indigozeal

Over here; I'm not reformatting. Hopefully, I'll be able to write on some of these titles in-depth soon.
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Up here. I have more to say about this later, but I think this is more than enough for now.
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Around the end of last year, I became aware that as much as time as I spent thinking and reading about games, I wasn't really playing them that much - there are so many titles I've been wanting to get around to experiencing one day, but I've instead been opting to consume game content passively. So for 2016, I've decided to try playing one new game a week. Chronicling Retour cut into that goal a bit, but my recent purchase of Capcom Classics Collection Reloaded for $1.99 in a recent PSN sale has tipped the scales in the opposite direction. But it's no use playing games if I don't talk about them, so let's begin to address the review backlog.

Like Alan Wake and Terraria, Bastion has become such a Steam staple that it seems redundant to recount the premise of this fantasy action RPG: you follow a survivor in the wake of an initially-unspecified world-shattering calamity as he finds his way to his culture's last refuge, the titular Bastion, and travels to hotspots among the ruins of the earth collecting power sources that will allow him and the scant other survivors to travel back in time and undo the damage. Besides the third-person narration by a Sam Elliott-alike that details your every move, Bastion distinguishes itself through its terrifically diverse range of weaponry. Your arsenal accommodates a huge number of different movement patterns and attack strategies: you can choose to take the time to draw a bead on your opponent for a devastating single attack, or lob explosives into crowds, or protect your personal space with a continuous trail of HP-eating flame, or - just tons more. Though there's ultimately too much choice for the length of the game and the limited range of situations it throws at you to support, combat is sprightly, you have a number of solid number of challenges to complete with your weapons, and experimenting with the different loadouts and customizable upgrades is addictively fun: I played Bastion all the way to completion over the course of three days, which is an accomplishment in the face of my work schedule and procrastination, let me tell you.

It's unfortunate, then, that the game feels ultimately disposable to me. For one, though the art design is kind of impressive in detail, Bastion in aggregate takes this cluttered rag-and-bone approach and adopts a muddied palette, both of which make its environments feel samey. (Their isometric, aggressively-quadrilateral grid-based design doesn't help; it makes the locales seem as organic and lived-in as graph paper.) The game really doesn't have enough story to support its omnipresent, legend-in-the-making narration, and telling the tale in third person puts you at an emotional remove from the characters, who generally do bupkis anyway. While the variety of enemies is refreshing in the different tactics each foe requires, there are no sweeping changes or unexpected twists in gameplay or the challenges you face, and as mentioned previously, the game's just such a slight, short thing. Bastion just doesn't make a lasting impact - except at the end, in a way it really shouldn't, due to a plot denouement whose implications were not considered by the writers in the slightest.

See, the story focuses on a conflict between the culture that built the Bastion and the Ura, a native people whose visual design is rooted in Japanese culture but who are blatantly modeled after American Indians. (There is pointed exposition about how the ruling powers stole the Ura's frontier land through dishonest treaties to build their railroads, etc.) Though the Ura have been conquered and subjugated, TPTB are antsy about lingering unrest among the Ura and the prospect of another war. So they devise a final solution: a weapon that will exterminate the Ura to prevent any further conflicts. The Ura scientist dragooned into creating the weapon, though, secretly rejiggers it to target the entire population instead of just the Ura - leading to the calamity that depopulated the world.

Eventually, one of the Ura survivors you pick up finds this out and reports back to his brethren, whereupon the rest of the surviving Ura declare war on the Bastion to prevent you from finishing the genocide. Just a big misunderstanding, huh? Later, however, you learn that - ha-ha - they're exactly right, as collecting the world's last power sources to fuel the Bastion is killing the Ura's remaining settlements. But you have to persist, as powering up the Bastion is the only way to go back in time, undo this whole horrible timeline, and save everybody, the Ura included.

OK, so you eventually do fully activate the Bastion, and you reach the end of the game - whereupon, to my puzzlement, it presents you with a choice. The cute female Ura survivor you picked up starts going on about how free & happy she's felt in humanity's sole refuge and how all the moments she really treasures have happened after the breaking of the world and the holocaust of her people - despite the fact that you haven't interacted much at all, and that most of the action in the story has been the player character fighting & Uras dying. Nonetheless, she urges you to forget all this "saving humanity" nonsense and just tool around the cursed earth in your awesome flying fortress with her for the rest of your days. And, instead of fulfilling your mission, you can actually choose to do this. Dumbfounded, I thought, well, no. I didn't commit genocide for nothing here. What are you even talking about?

It turns out, however, that saving the world and averting mass slaughter is the wrong decision. Choosing the "go back in time" ending will unlock the game's New Game Plus mode, whereupon you learn that, ha ha, the calamity can never be averted, just because you can go back in time doesn't mean you can change time, what were you even thinking, you dope. So why were the characters trying to activate the Bastion if they couldn't change anything? Your band includes the engineer who built the Bastion - he knows exactly how it works. The answer: Because the writers wanted to stack the deck toward a trite ending that espouses letting go of your past and FREEDOM - even if that ending inadvertently argues that the game's Native American genocide was totally cool, since it got you a sweet spaceship, so weren't you silly to be so concerned about that whole mass extinction of humanity thing the first time around?

Look, the gameplay's strong enough that I'll eventually check out the studio's follow-up effort, Transistor, but what I'm saying is: maybe you shouldn't draw such close real-life parallels with your genocide if you're arguing that it was really the best thing to have happened and totally sweet.

(Also: Special mention must go to the love interest, who is one of the most token throwaway female game characters I've seen. She's a pretty singer! She cooks badly! She gets kidnapped! Wait, she didn't get kidnapped; she actually ran away so the male lead would come find her and prove how much he loves her! Did they glitch out the part where she says that "Math class is tough"?)

As I am the very last person on Earth to check out Plants vs. Zombies, you probably don't need me to tell you that it's a surprisingly robust tower-defense game where you landscape your gridded lawn with legume-spitting sweet peas, melon-launching catapult vines, and spore-breathing fungi to keep an army of increasingly resilient and mobile zombies from invading your home. Despite the fact that the zombie theme is played-out even beyond the limits of undeath, Plants vs. Zombies has an avuncular Zombies Ate My Neighbors sense of humor & retro aesthetic that, together with the shared emphasis on plants & greenery and the sunshiny art style, neutralizes the game's overdone subject matter - and there's no off-putting gore. I clicked on a Flash version of game for a lark, bought a Steam copy after getting drawn in for eight levels, and played it for 24 hours over the next week-plus. Turns out that as much as zombies love brains, they find your productivity even more delicious.

Despite its plaudits, you'll understand my trepidation toward purchasing Her Story when I learned that the scribe of Shattered Memories was behind the project. Thankfully, actual adults were involved in this production, leading to a considerably more tolerable game. You're set in front of a police database UI with a few interview videos loaded and the word "MURDER" helpfully inputted into the search engine. You're given no initial information beyond that: you have to watch the starting videos, identify possible lines of inquiry, and input keywords you think will be fruitful to bring up more videos and piece events together. It's Googling as a game, a totally unique, intuitive, and instantly engaging approach to gameplay. The hook of piecing together the events and players under investigation, as well as the gradual truth (or something like it), is strikingly compelling.

Now, while the story is indeed several steps up from Shattered Memories, it might not be for everyone, as per this review. (And it is indeed possible to figure out what you might call "the twist" relatively early on in the proceedings, as that couple did - though there's much more to uncover after that regarding whys & wherefores, as well as small character moments to appreciate; it's far from the endgame.) Granted, the more you think about the story after the fact, the dafter it becomes, but in the midst of the gameplay, told in the bits and pieces of the video clips, it's fascinating - and it's sold well in its telling, from a possibly unreliable narrator, by an actress who's just the right degree of authentic (you'll see what I mean) for the job. I hope the developers produce more stories in this vein.

(But, guys: Out of Loreena McKennitt's entire catalogue, you choose to copy her guro transformation filk?)

Unlike the saga of Henry Townshend, the PC puzzle title The Room is all about breaking in instead of breaking out. Namely, you're attempting to break into a series of nesting puzzle boxes inherited from your vanished grandfather that are said to hold at their core the end result of his Lovecraftian experiments into the nature of the universe.

It's very difficult for me to judge the technical performance of The Room, since I played the game on a laptop that's several years old - indeed, I'm grateful that the designers were considerate enough to include a vast variety of display settings to make the game playable on a wide range of machines. Still, I feel safe in saying that the PC controls can be a little finicky - with all the flicking, twisting, turning, and winding of the boxes' control mechanisms (all mimicking real actions with clicking & dragging; no simple button presses here unless there are on-box buttons to be pressed), it's clear this was designed for tablet touch controls. That's a minor drawback, though, one that doesn't significantly interfere with the real treat of The Room: exploring the smart Hepplewhite-come-steampunk design of the boxes, and how they unwind, unfold, and transform themselves to reveal more sinister surprises. The puzzles are good, mostly not too hard, but enough so to provide a sense of accomplishment when solved, and rewarding curiosity and thoroughness - they're at just the right difficulty, and in just the right amounts, to sustain a satisfying yet sprightly playtime. There's an unspoken tension throughout the experience, too: you know, despite your gog-eyed fascination with the parade of neato doohickeys you that unleash, that none of this is going to end well. But you just have to see.

Unfortunately, despite a few potently creepy moments that seem like they're really building to something, you have to reconcile with the fact that there's not any ultimate point or endgame here except "Ha ha, stay tuned for more Room, hombres!" - which you can't, actually, if you're on PC, as only the first game has been ported from mobile & tablet to that platform. Still: The Room has been crafted with as much diabolic care as its boxes and is clearly worth a look for puzzle fans.
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A while back, I posted about an excellent Humble Bundle deal on Neo Geo games: 25 of the system's headliners for $10. I picked it up mainly due to fond memories of the candy-colored shooter Twinkle Star Sprites back in my Gametap days, but I was also curious about the library of an odd system with which I was almost completely unfamiliar.

Part of this is due to how the lion's share of Neo Geo games are fighters, a genre at which I am all thumbs. (The Neo Geo's ultra-hefty price tag back in the day was also a factor.) And, indeed, the Humble Bundle featured a great many fighting games - but it also featured the first three titles in the Metal Slug series, 2D shooters with spectacular sprite work that have produced many an impressive gif on VGJunk (like the one above).

I ran through those three games, one per night, and had great fun. The games are entirely dedicated to spectacle, and spectacle they are: there are so many detailed enemy sprites just bursting with life, huge & tiny & everything in between. There's an emphasis on overwhelming presence, but also a great attention to the finer details, making for a real visual treat. The games in motion also trend toward shock & awe; the Neo Geo's horsepower allows so much on screen at once that the game space is often just an utter pandemonium of bullets and explosions. To add to it all, each individual enemy death is surprisingly - and, to be honest, needlessly - gory; in the thick of the mayhem, though, the blood barely registers. And you get to commandeer a lot of neat-o heavy machine guns and tanks and ROCKET LAWNCHAIRS and fighter jets that produce equally unsubtle hails of bullets and carnage.

All the action at once is a big adrenaline rush, but it handicaps the games somewhat as shooters. Like in Contra, a single hit will kill you, but, as you can gather from above, it's much more difficult here to see from where those hits are coming. As a result, there are sections of the games where it feels like you have no choice but to die constantly. In a way, the difficulty doesn't matter, because the game's in endless-continue arcade mode - but it's a big hit to the flow of the games, to be constantly taken out of the action, if only for a few seconds at a time. I really do wish that they were tilted more to the gameplay side, that getting into a groove had a chance of keeping your high going, that you were allowed to prove yourself in some sort of legitimate challenge - that would provide a satisfying feeling of accomplishment to go along with the constant fireworks. As it is, all you can do is watch the number of continues used in your playthroughs slouch from mid-double digits to low double digits with replays. There's ultimately not much to say about the game - you just sit back, pump A, and watch the show. But it's a show you won't see in any other series.
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Yet more complaining about video games. This time, it's games that I made an earnest attempt to complete last year but where I didn't get past the finish line.

I picked up The Vanishing of Ethan Carter on sale several months ago against promises of a beautiful walking simulator combined with an atmospheric mystery. When I finally got around to playing it this holiday, I discovered that it was a little heavy on the beauty: it's an extraordinarily demanding game specswise, and I had to turn every graphical effect off or to its minimum settings to get the game to run at a blistering 4 frames per second. Turned out that that was only the beginning of the frustrations. First, this is another goddamn game that breaks saving, with no manual saves allowed and checkpoints that are very infrequent, the first coming about an hour and a half into gameplay, leading to my initial 45 minutes going down the drain when I took a break before apparently doing anything the game deemed noteworthy. Second, the game's paths are so poorly-marked that finding anything you're required to find is an exercise in pixel-hunting frustration. Third, the "atmospheric mystery" is more of a "stupid gory horror story" in the vein of The Hills Have Eyes, with the family of the titular vanishee being possessed by a demon that turns them into bloodthirsty psychopaths and the first plot vignette revolving around a murder committed via severing of the victim's legs. Fourth, the ending is so trite and renders what came before it so pointless that the designers were prompted to write an extensive defensive apologia for it. Not that I came close to reaching that ending, though; points 1 to 3 were enough to send me to the internet and see if pushing through all the above aggravations would be worth it. Turns out: definitely not.

Besides the PS & Lunar series, I haven't dabbled much in 16-bit Sega RPGs, so I thought I'd fire up the Sega Genesis Classics Collection I have on Steam and give Wonder Boy in Monster Land a try. I'd seen it on a Giant Bomb Quick Look for some retro collection and was drawn in by its adorable Duplo art & animations. (Your healing fairy friend, for example, will continually whap enemies on the head with her little wand when she's not on Curaga duty.) But there ain't enough of that. The cute elements begin to wane around the halfway point, whereas the gameplay weaknesses are constant: your pathetic little butter knife has a range of about 2 pixels, and you have like zero invincibility frames (and a low health bar, with big leaps in damage from level to level). I eventually wandered away when I reached the ice castle, with whose slippy, slidy floors and rampant enemies the "zero invincibility frames" combines smashingly, let me tell you. I tried using a walkthrough, but even it got confused here. I actually got about 80% of the way through the game, so I might go back, but I'm not chomping at the bit.

I've been playing Legacy of the Wizard even since I was a kid - I even remember the commercial on TV for it. I was charmed by the central idea of an entire family on a quest, with Mom, Dad, son, daughter, and even the family dog (er...monster) pitching in. This was my first real, earnest attempt at it, though - and it apparently is a legendarily difficult game due to its sheer size, as these Nintendo Power counselors will tell you. What deterred me, though, was that the game, in the words of this rather annoying article, is somewhat "poorly programmed." The very last section of the girl's stage depends on making a jump that in essence depends on glitching out the game, as it's not a move that can be made normally. (It took 30 attempts before I got it the first time - and I then lost nigh-instantly to a boss who for this character requires an item that you get in another family member's part of the dungeon.) I went on to the father's stage, but it features these block puzzles with really unreliable and frustrating block-pushing controls. Apparently, Dad's stage can be cheesed by his daughter, so I'll have to try that in the future; the game has interesting ideas, such as the truly versatile sets of powers possessed by the various family members (the "dog," for example, is weak but does not take damage from colliding with his fellow monsters, which allows him to ride them to reach new areas), but for right now, I just want a break.
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Up here. I motored through the remaining portion of the game in one night a few weeks ago. I haven't gotten up the gumption to detail what happened yet because I'm done with the game. It proved itself to be stupid and not worth the trip. It's all over but the eBaying.
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Most reviews of Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows concentrate on what's missing: how John Romero was once attached to the project but was ousted; how his two original characters (a Lancer and a hand-to-hand fighter known as the Tragedian) got cut; how the online multiplayer feature around which this PS2 title was built no longer functions. What is present, though, isn't bad: at the baseline, you've got an effective 3-D conversion of the Gauntlet formula that feels like the classic game (enemy generators, rampaging hordes, considerable emphasis on Needing Food Badly) yet with enough gameplay development (combos & unlockable combat moves; rudimentary stat management; an actual story) to pass for a modern-ish title yet not weigh down the ever-forward impulse on which Gauntlet thrives. There are a few ill-considered decisions, like that boss my fragile elf was forced to beat by running in circles for ten minutes, and some more enemy variety and maybe alternate level exits would have been nice. But the environments - a twilit pirate village with persimmon lamps reminiscent of Baten Kaitos's Nekton; formations of standing stones dotting rolling hills against a sunrise - are more intriguing than they needed to be, and the redesigns of the traditional Gauntlet classes make some striking choices (a robust, muscular wizard; an elf drawn from the LotR movies' Elrond). And there are other interesting aspects, like the Incan touches in the ancient fantasy empire in which the story takes place, or how the designers resolved the quandary of wanting a sexy valkyrie yet not wanting to be sexist by giving none of the characters adequate clothing (in the cutscenes, at least). Perhaps this really wasn't meaty enough to merit $50 when new, but at current prices, it's a quite nice hack-'n'-slash.

A child's pop-up book in game form, Windosill is a neat, short (~2 hours) exploratory game with bright, basic colors & shapes and lots of busybox activities that reward friendly curiosity. The aesthetic exudes a Sesame Street cubism, the atmosphere recalls the best of the "all the world's a toychest" attitude of titles like The Manhole, and the discoveries are satisfying and imaginative. The title's big sticking point is its final screen, a 30-panel game of Memory where each element must be hit in exactly the right order with precise timing. This would've been doable if Windosill had a functioning save system, but this is another one of those games that inexplicably uses Flash cookies, so those not down with Macromedia's data-collection policies are out of luck. Still, bail at the last screen, look up the ending on YouTube, and you've a nice little evening experience.

Can we name a single title where wall-jumping has enriched the gameplay experience? You Have to Win the Game is another one of those Super Meat Boy super-hard-platformer affairs, this time in a spiffy ZX Spectrum shell. The game looks bright & cheerful in its four-color cyan-magenta glory, and it charms with convincingly retro details like each screen having its own name. As per the genre, death is constant but cheap, with saves on nearly every screen and instantaneous respawns, and the design is remarkably thoughtful, in a diabolical way: each pit is placed exactly where you will fall after a failed jump. YHtWtG does successfully balance its frustrations with the sense of accomplishment it gives for much of its length, and to its credit, it seemed like I played, and enjoyed, the game for much longer than the 2-3 hours I actually did. Eventually, though, the repetition takes its toll: you'll finally get by that impossible jump it took you 50 deaths to squeak through...only to learn that (thanks to the placement of locations on the game's Metroidvania map) you have to do it again. Then again. Then again. Then you have to learn to jump all over those goddamn walls. It's to the title's credit that I hung in there till the 80% complete-mark, but after a while: enough is enough.
(Also: The game's ultimate solution is reliant on its audience knowing what rot-13 is, which is not exactly a fair prospect in this day & age.)
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Heads up: My car's rear struts blew, my tax bill was considerably higher than expected, my dog's had vet problems, and my laptop is threatening to off itself. The various problems are getting sorted, but posting might be sporadic for a bit as I deal with the fallout.

In happier news: I finally beat Mega Man 2 tonight. I never owned the NES cartridge, but I rented it a few times shortly after it came out. Even playing on the U.S. cart's slackened difficulty, though, I never beat the thing; I always got stuck at (of course) the Wily stages. Prior to this last run on the Gamecube Mega Man Anniversary Collection, I don't think I'd ever gotten past the boss of the second stage, the living room; I know I never saw the Boobeam Trap.

I'd always thought of 2 as the quintessential Mega Man game in the 2 vs. 3 debate: it has the best music, the best Robot Masters, the best arsenal, and the best variety of stages, and it's the best incarnation of the classic Mega Man aesthetic (and, man, isn't it great how these games still look and sound terrific today?). After playing both 2 and 3 to completion, I still have to come down on the side of 2, but I can see the case for 3 for the first time. 3 is kind of a jumble with its weapons & Robot Masters, but 2 has a couple really frustrating design decisions near the end, where the game demands absolute perfection, or your entire game is shot. The first is the Boobeam Trap. This page in the middle gives a good rundown of the problems, but in (not so) brief: it's a boss that's vulnerable to only one weapon; you cannot waste any shots; and in order to negotiate the room and get yourself in the proper firing positions, you have to use your items with pretty perfect timing. In particular, getting up to the first target requires pixel-perfect deployment of the Item 1 rising platform; if you position it incorrectly horizontally, it'll disappear before you get to where you need to go, and if you don't time your leaps correctly, the platform'll either take off without you or vanish beneath your feet. Furthermore, if you don't deploy the platform correctly immediately upon entering the room, the timing of the boss's homing lasers will knock you off the platform before you get to your destination. You can recover from this, but chances are you'll eat a few hits along the way. Oh, and everything's flickering due to the amount of stuff on screen, so it's difficult to tell what's going on.

In any case: if you mess up too many times with the platforms or just once with firing your weapon, you won't have enough weapon/item energy to complete the fight; you have no choice but to die. Even if you regenerate, however, there's no real way in the level to regenerate your lost weapon/item energy - so, effectively, if you fail in this fight once, your entire game is ruined. (What you're supposed to do, I think, is save the two weapon energy refills you can find at the very beginning of the level for just in case you do fail at your first attempt at the boss - but getting your second chance means that you have to backtrack all the way to the beginning of the level.)

The second big problem is the very last fight, against Wily's alien hologram. It's vulnerable only to Bubble Lead (so that's another weapon you've got to make sure is at near-full at the game's very end) - but the big problem is that it drains 2/3 of your health if it touches you. It's also firing shots at you as it darts around the room, so if you've taken a few hits, one touch is an effective instakill. Now, it's not that difficult to avoid touching the hologram in the fight, or to avoid too many hits from the shots...but it's a debacle when you first encounter the fight, which comes after an 8-boss rush, two final bosses, and a corridor with exceptionally damaging acid traps. It's too much, and it's a big letdown to make it all through that only to lose to an afterthought. (I note that 3 does this "anticlimactic gimmick end boss" thing, too, with its Gamma fight that's vulnerable primarily to Top Spin.)

It's interesting how the Wily stages in 2 basically form one big puzzle, where you have to know not only what weapons & items to use when but what weapons & items to refill when. You want to get past obstacles in fairly good shape (health being a pretty scarce resource itself), but using the easiest option can sometimes land you in trouble later. It's not a matter of brute forcing the levels the first time; it's a matter of becoming intimately familiar with them and figuring out how to ration your resources at every step of the game. You really have to use all of the tools you've accumulated to survive. I respect that - and I would've really liked it, had it not been for the punishing difficulty of the above two fights, particularly Boobeam. ("The haunting threat of Boobeam" would've been a better title for this post.)

Man, that was more words than I expected to expend on that topic. Anyhow, Mega Man 2: classic game, glad it's finally under my belt after over 25 years.
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I just finished Apotheon, that game designed to look like the side of a Greek urn. This sounds like weak praise, but the visuals are the best thing the game has going for it: the stylistic illusion never broke over the 17 hours I played the title, and it makes Apotheon look instantly classical, instantly distinctive - it gives its tale of ancient Greek gods & men this august, timeless feeling that pixels or more lifelike graphics wouldn't. The artists were also very skilled in creating different environments within the style; they're able to evoke locations like a sunlit forest, an overcast seaside town, and a razed, burning village with only a few colors and silhouettes, and the domain of each god is quickly identifiable and in-character.

The game's been labeled as a Metroidvania, but it's not really; Metroidvanias are marked by your character being able to access more areas of the map as they find & unlock movement-based abilities. The upgrades Apotheon hero Nikandreos gets are just stat boosts (and rather menial ones at that). Apotheon's more like a side-scrolling Zelda, with a larger world with optional subquests to discover & complete and gated, self-contained sub-worlds that house your main objectives, which can be tackled, to a certain degree, in any order.

The game's drawn a lot of fire for its controls, which are very...clamory. You have several classes of weapons - melee, ranged, firebombs - and you switch between them by using the analog stick to scroll through your armory via various icons on the lower-right (or, if x360ce isn't working properly, by just going to the inventory screen). Weapons will eventually break - or just be lost, as your character throws freaking everything, even alleged melee weapons - so you can't really get into a rut of relying on one certain weapon type exclusively or finding one hugely powerful ultra-weapon and just maining that; you have to constantly scour battlefields, dead foes, and secret caches for weapons and just make do with what's available. That approach to weaponry is unique & really interesting, and there's a lot of potential depth to combat (with different proficiency levels for different weapon classes, different trajectories for various ranged arms, special abilities like setting an opponent on fire or doing 8x damage if the target is caught unaware), but it's hard to explore, just because encounters are so desperate and the controls are so scattered & cumbersome. Also because, as mentioned, your character just freaking throws everything; I don't think I got into an actual melee fight once in the entire game. (The developer says that his team meant to evoke the desperation and messiness of real combat, and I guess they do, but a bit of fabulism for gameplay's sake wouldn't have hurt here.)

Now, I wasn't controlling the game completely as intended - I was using x360ce to emulate a 360 controller with a PS2 Dualshock, but the analog sticks wouldn't map for some reason, so I didn't have access to this interesting aiming mechanic that seems to give the player a bit of an advantage: if you aim for the head, you'll do more damage; if you aim for the legs, the enemy will collapse, etc. Perhaps, then, it's a bit unfair for me to impugn the game for its combat controls. I can, though, speak up on the platforming, which is a huge pain: the character's too sticky, and his movement is too jittery and imprecise - he's always overrunning his mark. Now, most of the time, this doesn't matter, since there's not a lot of platforming in the game. Where there is a lot of platforming, however, is the final boss battle, which therefore becomes intensely difficult for absolutely the wrong reason. The biggest challenge in the game - I kid you not - was jumping up while under fire onto a couple small platforms, which my character would consistently overrun, or stick to the wrong part prematurely and slide down, or do any number of wrong and horribly catastrophic things from which I was powerless to stop him. Add to this a couple other completely unnecessary control-related frustrations - Nikandreos falling off ladders; Nikandreos spontaneously choosing to put away or just freaking throw away his shield at a stage of the fight where it's absolutely vital; Nikandreos taking his recovery items and, instead of drinking them or using them to repair his armor, electing to throw them at the boss - and the final boss fight, which should have been a satisfyingly titanic struggle, led to John McEnroe levels of "You CANNOT be SERIOUS!!" and other harsher expletives.

(Also, I said I'd lay off weapon-related control complaints, but I didn't much care for how if you run out of ammo or if your weapon breaks mid-battle, Nikandreos will automatically switch to your very best weapon in that class - meaning that he might just start expending those special projectiles you wanted to save for a boss. It'd be nice if you could input a customized weapon hierarchy or something.)

Where the game does triumph is in offering lots of well-thought-out variety in its gameplay scenarios. There's a siege, where you're leading one band of soldiers against another; there's a battle on horseback, if you want (I opted to go on foot, cause horsie can die if it takes too many hits); there's a seafaring bit where you're navigating & exploring a patch of ocean; there's a stage devoid of enemies, where you have to your way through & over nested layers of rotating terrain. Then there's the absolutely fantastic Grand Guignol Agon of Ares, an arena of catacombs couched in rivers of blood where crazed berserkers frantically try to smash each other with stones, pots, and anything they can lay their hands on, all the while shrieking, "Kill...kill...KILL FOR ARES!!" Each of the divine hideouts is appropriately themed and smartly paced at just the right length to be satisfying yet not overstay its welcome. I've played some skimpy indie titles recently, so it's a relief to report that Apotheon is a good, meaty game that doesn't rely on padding for substance.

The portrayal of the gods themselves, though, is spotty. The story is derivative: Zeus is attempting to purge the earth of humanity out of disappointment in their failings, and it's up to the player avatar to wrest control of the world from your sky-father. Though the acting improves considerably in later stages, early on, the gods are all voiced like Saturday morning cartoon villains (though I did like the fluvial demigod who drily observed that he "never did care for the humans, anyway - always urinating in my river"). While the creators know their mythology, and there are some deep cuts like Otus & Ephialtes and the Kourai Khryseai, the game clearly goes for a largely one-sided "corrupt, petulant children" portrayal when it comes to the Olympians. That's not entirely wrong, and there are some interesting portrayals of gods in the game: Persephone gladly surrenders her powers of renewal, as she has grown weary of being separated from her husband for so long every year; an almost survival-horrorish characterization of Apollo during his climactic confrontation effectively paints him as an illuminated but genuinely scary individual, finding fear and darkness in a god personifying pure light. Overall, though, the characterizations are a bit too one-sided for my liking and elide many of the gods' human qualities. (I was intrigued when I learned that Hera was your patron in the game, thinking that we might get a more nuanced portrait of her, but nope.)

Which brings us to my primary issue with Apotheon besides the controls: in many aspects, this is basically just a God of War game. The title shows such imagination and genuine curiosity about ancient Greece & the world of its myths in its art and worldbuilding that I wish it had something greater on its mind than hunting down the gods & killing them. As your list of divine victims grows, shopkeepers cringe in your presence, everyone cries out as to why you're killing their gods, there's an APB out on you and you can't go anywhere without hate-filled eyes watching you and angry threats being issued (though why Zeus doesn't just strike you down flat-out is never addressed). You can also kill innocent passersby with no repercussions, which is de rigeur in too many games nowadays, but disappointing in what in some aspects is trying to be a more thoughtful title - and the shrieking & cowering fear with which the general populace responds to the violence in their midst only intensifies the sense of wrong. The atmosphere got so oppressive that I eventually stopped trying to explore the world altogether, completing only the tasks that would bring me closer to the game's conclusion. The classical era and barbarism go hand in hand, and the Greeks were not known for happy stories, but this is well-worn territory, and I wish it'd been left to the lesser games that generally trod it. There's a lot of quality put into Apotheon, but in the end, I was honestly glad that it was over.
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I took some time these past few days to polish off Resident Evil 2's Leon B scenario. To my surprise, I pretty much (pretty much) motored through the game, once I figured out that I was supposed to, you know, run away from that Tyrant that accosts you at the beginning of the B scenario instead of try to deal with it in any capacity. I was helped by the fact that RE2's "Zapping System" - the idea that each character in the A and B scenarios is performing a different & complementary set of actions through the story, the effects of which you can see from the other end of the plot as it progresses - is kind of bunk. Leon & Claire go through the same sequence of tasks - putting out the fire on the roof, collecting the card-suit keys for the police station, unlocking the clock tower, having their sidekick explore a side area in the sewers that yields additional ammo if she explores an optional side room, having a boss fight interrupt the ride to the laboratory - etc. The only places you see Zapping System effects are a) in the weapons locker, where Claire taking a gun and/or a hip pack will make those items unavailable to Leon later; b) in the police chief's office, where a passage will open up after a certain point in the narrative after Claire would have unlocked it in the A scenario; and c) in the lab, where performing a task that seems fruitless in the A scenario will, with additional rigmarole, provide access to a superweapon in the B scenario. (There's also the bit where Claire clearing out some chopper wreckage in a hallway will allow Leon access to a certain door at a certain point in the story, but that's more a mandatory storyline beat than a Zapping thing.) The two scenarios are so similar that going from one to another is really no different than picking from Jill or Chris at the start of a game of the first RE.

For variety, I tried just blasting every enemy that was a reasonable obstacle in the game with little regard for ammo conservation - as I thought perhaps the game had intended during the first scenario - and it worked out pretty well. The exception was the endgame, the laboratory, where the game does throw some ridiculous ammo sponges at you (three shots from a Magnum for a Licker? Please), which did get me in rather desperate straits at the very end. See, my other big idea was to attempt to go for a reasonable ranking this time, and one of the criteria for doing so is not using any of the superweapons that you get at the end of the game, the ones that take up two inventory slots. (Otherwise, your ranking gets dropped a whole grade level.) This left me reaaallllllly high & dry offensively at the end. Not horribly so, but to the point where I decided to skip exploring a few optional rooms at the end that I knew wouldn't give me ammo. (Granted, I was kind of fed up after trying repeatedly & failing to get through this room packed with a couple of persistent Super-Lickers without eating up almost a whole cartridge of magnum rounds - I eventually relented because I thought I'd have to go back into the room eventually, but I never did, dammit - and after that frustrating experience, I just wanted to get through the rest of the game as quickly as possible.) I came upon the Tyrant with about 20 shotgun shells, nine magnum rounds, and all of *three* handgun bullets, and if I'd actually had to fight him - instead of, you know, running around until someone throws you a rocket launcher, just like the Tyrant fight in the first RE - it would've been bad news.

It was still bad news, actually, since dodging the Tyrant without being able to shoot & momentarily stop him really eats into your health and cut into my herbs considerably. I ultimately had to use a First-Aid Spray instead of herbs during my winning run, which eats into your Ranking Points! And the game pulls a nasty little trick where after the Tyrant fight, you run back to your escape tram only to discover that you have to do one more stupid anticlimactic chore and open this gate outside, where a flash mob of superzombies has just popped up. I actually got killed by this unfair stunt after the first time that I had finally succeeded in dodging the Tyrant, and I was freaking livid.

Anyhow, the upshot of all this is all my avoidance of superweapons in the final level and the frustration it caused was completely for naught, as the game dropped me a level anyhow! See for yourself. Oh, wait; I don't think you can actually see anything with this:

I used this IGN guide to double-check my ranking, and it turns out that I should've gotten a B. Getting dinged for the two-slotted weapon thing is the only explanation. Now, you do have to use that rocket launcher, which is a two-slotted weapon, to finish off the Tyrant, so I shouldn't think that would count against your score, but I did have one shot go awry before I actually hit the Tyrant, so I don't know if that was counted against me - that I took one more shot from a two-slot weapon than necessary and thereby tasted forbidden fruit - or what. I have RE experts looking into this pressing issue as we speak (ETA: RE experts say that the guide is approximate; no one really has an exact handle on the cutoffs for each rank), but for now, I can only grit my teeth. There is no escape for me from survival horror mediocrity!

Random stuff:

- I suppose complaining about characterization to any degree is futile in this game, but there's a big disconnect between Leon's characterization in the opening and the Claire A scenario, where he's a nice, dopily friendly guy, and in the rest of the B scenario, where he's this sarcastic, bossy jerkass.

- For all I've heard about him, Ben Bertolucci was a rather pointless character, wasn't he? I understand he has more to do in the Leon A/Claire B scenario, mind.

- The much-ballyhooed control room security camera scare a big washout. I actually found the media room scares more effective. But this isn't a game that's really trying to be scary. Unfortunately.
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The paperbox dioramas of Lume are adorable, but they belong in a short film; the creators didn't know how to make them into a game. Lume's message about renewable energy is welcome and its story, about a girl returning power to her grandpa's house, is sweet. The puzzles, though, are poorly executed, with a heck of a lot of aggravating trial and error - a matching game with miniscule differences and no feedback; a mapping puzzle with indistinct directions. I can't see the target elementary-school audience working them out, and I can't see their parents being able to help them, either. (I had to use a walkthrough.) Also, saving depends on having flash cookies enabled, so if you're not cool with Macromedia's tracking, you're gonna have to start from scratch every time. Not that that matters, 'cause the game lasts only an hour.
(Incidentally, this was the second time in one year that I discovered a modern game with broken saving. I'll ask again as I did with Terraria: why are we suddenly intent on breaking this extremely basic feature?)

Hello? Hell...o? is a bunch of intriguing gimmicks in search of a story. An RPG Maker horror title initially about a man whose lover has recently died coming home to a haunted apartment and a creepily ringing smartphone, it starts out as something like the text adventure Aisle, where your game is over with a single move, but instead goes on to ape Virtue's Last Reward, where you're required to find bad endings in order to get the information you need to open up paths to good ones. And then you find out that that's not ultimately the case, either - load up the game again past the apparent ending, and you'll experience events from a different vantage point, whereupon the game will reinvent itself around shifting perspectives. Oh, and the start screen eventually integrates itself into the gameplay. All of this sounds more interesting than Hello? Hell...o? actually is, though: after you unwrap and unwrap the various layers of the game, you discover that there really isn't much in its plot box but a bunch of tissue paper. I mean, I can't emphasize enough: there's really almost absolutely nothing to this story. That's a shame - for all the nifty mechanics, there deserved to be some meat on this bone.

As Kyle said in a Run Button video on this title: "Some at Namco woke up and realized that the part that people like about Pac-Man is eating the ghosts and just made a game around eating as many goddamn ghosts as you possibly can." Pac-Man Championship Edition DX takes the Pac-Man framework and makes an entirely new game out of it with the same satisfactions. You careen around a Pac-Man board that reinvents itself every time you eat all the dots & chomp a fruit and that's littered with sleeping ghosts; go past one, and it'll start trailing you around the course, gradually forming one extraordinarily long spectral conga line behind you. You want that though, so that after the board goes through several iterations and you finally get a power pellet, you can turn around and chomp like 50 ghosts at once. DX becomes a game of finding the shortest route through which you can eat all the dots and attract all the ghosts while being careful not to plow into the ever-lengthening ghost train you're leading as you zoom through the curves & loops at increasingly ridiculous speeds. And I haven't even mentioned the game's neon rainbow dance-floor psychedelia. A terrifically smart & satisfying reinvention of the Pac-Man concept, it's a great "short bursts" game, a pleasure to watch & play, and highly addictive. I just wish it lasted longer!
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Kentucky Route Zero reminds me most strongly of the Utena movie: it boasts a painstakingly distinctive & polished art style and looks just terrific, but the thick tangle of compressed metaphors and stylistic affectations gets in the way of its human stories. The game's best chapter is its first, which follows a deliveryman for an antique shop in search of the location of his very last dropoff, which, he keeps being told, is located off the mythical "Route Zero." I enjoy settings that are specific, journeys that don't trot the entire globe like we so often see in videogames but instead explore a single location or culture in depth; while KR0's first chapter has a strong dose of magical realism, it's rooted enough in something resembling the actual Kentucky, and I enjoyed exploring the overgrown Appalachian mountains, driving down sparsely populated country roads, and learning about stuff like coal scrip. There's a real haunting sense of place as you explore out-of-the-way locations along your deliveryman's route - an abandoned church where you hear choir singing outside but discover upon entry that it's just a tape recording playing to an empty audience; a run-down convenience store with indistinct marine creatures swimming in ill-lit, murky tanks - on impulse, the deliveryman plunges his hand in one of the tanks and has a vision. There's life and civilization here in the backcountry, but it exists in lonely pockets and often resists explanation.

Subsequent chapters, though, get way more into outright fantasy, as our protagonists are carried away by giant eagles out of Lord of the Rings, get robot limbs, and visit distribution centers staffed by aliens. These ideas certainly aren't the product of an unimaginative mind (and they have, in some cases, a metaphorical purpose), but they lead the story more and more into abstraction and away from the skancewise human element that made the game's setting so affecting. Kentucky Route Zero's later chapters also have the aggravating tendency to pile on more and more characters and side objectives before the game's finished everything on its plate; as soon as you get absorbed in one storyline, the game shifts gears and says, OK, here's the next shiny thing, drop everything and fixate on this now. I understand that on-the-road stories have an inherent transience in what you see and visit, but this comes off too often in KR0 as just the result of a short attention span, reducing intriguing concepts to passing distractions.

Another aggravation was the nature of choice in the game. Choice systems in videogames come in two general varieties: either the parameters of the universe are set and you're determining your character's actions within them, or you're determining the parameters themselves. KR0 initially seems like the latter type of game: your very first option is to name your dog and establish its gender; later on, you can choose whether your characters previously got lost because they were new to the area or because they had been drinking, etc. You're defining certain parts of who your characters are, not just what they're doing during the timeframe of the game. OK, now, later in KR0, there are a couple junctures where the game makers offer an option to give one of the characters a certain backstory - which I turned down, since it would've weighed on the road story like a leaden curtain. The late third chapter, though, hinges on a "but thou must" non-choice that not only definitively establishes this backstory but cements it as the central plot of the game. It felt like an unnatural intrusion, a betrayal not only of atmosphere but of mechanics: the entirety of KR0's gameplay rests on player choices, on you writing this story (or at least its details) as you go along, but here, the writers abruptly entered the frame to render a good deal of my choices ultimately pointless and Canonically Wrong.

Still, the game looks like nothing else on the market, and there are moments and sights that aren't offered anywhere else. Videogames usually do understatement horribly, but there's an empty scene between the deliveryman and his employer, who is developing dementia, that's excellently understated, a dialogue between two people who know each other well but have nothing left to say to each other, despite desperately wanting it to be otherwise. (The scene is also memorably lit, with pale, strong morning sunlight that casts grey shadows in the foreground.) The game finds a number of original ways to direct its action, from choosing the lyrics to a song to describing the playable characters' actions in one section entirely through chatty secondhand accounts from NPCs. And there's the Zero itself, which looks to be very much like what would happen if the psychedelic continent of Mira from Baten Kaitos had a highway authority. And the game's hallmark building, a gas station shaped like a horse's head, with the structure's underground basement forming the rest of its interred body...there's a lot to like here. I was extremely aggravated during large stretches of Acts II and III, and I suspect I'll be rolling my eyes a good deal moving forward, but I don't want to ding the game too hard for its faults, since while it's a mess at times, it's one of those messes that few other titles would have the audacity to create.

(Bonus: Ever since watching this LP, I have a hard time imagining the game without the male LP partner's voices.)
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I finished Soul Blazer a couple nights ago, and I'm pleased to report that it was pretty good! I'm writing out of order here - I still haven't talked about Terranigma - but I don't think a few paragraphs will go amiss.

The plot concerns a king who sold his subjects' souls to a demon in exchange for gold. (The demon's name is "Deathtoll," and the game's box, rather terrifically, exhorts the player to "make Deathtoll pay.") You're an angel sent down in human form by the god of the land, the Master (the same Master who headlines ActRaiser, in fact), and you're charged with reconstructing & repopulating the land. When you first arrive in a given region, you'll typically find little but a deserted wasteland and an entrance to a dungeon. As you defeat the creatures within the dungeons, however, you'll one by one release the souls of the land's former inhabitants. The soul's return to life & home is illustrated with a satisfying & well-done effect: as a given soul reincarnates, the structures which they knew and inhabitated in life are rebuilt around them - houses are reconstructed starting with the foundation, then with the walls, then with the layers of the roof; the tree where a bird once nested grows & releafs, etc. This video showcases some examples of the process starting a little more than five minutes in. Thus the world also comes back to life as its souls return to it.

You'll note that you're saving not just the souls of people, but souls of animals and even plants as well. Here we find the origins of Terranigma's animism: every soul is important, and every one helps you accomplish your goal, from people who give you information to dogs who sniff out the locations of new items to ivy that you can climb to reach new locations. Soul Blazer has a welcome thoughtfulness regarding the lives of its NPCs: you can peer into the dreams of a dozing tree, for instance, and learn that it yearns to be a bird, flying free & mobile.

Then there's the tale of the widower who, in his loneliness, has taken in a goat that unbeknownst to him is the reincarnation of his wife; your divine avatar (who, being from heaven, can communicate with all God's creatures) learns from the goat that while she can no longer speak with her husband in her current form, she enjoys his company. (I imagine this situation will turn a bit complicated if the man chooses to remarry, but so it goes.) The overall plot isn't as elaborate or thematically focused from beginning to end as Terranigma (and it kind of wastes its very last act on a forgettable & extremely thin damsel-in-distress love-interest plot), but Soul Blazer's investment in the people of its world, how it values them and puts them at center stage, sets its apart - it's a game not of one big story, but of a hundred little ones that are no less important.

It also has a great, humanizing sense of humor.

The action itself's not very complex (battle tactics consist mainly of intuiting where to position yourself for best defense, which is usually some variety of "diagonal"), but it benefits from being breezy & fun. Your larger strategy revolves more around knowing when to go back to town for more items or clues on how to progress, or just to recover. Fortunately, the game is kind again here: it gives you a few bars of health back every time you release a soul, and it seeds the dungeons with special gems that allow you to return to town, which show up with fairly perfect timing. It doesn't take the challenge out of the game, but it keeps the title approachable and user-friendly.

(One very minor sour note I have to mention, though, just in case you end up playing this yourself: the Master's Emblem G is hidden somewhere that's absolutely undiscoverable without a walkthrough.)

The graphics and sound are rather inoffensive yet unremarkable early-SNES fare. There are a good number of imaginative locations, though, like the model town where you fight toy soldiers and go tromping through like Gulliver through Lilliput. The game's not on any absolute best-of-system lists, yet it's well-respected and fondly-remembered in a good many quarters, and I can see why. I logged a little over 13 hours for a completionist playthrough, so if you're looking for a fast-'n'-friendly action RPG to play, you could do far worse than Soul Blazer.
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Cinemassacre's James & Mike Mondays just showcased a neat li'l fan-made Atari 2600 Christmas-themed game called Toyshop Trouble that's well worth a look. You're an elf trying to paint a group of toys running down various conveyor belts, and you have to race from bucket to bucket to paint each toy in its correct color scheme: red for fire trucks, green for mini Godzillas, white for...Star Wars AT-ATs. (Later levels introduce multicolored toys - red & blue rocketships, for example - that require multiple paintbrushings.) You can hold only one color of paintbrush at a time - you have to dash to another bucket to switch colors - and while there's no penalty for painting a toy the wrong color, you're under a pretty tight deadline.

The game's actually pretty difficult - I can get only to December 9th (out of 24 days, natch) currently - but it's fast-paced and fun, and it looks good: the programmers really maximized the limitations of the 2600, making the lo-fi presentation work for them and add to the game's charm. (It's such a kick to see those little AT-ATs come down the conveyor belt.) I doubt more sophisticated graphics could've improved on the big, simple blocks of Christmas toyland color on tap here (though the shading is surprisingly detailed for the system), and gameplaywise, Toyshop Trouble's the type of quick-moving action-puzzler that's the perfect balance of fingers and brain. It's such a sweet thing. You can get the ROM (legally; it's freeware!) on AtariAge; out of the available 2600 emulators, z26 was in my experience the most hassle-free.

(ETA: I've discovered that the OpenGL version of z26 can run at erratic speeds on some modern computers; you're better off downloading the SDL version listed directly below. I discovered that even at "regular" speed on the OpenGL verson, the game was running a bit faster than intended; now, at the proper speed I can now get up to December 15 - yippee!)
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There's a thread at the 1up forums now about indie games and whether they're more sizzle than steak, so to speak - whether too many of them rely too much on high concepts and fall through on execution. Considering my recent experience with The Last Door, I thought I'd make like many of the posters in the thread and take stock of my satisfaction with the indies I've played.

Genuinely enjoyed; these were great: The cooking sim Cook, Serve, Delicious is one of the best games I played in its year, an immensely satisfying combination of planning and quick-hit, fast-fingered gaming with excellent art & sound assets that provide crucial sensory accentuation to the experience. Ib, likewise, is a sweet, imaginative children's horror adventure with a great premise, lovable characters, memorable visuals, genuinely scary moments, and really player-friendly save placement and game length. Puzzle Quest's Bejeweled-RPG mashup was daft yet inspired and addictive, and the game had a good sense of humor. (I haven't beaten its final boss to this day, though.)
I'm getting conflicting info on whether Chime is an indie game - its studio has handled some bigger 360 titles and shovelware but seems to dabble in smaller titles - but it's a sleek & terrific music puzzler nonetheless.

Not entirely successful but interesting: Kentucky Route Zero's artsy ambition and tendency to heap too much on its plate get in the way of it telling its human stories, but it sure is striking visually. Planet Stronghold makes some goofy decisions in a sort-of misguided pursuit of being sexy, but its combat engine did some genuinely interesting & challenging new things, and I took a shine to some of its characters; I'll be playing the sequel. I remember Yume Nikki more fondly as time goes on; it's formulaic in how it's assembled in parts and often too incoherent even for dream logic, but it's unlike anything else out there - it's genuinely surreal. Palette needed some reworking of its script, but I liked the premise and the visuals of the amnesiac protagonist piecing together her shattered memories (with yet-unidentified figures sketched in silhouette like chalk outlines) and trying to string them back into the missing story of her life.
I admired Home's smart commentary on how player freedom often clashes with telling a narrative, even though I gather from other players' experience that some possible routes showcase this theme better than others.

OK: I was obsessed witih Terraria once I finally got around its ridiculous save-eating problem (in short: play it only through the Steam client; do not download it separately), but after I finished with the game, I didn't feel the slightest need to go back to it; it's utterly disposable. The Crooked Man lacks inspiration, though it has solid work put into it. Wizorb's OK if you're using a mouse and arrrgh otherwise. Five Days a Stranger has some good puzzles and Trilby's Notes some deft cutscene direction (and the origin of Slenderman, if you care about that), but I like them and their uglier aspects less as time goes on and I become better-acquainted with their superior inspirations.

Groundbreaking experiments that are important but flawed: Gone Home is an interesting, exhaustive study of how to tell a story through documents and environment, and I like the story - which has really resonated with a lot of people - but my overriding sentiment to the game is still "that was not worth twenty bucks." Dear Esther: that story is a big bunch of hooey, but it did demonstrate, as one GameSpot reviewer put it, how "video games allow for pacing and discovery that would be impossible to reproduce elsewhere" - and those are dang purty caves. I respect what Depression Quest is trying to do, and it's smart in how it plays with game conventions to reproduce the mindset of depression - but it falls down a good bit when it comes to addressing how to treat the illness (byproduct of the designer living in a land of unlimited healthcare, I suppose), and the ridiculously, unrealistically sunshiny best ending makes the whole game ring a bit false.

Didn't work: Neverending Nightmares and The Last Door. Also Desert Nightmare and The Longing Ribbon. All of these are horror games, and all of them share, in different ways, a fatal callousness toward their horrific events. Good horror demands empathy.
Sword & Sworcery is near-entirely a delivery system for geddit-geddit memey humor that's not up my alley. Lone Survivor is too busy trying to elbow the player in her ribs with unsubtle Silent Hill references to notice the gapingly stupid game-killing flaws in its designs; wish it hadn't taken me over three hours to do so.
Hello? Hell...o? assembled a slew of interesting story gimmicks and completely forgot to write a story worth telling with them.
(Continuing from a couple categories above: 7 Days a Stranger and 6 Days a Sacrifice are largely ecch.)

Cannot play due to technical issues: I know Anna got critically drubbed, but I was intrigued by the setting - a dark but smallish and overgrown abandoned building located in a sunlit mountain range. I wanted to see if the designers could use this contrast of dark and light, and the overwhelming presence of nature, to their advantage. The camera just whips around at an utterly unplayable speed, though, and the frame rate is garbage. (My computer just might not be equipped to handle the game, though it's played seemingly more demanding games without a hitch.) I also downloaded the demo for Blueberry Garden a couple nights ago, but something about the character movement makes me nauseous. (I also can't figure out what the heck's going on in the game.)

Conclusions in this experiment:
- Indies are prone to trying too hard to be edgy or memey and thereby forgetting to be good. Horror titles are particularly susceptible to this.
- Many good indie titles, or at least good aspects of indie titles, are born out of coping with limitations (Gone Home: we don't have the budget to animate characters, so let's concentrate on telling a story through documents; Chime: we're blowing most of our budget on song licensing, so let's make sleekness a hallmark of our by-necessity streamlined interface & gameplay).
- The more ambitious and better-funded - or at least most expensive-looking - titles (Dear Esther, Kentucky Route Zero, Gone Home, Neverending Nightmares) often let their ambitions trip them up on the basics of either gameplay or storytelling.
- Across every category, in fact, there are mistakes made that wouldn't make it past the QA process of mainstream ventures (Terraria's lost saves; Lone Survivor's dead ends; Yume Nikki's...well, it's not a mistake, but I don't think anything in Yume Nikki would get through corporate).
- Not all of this experimentation pays off, at least in the game that introduced it, but it gets ideas into the market that wouldn't arrive there any other way. It's heartbreaking when great, original ideas don't deliver, but that's the nature of experimentation - not everything leaps into the marketplace fully-formed, golden & gleaming, like Athena out of Zeus's head.
- The variation in quality in a given gamer's indie game portfolio probably has a lot to do with buying habits, too. The minute barrier to entry presented by Steam-sale bargain prices and RPG Maker free-for-alls means that the average player is willing to take a good deal more risk and try stuff that wouldn't get by their purchase-vetting process normally. I didn't like Desert Nightmare at all, but I wouldn't have given it a second glance if it weren't free in the first place.
- Where indie games seem to succeed, mostly, is in introducing the market and audience to new ideas, which certainly isn't a bad thing. And, hey - at least in my experience, I've beaten Sturgeon's Law, at least. I can't say indie games are doing much worse than mainstream commercial titles for me this year (*coughcoughChronoCrossSeikenDensetsu3LegendofManacoughcough**).

My, those conclusions were original and illuminating! Most assuredly, they were worth all that rambling!
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I bought The Last Door from $5 on Steam hoping for an atmospheric Lovecraftian pixel-art adventure game. I got a game that forces you to make a character go through every painstaking motion of hanging himself (gathering the rope, climbing a chair, hanging the rope over a rafter, tying a noose, watching character clutch helplessly at his throat as he chokes to death) in its very first section, which blares LOOK AT ME LOOK AT HOW FUCKING EDGY I'M BEING with all the subtlety of an elephant. It also has a protagonist who has to be laboriously yet ever-so-gently prodded to take usable items (absolutely refusing to do so on the first click) and who moves at a speed that recalls that Evil Tim Castlevania 64 LP line about being so slow you're mocked by layers of sedimentary rock. Then there's the puzzle where you pick up a dying, bloody, nearly-pecked-to-death crow, its anguished cries echoing throughout the soundtrack all the time your crazy fucking protagonist has it in his inventory, and "end its suffering" by putting it in a cat food bowl and letting it be further mauled and ripped apart by the household feline.

Then I hit the Options out of extraordinarily ill-advised curiosity and discovered four short playable side-stories. I chose "Wanderer in the Fog," which lets you play as a Dr. Kaufmann interviewing a patient who dreamed of being "trapped in the fog" in a "land that loves silence," and who proves her story's veracity by producing a tarot card, WHICH WAS THE SAME CARD FROM HER DREAM, and on the card is FUCKING PYRAMID HEAD.

So it's back to Soul Blazer! It's the game that keeps on giving!

baa

That's not the protagonist speaking.
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The last Castlevania I played before Circle of the Moon was Harmony of Dissonance - which is convenient, as Dissonance is the next Metroidvania in the series chronologically. Dissonance makes a good point of comparison to Circle of the Moon in other aspects, because they're opposite ends of a spectrum: while Dissonance largely hews to traditional Symphony baroque excess, with its fancy-boy protagonist and bevy of loot and wealth of screen-clearing gee-whiz item crashes & spells, Circle is far more spartan: you will take your standard five Belmont subweapons and traditional Castlevania levels and absolutely minimal story and like it, thank you. Also - crucially - while Dissonance is stupid easy, Circle is stupid hard. I mean STUPID hard.

Part of this has to do with issues in the execution of the classic Castlevania style. For one, Nathan's whip is pixel-thin. It's a wet noodle, and it's hard to target enemies, because your weapon has such a narrow hitbox. For another, Nathan has ridiculous knockback. It's at least half the screen. You can imagine the fun to which this led in Circle's version of the clock tower. It also makes just plain progressing through the castle a huge slog, considering the sheer distance you're sent back (and down, through gaps in platforms) for getting hit; to have such ridiculously overblown punishment for failure is extraordinarily patience-trying. While I respect the game for trying to inject a good helping of toughness back in the franchise, Circle's difficulty isn't...organic, like it is in the best of the level-based games. It's dependent on cheaply unbalanced numbers.

But back to that in a minute. Circle's mission, seemingly, is to marry Symphony of the Night's then-new style of explorative gameplay to the franchise's old-school roots, with a limited moveset and at-times punishing difficulty. I respect the attempt, but I can see why Castlevania ultimately went the other route. The lack of neat stuff in Circle, be it from a mechanical or audiovisual perspective, is a letdown. Loot in Metroidvanias is a reward for exploration: you see cool stuff and get more neat toys to play around with if you poke around the castle instead of blazing straight through, even if said stuff & toys are ultimately not very useful. In Circle, on the other hand, you'll just get one of three bog-standard (and very meager) stat increases from discovering new areas (through whipping walls, which here yield short secret passages instead of the traditional Belmont wall meat). It's disappointing to find a hidden path, only to be rewarded at the end with another dinky 5-point life/magic/heart pickup.

Now, Circle has a tarot system that should provide for some fun experimentation - you have a series of primary cards and a series of secondary cards that you get from random drops, and each combination of primary with secondary yields a different effect - bathing your whip in flame, or changing it into a thorny sword that unleashes a torrent of rose petals with every swing, or giving Nathan immunity against poisoning, etc. You're not told, though, what the effect of each combination is until the character actually makes use of it in-game, and while some of the effects are self-evident (the weapon augmentations, for instance), in some cases, they're not so apparent (with the status immunities, you have to be actually hit by the status-inflicting attack before you're learn you're now immune).

The problem, of course, is the goddamn difficulty. While the tarot effects are neat, you're allowed to activate only one effect at a time. I clung like grim death to the "increase damage by 25%" one, because otherwise, I would've had no chance of surviving in most of the game's areas, particularly later on. Circle has too many overpowered enemies who are ridiculous controller-throwing threats. There's this waterway area populated by knights with ice magic who, when you first encounter them, will take off 9/10 of your health and freeze you long enough to ensure they land that finishing blow - meaning, essentially, that Circle is the first Castlevania to feature an area with all one-hit kills. There's a good number of miniboss-type enemies who have significantly stronger attacks and can't really be run past effectively but who are big health drains to fight. (One of these, in fact, lurks between the next-to-last boss room and the nearest-yet-not-very-nearby save room, ensuring I had to refight that boss at least three times despite defeating him each time because I'd get wrecked post-fight by the miniboss before I could make it back to save.) Then there's this demon miniboss who summons this ice asteroid storm that covers like 75% of the screen (with the remaining 25% broken up into little tiny crevices), which then sweeps across the screen diagonally, making evasion impossible. Combined with the knockback and the falling and everything else, it's just so, so...well, I keep returning to the word ridiculous, but that sums it up; no one on the dev team cared whether or not these threats were survivable.

The easy ("easy") way out of all of the bruising combat is to grind levels. Sometimes, there's nothing else you can do; there were a couple times where I'd run into a new area and discover that I was doing only 1 damage to everything, and final-stage Dracula fight more or less requires you beforehand to go kill grunts for 45 minutes or so. This seems to suggest that I was traveling through the game underleveled, but I'm not a speedrunner by any means - I like to take my time and explore, which usually results in me being overleveled - and I didn't have any inordinate problems with the bosses (the bosses, mind you, not the regular enemies) for three-quarters of the game. Circle is too often just unbalanced. While I can understand that RPG elements are still kind of new to the series and their implementation isn't going to be perfect, the blatant stat walls are aggravating and, taken with the other cheap gameplay mechanics, make the game reek of a certain type of laziness.

The game's artistic aspects gravitate toward being at the very least serviceable but certainly not the focus of the production. In another version of Circle's back-to-basics aesthetic, most of its soundtrack is taken from previous games, which isn't bad - it has a snazzy rendition of "Vampire Killer," a version of "Clockwork" that goes in an interesting, more modern direction, and a couple welcome deep cuts like CV3's "Nightmare" and Bloodlines' "The Sinking Old Sanctuary" (Circle deserves credit for rescuing the latter from obscurity; no one cared about Bloodlines till Portrait of Ruin). I wish the game had more original tunes, though. It does, perhaps, have one of the better-looking end bosses in the form of Xenomorph Rocket Sled Dracula up there, (and, strategywise, even after you beat the grinding game, he does require you to think a bit to figure out how to counter his various moves, which is welcome). Though the game is otherwise wholly visually unremarkable - save for the fact that it gives Dracula a treasury with giant piles of gold coins & jewels & crowns & stuff, which Dissonance, despite having a specific Treasury level, failed to do - I did kind of like its atypical palette of off, muted shades of blue, green, & grey to match its hero. Not that the hero, or anyone else, is remarkable in any other way: the kidnapped-mentor story is, like I said at the start, serviceable in that NES-manual sort of way, but after Symphony and even, God help us, Castlevania 64, we expect a little more in the plot department.

But I expected more in the combat, too, and, welp.
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Every post I have on my to-do list is a huge write-up at this point, so I thought I'd just run down quick capsulated thoughts on the games I've played but not documented over these past few months.

Silent Hill 4: This is still going to be my second-favorite Silent Hill, and I like a lot of what it attempts and its "new" (compared to SH1-3) spins on the series' journey-of-the-mind psychodrama that still feel of a piece with what came before. It blows a good deal of what it's attempting to do both gameplaywise and thematically, however, with two poor decisions in the second half: a) interlacing its potentially interesting gameplay mechanics into this punishing and utterly unrewarding web where there's only one way to do a series of very difficult tasks and any deviation completely blows your game, or at least your chance at a good ending; and b) dropping the ball after Walter Sullivan's interesting first-half characterization, instead opting to switch back and forth like a light switch between his malevolent side and his human side instead of having both exist concurrently. The game has some superb ideas, and all the pieces are in place for a terrific symbiosis of gameplay and story, but it fails to sort out the last remaining unresolved issues with its approaches (and they are solvable; the finish line is right in sight, which makes the game's failure to go those last few steps such a heartbreaker). As a result, it stops short of its goals and fails to deliver fully on its ideas - but, again, those ideas are strong enough for it to merit a good deal of esteem.

Seiken Densetsu 3: I think the people overseeing the Mana series got it into their heads at some point that RPGs have to have a lot of numbers and stat screens and folderol in order to be respectable, and that the more buffers between the player and the action, the more complex and intellectually challenging the game is. Secret of Mana works in great part because it's great fun just to run around and hammer on the goddamn buttons, and Seiken Densetsu 3 in great part doesn't because the game won't let you run around and hammer on the goddamn buttons. It has this horrible automatic-blocking and repositioning system where your characters won't respond to your commands even half the time (in fact, at one point, I counted that the Amazon was acting on only one out of nine of my button presses), and not only does it make the game not fun, it makes it unnecessarily difficult due to how the characters will move themselves around and get themselves into problematic positions due to garbage A.I. commands, requiring you to keep an eye on them at all times - which is an issue when there are three separate characters to babysit. Even your main character can get utterly wrecked if you switch over to a backup chara for a few seconds to do some healing or spellcasting. Add in a gratuitously woe-choked main story, and...well, I just saw no reason to continue halfway through.

Legend of Mana: This could've been one of my favorite games, with its gorgeous 2D hand-drawn art style and fairytale pop-up-book world. Alas: a) the combat is very shallow, easy, and unsatisfying, yet, in a continuation of SD3's woebegotten design philosophy, it's very stop-and-start and drawn-out due to the extensively worthless stat reports the game forces you to open up and check and close at the end of each little skirmish, and b) despite a perfectly amiable anthology-style storyline following the day-to-day adventures and tribulations of a bunch of creative, vibrantly-designed fairytale characters, the game forces you to finish one of three "central" storylines bolted onto the proceedings in order to finish, and they are all utter misery-porn dreck with unlikable characters, no-win dilemmas, and unsatisfying resolutions.

Castlevania: Circle of the Moon: Blows an interesting elemental+special-attack combo mechanic due to absolutely ridiculous difficulty, and I've been through that Axe Knight hallway in Stage 5 of the first game.

Terranigma: I recall the opening to Roger Ebert's review of Joe vs. the Volcano where he "realized a wondrous thing: I had not seen this movie before. Most movies, I have seen before. Most movies, you have seen before. Most movies are constructed out of bits and pieces of other movies, like little engines built from cinematic Erector sets." In its first few hours, Terranigma is refreshingly, arrestingly original, and the bulk of what follows, though colored a bit more by RPG conventions, continues in that vein. To paraphrase from further on in Ebert's review: it is not an entirely successful game (though it succeeds way more than it stumbles), but it is new and fresh and not shy of taking chances. It's in contention for the best action RPG on the SNES, and it has perhaps the most poignant ending to a game I've seen.

Chrono Cross: Continued to have absolutely no plot in its first half, then switched over to a totally nonsensical perspective-switch for its second. It's kind of stunning how ineptly the story is written and told in this game. It'd be worth breaking down and studying the myriad ways the narrative or lack thereof went wrong, and how the writers might have come to the conclusions and made the choices they did. It's a breathtaking failure.

Soul Blazer: Pretty fun so far! The combat system is limited (at least in my early going) but breezily fun, and it has that winningly humanistic & charmingly animistic touch that Terranigma did.
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It's basically another iteration on The Twist, and while it's not quite as egregious as Gods Will Be Watching - it actually has something to say, for one, even though that something is just a slightly different variation on "you shouldn't be playing this game in the first place" - I'm still vaguely but piquantly dissatisfied with it, not only for that but for some other reason. The essays you unlock after you get the true ending go on about how the game's a response to GamerGate, and while I was initially going to object to that claim, the upshot of the work is that "people are more important than games," which is exactly what all those defending or dismissing the harassment campaigns in service of an allegedly higher cause fail to grasp. But the game - and while I'm wary of levying this charge considering how often in recent weeks it's been unfairly flung against genuinely worthwhile articles and viewpoints, it's true in this case - is acutely histrionic in how it trades in self-sabotaging absolutes. It talks about how games are "creating culture" and how it's good to have "games about more things...by more people," and yet it portrays games literally as these horrible monsters who enslave all who come in contact with them, shutting their victims off from a bright and ever-welcoming world of friendship and love. It wants to use the benefits of the medium to communicate its message, yet it also wants to end that medium due to the danger it supposedly unilaterally presents. It has a big dramatic climax that screams to all those in gaming's alleged thrall that we are here! We are here for you! We can rescue you unfortunate, benighted souls from your emotional isolation! And, dude, you're not here. You're a pretentious, self-absorbed git with a keyboard God knows how many miles away. The creator links to all these essays about how gaming provides an avenue for agency for those who feel powerless, how those people lack a connection with the common culture, and yet...he doesn't get it, on some level. He doesn't get that not everyone who plays games has "the same impulses as a suicide bomber," and even with those stuck in his Reefer Madness-level worst-case scenario of utter dependence on games for emotional fulfillment, he doesn't get how sometimes those support structures he assumes to be omnipresent in real life just aren't there. The game pretends it understands but has no real understanding of the situations it wants to address. It's this aggressively condescending yet kind of dunderheaded thing that sabotages any useful points it can make.

The other thing is that author is completely full of himself in his closing thoughts, both in substance and verbiage. "The abysm of my 4chan days." "The idiosyncratic haunted house that functions as my mind." They're the true horror that lies at the end of the game.
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I posted a full review of Neverending Nightmares, the Edward Gorey-esque game about which I complained yesterday. Warning: contains the word "unhealthily."
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Entries tagged with reviews but not really: games

Looking back at 2016 games

NightCry review done, at least.

Short reviews, greatest hits edition

Metal Slug.

Short reviews, I Couldn't edition

So I posted a review of Shattered Memories.

Short reviews, back to basics edition

Everything is broken and on fire, so let's talk Mega Man 2.

Kill...KILL...KILL FOR ARES!!

Resident Evil 2, Leon B

Short reviews, little worlds edition

On Kentucky Route Zero

You have to admit, that's a great tagline.

Nothing says Christmas like Atari.

Indie games: Blah blah blah blah, BUT blah blah blah blah...

Serves me right for buying a horror game before Christmas month.

Actually, "extraordinarily patience-trying" sums up a good deal of the game.

Upcoming post spoilers

About that uncle who works at Nintendo game

Follow-up on the previous entry