current Mento realizes he should probably go over the rules again:
I pick one N64 game to showcase every week. I also have one foisted upon me by a metaphorical wheel of misfortune, drawn randomly from the system's entire library. Yes, including Superman 64. What a dark day that will be when that finally shows up. A dark, foggy, hoopy day.
For each, I spend sixty-four minutes with them exactly with check-ins written after every sixteen minute interval. Progress reports, status updates, and anything else I feel deserves a mention.
My closing thoughts take into account how well the game has aged and the likeliness of it showing up on NSO given its quality, reputation, and the present state of its IP owners.
We're also excluding any game that is presently already on the NSO service. As of March 11th, that now includes Nintendo's own F-Zero X. Missed my window on that one.
History: Rare's fourth game for the N64 sees them reacquainted with the Donkey Kong Country canon, giving Diddy his own kart racer game with various new friends that will later find their own solo successes, Banjo and Conker being the foremost examples (though I'm still holding out for a Tiptup solo project). Animal pals Diddy, Timber, Pipsy, Tiptup, Conker, Banjo, Bumper, and Krunch are all recruited to save an island paradise from the intergalactic villain Wizpig by out-racing him and his speedy minions across land, air, and sea.
I was planning on playing Diddy Kong Racing earlier in this feature, as it's one of my favorites for the system, but I was waiting for a merciful dry spell of racing games to prevent any burnout (incidentally, Burnout did not appear on the N64). It is my favorite kart racer to this day, though granted I don't play too many, and since it's one of a handful of games I'm near certain will be arriving to the NSO service at some point soon I wanted to cover it on here ahead of that announcement. Given we've now had to exclude another of the few great N64 racers (see above), it seemed prudent to hurry this process along. After all, isn't hurrying up the essence of racing games?
16 Minutes In
Hot-Top Volcano is the first flying-only race in the game. What better motivator to learn the ropes of aerial movement than the threat of burning hot magma?
Man, it's like riding a bicycle. Or, more accurately, like riding a cart, a plane, and a hovercraft. The trick you need to remember in Diddy Kong Racing, and that I've never forgotten, is to let off the accelerator just before hitting any of the zippers on the track for an extra boost. Armed with that tidbit and an uncommonly eidetic memory for these tracks, I'm already in the final course in the first major area of the game. After this race, I'll take on the easier version of the boss and then probably bounce over to the wintry area rather than do the coin challenges here. DKR always gives you a lot of options in its otherwise linear adventure mode, though, so I'll gravitate towards whatever track seems the most palatable.
I'm maining Bumper here because the poor guy never gets any love. He's the Luigi of the DKR world, with the same all-rounder stats as Diddy and Timber. Haven't run into trouble so far but then DKR is a game that gets steadily more difficult as it progresses. Also? This soundtrack continues to rip. Not a surprise but worth mentioning nonetheless.
32 Minutes In
Check out this smug timepiece-of-work. Being all clock of the walk. I'm in no mood to deal with this bold timer today, but T.T. better stopwatch his back.
In almost no time at all my overconfidence has once again proven to be my undoing, with some very narrow wins over the Dino Domain boss and the first three coin challenges of that realm. The coin challenges, for those unaware, involve collecting eight silver coins in each course (since it's a Rare game, we gotta have collectibles) and finishing the race in first place as usual. The hitch is that these coins aren't always on the optimal route and there are a few which you can't really get on the same lap because they're on branching paths or on opposite sides of the track. I usually burn my first lap collecting as many of the out-of-the-way coins as possible and then catch up and win with the second and third. It can be a fun challenge that tests your knowledge of the course and often does the clever design trick of teaching you the shortcuts if you didn't already know about them, though naturally the coins are in weirder places on the harder courses making those races even more of a struggle than usual.
I'm still rocking my man Bumper over here, now taking on the Snowflake Mountain challenges - most of which involve endlessly complaining about having to wear a facemask - as I work through the game's early content at a rapid pace. Whether or not I can maintain it over the next thirty-two minutes is the question.
48 Minutes In
The first hovercraft race is actually the second boss challenge, which is also maybe a lot to ask of the player. Especially given the hovercraft is notorious for its awkward controls. It's not that tricky though: you just kinda have to bank turns in advance.
As you can see, I've already conquered Snowflake Mountain and achieved the goal of going outside and touching grass, or whatever the internet's mad about today. As well as the standard single races, the boss challenges, and the coin challenges, there's also a hidden key in each world that unlocks a single-player version of one of the game's many battle mode stages. For some reason, these are super hard against CPU: the first involves taking eggs, incubating them at your nest, and protecting them from poachers (the other players) long enough so they'll hatch. I was lucky to nail it first time here, but if the CPU are really on your case with their sticky fingers it's often a crapshoot. The other thing are the trophy races: the grand prix mode, as it were, where the goal is to earn points across all races and finish at the top of the leaderboard. I'm not going to be doing that here though: I've too little time to spend racing on all these courses again.
Bumper continues to defy all contenders as he romps through to another first place finish. After this, I think I'm heading to the beach for pirate ships, rock pools, and a bit of the ol' sandy badger, if you catch my brake-drift.
64 Minutes In
Folks had their problems with friendly elephant genie Taj. After all, he has the sort of broad Indian stereotypical accent that would make Fisher Stevens and Hank Azaria blush. However, I always liked how you can hear him humming the non-diegetic music whenever you're close by.
With one final push in Snowflake Mountain and its coin challenges I managed to finish this session with a semi-respectable 17 balloons, though I got too distracted to follow through with my trip to the beach. I would've preferred 20 - as well as being a nice round number which matters to OCD weirdos like me, it's the same number of stars I earned in the Super Mario 64 playthrough for this series - but that's my bad for being stubborn about those tougher coin challenges. They start getting a lot harder in the ice world, often placed far away from the zippers that make getting ahead of the crowd that much easier. When you're in the thick of the group, you're much more prone to getting hit with a missile or an oil slick.
Bumper lived up to his name, driving into many a wall in dogged pursuit of those annoying coins, but still reigns supreme for now. This playthrough was an utter delight and I'm sad it's already over, but maybe getting out before the game really starts to ratchet up the difficulty is for the best. I've had the soundtrack on in the background as I write this up and may just continue to do that with all episodes going forward.
How Well Has It Aged?: Like a serving of chilled monkey brain, this game is exceptionally well-preserved. The feel is always the most important aspect of any good kart racer and it's not an easy balance to strike between arcade-style racing, power-ups that can make or break a strong lead, and environmental hazards where a lot of lost ground can feel arbitrary due to some unlucky turn or a giant dinosaur stomping on you as you drive underneath. Modern kart racers, specifically the Mario ones, are too focused on levelling the playing field so that anyone of any skill can win from behind, which makes the multiplayer chaotic and exciting but the single-player a nightmare. Diddy Kong Racing is one of the old guard that hits a happy equilibrium, giving you several opportunities to catch up and get ahead with your own skill without relying on lucky item box draws (all items in DKR are static: you always know what you're getting due to how they're color-coded) or too much in the way of rubberbanding that make victories feel unearned and hollow. Also, the three vehicle types and how they each change a course's feel completely! The course design with its wildly varying thematic differences! That music! It really is a complete package and one of the finest N64 games out there. (I swear I'll get around to my problematic faves in due time.)
Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Good. I'm liable to repeat most of what I've already said in the Blast Corps entry about Rare, their current owners Microsoft, and the friendlier relationship the latter is fostering with Nintendo. I might argue that Diddy Kong Racing has a better shot than most of Rare's back-catalogue due to the Kong connection, or the Kongnection since I have no willpower to stop myself from writing portmanteaus, but it's all down to what the two companies decide to allow and/or prioritize when it comes to the NSO inclusions. Nintendo might also try to stick to first-party stuff for the foreseeable future just to avoid having to pay MS anything.
Retro Achievements Earned: None. Used the wrong ROM again. Really picky stuff, this site.
History: While a sequel to one of Street Fighter's many imitators (though perhaps closer to a Virtua Fighter in practice), the Fighter's Destiny franchise made the unusual decision to turn the game into a martial arts sim with a point-based scoring system that rewards knockdowns based on the technique used. Drop foes quickly with special moves and counters to become the world's best. Developers Opus were not particularly renowned at the time, having mostly only put out PlayStation music games like Denki Groove Jikoku V and Fluid. As for the publishers, SouthPeak got into the FMV adventure game racket a little too late and focused on publishing licensed games thereafter while Imagineer's had a long and spotty track record going all the way back to the Famicom Disk System, including many more N64 games. (One of the few games they both developed and published for the system is Quest 64, which I'm going to force myself to play for this feature eventually if the lottery doesn't beat me to it.)
One thing I recall about the N64 from a historical perspective is that it had a rather poor track record when it came to one-on-one fighters. It saw quite a few of them, but they were all early polygonal fare that neither looked good or ran as smoothly as you'd hope and won't have improved with age. Didn't help much that the better fighter developers like Capcom and SNK largely kept to the PlayStation and Saturn during that era. I have zero experience with this franchise and little with its developer (Opus made A.S.P. / Desert Fighter for SNES, which was kinda bad but I liked it anyway, and more recently the amusing Half-Minute Hero games) so this should be a trip. Speaking of which, I should find the sweep leg button and spam that shit.
16 Minutes In
I'm going to say this is an atypical snapshot of this otherwise serious fighting game. Or at least I'd like to.
Took Saeki out for a spin, since he's evidently the Ryu of this game and I'm too much of a noob to not pick the shoto. After getting three opponents deep into the main Vs. CPU mode I decided I needed to brush up on how this game actually works and skulked off to the labs to train. Saeki's move list is relatively simple: there's a special on forward-forward-kick that's easy to learn, and forward-forward-punch is the counter. Hitting punch and kick together is the universal throw, but I need to be close to pull it off and the CPU can do it to me too once I've closed the distance so that strikes me as a risky strat unless I've stunned them first.
I'm definitely seeing the Virtua Fighter comparison. Granted, I'm not the most well-versed in this genre but Fighter Destiny 2's a bit more technical than I'm used to. It's a lot of reacting to your opponent's moves and responding when their guard is down; more a mind game than a masher. Took me a moment to acclimate to the points system and there's some evident strategies that it prioritizes, which I've only picked up on after watching the CPU exploit them. For instance, throws are an instant win and give you two points, while pushing your opponent off the ring with sustained aggro is only one point, which makes it way less viable a winning strategy. Pulling off a special - which are comparatively easy to avoid, since there's build up - will always knock down your opponent for three points, as does countering your opponent's attack with certain moves. Using the specials seems to be the fastest and most reliable route to winning a match, which requires you earn seven points total, but the CPU can dance around them if you're not careful. All right, I'm intrigued enough with what's going on here, though I can't imagine I'll get good enough to win any of the modes within this time limit.
32 Minutes In
Just got pounced by Ponce de León over here. He Raleigh handed me my own ass.
Armed with the dreaded leg sweep move, I've taken Saeki all the way through the versus mode to this foppish French dude who looks like Shakespeare. Given this guy wasn't on the character select screen, he's gotta be the boss or at least one of them. Along the way I've been introduced to most of the other fighters: there's a rough British street boxer called Dixon that reminds me of Vyvyan from The Young Ones; another British fighter named Kate who I'm fairly sure is modelled on Titanic-era Kate Winslet (not that she has too many fistfights in that movie...); a ninja called Ninja; Ziege, who's like a pro-wrestler Frankenstein, so maybe a Frankenscottsteiner? (we'll get to the genetic freaks when Bio F.R.E.A.K.S. inevitably shows up on here); a large dude who just makes weird noises called Abdul; Adriana, one of those Brazilian Mardi Gras festival dancers wearing next to nothing; Mei-Ling, the customary Chinese girl with pigtails; D-Dog, who is just straight up Dennis Rodman; and a clown named Pierre who fights in the nightmarish metaphysical circus stage that you saw above.
I've also gleaned a few more tidbits about how the game functions, which you'd hope after spending thirty minutes grappling with an engine. Throws aren't the instant wins I thought they were: there's a rapidly draining gauge that means you can hit an attack button to escape the throw in time, though this gauge is smaller when you have low stamina or are being thrown from behind. Draining the stamina bar, which isn't health, causes your opponents to be briefly stunned though they can still move out of the way and dodge. If they can recover, most of their stamina comes back, but almost any attack will knock them down for three points in this state and some specials even earn four points. It's also possible to grab onto the edge of the ring if you're about to fall and there are moves you can pull off here to yank the opponent down, but I've not been able to perform them yet. So far, Saeki's leg sweep seems to be doing wonders. I just need to kick this guy all the way back to Stratford-upon-Avon and then maybe I can check out the other modes before my time's up; right now it's simply a case of "To Beat or Not To Beat."
48 Minutes In
Turns out unlocking the special attacks first makes it easier to win matches. Who knew.
Well, that didn't take long. After a couple more attempts I managed to take out that upstart crow and now his winter of discontent is my summer of victory, as it were. I was surprised to find that beating the single-player unlocked one of Saeki's special moves: they're not all available from the jump, it seems. I suppose this system makes some amount of sense - some of these specials are powerful, and you're likely overwhelmed by choice early on and might appreciate a dripfeed of new skills to try - but if you were playing these games casually with friends it might rankle if someone couldn't use their usual tech because the console owner hadn't progressed far enough in the single-player. After completing the game, which is a first for 64 in 64, I tried out another mode: the Fighter's Arena. This place is absolutely wild: it's a sugoroku game where your chosen fighter earns stat upgrades and new moves (probably making it more viable than completing the Vs. CPU mode over and over) by moving around the board and getting into fights with special conditions. Sort of like a Mario Spar-ty.
I also met the Master and the Samurai here: the former is this game's Edge Master (from the Soul Calibur series), an elderly sensei that shows up in training battles that'll probably be difficult to unlock; and Samurai's basically Mokujin from Tekken - a possibly-sapient training dummy who I imagine can also be unlocked by jumping through the right hoops. The Master warned me about a character named Cherry who pops up in the Fighter's Arena and is apparently quite a challenge. I'm going to see how far I can through this mode with the remaining time as Fabien - since I just unlocked him and he seems kinda tough for a 17th century aristocrat who named all his moves after The Three Musketeers, the dork - so here goes nothing.
64 Minutes In
Instead of super cancels, this fighter game is just going to get me super cancelled trying to talk about Cherry here.
So... Cherry turned out to be Ivy Valentine if she were a vamping drag queen. Or maybe not, since the game uses female pronouns for her. I'm not sure where to start parsing any of that, so I'm going to move on to talking about this sugoroku Fighter's Arena mode a bit more. You actually start with pretty lousy stats: it's not what I first thought, where you bulk up a standard character and can transfer the resulting monster into the other single-player modes to dominate them, but rather you're working your way back up to that standard fighting shape. However, I think the moves you learn from the board's bigger fights might actually carry over. By taking part in as many of the smaller fights as possible and beating them, you earn stat points which make the important fights more winnable and that's where you earn the permanent upgrades. An interesting approach to fighter training, though as you can see above it can get a bit... strange.
Sixty-four minutes later and I feel like I'd be just about done with Fighter Destiny 2 even if there wasn't a time limit, excepting that I didn't get to try out too many of the other fighters. Ninja and Dixon seemed kinda fun and Ziege hits like a freight train which might've made his Vs. CPU route a bit easier to handle. I had a glance at the other characters in the game: I forgot to mention Federico, from whom I get Doctrine Dark vibes, and there's apparently a bipedal cow character you can unlock. I mean, I guess, right? '90s fighters all had something like that (and yes, Fighter Destiny 2 predates the fighting cow from Kung Pow: Enter the Fist, though does not predate fighting like a cow from The Secret of Monkey Island).
How Well Has It Aged?: Honestly, not so bad. The polygonal graphics are decent enough for N64 standards, though obviously of that generation, and the points system is an uncommon way of framing success and prioritizing a more tactical, risk vs. reward approach than just tossing out supers every other second. Throws become more like pins in wrestling games: they can end a match quick but your opponent won't take them lying down if they have enough vitality left. With only two attack buttons though I'm not sure it has the complexity most FGC types would want. Bit more of a gimmicky Virtua Fighter overall, though not without its nuances. It certainly falls outside my area of expertise so take all of this with a grain of salt.
Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: I'm going to say Not Great. SouthPeak vanished in 2011 after putting out the mostly reviled Stronghold 3. Imagineer's still around - they just put out a curling game on Switch last month - but I'm not sure Nintendo's bashing down the door for the rights to their N64 library. Given netplay is a major component of the NSO service, though, they might look to include some of the system's better fighters; since I imagine it's a short list, Fighter's Destiny and its sequel might be in with a chance.
Retro Achievements Earned: None. Doesn't have any.
Somehow, either through good fortune or sheer coincidence, I ended up playing two games this week with a considerable amount of overlap. One is Respawn's Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and the other is this week's Indie Game of the Week, Death's Door: both games feature a certain breezier variant of Souls combat where cautious strikes and situational awareness are key factors while also being open-ish explormers full of secrets to find and no small amount of backtracking required to do so. I've also been enjoying them both quite a bit, given the center of that Venn diagram might as well have my name written all over it.
In Death's Door, a crow reaper is assigned to procure a "giant soul" - one where the owner has been alive so long that they've turned gigantic, their souls having bloated with age in a cute nod to one of the less explicable aspects of Souls lore - but is ambushed and robbed before they can return it to the reaper base of operations, finding themselves on the hunt for three more before they can return to their grayscale dimension and, vitally, halt the natural aging process reapers undergo when on assignment. The gameplay balances combat, usually wave-based fracas against multiple opponents, and exploration propelled by some mild puzzle-solving and acquired traversal abilities. Were it not for the isometric perspective and the CG artstyle it'd be a dead ringer for Hyper Light Drifter.
One thing worth praising about Death's Door's combat is that there's always a manageable number of foes to defeat.
That comparison is especially apparent in the rapid pace of the combat, where you're whizzing around dodging projectiles and incoming foes to carve out melee hits between enemy chains or use some of your ranged abilities, each requiring a small amount of charge up. Mostly any projectile can be reflected also, provided they don't fall on you from above, and so you can use the attacks of ranged enemies to soften up the melee ones advancing menacingly upon you. Abilities use an ammo system that is replenished with melee hits, so you're encouraged to mix it up with long- and close-range assaults whenever possible. It's been a great deal of fun, in part because enemies and projectiles move slowly enough that you're rarely caught unawares by an attack or are unable to juggle all these enemies at once. Unless you really leave yourself open, you have more than a fraction of a second to react in time by dodge rolling out of the way, or swiping at the enemy/bullet to briefly stun them/send it flying, respectively. Notably, getting this rhythm down is easier than it looks and makes you feel like a badass when you're able to control the battlefield so readily. To compensate, you have a very limited amount of health and equally limited opportunities to heal; however, the game isn't looking to be as punitive as its Soulsian contemporaries, and so the penalty for death is immaterial. All you ever lose is time getting back to where you were.
The game's presentation is really something else too, though it can be a little jumbled with its tone. While the eccentric enemy designs owe much to animators Studio Ghibli, especially its pottery-obsessed oba-chan The Urn Witch and the kodama-like forest spirits, the typical level geography has a much sharper and cleaner look that helps highlight points of interest and allows enemies and their projectiles to stand out all the more in contrast. Musically, it has a fantastic, atmospheric soundtrack by David Fenn (who also worked on the mechanically and tonally similar action-adventure Indies Titan Souls and Moonlighter) that perfectly suits whichever environment it's in, with a melancholy seriousness that is often at odds with the game's silly sense of humor. (But hey, that didn't make Secret of Evermore any less of a banger either.) Despite being primarily about death and the inevitability of same, Death's Door can't help but humorously flesh out its antagonists by having them pop up for the occasional taunt while you're exploring their lands, and the reaper HQ that'll you regularly visit (as it's both the fast-travel hub and the upgrade store) has some mind-numbing bureaucratic 9-to-5 office job energy which feels especially germane to a colorless world frozen in time.
The Urn Witch is nothing if not polite the first few times you encounter her. By the point you meet her in her mansion's basement for a final showdown, however, any semblance of civility has evaporated along with her patience.
We return once again with 64 in 64's newer, slimmer form as we take on the best and more frequently worst the Nintendo 64 has to offer. Our goal, as always, is to critique these games in a modern context to see if they're something that should be added to the Nintendo Switch Online service, which is presently stuffing its premium subscription tier with whatever N64 games it can find at a glacial speed.
Episode 5's solo random pick isn't... awful? Considering what else is out there? I won't have to play a racing or sports game this week, for the first time since this feature began. Dropping to a single random game per episode means I won't be too verklempt if I get hit with a Whammy, but all the same I hope this luck holds.
Once more unto the rules:
I choose one N64 game and have one chosen for me by a random selection process. Yes, this can include either of the Sesame Street edutainment titles. Elmo better watch his back.
I then play both games for sixty-four minutes exactly, with each receiving progress reports taken at sixteen minute intervals. There's a "sixteen minutes of four-play" pun I refuse to make in there somewhere.
I conclude with my closing thoughts on the game's enduring legacy, its odds of ever appearing on the NSO service, and whatever achievements I earned through RetroAchievements dot com.
Also, and I don't mention this often, but we're excluding any game that is already available on NSO. Kinda defeats the purpose otherwise. It is very brave of me to exclude a dozen of the few games actually worth playing on the N64, and I thank you for saying so. (Related: February 25th saw the addition of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, so now that's out of the running.)
History: Treasure was one of Sega's secret weapons during the 16-bit era, putting out a series of colorful and eccentric hits on the Mega Drive that included all-timers like Gunstar Heroes, Dynamite Headdy, Alien Soldier, and Light Crusader. With the dawn of the 32-bit era, they followed Sega to the Saturn with Guardian Heroes and Silhouette Mirage but around the same time developed the N64-exclusive Mischief Makers (also their first non-Sega published game) as they were intrigued by the system's tech. This curiosity would become a pattern for them going forward, using their prowess at pushing hardware to its limits to adapt games for a plethora of home console and arcade platforms. Mischief Makers is a 2D platformer that follows the robotic maid Marina Liteyears as she attempts to rescue her creator by grabbing, shaking, and tossing around all obstacles in her way, including enemies.
I've spent very little time with Mischief Makers in the past because I never really got Treasure the way many of my retro-gaming-focused contemporaries did, but after a few years of the Mega Archive I've definitely come around to appreciate the level of craft and personality that goes into every one of their creations. Even though it's just an hour and change, I'm hoping this playthrough of Mischief Makers resonates a little harder this time.
16 Minutes In
That dude with a gun down there is an enemy, whereas this dude with the pompadour is not. Best to shake everything and everyone just in case.
Mischief Makers dumps a lot on you in the first two levels, which use roundabout ways of teaching you the core mechanics while setting up the story and a few major characters. The second actually has a funny way of introducing your moves: you're met with an evil version of yourself who promises to use all of Marina's techniques on the nearby innocent civilians to trash Marina's reputation, and whenever you talk to one they say something along the lines of "don't do [mechanic] to me again by pressing [button], I beg of you!". So far I've learned how to dash in any direction (both the C-buttons and D-pad do this, but for some reason the C-button versions are weaker), how to grab enemies (or really anything) and either throw them or shake them down for money, how to dig at suspicious spots, and how to use the teleporters.
I can already tell this is a Treasure game from its offbeat attitude and how, structurally, nothing is straightforward. I thought all these clay doll-looking dudes with the glowy red eyes were enemies, but most of the ones I've met so far have instead been friendly NPCs. There's still a lot of questions I have about some of these gem collectibles - chiefly, what any of them do, though I've noticed a few of them heal you - and how to reach the ones that are higher up that the dash can't reach. There's also a few buried in the landscape, so I think I need bombs for those but have no idea where to find one. There might be some backtracking involved, either that or the collectibles don't matter at all and I can probably just keep going. So that's what I'll do for now, despite it running counter to how I play anything with shinies to collect.
32 Minutes In
This Mighty Blockman level is some classic Treasure. All I have to do to make it go is to squeeze its head. So to speak.
The next level introduced a theme park revolving around "Cranballs" ("I've been calling her Cranball! Why didn't someone tell me?!") which can be used as airborne grapple points, and there's a recurring pink Cranball with a ribbon called Ms. Hint who gratefully accepts my crystal collectible things to tell me important game information like recommending I try the shake button on the Cranballs. Turns out shaking one's balls provides all sorts of benefits, not least of which is activating additional balls to shake and opening the level's exit teleporter. The subsequent level was another theme park, this one themed around spikes, which naturally didn't do you any favors if you tried to grab them. The level after that involved me finding a bunch of kids and returning them to their mother, having to quickly master the dash and grab moves to chase them down as they ran away.
I have to say, I'm enjoying the silly method this game is doling out these necessary mechanical tutorials, building jokes and strange mission concepts around them. Definitely reminds me of how many of Dynamite Headdy's levels were just one-off skits and other goofy asides. Treasure's never been one to adhere to a traditional pattern of having each world be a set of standard-length levels punctuated by a boss fight at the end. Instead, a boss can show up at any time, and levels can be ten minutes long or ten seconds long. A game with a personality this strong would also explain why it's such a cult favorite: we tend to remember the games that stick out most.
48 Minutes In
One of the golden gems. Not sure what these do, but I still gotta have them.
Progressing through the first world - there's a map screen with discrete worlds, but given the nature of these levels there's little in the way of thematic cohesion - I've learned a few more tricks while the game continues to throw its curveballs. In the 36 minute screenshot I was halfway through a level where you control a colossal "Blockman" to bash through walls and since then the game's been freely tossing enemies my way, starting with a sudden boss fight against a desert worm that could breathe fire and more recently against a pack of these Clancer guys wearing cowboy hats. Clancers, incidentally, are the name of those spooky robot dudes that have been mostly friendly so far, though I guess some have been turned evil by the Empire that kidnapped Marina's prof. It's not always easy to tell apart the good ones and the bad ones, but fortunately you can't seem to do any permanent damage to the former.
With the introduction of enemies it feels like the game's ready to take the training wheels off. I think I have enough practice with the mechanics now to make progress. One thing the game's not formally introduced me to yet are the golden diamonds: you can see one in the above screenshot behind these red walls I need to explode. Collecting them generates a little victory chime and places a golden diamond next to the level's name, so I'm guessing these are the important collectibles. I'm just going to see far I can get in this last 16 minute segment without getting obsessive over backtracking for collectibles - believe me, though, it's a test of willpower.
64 Minutes In
A typical level ending screen. I like this grid of portraits, random each time. I imagine most of these are future bosses?
Two levels into the second world, though thematically 1-10 and 2-1 are connected to one another, and the game's starting to get visually ambitious with some 3D depth to the otherwise 2D platforming. In fact, the level I just completed here in the screenshot, where you climb a tower activating Cranballs that reset destroyed walls so you can use them to climb up further, reminded me a lot - if only superficially - of a Kirby 64 level where you're being chased upwards by a rising floor of sand. So far, Mischief Makers has performed a minor miracle of creating a wholly distinct hook for each of these levels: 1-10 had you escaping a live volcano - a familiar pattern of dodging past fireballs which fall at regular intervals, which I believe was also a Yoshi's Island stage - while 2-1 saw you boosting past lava traps with a mix of the horizontal dash and roll moves (the latter allows you to escape damage while moving forward, ideal for traps that can't be leapt over) and 2-2 had the aforementioned tower climb.
I'm honestly sad to put the game down, but rules are rules. After half an hour, once it's assured that you have most of the mechanics down, the game starts to let its hair down a bit and give you some challenging fights and platforming sequences. If I were to return to the game, I might backtrack for those golden diamonds - despite the fact I still have no idea what they do - and keep seeing what kind of surprises future levels have in store.
How Well Has It Aged?: Superbly. Graphically it's doing the same pre-rendered sprites thing that Kirby 64 would eventually do (as well as Donkey Kong Country on the generation previous) but Treasure games have always had this certain abstractness when it comes to their aesthetics so it mostly works. Gameplay-wise Mischief Makers follows Super Mario 64's conceit of creating a wide repertoire of moves the player can pull off and constantly coming up with new ideas to challenge their growing mastery of same, and this early variation - no clue as to how long into the late-game it lasts - has made it a joyfully unpredictable journey. Ultimately, the fact that it's so distinct (in both mechanical and narrative terms) is probably why it's aged as well as it has.
Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Unsure. Treasure is still around but they've been inert since 2018, when they ported their polarity-switching shoot 'em up Ikaruga on Switch and PS4. Prior to that, their last original game was the vaguely Mega Man-esque 3DS character-action Gaist Crusher God, released in 2014 in Japan only. Most of their Mega Drive games have been widely available for a while (the exception being the licensed stuff, like McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure and their YuYu Hakusho game), but that might be more Sega's doing than Treasure's. Mischief Maker's original Japanese publishers were Enix, so if this is something Square Enix has the power to make happen it might become part of whatever deal they eventually sign with Nintendo to put their SNES JRPGs on the service. Lotta big maybes though.
Retro Achievements Earned: 2 (of 55). Standard assortment of achievements for story progress, no-damage boss clears, and collecting all those gold gems I mentioned. There's also a few for earning A-Ranks and S-Ranks on levels (I didn't get a single one of either of those; I guess I had to be much faster).
History: Rampage 2: Universal Tour is the direct sequel to Rampage World Tour, itself an attempt to reboot the 1986 arcade game Rampage with pre-rendered 3D graphics and something resembling a narrative thread as your chosen colossal mutant terrorizes cities across the world. Intended in part to be a competitive multiplayer game, where you and a rival cause the most destruction as quickly as possible, the game still just about works as a single-player experience. Developers Avalanche Software rose from the ashes of Acclaim, founded by former members of Sculptured Software (briefly Acclaim Studios Salt Lake City), and got their auspicious start with the SNES/Genesis port of Midway's Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. They remained a Midway subsidiary until the mid-00s when they were bought by Disney, and jettisoned along with its entire games branch after the "disappointing" sales of Disney Infinity. Avalanche is still active today, having been resurrected by WB Games, and is currently working on wizarding sim Hogwarts Legacy.
With this feature, I occasionally run into the issue of "is an hour enough time to get a good handle on a game?" Ogre Battle 64 was one such case where an hour barely got me through the tutorials and opening cutscenes. Others, like Goemon or the Zeldas, increase in quality as they go beyond that sixty-four minute mark because you unlock new characters, items, and mechanics as you progress. Rampage, though? Rampage might be the perfect game to only play for an hour. In fact, an hour's probably too much. I'm very familiar with the original Rampage - I owned the Atari ST version, one of the home computer's better arcade conversions - and I've played through Rampage World Tour at least once on MAME. These aren't great games necessarily - the jumping controls and punching accuracy leave much to be desired, and it's repetitive as all hell - but they've always been decent enough timewasters.
16 Minutes In
If Jeff Grubb is looking for games for his daughter where Meeps eat people instead, this might be right up her alley.
Well, so far, so Rampage. The pattern's been the same since the original 1986 arcade cabinet: you climb buildings, punch each floor on either side to do the most damage possible while eating anything edible you find (including people), smash the roof until the whole structure eventually crumbles, and then move onto the next. Anything shooting at you needs to die ASAP. Once everything's a smoking crater you move onto the next city.
Universal Tour made me think this game was either going to start including other planets or maybe you fight Jaws or a T-Rex from Jurassic Park. Except I don't think it's affiliated with Universal Studios so it's probably the former and only after I get far enough through. Right now I'm stomping through San Diego and gradually making my way to the east coast and NYC. Taking a bite out of the Big Apple is sort of a rite of passage for giant monsters.
32 Minutes In
Definitely something a little psychotic about chasing people around to eat them for a very small health boost. Wouldn't be a giant monster game without it though.
Neglected to mention, there's three new kaiju in this one. We have Boris, a giant rhino; Curtis, a big rat; and Ruby, this enormous crab/lobster person who ought to be followed around by B-52s music. The original trio (George, Lizzie, Ralph) were captured after World Tour and you've set out to either rescue them or destroy them so you can take over as the dominant mutants. I'm wondering if by completing one set of levels, each on a different continent, you unlock the mutant you emancipate for the other level sets. Besides some mild stat variation I don't think it makes much of a difference which one you pick.
The other new thing, and this may have been in World Tour as well, is that you can fill up an ability gauge and unleash it to do a lot of damage very quickly. For Ruby, it's spinning around in circles doing lariats to buildings and tanks. It's been handy but I frequently forget I have it, since I'm so used to playing the original; I should remember to use it when there's a lot of stuff around shooting me.
48 Minutes In
I later read that every monster has their preferred type of non-human food. I think I can guess who likes these.
Gotta tell ya, stomping on buildings and squishing tiny humans can get old surprisingly fast. I've now made it as far east as Cleveland (I'll tell you what's "Hot in Cleveland" right now: all those smoldering ruins I left behind) and the usual Rampage doldrums have set in. One issue with these classic arcade game remakes is that they don't really do enough to flesh out the game sufficiently to make them viable for home systems. Rampage arcade conversions, and the arcade original itself, were fine in the mid-1980s because games weren't generally sophisticated enough to extend beyond thirty minute playthroughs before you got bored and moved on, but trying to sell that same model of game at the cusp of the 21st century for fifty or sixty bucks seems almost obscene in comparison. Cynical, even.
Granted, though, in its multiplayer mode you can forgive much of its mindless repetition: if the stated purpose of Rampage is to get drunk (or giddy on sugary drinks, for younger audiences) and smash a city to pieces with your friends it works well enough in that context.
64 Minutes In
Movin' On. That's what I'm doing now.
I eventually got a game over in Boston - Red Sox fans are pretty intense - and, naturally, there are no continues. There's an in-game save system though, so I imagine I would've started over a few levels back when the prompt to save last appeared. No skin off my colossal chitin either way, since I only had about three minutes left on the timer. I decided to see what the European levels were like with Boris, and... well, let's just say Madrid looks shockingly like San Antonio. It even had the same twangy banjo BGM.
I'm not wary enough of jinxes to say that I hope this is all the Rampage I end up playing this year. A little certainly goes a long way with these games.
How Well Has It Aged?: Meh. You could say Rampage 2: Universal Tour didn't age all that well when it first came out, given it meticulously followed the blueprints of a then-thirteen-year-old game. On the other hand, the Rampage series was never one for nuance or a gradual progression of mechanical depth, and it works about as well today in delivering what it does as it ever has. I will say that I had more fun with Blast Corps, which has more or less the same objective of causing widespread destruction at a rapid clip.
Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Not Zero. Rampage is now property of Warner Brothers, along with Avalanche, and they're still very active in video game development. Rampage memorably became a movie vehicle for The Rock as recently as 2018, and while I doubt anyone's interested in making a new game based on that giant mutant turkey whatever cursed focus group was involved in the decision to make it happen presumably considers Rampage to be enough of a recognized brand. Midway made many N64 games though, so if WB ever gets involved with Nintendo Switch Online they're going to be spoiled for choice: no telling if Rampage World Tour/Universal Tour is prioritized over the likes of Cruis'n USA, Rush, or MK4.
Retro Achievements Earned: 3 (of 25). Sometimes these little guys produce spoilers: there's one each for destroying major cities as George, Lizzie, and Ralph so I was right that you eventually unlock them. There's also several more kaiju too: Myukus, Big Al, and Noobus, the last of which is a Noob Saibot palette swap of Myukus. Good to know? I think I would've had to play the game for another two hours to unlock any of them though, so nuts to that.
8-bit homages are nothing new, but what's perhaps a little less common than the NES throwbacks are those referencing 8-bit home computers that were a much bigger deal in Europe and in particular the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, perhaps due to its instantly recognizable neon-on-black color scheme. The brass ring of this particular sphere of nostalgia-mining would be Terry Cavanaugh's 2011 game VVVVVV, which balanced that old-school platforming difficulty and personality with an injection of innovation and a fantastic chiptune soundtrack. Others, like Glass Frog Games's 8 Bit Space, are far more modest with their aspirations.
In 8 Bit Space you are a little astronaut dude whose job it is to explore planets for glowy objects - done up in the traditional strobing multi-colored style of old Spectrum collectibles - and gemstones in particular. Each of the game's five solar systems has five planets of levels comprised of multiple single screens stacked together, sometimes in a linear order but usually in a branching maze, and there are three gemstones hidden across system: finding them all unlocks a temple which provides one of several trophy-looking things that, once all are found, unlocks the ending. The game really is as simple as that: it's the type of throwback that errs closer to being as elementary as the games it venerates rather than looking to reinvent an archaic format for the modern age. That tunnel vision works against 8 Bit Space as much as for it.
It bothers me a little that some sprites, like these smaller collectibles and one particular monster that rolls around, don't conform to the pixel size limits everything else does. Feels like when you spot an extra wearing a wristwatch in a medieval battle scene.
If you were to go back and consider VVVVVV's approach to this homage format, the old computer game connection is mostly a superficial one. The core of VVVVVV is in its gravity-flipping mechanic, which wasn't anywhere near as old hat as its art direction, and the way some portions of that game might toss you into a deadly auto-scrolling tower or a sequence where you and a companion that shadows your movements need to escape together. Instances where a particular collectible was so difficult to reach that you might give up and focus on just completing the game, or stick around and doggedly pursue it for the eventual delayed gratification when it finally falls into your hands. That feeling of triumph when you complete the game's last few hurdles as the music swells up. 8 Bit Space has none of these ingenious concepts or moments. It's simply a game where you jump around small maps, collecting as much shiny stuff as possible before bowing out with its amusing ending after an hour or so. There's no other controls besides move and jump, every enemy mostly just patrols around passively, and the only variation in the level design is that sometimes they're a little bigger than average. Oh, and the color schemes are usually different.
That's not to say that 8 Bit Space doesn't have a few ideas of its own. It presents a difficulty system which seems to acutely understand the demands of the modern player as well as the type of older audience that might not desire such concessions for the sake of this contemporary notion of enhanced accessibility. On the easiest setting, you can die as often as you like with no repercussions beyond getting booted back to the level's entrance while retaining all collectibles. On medium, you have three lives before getting kicked out of the current level entirely and forced to start over at 0% completion. On the old-school difficulty, you have three lives and no continue function, so dying means restarting the whole game. In each case you're getting a version of the game that makes sense to you as either a casual tourist with some historical interest in the game's presentation, as a modern platformer fan who wants some kind of challenge and penalty for death, and those of an older or perhaps more masocore leaning who want the same harsh fail state conditions such a game would've had as a Spectrum ZX release in the mid-80s. I also found it cute that the game tosses in a few tips of the hat to classic Spectrum ZX icons, each of whom appear as statues in the five temples.
Our jumping egg person, who art in 8-bit heaven, hallowed be thy yolk.
The game is perfectly functional and offers some satisfying if basic platforming action, evading enemies rather than destroying them as you pick your way through each of its maps collecting as much as you feel like collecting en route to the exit transporter. Given the bar was made so much higher for throwbacks such as these well over ten years ago doesn't really do it any favors in comparison, though, and there are many other Spectrum ZX homages since that are more ambitious (another semi-recent favorite of mine is Lumo from 2016). Judged on its own merits of being a tiny, modest platformer sold at a tiny, modest price it's nothing to sneeze at - especially if you're a thirty- or fortysomething year old parent trying to explain the type of games you played as a kid to your own progeny and could use a cheap and cheerful approximation to demonstrate - but I couldn't help but feel underwhelmed by how rudimentary it all is. If you're looking for a 1:1 recreation of ZX gaming you might as well just boot up the original Manic Miner or Chuckie Egg.
Here we are again with more Nintendo 64 detritus to pick through to find those precious gems that have stood the test of time and should be welcomed with open arms by the Nintendo Switch Online service, which despite establishing an extra special super-premium subscription tier for N64 ROMs is being exceptionally languid when it comes to actually adding any. I say detritus, but we got some pretty fortunate picks this week. I guess miracles can happen.
A recap of the rules:
We're playing two or more N64 games for sixty-four minutes apiece. Hence, 64 in 64.
One is pre-selected by me, the others are picked randomly from the master list of 388 unique N64 releases. Yes, including all three Army Men games. Fingers crossed for those, yeah?
I write about my escapades with each after each sixteen minute segment. Sort of a quarterly report.
I then conclude with my thoughts as to how well they've aged and how likely they are to pop up on the NSO service, considering their desirability and the current condition of its license owners.
Programming note: After this week's episode I'm going to switch to one pre-selected and one random game per week. These larger editions were intended to jumpstart this feature for its inaugural month, but they've been consuming too much of my weekends. I'd rather put that time towards contemporary games from my gargantuan backlog and maybe less on annual sports games from 20 years ago. I have enough ideas for this feature to last the rest of the year if need be, but we'll see what kind of legs it has for the foreseeable future. Hopefully y'all are still enjoying my suffering. It's why I'm here after all.
History: Quest Corporation was one of those unassuming RPG developers of the '90s that was able to stay solvent thanks to a surfeit of talent: writer and designer Yasumi Matsuno, composers Hitoshi Sakimoto and Masaharu Iwata, and character artist Akihiko Yoshida. Sadly, most of them had already been poached by Square to create Final Fantasy Tactics prior to the development of Person of Lordly Caliber (soon followed by Quest itself), the exceptions being the freelance Sakimoto and Iwata. The third in the Ogre series, following Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen and Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together (both SNES), Ogre Battle 64 is - as far as I'm aware - the only localized tactical RPG for the Nintendo 64 and one of a small handful of notable N64 RPGs period.
My love for RPGs would later see me quasi-defecting to Sony during the late '90s, since the N64 was very much not the platform for those, but this is one of the system's uncommon few I never found my way to playing. Part of that is because the SNES Ogre Battle's real-time aspect never appealed to me much as it was far too anxiety-inducing juggling all those moving units running off on different tangents, but I'm still curious enough to discover what I missed out on. Its use of pre-rendered sprites and that isometric perspective always reminded me of Super Mario RPG too, so that's a plus.
16 Minutes In
See what it says on my uniform? Designated protagonist. Get over it.
As anticipated from my first RPG playthrough for this feature, I'm still in the opening cutscenes at the 16 minute mark. The game establishes your character as a man dissatisfied with his home life, choosing to enlist at a military academy to prove himself. Six years later, you're getting blessed by the local Archbishop with a graduation questionnaire - it definitely felt like one of those older The Elder Scrolls "pick your character type by truthfully answering these vague prompts and be dissatisfied with the result" scenarios - and then it's off to the first location of the game, Tenne Plains, for further training. It was shortly after the first mission's briefing that I received the above scene between my character, the guy with the customary purple protagonist hair, and this disgruntled Dio guy who wasn't happy I was commander. I mean, you could fathom as much from the dialogue captured. (There was actually a decision here whether or not to accept Dio's challenge for a duel; I hope I made the right choice by accepting. Weirdest feeling that this character might run off to become a vampire if I mess up.)
Suffice it to say I don't have much to comment on the game's combat mechanics (or really any mechanics) just yet. I remember Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen kinda dropping you into the thick of it from the go with a huge battle - either my memories are screwy or it was one of those mostly-automated abilitease fights like the start of Final Fantasy Tactics - so I appreciate a little bit of worldbuilding and character work before the first fracas. Here's hoping I get through at least one battle before the full 64 minutes are up, though.
32 Minutes In
Get back here, old man, I'm not done beating you with your own walking stick.
The next sixteen minutes mostly comprised of the first true battle of the game, in which I am to take the local mines from some monsters and bandits while capturing one or more of their three settlements along the way. By capturing settlements I can recover faster and deprive the enemy forces of the same benefit, though they aren't all strictly necessary for the mission. While the player determines a unit's movements and direction, the actual combat is automatic: your unit engages the enemy, they exchange a few blows, the game decides the winner and forces the other side to retreat. This is how you take over settlements: by routing its defenders, you deny them a safe haven and can either wait for them to try to retaliate or chase them down as they escape. It's a Catch-22 however: either they wait until you leave to recapture the base, or you let it be captured by another enemy force while you pursue them.
I only have the one unit right now, so strategizing around their superior numbers is kinda cumbersome. I've managed to successfully eliminate a single group of enemies so far, after three battles and the subsequent attempts to run after them, and I've since captured all three enemy settlements and then lost one because my attention was split. Literal "three steps forward, one step back" type of slow process. But, hey, things might change once I get another unit to work with.
48 Minutes In
Conquer all the red bases. Got it.
I completed the battle shortly after the previous screenshot, though it took a total of seven days to chase all those enemy units down before making a break for the enemy HQ. Every time I finished one off, I got an "ali. down" debuff on one of my units, which I can only guess means they disliked that I was coup de gracing all these bad guys. However, if you don't actually defeat them you run the risk of them taking over an allied settlement to recover and your unit only earns 1 XP from successfully forcing them to retreat and around 20 XP if you wipe them out. I gotta be ruthless if I want to be strong enough to face the battles to come.
I'm also finding new gear occasionally but I've no idea where to equip them. There's no interstitial character customization menu I can find, so when the next battle starts (this is the briefing) I'm going to see if it's a HQ-only service. Seems a bit odd that I can't just equip them in the field, but maybe they have to be modified for my burly physique first or something.
64 Minutes In
Check out this guy's swag pose. I guess I'd be overconfident too if I had two healers with me.
Yeah, it's the R button. Not sure why I didn't try it until now, though I have my suspicions (i.e. I'm an idiot). Not only does the R menu let you organize and equip your units and potentially change their classes (once they've gained enough XP) but you can use it to dispatch your other units. I had five other troops sitting in here twiddling their thumbs, including that hothead Dio, that I could've used to that make first map far easier on myself. In my defense, it does seem odd that they're not all active from the get go, though maybe there's an option to dispatch at any allied settlement and the strategy was to pick something a little more central and deploy everyone from there. Well, I didn't need much help for the first map and it's not looking like this one will be much tougher despite the bigger field.
For the long-term, which obviously isn't applicable here, I'd probably want to figure out how to distribute the enemy XP evenly across all my active units so no-one falls too far behind and becomes a liability. I think there's a way to switch non-leader troops between units if I want to even out the level averages of each though with games like this I'm always inclined to put all my eggs in one basket, that being the protagonist's unit: the one I cannot afford to lose (it's a game over condition and everything). I now think the "ali. down" pop-ups meant alignment down, because everyone is neutral but could be lawful or chaotic. If my main unit is OP, then it's probably an alignment hit if I'm bullying these weaker units. I think the strat here is that my heavy-hitters come in to soften them up and I send one of my chump subordinates after them to finish them off so they can benefit from the XP. If nothing else, the game is certainly more complex than I gave it credit for: something about the real-time element had me believe Ogre Battle was the shallow brother to Tactics Ogre's deeper waters.
How Well Has It Aged?: You know, not so bad. The pre-rendered sprite approach has aged worse than most pixel graphics from the era, but the backgrounds and UI look fine. It really does look like a PS1 RPG that got lost and wandered into the wrong game library, but not necessarily in a negative sense. I'm glad the N64 saw a few of these complex, traditional SRPGs, even if the biggest developer of them - Squaresoft - very much wanted nothing to do with Nintendo after their optical media falling out. I probably wouldn't keep going with it after this, but I recognize and respect the level of depth involved if I ever decided to get serious with it. (One thing I was curious about: the game referred to itself as the sixth episode of the Ogre Battle saga, though I was certain it was only the third game in the franchise. I'm guessing they were going for a Star Wars thing? Leaving some room for eventual prequels?)
Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: High. Quest was absorbed by Square shortly after this game's release, which of course is now Square Enix, who has long since buried the hatchet with Nintendo and frequently pops by with ports. They were involved with the SNES Classic Mini (contributing Super Mario RPG, Secret of Mana, and FF6) and while they've yet to add any SNES games to the Switch Online service there's probably some sort of agreement in the works given how important Square RPGs were to that platform. (The Final Fantasies 4 through 6 probably won't be joining NSO any time soon, however: SE's trying to sell their "pixel remaster" versions at present.) Crucially, Ogre Battle 64 was part of both the Wii's and Wii U's Virtual Console libraries so they've already gone through this process twice.
Retro Achievements Earned: 1 (of 116). Almost all of these are story progression, recovering the hidden items on each map, and recruiting characters and finding their special equipment. Given there are over 40 maps, I wasn't anywhere close to being done.
History: An Atari Games arcade racer brought to home consoles by fellow arcade devs Midway, San Francisco Rush 2049 took the high-octane formula of the previous two Rush games and injected some sci-fi, introducing retractable wings and a WipEout-style neon aesthetic to its titular city setting. It would be the final game created with the Atari Games label: the studio was renamed Midway Games West shortly after the game released.
There are fifty-eight racing games for the N64 as far as I can tell, which comprise approximately 15% of the whole library, so I can consider myself fortunate that I rolled up one of the better regarded ones. After all those dry F1 games I'm jonesing for a good arcade racer, if not a kart racer, for a bit more excitement. Also, shout-outs to our own King of Head Action, @rorie: he selected San Francisco Rush 2049 as his "Guilty Treasure," though I'm pretty sure the N64 port wasn't the edition he had in mind.
16 Minutes In
Oh Lord, protect this rocket car and all who drive within the rocket car.
I dimly recalled from that Guilty Treasures video that the way to succeed in this game is by exploiting shortcuts in the environment, and so I took on the first track in Practice Mode to give myself time and space to look for them while also familiarizing myself with the controls. Man, this game moves real fast. Fast enough that even if I knew a shortcut was coming I'd barely have time to slow down and take the diversion in time without flipping my car or driving into a wall (both of which causes it to explode). Yet, as I found out when I attempted that first track again in a real race, there's almost no way to catch up to the cars ahead of you unless you creatively cut some corners. I spent almost that entire race in 2nd place unable to get an inch closer to the car ahead until I made an unfortunate choice with a shortcut that required a sudden 90 degree turn, and the subsequent barrel roll and immolation combo ensured I would finish in third place overall.
I like that the car selection included an F1 open-wheeled vehicle, a Super GT, and a straight up rocket car. Like, yeah, I'm going to pick the grampy '96 McLaren over the sleek 2049 vehicle with a jet engine strapped to it (no real noticeable difference in speed though). Even in circuit mode it looks like you can switch vehicles between races, so I think that's what I'm going to do. Hopefully it's not just a matter of memorizing the courses beforehand if you want to win and something more along the lines of just hitting the nitrous button (as soon as I find one) on the straights.
32 Minutes In
Wings and cars don't mix. Well, outside of Diddy Kong Racing.
The difficulty is definitely starting to ramp up here in the fourth race which, fittingly, has way more ramps in it. I figured out the wings button but if there's a benefit of using these I've yet to find it. I've not been that much faster in the air and the slightest horizontal movement causes it to yaw dangerously as you can see above. My CPU opponents, of course, have no trouble with all these 90 degree turns and regularly head straight for all the shortcuts, so I'm starting to wonder if this "Beginner" difficulty isn't something of an ironic misnomer.
The game certainly has an element of fun about it - the last track had a jump near the end where three jets would regularly fly overhead as you hit it - but the increasing number of squirrely turns and the dawning realization that I should've practiced all these tracks beforehand is sapping my will by the moment. I've since switched cars from the Rocket 2X to the Magnum, as I figured I needed a monster car for my magnum dong, and its superior handling is definitely making a difference on these twistier tracks. Statistically, every car I have unlocked is identical besides the rocket car (faster top speed and acceleration, worse handling, perhaps as to be expected) so I might just stick with this for now.
48 Minutes In
I grew to appreciate the UI widget on the left that tells you how close cars behind you are. Encouraged me to put my foot down more than once.
Ah, so it turns out the game only has four tracks. The second half of this eight-track circuit are the same four in reverse. I did score my first victory on the reverse version of the first track, and would've won the above race on the reverse second track were it not for my update timer going off and distracting me (an ever-present menace in this feature). I haven't tweaked much, besides switching to a medium frame for the Magnum to boost my max speed a little. I still have no idea if the wings are helping, but I enjoy popping those bad boys out for some air too much to mind at this point.
With only four courses, it's making sense to me now why they're so elaborate with the shortcuts and alternative paths and how much they change when you're driving down them the other way. Gotta give them some replay value. There are also these collectibles I keep finding off the beaten path: I've no idea how there's so many or why they're split into silver and gold (are gold harder to find, perhaps?), and of course I have no idea of what they do or unlock, but any N64 game with collectibles has my interest piqued. Since they still count in the practice races, I might spend the remainder of my time left after this circuit (I'm not going to win; one CPU opponent in particular regularly trounces me and is like 20 points ahead) looking for shinies.
64 Minutes In
I know nothing of SF geography, so I'm just going to assume I lucked into taking a photo of Giant Bomb's former offices. They all worked out of a factory, right?
As expected, I managed to squeak my way to a second place finish, and in doing so unlocked a fifth course! I guess this one's a little tougher, as it only appears in the Intermediate circuit (which was also unlocked) and appears to be full of twists and hard turns. It'd be easier if there were more straights, but that was never going to be the case for San Francisco. Going to extrapolate from this completion bonus that there might be even more tracks to unlock on higher difficulties, though I wonder if I would've received something special for first place? The game seems cool with you restarting any race provided you're still in the middle of it, so if I was obdurate enough I could probably find out. I'm not that invested though.
After that sliver of silver, I decided to check out this new course in the practice mode and as you can see in the screenshot above I went a little off-track looking for spinning tchotchkes. Gold ones definitely seem a bit trickier to collect: it's not just that you have to find them, but many require you to be moving at great speed before hitting some part of the geometry to send you flying high enough to reach them. It's clear that the direction of the course is also important for specific collectibles, though it wouldn't take much to pull a U-turn and check the same course again backwards. Either way, I'm bowing out here before I give into my nook and cranny exploring instincts.
How Well Has It Aged?: S'fine. Within its generation SF2049 kinda sits between the more realistic racers like those F1 games from previous episodes and those of a more fantastical bent, like the system's many future racers (F-Zero X, Extreme-G) and kart racers (DKR, MK64), neither of which I wouldn't mind bumping into eventually. I'm not the type to race on the same courses over and over to shave off another second from my best lap and so I doubt this game would've retained my interest beyond the length of a weekend, but I appreciate how ridiculous it knows it is. If I never have to dodge another incoming tram or get blown off-course by low-flying jet fighters I'll be all set.
Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Slim. Midway's IPs were all bought up by WB Games after the former folded but I don't think the Warners are doing much with any them besides Mortal Kombat. WB has a lot of studios under its belt off doing more important things than converting old games for digital archival projects, though I use that term very loosely wherever Nintendo is involved. The last time SF2049 (or any of the arcade Rush games) saw a port it was on one of those Midway Arcade Treasures compilations back in 2005, so it's been dormant a while.
Retro Achievements Earned: 1 (of 65). Whoever created these achievements was inventive, enforcing rules like never accessing the menu (presumably because you can restart races endlessly; though it wouldn't stop someone exploiting save states) and taking on specific tracks with specific settings for the achievement to count.
History: Our first Rare game on 64 in 64, and the second they ever developed for the N64, Blast Corps has the player become a demolitions expert as they drive around a series of maps destroying everything that stands in the way of a slow-moving tanker. Rare is, to some degree, the third-party champ of the N64: if you peruse any "best of" list for the system, it's usually (if not exclusively) a mix of first-party and Rare titles. As of writing only Banjo-Kazooie has appeared on the NSO service, but I'd imagine more are to come if Microsoft (Rare's owners) and Nintendo maintain this cooperative relationship of theirs.
I really won the random chooser lottery here. Blast Corps was already on my shortlist of pre-selections as it's the only Rare N64 game I've never had the opportunity to play before (besides Mickey's Speedway USA, though I'm a little less enthused about that one despite Rare's pedigree with kart racers). Don't worry, I'm sure this good fortune won't last.
16 Minutes In
When I was young, this was all buildings.
Wow, this game wasn't kidding about its simplicity. Drive into buildings marked by arrows before the tanker reaches them and that's pretty much all there is to it. Some buildings are a bit sturdier than others, so you'll sometimes consider getting a run up to knock them down harder. There's so much extra on each map though, and the game does you a solid of letting you stick around after the tanker has made it safely through to sweep up any remaining collectibles before moving on. Maps can also contain other vehicles, in addition to the truck you enter to finish the level, and I suspect that'll become an important factor later if it turns out your starter vehicle isn't up to the task ahead. Blast Corps is like if someone took one of those EA Strike games with their multiple objectives and vaguely isometric open-world maps and turned it into a gloriously mindless action game. With more explosions.
In the first sixteen minutes I managed to complete two of the earlier maps, though I'll admit to spending some time driving around looking for that elusive 100% completion gold medal. In addition to knocking down all the buildings, not just the critical ones in the way, there's also road markers that you need to drive past and other objectives like rescuing survivors and hitting these bonus level beacons. I'm curious to see how the difficulty curve will build or if the game's going to maintain this "fun for all ages" attitude throughout. I feel like I would've adored this game had I played it at the time (and I still kinda dig it now).
32 Minutes In
Do or donut, there is no try.
Soon after the previous, I took on some levels that were actually tutorials for how the game's other vehicles worked. As well as the standard bulldozer, you also have: Sideswipe, which can demolish anything on its left and right with hydraulic side-panel thrusters; the J-Bomb, a flying mech that powerbombs buildings from the sky; and the Backlash, a loader vehicle that destroys buildings by drifting at them real hard. The last of those is what you see in the screenshot above, and it's also the first instance of me having some trouble earning the high score for a map. Drifting into buildings backside-first is proving a tricky maneuver to master.
The introduction of these vehicles answered the difficulty curve question I had earlier, as the bulldozer now strikes me as the purposefully simple starter vehicle meant to acclimate new players. I'm hoping Backlash won't get used too often as I'm still struggling figuring out the right angle to start drifting if I want to catch as many buildings as possible without just driving straight into them (which does minimal damage in this vehicle).
48 Minutes In
An elegant map screen for the 3D age, though it does look like most of these levels are in the middle of the ocean somewhere. Blowing up the ocean seems like something Cobra would do.
My conclusion regarding the Backlash: I'm just going to avoid using the Backlash whenever possible. Fortunately, as you can see from the overworld map, there's always plenty of other choices if any particular stage is giving you trouble. The larger circles on this globe represent the normal levels, where you simply carve a path through priceless civil infrastructure as quickly as possible, while the smaller ones have largely been single vehicle tutorials though I've had a couple of other non-standard bonus levels too: one required I destroy everything as quickly as possible, and the second was a race that could be made much easier by finding shortcuts (that often require you drive through some buildings in the way, since that's the game's whole deal).
I'll admit, like last week's Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon, this is a game I kinda want to keep playing after we're done here. Who knew driving through buildings could be this enjoyable?
64 Minutes In
In the races, you need to make your own shortcuts.
One more standard level as the Sideswipe and a few more bonus levels and I was done. My compulsion to collect the gold medals meant I probably didn't get too far through the game's content, but I certainly made a dent with nine golds and two silvers (that darn Backlash...). I didn't mention him yet but there's a ten-meter-tall mecha named Thunderfist that likes to roll into things and has his own theme tune that I think is probably my overall favorite of the vehicles I've seen so far, though I might understand if the developers use him sparingly for future levels. Reminded me a lot of Mecha Hawk from Pilotwings 64, sadly absent the giant metal moustache.
I definitely get the appeal of Blast Corps now. If it's not the sheer destructive euphoria of its standard levels it's in providing all those bonus areas with their own rules and mechanics to keep it varied, even if the actual gameplay doesn't deviate too far from the norm. That many stages let you pick which vehicle you want to use - though on the standard maps you have to find them first, which might not be feasible with the strict time limit - feels like a modern concession to accessibility I did not anticipate a game this old would allow. It's rare, albeit not rare for Rare, that an arcade-feeling game is this dedicated to making sure the player is having a good time, challenge level occasionally be damned. Then again, perusing its retro achievements I can see where this game could start to really get tough.
How Well Has It Aged?: Like a fine Scotch turned improvised Molotov cocktail. If someone were to tell me that Blast Corps was the best Rare game for the N64 I would've just assumed that they were being contrarian because they'd become so enervated by all those beloved animal platformers and/or were less than impressed with GoldenEye 007 when compared to the likes of Quake or Unreal Tournament. Like one of those Jeff Gerstmann "don't @ me" type of hot video game takes. At least, that's what I would've assumed before I actually played it. I'm now of the opinion that Blast Corps is one of the best-preserved games on the N64 as well as one of its most original. I could totally buy it being on anyone's top ten for the system.
Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: High, I'd hope. We already have Banjo-Kazooie on there so whatever unholy ritual needed to happen to get Microsoft and Nintendo to see eye-to-eye on these Rare ports has already been sealed in blood. GoldenEye 007 might be more of a sticking point given the recent furore over that aborted remaster, but getting Blast Corps on there seems like a safe bet. If you don't feel like waiting and already have an Xbox One/Series X, it's available on Rare Replay too.
Retro Achievements Earned: 0 of 24. I think I used the wrong ROM again. Ah well. Regardless, I probably would've only earned one of them: most seem to be reserved for earning Platinum medals on levels, which I'm guessing is perhaps a post-game difficulty unlock?
Man, not to beat too often on the same drum here, but 2017 really was a trove of underappreciated delights. I obviously picked up on that message last year when I somehow completed forty-four games released in 2017 I'd never played before but that it still remains applicable months into 2022 just emphasizes it further. With the exception of a few minor technical bugs, I really enjoyed Paradigm: Australian scamp Jacob Janerka's loving ode to classic point-and-click adventures and one of the most consistently amusing games I've played since Jazzpunk.
Paradigm, a slovenly mutant living in a remote (and highly irradiated) region of eastern Europe, wants nothing more than to sit at his computer, compose repetitive electronic music, and compulsively eat bowls of cereal. A procession of unfortunate events forces him from his power plant home to chase down a BIOS disk to avert a nuclear catastrophe and then into the bowels of the corporate headquarters of the villainous DUPA Genetics, the CEO of which is planning to covert all the world's entertainment into only glam metal and professional wrestling. The story is, of course, deliberate nonsense meant to ferry you from one comedic situation to the next and the game's charm is in its many one-off environmental gags and some well-voiced dialogues with other bizarre mutant people with their own problems to deal with. A typical scenario might involve you being trapped in an office by a sapient water cooler who has gone mad after hearing too many poorly-retold jokes from television shows, or a mission to score some drugs by beating the local dealer at a video game about boosting the confidence of Final Fight-esque street thugs.
I didn't have to do this too often myself.
To say too much more about Paradigm in the micro would rob it of many of its standout moments, but in the macro it's still a perfectly satisfactory adventure game in that classic Sierra/LucasFilms inventory puzzle mold. You procure objects, figure out where to use them to resolve the current predicament, exhaust dialogue trees with NPCs for all relevant information, and eventually the game moves forward with new areas to explore and NPCs to talk to. The puzzle difficulty is extremely fair: while the game does have its own hint system (which also doubles as a hotspot highlighter, my favorite feature in any adventure game) there are often more subtle clues as to where to go and what to do next the moment you pick up a task, and the player always has a firm idea what objective Paradigm is ultimately working towards. This approach is effectively foolproof; a means to deliver its yuks without causing you to be lost for an hour unable to progress because of some obtuse puzzle solution. It's also a game that doesn't have too many moving parts - the maximum number of screens you can visit at any time is in the single-digits - and subsequently does its darnedest to not wear out its welcome by extending the story into infinity. That said, there's more than a few bonus features and asides the player can enjoy: a fast travel device found early on also includes some mini-games, like a post-apocalyptic dating simulator where you can date a duck-human (though sadly not Duckman, who I believe already had an adventure game of his own) and an "existential endless runner."
The presentation of Paradigm is also top-notch. The visuals are frequently surreal but very detailed especially in the dialogue scenes where you get close-ups of the character's faces, the eclectic soundtrack (by Wrench-se) creates the perfect '70s/'80s Tangerine Dream former-Soviet sci-fi atmosphere the aesthetic is going for and offers plenty more idiosyncrasy besides, and the jokes are of that scattershot approach where you might not laugh at a goof but could well be bowled over by the one that immediately follows. Unfortunately, the showy visuals - specifically the glitchy degauss effect whenever the player accesses their inventory - caused the game to constantly hitch up on me while playing. Probably a potato PC issue no-one with half-decent hardware needs to heed, but it's something that caused my playthrough to occasionally grind to a halt as the game took its sweet time to resume normal operations again.
Despite the imminent meltdown, time doesn't really mean a whole lot. I got this splash screen after cutting the head off a mannequin with a serrated spoon.
On the whole, though, I was thoroughly impressed with almost every aspect of Paradigm despite a rough start. Any video game that can elicit a sensible chuckle - the cornerstone of Australian comedy as I understand it - has accomplished the nigh-impossible if past experiments combining games and humor are any indication, there's a significant element of imagination and ingenuity that went into Paradigm's many scenarios and puzzles while still keeping them relatively simple to solve and simple to understand, it's definitely one of the more intriguing aesthetics for a game I've seen and there's something about its peculiar ugliness contrasted with its sharp and clean backgrounds that reminded me a lot of the more experimental adventure games of the late '90s, like the unsettling edgelord antics of Harvester or the occasional rough chuckles of Toonstruck. (If you recall that Total Distortion game that GBEast were temporarily fascinated by, Paradigm frequently feels like it was cut from the same "MTV animators run amok" cloth.) Plus I love the many, many dumb little touches that are too numerous to name here, like how the "Pick Up" command would almost always invoke pick-up lines whenever Paradigm couldn't just pick the object up, or a five minute looping sound clip on the radio of SungWon Cho (uncredited, for some reason) talking about how his friend was turned into a car after being cursed by a Baba Yaga and was then tricked by said friend into giving his gear stick a handy. If you were a fan of Jazzpunk's smartly-absurd skits or the Ben and Dan irreverent parodies, I'd recommend giving this lumpy-headed layabout the time of day.
Hey folks. I have a nasty habit of getting really invested in open-world games that offer many different gameplay modes and activities to potter around with, chiefly those of a more simulation-heavy bent like farming and construction sims. I'm talking games like Terraria where you can spend whole weeks building your own village of NPCs or Stardew Valley where you can get wrapped up in gathering all the resources to fix the community center that you don't even realize it's four in the morning.
My latest one of these is Pathea's My Time at Portia: a rare 3D variant of this kind of open-world, do-whatever life sim that I reviewed back at the tail end of last year for Indie Game of the Week. After a busy January trying to squeeze in as much 2021 gaming as possible before the site's GOTY coverage I got back into Portia in a big way this month. As I continue to play, more and more of the game's extracurricular features have become unlocked, and with it more indecision about how I want to spend what little free time you get on an (in-game) daily basis. It's been a little surreal seeing how many more layers deep this game can get: the benefit of being one of very few games like Terraria or No Man's Sky to see major post-release content updates despite not being a F2P or service game.
Since that original IGotW review stopped way before a lot of the game's more engaging content showed up, I want to do a little addendum to cover what My Time at Portia offers would-be builders in this relatively late stage of the playthrough. It's definitely made me curious how much more ambitious their follow-up, My Time at Sandrock, is going to be when it releases sometime later this year or next.
Construction
The game's bread and butter. The goal of the game, on the surface, is to take commissions and build the doodads people want. This eventually segues into developing infrastructure, helping to construct things like bridges and new buildings that have marked effects on the world (the former, for instance, open up new areas of the world map). Most of the time you're balancing looking at progress markers on your many resource-crafting machines while going out to gather said resources, such as making trips to the forest for lumber or the local ruins for metal ores.
The huge variety of items and constructs to build, some of which are assembled piecemeal on a special platform while others are created instantly at a workbench, make this progress-bar-watching aspect of the game a little more palatable than it might be otherwise. It is the cornerstone around which everything else is anchored after all, as both your chief source of income and the impetus for story progression, so it's important to make it somewhat full-featured and compelling. These long development times also have a silver lining in that they're an excuse to leave components to generate at your workshop on their own while you head out and busy yourself with any number of other pursuits. You can set up your constructors early in the morning, head out to do any of the below, then come back at the end of the day to assemble whatever finished products you can with all the materials that have transpired in the meantime.
I'm longing for the day when I can turn all this greenery into smoke-belching factories. This world's already had one technological apocalypse, it probably won't have another for a while yet.
Socializing
Most of these life sims also have a heavy social element, where you're encouraged to talk to the townspeople, give them presents, and sometimes play mini-games with them. In no game I've encounter has that aspect been more pronounced than in My Time at Portia (excepting, perhaps, multiplayer games where you make your own fun with actual human beings). Not only does every townsperson - and there are over fifty, not including pets - have their own likes and dislikes and personalities, but most have side-quests attached to them that become unlocked as you become better acquainted with them.
I've been digging into the social aspect more after I accumulated so much crap that has no other use than as gifts, and there's some surprisingly complex business involved. Like how if you upgrade your friendship with a character to the next level - everyone has ten "levels," a bit like social links - you earn bonus friendship points with every character in that person's clique. That might mean family members, best friends, co-workers, or pets. For instance, there's a group of septuplets and it's possible to upgrade your friendship with one of them, hit the next level with a different one from the bonus points, get another round of bonus points for every brother, and possibly hit even more level-ups from these crazy long chains. It's rad when it happens.
The side-quests you get as friendship rewards are worth it just to learn more about the characters they relate to, even if none of them are particularly memorable, and each one has a set of perks related to their friendship level: discounts at their store if they're vendors, stat increases, befriending the mayor makes it cheaper to buy land around your home, they come to live with you (in the case of stray animals), and others. Some characters can, of course, become your partner (and later spouse): it wouldn't be a Harvest Moon type of game without getting hitched and exploiting your beloved as free labor.
Fishing
You can tell a lot about an open-world game from the quality of their fishing mini-game. That sounds like an aphorism restructured for video games, but it's actually true: a developer will usually include a fishing mini-game because they're so often expected, same as lockpicking, and based on whether or not it's something perfunctory slipped in mid-development for the sake of more features or a case where the developer really considered its inclusion and tried to make their particular spin on the idea distinct is often a clue to the level of attention provided to many other value-add features.
I say all that, but Portia's fishing mini-game is mostly just OK. It does a fine job representing that balance inherent to angling where reeling in too quickly can overwhelm the tensile strength of the line while reeling too slow can risk losing the fish by drawing out the "battle" too long, but that's mostly hitting the bare minimum. It also moves quick, which is more what I'm looking for in a fishing mini-game: hooking a dozen fish in a couple of minutes is ideal if I have other tasks on my plate that day. However, I will point out a notable and extremely handy feature - one that I've not seen any other fishing mini-game do - is an upgrade that actually tells you what type of fish is biting on the line before you press the button to start reeling them in. If you have plans for a specific variety of fish, sitting there until the name of it appears makes catching one that much quicker.
Ruin-Diving
Like the Rune Factories (and, indeed, Stardew) Portia has a weird selection of monsters to fight and dungeons in which they can be fought. Half the dungeons are actually devoid of enemies, however: the game separates the two sets as "Abandoned" ruins and "Hazardous" ruins. When entering the former, the player digs through solid rock to find ore deposits and treasures for as long as their stamina lasts. These ruins have a "relic scanner" device that points out buried treasure and lets you dig towards them, though you need to upgrade it before you can know in advance what you're digging towards. Of course, you can ignore the relics entirely and look for the ore, since you'll be needing a lot of it (like in No Man's Sky, ore just looks like different-colored rock making it easy to find and identify).
The Hazardous ruins are just randomized dungeons with a standard selection of enemies and traps and treasure chests; this part of the game isn't super in-depth, with only a handful of pre-generated level design variations to encounter. Still, though, the rewards - lots of ancient mechanical crap needed for some constructions - are often worth it, and the game does you a solid of freezing the timer whenever you enter one: instead, it simply subtracts a certain amount of hours from the day once you emerge.
I'll admit to not spending a lot of my character building points on the combat because it's the weakest aspect of the game, but dedicated monster-bashers can find some really valuable stuff down there. The game, almost as if recognizing its own weakness, also includes a feature where you can just pay the local guards to go dungeon-delving on your behalf.
The wall coloration tells you what sort of ore to expect. The lights, meanwhile, could be anything from scrap to relic pieces. Relics are a menace to assemble but they're sure worth a lot.
Events
After almost an entire in-game year, I've seen almost every event Portia has to offer. Most are opportunities to earn event-specific currency in a special mini-game that you can exchange for unique prizes. For instance, winter has a snowball fight (it's a bit like whack-a-mole), autumn has horse races, summer has a martial arts tournament and Halloween ghost-hunting for some reason, and spring has a fishing competition. More valuable to know is that all gifts count for double on holidays (birthday gifts count for triple), so it's worth hauling a chest's worth of junk around and meeting as many townspeople as possible before and after these events happen. They're great for having the whole town come together for some fun, including NPCs who have weird schedules where you never see them, and they help break up the usual routine... even if you're probably trying to finish up a bunch of commissions on the day they happen regardless.
Photography
I'm a sucker for a good photography side-quest, though sadly Portia's seems a little undercooked. There's albums for storing photos you take for fun, either selfies or group photos with other citizens, but the actual collection part only applies to different enemy types. There also doesn't seem to be any rewards for completing the collection? It feels like something the game threw in as a bonus though there are still a few side-quests that require the camera, so it does see some use. Mostly, however, it just exists as a photo mode, similar to those in various other open-world games. I could see this being something Sandrock expands on: I'd love a photography mode akin to Dark Cloud 2's, where objects can serve as inspirations for new gadgets.
Museum
I just unlocked this place and it lets you earn rewards by donating relics found in the digging mini-game and assembled constructs you can build in your workshop if there's nothing else you need it for that moment. Since you only need to build most things once, it's an excuse to take another swing at them if so desired. There's also an aquarium in the museum, so that's another reason to go fishing and be grateful the game tells you when something rare is biting. I look forward to filling it with crap, provided I ever get a moment free from all these main quest commissions...
More so than all these bulletpoints can express though is how Portia is constantly changing with each new major construction, and not just in the sense that the amount of traversable geography in the world keeps expanding outwards. The people you've come to know continue to live their lives - there are potential partners that will eventually hook up with each other if you're not actively pursuing them - and new faces show up in town all the time. I've helped create new mini-games (including my favorite, where you have to find differences between two flawed products), opened up new dungeons to explore, improved the lives of my neighbors in meaningful ways, and now there's a dozen different things I could be doing at any moment and yet somehow never find myself overwhelmed with indecision. Hell, I haven't even tried raising livestock or visited the desert yet.
I figured this flow of new content will slow to a trickle once I hit the second year, but since so many of them are predicated on the player's involvement with story quests and major construction jobs I'm guessing it'll only dry up once the main series of quests are done, and I happen to know that I've got several more projects to develop including a whole new extension of the town closer to the local desert. It's rare I get through a full year of a game of this sort and still find myself with so much to do, especially since each of its 112 days are about fifteen minutes long (or longer, since the player can change the in-game clock to half-speed, and it pauses when menus are open).
There's a certain unmistakably shoddy quality to the game's visuals and UI that goes hand in hand with its remarkable ambition as a 3D open-world life-sim made on an Indie studio's budget, yet spending all this time with its many quirks and glitches and largely unattractive Klasky-Tsupo-ass NPCs have lent the game an endearing personality of its own that I've come to appreciate. Planning to be done with the game before the end of February as I've so much else on the docket, but who can say if I run out of reasons to keep playing by then.
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