Gradii, Mega Man reboots, and 2D action - Part 1 of 2019 in review

In the year of our lord 2019 I completed 43 games, I believe exactly the same total as 2018. I'm not going to talk about the "games started" metric anymore - I've been trying that out a while and I just don't think it adds any useful information. The theme of this year was cleanup: cleaning up the list one chunk at a time.

First the co-op plays - Golem and I started the year on Hitman 2, the rare title so utterly useless we abandoned it halfway through - a guess-what-I'm-thinking adventure/strategy game that doesn't even have the courtesy to tell you when you guessed right. Adventure games use locks and keys to direct progression, strategy games use numerical metrics, Hitman 2 has neither. It's a completely unordered mess, a guess-if-you-guessed-what-I'm-thinking game. Things took a turn for the better with Mega Man Maverick Hunter X, the PSP remake of Mega Man X. The core gameplay of the best Mega Man is hard to ruin, though the gigantic new weapon set is the type of playground I'd love at age 12 but lacks the challenge I now prefer. The second Mega Man reboot of the year was Mega Man 11, the first since X2 to provide a decent contest for best in the series. The superhoned buster weapons and tightly tuned boss fights make this the first I genuinely want to call a run-and-gun (which is to say, a game more about bullets and aiming than about gravity and timing). Mega Man Legends was the third of the set, a strangely orthogonal leap for the series that is good at rivaling Zelda for a Playstation game, but still not great at rivaling Zelda. The element design is high quality, but Golem would say it's badly proportioned (too many weapons and too few enemies), and I'd say it's lacking in structure. Some sense of what will comprise a session is doubly important with content that demands experimentation (Volnutt's arsenal) - the player wants to be able to answer "when should I try this out?", "when should I switch?", and "when am I going to get a new one?".

I'm burying the lede. The largest and best part of our sessions in 2019 were the co-op 1CCs, first of Bio-Hazard Battle and then Gradius Gaiden (links to replays). BHB is a real gem of concrete design, the kind of game that looks and sounds like nothing around it, even if the shooting gameplay is fairly simple. Absolutely worth picking up a Genesis collection to try out. (Golem thought it was lame, but he's blind and deaf and plays games by smell alone). Gradius Gaiden was like learning a beautiful dance; a beautiful dance that you perform with a man. Truth be told, it was probably the instant startback offered by co-op mode (like Life Force) that made this so much more approachable and enjoyable than other Gradii. I'll reserve any more comment on Gaiden, as we're presently working on a commentary track for the game that'll be posted here and on Golem's Youtube when complete.

Onto solo clears - for shmups proper it was a light year, with just a few runs of the unspeakably easy Deathsmiles II X and a closeout of the NES Gradius. It's hard to say I've completed the Deathsmiles games, as I enjoy their scoring systems so much that I'd like to eventually play competitively. But my BFS mind won't let me settle down til I've cleared the majority of the Cave catalog, and that's a long way to go. Gradius was a 1LC mostly because there's simply no other way to play. Golem says hit points are a good thing for a shooter, and it took me clearing Gradius to understand why I've never felt the same. Gradation of punishment makes sense, but the problem with the shield system present throughout the series is that it absorbs an aribtrary number of hits not one-to-one with mistakes - or mistakes are judged at a much finer level than my ability to register - so punishment isn't graded by the severity of the mistake, but largely at random. That's complicated even further by the variable speed, which can carry you through more bullets for the same input if it's set higher. That is to say, it's very easy to make a single mistake (say, dodging a bullet in the wrong direction) and take three hits, and then later to make the same mistake and take only one hit, or none at all. This is not only poor feedback, it also undermines planning for errors. If you know there's an area you're likely to make errors, but don't know how harshly those errors will be punished, how do you use the power-up system to plan for that? I don't know, so beating Gradius required a zero tolerance approach. Setting that aside, it has good, clear level themes, and runs exactly the right length for a shooter (~20-30 minutes).

The more difficult classic clears I put aside were in the Contra Anniversary Collection and the Castlevania Anniversary Collection. With Hard Corps available for the first time digitally I had to 1CC that, and NES Contra followed. Though I wouldn't tag them with the 1CC label, I also made it through Belmont's Revenge and Kid Dracula for the first time, and more importantly, the white whale is dead! Castlevania III haunts my conscience no longer. (Then I made it about halfway through Lament of Innocence and kind of lost interest, it's a boring one. I'll be back to it later. It's uncomfortable to admit that that was the closest I came to a beat-em-up clear all year). While we're still talking classic 2D, I ran the original Klonoa - one of the all-time greats - and 100%ed New Super Mario Wii U Luigi Bros. Deluxe.

Tomorrow: the 3D lineup from the past year.