3D platformers index and rough ranking

UPDATE 5/24/22: 

- added Kirby FL (vague ranking) 

- added Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon after playing through the first dungeon. It's got some platforming

The following aren't ranked by core platforming gameplay alone, rather as complete experiences; great aesthetics benefit a platformer as much as any other game. As I add each game to the list, I ask myself: if I already possesssed all the games listed above, which of those remaining would I take next? Think of it like picking a kickball team. Every game ranked I have beaten from beginning to end! Most of them were 100%-cleared. 

3D PLATFORM GAMES tier list sorta

S-tier; which are unique and as close to perfect as one can ask


1. Super Mario Galaxy
2. Super Mario 64
3. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
4. Ape Escape
5. Rayman Revolution
6. Sonic Adventure 2
7. Maximo: Ghosts to Glory
8. Super Mario Odyssey

A-tier; good ideas well-executed, challenging and rewarding


9. Castlevania (64)
10. Candleman
11. Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back
12. Super Mario 3D Land
13. Sly Cooper & the Thievious Raccoonus
14. Maximo: Army of Zin
15. Sonic Generations
16. Jak & Daxter
17. Spyro the Dragon
18. Super Mario Galaxy 2
19. Jumping Flash! 2
20. Bomberman Hero
21. Rayman 3D
22. Banjo-Kazooie
23. Adventures of Cookie & Cream


? tier; both great and terrible


24. Sonic Adventure - What the fuck is going on here? But when the Sonic character gameplay is left alone it's a free-form experimental high speed analog genius. That's about 15% of the content included.
25. De Blob - The idea of directly interacting with surfaces is a fantastic one for a platformer. The idea of a motion controlled jump is a diabolical one. The Switch version may be worth visiting.

B-tier; solid but dominated by better alternatives


26. Super Mario 3D World: Bowser's Fury
27. Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction
28. Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones
29. Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon - Fantastic story and a decent world structure, strong theming to the platforming but simple and with very limited movement
30. Super Mario Sunshine
31. Wario World
32. Sonic Heroes
33. Super Mario 3D World
34. Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped
35. Ape Escape 2
36. De Blob 2 - De Blob already outlived its core idea, this is artifically distended even further with completion percentages and sidescrolling sublevels. Still a solid foundation, and there's a jump button now!
37. Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando
38. Rayman 2 (PS1)
39. Prince of Persia: Warrior Within
40. Jumping Flash! - identical to its sequel, with a less challenging "hard" mode.
41. Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal
42. Kirby and the Forgotten Land

C-tier; ones you can learn to live with, if you so choose


43. Sonic and the Black Knight - The controls are a huge hurdle to get over and never more than 90% reliable - after that this is arguably the purest 3D speed-based Sonic game.
44. Crash Bandicoot - Rudimentary and one-dimensional, but very well-made and fluid.
45. Psychonauts - Not any fun to play or mechanically challenging, but the metaphorical level design is earnest and thoughtful. The anti-Bandicoot.
46. Pac-Man World - Glaringly inconsistent and full of jank, with respectably element-focused level design.
47. Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness - A completely ruined camera and redesigned stages that removes most of the challenging skill tests with easy but irregular and repetititious lilypad platforming
48. Mega Man X7 - Alternatingly painful and impressive.
49. American McGee's Alice
50. Sonic: Lost World

D-tier; mechanically unsound and unpredictable; far more irritation than value


51. Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee - An alpha kit with fan created levels, always approximating ideas instead of creating them organically, though this is the one I am sorriest to rank so low.
52. Rayman 3 - The direst expression of the 3Dplat's fatal flaw, combat. That it's supported only by poorly utilized power-ups and trivial jumping challenges is damning.
53. Medievil - The jankiest game on this list, with all kinds of random interactions and glitchy behavior. 
54. Crash Bandicoot: N. Sane Trilogy - Crash is a tightly mechanical near-rhythm platformer. An adaptation that changes the tuning and nothing else is insane.
55. Jak II - One of the worst games I've ever played; utterly pointless meandering time-waster with arbitrary challenges as miserable balance. A tech showcase made unplayable.

Notable gaps I'll probably one day cover 

(red = in progress)

1. Ape Escape 3 - I liked 2, but it was unremarkable compared to the first.
2. Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg - It's Yuji Naka, but it's also Billy Hatcher.
3. Bionic Commando ('09) - If this counts, do I need to include Spider-Man games?
4. Donkey Kong 64 - About 15% complete. Gruelingly boring, flat, and repetitious
5. Epic Mickey - Depends on Epic Mickey 2. I got that one free.
6. Epic Mickey 2 - Dubious, but it's a late representative.
7. Frogun - etc
8. I-Ninja - Wild-card.
9. Jak 3 - The Sony sequel mantra was "simplify the platforming and add minigames", so this is dubious.
10. Mirror's Edge - Major gap. Potential gateway to other FPPs like Cloudbuilt and Clustertruck.
11. Pac-Man World 2 - Wildcard.
12. Prince of Persia ('08) - A dead end, but worth a look.
13. Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands (Wii) - The 360 one went too far brawler to qualify.
14. Rocket: Robot on Wheels - Wildcard. Would need to emulate.
15. Shinobi ('02) - About 80% through, and not sure it counts.
16. Sly 2: Band of Thieves - About 30% through. Hardly qualifies.
17. Sonic Unleashed - Werehog.
18. Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage - Similar-looking sequel.
19. Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz: HD - About 95% through.
20. Vexx - About 80% through.

Notable gaps I'll probably never cover

1. Banjo-Tooie - I don't love Rare and hear this is even more distracted than Kazooie.
2. Bubsy 3D - I probably should.
3. Conker's Bad Fur Day - Banjo-Kazooie's aesthetic is already hard enough to stomach.
4. Pac-Man World 3 - Depends on Pac-Man World 2.
5. Prince of Persia 3D - Need a way to play it.
6. Ratchet & Clank - The three I've played are *so* similar, even if this is the original.
7. Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves - depends on Sly 2.
8. Sonic the Hedgehog ('06) - If it wasn't for the load times I'd suffer through.
9. Spyro: Year of the Dragon - Depends on Spyro 2, but knowing Insomniac...
10. Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz - infuriatingly, this is not the same game as the HD one.
11. Yooka-Laylee - we'll have to see how the new wave of 3D platformer fangames fares.

Others that exist

1. 40 Winks
2. A Hat in Time
3. Balan Wonderworld
4. Blue Fire
5. Chameleon Twist
6. Chameleon Twist 2
7. Cloudbuilt
8. Clustertruck
9. Croc
10. Croc 2
11. Crash: Twinsanity
12. Geograph Seal
13. Gex 3D
14. Glover
15. It Takes Two
16. Jett Rocket
17. Medievil 2
18. Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time
19. Ratchet & Clank Future: Into the Nexus
20. Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty
21. Scaler
22. Shadow the Hedgehog
23. Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time
24. Sonic and the Secret Rings
25. Sonic Colors
26. Sonic Forces
27. Tonic Trouble

Master list

1. 40 Winks
2. A Hat in Time
3. Adventures of Cookie & Cream
4. American McGee's Alice
5. Ape Escape
6. Ape Escape 2
7. Ape Escape 3
8. Balan Wonderworld
9. Banjo-Kazooie
10. Banjo-Tooie
11. Bionic Commando ('09)
12. Blue Fire
13. Bomberman Hero
14. Bubsy 3D
15. Candleman
16. Castlevania (64)
17. Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness
18. Chameleon Twist
19. Cloudbuilt
20. Clustertruck
21. Conker's Bad Fur Day
22. Crash Bandicoot
23. Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back
24. Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped
25. Crash Bandicoot: N. Sane Trilogy
26. Crash: Twinsanity
27. Croc
28. Croc 2
29. De Blob
30. De Blob 2
31. Donkey Kong 64
32. Epic Mickey
33. Epic Mickey 2
34. Gex 3D
35. Geograph Seal
36. Glover
37. I-Ninja
38. It Takes Two
39. Jak & Daxter
40. Jak 2
41. Jak 3
42. Jett Rocket
43. Jumping Flash!
44. Jumping Flash! 2
45. Kirby and the Forgotten Land
46. Maximo: Army of Zin
47. Maximo: Ghosts to Glory
48. Medievil
49. Medievil 2
50. Mega Man X7
51. Mirror's Edge
52. Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon
53. Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee
54. Pac-Man World
55. Pac-Man World 2
56. Pac-Man World 3
57. Prince of Persia ('08)
58. Prince of Persia 3D
59. Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands (Wii)
60. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
61. Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones
62. Prince of Persia: Warrior Within
63. Psychonauts
64. Ratchet & Clank
65. Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time
66. Ratchet & Clank Future: Into the Nexus
67. Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty
68. Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction
69. Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando
70. Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal
71. Rayman 2 (PS1)
72. Rayman 3
73. Rayman 3D
74. Rayman Revolution
75. Rocket: Robot on Wheels
76. Shadow the Hedgehog
77. Shinobi ('02)
78. Sly 2: Band of Thieves
79. Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves
80. Sly Cooper & the Thievious Raccoonus
81. Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time
82. Sonic Adventure
83. Sonic Adventure 2
84. Sonic and the Black Knight
85. Sonic and the Secret Rings
86. Sonic Colors
87. Sonic Forces
88. Sonic Generations
89. Sonic Heroes
90. Sonic Lost World
91. Sonic the Hedgehog ('06)
92. Sonic Unleashed
93. Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage
94. Spyro the Dragon
95. Spyro: Year of the Dragon
96. Super Mario 3D Land
97. Super Mario 3D World
98. Super Mario 3D World: Bowser's Fury
99. Super Mario 64
100. Super Mario Galaxy
101. Super Mario Galaxy 2
102. Super Mario Odyssey
103. Super Mario Sunshine
104. Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz
105. Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD
106. Tonic Trouble
107. Vexx
108. Wario World
109. Yooka-Laylee

Valfaris: "Gazer Guard" boss analysis (phase 1)

Valfaris' "Gazer Guard" is a mid/late-game boss with a compact, elegant design. The first phase of the battle (see video) is composed of three sequential tests: reading, vision, and reaction.

NOTE: The video depicts a successful run of "Gazer Guard's" first phase, so some of the interactions described in the following paragraph aren't seen here. Valfaris expects the player to risk death during experimentation, so defeating this boss for the first time may take multiple restarts, refining and hastening the eventual successful run.

The majority of enemies in Valfaris take direct damage from weapon fire, but "Gazer Guard" does not, setting up a unique boss fight. When "Therion" fires upon the central eyeball which appears to be the boss's body, its blue shield aura* and static health bar indicate that damage is not being inflicted. This feedback is identical regardless of "Therion's" equipped weapon, ruling out direct attack and suggesting a more patient approach. While the eye remains invulnerable, six floating beacons dash around the screen, pause, and repeat in an ostensibly randomized pattern. "Therion" cannot interact with the beacons while they are moving; though they can be attacked during the final and longest pause. Attacking a beacon won't kill or damage it, rather it triggers one of two events. When a beacon is struck, the boss eye either fires a single aimed laser directly at "Therion", or it recoils and its health bar decreases by a fixed decrement. Afterwards, the beacons resume their pattern of shuffling and the eyeball remains invulnerable to direct attack.

The first test for the player is reading the scenario as laid out. Once they've experimented enough to determine that the beacons are vulnerable and not the eye**, they need to figure out why sometimes damaging a beacon hurts the boss and other times it triggers a counterattack. They may deduce that given six beacons, only one is a correct target, or they may simply continue observing and experimenting until they come to the same conclusion. This should draw their attention to the shuffle, at which point they need to observe that one and only one beacon glows blue at the beginning of each cycle, just before the shuffle. At this point, the player has passed the reading/observation test; their reward is the knowledge of which beacon to target.

Now the focus shifts to the shuffling pattern. The target beacon is indicated before the shuffle, but the vulnerability window comes after. The player needs to track the (now identical) target beacon as the pattern speedily and repeatedly reconfigures. It's a game of three-card monty, a fairly rudimentary and likely familiar test of vision. This is the second test; the reward for successfully tracking the beacon through the shuffle is again knowledge, this time knowledge of the target location when it becomes vulnerable.

The third test barely registers as such, it should be so ingrained into the player at this point. As the beacons finish shuffling and are fixed in place, they lose their purple glow, indicating a change in state that experimentation will have revealed to be their vulnerability window. If the player has passed the first two tests, they know now which beacon to target and where it is. If any other beacon is attacked at this point, the window ends, the eyeball attacks, and the cycle restarts. Striking the target beacon without damaging any of the others is the third test. This can be accomplished with a melee weapon by running and jumping to its location, or with a ranged weapon by aligning "Therion" with his target along one of his eight axes of aiming. This action needs to be accomplished in a short period of time (1-2 seconds), otherwise the cycle restarts. To pass the test the player needs to be able to quickly attack an arbitrarily placed element (the target beacon) while aiming around its cover (the other beacons). This time the reward is damage to "Gazer Guard" - irrevocable progress in the boss fight.

This ends the suspension of challenge and the cycle of tests returns to the beginning. Invoking the rule of threes, the player needs to complete this three-part test three times to end phase one of the battle. The beacon movement during the shuffle becomes faster through progressive cycles, increasing the difficulty of the middle test while leaving the other two consistent. This produces a linear difficulty  curve. Phase two will be discussed in the next video.

What makes this part of the "Gazer Guard" battle particularly elegant is the inverse relationship of complexity and suspension as the tests progress. The first test is highly specific to this boss and requires processing and filtering novel information. The subsequent shuffle challenge is a new way of testing visual tracking, a skill underpinning the entire game. The player is applying a developed skill to a novel scenario, which they ought to be more comfortable with than they were with the initial analysis. At the peak of suspension, the third test, the player needs to aim and shoot at a static target, something they've been doing against every enemy in the game. As more successes are suspended on the line, the abilities tested are increasingly fundamental - this gives the game cohesion and identity: victory in Valfaris is ultimately determined by running and gunning skills, not isolated puzzle solutions.

* the blue shield aura is an indicator the player should have learned by this point in the game, as it is used on every enemy that receives an attack but no damage (guarding).

** you could say experimentation is the first test, but I think that's implicit in any scenario where the player does not yet know how to progress.

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).

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.

Strategizing for the ammo/health balance in Journey to Silius

Journey to Silius is balanced such that ammo is more valuable than health. This is the case because the player possesses 3 health bars to a continue and only 1 ammo bar*, though expending ammo rarely saves health in a 3:1 ratio. For ammo to be of greater or equal value to health, it would need on average to decrease the health lost to the enemy it was used upon by a factor of 3. Put differently, it would need to kill damage-dealing enemies 3x as quickly, below which rate it would not be useful against enemies with less than a 2/3 chance of dealing damage.

The "ammo" and "health" abstracts underpin a strategic decision presented to the player: to fire a weapon [consume ammo in exchange for advanced targeting or damage rate] or to accept a mechanical limitation [smaller attack zone, shorter action timers, longer conflicts] which creates varyingly a finer tuned style of play or a higher probability of error, dependent upon the enemy/layout at hand and the player's technical** skill. Where the prolonged conflicts (resulting from the slower damage rate of ammo conservation) exceed the full cycle of an enemy's actions, this puts especial pressure on the player's ability to repeat a single technique reliably.

Thence, Journey to Silius feels like a lot of doing the same thing over and over. In a way it's like a survival horror game where you can kill everything with the knife if you kite it properly, except that in Silius it's slightly easier and much more necessary to do so. Like if you took RE2 and gave the player only a knife and a shotgun with one bullet for every dozen zombies, then placed a dozen zombies at every bottleneck.

*Journey to Silius features ammo and health restoratives which should alter these ratios. However, as far as I have discovered, the rate of appearance of these items is completely random. This means the player can't rely on their presence and must plan/execute as though they will not appear - that, or accept a built-in failure probability even on a perfect execution.

** a "technique" here refers to the combination of a game input and a timing. A timing is the combination of a [feedback] trigger and a length of time.

Come on, God of War isn't a brawler, don't be ridiculous

Sorry there are more enemies in God of War than grunt and minotaur? They must've been hiding behind the sheer millions of grunt and minotaur corpses when I was playing. You haven't even gotten to the part where it's two straight hours of grunt fights ("the whole game lol!" no you don't even know). Pretty much everything about God of War's brawling is wrong, so starting from enemy variation is far too high on the chain. I think that's one place where it's bad, but not unforgivably so. The fact it's so noticeable is more a symptom of the failure of everything else.

Why doesn't combat with a single enemy work? The omnidirectional i-framed-up dodge move means position doesn't matter, so the game space is reduced to one dimension. Then the grab trumps everything (if you haven't already discovered), so we're in a volitional difficulty situation. Survival is only challenging so long as the player voluntary limits their options. Feedback on moves is near impossible to read because the chain is just a giant swath that hits eight enemies at once and conflates all their states (plus might have different effects based on distance). Who fucking knows how much damage anything does. Not to mention every combo looks like the exact same noisy mess. Then dial-a-combos for button mashing heaven, but also free interrupts (dodge) because it started to get hard. Stuff like "there's a launcher" is typical "we don't understand what is happening in the combat and why it isn't fun, what's something else that Devil May Cry has?" I couldn't tell you exactly from game to game within the series, but I believe the launcher is completely useless almost always. You can dodge to get out of combos, why would you need to be in the air? 1D game space. I think the toughest the game ever gets is when there's a boss that has an attack you're supposed to block, and you have to remember what button is block again.

But all that is totally beside the point, because God of War doesn't expect the player to take initiative and explore offensive capabilities within the combat. God of War is a game about having violent semi-realistic animations applied to spectacular mythological creatures. Everything else about the game flows from that. You can contend that Devil May Cry is a game about having a cool anime guy do stylish sword swings at demons; granting that this is of course wrong, the difference is that Dante's "style" is his offense, it is the sequence of moves he performs and that the player controls. God of War is centered on the baddies. This is why its primary novelty is extended cutscene kills, and why executions are the only thing it bothers to incentivize. It's why the boss fights aren't even beat-em-up style half the time. It even kind of explains why grab is so OP (it has a unique animation). The button mashing is just there to connect the dots.

I've played a few dozen 3D beat-em-ups at this point, and I can fairly confidently say that God of War is the worst. The only thing giving me pause is that I can't clearly remember the story mode from Tekken 6. But I don't think God of War wants to be compared to Devil May Cry - in its mind, it belongs to the same genre as Uncharted. To be clear, I don't think it's successful as a cinematic experience either. There's no excuse for filler, and it has especially arbitrary quick-time events (on part with RE4). Asura's Wrath is basically the same idea done correctly, though I think GoW2 and GoW3 are a lot better too.

A thought on strategy in Armored Core / Daemon X Machina

It occurred to me in considering Dick Terrell vs. Daemon X Machina that an appealing, if uselessly vague, way of describing strategy games is "puzzle games with statistics instead of rules". Decisions are weighted and evaluated in parallel rather than binary in series. 

Armored Core is in a sense the apotheosis of that idea, since there are so many decision points (equipment) weighted across so many variables (the stat sheet for a mech has a dozen or so parameters in the first game and probably 50ish by AC5), yet they are all codependent (since there's only one mech per mission). If you think about buying/loading gear as the fleet-building stage of Sins of a Solar Empire, with the choice of arm/leg/missile/etc corresponding to choice of frigates/cruisers/carriers/etc, I think they line up fairly well in terms of what the player ought to be calculating and trying to predict. There's more pressure in the action phase of Armored Core because the player is in full control of the mech, which is the advantage (design-wise) of unifying all the statistical parameters. The player needs to design a mech that they are also capable of piloting, and some decisions will be based on accomodating that (for instance, a novice might prefer a slow machine with higher armor because they find the controls clunky and can't take advantage of the ability to dodge). On the flipside, there's more pressure in the decision phase of Sins, because the entire game is played out in real-time. The action itself is almost completely automated, sheer number-crunching.

It makes me wonder what a mech game with real-time mech building would play like. Probably similar to a traditional RTS (StarCraft), since Sins and AC are kind of sitting at two extremes. StarCraft does have full unit control, it's just - there are so many independent elements that the technical bar for maximizing strategic efficiency is incredibly high, and the casual level of play relies on a lot of Sins-style automation. For the real-time element (in this theoretical mech game) to make sense, there'd probably need to be some kind of resource race, and the mech would need to be upgradeable on the fly (since there would be no additional/replacement units to build - otherwise resources would become irrelevant as soon as combat began).

Actually, if you took the standard RTS model (building drones and exploring a map to gather materials), this starts to look a lot like a MOBA. MOBAs after all were built from an experiment with WarCraft 3, asking what would happen if the player controlled just one powerful "hero" unit instead of a bunch of disposable little ones (the original Defense of the Ancients, if I'm not mistaken). MOBAs just tend to have really boring/convoluted combat, since they use an action model designed and for decades optimized for controlling dozens of independent units in parallel. They don't do nearly as good a job as Armored Core at taking the aforementioned advantage of unifying your parameters. The Dynasty Warriors/Musou games are somewhere in the middle here - only a few player units and combat more complex than League of Legends, but much simpler than Armored Core. They don't have much of a prep phase, though, and therefore play more like tactics-action than strategy-action.

Huh. So what really obvious game am I forgetting about that does exactly what I'm describing? What about if we add a metroidvania backtracking structure, roguelite procedurally generated encounters, and soulslike boss battles? Tune in tomorrow to find out. 

Back in the CCCR New Mario Revisited

you can turn off the jump/twirl dual mapping by holding in the left control stick for a few seconds on the title screen

what the fuck

Back in the CCCR returns again: New Mario Wii U Luigi Deluxe

Back in the CCCR, aka Control Customization Reviews Revisited, is a column where we review control customization options in video games. 

It's been many long winters since we've been Back in the CCCR, but I thought I'd buy a Mario with my Christmas money and got exactly what I deserved. If there's anything that fires me up to write, it's muddled and overmapped controls with duplicate buttons that offer no customization whatsover.

I should be honest, though, and admit that New Super Mario Luigi U Deluxe Wii Brothers does have one option, and it's quite a pickler. The face buttons of the Switch controller (A, B, Y, X in the SNES diamond layout) are mapped in pairs to two functions - run and jump. Actually, it's a whole lot more functions than that, but hang tight. By default, A/B jump and Y/X run. If you'd like, "Controls 2" will swap the functions of B and X. However, A must remain as jump and Y must remain as run. This doesn't bother me so much as that I just don't get it*. Why not also swap the other two? Or just put the same-function buttons opposite each other (B/X run, A/Y jump) so that the player can get any configuration just by laying their thumb differently. Isn't that the point of dual mapping anyway?

Anyway, am I the only one that feels like Super Mario controls are getting kind of crappy? First of all, after playing various 3D Mario games, pressing down midair to ground-pound feels awful, especially on the already subobtimal non-gated analog stick or C-buttons. It's a dual mapping of actions that for maximum precision need to be synced - a ground-pound is a targeted action, and the targeting is performed by moving the stick while Mario is midair. So there's a moment when the player has Mario in position and now needs to swing down to actually trigger the action, meaning there will always be a delay. Compare to 3D Mario, where the L/R button is an independent input and frame-perfect timing isn't all that hard.

Then there's spin jump. Oh, the terrible spin jump. The default mapping on R/ZR is sensible enough if you're going to dual-map the face buttons like described above. Pressing R/ZR in mid-air performs a mid-air twirl for a bit of extra air-time - this is even more sensible, since there will be situations when a player needs to hold run, hold jump, and be ready to twirl, and all three on face buttons would preclude this. But then they start throwing wrenches in the gears. As is, this was too simple? complicated? so pressing jump again in midair ALSO performs the twirl, I guess for when your elderly grandfather is over for Toadette co-op and can only remember one button. This is a problem, because holding A midair has a different function - it extends jump height and puts Mario into enemy-bounce state. And these too functions are occasionally at odds: for instance if the player wants to do a short hop onto an enemy and bounce off (a common setup for jumps just out of normal reach). The correct button input for this would be tap A (short jump) then press and hold A (bounce state) before landing on the enemy. In Nu Luigi Mario: Two Deluxe Wii Brothers, this input sequence will trigger a midair twirl, slowing Mario's descent and fucking with the timing of the landing. This point, you could argue, is not inherently bad. It's just increasing the technicality of the gameplay. If you want to short hop and bounce without a twirl, you now need to time the second A to exactly the landing on the enemy. But didn't we just get through discussing an example where the gameplay has become less technical? We can't go both these directions at once. And the short hop and bounce has been in Mario Brothers since day one - for over 30 years - so I don't know why it needs to change now**. Just leave twirl on the other input you already established for it.

As usual, this stuff wouldn't be so frustrating if it wasn't done correctly right next door. It shows, or reinforces, that their focus with these games isn't solid action, but loosely sorta getting the right idea so you can play with your newborn baby and dog. Why does it matter if you can't get a frame-perfect ground-pound? asks Miyadumbo. We made it so that you can set a controller on your pregnant wife's stomach and the baby can kick Mario through the levels! And if your child was born with no head they can still beat the game without looking at the screen! More than anything, what makes Nintendo weird isn't so much that they pick weird targets, but that they refuse to broaden their aim just by adding in some very simple configuration (which I suppose does fit into the mentality of not considering your customers adults - we're having peas for dinner because I said so). I mean, is it really going to fuck with kids' heads so terribly if you let them put spin jump on a face button? You don't even write manuals for your games anymore.

*Actually, it does grate an extra 50% because the same exact "swap B and X" was the only control option in Zelda: BoW, and was substantially more pointless and obstructive there.

**I can't be fucked to remember when in the New Mario canon twirl was introduced - I don't remember it before this, but these games are designed with forgettability in mind.

A brief consideration of tells in shoot-em-ups

I was considering the application of "show &" tells to shoot-em-ups the past few days while playing Raiden IV, Mushi-F, and Lightening* Force; the idea that enemies should visually indicate when an attack is about to happen (e.g. Bowser sucking in air before breathing fire). It should be taken into consideration that I have not cleared any of the three games I'm about to discuss, although I'm on the final stages of Raiden IV and Mushi-F. Lightening Force I've played for like 3 hours so take that with a grain of salt.

As I said before, Raiden is so positionally-oriented that precise shot timing doesn't really matter. If there's a group of enemies above me that I know fire single tracking bullets, I also know that I will be safe sweeping left until I clear the bullets. I can start the sweep any time before the first bullet reaches me and end it any time after the last one fires. If there's also an enemy left of me, then I should probably sweep up-right to get away or down-left to get under it and fire. These scenarios are pretty static across runs. Timing doesn't really matter that much - what matters is doing these movements in such a way as to sync up with targets while also setting up the next dodge. Which is quite enough to make it more complicated than "sweep left". I did think it would be helpful on a few enemies who shoot starburst or static patterns - and I also noticed these enemies do have animated tells (e.g. a mine blinking faster before it explodes).

Mushihimesama Futari yeah nah. It's all sight-dodging. I'm looking at the bullets for paths through them, or for enemies under them to shoot and consume them. Also, everything pretty much shoots immediately as it comes on screen and doesn't stop til it's destroyed. Herding is a pretty big deal in situations where aggression fails - essentially, you can treat enemies as though they are firing at all times and this would not significantly change the strategy.

Lightening Force I can definitely see the applicability. Not for bullets so much, but the game is plagued with enemies that blast on screen and smash into you so fast there's barely a second to react. Some of them do have foreshadowing, swooping across the background or burrowing through the desert sand, but not nearly enough. Blazing Star solves this in the simplest way possible, with "incoming" arrows where enemies are about to emerge. Crude, but effective. The bosses desperately need tells for everything they do, because they move around jerkily without pattern and again fire extremely fast bullets without warning. Maybe need is too strong - they'd be altered, for sure. As is, playing it safe and staying completely out of their targeting zone is pretty much the only road to success. The anxious fidgeting makes sure that even that isn't particularly easy.

So yeah, I'm inclined to think something is wrong with Gradius if it would really benefit from visual tells, and I'm starting to question if it actually would. The most troubling factors seem to be malingering enemies like the footbots who hang around for 10 or 20 seconds and can mostly be ignored except for those three random times they shoot, and the crowded spacing that means sustained motions like I described re:Raiden lead to constant collisions (I've said in the past I don't care for walls in shmups). It's like the series carves out a weird space between Thunderforce, where you always have to play it safe, and Mushihimesama, where you always have to wait and see, but without having the elegant level design of Raiden IV which realizes that it's in that space.

*light·en·ing

/ˈlītniNG/

noun

noun: lightening; plural noun: lightenings

1. a drop in the level of the uterus during the last weeks of pregnancy as the head of the fetus engages in the pelvis.

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

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?

Weak franchises

I was thinking that the movie franchise equivalent to Mega Man vs. Mega Man X (in terms of quality, disregarding that the two series are related) is probably Friday the 13th vs. Hellraiser. With Friday the 13th, you know exactly what you're going to get - it's never going to be particularly great or special, but it's never going to go off the rails either (except the one time it did, catastrophically, with Mega Man 8 GOES TO HELL). Hellraiser starts off genuinely great and hits one solid riff on that, takes a wrong turn but is still kind of tolerable for a few more entries*, completely jumps off a direct-to-video cliff by the fifth, and hangs around for four more things and a reboot that no one was asking for.

*I hated HELLRAISER: BLOODLINE ("in space") until I saw its pathetic shadow EVENT HORIZON.

Mega Man X7: The Final Trilogy

For hopefully the last time I ever publicly discuss Mega Man X7, let's talk about Mavericks. In the spirit of wonderfully creative portmanteau names, why not offer some alternates in the form of anagrams?

FLAME HYENARD
Okay, he's definitely a hyena, but what ends in "rd" or "ard" that would describe a mentally deranged dog-man who runs in circles and screams the word "burn" so frequently that he often can't make it through the first syllable without interrupting himself? Best anagram: Handle my fear!

VANISHING GUNGAROO
Pretty easy one here - it's a kangaroo who rides around in the front pouch of a giant mech (actually a clever way of integrating X's animal and ride-mech themes). The mech carries the Maverick like an Indian water-bearer carries his burden, thence Gunga Din + kangaroo = Gungaroo. Best anagram: Ongoing vagina rush.

SPLASH WARFLY
I was tempted to believe war fly could be an actual species, maybe one that was particularly recognized for hanging around the carnage of battlefields. I may have been thinking of the Black Fly. Why when you look up pictures of flies are they always perched on human skin? It's like we've encoded into the entire phylum this notion of personal intrusion. Someone oughta get these guys a microaggressions lawyer. A micro-lawyer? Best anagram: Wasps shall fry!

RIDE BOARSKI
Take away this motorcycle man's wheels and you bet you'll find him chasing his speed fix out on the slopes, skiing down the double black diamonds in record time. We've got all the bases covered and filled in quite a bit of backstory too. Best anagram: I broker AIDS. Hey, someone's gotta do it.

SNIPE ANTEATOR
The wise, veteran member of Red Alert's ensemble, nimbly picking apart his opponents' psychology with years of battle experience to draw upon. Thus the name must refer to Shakespeare's most famous poem, "To be, or not to be" - a question all foes looking to defeat Anteator will soon have to answer. Best anagram: Psion Anteater.

TORNADO TONION
Now presumably this is a contraction of a name that once had an apostrophe, like Darby from D'Arby, and historically our Tornado would hail from the T'Onion clan. I find myself picturing an African kingdom, where the T'Onions coexist alongside T'Carrots and T'Artagnans and T'Challas. Not particularly great anagram: Onto triad noon.

SOLDIER STONEKONG
I mean, I think we all know exactly what a Stonekong is. You've seen CONGO, I've seen CONGO; killer volcano apes are not something to be messed with. These guys would rip Donkey Kong's head off and serve it on a silver platter (which is just something they do with any dismembered body parts they have available). Best anagram: Gooks' tenderloins. I apologize for the slur, but you'll have to blame this one on Capcom.

WIND CROWRANG
For one thing, didn't we just have a wind-themed boss in this game? Secondably, isn't Tornado Tonion meant as a clever satire of the dozens of wind/bird Mavericks throughout the series? This seems to undercut that otherwise effective parody. Not to mention this is the hackiest portmanteau of the bunch. Seriously, fuck Wind Crowrang! No anagram!

Revisiting Mega Man X7

Finished the game this week, clocked in around 6 hours at a solid D hunter ranking (I did get a single C on Ride Boarski!). Luckily the game treats all time equally, whether or not it's paused, so if you take a mid-stage break, enjoy your automatic D. I guess it's true an elite Maverick Hunter wouldn't stop for a piss or a yogurt. Presumably what I saw was the "bad" ending, but it's just X saying to Axl "you're not ready to become a MavHunter" (presumably only veteran Hunters are allowed to get D rankings and stay on - a sort of grandfather clause). Not really on the same level of consequence as X5, in which I believe the entire Earth blows up if too much time expires. And what's with Sigma's master plan? He comes back from the dead, takes over a vigilante gang, gets them all killed, and then says "X and Zero will be mine!". You could call it a revenge plot, but it comes across as romance.

In terms of series ranking X7 probably belongs around the middle, between X3 and X5 (as if it needs to be said, the full ordering is X > X2 >>> X4 > X3 > X7 >>> X5 > X6, and I've yet to play X8). And I probably feel better about it than X3, which only barely coasts by on the strength of things done better in X and X2. X7 at least feels fresh and has some new ideas that genuinely work, namely the 3D stages and the weapon and character swapping. The story - while really terrible - is at least perfectly comprehensible, a big step up from the latter two PlayStation games. I even like the pre-fight dialogue with bosses - never hurts to give them some personality, and it's pretty cool that each player character gets unique exchanges. As for the legacy stuff: the 2D levels range from fan-made level editor junk (Soldier Stonekong) to tedious redundant slogs (Tornado Tonion); the Maverick designs are insanely terrible (did you read the names I just quoted?); hostage reploid permadeath is goddamn obnoxious; and copy abilities have never felt more superfluous. In the category of new-but-bad are the frankly humiliating graphics, absolutely pathetic for a 2003 PS2 game from a major studio competing against the likes of Jak II and Going Commando (it doesn't even look to be from the same hardware generation as Capcom's own Devils May Cry or Maximos). Yet more embarrassing is the frequent slowdown, an unheard-of problem on the PlayStation 2 even for games with acceptable sixth-gen polygon counts.

There's a New Game+, which would allow fully powering up all three characters (there are only enough chips in a single playthrough for 16 upgrades; each character has 12 slots). I wonder if that has any reward. I got enough out of the experience that I'd like to get to know it better, although I may wait a month for the Switch Mega Man X Legacy Collection Collection, which collects Mega Man X Legacy Collection 1 and Mega Man X Legacy Collection 2. The weapon and character selection add textbook replayability, about half of the bosses seem decent (Snipe Anteator eventually did get some competition for worst), and 3D action-platformers are just a rare thing. I mean, I'm the guy who likes Shinobi '02. On my most recent go-round with Ratchet & Clank Future... Dudes of Destruction? (sounds too cool, must be something stupider), I realized the series thinks it's 3D Mega Man, and started to process it in those terms. So Mega Man X7 is a great point of comparison, as it completely butchers all the presentation and accessibility stuff that makes R&C so palatable, yet maintains the legacy of Mega Man enemy and stage design.

Then I wrote a blog post about the motorcycle stage in Mega Man X7

Yeah but you know what does have great hover bikes? Mega Man X7. It doesn't, but I'm glad to see they at least tried for a 3D version of the then-established variety stage. And the fact that the bike accelerates rather than blandly auto-scrolling almost inherently makes it the best iteration of the always weak gimmick. Unfortunately, there's something terribly wrong with the steering mechanics that I can't quite put my finger on - it might actually be what's been described to me re:Outrun, that X-velocity and Z-velocity are totally independent, combined with a 3D Sonic camera that doesn't stay behind the vehicle (e.g. a left turn will have the camera placed so the road snakes from the right edge of the screen to the left).

Whether or not the controls are something I could get used to, the design of the stage is especially trashy, just a narrow corridor littered with boxes, hostages, and the now-iconic Runnerbombs. (It's pretty amazing that "Runnerbomb" isn't a name that I made up, although maybe not as amazing as the fact that a Runnerbomb's modus operandi is to stand in place and throw bombs). Each of the obstacles/enemies spawns on-screen with a bright teleporting-in effect that saves the game from needing a draw distance - it's good for drawing attention visually and shows that the developers at least understood that you can't just have enemy pop-in (I really am describing an Outrun remake, huh?). The downside is that Runnerbombs, which need to be avoided, and hostage reploids, which need to be collected, have near identical silhouettes that make every decision whether to dodge or collide a last-second one. That gives the already cluttered layout an extremely haphazard mouthfeel, and, since this is X7, the heroes have enough reserve HP to just plow through everything. Which is important, because all of this is operating on a time limit.

Yup, continuing on from the brilliant structural mix-up of the intro level's cyclops-walker arena-showdown, the bike stage deviates from standard traversal/survival gameplay towards an actual racing format. Not entirely racing, thankfully, but the objective is to grab (all) 20 time-bombs planted across the course loop before the countdown timer reaches Zero. The player can drive as fast or slow as they want, but can't turn around, so missing a bomb means needing to speed through another lap to come back to it. The mission ends instantly as soon as the 20th bomb is collected. Given this collection objective structure, you might call this the long lost final level of Sonic R.

Indeed, I should probably mention that the Maverick ruling over this high-speed terroristic attack is branded Ride Boarski. I'm going to go out on a limb and hypothesize the name is a reference to Polish sausage, you fill in the details.

Ultimately the whole experience is like the opposite of the PSX/Battletoads-era cycle rides where any minor deviation from the exactly plotted course is instant death. Since the layout requires constant last-minute course correction, the slippery mechanics make that especially difficult, and there's plenty of time for multiple laps, the most productive strategy seems to be starting off barreling forward as fast as possible, grabbing all the low-hanging fruit, then on later laps slamming on the brakes whenever a bomb is known to be coming up. Like other points of comparison with X5 and X6, X7 isn't really better, but it's at least more interesting.

New 1-credit clears! Axelay, M.U.S.H.A., Cho Aniki, and Other Nonsense Words

Spring is such a wonderful season for shoot-em-ups. God knows you can't play them all year round, but in the spring, you can. I'm a terrible player, but I've finally developed the method and Schedule I prescriptions necessary to clear extremely easy shooters in roughly five years apiece. Mostly that means sticking to old 16-bit stuff on Wii VC; I'm fonder of later arcade and XBLA games like Strania or Under Defeat, but I haven't improved to the point that I can clear them. Plus, fuck rank.

This week I finished a somewhat controversial 1CC of Axelay, one probably not destined for the record books at Win Galaxies. So whenever I pick up the game I play out the remaining credits of my last suspend state for practice; I was busy all weekend, but when I picked up last week's suspend I ended up clearing the game. Some key notes:

• The game lets you map Shot and Missile to different buttons or to the same (like later Gradii). Naturally, most people will put them on the same button - but they'll be displeased when they reach the final boss's mirror phase, where he fires shots when the player does and missiles when the player does. And if the player fires shots and missiles at the same time, so will he, and that'll create an undodgeable attack pattern. So ten hours in I had to relearn to play the game with two buttons (harder than it sounds, because there's a lot of trigger fluttering).
• I like the weapon select, but it's oddly balanced. Once you get a new weapon in each category, you'll never use the previous ones - they're not objectively worse, but they don't complement each other correctly. And one weapon, Spinneroo, I couldn't comprehend in the slightest.
• The rotating vulcan weapon that starts firing backward and angles forward as you hold the button is enough to base a game around. It puts timers and technique into an independent aiming mechanism, like a cross between dual stick (because it's independent of ship movement) and reverse options (because it has its own traversal time).
• The vert stages would be better if they weren't multiple screens wide. The breadth is meant to offer different paths through the stages, but it ends up being like Life Force's split routes, where you just choose one early on and always take it. Ultimately it just adds confusion and ambiguity to an already difficult-to-read style of presentation. 

Overall I liked it a lot. Naturally it's reminiscent of Gradius and Life Force, but the weapon-swapping and management (where getting hit costs the currently equipped weapon, like M.U.S.H.A.) also adds an element of Contra III. I definitely prefer a shooter without any powering up or recovery phases; saves all the frustration and jerky pacing without dismembering the difficulty. The rules are simple, the design is lean (not a hint of popcorn), the weapons are self-consciously weird, the visuals are terrific (the artwork, not the Mode 7), and the difficulty lives in that perfect spot where screwing up hurts but doesn't undercut the momentum.

Cho Annunaki is interesting to look at too, with an aesthetic somewhere in the neighborhood of 15th century European painting crashing a train into 20th century manga. Even the buff dudes at this point feel more Classical Antiquity than Homoerotic Gaydiquity. Notes:

• It's tempting to call the game pure popcorn, with enemies and even bosses rarely hanging onto life for more than a few seconds, giving it a really soft, smooth flow. 
• Each stage has a unique enemy set that tends to conform to the same balanced triumvirate: one enemy creates barriers (the lenses in Stage 2, the alarms in Stage 3, the nautiluses in Stage 4, the helms in Stage 5), one pumps bullets onto the screen (the chess knights in Stage 2, the jerkoffers in Stage 3, etc.), and one that dive-bombs toward the player (the birds, the bees, the planes). It's a conservative style, but it does highlight the subtleties in each incarnation, like the way the lenses can be pushed back and the nautiluses fire when passed.
• This is the most tautly suspended power-up system I've ever seen. Basically the player has ten power-up levels to scale and five for each of two options, only each level takes more and more pick-ups to achieve (1 for the first, 3 for the second, 7 for the third, 17 for the fourth, 28 for the fifth, so on - the game doesn't display any of this, and only the first, third, and ninth (I think?) level-ups even result in a visual distinction). On a good run, I reach full power by the final boss of stage four (of five), and any single death shaves a good chunk off that (maybe half?). So if I've died twice, no way I have full power on the final boss. And since it takes so long to power up, I ended up essentially competing with my options, as splitting things three ways drastically slows down the leveling up, and isn't worth it in distributed firepower. 
• No extends! No hidden 1UPs either. This is true of all Masaya games I know (Gley Lancer, Cybernator, Gynoug). Extends shouldn't be underrated as a mechanism to draw the player into the scoring system and reward them for perfecting early parts of the game.
• Was there a lot of subtly sexual language in what I just wrote?

Then we've got M.U.S.H.A., my first victory over Compile (unless - is Recca considered crypto-Compile? It at least came from the same Carnival that generated Spriggan). Anyway:

• On the subject of extends, I didn't really notice them here, but the option supply is kinda accomplishing the same thing. It's really quite odd that the player can build up a huge stock of options to deploy later, never affected unless they use a continue, and it can definitely be put to use. Personally I stuck with 3-Way, Back, or Reverse for the early levels, then once I had 30+ in stock and things got bitchy, I switched to Lock. These little fellas eat bullets, too, and they're graciously fixed in place for reliable dead zones.
• Splitting the weapon power level such that picking up a secondary weapon provides an extra hit point (and getting hit costs the secondary weapon) alleviates recovery as I discussed favorably wrt Axelay, but M.U.S.H.A. goes a bit too far and strays into easy mode. With a pretty sizable invincibility frame and frequent weapon drops, the max challenge is really just to go ten or fifteen seconds at a time without getting hit. Of course, if the main power drops enough and your option supply runs out, you're pretty much fucked. So it's a very low difficulty hurdle with a steep dropoff. 
• Black hole bomb* is a crazy and awesome weapon concept (pulling enemies! in a shmup!), but it generates so much chaos on screen I ended up not using it much. At the same time, white-green laser loved covering up bullets approaching from the front, so it needed to be paired with Reverse option to last. 
• The graphics are too big.

So yeah. All three decent, fun games that I'd recommend, but I liked them in the order listed here. 

* The idea that angular momentum and energy may be transferred from a rotating black hole to a particle being scattered by it was proposed by Roger Penrose in 1971. The first discussion of a runaway effect, the black hole bomb, was explored by W. H. Press and S. A. Teukolsky in 1972. If such an effect were to spontaneously occur, it may point to new physics beyond the Standard Model, and showing that black holes have "hair", as pointed out by a paper from 2017, by William E. East and Frans Pretorius.

Blogging like it's 1997

I like how Dunkey's new Rockstar video, another step on the path to being W.O.K.E., starts with "the second time I played Red Dead, GTA, etc, I noticed how 90% of the game is time wasting. You don't really pick up on this the first time...". Yeah, you don't pick up on it the first time if you're not paying any attention to the game you're playing, and are therefore forming superficial and useless opinions.

It's funny, years ago he pointed out something I hadn't noticed in Arkham Asylum, that it takes Batman like an 8-second cutscene to open vents, an action you do about 150 times over the course of the game. He called it something like "artificial game lengtheners". Now, in that particular case, I think it's a hidden load buffer, like the "buggy" doors in Metroid Prime, but there were other examples that couldn't be, and I've noticed it as a thing ever since. For instance, in God of War 1-3, you have to hold R2 for like 5 seconds to open a chest. I think on paper the reason it's there is to make it feel more tactile, like you're 'doing' the animation of Kratos ripping open a chest. But when there are three next to each other, it's suddenly the dumbest thing ever, and again, it probably adds something like 20 minutes to the total playtime, plus all the other kinds of non-combat QTEs adding 5 minutes here and 10 minutes there.

Man, I haven't played Metroid Prime 3 in a million years. I should really find time for that.