It's been a crazy June, between E3 and a week-long Atari ST daily series or two, but I'm ready for a nice relaxed July of digging into some of the games I bought during the Steam Summer Sale, checking out the new additions with the Terraria 1.3v patch, and barely staying conscious in the Summer heat. It's about to hit 80°F where I am in the North of England, which is probably small potatoes to most of you (both the temperature and the geographical location) but for me it's a significant shift from the unusually cold Spring. For some reason the weather in the UK seems to regulate temperatures the same way faulty showers do.
Anyway, we're not here to listen to an old man complain about the weather; we're here to watch him get utterly perplexed by another gag gift courtesy of a magnanimous pal of his. A time-honored tradition, buying gag gifts for your Steam friends during the sales is a way of communicating to them that while they're important to you, it's equally important (and fun) to watch them struggle in bemused discomfort in an effort to make a show of appreciating said gift. Like giving someone a sweater with arm holes that you've surreptitiously sewn closed. Or, I dunno, poison in their coffee. There's a reason I stopped trying to prank people with practical jokes turns out. A court-mandated one, even.
Harvester - Long Live the Queen - Luftrausers - Papers, Please. (I'm going to make it a habit of linking back to previous Commishes. If nothing else, I want to track just how many of these gifts appear to have been given in good faith.) (Let it be said that I still appreciate all and any gifts. In spite of my... well, spite.)
NiGHTS Into Dreams...
NiGHTS Into Dreams showed up on Steam around the same time as the Ultimate Genesis Collection (which was helpfully carved up into smaller bundles to make Sega more money) and the updated Dreamcast Collection which included such bangers as Sonic Adventure and a version of Crazy Taxi without the licensed music. It's the rare circumstance of a Saturn game getting some love, something that rarely occurred even when the system was still active, though one has to wonder if the nostalgia goggles aren't at least a little bit responsible. I hesitate to poke fun because I personally didn't grow up with the Saturn - I bought it long after the fact, like most of my Sega consoles - and I've been known to vouch for some very questionable N64 games in the past, which was the Saturn's contemporary both chronologically and in terms of its critical reception.
NiGHTS boils down to what is essentially a flying Sonic game. (Which is to say a Tails game?) The player, as one of two sleeping children, must team-up with the eponymous heel-turned-face agent of a nightmare-spewing mage in order to stop him from destroying the world of dreams, Nightopia. He's stolen a bunch of "Ideya" orbs, and the children and NiGHTS have to recover them all from their cages by whizzing around landscapes at high speed collecting things and being stylish within a strict time limit. I didn't want to read much more than that going into it: if it's as good as people say, that would mean the controls and goal targets are at least somewhat intuitive and logical, right?
Knowing exactly how certain staff members feel about this game, and how many others have felt differently in the past, I wanted to go into NiGHTS with an open mind. I refuse to sink (or rise (or loop-de-loop)) to Jeff's level with wholesale snark, but I wouldn't expect a particularly glowing report either. Whatever, I'm getting ahead of myself.
That's enough flying through the sky so fancy-free for now. I feel like I got the gist of the game fairly quickly, though a lot of aspects still elude me. I'd imagine that's a natural part of getting better at the game, however: the game's progression is built like a number of shoot 'em ups I can think of, which makes sense given that you've moving a flying character around a 2D screen in a style similar to a Vic Viper or a Pentarou. The core growth mechanic of a shoot 'em up (and NiGHTS by extension) is entirely on the player rather than the game; it comes through practice, memorization, learning how the deeper scoring mechanics function and having enough skill to recover from the occasional mistake. That the game is heavily focused on earning high scores would corroborate with this assessment.
As someone who doesn't care for flying through hoops sequences in action-adventure games, or for the whole shoot 'em up genre, I'm not sure NiGHTS is the game for me. I can certainly appreciate how this wowed people back in 1996 though. At the time, there were still only a handful of console games that had taken to polygonal graphics, and most of those featured ambulatory colored blocks of Plasticine attempting to perform poses in grotesque mockeries of human locomotion. However, given how often Sega games were developed with an Arcade mindset, I wonder just how much longevity a game like this can really purport to have.
But hey, I did a loop-de-loop and got an A, so I guess we're all done here. Thanks for stopping by, and watch out for some more articles later in the week. (And thanks again to @teflonbilly for the gift, regardless of any ill intention.)