Finishing with 3D plats, vehicle action, and GOTY - Part 2 of 2019 in review

Why doesn't anyone talk about Ape Escape, easily one of the top 10 and probably one of the top 5 3D platformers ever made? Yeah, the sequel is mush (I didn't bother continuing onto Ape Escape 3), but the original's tight focus on dual analog mechanics and evolution of collectibles into enemies with unique behavior paves a path for 3D action that was never followed up. Comparing this to Banjo-Kazooie (where I made the 100% clear with the assistance of the unimpeachable WarioFan63) is like comparing homemade ravioli in lamb ragu to a cold can of spaghetti-Os. The sixth console generation relegated the right analog stick entirely to camera control; Ape Escape posits a world that didn't need to be that way. Full-on dual-analog action games are something to consider for the future. (Keep in mind that the greatest 3D platformer series of all time, Super Mario, has always gotten by just fine without a camera stick). Other major 3D platformers cleaned up were Spyro (very solid), de Blob 2 (de Blob 2 long), Jumping Flash! 2 (identical to the first), and Psychonauts (not my thing). There's a ranking of the all-time top fifty 3D platformers coming sometime in the new year. And shout-out to Candleman, an awesome indie game from China doing something absolutely no one else in 2019 is doing - being a 3D plat that isn't a Banjo-Kazooie fangame.

To return to Psychonauts for a moment, I've added a new category to my table - forfeited games. Ones which will take too much effort to finish, or offer so little new information, that they just aren't worth wasting more time upon. Some of this year's forfeits were games that had been sitting on the list for years untouched - Axiom Verge and Popful Mail, both taken on only as part of the Commune - and the other three fill me with such utter disdain that they didn't seem worth the mood penalty - Psychonauts, Battalion Wars, and Rayman. Still, I'm reserving forfeits for games 1.) that have been half-cleared 2.) that I played at the behest of others, and 3.) that I severely dislike. It's a last resort.

Racing, flying, and all that great vehicle shit - these are the games I live for these days. Birds of Steel should've been the game of the year, as I finally wrapped my head around energy fighting and how to use a plane's traits to guide strategy (best represented by figuring out why everyone likes the Corsair so much - you don't fly it like a Spitfire). I knocked out the first three Aces Combat in what must've been January, since they seem such a distant memory. We got as close as we're going to get to a new Armored Core game in 2019 with Daemon X Machina - though I don't like the idea of using loot for tuning and the framerate can be a bit slow, it otherwise provides a great weapon set almost worthy of the almighty Custom Robo. Rogue Squadron on Steam was fun to revisit, more of an on-rails style Star Fox game thanks to the heavy use of linear canyon design, though it's ostensibly free-roaming. And the Commune played Pilotwings, ever the meditative experience.

GRID Autosport was my first real go at a racing sim - the previous two Codemasters games I played are the simcade ones, and though I love them quite a bit, Autosport clearly is operating on a far more nuanced level, showcasing that modern racing is really about how to use the brake. An important technique I picked up along the way is using an analog stick for acceleration/braking, which (for my hands at least) offers a finer level of control than analog triggers. I guess you could also call this the year of the right analog stick. I finished off the EAD racing line with F-Zero and Stunt Racing FX on the Nintendo Switch SNES Online, the former an unending frustration and the latter a treat that really deserves the Sega Ages treatment (as do all the Super FX games). Once I figured out how to driftcelerate I was also able to clear the hard modes of F-Zero X, a weird detail that makes me slightly less confident in calling it EAD's best.

But GOATY was not Birds of Steel, nor any of these others, but a game which is much narrower, a game with level design so tightly tuned that it is almost indistinguishable from the mechanical design, with dynamics worthy of any arcade-style action game, yet bounded such that they never overwhelm the universal technique driving the entire experience, none other than Virtua Racing. Specifically the Sega Ages variant, which takes a design that was perfect in its original form and upgrades the presentation not to match modern standards, but to let that design shine through all the more clearly. M2 didn't upgrade the game, they did something even better - stripped out all the downgrades, be they draw distance, framerate, or price. Around October I was thinking I'd pick Sega Ages Outrun for doing basically the same thing, in that case with a game I never liked to begin with and was finally for the first time able to grasp (also thanks to some graphing I did that makes me think I should be applying mathematical methods to game decoding more frequently). But the subsequent 120 hours of V.R. can't be ignored.

Some epochal FPSs slipped in there (Turok: DH and DOOM 3) and some not so epochal (Quake 4 and Battlefield Bad Company 2).