I'm in a gaming situation right now which is normal for most but fairly unusual for me, and I'm wondering why it bothers me to the extent that I generally try to avoid it. I'm speaking about having multiple video game playthoughs happening simultaneously. Along with No Man's Sky, an open-ended game which I'd normally be happy to abandon but for the fact I'm very close to a Platinum trophy (a few more dogfights and system warps are all that's standing in the way), I've still got the space-themed final world of Yooka-Laylee to knock out, I'm two episodes deep in the excellent Tales from the Borderlands (more on both of those later), and have been dipping into Picross 3D: Round 2 whenever I'm away from my laptop.

It might be that because I play a lot of narrative-focused games - RPGs and adventure games in particular - that I tend to approach them single-file in order to not lose their narrative threads too easily. Games like those aren't easy to return to after spending some time away on a new and more exciting acquisition, and so it's often the case that I finish my plate before asking for the next course. Given that I literally do that as far as food as concerned, it could just be a neurotic trait of mine: that I can't enjoy something new without that feeling that I've left something half-finished distracting me throughout.

Anyway, to the above games' credit, they're all built to be played for intermittent stretches of time in varying ways. With No Man's Sky, there's zero narrative to be concerned with and the game seems ideal for short play sessions where you warp to a new system, explore the planets, pick up some new blueprints, gain some cash from mining, foraging or lifeform analysis, get prepared to move onto the next system and simply leave it there for days or weeks before repeating the process. With Yooka-Laylee, I can consume each of its enormous worlds at a pace of my choosing, and is once again another game where the story isn't exactly difficult to come back to after a hiatus. With Tales from the Borderlands, the episodic nature of its fractured tale means there's plenty of recaps and reminders for those who bought each chapter as they were released, often months apart. And Picross 3D is just Picross. It's the perennial puzzle game that's meant to last you. I've almost 100 puzzles completed with no end in sight.

There are definitely games that I have to hone in on with a laser focus until they're done. Most of the games on my 2017 "List of Games Beaten" so far have fit that mold, as do most of the games still remaining on my backlog. The ones I have going right now, however, just happen to have something of a more easygoing nature to them. The only worry is that I completely forget about them during the weeks of newly embarked playthroughs to come, especially as we edge closer to a very busy (for me) May. Speaking of weeks and embarking on things, here's the latest rundown of blogging content:

• The Top Shelf endures with another ten PS2 games receiving judgement. This week's theme was another all-Western releases edition, with Ubisoft in particular taking center stage with three major releases in the November of 2003. Next week will offer a more varied bunch, as well as our introduction to 2004, so I can't wait to tuck in.
• The Indie Game of the Week was, as previously stated, the first two episodes of Telltale's Tales from the Borderlands, set in Gearbox's shooter-RPG world of Mad Maxes, Mad Moxxis and memes. I've been enjoying the story so far, and the game's level of humor feels several tiers higher than those of the regular Borderlands games. There's very little interactivity, though, beyond a few QTE action sequences and the requisite Telltale dialogue choices and big decisions. Not that it's a bad thing at all - visual novels and quote-unquote walking simulators are proving to be extremely popular which suggests that, to many, story takes priority over inventory puzzles (and I can kinda see where they're coming from) - but each new Telltale series I play feels more like an interactive episode of TV with few opportunities to explore a space and take in the various hotspots for a few witty lines of dialogue. It feels more like something that could work better as a DVD game.
• This week also sees a irregular blog of mine make its second appearance this year: the Wiki Project series. In this case, I finally completed the Super '96 project which I began at the start of the year. With every one of the SNES's 1996 unique game debuts accounted for, we're just a few dozen away from a complete inventory of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. It's been a long road, as the saying goes, but I'm excited to finally put a cap on my favorite video game console after so many years. Like filling the final few spaces on a 5000-piece jigsaw and using that table space for something entirely new. (As for what I'm working on next for the wiki: I've got some NES clean-up that I've been meaning to get around to, followed by checking up on the Master System. After that is the final stretch for the SNES!)

Yooka-Laylee

For the most part, I'm enjoying Yooka-Laylee and I think it was worth the investment I made as a backer of its Kickstarter. I realize it is poor review form to put the bit that normally goes at the end at the start instead, but that's because I've spent the week trying to sort out my feelings on the game, and I'm concerned that thinking too much about it as I write up my impressions will cause me to change my mind in the eleventh hour. In the here and now, gut reaction, I think the game is a success in what it's attempting to do and (I hope) what it's attempting to bring back. I just don't think it's perfect. In many ways, I doubt it could've ever been.

When I think of games that saw a lot of crowdfunding buzz, I think of those that rely largely on nostalgia to draw an audience of backers who would be interested in seeing a game of that specific format return. The most famous example, and still one of the most successful, is Double Fine's promise of a point and click adventure game befitting of the LucasFilm golden era of attractive, usually high-concept and often very funny graphic adventure games in the mold of Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle or Full Throttle. Enough people have enough fond memories of those games to want to see another like it, made in the modern era with enough modern improvements to buoy that old-school approach. Shenmue 3, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, Torment: Tides of Numenera, Pillars of Eternity, Mighty No 9 and Shadowrun Returns all aimed (or will aim) to resurrect a specific video game paradigm that has fallen out of favor with major publishers and thus cannot be funded without a lot of grassroots support. The Kickstarter for Yooka-Laylee, proposed by ex-Rare employees in a newly formed studio named Playtonic, was definitely borne of the same idea: that to make an N64 collectathon 3D platformer in that same Rare style in this day and age would require a legion of nostalgic fans putting their money where their mouths are.

However, with a lot of modern reboots of antiquated game formats there's often a schism between attempting to marry modern game design to that older model, like sticking a new engine inside a classic chassis, or to stay as true to the original model as closely as possible, outmoded warts and all. I wasn't quite able to ascertain where Yooka-Laylee's own philosophy lies: it has problems persistent to this format, like a hyperactive, easily trapped camera and various sequence-breaking type glitches, that I'm not sure modern advances could easily fix. There are also cases where it's evident that there have been meetings on minimizing the amount of bullshit that was in the original Banjo-Kazooie, like losing collectibles upon death or having to deal with "lives" at all (Yooka-Laylee fixes both, for the record). But for the most part, the game is as wilfully obtuse and difficult to navigate as the bird & bear games ever were, and I sort of suspect that it was the designers' imperative. There's no hints as to how and where each world's 25 "Pagie" progression-dependent collectibles can be earned, here taking the place of the B-K "Jiggies" (B-K Jiggies being the name of my ska band in high school), and given how big each world is and how many caves and tunnels and other areas there are to uncover, you can find yourself wandering around for ages hunting for where the last few collectibles are hiding. In the first world, as an example, there's a cloud that talks about badly wanting to rain - true to the sense of humor seen in games like Conker's Bad Fur Day, the game treats all this like a giant "wanting to pee" goof - and doing so by acquiring a nearby water-shooting power-up lets you help them out and earn a Pagie for your trouble. However, you can also feed the same cloud an ice-based power-up which causes him to freeze a part of the level instead. This lets you take part in a race with another cloud NPC, who had already given you a Pagie for a different race, in order to earn another one from them. Took forever to work that one out, and I'm not sure if I hate or appreciate the game's obtuse ingenuity.

The game's not just withholding in the sense of where to go next, either. I suspect someone on Playtonic's staff really doesn't care for games that have extended tutorials, or hold your hand by pointing out every nearby item of interest via icons on a map or some big indicator on the player's radar. This also extends to power-ups, as we saw on Giant Bomb's unfortunate but understandable Quick Look for the game. The player only gets a surface-level introduction to each of the game's many acquired abilities. For Yooka's roll move, which is the first move the player earns, the player can be forgiven for assuming that the rolling mode only has one speed: full tilt forward. Indeed, the first time you use the power-up for something other than climbing slippery slopes is to race that aforementioned cloud. Thus, you're conditioned into thinking the power-up is only there to help you move fast. Against the first world's boss, though, there's no other way than to roll slowly enough to navigate past the rolling logs separating the boss at the top of the slope from you at the bottom. To work your way past or over those logs, you need to gently tilt the analog sticks to carefully move Yooka while in ball form. Without knowing this, you're likely to hit your head against that boss for an hour or more - since he's literally a wall, that analogy works a little too well not to be deliberate on the part of the developers. Keep in mind also that it's the first boss of the game and the rest get much more difficult. There's very little leniency or guidance in Yooka-Laylee, which you might say is a core component of the era it hails from that the game is deliberately invoking, or a failure on the part of the game developers to not adjust to the times by redoubling on user-friendliness. Personally, I'm not sure where I stand - I've been thwarted enough times with instances like the above to get a little frustrated that some power-ups have heretofore unexplained aspects, but I also respect the hustle. Maybe games have gotten too signposted and straightforward, and we need to readjust to appreciating games with a bit of mystery and experimentation involved. Or maybe they just screwed up. I cannot say with any certainty.

In terms of presentation, the game is uncannily like Banjo-Kazooie right down to the fine details. The dynamic of the two characters is identical - the large, male biped is the polite straight man, while the female flying creature on top is a more sarcastic barb-trader who is the secret VIP as far as traversal goes. The font's the same, the set of grunts and squawks that accompany dialogue is the same, the game looks like that 360 HD remaster of the Banjo-Kazooie games with a lot of plain and basic textures propped up by some high-definition effects and character models, there's an NPC that turns you into different creatures (sometimes vehicles), there's a set of five color-coded creatures that appear as collectibles within each world, there's one collectible set for buying new levels and another set for buying new abilities, and so on and so forth. The game is "Banjo-Threeie" in all but name, and even if the stages are meted out differently - there's five worlds instead of B-K's nine - each one can be expanded to include twice as much content. The game is therefore about as large as Banjo-Kazooie, but not quite as varied, which I imagine is due to limitations in the budget for new art assets. The knock-on effect of that decision is that the levels feel huge and much harder to navigate in part because it all looks the same - each world has its own theme and is entirely distinct from one another, but internally each world features the same recycled props and textures making it can be hard to figure out where you are and where you want to go. In each of these worlds, there's 200 of the "quill" currency (needed for upgrades) and 25 Pagies, as well as the five color-coded ghosts, a health extender and a power gauge extender (the power gauge, incidentally, was created to limit how much the player could use their abilities in one go without the need for a dozen different types of ammo, which made Rare's platformer levels a mess to look at), a token for each stage's arcade machine, a "molly cool" for the creature polymorph machine, AND a top secret pirate treasure that is so elusive that the game doesn't even track them anywhere. It's not quite Donkey Kong 64 levels of collecting lunacy, but it can be tricky to find that one collectible left over with such huge levels to comb. Very much like the proverbial needle in a haystack. I half wonder if the devs wouldn't have been better off pulling a Super Mario 64 and doubling up on certain themed worlds, like two snow levels or two swamp levels. Cheap, sure, but making the levels more compact would've helped immeasurably with mentally mapping them out.

I can't leave without discussing the game's absolute nadir: the mini-games. Each level features exactly one arcade machine and one minecart challenge. With the former, you're playing reimagined versions of classic Rare games and other sort of small games-within-games, like an endless runner, RC Pro-Am, or an odd take on Joust. These games are individually so basic and undercooked that they add little to the experience, and there's two Pagies hidden within each one: the first for successfully reaching the "end" of the game, and the second for doing so with the highest score. You cannot earn the high score Pagie at the same time as the completion Pagie; they must be done consecutively. It's a really unfortunate twist to an already miserable inclusion. The minecart levels are even worse, however: the goal is to navigate an auto-scrolling course of tracks while collecting diamonds. You also have to avoid enemies, as collisions reduce the number of diamonds you have. If you fail to complete the course with the required amount of diamonds, you have to start over. Not only are these sections incredibly challenging on their own but are exacerbated by the abysmal cart controls. You can hit forward on the analog stick for a burst of speed or back for a short brake, but it's very difficult to gauge when you need to use either and you can barrel through a whole bunch of obstacles and lose half the diamonds in your reserve with one mis-timed use of the acceleration/brake. If you happen to fall down a gap the mini-game is instantly over and you have to restart (or ragequit in disgust, that's an option too). The required diamond total, as well as the length of the course, increase with each level to the point where they now require such a prohibitively high level of skill over something inherently uncontrollable that I'm tempted to leave this game at 99% completion, despite the conniptions that would normally cause me.

As I said, the game's not perfect, but it does what it sets out to do and I've no trouble believing that a subsequent game with a better budget couldn't knock it out of the park. Why? Well, I figure that Yooka-Laylee probably knocked a few cobwebs loose and stirred a few familiar veins during its development, and that the divisive feedback will give the designers a much better idea of what a modern audience wants out of a throwback 3D platformer like this. I'm not sure if the "Rare-vival" is here to stay without seeing the revenue numbers, but even if we don't see another game with the lizard and bat there'll be plenty of other nostalgia-traders waiting in the Indie wings to help ensure this sub-genre makes an overdue return. Who knows? Maybe the cute visuals and not-always-sexual humor of Yooka-Laylee begets a new generation of young fans who appreciate a game that doesn't talk down to and coddle them. It's not like they don't take easily to games without a whole lot of direction - just see the numbers on games like Rust or Minecraft for proof.