What I'm Playing, November '14

In this feature, we commemorate games I have for the first time started and finished in the last few highly variable time units.

Looks like Christmas has come early this year.

Special Recognition for Starting and Finishing:

Gargoyle's Quest II (NES / 3DS VC)

This is your pretty predictable midpoint for the Firebrand series, though as the name implies, it sits closer to Gargoyle's Quest than the more exploration-heavy Demon's Crest. Emphasis on boss fights is cranked up, as is skill selection, but the game is still a matter of linear platforming levels laid out on a linear RPG over-world.

The only way to beat a gargoyle is to be a gargoyle.

Sadly, that wraps up this series for me. I highly recommend the latter two games, and to anyone wanting more, the original works too. In fact I'm not sure it is all that sad - the games pretty cleanly ran the gamut of what you can do with Firebrand mechanics in a Metroid-meets-JRPG setting. It's not like many franchises get too great after the third entry without raising the question "what does this have to do with the series?" (e.g. Resident Evil 4). I'm not exactly grateful for the existence of Mega Mans X4-X8.

Mighty Gunvolt (3DS freeShop)

This half-game came for free with Azure Striker Gunvolt so I can't complain too seriously, but man does this feel like a half-game that came as a free pack-in bonus. The mechanics are Mega Man-lite (no weapon selection or power-ups), the gimmicks are directly imitated from ASG, and the level layouts are boring verging on trite. Every jump is painless, every enemy isolated to the point where there is only one supremely obvious solution to every conflict: wait til they shoot, jump, then shoot back. The boss fights are the best part, but only two are original (the rest are repeats from ASG). It's fun to see the Gunvolt characters rendered in NES style, but this is a demo reel, not a game.

Games Finished:

Wave Race 64 (N64 / Wii VC)

Still like the physics, still don't know what to do with the game. Perfecting time trials is a bit of fun and eliminates the arbitrary nature of the main competition. But it's so short on content. The racers aren't different enough or the courses dynamic enough that it feels worth playing through with everyone. I kinda feel like I'm already a pro.

Red Dead Redemption (Xbox 360)

Can you say decompression? This game runs for about 15 hours past the climax, introducing a late game new-final-boss and then a huge denouement that returns to the basic herding and delivery tasks of the early chapters. The closest thing Redemption finds to a gameplay identity is the horse-riding, so it's a shame that so many horseback missions take the identical form of riding on a road while packs of enemies give chase. Herding cattle, rustling horses, and racing made the most use of varied and technical (but still very basic) skills, allowing the game to at least feel like something. Unfortunately those were not supremely fun activities, offering little payoff for challenge, so the game mostly gets by on the occasionally open-ended cover shooting.

Dueling is a great idea for building variety around shooting skills. Some greater depth built around weapon selection or enemy AI could've really sold this as more than a shallow minigame... alas.

There was one neat thing about cover shooters that occurred to me while playing Red Dead. Generally I hate any type of AI companions in a shooting game, as they add an element of unpredictability and don't let me turtle like I like to. Many such games (Gears of War, Spec Ops, Halo) use a regenerating health system that means if I take some hits I end up taking cover to recover and then my allies get all the kills. But that actually makes sense in providing a risk/reward challenge for the player: instead of pressure coming from depleting health or ammo reserves, the game creates pressure by gradually eliminating targets. Since getting to shoot guys is more important to me than survival, the impulse to push on and play aggressively is established through "helpful" allies.

This systems rewards skill without punishing lack of skill, adapting the gameplay to all levels of players. At the same time, because both the skilled and unskilled player will survive and complete the game, there is no direct feedback on how they're doing. Thus "helpful" allies would be best supplemented with a ranking/scoring system to fill in that missing info. Of course, Redemption is woefully lacking in any feedback on performance, being a forerunning member of the "games as cinema" rather than "games as games" school.

Spider-Man: Web of Shadows (Xbox 360)

This one had some good ideas not deserving of general comic book game skepticism. Entirely airborne (but still gravity-bound) combat is very cool, making maintaining air a key factor in combos. In a way, instead of jumping to platform, you're punching to platform.

Throughout the open world, hundreds of collectibles are placed in obvious but hard to reach locations to create swingforming challenges. The city evolves as the game progresses, incorporating new enemies and random events in each chapter, but the architecture remains static.

This game could've legitimized Spider-Man the same way Arkham Asylum did Batman. Unfortunately, loose controls, an asinine voice cast, and lazy writing nip that aspiration in the bud. The game's targeting and camera does not work nearly as well as it should, so pulling off a seamless combo generally requires luck or reliance on a small handful of long-range attacks. Even the swinging controls get hairy, with too many state-specific functions mapped to the right trigger. The controls can seem to lag or misread at times when the game doesn't yet register Spider-Man in the correct state to do a particular move.

Also, in the final two chapters the framerate gets awful (like 10fps swinging through the city). Kinda hard to excuse. 

Games Started:

Harvest Moon 2 (Game Boy Color / 3DS VC)

Never played a Harvest Moon proper - as a young lad I was never interested in games about farming and by the time I was an older lad Natsume had picked up on my young lad action needs and compensated with Rune Factory. But the Rune Factory series got real bad real fast when opaque story triggers (plant X flower on X square and water it at XPM on X day of the week) and awkward side systems (Runeys) became fundamental to the series. So, being more amenable to boring stuff these days, I decided it was time to turn back.

There was not a single Harvest Moon 2 screenshot on Google that depicted an actual field of crops

Harvest Moon 2 uses a very simple farming system with just a few crops and animals, but it also makes just harvesting a much bigger hassle than in Rune Factory. There's a lot of repetitive action picking every single crop individually and running back and forth from the field to the sale box. It's that laborious cycle moreso than profit margins that pushes me to optimize my field layout/harvest cycle. Maybe if it was too fun to water every square there wouldn't be any motivation to plant strategically.

One and Done:

Super Time Force (Xbox 360)

I played a demo for this game. The rewind-time mechanic that allows you to duplicate your character actually feels like a turn based orders system, like the alternating action of Valkyria Chronicles, Eternal Sonata, or Quest 64. On the "to buy" list.

Read Dead Reademption: A second take

I was kinda tricked into playing this game by co-blogger Andrew, because I really wanted it to not be as bad as I knew it was going to be. I want there to be a good Western game (and Gun was just OK). But Rockstar Games is not the company to do it. They are not the company to do anything - as a matter of fact, they pretty much suck. They just have no grasp of gameplay fundamentals or storytelling logic or technical competence. I feel like I'm stuck in 1999 every time I make the stupid decision to try one of their games. Unfortunately, they also have nailed the business aspect of the game marketplace, and know how to sell millions of copies to millions of idiots. They're our Michael Bay. They make an awfully exciting trailer, but that's where their talent ends. Max Payne 3 is my runner-up for worst game of the decade, including last decade. 

Killing and skinning cats is such a cathartic experience. In the game, I mean.

But that's off-topic, because Red Dead Redemption doesn't quite hit their standard for terribility. When anything at all actually happens, it can be kinda fun. The shooting is competent, if primitive - and unbearably easy - in comparison to more advanced third-person shooters like Red Faction: Armageddon and Transformers: Fall of Cybertron. The world itself is gorgeous, one of the prettiest realistic-graphic worlds I've ever seen, if not the prettiest. That is complimented by some neat RPG elements at play that I'll talk about at a later date.

The game's downfall is that it really is Grand Theft Equestrian, as Andrew joked in his review. The entire game is fucking riding horses to places. Even most of the missions are bookended by 5-10 minute horse-riding segments - that's after you've ridden that long just to get to the start point! This would be annoying but perhaps forgivable if not for the horrendously botched horse controls. I'm sorry, but I'm not okay with speed-tapping a button for minutes on end just to get a horse to run (unlike a gas pedal, you can't just hold the button). Beyond the fact that it's a physically annoying task, it's immensely distracting - the game's strongest strength is the beauty of its setting, but I can't relax to take it in because it takes my full attention just to drive the horse. And that's not even the worst part! See, the button you have to tap (or hold, if you're okay with moving at 50% velocity), is "A" on the Xbox controller. Yes, that's a face button. Which means yes, your right thumb will be on a face button at all times. Which means you have zero camera control during any of the riding segments. This is unforgivable in a game dominated by travel segments in which all I want to (or can) do is pan the camera, both to take in the world and to get a sense of position. It leaves me staring straight forward and at the radar (fucking Wild West Radar) for the entire game - the worst pitfall for any open-world game.

And good fucking luck trying to ride and aim at the same time without coming to a complete halt.

The voice-acting and VO-quality ranges so far that I was almost a bit confused - characters like Nigel West-East-Dickens (the seedy snake-oil peddler) and Marshal Marshall (the apathetic but honorable sheriff) are perfectly matched to their actors and immediately bring the world to life, while our protagonist Red Dead Ryan sounds like he's trying to yell into his mic from halfway across the room while choking through a bag of croutons.

And that's not a compliment!

Let me also complain for a second about the save system. The game lets you guess when it auto-saved if that's your kind of thing, but if you want to actually be sure that your progress is maintained, it requires a manual save. Which can only be pulled off if you spend hard-earned in-game cash on a house, which serves no other purpose but to let you save. Except that you can also setup a campsite for free to accomplish the same thing, except that you can't do so in town. So you'll frequently find yourself running a beeline into the desert where you're allowed to camp so that you can save. That's terrible design. It hardly affects the gameplay experience, but it does make you wonder how millions of dollars were spent on a game's development without anyone suggesting this was a terrible idea.

Is Red Dead Redepmtion the Wild West journey we've all been waiting for? What does it sound like to you? It has a stupid main character and a lot of awkward design decisions that actively make it more difficult to enjoy the game's greatest strength, its stunning natural world. It's also one of those games that really nails you to the cross of unrewarding linear progression with boxed in missions. Too many of the main story missions left me wondering what I was doing. Is helping this woman herd cattle really necessary to track down an outlaw? And someday, someone will learn that the difference between a sidequest and a mission is that in the former, you're free to jump in and out of progression at will, while missions must be started and finished in one straight run without interruption. Ah well. Maybe next time. Not with Rockstar at the wheel, though.

Poker minigames are fun, m'kay?

Poker (or any variety of gamblin' card game) is pretty much a love-it or hate-it affair. It's unique in its blend of number-crunching, risk-management, and social manipulation, but it can be a little too tense (or expensive) for some. I'm not pretending for even half a second that I'm a serious poker player - I've never been to a casino, rarely played a game with real money, and would certainly never delve into the online competitive scene. I'm just too paranoid about money to go playing with strangers, too carefree and lazy to do mental probability calculations, and don't have any interest in playing a ruthless bluffing game to take money away from my friends. It seems like a recipe for disaster. And playing without real money (or anything of value) on the line deprives the game of its fun and tension.

Dedicated poker video games (like Telltale's Poker Night 2) address these concerns somewhat, establishing a virtual currency that can be won/lost without hurting players' ability to pay rent, and removing human, vulnerable emotions from the field. But it's still kinda pointless, because who cares about some in-game bank tally? If you have money that can only be used to play more poker, and the only way to win or lose it is to play poker, it just seems really pointless.

So why not set this virtual poker in a world where the currency does hold some weight, where there is something totally non-poker-related, yet also not-life-endangering on the line? "Yes" is the answer to that question, and video games the worldround are happy to answer the clarion call. Game-currency in an RPG, adventure, or any economically-driven virtual world makes for a great betting chip. It has a purpose outside poker (buying guns/gear/stuff), can be earned outside poker (grinding/questing/gobbles), and has non-trivial but non-life-ruining value: the time it takes to earn. You still need to be wise with your money, and you can still get worthwhile rewards. This makes poker minigames in Red Dead Redemption, Gun, The Witcher 2, and dozens of other games a great pastime for casual players like myself. Sometimes I find myself wasting more time on these games than on the real thing (Red Dead, I'm looking at you).

Just a thought.

What I'm Playing, Mid-May '13

In this feature, we commemorate games I have for the first time started and finished in the last few highly variable time units.

I intended to do this in the last week of April as a month-summary, but I'm now half a month behind, have finished some of the games I started then, and don't exactly remember the difference between April 31st and May 1st. So, as ever, this is really just "what I've started/finished since the last time I did this feature". Oh shit! It's Monday the 13th! What is this, bizarro world?

Special Recognition for Starting and Finishing:

Retro Game Challenge (DS)

I've already talked quite a bit about this one, so there shouldn't be much need for introductions. As per usual, this wasn't a 100% completion - I made it through the challenges, but that didn't entail visiting every last nook and cranny of Challenge. This is a fantastic game, especially considering how completely off-guard I was caught. Challenge set out to make games that feel classic, not old, like homages, not knock-offs. This is a path laden with pitfalls, as many wannabe-retro games overstep their bounds in trying to "upgrade" classics, in the process destroying what originally made the games worthwhile. RGC doesn't do anything that would feel out of place in the '80s, and while that leaves its games vulnerable to the same flaws that ran rampant back in the day, it allows us to evaluate them from that baseline. They don't demand comparison to every other game in 2013.

Crimson Shroud (3DS eShop)

Shroud is an awesome little mini-RPG from Yasumi Matsuno that throws back to pen-and-paper, dice-and-figurine tabletop role-playing. This nostalgia angle was meaningless to me, but I got a lot of mileage out of the superbly balanced turn-based combat. As a matter of fact, this is one of very few turn-based game of which I could say that I would return for the combat alone. Every character has a huge variety of abilities, every ability has a unique function, there's a combo mechanic to reward macro-strategy, and battles are lengthy standalone affairs. The entire seven-hour game probably only had about 20 enemy encounters. Maybe less. And there's no stupid experience points, thank god!

The rigid character-figurines have a certain charm in the way they hop, spin, and topple, providing a coherence to the art-style similar to Paper Mario. In a lesser game, I'd be perfectly content with this faithfully executed vision, but Shroud sits so close to greatness that this presentation comes across more like a lack of ambition and (obviously) budget-cutting strategy. With character concepts this solid (pardon me for loving the look of Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy XII) and battles so expertly crafted, a few flashy attack and spell animations to keep my eyes dazzled would threaten to elevate Crimson Shroud to the sublime. In some sense it's neat to see what my brain comes up with in the absence of visual stimuli, but more often than not I simply zone out and the game becomes nothing but number-crunching. It'd be a neat experiment elsewhere, but come on - we only get a Yasumi Matsuno game every seven years, and the least they could do is take it to the maxxx.

Games Started:

Red Dead Redemption (Xbox 360)

This is a Rockstar Game through and through, chocked full of pointless subplots, cynical worldviews, tedious gameplays, nonexistent difficulty, garbage interfaces, and terrible never-played-a-game-before controls. It's also drop-[red]-dead gorgeous, perhaps the most stunning realistic-graphics game I've ever seen. It's sad to see such a crappy game overlaid on what had the potential to be the best realization of the Wild West this side of ever, but I've yet to count it out completely. The gunplay is fun and there are some promising hints of adventure elements - hunting wildlife to collect pelts, side quests (versus typical open-world side missions, which lock you into an objective and don't let you don anything else til it's been completed), an economy - so I can't discard it out of hand. Let's remember that I somehow made it through Max Payne 3, and this is the same third-person-shooting in a far superior architecture. And heck, I'm a sucker for poker minigames.

Mark of the Ninja (XBLA)

This is the last one I'm writing and boy are my arms tired. Mark is off to a good start by emphasizing platforming over stealth - realizing that stealth is a modifier to existing gameplay, not an interesting driving challenge in and of itself. Mark is all about navigation, requiring ninja-like dexterity to pull off stealth tactics.

Just Cause 2 (Xbox 360)

I dunno I bought this because it was on sale for $10 and I've only heard good things and it's supposed to be about open world exploding and so were Red Faction: Guerilla and Prototype, which I really liked, but so far it blows. Why are the controls so bad. Why is the jump so sluggish and awkward. I dunno. It could turn around. My hopes have at this point jumped off a cliff.

Games Finished:

Zeno Clash (XBLA)

I started Zeno Clash what seems like an age ago, back when I was writing about FPBs (first-person brawlers) on my personal website. The brawling is mechanically solid and diverse, offering fair competition to top FPBs like Red Steel 2, but it's the art and story that stick around in your head once the credits roll. The setting is bizarrely gorgeous, conjuring a sort of prehistory-gone-wrong: what if mammals weren't the only ones to evolve into humanoids? The atmosphere is overwhelming, supported by freaky instrumental music and grotesque visual details like a beached whale with teeth on the outside of its mouth. The only gripe I have about the audio-visual presentation is that it could use a few more musical tracks. While the main 'creepy' background piano piece is beautifully unsettling, repeating it for 2/3 of the game detracts from its effect.

Something that should be a complaint but somehow isn't is the HORRENDOUS voice acting. It's so weird and bad, like none of the readers can speak English or understand their lines (this is possible - the game was developed by a Chilean indie team). A great deal of the voices are also supplemented by a handful of electronic effects. My sole complaint here is the same as for the music - for such a short game with only a dozen or so characters, should I really be hearing the same voice actor playing so many parts (in the same voice, no less)?

More on Zeno Clash later though. Very clever game. Grab it now if you haven't already - it's on Steam too.