What I'm Playing, October '14

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

Well my initial push to finish games is looking pretty good.

Special Recognition for Starting and Finishing:

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (Xbox 360)

That took all of five days. It's not the 8-hour playtime that makes Revengeance feel short, it's the swift pull-up halfway through where the earlier multi-tiered levels give way to reused environments, redundant stealth encounters, and sorta insulting stage numbering (one short stage doesn't have a boss, then the next is just a boss, etc.). You basically get 3 full and 4 quarter-stages. Still, I love the action here - it's a Japanese assimilation of the stealth alternating counter-driven style of popular Western games like Arkham Asylum and Assassin's Creed. The weird pacing just makes higher difficulty replays awkward, with the shockingly early climax leaving little to challenge your skills on the back end.

This is the peak of the game's difficulty. It is the Stage 3 boss. In a 7-stage game.

Kid Klown in Crazy Chase (SNES)

This one was done for the already-published Platformer of the Month Club, enjoy.

Games Finished:

Bayonetta (Xbox 360)

Speaking of weird endgame pacing. Bayonetta becomes wildly indulgent in the final act, giving too much time to variety stages (both Space Harrier and Motorcycle Madness), redundant boss reduxes, and fake-out endings. The main thing I like about this game is the bread and butter combat, but for the last two to three hours there basically isn't any. It doesn't help that (at least in Normal mode) bosses are excruciatingly easy, but still tediously long. Recently I've been starting action games on hard mode because why fuck around, but Bayonetta sadly does not permit that and is far, far too easy for any but the most novice players (professional reviewers) on Normal.

In also hurts that the game is a bit churlish with rewarding performance, as the only thing holding me back from platinum level rankings was that I didn't seek out the hidden sub-stages and thus had a bunch of zeroes in my overall score. Here's a bit of personal philosophy: action games should not have hidden sub-stages. Ever. That is explicitly, shamefully bad design.

Bayonetta had some uniquely paced combat, getting almost turn-based with its reliance on time-slowing dodges, so I could see myself playing it again. Still, it's very sandboxy and I think you'd have to be an idiot to rank it with the good stuff like Ninja Gaiden Black and Double Dragon 2.

Crashmo (Nintendo 3DS eShop)

I kinda can't believe I beat this. Technically there are still 20 or so bonus stages to go, but I got the all-important credit roll so I'm happy to call it done. The thing that kept Crashmo alive late-game was the introduction of gigantic puzzles with dozens of pieces that allowed free-form solutions. They probably rank as much easier than the more rigid challenges (at least for me they were), but they were a lot more rewarding to play, allowing me to prove I had learned and could reapply the many specific techniques developed through the game's course.

Street Fighter 2010 (NES / 3DS VC)

Okay, the last level here was insane. Most stages in this game give you 120 seconds to kill one boss. With the same time limit, this level featured three reused (but now harder) bosses and two totally new ones. That's 20 seconds a boss, and these guys have strict patterns that only leave them vulnerable in certain windows. I really had no choice but to cheese it with save states. Oh well. Lotta good bosses here, you can see the Capcom house-style that permeates Mega Man X and Gargoyle's Quest as well.

Super Mario 64 (N64 / Wii VC)

I have a bit of an OCD problem with Super Mario 64. I am really uncomfortable with leaving stars behind, so I end up 100%ing every world before moving on, which leads to a lot of time wasted on levels I don't really like. Still, this game is goddamn genius no matter which way you slice. Level greats include Whomp's Fortress, Lava Lava Lake, Hazy Hazy Maze Cave, Dire Dire Docks, Pirate Bay's Cavern, and Tock Tock Clock. Anti-favorites include: Shifting Shifting Sand Land, Snowman Blowman Land, Tiny Tiny Big World, and Boo House.

The improved resolution Virtual Console port proves that SM64 still looks fantastic

God of War (PS2)

Even back when it was the second or third modern melee action game I'd ever played, I really did not care for God of War. It has these insanely unwelcome "adventure" parts that usually involve mandatory backtracking or puzzles, the camera angles are very annoying (namely because the movement controls are camera-relative), and the combat is soooo repetitive. Sure, it feels nice and squishy, but that only gets you so far after battle #1000 with the same three enemy types and the same two combos that always defeat them. The game sorta tries to find some identity by spreading battles across different arena types (moving floors, small platforms, tiers) but it makes annoying choices that tend to backfire.

Games Started:

The Evil Within (Xbox 360)

Check up on my chapterly coverage for which I am being paid by Capcom to make as many Resident Evil 4 comparisons as humanly possible. In my defense, I see every game through the lens of Resident Evil 4. Or Mega Man X or Ogre Battle 64, as genre applies.

Wave Race 64 (N64 / Wii VC)

The international Commune Podcast game du jour for November, Wave Race is heavy on the waves and light on the races. I enjoy the wave-handling mechanics a lot, it's just that the sparse course selection and 1v1 limitation pretty heavily restrict this as a multiplayer alternative. Compared to this, it's no surprise that the de facto party racer for the eternally ripe N64 has become Star Wars Episode I Racer.

One and Done:

Hyrule Warriors (Wii U)

Just got this for the sake of it, it feels insanely well-polished - at least compared to the "budget" feel common to Dynasty Warrior games. I'll come back and play it for real sometime in the future.

The Firemen (SNES)

Another podcaster, this is a pretty easy top-down shooter that mixes in a little exploration and a timer. It's fun but it is hard to count it as a game-in-progress when the only thing holding me back from beating it is I just haven't played it a second time.

What I'm Playing, September '14

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

Here's a crazy thing I came up with that I probably won't follow through on. Starting now (now being when I had the idea, mid-September) I'm going to have a fixed length queue for games - that is to say, I'm not going to start a new game until I finish one I have in progress. I've listed out at least 120 games I currently have in progress, so it's no big deal. But from now on the Finished/Started lists should be about the same length.

Because of that, I'm adding a new category called One and Done for games I played but have no intention of completing.

By the way, we're now up to date! After two weeks of constant What I'm Playings, there won't be another til the end of October!

Special Recognition for Starting and Finishing:

Azure Striker Gunvolt (Nintendo 3DS)

They^[who?] said Mega Man was dead, but Inti Creates here proved there are still different directions to take the concept for unique gameplay that isn't nearly as redundant as screenshots will make you think.

Actually this screenshot doesn't make it look all that redundant.

Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge (Xbox / Xbox Originals)

One of the best flying game I've ever played, replete with unique enemies and obstacle-filled environments - Pilotwings 64 meets Rogue Squadron. High Road to Revenge never languishes in endless dogfighting, keeping the gameplay mixed up in each mission even as it iterates over the same styles of aerial strikes, escorts, races, and of course dogfights. The game keeps interesting by introducing a more complex setting every couple missions, from the mountainous island of world 1 to a full-on metropolis and finishing with underground caves and ruins. Each style of gameplay takes on a different character dependent on the environment it's set in.

Devil May Cry (PS2)

I'd say Devil May Cry holds up really well, but I never played it back when it originally came out, so all I can say is that were it released today it would still be one of the best action games on the market. In fact, it's particularly refreshing to visit a game that is a.) short (4.5 hours on a first run), b.) mechanically simple, and c.) focused almost entirely on mini-bosses and bosses. The most interesting takeaway for me is that the game feels more like Ninja Gaiden than Devil May Cry 3. While the former goes for environmental variation, wild enemy variety, and challenge through survival, the latter is more about mechanical variation, enemy volume, and challenge through style/score. In fact playing Devil May Cry made me realize Ninja Gaiden is not as original as I originally thought, though that's hardly a bad thing - I only wish there were more action games that took their approach.

Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight (NES / 3DS VC)

If it wasn't for the inappropriate name, I wonder if this Alien Soldier-esque boss rush game wouldn't have a cult following, particularly thanks to its consistently unique approaches driven by variations of enemy movement patterns and environmental properties. The game provides infinite continues, so with save states to keep a session going victory is just a matter of mastering one stage at a time, making it a perfect handheld experience. The controls are on the complex side for an NES game and the end-lag on most moves takes some getting used to, but it's all very precise once you get your bearings and every attack will eventually be revealed to serve some purpose.

Games Finished:

Mario Kart 7 (Nintendo 3DS)

I only had this because it came with my 3DS, but it's hard not to enjoy such a perfect game design, even if it's becoming impossible to tell the difference between new courses and repeats. This time around I was most fond of the SNES courses, as they've benefited the most from mechanical changes in the series - taking the continuous 90-degree turns of Super Rainbow Road as one giant drift is really satisfying and not like anything else in the game.

Games Started:

Dark Cloud 2 (PS2)

This is like a treatise on the subject of crafting, skipping traditional character-based role-playing for two separate systems of item customization. The supporting world-building side-game isn't really a sim (there's no passage of time / interaction of creations) so much as it is another free-form crafting system that lets you play in a sandbox and earn points for making things that look cool/balanced. That is to say, it's more like house decoration in Animal Crossing than city building in Sim City. While it passes its time with dungeon-crawling, at its core this is a game about manipulating numeric systems to accelerate progress. If my post about New Horizons didn't make it clear, I enjoy maximization/minimization problems far more than traditional puzzles, so this really works well for me.

One and Done:

Wizards and Warriors 3 (NES)

Played this for platformer-of-the-week night with Greg L. (possibly an upcoming feature? who's to say?!). Wander around a light-on-content world and find self-contained platforming challenges - WiziWar 3 is what you'd get if you took Wonder Boy 3 and cranked up the size of the hub town and downsized the dungeons to 60-second runs. The "guilds" (dungeons) make for neat obstacle courses that iterate over a handful of themes, but they are so hard to find and brief that the game ends up mostly as bland wandering, far more reminiscent of Ufouria than Castlevania II. If you like exploring without much challenge, you might enjoy this, but it's not too satisfying as a platformer.

Super Smash Bros. Demo (3DS)

Who cuts the options screen out of a demo? The default controls are NES-style instead of SNES-style (weird for a diamond layout like 3DS) and I just want to fix it! Mega Man is pretty cool and the AI is still such a joke that I beat a level 9 computer on my very first try at the game with a character I had never played before and controls that were super annoying. Most importantly, when unleashed from an assist trophy, Knuckle Joe still shouts his trademark "KNUCKLE-EEE!" I only listed this because I'm pretty positive I'm not going to get Smash on 3DS - I'm a series fan but it's too intense a game to play on handhelds and I'm happy sticking to Brawl until whenever it is I buy a Wii U.