647 reviews liked by DMCameron99


You're the first to race this track!

You'll be enshrined as the track's creator for all time.

And you've earned 100 coins.

If you want a good frame of reference for how our culture adapts to change, consider that AudioSurf was released a full three years before Spotify came out in the United States. As one of the first independent titles to really use Steam's API on Valve's, at the time, infamously closed off platform, it was considered significant enough to come in a bundle of twelve other independent titles officially endorsed by Valve in 2011, with a fancy TF2 hat to go along with it.

AudioSurf is not a game that could be released today and have the same impact. Case in point: when AudioSurf 2 was released with YouTube functionality and had its already minuscule playerbase disintegrate into double digits when it had to be gutted with no replacement in mid-2018. Music Racer, a less popular alternative priced at only two dollars, was released a month later with YouTube integration. To Audiosurf 2's credit, it managed to maintain a small but dedicated playerbase two years after its launch. To Music Racer's credit, it did ten times that in only fourteen months. If you want further proof that these games aren't sustainable anymore, in January of 2023, almost seven years after its release and my favorite of these games, Riff Racer, shut its doors for good.

As all functionality is tied to online connectivity, you can no longer purchase Riff Racer on Steam. To add insult to injury, without online connectivity, you cannot play any new songs. However, thanks to the efforts of a dedicated individual, Riff Racer is not entirely lost to time. Yet. But the competitive angle is gone for good. From here on out, all scores recorded in the replacement server were scores recorded before the official one turned off.

Racing along the bright neon colors with pulse-pounding music, causing the speed of the bar I'm chasing to outweigh my human capabilities without the ghost of another player to challenge me, Riff Racer begins to feel oddly hollow. But it would be wrong to blame the developers who couldn't afford to keep their servers running. It's the same issue with AudioSurf and its sequel, Music Racer, Beat Hazard, and any other game of this mold. In our current day and age of Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube, TikTok—fuckit, Pandora—who's buying MP3s anymore? The market for that isn't nonexistent. You can still go on Amazon, find a brand new album, and then pay to own a digital copy of it that's not reliant on their servers. But you have to go out of your way to do that (e.g. Amazon forces you to go through their interface for streaming music, and then click on a small button with three bubbles, to even see the option to buy MP3s). The only websites that are marketing themselves on MP3s nowadays are the YouTube download sites not killed by Google, shady Russian ventures only frequented by the desperate, and Bandcamp. As much as I adore Bandcamp, its artists range in recognition from Carpenter Brut to The Skeletones Four. You can't convince me that it's a mainstream site when all of its most popular acts are on other services, and the ones that aren't are niche bands like Battery Operated Orchestra.

Whether or not the shift to streaming has been beneficial largely depends on perspective. From the perspective of an artist, royalties can be a pain in the ass. Spotify is notorious for paying their artists' jack shit, and Apple isn't much better. It's easy to say that the ideal solution would be something like Bandcamp, where you get to stream as much of the music as you like if you're online, but you can only access the album offline if you've paid for it. But that'd be like saying WinRAR's business model has paid dividends in casual markets. As a consumer, it's convenient; you don't have to slap down tons of money for something you may or may not like. But if you're a game developer working around music that the user has control over, I can only imagine the headache. Right now, these kinds of games have to be in an adapt-or-die mentality. The only reason Beat Hazard has had two successors is because it's been willing to change its model to whatever the user is playing on their desktop. This creates the issue that games might run in perpetuity instead of playing out as levels. Between that and having to pay streaming services or face the reality that you're working on something downright ancient, unfortunately, there isn't much of a middle ground.

I liked Riff Racer a lot, and I still do. Playing through the entirety of Jasper Byrne's 2019 album Night with outrun aesthetics is a vibe I didn't know I wanted to feel. And it goes without saying that the visual style, plus the drift-based gameplay loop, makes this perfect for synthwave music and the occasional goofy track like that one from Initial D and that other one from that Fast and Furious movie that makes Enter the Void look like an accurate portrayal of Japan in comparison. I'm sad to say that I can't recommend this experience to you because you are no longer able to buy it. I pity the developers, truly. I want them to be proud of the thing they've created because I think they should. But outside of a fan patch with its own expiration date, they've lost the race. In retrospect, I can see them patting themselves on the back. But it's dead, and unless some act of god intervenes, it's going to stay that way.

Fuck, if they added anime girls to this game, they'd probably have Osu big-bucks by now.

Gris

2018

You can file this in the special filing cabinet of games that I know I played and I know I kinda liked but if I had to explain a single thing about them to you I'd have to excuse myself to go to the bathroom, climb out of the window, and run for my life.

In one of its previews, Hideaki Itsuno was deliberately evasive when asked about why Dragon’s Dogma II’s title screen initially lacks the II, saying only “nothing in this game is unintentional.” You can draw whatever conclusion you like from that, but I think I’ve a different interpretation from most – it’s less a signal that this is a reimagining or a remake or whatever else in disguise than a display of confidence in how well he and his team understand what makes it tick.

As much as I’ll never wrap my head around how they got the first Dragon’s Dogma running on 7th gen hardware (albeit just about), I would’ve said it was impossible not to feel how much more II has going on under the hood in even the briefest, most hasty of encounters if it weren’t being so undersold in this respect. While my favourite addition is that enemies’ individual body parts can now be dragged or shoved to throw them off balance, tying into both this new world’s more angular design and how they can be stunned by banging their head off of its geometry, yours might be something else entirely with how many other new toys there are to play with. One particularly big one’s that you and your pawns can retain access to your standard movesets while clinging to larger enemies if you manage to mantle onto them from the appropriate angle, but you’ve gotta watch out for the newly implemented ragdoll physics while doing so, since the damage received from getting bucked off now varies wildly depending on your position at the time and the nearby environment as a result of them. Successive strikes create new avenues of offence akin to Nioh’s grapples, pressuring you to get as much damage in as you can before letting one loose and taking your target out of its disadvantage state, while also enabling you to keep them in a loop if you’re able to manipulate their stun values well enough. Layers of interaction just keep unravelling further as you play – controlling the arc you throw enemies or objects in, tackling smaller enemies by grabbing them mid-air, corpses or unconscious bodies of bosses now being tangible things you can stand on top of instead of ethereal loot pinatas… I would’ve taken any one of these in isolation. To have them all, plus more, every one being wholly complementary and faithful to the scrambly, dynamic, improvisational core of Dragon’s Dogma’s combat? It’s i n s a n e to me that someone can undergo even a confused few minutes of exposure to any of this and reduce it to “more of the first” or what have you.

Your means of approaching enemies or general scenarios which return from the first game’re further changed by II’s more specialised vocations. Having spent most of my time with Warrior in both titles, I love what’s been done with it in particular. They’ve taken the concept of timing certain skills and applied it to almost every move, anything from your standard swings to its final unlockable skill becoming faster and faster as you time successive inputs correctly – this is only the slow, basic version of the latter and I still feel bad for whatever I batter with it – with chargeable skills now also doubling as a parry for attacks they collide with, similar to DMC5’s clashing mechanic. It’s emblematic of the devs’ approach to vocations in general; Archer’s relatively lacking melee options and litany of flippy, full-on Legolas nonsense encourages keepaway where its four predecessors were all slightly differing flavours of “does everything”, Thief trades access to assault rifle-like bows and invites stubbiness for being able to navigate this world’s much rockier terrain like it’s a platformer, Fighter no longer has to waste skill slots to hit anything slightly above your head and has more versatile means of defence in exchange for melee combat being more punishing in general, etc. It’s to the extent that choosing between any two vocations feels like I’m switching genres, man. In a landscape where people are demonstrably content with having no means of interacting with big monsters other than smacking their ankles, how is even a pretty simple interaction like this not supposed to feel like a game from the future?

On simple interactions, much of this would be lessened if it weren’t for the loss gauge in tandem with the camping system and how these accentuate the sense of adventure which the first game built. The persistent thoughts of “how do I get there?” are retained, but only being able to fully recuperate your health via downtime with the lads and/or ladesses fills every step of the way toward the answer with that much more trepidation, bolstered further by the aforementioned verticality and on the more presentational side of things by how your pawns actually talk to each other now. It leads to some very memorable, emergent experiences which are personal purely to you – one I’m especially fond of involved resting after killing a drake, having my camp ambushed in the middle of the night by knackers who were too high up for me to exercise my k-word pass and having to trek all the way back to Bakbattahl with barely a third of my maximum health as my party continually chattered about how freaky the dark is. I take back the suggestion I made regarding potential changes to the healing system in my review of the first game, because even superfans (or, maybe, especially superfans) can, and do, think too small.

I realise in retrospect that even I, on some level, was wanting certain aspects of Dragon’s Dogma to be like other games instead of taking it on its own merits, something II’s seemingly suffered from all the more with how much gaming has grown since the original’s release, the average player’s tolerance for anything deviating from the norm and, presumably, frame of reference growing ever smaller. Look no further than broad reactions to dragonsplague and its effects (which I won’t spoil) being only the second or third most embarrassing instance of misinformed kneejerk hostility disguised as principled scepticism which enveloped this game’s release to the point you’d swear Todd Howard was attached to it – we want consequences that matter, but not like that! Even if you aren’t onboard with this being the coolest, ballsiest thing an RPG has bothered and will bother to do since before I was born, how can you not at least get a kick out of starting up your own homegrown Dragonsplague Removal Service? You thought you could escape the great spring cleaning, Thomyris, you silly billy? I’m oblivious like you wouldn’t believe, had her wearing an ornate sallet by the time she’d first contracted it and still noticed her glowing red eyes every time, so I’m at a loss as to how it could blindside anybody. It vaguely reminds me of modern reactions to various aspects of the original Fallout; a game which you can reasonably beat in the span of an afternoon, designed to be played with a single hand, somehow commonly seen as unintuitive because it just is, okay? Abandon all delusions of levelheadedness: if a Fallout game with a timer were to release now, the world’s collective sharting would result in something similar to that universe’s Great War or, indeed, Dragon’s Dogma II’s own post-game.

For as many hours as I’ve poured into the Everfall and Bitterblack across two copies of the original, they’re not what I think of when I think of Dragon’s Dogma (or particularly interesting, in the former’s case), which is adventuring in its open world. In that regard, I can’t be convinced that II’s post-game isn’t far more substantial, comparatively rife with monsters either unique or which you’re very unlikely to encounter prior to it, changes to the world’s layout beyond a hole in the ground of one city, its own mechanics (one actually a bit reminiscent of Fallout’s timer), questlines and even setpieces. It’s got a kaiju fight between a Ray Harryhausen love letter and a demonic worm thing which, as of the time of writing, roughly 2% of players have discovered, and instead of being praised for the sheer restraint it must’ve taken to keep something like that so out of the way, it’s chastised for it?

I’m not sure any other game’s ever made me realise how divorced what I want out of games seems to be from the wider populace. So much of this is 1:1 aligned with my tastes that the only thing that feels potentially missing’s the relative lack of electric guitars, but even then I’d be a liar if I told you that Misshapen Eye, the dullahan’s theme, the griffin’s new track, the post-game’s somber piano keys or the true ending’s credits song among others haven’t gotten stuck in my head at some stage anyway or didn’t perfectly complement the action through dynamically changing. It manages this despite clearly not caring about what you or I or anyone else thinks or wants from it. It’s developed a will and conviction all of its own. It’s Dragon’s Dogma, too.

These are my live notes as taken while attempting to play through Altered Beast for the first time:

Huh. This is pretty slow.

The main character sprite is pretty ugly. Why is his head so tiny??

I can see this getting really repetitive

Wait, powering up is just removing clothing?

Okay, he's even more jacked but that just accentuates his already-tiny head

WHOA

Okay this werewolf is AWESOME

What's this lightning guy? Why can't I hit him?

What does he mean "Welcome to your doom?"

WHAT IS THAT

SERIOUSLY WHAT IS THAT

Okay, I get it now, the lame human tinyhead man is a contrast to the awesome werewolf character, it makes you want to transform and you appreciate the werewolf more when you change into him, got it.

Gotta kick a bunch of purple goo so I can be the werewolf again

WHAT

A DRAGON

HOW MANY FORMS ARE IN THIS GAME

These foreground rocks are hiding a LOT of holes

Can I even jump across these??

Okay it's a good thing I'm on NSO with rewind, I would have absolutely blown all my lives trying to figure out how to jump high

These stinging mantis bug guys are horrifying

Okay aaaaaaaand BEAR

BOUNCING BEAR

Is this a snake statue? Is it alive? What am I fighting here?

No seriously, I can't figure out how to damage this thing

Ooooh the bouncing hurts the top of the statue

Okay this next stage seems simple enough

Ooh Tiger! Tiger is good

Skeleton Lava Croc Fetus?

Okay I hate this thing

I hate Skeleton Lava Croc Fetus so much

UGH THAT TOOK SO LONG

You know what, I have barely any life left. Go ahead and kill me, weird Satyrs. I'm out.

This game's level of Jank Difficulty is absolutely miserable, I'm gonna go watch a speedrun now to see how anyone can actually finish this mess.

its a better god of war than gow 2018

I used to think there wasn’t such a thing as ‘the best Tetris’. There are bad Tetris games, of course, but in my eyes all the good ones were equally good, just offering different things for different people. I was wrong. This is the best Tetris.

They should've added at least 5 more years to Yuji Naka's sentence for this godawful game

I can't think of a single new criticism to say about this game that hasn't already been said.

It's just bad.

Cars

2006

I don't even remember this game other than this was the game I played when I dropped my DS on the kitchen floor. Couldn't afford a new one so we had to duck tape thing together. It worked for a while until the top screen went. Okay game.