2018: The worst year yet? in video games?

I started 41 new games this year and finished 43. As the uneven numbers suggest, among the 43 completed were quite a few being cleaned up from previous years, and among the 41 started, many remain in progress. The ratio remains on track from the past couple years*, demonstrating that I'm doing a good job keeping to my one-in/one-out rule. Given that the list is expanding more slowly now, I was hoping to finish at a higher advantage, but a couple factors kept the completion total in check.

First is that I binged on a lot of Switch arcade games. I'm guessing I bought nearly 20 NeoGeo / Arcade Archives titles over the spring and summer and finished nearly none of them. Arcade games are arcade games - good for repeated 10-20 minute bursts, but unlike platformers, you can't count on the brute force Arino-clear.

Speaking of sidescrolling platformers, I barely touched the staple genre this year, less because of disinterest than because the well is drying up. Sonic Mania led to a cleanup on aisle Chaos Emerald, and Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze was fantastic, but I really didn't have much else to pick from. A dozen years and dozens of games later, I've whittled Wii's Virtual Console down to scraps, with remaining options the caliber of New Adventure Island and Kirby's Dream Land 3. And Rayman, over on PS3. Unless the contemporary trend of adventure-platformers abates or I find new patience with PC emulators, this looks to be the start of a long winter. A real shame - for many years there's been no safer bet than grabbing a random 16-bit sidescroller on a Saturday night and playing til the credits roll or the sun rises.

Run-and-guns at least seem to have retained some popular support beyond the plague of 'roguelite' and 'metroidvania', and the aforementioned arcade libraries are only helping. Beyond the many hours of Super C loops, Alien Soldier, Bleed, and (the final release version of) 20XX were among those I finished, with a few more newly underway. Mega Man X7 and X8 were more... rewarding... than expected, enough so that I intend to revisit both on the re-anniversary collection. 3D platformers provided plenty of substance too, with Rayman Revolution being the highlight, Rayman 3 being the lowlight, Jak & Spyro as pleasant surprises and Jak II an ill-forgotten curse. Sonic and the Black Knight happened too, and like X7, doesn't really deserve its awful reputation.

But the main story of the year is of course the shift in taste that has left me spending the majority of my time with racing games and shmups. I've always enjoyed both on a seasonal basis, but 2018 was an endless chain of both genres in parallel (though Raiden V did aggravate me off of shmups for a couple months). Nine 1CCs nearly doubled my lifetime total, and I'm still hoping to make Raiden IV the tenth before the new year. Deathsmiles was a clear favorite, though Axelay is close behind and only Forgotten Worlds caused any pain (well - any bad pain. All shmupping is pain). This was the other big detractor from the ratio - the length of shmups is hard to predict, and for each of the nine I beat, I started another, nearly none of which got finished (goddamn Ikaruga). Put a lot of hours into Mushi-F without much to show, but Akai Katana won't last much longer.

Fuel may be the best driving game and the best open-world game I've ever played, combining a huge world of Skyrim-like terrain with simulation-nuanced physics and as wide a range of vehicles as can be fitted with tires. The races are fucking hard and the landscape is complex, complicated further by the free-range navigation imported from the continuous overworld. It's hard to express how many light-years more interesting this is than something as precious and decompressed as GTAV, but it's buggy, doesn't have side-quests, and the netcode was weak (forget the hundred hours of single-player gameplay), so it tanked in ratings and sales. Burnout 3, Hydro Thunder Hurricane, and ExciteTruck provided some arcade counterpoints, though Burnout got hairy at points with insane AI and arbitrary traffic creating challenges too reflex-dependent to be especially satisfying - still, it's close enough to working that three times out of five you can see the great game underneath. It'll be interesting to check out Paradise. Crazy Taxi snuck in there too, but I wasn't feeling the alien technical maneuvers that seem fundamentally cabinet-bound. Ultimately I've wrapped back around to Codemasters with GRID 2, strapping the mechanical range and dynamism of Fuel to more traditional level design. So far that's a go.

A few action-adventures and RPGS filled the adrenaline troughs, but not many made the clear list. It did feel good to finally retire Darksiders II after many years of prolongation, and my feet are starting to sink into the mud and muck of Ys VIII. Yakuza 3 is a really neat River City Ransom sequel which, unexpectedly for a beat-em-up, would probably win story-of-the-year if I'd finished it (actually, no, Wolf Among Us). 60 hours into Final Fantasy VII I am STILL on disc 1. OCD and materia are a dangerous mix.

That's about it for the year. Greg and I partner-played six games, all distinctly unnotable: Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 6, Munch's Oddysee, Rayman 3, Pikmin 2, and Metal Gear 2. The dual themes of the series were A.) solid foundations spoiled by overfocusing on one stupid element (dungeons in Pikmin, combat in Rayman, etc.) and B.) going on for way longer than necessary. I pretty much disliked all of them, though RE2 is more boring than bad, Munch is a promising alpha, and RE6 was shallow incredibly trashy eye-rolling fun. I mean RE6 was definitely the best one. That's how good a collection of games we're talking about.

* 2015: 74/54, +20
* 2016: 55/55, +0 (I may have tracked 'started' differently for 2016)
* 2017: 60/59, +1

2018: The worst year yet?

I think we all know and remember by now what a terrible year 2017 was. It is scarred onto our brains like those ubiquitous marks on pears that make you never want to buy them at the grocery store, as each and every one of us struggles through treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder which doctor's are campaigning to have renamed as "2017 disorder". Carrie Fisher died. A show I liked on TV got canceled. Netflix. And probably the worst thing about it is that it came directly after 2016, which was far and away the worst year of all time, for reasons that I cannot recount without being immediately hospitalized into a psychiatric health facility.

The question we've come together today to answer, as we count down the final years of 2018 (which interestingly enough is only the 2017th year since there wasn't a year zero or August for a while) is whether things have gotten any better. Let's a take a look back at the ten biggest events that afflicted us all this year and consider how things stack up.

1. Kavanaugh got supreme court
2. The rape crisis
3. The opioids
4. (*U.S. ONLY*) Democrats won Congress but Republicans won the other half (end *U.S. ONLY*)
5. The heat doesn't work in my new apartment
6. At Super Bowl they didn't kneel for the flag
7. Trump took a picture shaking hands with a fascist tyrant who murdered more people
1. (Trump tweets) (not a separate event)
8. Slatestar doesn't support marijuana anymore
9. Lives lost that the world probably cannot cope without:
1. Stan Lee
2. Charlie Krauthammer
3. John McCain
4. John Carpenter
5. Lyric McHenry McHenry, who appeared on EJ Johnson’s Rich Kids of Beverly Hills spinoff EJNYC, was found dead in the sidewalk in New York City on August 14. She was 26 years old. 
6. Simon Kerr
7. Joe Jackson
8. Aretha Franklin
9. Everyone in Marvel when Thanos snapped (spoiler)
10. Suicides
1. Anthony Bourdain
2. Avinci
1. Possibly not a suicide
11. Margot Kidder, Superman's Wife
12. David Spade
13. What the hell Mark E. Smith died and no one told me about this? That's what I get for not checking Prindlebook anymore
10. Bill Cosby was in the news again

The evidence is definitely in and we can safely declare that 2018 is definitely the worst year ever, and that's with a month and a half left for things to get worse. Post in the comments how your life changed because of some of these events.

Baby clears: Prehistoric Isle 2

Well that didn't take long. Still, it's nice to get a quick clear here and there, especially after weeks toiling away on arduously boring Raiden V or vengefully punishing Psikyo "games". Nicer still to land at #4 on the Switch leaderboards, though that's a meager accomplishment if ever there was one (only about 15 players appear to have hit the 1CC so far. Judging from their score, the 100th ranked player hasn't even cleared Stage 2!). Prehistoric Isle 2 was never going to amount to much anyway, being a plainly stripped down, late-period aesthetic showcase. The reward on offer is clear: fluidly animated prerendered prehistoric creatures inhabiting dreamy ruins, jungles, and volcanoes. After struggling under the bitter tyranny of hellrank stoking the fires of Strikers 1945, the opportunity to memorize a couple patterns, learn a handful of scoring techniques, take a couple risks and finish the ride is just nice, like a blowjob for fifty bucks. Notes:

• I've said it a thousand times before, I'll say it a thousand more times before I die, I don't like rank (PI2 has none). If I want to increase the difficulty of the game, I'll go into the settings and increase the difficulty. I did exactly that with Preshistoric Isle 2 after my first attempt was a startling 3CC, then realized that I'd rather play at the default difficulty and strive to increase score, interacting with more of the game's systems without having to worry about an ever-fluctuating survival threat. Build dynamism into your design (chains, score items, whatever) and you can allow the player interesting choices, rather than railroading them onto the hardest path.
• The difficulty curve is just right - Stage 1 is pretty easy, leaving most of the challenge first to learning mechanics and later to maximizing score; Stage 2 gets the enemies more active, making sure there are always bullets onscreen; Stage 3 is almost like a bonus level, a really simple straight shot that also has the prettiest backdrop - the calm before the storm; Stage 4 is where the difficulty peaks, introducing lots of new enemies and constant pressure; Stage 5 is the gauntlet, revisiting all the previous challenges and providing very few opportunities for recovery; and Stage 6 is the denouement, a protracted boss battle of the R-Type battleship form.
• The Japanese version has a 5-HP health bar versus Worldwide's 3-life stock; this doesn't change the effect of getting hit (main weapon and subweapon single-level power-down, one rescue lost), but it does change the appearance of restoratives. In the Japanese version, delivering a certain number of rescues (more than three?) to a pre-boss evac chopper generates a +1HP item. At the beginning of Stage 4, defending a certain number of evacuees (all 30?) grants another. (That's at least +5HP total over the course of the game, and I may have missed some). There is a 1UP that appears somewhere in Worldwide, but I haven't been able to find it. This was a clear of the Japanese version, which is obviously somewhat easier, although I also chose that route because....
• The health bar makes the game more interesting. Delivering rescues to the evacuation chopper can be used to get back health, but it means sacrificing the pretty hefty stage-end bonus you get for carrying them through the boss fight (500k per rescue + another 500k for all five). This is a neat twist on the traditional score-extend - you have to pull off the rescue to get either benefit, but at stage-end you get to decide whether it'll be a score bonus or recovery - and whether you want to risk losing the bonus entirely if you make a mistake on the boss. The North American version of the game trades this for... nothing. Delivering rescues still grants some power-ups, but that isn't nearly as meaningful as health/1UPs. The game is simply boringer without that element of risk/reward.
• The design of bosses is a clear highlight. They last for minutes, moving around the screen, attacking from different directions, almost never repeating attack patterns. Having a fully powered up weapon or using bombs to shave off a few seconds can make a huge difference if it means skipping the last phase or two. Particularly vicious is the Hornetpede who snakes unpredictably across the screen while firing two-phase bullets.
• The bomb doesn't seem to offer any invulnerability, or if it does, it's so short as not to matter. No panic-bombing. This is a pretty fair trade-off in a game that offers at least one health restorative per stage. 
• I played with the green chopper (spread shot) using the red (chain gun) weapon. Subweapons I swapped a lot, it's hard to hang onto them for long, but super missile seemed to be the best. Napalm was invaluable in the final boss confrontation. 

Anyway, that's a solid recommend for $8. Now I guess it's Blazing Star, unless I want to scream some more at Strikers.

Don't buy the Crash N-Sane Trilogy you stupid mothers of fuck

God why do they even make games that are this broken? And why do game reviewers feel like it's okay to equivocate to a middling score of 7 or 8 in the face of such fundamental flaws?

To get straight to the point, Crash N-Sano is a shot-for-shot remake of the original three Crash Bandicoot games for Playstation. It is a graphical update that preserves the exact level layouts of the original recreated in a new engine capable of rendering 1080p 30fps motion-blur visuals with gruesome lighting effects. Despite making no modifications to the level layouts, the developers have changed the height of Crash's jump* (accidentally or intentionally, who's to say). Crash, perhaps tired from years of overwork, simply can't hit the heights he once did, and now jumps a few pixels shorter than in the equivalent PlayStation titles. To retiterate, this is without any modifications to the level layouts to accommodate.

Now, if you're not recoiling in abject horror that a developer could modify a platforming character's jump height without expecting any repercussions on the experience, Crash Bandicoot may not be the series for you. See, the entire pleasure of the Crash games, very much like the Donkey Kong Country titles that clearly inspired them, is the rhythm and flow of platforming. It's the gradual accumulation of that melody for each stage, the building of muscle memory such that however hard each stage, it will feel perfectly natural by the time the player has mastered every jump. There are no stutters, no shimmies, no need for visual alignment or minor tweaks - it's all timing and technicality, hitting the right inputs without needing to think. This isn't every platformer, mind, just this specific subgroup that more or less boils down to Bit.Trip Runner. So when you change the properties of a particular move, it's like altering the time signature of a composition. The whole fucking thing changes. Though this doesn't necessarily ruin the song, if every note and break has been perfectly configured to sound right at its original time signature, you can't simply expect equivalent results after altering that. And, more importantly, you shouldn't tell someone they're getting the original when you've made that swap.

What bugs me nearly as much as the audacity of the developers and publishers in letting this slip through is the cavalcade of reviews that note that Crash's controls or mechanics 'feel off', but can't be bothered to investigate further than that. Many of them note that this may be because of the mapping from digital D-pad Playstation controls to an analog stick on Switch/PS4, and others observe oddities with hitboxes. Yet no one (that I saw published on Metacritic - surely some dude on Youtube has made this his life's purpose) sat down with a PS1 copy of Crash 2 and a handheld Switch and did a side-by-side comparison to root out the specific issue, something that took me far less time than it did to compose this screed.

*alternately, Crash's entire hitbox may have been shrunken, such that his head doesn't reach as high at the peak of a jump and his feet don't reach as far at the length. The effect is the same: overhead boxes that could previously be bonked with a normal jump are now out of reach, and ordinary gaps that could previously be spanned with a normal holding-forward jump now require a slide jump.

People hate Raiden V, right?

Picked up Raiden V: DX for a pretty good sale price at $13, gave it a spin just to see how it would run on my new PC. Lightning fast, you might say, although I've never played nor imagined a game so dedicated to the furiously denounced flaws of the widely derided Sine Mora. Can you say BLOOM LIGHTING EFFECTS? And while Sine Mora was able to light the shmup world on fire with just optional screen shake and two bullet colors (orange and blue), Sine Mora 2: Raiden V has individual enemy volleys that can mix as many as five colors (red, blue, green, yellow, pink!), not to mention any other enemies on screen and the player's two hues of their own (blue and your choice of red, blue, or purple). It even has a camera that will zoom in and out mid-combat! Boy there's nothing I love more than watching the playing area shrink to half scale (and double size) while an approaching bullet pattern become so small and orange that it's completely obscured by the sun glare blooming off the orange buildings in the orange desert and the whole game becomes a gleaming white blob.

Seriously it's a nightmare. It's also baffling that anyone called this game "burdensomely latched to hoary conventions of shmups yore", when it's in fact so modern that it barely feels like a Raiden game at all (unless this is what the Fighters subseries is like). It has a long-form story mode with incessant voiceover during gameplay (you may say - hey, isn't that a Star Fox thing? but only Sine Mora and Raiden V are smart enough to pair it with subtitles covering part of the gameplay area), save points, branching paths, three ships with different stats and fully customizable weapons loadouts (three choices each for red, blue, and purple, for a total of 81 different profiles!), achievements, and a goofy-ass networked parallel-play power-up system. Like, Raiden III and IV are 90% the same game, IV is a loose remake of II, and the original Raiden has like eight variations and ports. This is a series about on par with Mega Man for variation, so continuing from IV to V feels like going from Mega Man 4 straight to ZX Advent without the 15 years of connective tissue explaining how you got there.

Did I mention the lifebar!!!

Okay I just hit up YT and WP and yeah looks like most of the new weapons and the branching paths are just carryover from Fighters. Why not now, nearly 20 years after the final entry?