What I'm Playing, November '14

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

Looks like Christmas has come early this year.

Special Recognition for Starting and Finishing:

Gargoyle's Quest II (NES / 3DS VC)

This is your pretty predictable midpoint for the Firebrand series, though as the name implies, it sits closer to Gargoyle's Quest than the more exploration-heavy Demon's Crest. Emphasis on boss fights is cranked up, as is skill selection, but the game is still a matter of linear platforming levels laid out on a linear RPG over-world.

The only way to beat a gargoyle is to be a gargoyle.

Sadly, that wraps up this series for me. I highly recommend the latter two games, and to anyone wanting more, the original works too. In fact I'm not sure it is all that sad - the games pretty cleanly ran the gamut of what you can do with Firebrand mechanics in a Metroid-meets-JRPG setting. It's not like many franchises get too great after the third entry without raising the question "what does this have to do with the series?" (e.g. Resident Evil 4). I'm not exactly grateful for the existence of Mega Mans X4-X8.

Mighty Gunvolt (3DS freeShop)

This half-game came for free with Azure Striker Gunvolt so I can't complain too seriously, but man does this feel like a half-game that came as a free pack-in bonus. The mechanics are Mega Man-lite (no weapon selection or power-ups), the gimmicks are directly imitated from ASG, and the level layouts are boring verging on trite. Every jump is painless, every enemy isolated to the point where there is only one supremely obvious solution to every conflict: wait til they shoot, jump, then shoot back. The boss fights are the best part, but only two are original (the rest are repeats from ASG). It's fun to see the Gunvolt characters rendered in NES style, but this is a demo reel, not a game.

Games Finished:

Wave Race 64 (N64 / Wii VC)

Still like the physics, still don't know what to do with the game. Perfecting time trials is a bit of fun and eliminates the arbitrary nature of the main competition. But it's so short on content. The racers aren't different enough or the courses dynamic enough that it feels worth playing through with everyone. I kinda feel like I'm already a pro.

Red Dead Redemption (Xbox 360)

Can you say decompression? This game runs for about 15 hours past the climax, introducing a late game new-final-boss and then a huge denouement that returns to the basic herding and delivery tasks of the early chapters. The closest thing Redemption finds to a gameplay identity is the horse-riding, so it's a shame that so many horseback missions take the identical form of riding on a road while packs of enemies give chase. Herding cattle, rustling horses, and racing made the most use of varied and technical (but still very basic) skills, allowing the game to at least feel like something. Unfortunately those were not supremely fun activities, offering little payoff for challenge, so the game mostly gets by on the occasionally open-ended cover shooting.

Dueling is a great idea for building variety around shooting skills. Some greater depth built around weapon selection or enemy AI could've really sold this as more than a shallow minigame... alas.

There was one neat thing about cover shooters that occurred to me while playing Red Dead. Generally I hate any type of AI companions in a shooting game, as they add an element of unpredictability and don't let me turtle like I like to. Many such games (Gears of War, Spec Ops, Halo) use a regenerating health system that means if I take some hits I end up taking cover to recover and then my allies get all the kills. But that actually makes sense in providing a risk/reward challenge for the player: instead of pressure coming from depleting health or ammo reserves, the game creates pressure by gradually eliminating targets. Since getting to shoot guys is more important to me than survival, the impulse to push on and play aggressively is established through "helpful" allies.

This systems rewards skill without punishing lack of skill, adapting the gameplay to all levels of players. At the same time, because both the skilled and unskilled player will survive and complete the game, there is no direct feedback on how they're doing. Thus "helpful" allies would be best supplemented with a ranking/scoring system to fill in that missing info. Of course, Redemption is woefully lacking in any feedback on performance, being a forerunning member of the "games as cinema" rather than "games as games" school.

Spider-Man: Web of Shadows (Xbox 360)

This one had some good ideas not deserving of general comic book game skepticism. Entirely airborne (but still gravity-bound) combat is very cool, making maintaining air a key factor in combos. In a way, instead of jumping to platform, you're punching to platform.

Throughout the open world, hundreds of collectibles are placed in obvious but hard to reach locations to create swingforming challenges. The city evolves as the game progresses, incorporating new enemies and random events in each chapter, but the architecture remains static.

This game could've legitimized Spider-Man the same way Arkham Asylum did Batman. Unfortunately, loose controls, an asinine voice cast, and lazy writing nip that aspiration in the bud. The game's targeting and camera does not work nearly as well as it should, so pulling off a seamless combo generally requires luck or reliance on a small handful of long-range attacks. Even the swinging controls get hairy, with too many state-specific functions mapped to the right trigger. The controls can seem to lag or misread at times when the game doesn't yet register Spider-Man in the correct state to do a particular move.

Also, in the final two chapters the framerate gets awful (like 10fps swinging through the city). Kinda hard to excuse. 

Games Started:

Harvest Moon 2 (Game Boy Color / 3DS VC)

Never played a Harvest Moon proper - as a young lad I was never interested in games about farming and by the time I was an older lad Natsume had picked up on my young lad action needs and compensated with Rune Factory. But the Rune Factory series got real bad real fast when opaque story triggers (plant X flower on X square and water it at XPM on X day of the week) and awkward side systems (Runeys) became fundamental to the series. So, being more amenable to boring stuff these days, I decided it was time to turn back.

There was not a single Harvest Moon 2 screenshot on Google that depicted an actual field of crops

Harvest Moon 2 uses a very simple farming system with just a few crops and animals, but it also makes just harvesting a much bigger hassle than in Rune Factory. There's a lot of repetitive action picking every single crop individually and running back and forth from the field to the sale box. It's that laborious cycle moreso than profit margins that pushes me to optimize my field layout/harvest cycle. Maybe if it was too fun to water every square there wouldn't be any motivation to plant strategically.

One and Done:

Super Time Force (Xbox 360)

I played a demo for this game. The rewind-time mechanic that allows you to duplicate your character actually feels like a turn based orders system, like the alternating action of Valkyria Chronicles, Eternal Sonata, or Quest 64. On the "to buy" list.

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.