Game game game of the Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaar Awards!!!!!!!!!!!! Part 1

I totally forgot that I wrote 50% of this back in December then it got shelved during the hiatus. So it's time for...........

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

Alright. I know I'm excited. So in order to make this extra pointless, this year's GNG Game game games of the Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaar will be chosen from games new to me in 2013, not necessarily games that were published in 2013. Think of it more as a selected selection of selections, the cream of the crop of a creamy year of gaming, the choicest cut of many fine meats I've enjoyed playing. This isn't supposed to be an objective evaluation of these games or a means of rating them, it's just a way to recognize and point out to you the viewer some selections that you should ABSOLUTELY GO PLAY RIGHT NOW WITHOUT ANY HESITATION WHATSOEVER. Every game listed below comes with a 100% unmitigated endorsement, and I'll even be so kind as to tell you a little bit about why. 

Since this is more a recommendations ceremony than an awards ceremony, each game is only eligible for a single mention. Anyway, there's nothing more annoying than reading through an awards presentation and seeing "Mass Effect 3 is the best RPG of the year, Mass Effect 3 is the best story of the year, Mass Effect 3 is the best racing game of the year". I get it. You like Mass Effect. Seriously, 75% of the past five years' "of the year" awards around the web have been dedicated in some way to Mass Effect. You could say the series has had a............................................. SHIT EFFECT. Zinged ya!

Genre that is just okay: Best Platformer

Aw I'm just kiddin' ya guys. I love platformers! I guess? They are definitely a genre that is okay to play that reveals a lot of interesting ideas about stage design, something that carries over into just about ANY type of game, but they're primitive and thus my interest tends toward the scholarly rather than the funarly.

#2: Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse, Xbox 360, Sega Australia Ltd., 2013

The game does a fantastic job of laying out 2D paths without making them look 2D

I've already gone on quite a bit about how much I love this game, but I do love this game. IT'S FUCKING MAGICAL, OKAY? I don't give a shit about the original or Mickey Mouse, I don't even particularly care for Fantasia. This was just a singularly atmospheric, gorgeous journey. It made me feel like I was actually exploring a land of colorful ghouls and giant globs of gelatin with detail after detail after detail. It sounds cliche, but everything in the game is just so overflowing with personality. It finally occurred to me what it reminds me of - those old I Spy books, with their photographed arrays of toys and trinkets arranged into surreal landscapes. The cotton-ball clouds, the cookie cookies, the playing card towers all pop with a realism that makes you feel as tiny as Mickey appears onscreen. The platforming itself is a litany of playful gimmicks that may not be Donkey Kong Country-precise, but work exceptionally well in further developing that sense of a real space without needing the crutches of hyper-realistic physics or octopus rifts.

#1: Sonic Generations, Xbox 360, Sonic Team, 2011

Got places to go, gotta follow my rainbow!

In a blaze of cat, Sonic returns to America for the first time in the 21st century for the best racing action platformer on feet that you never thought you've played before. Sonic Generations is a really satisfying game both to explore and to master, and you'll master it as you explore. It makes the trademark Sonic speed refreshing by varying its application from stage to stage without artificially varying gameplay mechanics - the level design gives clear focus to everything from "supersonic platforming" to "supersonic mazes" to "supersonic murder" without needing transformations or team mechanics or a gigantic lineup of eleven furballs. I don't begrudge the other games their gimmicks (well, some), but there's a certain elegance to Sonic Generations - that you can visit each era of Sonic's history and get a taste of the gameplay that characterized it while still playing as the same character with the same mechanics. Maybe it only works because 20 years of game design has been condensed into a 6 hour campaign, but hey, it works. And it only gets more gratifying as you learn the ins and outs of each level and push yourself to play faster and faster.

Kill 'em til they're dead: Best Shooter

Shooters are a genre that have really changed a whole bunch over the ages. Where once we had Gradius, now we have Fark Rye. Some people pretend those are different genres. For the point of this, it doesn't really matter, does it?

Honorable Mention: Kid Icarus: Uprising, Nintendo 3DS, Project Sora, 2012
Kid Uprising gets a mention for having some terrifically fun rail-shooting action, but I can't give it a wholehearted, unmitigated recommendation because of the weird 3rd-rate action stages that make up the bulk of the game. I'm not the first to say it, but the game just does not control like a third-person game should control - and when I say "should", all I'm suggesting is that I "should" feel in control of my perspective and my movement in relation to that perspective. But the auto-scrolling levels are solid (if easy) and I can't help but fawn over a game that does 3D rail-shooting. It's a genre that's existed for like twenty years and only seen like twenty games! The stereoscopic 3D looks great as well, it really gives the action a more dynamic feeling over games like Sin & Punishment, actively contributing to playability by allowing targets to be easier distinguished, grouped, and prioritized. Area-of-effect and melee attacks just feel more... distinguished when playing in 3D - you can literally better see the space they take up. IIRC (in IRC) whatsisname said they weren't making another one anytime soon, and I'm usually not a guy to demand sequels, but I really wish Sora or Nintendo or someone would take these on-rails levels and make them into a full-length game. I promise it's at least going on my to-do list for next week if no one else gets to it sooner.

#2 Saints Row: The Third, Xbox 360, Volition, 2011

Liking this game doesn't exactly make me feel awesome about myself, as it's buried in perhaps the most moronically obnoxious presentation imaginable, but it's about as fun as a sandbox shooter can get. At first I pined for the full destructibility of Volition's earlier triumph, Red Faction: Guerilla, but as I played more I realized there was a certain satisfaction to be found in adapting havoc to Row's rigid city structure. Combined with the visceral and punishing third-person shooting, the world encourages players to get creative with their tactics. I guess using a pick-up truck as a battering ram to scatter a gang and ducking behind a building to lob grenades while waiting for the helicopter cavalry to show up just never got old for me. I appreciate a game that gives me the satisfaction of "realistic" weapons and physics (like baseball bats and grenade launchers) but throws them into utterly preposterous setups - like riding around in a tank on a helicarrier and shooting down jets. There's a great balance here between something totally over-the-top like Vanquish, which completely removes the player from reality for its absurd shenanigans, and something totally gritty and down to earth like Sleeping Dogs, which doesn't let the player indulge in the violence.

It's hard to express exactly what makes this game good. All the hype I read (before having played it) and even the above just comes across as "yeah, but isn't that every sandbox game? how is that different from GTA?". But every shooting/driving sandbox I've played before Saints Row (certainly every one made by Rockstar) is totally undone by a foundation of shit mechanics. Their hearts are in the right place but their heads are up their asses. Saints Row: The Third would be good even if it was a totally linear mission-oriented game (see Red Faction: Armageddon for essentially that) and that's what makes it work in an open world. You'll just have to take my word for it. Or fuck it, whatever.

#1 Capsized, XBLA, Alientrap, 2011

I was almost disappointed when I first saw the look of Capsized, only because I said "goddamnit, this was my idea for a game world!"

Yup, it's imperfect. Yup, it's raw. Yup, that works just damn fine. Capsized manages to combine the what-the-shit chaotic physics nonsense of a game like Red Faction: Guerilla or Worms with the strategic tension and ammo management of Resident Evil 4 with the atmosphere and methodical hunting of Metroid. How well do all those things mesh? Really weirdly! And that makes for a game that doesn't play quite like any other. It may seem to share gameplay with the brain-dead Bad Bots or be inferior to the carefully-wrought Bleed or lack the laborious architecture of Shadow Complex, but Capsized wields an awesome free-spirited naturalism that emancipates it from the oppressive digital nature that we typically treasure in "precise" games. Beyond the loosely mazey level design, the mechanics are imbued with a large factor of randomness. And that ratchets up the tension and makes the insane array of tools at the player's disposal feel a little more welcome. Capsized is a great game because it's not pure playground, it's not "Grand Theft Auto in spaceballs" - it forces the player to focus the absurdity of the action to an end. Lives and ammo are in short supply for each stage, so this isn't pure fucking around. The player needs to be able to gauge when to deploy method and when to deploy mayhem, and how to try to take control or at least recover once things inevitably get out of hand. That does a pretty good job making them feel like an astronaut lost in an alien jungle overflowing with way too much life.

I'm bored just talking about it: Best RPG

I had a huge resurgence in RPG popularity this past year. What I'm trying to say is that I have not liked RPGs for a long time and in 2013 all of a sudden I played like a thousand and was really lovin' 'em. It all goes back to Retro Game Challenge's Guadia Quest, a game that showed me that with a limited scope, I could actually still love a JRPG. I even took a slight detour into roguelikes and had a good time with Shiren the Wanderer before fully circumnavigating the globe back to that seminal WRPG classic, Ultima VII. But floating (or skyrocketing) to the top of that list we had....

#2 Crimson Shroud, Nintendo 3DS, Level 5, 2012

The game had a really fun script and made just the right amount of winking nods to its D&D origins

A short RPG?! Perish the thought! In fact, 2013 taught me that short RPGs are the way 2-B. I assume nearly every mechanic in Shroud is straight outta Dungeons and Dragons, but as I'm barely familiar with tabletop rules (I have one round to my name) I can only credit it all to the game. Shroud's got a neat terse tale to tell, following the old tradition of short/scary stories that are built entirely around one big reveal. There's no need for bullshit lore and an endless backstory to every character - it's all about moving the pieces forward to that big curtain-pull. That's just plain fun, and the handful of battles along the way are unique and challenging and follow the same mentality of stripping out the chaff. Only do anything once - and that'll make Shroud that much more fun a game to revisit. 

#1 Phantasy Star IV, Sega Genesis, Sega AM7, 1995/1993(JP)
So I have to admit that part of my love affair with Phantasy Star IV simply amounts to being swept off my feet. I wasn't ready to like a 16-bit JRPG. But Phantasy Star succeeded because it was fast and funny and kicked me in my emotional nuts before I was ready, and all the painfully cliche fantasy storytelling tropes were saved until the point where a character could react to an ancient apocalyptic prophecy with "Aw, man!" and I could feel exactly the same words echoing in my brain. The dialogue is dopey and innocent but heartfelt, genuine, and just witty enough to cut down any building fatigue. It helps that the biodome paradise scifi future has a truly unique look that escapes cliches of hyper-techno, post-apocalyptic, or utopian futurism, and that the gigantic battle sprites show off tons of memorable detail. Phantasy Star IV is, simply put, a one-of-a-kind adventure spanning beautifully developed worlds and starring a cast of unforgettable characters. That's all I want out of an epic, and as an epic this game shines.

The anime-style cutscenes add a great deal of personality and drama to the story, far more than is achieved in bland talking-headPGs like those made by Square

The battle system is solidly engaging with a nice large-scale challenge structure oriented around managing HP and TP (health and magic). There is a real satisfaction to surviving a dungeon with genuine risk/reward built into the exploration, thanks to the extremely sparse magic restoratives and revives. Definitely no grinding (early Final Fantasy) or training wheels (later Final Fantasy) here - success is driven by careful management of skills, not statistical advantage. It's not an absurdly hard game per se, but every victory feels earned. You've got to give it up for a game with such a neat way of handling random map battles (not gonna spoil it) that doesn't excise them entirely but somehow makes their triviality exciting. 

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Come back tomorrow to see my top picks released in 2013 as well as my overall TOP 3 GAMES OF THE YEAR!!!!!!!!! Will GTAV make a sweep? Super Mario Bros.? Or will it be the underdog Flappy Bird in the top spot? You'll have to wait and see!

What I'm Playing, Junely '13

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

It's pronounced "june-LYE". Because once again we're stuck between months, because I forgot when something ended and then a whole week passed and then it was like oh no my life is flashing before my eyes. It's summer, so new games aren't coming out, especially because a new console generation is on the horizon, but it's not like new games ever stopped me before.

Special Recognition for Starting and Finishing:

Mega Man: Dr. Wily's Revenge (Game Boy / 3DS VC)

Despite Capcom having released up to as many as like I dunno I think six Mega Men on 3DS Virtual Console, only ONE of those is from the Game Boy Mega Man series (which itself contained five unique games). Because this is Capcom we're talking about, so they need to milk stuff they've already released - you know, those NES Mega Man games that were already re-released as a collection on GCN and PS2, then re-re-released on Wii Virtual Console? Where the hell are the fucking Game Boy Mega Mans?! Don't you worry, because I wrote on my Wily's Revenge post-play survey at Club Nintendo that if Nintendo doesn't get on Capcom to release these games, something bad is going to happen. Yes I fill out those surveys. You get 10 coins for it! That's like 1/10th of a free game!

Anyway. Wily's Revenge. Considering that the original NES series teetered on the brink of tolerability, often slipping into shit (MM1 and MM3 in particular), you'd worry that a Game Boy entry would certainly fall on the crap side. I know I did. Surprisingly, though it may be a bit tame, Wily's Revenge is awfully competent and occasionally even surpasses its console brothers with smart design twists. In particular it displays my favorite use of fuzzy blocks to date (to be elucidated in a later article) and one of the cooler boss weapons up to this point in the series, Enker's Reflecto-Shield. The game is short and the levels largely in the class of easy forgettability recognizable from MM1's Bomb and Cut Man stages, but it's a fun taste of Mega Man worthy of a look from fans.

Games Started:

Bad Bots (PC/Steam)

More like Bad Game! Eh, that was a cheap shot. Plus it's not a bad game. So double cheapshot. Basically I'm an asshole. Bad Bots was a relatively minor indie release on Steam that probably isn't benefiting from the hovering Metacritic average of fucking 40-something. It's not exactly innovative, but something this competently made by such a small (single-man) team at a low price-point hardly deserves that kind of derision. It's fun, it's unique to look at, it offers enough linear progression to distinguish itself from the litany of free Flash/mobile games out there, and it's fucking fun. Sorry if side-scrolling twin-stick shooters aren't en vogue anymore - anyone who likes them is sure to like Bad Bots. As is anyone who likes heavily saturated pulp-style scifi artwork. It's definitely not a must-buy, but the demo is worth a try, and if developers like Point 5 saw the same kind of cash flow as garbage-brains like Twisted Pixel and Team Meat, we'd have a much more colorful indie marketplace. Normally I'd complain that the writing is embarrassingly terrible, but it'd be kinda hard for the sole writer - who isn't a native English speaker - to be too embarrassed by his script.

Minecraft: Xbox Edition (what platform do you think?)

Never before has a game pioneered so quickly going from so addictively fun to so forgettably boring. Come on spell-check, your suggested corrections for "forgettably" are "forgettable" and "unforgettably"? How can those both be in the dictionary but "forgettably" isn't? What a mad, mad world we live in. This is like the time I killed that kid.

I'm exaggerating of course. He survived with fourth degree burns covering most of his body. But Minecraft certainly has the fun dynamic of like... those Flash games I played in the student center to kill free periods in high school. Kinda tedious at first, then it gets exciting, then it's just plain awesome, then around the three hour mark it's completely peaked and I move on. What was that one? Defend Your Castle or something? Minecarp is Defend Your Castle for a new generation. A generation where that is by far the most profitable business model in gaming. Could it at least have fucking quests or something? Why not just play with Legos?

See, I'm like a steelworker: I kill what I eat. See, I'm like a hunter gatherer: I kill what I eat. See, I'm like a bricklayer: I kill what I eat. See, see, I'm like a murderer: I kill what I eat. That's my description of Minecraft, and/or the lyrics to "Steelworker". Your call.

Mysterious Dungeon 2: Shiren the Wanderer (SNES)

Broooooooooooooo! Or is he???

If there's one thing I sometimes do, it's follow through on my promises here on this blog. So I played a bit'o roguelike in Chunsoft's original Shiren the Wanderer. Surprisingly, the game is damn fun - there's a gratifying responsiveness to the turn-based real-time action, the randomized floors are just the right size to feel unique but not labyrinthine, and the action comes fast and furious. Tying it all together of course is that one-death-ends-it-all tension that makes every rare reward feel even rarer. Unfortunately, I've now died so many times that I have a hard time reveling in any particular treasure, knowing that just around the corner some random-ass trap is probably gonna take it away from me.

Gradius II: Gofer's Ambition (Turbo-Grafx 16)

Konami riffing on Alien? I refuse to believe it!

The history of Gradius II is a bit odd - I'd actually like to do a feature comparing the NES and Arcade iterations of the game, as they're so completely different that they're essentially different games. What Japan got on the Turbo-Grafx (the US didn't get the game at all) is supposedly a pretty direct arcade port, one that will feel suspiciously familiar to any veteran of Gradius III. While II may lack III's coolest upgrade over the original (and the rest of the series), the customizable weapon sets, it otherwise parallels its graphics, music, and gameplay mechanics. Where the two differ is that Gradius II is really fucking hard. Maybe I'm speaking too soon, but after a few weeks with the game and dozens of runs, I can barely get through level 3. By comparison, I could beat the first five stages of Gradius III basically just by looking at them. II is almost like the Lost Levels of this series. 

Games Finished:

Saints Row The Third (Xbox 360)

Play through all two alternate endings! Experience morality choices like you could never dreamed was true! Man the ending of this game was dumb as hell. I was just excited that they finally gave me the chance to let a member of my "crew" die. Of course the game tried to make that feel super morally ambiguous or something and was all like "AH HOPE IT WAS WERT IT, DAWG", and I was like, hell yeah it was. That bitch was a stupid bitch. She did nothing but bitch and moan the entire game. She extremely deserved to die.

The climactic battle against the main villain is immensely unfun and ill-conceived. See, he's a luchadore, so the only way to defeat him is quick-time events. That's what I said. It's not like it was hard, but I was pretty pissed when the game glitched out and left me wandering around the ring for ten minutes mashing the attack button and thinking I was making progress, only to learn (after giving up and going online) that a QTE had failed to trigger and I had to reload my last save file. Weirdly (or thankfully), this battle isn't the end of the game, being followed by two 'cooldown' missions determined by the aforementioned moral choice. The better of the two sees the player take to Mars for one final confrontation with the villain (hmm... wonder if Volition reused their Mars assets from the Red Faction series...).

My final takeaway from this game: about halfway through, there was a zombie mission, and I thought to myself: for all the mayhem this game touts, how come there's no chainsaw melee weapon? Then at the end of the game, you do get a chainsaw. So good on 'em for including the chainsaw, but a little too late, no?

Saints Row 3 is about the War on Terror... and you play as the terrorists

It's not that strange a premise for a game, I suppose. Then again, it is a strange premise for a comedy sex game. Saints Row: The Third is an unabashedly stupid game, there's no doubt about that. It just doesn't realize quite how stupid it is. And it would be kinda funny to see, for instance, a U.S. Iraq War veteran play the latter half of the game. It wouldn't actually be funny, because the game is so busy making stupid unfunny yolks about how WEIRD sex is and how CRAZY it is to be gay and how COOL it is to shoot someone in the dick that you don't really notice what's going on unless you're the kind of person who stops for a second to say "hey. what's going on?"

It's actually just now that I'm remembering, and this really lends a massive heaping of credence to my theory, that the Red Faction games are overtly about joining a terrorist cell and taking down the military.

I thought it was ill-justified and kind of politically despicable in those games, but hey, that's most video game stories for you. Didn't really bat an eyelash. Sad to see it peddled to teenagers, but smart teenagers will figure out what's going on anyway, and dumb teenagers will be impressioned by something else dumb sooner or later. Why accuse some idiot game devs of being idiots? They made a fun game, they get a pass.

FOR NOW.

The premise of Row 3 is that the Saints are an Ivy League crew club that go a little overboard after winning the World Crew Cup, deciding it's time for them to take over Fake City. I wish that was the premise. It's actually that you're a member of a purple-themed gang, and despite the fact that literally thousands of people are dying left and right in this lightly futuristic open gang war, you get pissed off that your friend dies. It's not clear why. Presumably he was in Saints Row 1 or 2, and your character was a fan of those. So it's time to take it to the Red Gang, who has managed to unite the Blue and Green gangs against you. I'm not making up this color shit. It is pretty literally Power Rangers. Anyway, you have to build up the reputation of Purple Gang from scratch (dunno why, they appear to be some kind of Disney-level mega-corporation with their own department stores and television channels and record labels), such that you can be strong enough to kill Red Gang (sigh, whatever), then you move on to Blue and eventually Green. That's all so preposterous that I kinda liked it. The gangs have goofy themes like cyber-ninjas and luchadore-commandos and it's got an, I dunno, Running Man kinda feel?

At some point Sarah Palin shows up and says "wow, this gang shit is getting out of hand. We need a military crackdown here". I don't know why this had to happen, or why it had to be played as a mockery of right-wing politics, because if gangs were literally patrolling the streets in tanks, the military would be exactly the most sensible and desirable solution. People would be demanding it! It's not like "everything was going just fine until these jarhead assholes showed up!" It was anarchy approaching apocalypse. And that was fine! I was enjoying that! Taking a ridiculously fantastical situation (color-gang wars) and introducing what would be the level-headed and logical result (martial law) ruins the fun - especially if you're going to sit there and act like martial law wasn't the natural resolution. So now we're left with an anarchic organization trying to establish street-level power through violence (player-side Purple Gang) and an invading military force attempting to reimpose order with the declared purpose of reestablishing peace. So the player is Al Qaeda in Baghdad fighting against the US military? That's a little awkward, especially considering the game's hesitance to acknowledge it.

It's funny that now I know I can go to Volition games if I want to play out juvenile terrorist fantasies about wanton murder and oppressing a populace through random acts of destruction and violence. There's apparently a market for that! What disappoints me is that they don't embrace the evil spirit of it all. It would be genuinely harmless fun, completely removed from reality if they just let the fantasy run wild, let it be destruction for destruction's sake. Make the protagonist someone like M. Bison or Carnage. Instead, Volition thinks the player will better be able to connect to nuking an entire city of innocent people if their character seems 'honorable' and the villains seem 'mean'. It's okay to drive a tank over a baby, as long as you're using that tank to shoot at someone who betrayed your best friend (who was also a psychopathic murdering asshole but honor, dude)!

I'm arbitrarily peppering in screenshots here. I have no images to help illustrate my point.

It's certainly a case of show-me-don't-tell-me, where what the characters seem to think is happening is not what is actually happening, and we're apparently supposed to be as ignorant as they are. This creates an irksome disconnect, making it more difficult to enjoy the rampant destruction. If the game is going to ask me to murder hundreds of soldiers whose only sin is trying to stymie the highest domestic death toll since the Civil War, could it at least not patronize me along the way? The "saintly" portrayal of our protagonists as a bunch of comic goofballs "just tryin' to have a good time" undermines my own good-time-rampage, not to mention it gives the game a weird pro-capitalism cultist propaganda vibe (that Red Faction: Guerrilla bore as well). I'm all for, you know, fightin' the man. I don't need society. But I feel like if the DKs had done a video game in 1981 instead of Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, it would have been a bit smarter than this.

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

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

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

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

Special Recognition for Starting and Finishing:

Wario Land II (Game Boy / 3DS VC)

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

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

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

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

Games Started:

Ys: Oath in Felghana (PC)

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

Prepare to be seeing a whole lot more of this.

Saints Row: The Third (Xbox 360)

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

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

Games Finished:

DmC: Devil May Cry (Xbox 360)

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

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

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

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