Game game game of the Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaar Awards!!!!!!!!!!!! Part 2

Continued from yesterday. You can see the rules in that post - remember, the top three are picks of games I played for the first time in 2013, not games that were released in 2013.

Game game game of the Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaar Awards!!!!!!!!!!!! 2013 Ed.

Special Baby Retard Category: Best Game released in 2013

You folks asked for it, so here it is: my vote for best game that was released in 2013. The reason I would never bother orienting a peer-to-teen choice awards contest around this idea alone is that I don't actually play enough games that come out in any given year to choose anything even remotely representative of "best of that year". I played maybe 20 of the, I dunno, 500+ (mainstream) releases of 2013. I'm not gonna judge a game I haven't played, no matter how much I've read about it. That's why... well, I'm not going to criticize the big boys. I'm sure they know what they're doing and they have their integrity and we all respect that. Anyway, the second runner-up to Best Game Released in 2013 WOULD HAVE TO BE:

#3: Killer Is Dead, Xbox 360, Grasshopper Manufacture, 2013

It's action. Reaction. Random interaction. Now who's afraid of a little abstraction?

Not I. And neither should be you. I like a nice formal narrative. Okay, does it really count as formalism versus bland David Lynch symbolism when a guy's secret twin brother appears in his dream and slices his breakfast of a single fried egg perfectly in two? No, but that's exactly what makes it funny! There's a fine line Suda walks here between depth and mockery, and that's what makes for great satire. Killer works as a compelling mystery of its own, carefully exploring the facets of Mondo Zappa's buried psyche, and also takes every opportunity to send up the video game industry's self-seriousness about sexuality while being incredibly sexist (see the Gigolo segments), existentialism while being incredibly preposterous (see the Alice-meets-lobster boss), and even bromance while being incredibly... bromantic (see the hilarious Gears of War mission). I must admit I wasn't left wanting for more of Killer Is Dead's combat, but it was fun while it lasted and tough enough that there was mastery on offer. [I also have to comment that my combat fatigue is probably more a testament to having played too many of this type of action game in the past year or two... Killer Is Dead is more unique than Platinum fare, but doesn't transcend the crowd like Arkham Asylum or No More Heroes 2] Considering that the game is nice and short (praise short!), looks like a impressionist painting, and has a soundtrack ranging from thrash to hip-hop to classical remixes (by Akira Yamaoka of course), it certainly justifies further plays to investigate the themes.

#2 DmC: Devil may Cry, Xbox 360, Ninja Theory, 2013

S-Stutter!!!!

Certainly this is one of the combat action games of the generation. This is combat that derives its depth from clever reactivity, the ability of the player to quickly analyze a split-second situation and be prepared with which tools can be deployed to handle it. Those tools are what make DmC particularly rewarding - like the original Devil May Cry, this isn't a game where you'll be stressing to remember which combo string does what and spending hours mastering the input timing to pull it off (a la Bayonetta or BlazBlue) - DmC is based around simple inputs with wildly varying results. If you want to play a game where you fight demons with swords and guns, it is hard to pick one that will make you feel more powerful and graceful than this. The chains (uh, physical chains that is, not combo chains) that pull Dante or enemies across the battlefield add such speed, dynamism, and - yes - chaos to the battles that you'll never feel you're repeating the same conflicts, and the bit of platforming they provide between fights strings the adventure along all the more fluidly. I may not have been a huge fan of the story, but few players will have time to worry about that amidst the endless combat variations. In fact, this is kinda the opposite of Killer Is Dead - where there the story inspires replays that the gameplay is just good enough to support, here the story is successfully kept out of the way enough not to ruin a first play-through which is sure to inspire more gameplay-based reruns. The stages are loaded with unique enemy combinations and scenarios that'll draw you back for score- (and collection-) based runs.

#1: Bit.Trip Runner 2: The Legend Runs On, XBLA, Gaijin Games, 2013

It's actually called Bit.Trip Presents... Runner 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien. For those worried about copyright infringement. If that's how that works.

I actually like my name better than the real one. Can we do anything about that? Tim? Name change? Tim's giving me a no. Runner 2 is the type of sequel that does exactly what the Bit.Trip series wasn't all about. Bit.Trip told a succinct and fluid story through gameplay, music, imagery, and a tiny handful of abstract cutscenes. Gaijin didn't have time for a typical video game sequel that reiterated gameplay concepts with better graphics, more songs, multiple playable characters, a world map, and dancing. They had an artistic vision to uphold. But people loved Bit.Trip Runner and they didn't give a shit about Artistic Vision: The Game, so Runner 2 is exactly that typical sequel I described. Thing is, as far below the genius of the original saga as it is, it's still an absolute blast. It is everything an arcade-style rhythm platformer could hope to be, overflowing with charm, style, gorgeous visuals, toe-tappin' tunes, a great sense of humor (if you like pickles), and one HELL of an addictive structure. I couldn't stop playing for days, and the game is cleverly crafted arcade greatness that always allows room for improvement while still providing multiple levels of satisfaction for skilled runs.

This is the epitome of a fun video game - one that is memorable and delightful even for unskilled players, and a sensory treat that demands mastery.

AND FINALLY: GOTYE 2013

Yes ladies and gentlemen, the moment has arrived. It is time to unveil my three very favorite games I played in the last year that every single one of you should go out and play right this very instant. The second runner-up, bronze-medalist, almost as good as the other ones Game of the Year 2013 IS:

#3: Mark of the Ninja, XBLA, Klei, 2012

Playing to terrify guards is one of the most challenging and satisfying strategies

Mark of the Ninja is a game that knows what it wants to be. It's a ninja game and it's a stealth game and it's a platformer. It's not a stealth-platformer starring a ninja. It's a ninja game and it's a stealth game and it's a platformer. To clarify the seemingly arbitrary semantic distinction I'm making here: over the course of the game, Klei cranks up all of its design elements independently and allows the player to choose how to approach each situation using distinctive gameplay methods. Your "tools" aren't just a set of interchangeable maguffins like night-vision goggles and lazer trip wires, they're gameplay styles like "slow and strategic, using items" or "fast as possible using precisely timed jumps". This gives the game an almost Sonic-the-Hedgehog-high-path-low-path feel, where knowledge, skill mastery, and choices can be applied to result in a totally different gameplay payoff. It's amazing how naturally Klei pulled this off without ever making the game feel like a series of discrete choices. Partly that owes to the stealth framework, wherein a mistake gives the player a chance to adapt (as in Sonic when a player falls to a lower path) rather than immediately sending them back to an earlier checkpoint. There's so much variable gameplay here, especially once the extra playable characters (costumes) are thrown into the mix. This game demonstrates that there are still new ways to do the classic platformer (without just throwing in puzzles, fuck you "indie" gaming). [it wasn't my #1 platformer just cuz I wanted to make it clear it was one of my absolute favorite games of the year, transcending genre, and that everyone should play it].

#2: Retro Game Challenge, Nintendo DS, indieszero, 2009/2007(JP)

This is such a great total experience that was completely undersold by everyone who pitched it as an anthology of faux-classics or a nostalgia trip. Retro Game Challenge is the story of two Japanese kids (one of whom happens to be a young Shinya Arino) growing up in the late '80s indulging in video game culture. The beauty of the game doesn't come from the neo-retro "8-bit" games (which are a dime a dozen these days anyway), it comes from the fictionalized experience of anticipating a new game, finally getting your hands on it, sitting down and going nuts trying to master it, reading magazines with fan letters and hints, and going through the entire cycle again with the next game. It's meta as hell, but it's a game about the experience of being a gamer, set in an idealized time we imagine as more optimistic and which many of us associate with our youth. Still, I think this experience would resonate with anyone who's ever been excited about games. The fact that you actually get to dig into eight cool original titles (that are just as fun as those they're based upon) is really just a bonus. 

#1: Ys: The Oath in Felghana, PC/Steam, Falcom 2012/2005(JP)

Oath is actually a remake of the SNES/Genesis/Turbo16 Ys III

This game made me so happy. I don't know how else to put it. I just felt extreme, unadulterated happiness every time I sat down to play it. Okay, that made it sound a little creepy. But there's a child-like sweetness to Oath in Felghana, a romantic simplicity to the classic story of innocence lost that pairs wonderfully with the gung-ho "cool" metal and hardcore action that characterizes the game's underworld. I think I can best explain it using the soundtrack. The game goes from the track on the left when you first arrive in town to the track on the right when you're in a dungeon. That's the span.

    

It's just... a perfectly straightforward, honest video game. It's a fairy tale, not an epic, a stylized adventure that serves theme over story or character. If there is action, there are fucking wailing guitars. If there is sensitive stuff, there are sad violins. The dialogue and cut-scenes are just enough to carry a through-line, the rest is entirely mood.

The essentially-one-button action follows that fuck-it-just-get-to-the-point mentality. Just because it's button-mashing doesn't mean it's easy or mindless - your character is so fragile and everything moves so quickly that you'll need to learn enemy patterns and probably die (or at least restart dungeons - no healing items here) a lot of times to perfect your skills. Once you get it down you'll feel like a steamroller completely crushing everything in your path - until, of course, you hit the shmup-style bosses with their strict patterned mechanics. Will you have to match your magic charge attacks to a color-changing boss' periods of vulnerability while dodging his attacks specifically designed to capitalize on that element's weakness? Or perhaps you'll be up against a trio of spirits who adapt their aggression as you pick them off? There's even a side-perspective 2D fight that had me thinking of Castlevania. The boss fights are the game's absolute highlights, calling back to the style of classic Treasure and Konami action. 

Ys: The Oath in Felghana is my game of the year because it captures what is for me the absolute essence of a video game experience. It immediately puts all the cards on the table and develops challenges from established mechanics, putting me into a continuous state of adaptation. Each situation is a puzzle in and of itself, fun to learn because of the enjoyable core action and a different kind of fun once perfected because of the uniqueness of the setting. The fighting is contextualized with a concise, purposeful story about the consequences of action and responsibility and adorned with a sweeping, roaring soundtrack and minutely detailed graphics that bring the game's inhabitants to life. The action doesn't have to be the greatest ever conceived nor the tale the greatest ever told for the experience as a whole to be what every action/adventure should aspire to parallel. 

What I'm Playing, Majune '13 (Pt.2)

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

Let's finish this, you [expletive deleted] fuckheads. Here lies the rest of what I played in the second half of May and first half of June.

But first, a little investigative journalism. Which song is better: "L Dopa" or "Precious Thing"? Ooh, that's a tough one. No right answer there.

Special Recognition for Starting and Finishing:

Wario Land II (Game Boy / 3DS VC)

Basically, this is the twist - you don't see this until the end

Wario has never reached quite the Nintendo stardom he deserves, first and foremost because his main series lived mostly on handhelds. But the same can be said for Pokemon, and Pikachu was famous enough to earn a crossover with Nobunaga's Ambition. Perhaps Wario sequels would be demanded with the same fervor as Star Fox and F-Zero if he hadn't peripherally been kept alive through the virtually unrelated WarioWare micro-game slop. Then again, I'm not sure Nintendo could sustain yet another line of 2D platformers - they're still juggling Mario, Kirby, DKC, Mega Man, Yoshi, Pokemon Snap, Gran Turismo, and Gran Turismo 2.

Wario Land II is where the fat man really hits his wobble, the previous game being more of a Mario Jr. (as suggested by its prefix, Super Mario Land 3). It's not until II that the visuals take on their trademark cartoonery (this unassuming Game Boy title has far more personality than many 16-, 32-, and cu-bit counterparts) and the design starts to rely heavily on puzzles and weird abilities. There are a lot of lessons to be learned just from the use of enemies here.

The game has a Super Mario World-esque wealth of hidden content - I imagine most players, like myself, will first reach the credits and scratch their head to find their completion rate was only 50%. At this point the game pulls back the curtain and reveals its secret stage-map, providing a much needed clue to uncovering all its content. I'll admit I have not yet delved into what is essentially a Second Quest's worth of new material, so it's a bit of a stretch to claim I'm "finished" with the game. However, I was also driven to kick someone's brain off when I witnessed (after wasting 20 minutes and a youtube search) how deviously hidden are the secret stages.

Games Started:

Ys: Oath in Felghana (PC)

This is a remake of Ys III in the style of modern PSP/Steam Yss like VI and Origins. That means it's a top-down isometric hack-and-slash with minimal RPG elements, orchestral musical arrangements, and fleshed-out story. It reminds me of the non-farming portions of the Rune Factory series. I'm working on a Let's Play of this one, so you'll have to tune into the videos for further commentary.

Prepare to be seeing a whole lot more of this.

Saints Row: The Third (Xbox 360)

I've been seeking an open-world destroy-everything game and last month made the mistake of wasting money on the stultifying Just Cause 2. Instead I should've been looking to the further works of former Red Faction developers, Volition - in particular, Saints Row: The Third. I had brushed off Row 3 when I first read about it, understanding it as yet another Grand Theft Auto 3 redux with a comedy gimmick. While Sleeping Dogs has tired me of city driving, Row 3 at least sports a world-class engine that permits and encourages the insane and reckless stunts which would have been out of place in Dogs' gritty cop-story. That's to be expected, as the Red Faction games excelled at physics. Plus it offers tanks, helicopters, jets, and VTOLs if you don't feel like driving. Row 3's shooting has the visceral, impactful, and decidedly violent feel that Volition seems to do well. I can't exactly put my finger on why, but tearing through a mob with a submachine gun is simply far more fun here than it is in Max Payne 3. Maybe it's that it's not really cover shooting, but more a firepower cock-fight.

God forbid I mention it, but the game also wields a decided sex appeal. The female character models in Row 3 look... uh... really nice. And playing dress up (or dress down, as it were) leads to some satisfying results. It's equal opportunity, too. Meaning that if you prefer to play as a shirtless, chiseled dude, there's a meter that lets you crank up the size of his junk.

Games Finished:

DmC: Devil May Cry (Xbox 360)

Hey, Dante gets white hair at the end! Why do I care about this? Spoiler warning I guess? It signifies the transformation of his character from aimless rebel protecting the human race to white-haired aimless rebel protecting the human race.

Let's talk collectibles for a second, since I've already dedicated a post to story and future-dedicated a post to combat. Wait I changed my mind, let's talk platforming. Tangentially related to collectibles, since collectibles don't work in a game without some kind of interesting navigatory mechanic. One of the sleeper hits of DmC - and I think it was a sleeper even to the devs - is the grappling hook(s)-driven platforming. Like the combat, Dante's traversal techniques are so complex and overwrought that they actually wrap back around to be interesting. He's got a double jump, three kinds of air dash, a blue grappling hook that works like the Hookshot, and a red grappling hook that works like "Get over here!". The fun of the platforming is being caught midair saying "shit shit shit which do I use?!". Failure triggers something more like familiarization that memorization - you've got enough time for each input that you just need to be vaguely aware of what is coming to be able to pull it off. The floaty leeway between each move also means there's a difference between just making it and a badass perfect run. Frankly I'd play a game that was made up solely of this stuff, as I found the late-game climactic platforming gauntlet to be more exciting than the succeeding final boss battle.

Wrapping back to collectibles - they're handled quite nicely through the use of an ambient audio cue. "Hidden" items in 3D games are a can of worms because of camera abstraction - what's hidden to the camera may not necessarily be hidden in the environment. This isn't a problem in 2D, because there's no distinction between environment and perspective (or at least it's minimal). I'm not going to get into which games do it right (Super Mario 64) and which do it wrong (ugh) right here and now, but DmC comes up with an elegant little solution to circumvent the problem entirely - overtly tell the player when a collectible is nearby. Now before we dish out too much undue credit, let's note that 3D Marios do the exact same thing (stars make a telltale tinkling sound) and at least Skies of Arcadia did too, but that doesn't make it any less welcome. These cues mean that the player can naturally explore environments without worrying that the camera is missing anything, and it means that the developers can't get away with hiding an item in plain sight - at the very least they have to use alternate paths, and in the best cases they use platforming puzzles.

As if the uniquely pleasant platforming and camera-stress-free collection weren't enough, DmC throws one more bone onto the bonus content fire: challenge rooms. As did Donkey Kong Country before it, DmC  packs each stage with one to three hidden bonus rooms, rewarding diligent exploration with a spot of fresh gameplay.  All of this bonus content is thankfully tracked by a menu screen that lets you know how much you've done and how much is left to be done in each stage. Perhaps it's all in my head, but the whole experience has a really nice, delightfully old-school feel to it. The only downside - and sadly there is a downside - is that these stages are far too long to casually jump into for completionist runs. DKC and SM64 stages took five minutes from beginning to end, so it wasn't much to ask you to play them over and over looking for that one last macguffin. While the saving grace of DmC is that levels are usually free-roam (and enemies don't respawn), said levels can take anywhere from fifteen to thirty minutes to complete. If you find yourself at the end of a half-hour-long stage, still missing one of fifteen collectibles, you're likely to give up for the night - and possibly forever. So take it with a grain of salt - the collectibles are there and well-designed for the 100%-seeking player, but you'll need to be committed to catch-'em-all.

Let's Listen: Beasts as Black as Night

You're probably familiar with the old saying, "You can always judge an RPG soundtrack by its boss tune." Boss anthems are hardly ever the most emotive or interesting songs on a soundtrack, but there's something irresistible about their sense of dire emergency. I'm here today to talk about Beasts as Black as Night, the boss theme for Ys III.
What happens when you release the same RPG across multiple platforms? Ys III takes the route of using the same soundtrack on each console.

SNES

This is why that route is oft regrettable. In a Controversial Blogging Choice, I'm leading an article about one song with a bad example of that song.

Say what you will about the SNES, its synths hold up pretty well. The SNES version of Beasts as Black as Night, however, doesn't understand what to do with them. The lead instrument (0:12) is too contemplative to fit the urgent role of the lead melody. Equally puzzling is the pan flute used for the rapidly moving background instrument (0:00) which works more by chance than anything.

(Look to Nobuo Uematsu's SNES Final Fantasy soundtracks for songs that don't press the hardware but still pack in plenty of emotion and panache. For a soundtrack that tailors its sound to the console, check out Mortal Kombat SNES vs. Genesis.)

Genesis

The Genesis version finds siblings in the PC-88 and X68000 versions, but its production takes the lead by a nose. Just like the title, every instrument in here is dark and searing. Am I getting too flowery?

The fun of Beasts as Black as Night kicks off immediately (well, 0:05) with a guitar that spirals violently downward, marked spooky by a whistle in the distant background. Out of the soundtracks limited to hardware synths, the Genesis version is the best-produced not only for its synths but for its attention to mastering.

TurboGrafx-CD

But the TurboGrafx-CD version wasn't limited to hardware synths. It may be cheating, but the TG-CD version is my personal favorite. Most CD consoles back in the day (early 90s) had a penchant for overblown rock music, but Ys III does that one better and mixes in plenty of weird synths. I like to think that the lead synth is a bassoon!! The point is, this version--without going too far--has flakes of the unusual in its instrumentation.
Notable features of this version are the solo at 1:21 and the breakdown + solo at 2:52.

(For an overblown rock CD soundtrack, I think everyone's favorite example is Lords of Thunder.)

Unfortunately, there are some versions I couldn't find. I'd love to hear the MSX version, for instance. However, I would be remiss if I didn't at least link you to the Oath in Felghana version, which is overblown in a more orchestral and less weirdo synth way. Most of my talk was about instrument choice, but I guess that's what happens when you take a simple song and discuss it three times over.