It occurs to me that despite making this site my home over the past... oh god, nearly a decade huh?... I don't really talk about Giant Bomb and its output all too often. There's some big changes coming down the pipe fairly soon (nothing too grand as far as the content is concerned though - I don't have any scoops on new staff members or anything) but we've already seen a lot of unexpected changes to what the duders are keen on displaying of late. (Ugh, phrasing.) I talked about my general disinterest in the site's continued coverage of DBZ and Monster Hunter, but it's not something that bothers me that much; on the contrary, I like that the staffers are continuing to try new things and drawing inspiration for new features from those experiments. I though I'd weigh on some recent features that the site has introduced, mostly for my own gratification.

I should make it clear before I start, though, that I'm a big believer in the idea that the staff should have little to no input from the community for what they should do next: the way they organically create new concepts for features means they're that much more invested in them, and passion always trumps subject matter as far as I'm concerned.

• Thirteen Deadly Sims: I wanted to start out with some positive words for Abby, who I feel has been the subject of some unwarranted disparagement since her slightly villainous turn in the GOTY deliberations - about which I don't blame her, because the advice she was frequently given since she first mentioned her newcomer anxiety about it on the Beastcast was to "be assertive" and "passionately argue your case". However, Thirteen Deadly Sims proved not only to be a clever, high-concept idea for a feature, but one that has already paid comedic dividends from trying to juggle the well-beings of over a dozen eccentric duder Sims. My kudos to her for coming up with a genuinely irresistible feature, especially with the massive shoes to fill that was the superlative Steal My Sunshine.
• This Is The Run: I really like the games Vinny and Dan choose for this feature, as well as the interplay and teamwork between them, but I don't understand the purpose of this feature if it's going to remain a series of pre-recorded videos. If you're going to watch these two play through the same game over and over making incremental progress, you want to do so from the context of cheering them on from a chatroom, or giving them tips to help improve their game. Something like the Breaking Brad streams, in which Brad seemed to genuinely draw strength from a supportive community and their various "I Believe In Brad" messages. The appeal of watching someone tackle hard games is in that camaraderie, of cheering them on as part of a group, and I hope the duo come to their senses and start making them livestreams again.
• The Dating Games: I feel this was a misstep because we're not spending enough time with the individual games. It could be that they came up with the title and felt the need to keep moving from game to game each episode, rarely getting beyond the tutorials and early stages of their relationships with the various paramours of these dating sims. It didn't help that they gave themselves a strict Valentine's Day deadline either. I think with a long-form structure, where they play these games to completion (unless they really suck for the let's play treatment), they'd get more out of it. As it is, it feels more like "50 First Dates" with how far they get in each game, mercifully with nary a Sandler to be seen.
• Who's the Big Boss?: You can determine the quality of GBE's forays into older games where they play as a group by how often it diverges into unrelated chatter. I'm not against the latter, especially when it pertains to interesting conversations about what books or music the GBEasters are into, but if the game has them all invested enough in what's going on to help each other out then I think that makes it better material for a feature. That Vinny and Alex continue to rally around Dan's Metal Gear playthrough and goof along with him on the game's many ridiculous quirks is enhancing an already compelling historical endurance run.
• Garfield With Gerstmann: That this took off into its own thing was pretty amazing, but that's the sort of situation I really like to see emerge on Giant Bomb: a feature that grows organically from a seed of something very dumb. In this case, it's listening to a caller on the post-Bombcast show (the name of which seems to constantly change) talk about Garfield Lasagna World Tour as a guilty pleasure, which then got Jeff curious enough to play it on one of his solo Old Games streams from home, which led to dragging in other GBW staffers to see it through to the bitter end. If we continue to get more spontaneous features like this in 2018, regardless of whether or not it involves pasta-loving tabbies, I think we're on a good trajectory. C'mon, for fun?

Speaking of content, I made some of that too. Just not the video kind:

• The Indie Game of the Week this time was Bear With Me, or at least its first episode. I tend to set out the IGotW feature about a month in advance - I currently have the next four games I intend to look at downloaded and ready for testing before I start making real progress with any of them - so it was a weird coincidence that around five or six weeks after the first episode of this game was gifted to me by fellow user @sparky_buzzsaw that it was suddenly made available for free, in a similar "try before you buy" offer that other episodic games employ, around the exact same time I had planned to play it. It's a traditional 2D point-and-click game with a noir presentation, but a more meta and goofy personality given that the main character is a 10 year old girl and all the secondaries are anthropomorphic toys of hers. Apparently, the later episodes really play around with the premise to fascinating degrees, so I'm hoping to follow-up with another look at the game in the future.
• The SNES was the subject of this Tuesday's rotating space, with the third episode of my screening for a hypothetical SNES Classic Mk. II, which is really just an excuse to fill in some long-standing gaps in that system's library. The first game we looked at was Mario's Super Picross: picross being a genre of game that never goes out of style, but the game perhaps doesn't boast enough Nintendo-centric features beyond the inclusion of Mario and Wario as hosts. The second was Pilotwings: an early first-party game that not only helped to demonstrate what the SNES could do but was one of the few completely new ideas to help distinguish the 16-bit system from its universally beloved forebear. Both, I feel, could make for excellent additions to a second Classic mini-console should the mood strike Nintendo to create one. A bit of SEO serendipity this week in that the release of Analogue's Super NT had everyone thinking about the SNES again.

Addenda

TV: Stranger Things (Season 2)

I'm still catching up with last year's TV before I embark on anything new, and that meant checking out the divisive second season of Stranger Things. Set the small, fictional Indiana town of Hawkins, the first season of Stranger Things was a revelation in how expertly it tied together nostalgia with a wholly new story: it's an approach I see in games regularly, but not TV shows, where the creator cherry-picks not so much the broad strokes but dozens of smaller details from a wide range of complementary sources for something that feels both familiar and new. For a game, that can mean something like Shovel Knight: a game that - despite having a very nostalgic feel - can't easily be pinned down as a Mega Man clone or a DuckTales clone. It has elements of both for sure, as well as from a bunch of other NES games, but boasts a story and presentation entirely of its own. Instead, it feels more like a game that could've existed in a certain time and place - in this case, the late NES era - rather than a derivative throwback. Stranger Things is the same, but for sci-fi/horror 1980s movies and TV.

My anticipation for Season 2 was diminished somewhat by the visceral reception it received from Twitter and elsewhere, which ran the gamut from disappointment to outright revulsion for some of the new directions the show took. Having seen the nine-episode season in full, I can appreciate some of those concerns, even if I didn't dislike the season as much as others did. Though it's a weird analogy to use, given that it too has a new season I've yet to check out, Stranger Things S2 reminded me of Twin Peaks S2: there's a distinct feeling of wanting to expand this colorful world and incorporate more characters and ideas for arcs, but in doing so ended up spoiling the purity of that first season with additions that didn't really lead to a net positive for that world, and diversions that didn't seem to go anywhere. Obviously, I want to keep this as spoiler-free as possible until it's time to really vent, but S2 felt a little like feature creep with how it poorly it handled its characters both new and old - either forcing new changes to the paradigm, or forcing new arcs on those who had grown up since the first season. I suspect the Duffer Brothers are in for the long haul after the success of the first season, and created certain threads here that might continue into a third, fourth or fifth season (I believe they've stated that they're planning on stopping after S4 or S5), so I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt that they have some slow-burners planned.

I will say, though, that despite some of its miscalculations and unnecessary tangents, I still really liked season 2 of Stranger Things. The style and tone's still spot on, and that includes audio/visual aspects like the vivid lighting through colored smoke and its synth soundtrack, the acting is uniformly great with a few exceptions, it's still scary when it wants to be and funny when it wants to be, and I'm still invested in these characters and their various journeys. I recognize that it's going to be unusual following all those child actors in those roles as they grow up in real life, and I wouldn't be against the idea of moving several years into the future to where they're all awkward teenagers, and I'm really hoping that future episodes start moving past the Upside-Down or start expanding on it in more directions than "there are more weird monsters in there we don't know about". I suspect one of the bigger disappointments is that Stranger Things didn't become more like an anthology for its subsequent seasons, with new dangers threatening Hawkins: aliens, zombies, The Stuff - maybe not those played out antagonists in particular, but something new that still jibes with the 80s aesthetic.

OK, so I'm just going to rattle off some observations for those who have already seen the show to respond to. Please be sure to spoiler-block your own takes in the comments below, should you contribute any.

Movie: Your Name

Your Name's one of those anime movies that seemed to transcend the format and become a more mainstream hit, sort of like how you'd recommend Studio Ghibli or anything by Satoshi Kon to someone "despite being anime". I'm not disinclined towards anything anime myself - if anything, I find it challenging to figure out which series and movies I'm going to like from the many out there to choose from. When something breaks out from the weeabubble, so to speak, I'm likely going to find out more about it.

Your Name is a 2016 feature that comes courtesy of Makoto Shinkai, a filmmaker I've only encountered a couple times before with Voices of a Distant Star and The Place Promised in Our Early Days, both of which I picked up in a DVD box set about a decade ago. I liked them well enough, but haven't really followed the guy since then and more recently when this movie started making some ripples. I've noticed with Shinkai's work that he likes creating these sort of outlandish, "magical realism" scenarios and searches to find the relatable, very human connections and emotions at the root of them. In Voices of a Distant Star, this meant exploring the relationship between two lovers as one of them travels a faster-than-light journey to fight aliens in a far-off system, which meant they aged far more slowly than their partner, their correspondences taking longer and longer to reach them; in The Place Promised in Our Early Days, a fairly normal friendship between three schoolmates is complicated by an enemy occupation of Hokkaido and the bizarre events around an experimental tower that changes reality around it. In both, though we have this remarkable sci-fi hook, the focus is always on the human drama and romance between these characters, and how a traditional love story might warp and shift with an unusual obstacle placed in its midst. I'd liken it to how Black Mirror sets up a bizarre, fantastical premise and then tries to figure out how regular people would cope through it.

Your Name is a similar case. Without getting too into story details, two teenagers - Taki, a boy living in Tokyo with artistic aspirations, and Mitsuha, a girl living out in the country who is stifled by her small town and its traditions - inexplicably wake up in each other's bodies one day. This lasts as long as the day itself, after which they resume their lives having no memories of what happened to them. This body-switching continues every so often, and the two decide to leave each other notes on their phones, including details about their lives so the "visitors" don't get lost, and amusing rules about they can and cannot touch in their daily hygiene routines. Despite drawing some odd looks from friends and family as they behave differently and seem to forget important details of their lives, they begin to see mutually beneficial effects of living as each other for short bursts. Then, well... some stuff happens, and some revelations come to light. It gets a bit more strange and wonderful after that.

I'd recommend the movie. Like Kon and Isao Takahata's Ghibli offerings, it's a bit more of a slow-paced, bittersweet, slice-of-life affair than something as deliberately goofy and wild as the usual Freaky Friday/Vice Versa takes on the same premise. There's some moments of levity, like how Taki always instinctively reaches for his chest whenever he wakes up in Mitsuha's body, but for the most part it's about the inexplicable connection between two strangers that develops into something romantic and personal the longer the two spend in each other's shoes. It's a glorious looking anime that doesn't skimp on establishing shots or slow pans, partly to show off but partly because it's in no hurry to tell its slow-burner of a story. It won't be for everyone, especially those who like their animes loud and violent, but if you haven't encountered Shinkai but are fans of Kon or Ghibli, I'd absolutely recommend seeking some of his movies out, including Your Name. (And the reverse is true if you found Shinkai before Kon, incidentally: Kon's a wonderful filmmaker with a surfeit of imagination who is sadly missed.)

Is it all right if I admit that I only got around to seeing this now because it got referenced in Pop Team Epic? No? Okay.

Game: Rise of the Tomb Raider

I've still been tinkering around with Rise of the Tomb Raider's various "score attack" modes for what few trophies remain, because those things continue to have their hooks in me, but for all intents and purposes I'm done with Crystal Dynamics's latest adventure for Ms. Croft and her newly reset timeline. I actually liked Rise of the Tomb Raider quite a bit, largely because it's figured out what it wants to be after the far more Uncharted-like Tomb Raider from 2013, the first of this new canon. Rise of the Tomb Raider, or RotTR, instead feels much more like its own thing: one that supplements combat encounters with multiple armed human opponents with some Far Cry-like hunting and resource-gathering for upgrades and a lot more puzzle-solving in the titular tombs. The exploration factor is far more pronounced here, with several regions similar to that one large area in the recent Uncharted: The Lost Legacy where Chloe and Nadine roll around a hub for a while, checking out optional ruins and finding treasures scattered all around the vicinity. RotTR even has elements of a spacewhipper, as certain items and locations are prohibited until the player has found the right piece of gear to continue, whether that's a form of grappling hook or a re-breather for long underwater tunnels or special arrows that can dig into walls as makeshift handholds. You're invariably turned away from these locations without the right item, so it's rare you ever find yourself completely lost unsure of whether or not you can complete a certain tomb.

These aspects make the game far more appealing to me than Tomb Raider continuing on its quixotic quest to take back the "climb shit and shoot people" crown from Uncharted, and if Tomb Raider continues to be a little bit of everything from games like Uncharted and Far Cry - which, of course, owe a huge debt to Tomb Raider's long-lived presence - and emphasizes exploration and discovery, then I'm very much invested in seeing where the series goes from here.

However, I'm less sure about some of the incidental material around the game. For one, the score attack mode, which has you taking on various parts of the game - the tombs, the combat sequences, the traversal sequences - as separate little challenges that you can manipulate with "cards"; items that will make the game easier and harder by giving you certain equipment or making enemies tougher, most of which is provided through these consumable cards that - naturally - you can pay real money to earn as well. I'm not quite sure how successful the developers expected this system to be, but it stands out as particularly superfluous given that you get all the same content just playing through the game normally. The DLC, which was included in the PS4 version gratis, has been fairly hit and miss also: I really liked the Baba Yaga side-story and the Croft Manor epilogue, the latter feeling like a Tomb Raider-style take on Gone Home with its plethora of voiceover notes and lack of any real danger, but the rest like the Endurance and Cold Darkness modes are just the combat without much of what makes the core game compelling. Still, they're largely optional, so I can't begrudge the developers for giving players something extra to do once the game was complete.

Overall, I very much approve with what the developers are doing with Tomb Raider moving forward, and I hope to see that next game soon. If they could just decide on a look for Lara's gentle giant friend Jonah too, I'd appreciate it. It's kind of jarring how much different he looks here.

Ahh, it's great to be back in the comforting embrace of the traditional point-and-click genre, after some earlier tangential dalliances this year with the likes of The Wolf Among Us and those HOPAs I've been experimenting with. I have plans for plenty more of these this year, between Indie Game of the Week and the upcoming return of May Maturity, and Bear With Me is a fine game to start us off. A parodic noir game that nonetheless manages to effectively balance its off-kilter, oft meta humor and occasional bouts of dramatic tension - sort of the same combination that Discworld Noir had, though with a different sort of energy - Bear With Me concerns a girl, her teddy bear private detective partner, a cardboard city full of anthropomorphic toys, and an insidious "red man" who is causing mayhem wherever he goes.

The entire game is depicted in black and white, with the sole exceptions of Ted's Max Payne-style comic panel noir monologues, and the various traces of the red man's influence or presence (which are, of course, red). The actual character art and backdrops is fairly perfunctory, so the added layer of style really helps the game establish itself and its mood when compared to the many other Indie adventure games jostling for the limelight. Bear With Me also has some half-decent voice-acting (the intonations can be a little off) and an equally solid script, and goes out of its way to give every minor, inconsequential hotspot - like the many lamps and paintings on the walls of the explorable part of Amber's house that comprises the first episode - a little joke or non-sequitur to go with it. One memorable instance involved examining a wall lamp like any other only to be met with a panicked call for a help from one of the team's designers, before he is summarily knocked out and dragged away in an uncomfortably long foley-based sound clip - the duo of playable characters shrug it off, and the description for the achievement you get from it tells you not to bring it up again. Small touches like that can really elevate the moment-to-moment exploration in an adventure game, between when you encounter a new zone and after you complete the one or two objectives you have there before moving on.

Beyond that, there's nothing really that sets Bear With Me apart from the crowd. A lot of adventure games take upon themselves hooks or distinctive features to give themselves an edge: switching between multiple protagonists with different skillsets, for instance, or having to complete Layton-style brainteasers in order to progress. For better or worse, Bear With Me eschews the bells and whistles for as traditional an experience as you can get from this genre, and while I can't speak for the other two episodes - I do intend on picking them up together someday, so maybe that'll be a sequel entry for IGotW - I don't see Bear With Me changing its mind on this approach. As long as the rest of the game has the same focus on maintaining the dialogue and plotting and incidental humor, I can't say I disagree with the choices it's made.

For the sake of disclosure, this first episode of Bear With Me was a gift from former mod and fellow adventure game enthusiast @sparky_buzzsaw, and by a complete coincidence - I actually plan these Indie Game of the Week entries weeks in advance, despite all evidence to the contrary - that same first episode was yesterday made free for everybody to celebrate the complete collection becoming available on Steam. My timing could've been better, but I suppose that means that there's less of an excuse now to check that first episode out (hint, hint, @vinny). I think it's definitely a promising start if you like your point-and-click games on the classic side and, while some of its puzzles are a little obtuse, it does the contemporary adventure game thing of reducing the number of hotspots and areas to explore to minimize the frustration of not knowing what to do or where to go next. (Though, considering Indie games and their limited budgets for art assets and environments, there's probably a little bit of serendipity at play too.) I'd have recommended the first episode back when it was still being offered for a small price; presently, it's a steal.

Rating: 4 out of 5. (So far.)

The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as those in the first SNES Classic, but have equally stood the test of time. The rules, list of games considered so far, and links to previous episodes can all be found at The SNES Classic Mk II Intro and Contents.

Episode III: Aeronauts & Crosses

The Candidate: Nintendo/Jupiter's Mario's Super Picross

When I started this feature, I thought long and hard about SNES games that would still do favorably in today's marketplace. That usually meant looking for games that A) had an aesthetic - either in the art direction or actual graphical fidelity sense - that hadn't aged horribly, or B) were so distinctive and singular that they haven't yet been supplanted by a thousand iterative imitators in the interim. I neglected to consider that there are SNES games out there that are timeless because their genres haven't evolved - or, indeed, have needed to - since the 1990s. Picross (or nonograms, or picture logic, or paint-by-numbers) definitely falls into that category: while we've seen the popular picture puzzle try its hand with 3D, or multiple colors, or special limited abilities that do some of the guesswork for you, most Picross games made today still adhere to the standard 2D grid-like structure, presenting its numerical clues down both axes and giving the player some chill music to listen to as they take their time sussing out the pixel picture hidden within.

Picross became a fad for Japanese newspapers and magazines for a time during the 90s, and it wasn't long before Nintendo figured out how to get in on the act with a few Picross games headlined by their popular polymathic mascot Mario. The first of these was Mario's Picross, released for the Nintendo Game Boy in March 1995 - a perfect venue for a virtual approximation of the puzzles everyone was solving on the trains and busses to work - was the only one that saw an international release in its era. The second, which came six months later for Japan exclusively, was Mario's Super Picross for the Super Famicom.

The big difference between Mario's Super Picross and Mario's Regular Old and Busted Picross is that Super Picross offered two game modes: Mario mode and Wario mode. Rather than this affecting which puzzles they saw - though both have different sets, it's not like Wario gets nothing but pictures of farts and garlic or anything - it instead changed the rules. Mario mode was the buttoned-up, strait-laced, strict-for-your-own-good standard Picross ruleset that immediately penalizes you for mistakes, often adding time to the clock or making it impossible to earn a perfect score (though Mario's Super Picross doesn't actually track data like that, thankfully). Wario, meanwhile, didn't give a rat's ass. You can make as many errors as you want in his mode; he's not going to step in and tell you that you screwed up. This has a refreshing laissez-faire nature to it, but it's also subtly more difficult: if you make a mistake and don't realize it in time, you'll run into much bigger problems further along as the errors start to compound around this one faulty assumption. Because your supervisor is a lazy, good-for-nothing deadbeat like Wario, instead of the helpful and scrupulous Mario, you're left to make your own messes to clean up.

I vastly prefer the Wario system myself, largely because if I screw up because I read the board wrong that's my own cross to bear. If I mess up because I accidentally clicked the wrong box, or the right box with the wrong button, that feels less like an intellectual error that I ought to be punished for and more of a simple misclick that was no doubt the result of trying to expedite the early parts, quickly filling out or flagging all the obvious candidates so I can get to the meat of the puzzle faster. That Mario's Super Picross is one of very few Picross games with this option - another coveted rare recent example is Paint It Back! on Steam and mobile devices - elevates it the upper Picross pantheon in my view.

However, my one issue of complaint with this game and the major obstacle for its suitability for the SNES Classic Mk. II is that it doesn't feature very many Nintendo-focused puzzles. All of the game's puzzles I've seen so far - due to its nature, it's not really the type of game you can complete in one or two sittings - have been fairly generic Picross fare, with a surprising emphasis on fish of all things. I may have had better luck atempting to enter the lesser known but more Nintendo picture-focused Picross NP instead, which has a slightly bizarre release history you can read more about on its wiki page. As an episodic series released in an obscure manner, it wasn't suitable for international release at the time - by 1999/2000, it's not like a SNES game would've sold particularly well anyway - and likewise a bit of a strange case to stick on a SNES Classic device. In addition, its developers Jupiter have long since cannibalized most of the various Nintendo franchise-specific puzzles - Kirby, Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong, etc. - in DLC packs for Picross DS and for their Picross e series for the 3DS eShop.

Part of me wishes that, if Nintendo Picross was to be included in the SNES Classic Mk. II line-up, Jupiter would find a way to hack apart the various games to create a Frankenstein's monster that keeps the ingenious rivalry of the Mario/Wario modes while ensuring that all the game's puzzles were drawn from Nintendo's rich visual history, in the vein of Picross NP.

• Preservation: The evergreen nature of Picross is what inspired me to include it for consideration. I will say that, without any kind of scorekeeping or rewards for fast/accurate play, there's not a whole to keep the game interesting in the long-term besides encountering more challenging puzzles, but perhaps that's enough. There's no real need to gameify Picross to a significant degree if the puzzles themselves are compelling enough. 4.
• Originality: Without the Nintendo-specific puzzles, the originality takes a big hit. What was once a relative novelty in a video game format has been evolved several times since 1995, including the aforementioned 3D of Picross 3D and ideas like creating a gigantic picture from multiple puzzles, or the abilities of Pokémon Picross. However, I think the dual Mario and Wario modes really add a lot of variance to how you approach the game that few of its successors, spiritual or otherwise, ever thought to include. 3.
• Gameplay: In pure Picross terms, the game is a little outdated in a few quality-of-life respects. For one, a column of number clues won't gray out once you've solved that row, which is always a handy visual shortcut for how much progress you still need to make. Only the Mario challenges are timed, and you have 30 minutes (though it disappears quickly if you keep making mistakes), and there's a dearth of other options. It's just some standard-ass Picross, for better or worse. 4.
• Style: Mario and Wario are technically headlining this game, but you don't see much of either of them outside of the menus and some congratulatory screens after each of the 12-puzzle "chapters" are complete. All they do is stand there and yell things in Japanese, though, so we're not talking amusing Pac-Man style vignettes between Mario/Wario and other denizens of the Mushroom Kingdom. Hard to say what you might feasibly expect from the presentation of a Picross game. You do get little animations for some (not all) the completed puzzles though, which is cute. 3.

Total: 14.

Other images:

Gallery

The Nominee: Nintendo EAD's Pilotwings

Last episode, we explored the bizarre decision to leave Chrono Trigger off the SNES Classic, taking into account its status as one of the most beloved SNES JRPGs, its enduring popularity the result of its imaginative premise, its relatively svelte run-time, and its many mechanical innovations, such as a lack of random encounters and team-up special attacks. Well, Pilotwings is slightly less beloved, but I would still argue that its absence on the SNES Classic Mk. I is every bit as conspicuous. Along with Super Mario World and F-Zero, Pilotwings was a SNES launch title (or close enough in Japan) intended to demonstrate the various capabilities of the new system's hardware, not just with the introduction of dazzling 16-bit graphics but the system's snazzy new sprite-scaling features, including the inimitable "Mode 7". It was an internationally famous SNES game developed in-house at Nintendo's EAD branch and one of their few new IPs for the system, making it one of the more identifiable faces of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System both during the promotional push around the system's launch and later on when it came time for SNES eulogies with the advent of the CD-ROM era, and the nostalgia pieces that followed years after that. You know, like this one.

However, there would be no Pilotwings for the SNES Classic Mk. I. Despite a couple of sequels, the most recent of which was Pilotwings Resort for DS in 2011, Nintendo didn't feel like the once pioneering "flight simulator for dummies" deserved a spot on their retro celebratory system. It was one of those seminal SNES titles that, while not everyone was excited to play it again, it was widely expected by anyone putting together a list of their predicted titles for the SNES Classic, long before it was even announced.

For the uninitiated, Pilotwings is a mini-game collection in which each mini-game was based around some sort of aerial activity. Airplanes, skydiving, jetpacks, and hang-gliding were the main events, and each new chapter of the game had the player take an examination for three or four of them simultaneously, with the goal being to score well enough cumulatively to pass the qualifying amount and graduate. After graduating, the player moves up a pilot class, and is given even harder challenges to complete. A player's success at the game depended largely on their flexibility, as they couldn't flub the one event they were bad at and still expect to make the stringent passing score required: instead, they would often prioritize their lesser events and hopefully do well enough at them that their stronger pursuits could carry them over the finishing line. It certainly wasn't an easy game, but that challenge helped buoy what was a relatively short run-time all-told. (The post-game special missions, in which the player took to the skies in an attack helicopter dropping bombs on various ground-to-air turrets, were even less forgiving.)

At the same time, the skydiving in particular seemed to burrow itself into the public consciousness of what the SNES was and the types of new experiences it could offer over its predecessor and rivals Sega. The vertiginous Mode 7 made it seem the Earth was rushing to meet you as you tried to angle yourself to hit the various rings of yellow lights on the way down to your destination, and then the frantic correcting and overcorrecting of your parachute descent to hit that most elusive of targets: the moving bullseye, which floated around the moat that surrounded the more pedestrian static landing zone for casuals, taunting you with its alacrity. More so than bashing into F-Zero's futuristic barriers on every turn or dismounting Yoshi to assault a Koopaling's castle, that Mode 7 parachuting game made the most lasting impression of the early SNES era in my mind, back when I was still being floored by what the SNES could do. It's a shame that Nintendo didn't agree. Then again, maybe Pilotwings was never that great to begin with? Let's check:

• Preservation: As much as I hate to admit it, Mode 7 hasn't held up as well as most of us would like to believe. Like the Sega Genesis sound chip, it lives on our hearts because of its endearing flaws and limitations, though I can't for the life of me imagine how some modern-day tot would approach it as anything more than an archaic assault on the senses. There aren't that many console games that let you play skydiving and jetpack mini-games, though, so the game still has some historical value in that regard. 3.
• Originality: Besides its sequels, how many "casual" flight simulators are there? The genre has become more streamlined and accessible as the years have rolled on, partly for their own survival (outside of the deliberately niche stuff like Digital Combat Simulator) and partly because that's the direction all genres have moved towards as the audience for games has continued to expand, but Pilotwings was really the first to give you an airplane to fly and not make it a stressful nightmare of dials and switches that required a @drewbert-style 50 page printed PDF for all your preparations. It was a great distillation of a predominantly PC genre that a console audience could approach without collapsing into the fetal position after a few minutes of trying to check the engine's oil pressure. 4.
• Gameplay: In being unnecessarily stringent, Pilotwings was often a frustrating exercise in last-second failure, as you could power through two of the three before crashing and burning horribly (and literally) because of a mis-timed landing. While an effort was made to translate the various activities to a console-friendly format, it still took some finesse before you could make the plane move how you'd prefer, or accurately make a skydiving landing by feathering the approach the correct way without falling too quickly. To its credit, the jetpacking in Pilotwings has always been the most intuitive thing, conversely. Beyond that, there's not much more "game" here: it's the most "tech-demo"-y of the North American/European SNES launch library. 3.
• Style: The issue with Pilotwings is that it's perhaps a little too dry with its presentation. Pilotwings 64 and Resort made huge strides in giving their respective aviator tomfoolery sims a really distinctive look and personality, with 64 in particular invoking a more comedic vein that often made jokes at the expense of the various playable characters: the buff and impressively-mustachioed Hawk, for instance, has an enormous metal doppelganger that becomes a boss in one of the helicopter challenges. SNES PIlotwings lacks any similar degree of stylistic bells and whistles beyond the wonderful flat world of Mode 7, with the few moments of levity coming from the expressions of your instructors - either exasperated at your incompetence or astounded at your proficiency. 3.

Total: 13.

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The North American/European JRPG fan had quite the banner year in 2017 with the releases of Persona 5, Tales of Berseria, Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana, NieR Automata, Dragon Quest VIII (for 3DS), Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age, Xenoblade Chronicles 2, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3rd, Nioh, and others. If I were to narrow down the most exciting of those, objectively speaking, it'd be Persona 5 and NieR: Automata: my reason being is that they either came from a franchise that seems to put out one new game a decade (Persona), or one that was unlikely to ever see a sequel (NieR).

Not to disregard the many fine workhorse JRPG franchises putting out games every few years like Final Fantasy, The Legend of Heroes, or Tales - I'm still very much looking forward to playing the half of the above list I've yet to get around to - but it did make me think about what I would most want to see suddenly emerge from the deepest, darkest depths of JRPG history. A franchise, long thought deceased, that inexplicably springs back to life with a new entry that, despite the many years since the previous, manages to capture the same magic and retake the empty niche (if not sepulcher, at this point) its long absence left behind.

I've put together a short list below of dormant franchises that I'd love to see make a return, for as impossible a pipe dream as some of them may seem. After all, if NieR - a bizarre, cult game with middling-to-scathing reviews, developed by a studio that folded soon after its release - can put out a GOTY-worthy sequel seven years later, any of the below could theoretically make the same long journey out of video game Yomi-no-kuni with a similar amount of support.

1. Suikoden VI: Here we run into the "Konami problem," as Konami is no longer interested in taking anything that resembles a gamble for its game development wing; ironic, given how most of their efforts are being put into literal gambling machines. After 2006's Suikoden V, a high point of the series, it sputtered back to life briefly for 2009's greatly scaled-down 3DS spin-off Suikoden Tierkreis and the as-yet-unlocalized 2012 PSP game Genso Suikoden: Tsumugareshi Hyakunen no Toki ("The Woven Web of a Century") before disappearing forever. A proper sequel, which reintroduces the wargaming aspect that allowed the series to stand out during the busier PS1 and PS2 generations, as well as its trademark of an enormous cast of characters to recruit, would be a welcome surprise if I at all trusted Konami to deliver it.
2. Shadow Hearts IV: Shadow Hearts spawned from a gothic, turn-of-the-century (as in, 19th to 20th) Europe-set RPG called Koudelka, and maintained its sort of juggling of world history during the tumultuous time around WW1 with occult conspiracies and the best laid plans of men and the demons possessing them. It also started to get a lot more surreal with its humor as the series went on. Shadow Hearts 1 had a few goofy comic relief characters and villains, but Covenant really picked up on that spark of levity in an otherwise grim and grisly RPG and From the New World perhaps took it too far with Mao, a feline kung fu expert and confidante of Al Capone who wants to be a Bruce Lee style movie star, and the ridiculous elderly American ninja Frank Goldfinger. A hypothetical fourth game could continue ramping up the silliness, or return to the franchise's relatively more somber and ominous roots, but as long as it resurrected the fantastic "Judgment Ring" timing-based combat system and brought back Yoshitaka Hirota for its soundtrack, I'd be all over it.
3. Breath of Fire: Now, Capcom's Breath of Fire is still technically active: the sixth game was released as recently as 2016. However, it was a free-to-play browser/mobile game that was universally panned and mercifully spared a localization, so I'm choosing not to acknowledge its existence. As far as I'm concerned, the final game in the series was the very promising hard-left tangent that was Dragon Quarter, released in 2002/03 for the PS2. Dragon Quarter pioneered a certain incremental playthrough system that would find greater success in Capcom's Dead Rising series: the idea being that your protagonist was such a slow learner that it required multiple playthroughs, most of which were manually aborted long before the game's conclusive act, before they could reach a place where they could see their adventure through to the end. Dragon Quarter also dispensed with the franchise's sunny if generic fantasy setting for a more gloomy post-apocalyptic subterranean setting full of themes about the dangers of a society governed by those that claim a literal genetic superiority, and of the sinister side of technological progress and the atrocities that result from same. I'd love to see a sequel that expands on this particular black sheep of Capcom's series, but they're like Konami in that we're very unlikely to see anything "challenging" emerge from that studio ever again.
4. Dark Cloud 3: Yes, please. Right now. Dark Cloud forever and ever, a hundred years of Dark Cloud, forever a hundred times, www dot Dark Cloud adventures, every minute Dark Cloud dot com. (I really like Dark Cloud.)
5. Some others: Mother/EarthBound (Mother 3 localization when?), Grandia, Mega Man Legends, Wild Arms, and some dang ol' Baten Kaitos.

Anyway, enough dreaming of what might be, and more focusing on what has already been. Specifically, some blogging I did:

• The Indie Game of the Week this time was Affordable Space Adventures, one of a dwindling stack of Wii U games I wanted to see through before I put that thing in storage forever. Affordable Space Adventures popped up when I was researching for an earlier blog - Uurnog Uurnlimited, from last December's "Go! Go! GOTY!" feature - and I'd completely forgotten that I'd already bought it as part of a bundle. Turns out it was a great game I shouldn't have slept on, combining various environmental puzzles with a vehicle interface that allowed you to modify everything from the engine thrust down to the heat shutters. Most of the puzzles involved getting past hostile turrets by lowering heat/energy/sound output to below their detection range, which meant figuring out which systems you could live without for a brief time. A neat idea, and definitely not a feature I've seen used in this particular context.
• It was another week for the HOPAs, with the second episode of Rainy Days and Mundis. The test subject this time was Sunward's The Myth Seekers: The Legacy of Vulcan: an Indiana Jones style 1920s treasure hunt featuring the Roman gods. A few of my hypotheses are starting to see validation, but I think I still check out a few more of these games to see how closely they all stick to the same blueprint. At least I'm not having a terrible time with them? Even at their most generic, it's still some comfort-food casual gaming.

Addenda

Movie: Hanna (2011)

With Irish-American actor Saoirse Ronan making headlines of late with the well-received Lady Bird, I was inspired to try an earlier movie of hers: 2011's Hanna, the spy thriller in which a highly-trained teenage girl assassin raised far from civilization gives in to her desire to see the rest of the world and announces herself to the CIA, who has been trying to find her and her father (Eric Bana) due to their links to an old, clandestine genetic engineering project that wasn't entirely expunged. It's sort of a cross between the Jason Bourne movies and Kick-Ass, where you regularly have to wonder the kind of lasting damage teaching a tiny girl how to kick adults really hard will have on her developing psyche.

The movie has a very strange energy on top of that. Hanna bounces around Europe after waking up in Morocco once the CIA picks her up, fighting her way out of their secret facility and falling in with a slightly obnoxious but endearing British family on vacation as she makes her way to Berlin to meet her father at a pre-determined location. She's being chased by a German assassin played by Tom Hollander, who has sort of this pansexual artist vibe as well as being a really sick piece of work as far as torturing witnesses goes, as well as Cate Blanchett's senior CIA agent character, who was in charge of the project in question and the one who originally killed Hanna's mother. The cat-and-mouse routine lasts for the whole movie, but it takes some odd detours as Hanna adjusts to life in urban locations - she was raised in the arctic wilds of Finland for the sake of keeping incognito - and flirts with being a regular teenager. The movie is scored throughout by the Chemical Brothers, giving the movie a sort of Run Lola Run vibe as the various running and action scenes throughout picturesque areas of Europe are enhanced by this EDM/synth backing.

It definitely wasn't the movie I was expecting. I got as far as "little girl kills a bunch of people with knives, guns, and bows" but wasn't quite prepared for the atmosphere it had. Despite its distinctive flair, it's not a particularly deep movie nor does it really attend to its own internal logic or explore what Hanna intends to do after she has escaped the CIA on her tail, but it was equal parts suspenseful and exhilarating with a few curious narrative choices - depicting Blanchett's agent as a sort of sympathetic figure as she struggles with her lack of family and encroaching middle-age, almost subtly implying she had to give up her ovaries for the "les enfants terribles" style super-soldier project that Hanna was borne from - to set it apart from all the functionally identical continental chase thrillers. Ronan was pretty phenomenal for her part, too: though she spends most of the movie as a bemused waif out of her element, there's some steely and almost creepily detached determination for those vicious combat scenes. She was 16/17 when they made that movie, though, so it wasn't really the showcase of a child actor prodigy that I had earlier assumed.

Game: Persona 5 (2017)

I'm struggling to put all my thoughts in place when it comes to Persona 5. I admire it for taking as many risks as it did, but I'm not sure they all paid off. The Palaces are a fine example of what I'm talking about: when you're running around that first Palace, based on the twisted cognition of villainous and abusive Phys Ed teacher Suguru Kamoshida, it's an exciting development because the dungeon has been carefully designed - with puzzles and set-pieces, even - rather than a series of randomized dungeon floors. While I have nothing against procedural generation, the dungeons in Persona 3 and Persona 4 were often the busy work between the fun parts - the social links and life-sim development stuff - and I was psyched to see so much work put into their creation this time around. Unfortunately, that enthusiasm started to drop off towards the end of the game, as dungeons either became far too focused on obnoxious and time-consuming (but not necessarily difficult) puzzles or being far too long for their own good. Or, in one particular case, both.

Similarly, I loved exploring the new setting - Tokyo, with various districts like Shibuya, Akihabara and Shinjuku - and all its new amenities, but didn't care quite for the rogue's gallery of social links (now called Confidants) as much as I did for the eccentric folk of small-town Inaba. There were highlights of course, like the goth doctor Tae Takemi or your overworked homeroom teacher Sadayo Kawakami with her whole second life, and I really appreciated how each social link offered something tangible beyond boosted Persona fusion XP: in the above examples, Takemi let you buy expensive but powerful healing consumables, while Kawakami had various ways of increasing the amount of free time you had available for other pursuits. Persona 5 was full of instances like this, where you'd despair of where it falters when compared to Persona 4 while still enjoying the number of significant improvements to quality-of-life conveniences and gameplay features. I'd hate to say that Persona 5's strengths were purely superficial - the style and music were definite highlights, mind - because it does do a huge amount of work improving the fundamental gameplay. At the same time, and for as much as I still loved it and was sad to see it end, I'm still not sure if I'd rate it as highly as 4 or even 3. Could well be a case of diminishing returns of the format on top of everything else.

Before I move on, I just still want to reiterate that Persona 5 - like most of the Persona games in recent memory - is absolutely at the peak of its genre. All the above is like arguing how much the last Zelda was a letdown (well, bad example given the last Zelda game, but pretend we're still in the Twilight Princess/Skyward Sword era) when it's still head and shoulders over most of the competition. I'd recommend it in a heartbeat, regardless of your experience - if any - with the series, and it'll still rank highly when it comes time to re-evaluate my 2017 GOTY list in the near future. That it's a few shades short of what it could've been is almost academic.

Game: Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration Edition (2016)

I'm only a few hours into RotTR so this'll be a short recap, but I was slightly amused by the coincidence that both this game and Hanna, above, start with a young heroine hunting wildlife with a bow in the frozen tundra while learning multiple languages in her downtime, like that's a super easy thing to do while you're trying to keep warm. I originally missed out on the new adventures of Ms. Croft because it was an Xbox One exclusive for a while, and then I waited my usual requisite period of time after the release of the PS4's "20 Year Celebration Edition" (another weird coincidence, as Persona 5 also has a dedication to its respective franchise's 20 years of existence) before it dropped to an acceptable price. I didn't want to delay a playthrough any longer, since the next Tomb Raider can't be too far off, and I needed something relatively short to fill the gap between a 100+ hour run of Persona 5 and an upcoming 100+ hour run of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (which I really need to play) besides. So here we are, hunting bears and stags in the Siberian wilderness while looking for treasure.

I think the developers of the Tomb Raider games recognized the necessity of creating some distance between what they were doing and what Naughty Dog were doing with the Uncharted games, even if the latter appears to have ceased production for the time being. As such, there's a much heavier emphasis on stealth and crafting here, as Lara is invariably better off avoiding direct combat with the well-armed antagonists on her heels - in this case, a sinister clandestine Christian-based sect named Trinity - while being mindful of the hostile wildlife and environment. Lots of collectibles, lots of hemming-and-hawing over what skills and upgrades to acquire next, lots of puzzle-solving in tombs and precarious climbing - I'm looking forward to what's to come, and even though I'm playing on the second highest difficulty for the sake of trophies (yeah, yeah, I'm still a sucker for those things) I hope it's a relatively breezy adventure that won't outstay its welcome. I could use the breather after the mentally and emotionally exhausting Persona 5.

Though, I have to ask: was it really necessary to bring back the gory death scenes whenever she falls into a trap or failed a QTE? Those things turned my stomach a little in the previous game, not to mention being just a tad gratuitous.

In truth, I acquired Affordable Space Adventures in a special "Friends of Nintendo" Humble Bundle from a couple years back that I bought largely for a Wii U copy of Shantae and the Pirate's Curse, and promptly forgot about it. It wasn't until I played Uurnog Uurnlimited last December and was doing some research on Nifflas - the Swedish Indie developer who usually fills his 2D games with puzzles, platforming, and sometimes chill, sometimes ominous ambient atmsopheres - that I realized I'd not only missed a game of his, but that I already had a copy of it on a system that has been piling up dust for the past few months. 2018 is going to be a year where I finally put the Wii U to rest, picking up and completing the various games on the system that have yet to seek asylum on the Switch, and I'm starting with this one.

Affordable Space Adventures, like its name suggests, sends the player on an intergalactic adventure in which their safety and happiness has been assured by a chirpy promotional campaign and safety manual guide for a multi-purpose, flying "SmallCraft"planetary exploration vehicle. Crash landing on the planet with most of the vehicle's systems in disrepair, the player hobbles from one location to the next in a vain attempt to send a distress signal back to the corporation that marooned them there, UExplore. Despite the jokey tone of the in-game paraphernalia, seen whenever the game transitions from one area to the next, it's a fairly solitary and quiet journey through a system of puzzles and obstacles that require full control over the ship's systems, or at least control over whichever ones are currently available.

Excaberating an already deadly battle for survival are a plethora of alien "artifacts" scattered all around the planet, most of which will destroy anything within their vicinity. Their proximity sensors are often limited in what they can pick up however, whether it's sound, heat, electrical energy, or a combination thereof. In order to sneak past, the player must disable systems that generate whatever it is the artifacts disagree with. In addition to the various laser puzzles and environmental hazards, you're often having to look the loadout of mechanisms under your command and switch them on and off as needed - this is where the GamePad screen comes in, as it's on here that each function of the ship and its various settings are displayed in a touchpad-friendly manner. Dropping speed to reduce heat and sound, switching landing gears to a frictionless bar and powering off the engine to quietly slide beneath sensors, ramping up the anti-gravity to float through areas in lieu of noisy engine thrust, closing the exhaust to regulate the ship's temperature easier: there's a lot of options to go through, and to the game's credit it metes these out gradually throughout the game, before eventually disabling them at the same pace towards the end as the player's craft limps towards the proverbial finish line.

What's neat about this system is that it often lends itself to improvisation as often as it requires a certain, developer-specific solution. There were a number of scenarios I felt like I passed through in a way that was neither not optimal, but still worked, but were very clearly lucky coincidences. There was one situation where I had to slowly float past a number of mine-like artifacts and then hit a button to shut down a laser barrier and pass through it quickly before it reactivated: the goal was to narrowly avoid the mines, which would zap your craft and cause it to topple aimlessly out of the sky and into the lasers below, yet still be moving fast and accurately enough to hit the button and pass through. Instead, I got zapped almost immediately, tumbled directly onto the button, and still had enough momentum after bouncing off to pass through the barrier. Of course, there were just as many times where I spent upwards to ten minutes trying to get past the same obstacle, so it's not like the game was taking it easy on me. In fact, I'd probably say this was one of the more difficult games that Nifflas has made: there was a fairly high bar for skillful execution and puzzle-solving alike, and I found it especially hard to get my head around the heat/cold puzzles towards the end, as the player's craft has to survive a raging blizzard to make it to the last operational distress beacon before their vehicle freezes.

There's no getting around how the game can be a little on the dull side. Nifflas's whole "ambient atmosphere" vibe can be as soporific as it is tranquil, and Affordable Space Adventures in particular has little in the way of interesting backgrounds and level design. Outside of the more overt puzzle chambers, you end up flying through a lot of tunnels and passageways - some man-made, some decidedly less so - with only some quiet ambient music and the various bleeps and bloops of your craft to keep you company. You may have assumed going into the game, with its facetious "vacation of a lifetime" advertisements and tauted multiplayer features (naturally, with the collapse of the Miiverse, these no longer apply - it's a shame, because it has a great ending that would've been so much better with Miiverse), that it wouldn't feel quite as lonely and contemplative as it does, but I've played enough Nifflas games to know what I was in for. Occasionally frustrating, occasionally ingenious, frequently both simultaneously; this is an underrated game specially suited for - and I've no doubt history will corroborate this some day - an underrated system.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Now that we have a second game for a comparison, we're getting closer to what I wanted this series to be: a celebration, if that's the word, of the many differences and similarities of the fledgling Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure genre. We're not picking on Artifex Mundi in particular; it's just that they have the best reputation of the many developers who attend to this surprisingly popular format that combines classic point-and-click, Mensa brainteasers, and hidden object puzzles. In fact, it's why I picked a game this week that they didn't develop (but still published) - The Myth Seekers: The Legacy of Vulcan, from Sunward Games. Sunward, based in Hungary, is a frequent collaborator with Artifex Mundi, and is also known for their The Secret Order and Endless Fables franchises.

This is the only game of theirs I own and so will be their only appearance in this feature, unless I really start to get serious about collecting these things. I specifically wanted to see if a fresh developer offered a much more distinctive experience. After all, the most intriguing thing about this sub-genre is how codified it all appears to be.

(Episode 1: Grim Legends: The Forsaken Bride)

Episode 2: The Myth Seekers: The Legacy of Vulcan

In short, The Myth Seekers are a clandestine organization from the early 20th century who seek out the validity of mythological beings and artifacts. It's a fairly solid foundation for an ongoing series, with each future entry presumably looking at a different ancient culture's pantheon and legends. Its first episode, The Legacy of Vulcan, looks at the ancient Roman gods in particular: the ones our planets are named after. What's curious about this is that all these gods were originally Greek; the Romans still built temples and structures in their honor, but you'd think the deities themselves all live on Mt. Olympus and prefer to be called by their Greek names.

Instead, the game has you dart around Italy collecting relics - the Key of Janus, the Helmet of Mars, the Tiara of Venus, etc. - from various remote locations including Mt. Vesuvius (the game folds in the destruction of Pompeii as a major plot element) and the island of Capri. It's also the 1920s, which means Mussolini is theoretically on your case... except Il Duce never really turns up, and neither do his goons. Instead, the antagonist is another Roman god - Bellona, the sister/lover/wife (depending on who you talk to) of Mars - who has a grudge with the titular god of blacksmiths and is determined to stop you for reasons that become clearer as the story progresses.

While the game still has fantastical elements - you chat with a few immortal beings, after all - it's not the fairytale last week's game was, instead taking on more of an Indiana Jones period archeology vibe. If I'm going to do this "these HOPAs can't all be the same" in good faith, I felt like I should pick out something thematically distinct each week.

So, similarities:

• The general interface. Now, I actually like the first-person perspective in adventure games, with the inventory bar scrolling across the bottom of the screen: it's the same standard that Legend Entertainment used for most of their games, and I always felt those guys were underrated in this field. That it's become the de facto format for HOPAs is not unwelcome, but still a little odd. I suppose this means not having to animate a protagonist walking around.
• Speaking of which, in both of these games the protagonist has been some plucky young ingenue with more wits than she's usually given credit. Going from the icons for other HOPAs in my Steam library, this appears to be common practice. Despite their agency, they aren't given much dialogue and you rarely see their face, which suggests they exist primarily as a cipher for a mostly female playing audience. I wanted to avoid gender generalizations, but there's a building pile of evidence that points to developers of HOPAs recognizing that their target demographic is women.
• To build from that, and sorry for spoilers for this random hidden object game, both of the games featured so far have male deuteragonists who turn out to be evil. It's an emerging trend that the heroines of these games can't depend on anyone but themselves and maybe a cute animal or two, but I wonder how often these games specifically invoke the trope of a companion suddenly betraying you.
• Naturally, the hidden object puzzles are here too, but they have the same kind of distribution that they did in Grim Legends: approximately one third of the puzzles thrown your way involve one of these puzzles, the solution of which grants you a single item. If anything, Legacy of Vulcan minimizes their presence even further: each "scene" is only used once, rather than the twice per that Grim Legends had. In addition to picture and word clues, there's a few hidden object puzzles in which you have a single item to find and have to complete a series of objectives - move a book to find a saw handle, add the saw handle to a saw blade, use the completed saw on a ladder rung, use the ladder rung to prop up a chair, grab the item beneath the chair, etc.. It's kind of a neat way to re-frame those puzzles, and I hope other HOPAs have similar breaks from tradition.
• Less welcome is finding out that the game has the same graphical limitations as Grim Legends. To recap: the characters all look like barely animated cutouts and whenever the game is attempting some exciting action, it zooms in and swings the camera around a static image that looks way worse when you get close. There's probably a strict budget behind these games, so I can't begrudge them for doing the best they can with the resources they have, but wholesale replication of shortcomings just rings of low effort. Still intend on giving these games the benefit of the doubt that they're not coming off a factory assembly line, but...

Some major differences:

• A type of puzzle that this game features but Grim Legends wisely lacked are those sliding block ones where you need to make room to move a specific tile from one side to the other. These are the bane of my existence whenever I'm playing a Layton game; far worse than the usual picture grid variety, which can be solved in seconds if you know what you're doing. There wasn't anything in this game that presented a roadblock for too long, but I can probably contribute 30 minutes of my three hour playthrough to the two instances of this puzzle that The Legacy of Vulcan contains.
• The game is on a linear rail that does not allow for backtracking once you've moved to a new area of Italy. This means it's easy to lose out on several of the game's many collectibles, which once again are dotted around the screen and are fairly difficult to spot. Grim Legends, meanwhile, allowed you to revisit pretty much any area on the map besides a few of the early zones (and I'm not sure those had collectibles regardless) but then it had the benefit of the whole game being set in the same general area of Asspullsylvania. One of those unfortunate setbacks of The Legacy of Vulcan's roadtrip narrative, though nothing that affects the core game too much.

To see us off, I've created a small annotated montage of screenshots to give you all a sense of what the game has to offer. I'm going to try to make this a component of future Rainy Days and Mundis episodes too. It'll be easier to keep track of recurring plot tropes and puzzle configurations, for one thing.

Well, I can certainly say I'm getting a lot of data about how these games function, but I was hoping for something a little more distinctive from a different studio. It's remarkable how closely these games seem to hew to the same blueprint so far, and it doesn't seem to be evolving over time - The Myth Seekers was only released last year. Now that I have an idea of what to look out for, I'm going to get even more granular with future entries, maybe even start drawing up some stats and figures: I'm curious to find out how often the same puzzles keep popping up, for one, as it seemed half the puzzles in this game were iterations of similar ones in Grim Legends (and, I'm guessing, a dozen other HOPAs).

What's more, I'm starting to suspect the formulaic nature is actually one that works to this genre's credit. Casual games are meant to be as accessible as possible, and encountering the same puzzle types cuts down on having to learn new mechanics. Even on the Expert difficulty, I breezed through this thing no problem (the sole exception being that sliding block puzzle, of course) because I was never really required to think too hard. The stories don't generally matter either - they basically work as a framework to hook puzzles onto. Maybe the heart of the "casul" experience is something you can sleepwalk through and enjoy, vaguely, the whole while.

Could be that this standpoint will continue to shift as I continue play more HOPAs: we'll find out next fortnight, as we return to the forest and get married to the Mice King.

Ever have one of those weeks where nothing coming out interests you in the slightest, but is lighting the rest of the internet on fire? It puts you in that position of wanting to air your displeasure at this arrangement, but then stopping yourself from posting that tweet or Facebook post or Instagram when you recall at the last second that people who complain about the fun people are having with something you dislike have been scientifically proven to be the worst human beings.

Yet, I always feel for those people and those opinions. Not only because there are situations that crop up from time to time that put me in a similar mindset - such as how this week seemed to be wall-to-wall American football, DBZ and Monster Hunter talk - but because ultimately those people are reaching out for some kind of connection to a fellow human being. They want to feel like they belong, and this discrepancy between what others like and what they themselves are into is making them feel alienated and alone. When they yell out to the unfeeling void (my new name for Twitter), they're not looking for people to respond with, "Oh right, this thing I love is actually kind of shit, huh? Thank you astute internet stranger for setting me straight," but for someone to say, "Oh hey, I don't really care for this stuff either, let's go out for brioches sometime."

The message of "it's OK if people like a thing you don't like" probably should be printed on a plaque above the entrance to the internet, if one were to exist, but we can't lose sight of our ability to be critical. Difference of opinion, as long as one of the sides of that difference isn't objectively shitty (looking at you, people who complain about the SJW content of a game on Steam and think women in the industry have been too "uppity" of late), is the cornerstone of understanding media like video games and others, and allowing yourself to see the same piece of art from multiple perspectives always gives you a better sense of the whole. Yet... I dunno. When I complain or critique something, I always like for there to be a point. "Stop talking about this thing I don't care about" is rarely conducive to any goal you might have, unless that goal is to be whacked with a nailbat.

But man alive, do I not give a solitary fig about Dragon Ball Z and Monster Hunter. Good lord are they some trite bullshit for jerks.

Accentuating the positive now, let's talk about what I've been writing since last week:

• The Indie Game of the Week was the conventional but still frequently surprising puzzle-platformer Escape Goat 2, which like the first game keeps things relatively simple with its single-screen challenges but certainly doesn't make them easy. You can canter through the early puzzles quite handily, but you'll still regularly find yourself in situations where you need to restart after hitting buttons in the wrong order or dropping down the wrong gap, so it's definitely one of those games where experimentation is the key. Then you have the (admittedly optional) bonus rooms, which are just hell on Earth if your platforming skills aren't up to snuff. I've always liked this series for sticking to its guns with regards to its straightforward structure and devilish wit, and I'd be happy to see more entries in the future.
• We also have our second episode of The SNES Classic Mk. II, subtitled Time Bomb (the puns will get worse before they get better). It covers Operation Logic Bomb from Jaleco, which is the "candidate" game - the one I'd never played before - and Chrono Trigger from Squaresoft as our "nominee" - the one I've played at least once fully before, as I'm sure many have. Operation Logic Bomb turned out to be a delightful surprise, in part because its clever progression and brevity has allowed it to age with grace, and Chrono Trigger is just one of the games missing from the first SNES Classic whose absence is highly conspicuous. We'll be seeing a few more of those ringers as this feature progresses, including another one in the third episode of The SNES Classic Mk. II, due on the 6th of February.

Addenda

Movie: Kubo and the Two Strings

It's a wonder that it took me this long to get around to Kubo and the Two Strings. Laika Studios have recently pipped Pixar as the western animation studio to watch when it comes to striking new features with various thematic extravagances that nonetheless conceal a very human and relatable story beneath - it's a difficult balancing act to pull off, but infinitely more engaging than yet another batch of funny animals making cocky expressions who invariably end their movies dancing to a big musical number. Laika's still best known for their inaugural feature, Coraline, and Kubo follows some very similar themes about respecting one's lineage, as well as several of its own concerning the loss of loved ones and the loss of oneself - few kids films are going to broach the difficult subject of Alzheimer's, even indirectly.

The other reason I've been wanting to watch Kubo for so long is the Japanese theme. I'm a big ol' weeaboo at the best of times, but the animation that went into the various character models of this movie and the papercraft that accentuates them can be nothing short of breathtaking. It's less that the movie is obliquely about a handful of Japanese myths - the most overt of which is the tale of Princess Kaguya, the moon maiden who came to Earth and fell in love - but that it thrives in the aesthetics of that culture, of samurais and katanas and dragons and so forth. Ever since Disney's Pocahontas and the thrashing it got for its occasional insensitivity, I think we've seen a lot of animation studios across the world embrace visual styles and philosophies from other cultures with the utmost respect, and while Japan has plenty of its own animated output concerning its own legends and folklore it's always kind of exciting to see it from an outside perspective - sort of like Japan's own take on London and the UK in Level-5's Professor Layton games. Like seeing the same old streets, accents and personalities from a fresh pair of eyes.

The movie's actual story is fairly decent overall, one that's clearly geared towards a younger audience with its humor and plot progression, but it's certainly not afraid to get emotional and tackle some difficult subject matter (like Alzheimer's, above) head-on. The voice cast is fine if not exceptional, and I quite liked Regina Spektor's shamisen-tinged take on the George Harrison classic While My Guitar Gently Weeps that sees out the movie, which was an inspired choice of song given the movie's emphasis on the transformative power of music and of Kubo's origami-summoning stringed instrument in particular. I'm looking forward to what this studio does next given the confidence on display here, and am wondering if I shouldn't go back a little bit and check out ParaNorman too.

TV: The Good Place (Season 2)

This one's kind of a cheat since the series hasn't ended yet, but I've been glued to each new episode of NBC's The Good Place as they air. It's one of those sitcoms that pulls off the nigh impossible task of not only being hilarious week after week, but pushes its characters and stories in directions you're dying to see the conclusion to. In a sense, it does double-duty as a joke-dispensing half-hour of comedy and as a serial drama that demands your rapt attention.

The second season is difficult to talk about from a narrative perspective because the events of the entire arc hinge on the big twist at the end of the first season: that makes it impossible to talk about without revealing that twist, and that would mean spoiler-blocking half of this entire segment again. Instead, I'll vaguely gesture towards the fine work that the central cast of six - Kristen Bell as Eleanor Shellstrop, the regrettably relatable queen of selfishness; William Jackson Harper as Chidi Anagonye, the ludicrously strait-laced ethics scholar from whose regular discomfort the show reliably mines its best jokes; Jameela Jamil as Tahani Al-Jamil, the name-dropping aristocratic airhead with no shortage of family issues; Manny Jacinto as Jason Mendoza, whose endless stupidity and lowest-common-denominator cultural attachments makes him the best 30 Rock character that never was; Ted Danson as Michael, the slightly doddering and oblivious immortal architect of the afterlife; and D'Arcy Carden as Janet, the preternaturally chirpy automated assistant (not a robot) and secret VIP of the show - and to the imaginative set design and animation work that goes into creating the titular not-quite-real habitation and the greater metaverse of lost souls and eternal, eccentric arbiters that surrounds it.

To that last point, I think the thing I love most about the show after its humor and cast are how it deals regularly with the metaphysical ramifications of the afterlife and respects its audience enough to keep up with its many shifts and explanations. Some of those episodes almost require a couple of viewings just to make sure you're still on its wavelength, which comes with the added benefit of seeing a few extra jokes that may have whizzed by the first time - the best example of which is the many punnish business placards for various themed restaurants and food kiosks, which can change from episode to episode. Like Arrested Development, it's a great series for watching in the stream format (or DVD/Blu-Ray) because it allows you to go back and forth to see the groundwork for later revelations and appreciate all the callback gags at the same time.

Again, without heading straight into spoiler territory to explain why in more detail, the current season and the way it's wrapping up is very exciting right now, as it's impossible to know where the show is currently heading. The situation at present has very little in common with how the show began, and it's assuredly become must-see TV for me.

(In other TV news, I'm keeping up with the Pop Team Epic anime - it's been fairly hit and miss so far, as is often the nature of sketch comedy, but I still love that intro - and I'm intending to catch up with the rest of last year's Downtown no Gaki New Year No-Laughing Batsu game before this year's starts getting translated. Downtown's Batsu games have grown increasingly formulaic of late, and there's a lot of cultural in-jokes and cameos I'm not picking up, but its cruelty still reliably makes me laugh.)

Game: Atlus's Persona 5

I intimated last week that I was going to talk about the rest of the cast of Confidants in this Persona 5 update, but I'd be better off saving that for a final entry. I'm still not quite finished with a lot of the non-player character Confidants, and I'd like to see how their particular stories conclude first. Similarly, I don't quite have a feel for the two newest members of the Phantom Thieves just yet.

Instead, I figured I'd talk about all the features and upgrades Persona 5 has over Persona 4, since the latter is such a major touchstone for visitors of this site. If you've never seen the Persona 4 Endurance Run, it still remains Giant Bomb's greatest accomplishment for its long-term video features, and after spending 100+ hours watching Jeff and Vinny tackle its social links, fusion system and turn-based combat, you're going to know that game inside and out.

• The most welcome change is being able to pick the inherited skills of your fusions, something I recognize was introduced for the Vita's Persona 4 Golden port but is such an extremely valuable time-saver that it really should've been introduced to the series far sooner. You still have a random assortment of stat increases per level, which isn't perfect when you have dedicated Personas for physical attacks, magic, defense, buffing, and so forth, but I suspect that level of control might prove too prone to min-maxing, not to mention obsessive micromanagement.
• Every Confidant now provides benefits in addition to boosting the "Arcana Burst" - the XP bonus for newly fused Personas of the same arcana (Lovers, Chariot, Hanged Man, etc.). With player characters, this invariably means things like Baton Pass - allowing you to send your "one more" earned from hitting an enemy weakness to another party member, increasing their damage in the process - and old mainstays like taking a fatal hit for the protagonist, slapping characters out of their status effects, and surviving one instant-death attack per battle. Others grant you improved vendor choices, additional passive skills in battle, new options in the Velvet Room, the opportunity to boost increases to personal stats (like Knowledge and Charm) or affinities with other Confidants, and even bonus free periods during the day to work on stats and other pursuits.
• Infiltration tools are useful items for dungeons that includes lockpicks (the new equivalent of the distressingly finite Chest Keys of Persona 4), smokescreens, vanish balls, and "Goho-M"s - all of which were previously items you could find only occasionally when dungeoneering. Now, you can simply spend a period of free time constructing them, provided you have the right materials and enough of the Proficiency stat. This system means you can easily acquire what you need, but it still comes at a cost - your valuable free time, and limited resources that can't easily be found outside of dungeons. It's still a far better system than depending on the RNG gods for life-saving consumables.
• One of the many kindnesses the game gives you is an opportunity to change party members mid-dungeon without trekking back to the entrance or a safe room. A certain Confidant allows you to switch party members mid-battle too. It's very helpful when the spells you need to exploit an enemy's single elemental weakness are on a character you forgot to bring with you.
• Speaking of which, I love that this game now has damage spells for Bless and Curse, rather than the very unreliable instant-death spells they've been previously. That means you can actually exploit an enemy's weakness to them without spending a huge amount of mana on a spell that might not even work. I'm less sure about the addition of two new elements - nuclear and psionic - since it just means having more elements to fling at a new enemy type until one of them sticks. I suppose it makes it easier for the game to craft a party of eight characters if they all have their own element, though.
• Joker, the protagonist, soon acquires the ability Third Eye that lets him see finer details of the surrounding dungeons - a take on Detective Vision, if you'd like. Not only does this power show him the relative power levels of enemies - red is for dangerous, yellow for an even match, and blue for pushovers - but also points out valuables in the vicinity to loot. What's more, the game finds several applications for this power outside of dungeons too.
• This isn't much of a quality-of-life thing, but they expanded the number of things you can gain stats from. This now includes DVDs - each of which is hilarious, from their imitation titles to the clips of overwrought, premises-crystallized-into-a-single-soundbite dialogue of famous shows like The X-Files, Beverly Hills 90210 and The Walking Dead - and video games, which usually require some active participation from the player to complete. The movies can be pretty funny too (didn't expect a shout-out to a certain other Japanese urban life-sim), and the fishing and batting is far more elaborate now.
• Finally, there's Mementos. Whereas the Palaces - the game's main story dungeons - all have pre-determined layouts and puzzles to solve, Mementos is some old-school Persona/Megami Tensei procedurally generated levels and treasures business. That makes it a good place to train, to recruit Personas you may have missed, to acquire resources, and - most importantly - where to go to complete side-quests. Rather than the deluge of fetch quests that Persona 4 had, each side-quest in Persona 5 involves finding the shadow version of a bad person somewhere in Mementos and then changing their hearts. What makes this system better is how it regularly ties into roadblocks in your Confidants - sometimes you can't progress because there's some villain in their lives making it difficult for them to complete their goals, and that's where you come in to change some hearts and allow your various Confidants to continue to grow. It does also give you away a little - I don't think I've had a single Confidant yet who couldn't figure out who I really was by the end of their chain - but for as annoying it is to hit these roadblocks, I respect the game for finding new ways to integrate the dungeoneering and social life sim stuff more closely.

I think I have one more week with this bad boy before I can put it to rest, ideally finishing it before February rolls around, so next Saturday should bring with it a more conclusive review. Right now I'm leaning towards commending the game's many mechanical improvements and its boundless energy and style (that UI and menu design! That soundtrack!), while condemning its slightly less engaging cast and story and for the cheap way it recycles Personas for almost all its enemy encounters (though the blame for that really lies with the greater MegaTen franchise).

It's been a while since I last visited my hircine Houdini buddy; 2012, in fact. I'm heartened to see that not much has changed in his 2D world of blocks, mechanisms, platforming, and frequent mousecapades. The Escape Goat series invariably drops you into a single-screen room with an exit and any number of keys required to unlock said exit, with a handful of persistent mechanics to rely on and hazards to overcome, and simply sits there pensively with arched fingers waiting to see what you do. Escape Goat 2 gives you plenty of variance with the level design, backdrops and a steady influx of new wrinkles to conquer, but the real diversity comes from how the game frequently adjusts its sliders for "platforming prowess" and "mental acuity" with each new stage, and you're never quite sure when entering whether it's your mind or your reflexes (or an equal amount of both) that is to be tested.

In many respects, Escape Goat 2 is a quintessential puzzle-platformer: it's not that interested in providing an open-world - though you do have a few branches in the path towards the mid-game if you should need a break from one nasty stage in particular - and it didn't compromise its treasured simplicity for the sake of some spacewhipper hooks or an overly elaborate story with regular cutscenes. The game doesn't even have collectibles to find: the closest equivalent would be its secret doors, hidden very well, which take you to the game's exceptionally more difficult secret areas.

Which isn't to say that Escape Goat 2 doesn't have a few tricks up its sleeve. Your protagonist goat starts with a double-jump and an air dash - moves that the game will have you relying on from the offset, but won't necessarily give away certain advanced techniques, such as how air-dashing from a standing position allows you to jump twice afterwards. He'll soon encounter his mouse buddy from the first game, who darts along walls and ceilings until he hits an obstacle, and be reacquainted with two mouse-based power-ups that the game uses sparingly: a cape, which allows the mouse to charge enemies and breakable blocks to devastating effect, and a hat, which allows the goat and mouse to switch positions instantly, often destroying whatever was between them in the process. It's not often you'll come across a puzzle which depends on a specific technique you've yet to ascertain - though I did encounter a few - but more that the solution is either tricky to execute or depends on some experimentation with the stage layout. Fortunately, the single-screen format means that the list of possible solutions is pleasingly finite, and it's rare you'll find yourself completely stuck because the correct course of action eludes you.

Unfortunately, if you do get stuck, it'll be because of the game's often demanding platforming. Escape Goat 2 occasionally flirts with masocore scenarios, having you air-dash and double jump through a series of narrow passages filled with traps, or dashing through a crumbling level as you attempt to execute on a series of fast moves in a very small window of time. These wouldn't be so bad, but the game's engine isn't always up to the task: there's a floatiness to the jumping that makes it hard to judge landings, and when coupled with the game's tile-based level design - where even circular traps are treated as square tiles, meaning you'll frequently clip the edge of what appears to be thin air and die - a hefty degree of frustration ensues. No level was insurmountable, at least in my experience, but it's best not to go into this thinking you'll be able to reach the end with your wits alone: it's more platformer than puzzle game, ultimately.

Still, I can't begrudge a game for choosing to make the player work their way to the end, especially when many of its hardest challenges are entirely optional. It's a solid, no-frills, focused puzzle-platformer game of the devious type that regularly drops nasty surprises in your lap and eagerly observes the resulting devastation. You get the sense that the developers really enjoyed putting their QA testers through the wringer with some of the more diabolical scenarios provided here.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as those in the first SNES Classic, but have equally stood the test of time. The rules, list of games considered so far, and links to previous episodes can all be found at The SNES Classic Mk II Intro and Contents.

Episode II: Time Bomb

The Candidate: Jaleco's Operation Logic Bomb

I have a pal named Cal. Cal repped a fairly obscure game in 2017 called Cryptark: a sort of gritty, sci-fi space scavenger shoot 'em up with roguelike elements that I was tempted to try out but later found was not to my liking. I feel like I reduced my pal Cal's morale when I implied Cryptark was as fun as a root canal, by my rationale, which is why I was eager to mend this entirely imagined discord between us by covering an old SNES favorite of his that I'd never before encountered: Operation Logic Bomb, a.k.a. Ikari no Yosai ("Fortress of Fury", which is a pretty sweet name also).

Actually the third in its series, with the preceding two entries released exclusively on the Nintendo Game Boy (the first of which was released in North America as Fortified Zone), Operation Logic Bomb is a top-down shooter that owes a small debt to Alien Syndrome, Sega's love letter to gory sci-fi creature-features such as Aliens and The Thing. You're still running around shooting, blowing up and burning all manner of weird extraterrestrial lifeforms that have taken over a human settlement, but rather than a purely linear stage-based format you're required to explore the surroundings, take detours to find new weapons which can unlock new routes, and power up and activate useful terminals that provide maps, health refills, and security footage that offers hints on the bosses ahead.

It's definitely a little more involved than your standard run-and-gun shooter, and that's best exemplified by the weapons it provides you. Initially you start with a direct fire machine gun and a spread shot, in true Contra fashion. However, the machine gun takes enemies down faster with its greater rate of fire, while the spread shot is better for hitting enemies at acute angles, which in turn allows you to stay clear of their limited output ranges. Just these two weapons alone sets the tone for the rest of the game, where you'll frequently have to consider which weapon to use and how best to approach enemies based on how they act and their firing patterns. There's only about a half-dozen enemy types in the game, not including bosses, but it never stops finding new ways to increase their danger level with awkward placements, spawning them in unexpectedly, or combining them with other enemies.

Both the enemies and the weapons the player finds have some nice touches, unexpected for the usually straightforward and workmanlike output of perennial second-stringers Jaleco. For instance, the first enemy you meet is a blue turret that fires slowly in one of eight directions, giving you plenty of time to pick your angle of approach and preferred weapon: the way these turrets work is that they can't rotate counter-clockwise, so by moving around them and then back to force them to cycle all the way back around to the optimal angle, you give yourself a bit of time to rush in and finish them off. Likewise, each new type of gun offers a new tactical advantage: a reflecting laser, like that used by Gemini Man, that can bounce around corners allowing you to use cover more effectively; a flamethrower with limited range but can spread around corners; a hologram decoy that can't attack, but will distract enemies (not bosses, unfortunately) for a time; and timed claymores that are extremely powerful but requires you to drag enemies (or simply predict their path) into the blast zone. It's a far more strategic game than I was expecting, and probably the best type of its sub-genre I've played - by focusing on bullet evading challenges unique to the top-down format and streamlining the weaponry you have access to and ensuring each one has their ideal purpose, as well as super smooth eight-directional movement and handy option to fix your shooting direction by holding the trigger button, I found its pace far more agreeable than the likes of peers such as The Chaos Engine or even Smash TV.

Yet, I think the coolest thing about the game is its premise and look. You aren't so much fighting aliens from outer space but creatures that slipped into our reality from a sort of cybernetic alternate dimension. By destroying various generators created by the hostile invaders you clean up what appears to be decay seeping in from a wholly digital world and returning the environment to normal: the goal of the game is to halt the spread of this digital reality virus and eliminate the various robotic bosses instigating it. It's a really distinct cyberpunk aesthetic that kind of calls to mind Supergiant Games's Transistor, in the almost meta way that its reality seems to break down into its constituent 1s and 0s. Definitely an interesting little game that goes for quality over quantity - a full playthrough takes around an hour or two.

• Preservation: Operation Logic Bomb has aged remarkably well, in part to some quality pixel artwork, a distinct look, fluid 16-bit controls, and the various tactical hooks outlined above. I would also suggest its relatively brief run-time is another point in its favor: for a full-price game, it's a little distressing to beat in an hour or so, but that's an ideal amount of longevity for a retro game that sits in a collection of others vying for your time. 4.
• Originality: The top-down on-foot shooter hasn't been a particularly big deal at any point in gaming history, even with the popularity of Smash TV, Gun.Smoke and Ikari Warriors. Most were the type that scrolled forever upwards, like standard vertical shoot 'em ups. Rarer still are games that attend to their atmosphere like Operation Logic Bomb, in which every enemy encounter must be carefully considered and the tone hops between active and suspenseful. Very few games with alternating weapons really give you a reason to keep changing to suit the occasion, rather than sticking to personal preference. 4.
• Gameplay: It's a damn smooth game and an unexpectedly user-friendly one. It actually took about an hour - halfway through the game - before I realized you could lock your shooting position, since I considered that tech to be beyond the 16-bit era. Every fight is tough but fair; you could feasibly move through most battles without a scratch with enough preparedness and reflexes (making it suitable for replays), or you could end up losing half your HP bar because an enemy got too close to easily deal with. 4.
• Style: The combination of military research base and a "digital" virus look replete with glowing blue and green hexagons is a strong aesthetic, and it becomes all the more pronounced when you move outside and start repairing patches of interdimensional rot to recover the natural landscape beneath. The robot boss designs are rad too, and that industrial synth soundtrack is wonderful (especially the almost Super Metroid-like sinister bass-y music that plays when you review footage of the invaders). 4.

Total: 16.

Other images:

Gallery

The Nominee: Squaresoft's Chrono Trigger

Sort of a "no, duh" entry, but we might as well get it out of the way with. Squaresoft's Chrono Trigger is perhaps the most conspicuous absence from the original SNES Classic's line-up of all time greats, not only because its production values and story quality are through the roof - and not just comparatively, but in an all-time sense - but its relative brevity (or brel...vativ...ly... nope, that wasn't a portmanteau opportunity at all, a.k.a. an opporportma- what is wrong with me today?) means it's aged better than 90% of the RPGs for the system. That isn't to say a long-ass JRPG can't make it in this day and age, but that's because games are stuffed smarter - or so we'd like to think - rather than padded out with far too many random encounters (which Chrono Trigger more or less sidesteps, both figuratively and literally) which was frequently the case back with the 16-bit era.

All that aside, my primary reason for wanting to include Chrono Trigger is - like most nominees for this project - due to its distinctiveness and longevity. It's a time-travel RPG with a generic fantasy medieval setting, a slightly less generic post-medieval setting, a prehistoric setting, a mysterious "time of the ancients" setting - mildly subverting the old "vanished advanced civilization" trope by actually letting you visit them and watching their downfall in real-time from a relatively safe distance - and a post-apocalyptic future filled with robots concerned with their inchoate stirrings of sapience. There's only one other RPG for the SNES that can match that level of thematic variance that I can think of (Live a Live, which may or may not be the focus of a future one of these) and is arguably, to this day, the greatest RPG that Squaresoft ever produced.

Chrono Trigger covers the exploits of a quiet kid with a katana who travels through time with a princess, a nerd, a frog, a robot, a cavewoman, and (optionally) a DBZ villain who talks about the wind a lot. I'm torn between doing my due diligence in summarizing the plot and knowing full well that anyone reading this understands precisely what Chrono Trigger involves, largely due to its Endurance Run feature on this very website, and that it was followed by a PS1 sequel, Chrono Cross, and a Satellaview broadcasted visual novel, Radical Dreamers, that followed the mysterious disappearance of one of the major side-characters. They probably also know that the game was a collaboration between Hironobu Sakaguchi (the creator of Final Fantasy), Yuji Horii (the creator of Dragon Quest) and Akira Toriyama (the creator of Dragon Ball and lead art director for Dragon Quest) in what essentially amounts to the Japanese RPG developer equivalent of the Traveling Wilburys. The only reason I can imagine for this being left off the original SNES Classic is that Squaresoft only agreed to two games, and Secret of Mana and Final Fantasy VI both won their respective coin flips (whereas Super Mario RPG got a free pass due to Nintendo's involvement).

• Preservation: Here's the odd thing about games considered truly timeless (which, when you use it to refer to Chrono Trigger in particular, seems kind of ironic): the reason they don't age is because they did everything right, which very few games can manage. That's a cop-out answer without some evidence to back it up, so here goes: the sheer amount of artistic effort put into the game's most crucial scenes, the aesthetic and gameplay variance offered by the many time travel locations, the level of freedom provided by the open end-game and the player's own decision of when and how to strike at the cosmic horror in their midst, the soulful soundtrack filled with memorable leitmotifs that perfectly suited the personalities of the characters they pertained to, the carefully considered enemy encounters that a savvy enough player can evade, and an overall run-time of 30 or so hours that lasts long enough for what feels like an epic adventure with a minimal amount of padding and grinding. It was a hard act to follow for many years after. 5.
• Originality: Chrono Trigger wasn't the first time-travel game for the SNES, but it certainly wasn't not a common theme either. More so than that, the choice to break away from the older style random encounters (where the screen would get all funky and transition to a battle) and put more emphasis on character placement and party composition with regards to the effectiveness of special attacks was relatively new. I think there was probably a conscious effort from its developers to not let the game feel like a "best of both worlds" of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. 4.
• Gameplay: Streamlining is the key to good game development - figure out what you need, and excise the rest. This gives you the freedom to add new ideas in the spaces left behind, or simply create a leaner and more efficient game without sacrificing anything significant. Chrono Trigger was a mixture of both of those approaches, filling its spare time with silly bike races and fairground games and optional bosses, but by ensuring that characters grew quickly - but not so quick that the constant changes to their skill repertoire wouldn't lose you in the shuffle - the game could focus less on throwing hundreds of enemies at you and more on setting the tone, introducing new puzzles and obstacles, and a tightly paced story. 4.
• Style: Toriyama's an acquired taste as far as I'm concerned, but a game like this - where he was forced to draw a frog person, a robot, and other unusual characters - really brought out his creative side. Then you have intricate vistas like Magus's Castle, the courtroom in Guardia Castle, the forest campfire scene before Lucca's dream, and the dead tree on Death's Peak, all of which someone clearly spent a lot of time crafting. But even from the ominous majesty of the Black Omen to the kitchens in ordinary homes, everything has a ridiculous level of detail. Chrono Trigger regularly pushed the SNES to absolute breaking point. 5.

Total: 18.

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< Back to Intro and Contents

Towards the end of last year, when I was plowing through a group of 2017 Indie games for Go! Go! GOTY!, I hit upon an unusual number of roguelikes. It's a format that, along with spacewhippers and other old-school genres like point-and-click adventure games and first-person dungeon-crawlers, is something the Indie market has been resurrecting with a vengeance of late.

I have a few ideas for why this is, without necessarily making the effort to really dig deep and, say, ask the people who made them with the interviews and such. That seems like hard work. Instead, I'm tossing out the following theories:

1. Like the genres above, it was a genre type that was undeveloped by major developers. In fact, there have been precious few AAA games with permadeath and procedurally generated levels. The few I can think of are Diablo, in which the Ironman mode only became an option a few games in, and something like Dungeon Hack, which took its name from NetHack - probably the most popular of the true roguelike variants - and the structure and art assets from Westwood's Eye of the Beholder series. The Indie market excels at revisiting periods in video game development history where a promising new vein of game design went underdeveloped by the major publishers of the era, giving them an opportunity to pick up where they abruptly left off.
2. The second, and slightly more cynical theory, is that focusing on a roguelike progression structure, in which the game is constantly looping and randomizing its layouts with each iteration, saves a lot of time and effort from having to hand-craft every single dungeon floor. Instead of carefully considered level design, the roguelike developer can focus on character progression, inventory, monster behavior and other bare essentials. If there's at least some work put into making dungeon floors visually disparate between "regions", that's often enough.

I realize the second explanation sounds kind of accusatory, but there's a significant and important draw to any game developer if they're able to minimize or excise parts of the laborious process of developing professional-quality games with small teams. It's the same principle behind "programmer graphics" - games that take a hit in visual quality to account for how the creator's true talents lie in coding and design, which is often why store-bought assets are a godsend for the artistically deficient - or those that focus on antiquated genres of the 8-bit and 16-bit eras which are significantly less expensive to produce in the present day. Moreover, creating an RPG from scratch requires a lot of time; a resource your average Indie developer doesn't have in abundance if they aim to make a living at what they do.

It's for these reasons that I've made my peace with every other promising Indie RPG boasting permadeath and randomized dungeons: as much as I'd prefer the alternative, I recognize how costly and inconvenient that would be for their developers, and roguelikes are subsequently less an annoying persistent fad than a more rational means of crafting a fully-fledged RPG experience with everything that matters to genre fans - character development, plenty of loot, a relatively stable difficulty curve, multiple risk vs. reward decisions per playthrough, strong monster variation - within a comparatively compact development period. Thankfully, the big elaborate story-based RPGs are coming back in the AAA space if the present embarrassment of RPG riches - Persona 5, Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Ys VIII, Divinity: Original Sin 2, Torment: Tides of Numenera, NieR: Automata, to name a few from last year, and the upcoming Ni no Kuni 2, Octopath Traveller and Pillars of Eternity 2 - are anything to go by, and I doubt I'll be running out any time soon.

Speaking of boundless, here's another week's worth of blog reading if the above didn't contain nearly enough verbosity for you:

• The Indie Game of the Week this time was Octodad: Dadliest Catch, which is one of the older items on my Indie backlog queue. I wasn't too impressed by its mid- to late-game, but I could at least recognize the great idea at its core. In my mind, it's like the Scribblenauts franchise: sometimes you come up with a concept so good that you're not sure what to do with it, and the first Scribblenauts was this awful repetitive series of escort challenges where you'd invariably hook the key item to a vehicle and drag it to the goal, which entirely missed the point of the endless creativity the game's model offered. The sequel, Super Scribblenauts, was a far superior realization of that premise because it focused on clever "what item do I need to solve this?" logic puzzles instead of weak platforming challenges, and became an excellent game in its own right. I'd say the Octodad franchise is equally capable of a similar course-correction in its future, if its developers can realize it.
• I started the other of my two alternating Tuesday features this week, named Rainy Days and Mundis. It looks at a specific strain of casual adventure game known as the H.O.P.A. - Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure - which combines hidden object puzzles, the like where you have a cluttered screen of junk and must pick out items from a list the game gives you, with a more traditional first-person point-and-click adventure game filled with inventory puzzles and Professor Layton-style brainteasers. I'm particularly fascinated by the formula these games stringently stick to, especially in those crafted or published by the Polish masters of the genre Artifex Mundi, and I'm playing several of them to see just how domineering this blueprint is and how often the games diverge from it. Of course, in order to determine that I'd have to play several of them - I'm looking at a ten game series right now, though it might go longer or shorter depending on how much gas the concept has. At any rate, the inaugural episode looks at Grim Legends: The Forsaken Bride, the first of a trilogy of sinister fairytales.

Addenda

Movie: Logan (2017)

2018 Moviewatch continues with the marvellously bleak Logan, the last of Hugh Jackman's stints as the mutant Wolverine in the X-Men universe. An embittered and ailing older version of the character, this Logan is coerced into delivering a young mutant - the first he's encountered in 25 years, after they mysteriously stopped appearing - to a promised point in North Dakota, the opposite side of the country from where he's been eking out a living as a limousine driver in El Paso, Texas. This young mutant, Laura (or X-23 to the faceless corporation that created her), has Wolverine's claws and healing factor, as well as his occasional bouts of unfettered rage and lack of people skills. In addition, Wolverine's also been attending to an equally ailing nonagenarian Professor X whose Alzheimer's-like brain disease causes cataclysmic telepathic seizures.

It's not a happy movie, let's just say, though it is an ultimately hopeful one. For as ornery as this Logan is, he still stays true to his superhero ideals - most significant is the gratitude he feels towards Professor X, even if the rest of the X-Men are extinct, and his efforts to ensure his seizures don't get out of control. Stifled by his lack of freedom and cluttered mind, Professor X - simply named Charles for most of the movie - takes it out on Wolverine and his other handler, the "tracker" albino mutant Caliban, creating a very empathetic and human take on the once nigh-omniscient psychic mastermind. In fact, the movie is full of great performances, from the smarmy and sinister cyborg villain Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook) to a wonderful natural performance from child star Dafne Keen, who plays Laura like Millie Bobby Brown's Elle from Stranger Things: half oblivious ingenue who has yet to see the world outside her lab rat cage, half uncontrollable ball of rage ready to snap at any adult - good or bad - who gets in her way.

I think what I appreciated most about the movie is that, through all the grit and grimness and R-rated violence, it's still an X-Men story deep down. It's about mutants who are at odds with the world of humans being treated as freaks and scientific curiosities, and how they try to rise above the low expectations given to them. It's about Wolverine coming to terms with his angry past and reaffirming his almost expired sense of compassion and altruism, even as he continues to grow more scarred (in all senses of the term) and weaker with every injury. Ultimately, it's about hope and passing the baton to the next generation of X-Men: something Jackman's been wanting to do with this character for a while now.

For as much as people tend to dismiss the 20th Century Fox corner of the Marvel canon compared to the far more slick "Marvel Cinematic Universe" and its annual installments (though I suppose it's all one big happy family now thanks the recent Disney merger), the occasional R-rated movie like Deadpool and Logan really highlight what's possible for the superhero genre if it's willing to take a few chances. It's why people are taking a shine to the more auteur-driven Guardians of the Galaxy (James Gunn) and Thor: Ragnarok (Taika Waititi) or those driven by minority (within Hollywood, at least) voices like Wonder Woman (Patty Jenkins, a woman) and Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, an African-American). When there's four or five new superhero movies a year, it pays to have an original edge; but more so than that, someone who has a lot of emotional stakes in the characters they're bringing to the screen. The Guardians are perfect for a director who has always worked on the fringe, Wonder Woman's probably the most important female superhero in the world, and Black Panther is one of the few original black champions of the Marvel universe. These characters are far more than just a paycheck for the directors and actors that are working on them, and that really goes a long way towards ensuring a quality heart-and-soul production. I'm sure the case was the same for those behind Logan - James Mangold, who directed the previous Japan-set The Wolverine, and Jackson himself, who was probably more than eager to see off his most famous character in such a conclusive fashion.

Game: Persona 5

I'm in July now, so I feel like I've settled well into Persona 5's groove of exploring dungeons and managing my social and academic life. In that regard, P5 is very similar to the previous two games: when you aren't in dungeons progressing the plot, it's often difficult to decide between building social stats and hanging out with social links - both are invaluable to the dungeoneering and Persona fusing process, but I'm really more invested in seeing as much as possible of the incidental character studies that each social link provides.

It's for that reason that I wanted to focus on the game's characters for this installment of my Persona 5 rundowns. The Persona games often have the best ensemble casts, bolstered by these one-on-one social link cutscenes and fighting alongside them in battles, and 5 goes one step further by making each "Confidant"'s contribution to your cause unique, even among party members. For instance, there's a party member that will duplicate "cards" for you: items that essentially work the same as Pokemon's "TMs" in giving abilities to Persona that don't naturally earn them. Other Confidants offer you talents such as boosting how many Persona you can carry at once, being able to switch out party members mid-battle, increasing the number of free stat-building periods during the daytime, and more items at important vendors.

What follows are my takes on the characters I've befriended as of July in-game, and I've spoiler-blocked the section just in case:

That's going to do it for character rundowns for this week. I might pick up with the remaining party members (I think I'm about to recruit the dedicated support character, a la Fuuka Yamagishi or Rise) and other Confidants next Saturday. I will say that Persona 5 is every bit the jump Persona 4 was, improving on myriad quality-of-life touches that largely go unnoticed unless you're explicitly seeking them out for review purposes. Still the same nonsense too - so far I've had the hero fall to a single instant-death spell leading to an immediate game over and about a half-hour of progress lost, which is pretty much a compulsory initiation into any new MegaTen game - but it's overall better, I'd say.

What I really appreciate, and this ties all the way back to the roguelike stuff at the lede, that the game's main dungeons - the Palaces - are all pre-generated dungeons with set-pieces and puzzles to solve, but if you missed the procedurally generated loot and floor layouts from previous entries the game has you covered with "Mementos": an ongoing tiered dungeon that regularly expands after story events that's not unlike P3's Tartarus, and is perfect for farming rare Personae, money and items between story missions (especially since Palaces disappear forever once completed) and even includes side-questing in the form of optional bosses found on certain floors. It's too early to say whether or not I prefer Persona 5 to 3 or 4, but I'm definitely happy with the choices it's made so far.