sonic team should've stuck to their strengths and sold their games as arcade experiences through and through. nights is a masterpiece on all fronts; an experimental title at an experimental time in sega's life that fits somewhere between the worlds of sonics cd and adventure as far as presentation and game theory.

as said elsewhere its jungian roots and elaborate visuals are ultimately window dressing, but you bet your ass they sell me; i find myself regularly transfixed by the endless dreamscapes of nights' world and the perfect, and i mean PERFECT soundtrack composed by the minds behind several of my favorite sega scores - namely sonic cd and adventure. that's hardly to speak poorly of the gameplay though. i think 'getting' nights is a steep process but that session the game finally clicks for you, and you truly get to experience the feeling of flight and acrobatics in synchronicity with the analog stack, it's a high few other games can offer you. truly one of the most magical experiences i've ever had with a game. and no questions asked, christmas nights is a perfect bow on the present, uber-charming and sweet as it comes.

it's funny - this isn't one i spent time on as a kid, but it was a later discovery for me, and now i think i could probably call this my favorite thing sega's ever put out. that's about as high praise as i can offer.

I'll admit that Nights isn't my favorite game out there that I've played. That being said, its design philosophy screams "Sonic Team". There's something wonderfully dreamlike about the way all the areas and characters are designed. The sound design is excellent, making your actions feel satisfying to chain together in an arcadey manner. Tailor-made for an analog stick, the controls and animations coalesce in a way that actually feels like you're elegantly flying through these stages without a care in the world.

Gameplay's deceptively simple. You fly along a 2D track that runs through a 3D space ("2.5D", if you will). Your goal is to collect 20 orbs, smash open the nightmare capsule, and make it back to the gazebo starting point before the 120 second time limit is up for that lap. The track you travel along changes every lap. You'll fly through rings, fly in a loop to gather objects within said loop, encounter a handful of stage-specific gimmicks, the works. Where the magic of NiGHTS comes into play is learning the layout of a stage, chaining all of your actions together, and doing it efficiently enough to obtain a high score.

One thing I can knock against NiGHTS is that it teaches you jack shit, and expects you to learn a lot from trial and error. The biggest offender in particular is the bosses, which you face off against after the fourth lap of every stage. It can be decently frustrating to run out of time during a boss after finally making it through the stage. The other thing I dislike is how zoomed in the camera is. The game looks pretty great for a 3D Saturn game, but I often found myself zooming past rings or right into obstacles as they suddenly came onscreen.

The game requires you to get at least a "C" rank on a character's respective stages in order to see their ending, and I didn't mind that at all. In fact, I respect it. Trial and error aside, the bar isn't set too high, and the scoring system is sound and satsifying. If I could give any advice, break open the nightmare capsule as soon as possible, but don't return to the gazebo and officially "complete" the lap. Pass above it, and keep going around the same lap as many times as you can in order to get more points. Just don't let the timer hit zero, your run's basically fucked when that happens. The other tip I have is to not worry if you haven't quite met your score requirement by the time you reach the boss; if you know how to beat them fast, your score will be multiplied depending on how much time you have left over, doubling it at max bonus. That A rank may still be within reach!

All in all, NiGHTS is a really great and unique title, and a proud showcase of Sonic Team's passion and creativity. I wrote this review at 4 AM, so I don't really have a big witty quip to end this review on. I'm gonna go to bed and meet the Nightopians now.

Perhaps it is appropriate that Simon’s Quest is a game that is eternally losing. As one of those sequels to a hugely popular, foundational NES game that against common wisdom broke out in an exciting new direction rather than building upon the strongly laid groundwork of its predecessor, it’s been arguably doomed from the start. While reception upon release was largely positive, it fit into the landscape of its day a lot better than it does a retrospective one, and when it became one of the earliest internet punching bags its fate was truly sealed. Even consdering the sort of mild critical evaluation these sorts of games tend to get today, Castlevania II’s seems more muted, probably due to its low excitement factor, low level of challenge but high level of Annoying Tedious Bullshit, and most infamously its pretty-bad-even-by-the-standards-of-the-time localization that makes an already-cryptic game that much more obtuse to muddle through. I thought this game was solid the first time I played it despite these things, but now that I’m replaying it in the context of its status as a sequel to Castlevania, I think those maligned elements are essential to the powerful ludic experience Simon’s Quest offers that’s by far the most potent of the NES trilogy.

Simon Belmont’s got a problem. In the wake of his duel with Dracula in Castlevania (the game, and also, I guess, the location) things should be good, but instead they seem fucked up! The country is still overrun with monsters who become even more aggressive at night, there are weird cultists everywhere, and Simon himself has been afflicted with some sort of Castlevania III Dracula’s Curse, which is slowly killing him! His, and Transylvania’s, only recourse is for Simon to gather the bits and bobs of Dracula’s corpse that remain - claimed by his followers - resummon the vampire, and settle this thing once and for all, again, in another duel, I guess. I am not super clear on why Dracula isn’t dead or why just killing him again will supposedly work out this time I guess Simon just kinda sucks at his job. He’s a vampire hunter not a demonic progenitor of all evil hunter!

Even accounting for like, Gameboy games and Arcade games and ports and shit, Simon’s Quest is the most different that one of these will be probably until Symphony of the night? It’s an open world structure, essentially, with complete freedom of movement in left or right directions from your starting town, gated only by your skill with your whip and your ability to traverse the environment, which expands with your arsenal of skills, magic, and equipment. There are RPG elements that dictate your health pool, hearts act as a currency and subweapons are permanent zelda-like equippables that you select from the pause menu rather than semi-random powerups. Infamously there is a day/night cycle, and night time is significantly more dangerous, doubling enemy power and closing off your access to everyone in all towns, which includes shops and the churches which are the only means of healing in the game. The goal is to discover and explore five haunted mansions, claiming a piece of Dracula at the end of each, gruesome shit like his rib bone or his eyeball, so that you can reenter Castlevania and fuck him up.

What makes Simon’s Quest feel special is the relentless tone the game strikes via all of its combined elements. There is so much less color to the world now than there was in Castlevania. That’s funny, isn’t it? You were fighting for humanity at the gates of hell itself in that game, and surrounded by lush color at all times. Bright oranges, deep greens and blues and reds. Even the stones underground stood strongly contrasted to their waterways, the prison tower vibrated with supernatural malice. In the hills of cursed Transylvania things are brown and gray and earthy but not in a life-supporting way. They are dull, they look faded. The most vibrant color you see in the game is the toxic purple of the corrupted, poisonous marshes that sometimes there is no choice but for Simon to trudge through, one more self-inflicted pain to suffer in his quest not to triumph but to find any ending at all. The ending drives home that Simon's quest is leading him to finality rather than victory and with that in mind every step of the game leads morosely to that thematic endpoint.

Because the land is not the only thing that is cursed – Simon himself suffers now, and the game works to make you feel it. The would-be triumphant hero is mistrusted and feared by the townspeople. Sometimes they lie to him outright and that’s occasionally true even in the original text. People tell him to leave town, he’s scaring people. The single person living alone in the dilapidated castle town outside the ruins of Castlevania beckons him to stay there forever. He is like her, and he belongs there. She can tell. YOU can tell. Despite the fact that his sprite is the same size and nearly the same shape as it was in the first game, Simon is significantly smaller on the screen. There’s no letterboxing anymore, no points or weapon indicators or lives displayed anywhere; the entire screen is dedicated to the world, and it swallows Simon. He is diminished.

There is not NO challenge to be had here but there is nothing resembling the kinds of screens one might find in Castlevanias 1 or 3. It begins to feel like work, like part of the malaise. There are only two bosses in the game prior to Dracula himself and you only HAVE to fight Camilla! You could just walk right by Death if you really felt like it, but he’s an easy kill considering he rewards the game’s best subweapon. Every mansion otherwise has a unique layout and occasionally a unique and usually frustrating (but sometimes cool, finding fake floors with your holy water is sick fuck you) mechanic to them but they are always long and anti-climactic. When you arrive at Castlevania itself for the final confrontation it’s not the game-long, opulent nightmare from Simon’s first visit. It’s a ruin. It’s a gray husk. You don’t climb the iconic towers to the throne room but descend, going a long, long way down the bones of the castle, meeting no resistance. As much as the Curse continues to ravage Transylvania, it is unchecked and unimpressive in the same way Simon is withering and in the same way that Dracula ultimately is, no more threatening than any other boss in the game. The final kicker is that even despite all of this, it is borderline impossible to get the one ending of three where Simon survives the curse. You can’t do it without finishing the game within seven in-game days, that’s like forty-five minutes, basically speedrun times. And so almost every playthrough of this game ends the way it’s supposed to end, the only way that really fits with the vision of the world that’s presented to you across the more realistic 3 to 5 hours you’re going to spend with it: Simon dead, succumbed to the curse even in victory, maybe remembered for his service to his countrymen, maybe not, ambiguously relieved of duty and ambiguously at rest.

Even if it’s not as much a rip-roaring good time in the arcade sense, Simon’s Quest obviously has the same amount of thought and care put into the things it chooses to emphasize as its predecessor does. It’s a more challenging game, not in difficulty but in engagement, asking for more patience and more active synthesis on the player’s part between elements of play and aesthetic and narrative and tone (something that gaming reviewers famously and formally refused to do until like 2012 MAYBE lol). Once I did meet it on that level I found an experience that was enormously rewarding. I already liked this game quite a bit but now it’s one of my very favorites of its era.

PREVIOUSLY: CASTLEVANIA

NEXT TIME: CASTLEVANIA THE ADVENTURE

Not yet at the stage where in-game GPS can be used as a crutch for overly dense or visually monotonous levelling, the world design of San Andreas is all interconnected backstreets and shortcuts, and the artful use of colour and texture to suggest interest or to assist the player in building a mental map of all the landmarks across San Andreas' diverse city. To move through it is to learn it intimately, to belong in it, and to read the space and know which escape route to follow under which circumstances. Every backyard and park and underbridge. The missions carefully ripple out from Grove St, introducing new territories bit by bit, such that the player is still able to connect familiar signs and buildings with new vistas, like stars to a navigator.

Then when it suddenly all becomes too much, the story goes that it's too much too. We're miles away in the country and it's night time and the spaces are far too open and now we're lost because we're in exile. CJ cannot go home. The intricate network of passageways that constitutes Los Santos (where it's always better to move by foot or bicycle) is replaced with bare hills and long, straight highways leading to new nowheres. That which once took hours on foot because it was bustling with life takes minutes by car, and the human textures of the world are lost to a shiny sameness that actively works to deflect player interest. The passage from Grove St is to the Desert of the Real, its veins running cold and efficient with the anonymity of hyperspace.

The emptiness of much of San Andreas outside of Los Santos is testament to its overambition, but this works well for its narrative where CJ must return from the desert back home. It also gives the landscape an air of mystery that has to be actively filled by player imagination, hence the accumulation of community myths concerning ghosts, cryptids, angels, and parallel dimensions. GTA V would attempt to tap into some of these narratives in order to control them, but in San Andreas it's the organic byproduct of players, glitches, and weird landscapes. It's the perfect synthesis of broken and polished gameplay and features, and because of its homely details and manic scope, still one of the biggest feeling games there is.

San Andreas's achievement lies in performing what Rockstar has never managed to do before or since but has flailed for its lifetime to monopolize: the cinematic game. Yet it elides their usual trickery: long, laborious cutscenes with facile gesticulations of composition and montage, acting that mugs the eyes and ears to no particular end or effect, lightweight ideas imposed by the heaviest-handed touch. No, San Andreas chances upon its fertile relationship to cinema by accident, stumbling into a rich moving image tradition and by the vulgarity of its non-intention, dressing itself in those films' aesthetics and arriving at a place only a video game could reach.

In what tradition has Rockstar done it? Rockstar has tried its luck with the gangster film and the Western. Shock of shocks, it makes it with blaxploitation. The linear story of GTA games, often criticized for conflicting with their open world charm, is hardly so linear here, per the rhythms of that tradition. CJ's return to Grove Street and family and friction with corrupt police is interrupted by the betrayal of your annoying friends. After that comma, CJ gets bondage tortured by a psychopath lady in the countryside, torches weed farms, invests in upstanding businesses in Las Vegas, and robs a bank that indirectly leads to the catastrophes of GTA III. Then, with the help of a CIA agent that put you through hell and even worse, flight school, CJ returns to his neighborhood, to the police station where his brother was all this while kept, and upon hearing his traditionalist, slightly ungrateful brother instead chastise his disloyalty to the hood, erupts, "What did the hood ever do for me?" You are supposed to feel that line as though it is a culminating moment in Boyz in the Hood, a powerful, steadily building drama about the troubles of boyz in the hood. But you never really stayed in the hood. You jacked your first bike, did your street crimes for less than a third of the game, and some hours before your reunion with your brother, you infiltrated a military base and jacked their experimental jetpack. I used it to get to the police station faster.

It is at this reunion that something greater is reconciled than CJ and Sweet: CJ and Sweet Sweetback, something that people point to when they feel the "spirit" of the GTA games have been lost following this game. What is unified is the blaxploitation film and the open world game in the one narrative ethos - incredible, explosive, ridiculous distraction with a destiny: family, the hood, police corruption, resilience.

Yet here's the most important part of this case: one would argue - rightly, that San Andreas is not really about these things. I am not saying this is a political (read: politically interesting) game, which may be its most serious divergence from blaxploitation. But that's the crucial, kingmaking difference, what makes one remember and look back with longing. Every Rockstar game afterwards would attempt to deal with gravity, suffering, pain. In their vanity, they once again import film: Heat, High Noon, Rio Bravo, the entire hodgepodge collage. But even at their most ironic, such as Trevor's tirade about torture on the ride to the airport after pulling the shmuck's teeth out, they are deathly sincere about the important ideas they have and more importantly, the projection of the fact that they have important ideas. Not necessarily moralistic, but even at the peaks of satire, always too pointed in the way an accusing index finger or a flippant middle is brandished at the most obvious grotesqueries of modern/frontier life, and about as insightful. But what remains is insecurity. What remains is pointed certainty that video games believe it must negate video games to be serious. What's at this point moving about San Andreas is its stark, lonesome stance athwart all of this, no less as a blockbuster game from a blockbuster studio. Its lightness of feet and mind allow messages to not sound as thudding monologues but resonant echoes, easily drowned out by K-DST, possibly the greatest rock radio station in any video game. That is not passivity; that is confidence, grace, style, fun, and art.

The dreaded storygamer, Youtube analyst, or some unconscious industry poptimist asks, if not a message, though, what is there to hear? San Andreas is not a game of questions but it is a game of one, polyphonic answer. No "morals", no "satire", no thoughts, head empty. Pathos in the close periphery, lethally large dildo in hand, Ballas in view, sunrise in Grove Street, sunset in Mt. Chiliad, guns, muscles, fat, stamina, lung capacity, sex appeal, two number 9s, gang wars, martial arts, katana fight, the Truth, Samuel Jackson is in this, boats, following trains, nosediving jets, girlfriends, hot coffee, it's OOOOG Loc, all we had to do, one, two, three and to the four, ah shit, here we go again.

in the place of a message, music: gaming's most badasssss song.

Throwback 3D Platformer That Sits In The Vague Nostalgia Memory Zone Between N64 and Dreamcast Presentation is a booming genre these last few years and i'm a 3D platformer sicko so i'm having a great time with all these games, but it's especially gratifying when one is just sick as hell? Just knocking it outta the fuckin park? Which is what Lunistice does.

A tight set of short levels, controls just loose enough to demand a little care in your movements but tight enough to never give trouble, gorgeous soft pallet visuals and great tunes that always enhance the tone, we're doing everything right on the surface level.

I think the actual level design is deceptively good, though. You get a lot of skip opportunities and even in my few hours futzing my way through a couple playthroughs it's easy to see where the speed tech will develop here. The gimmicks unique to each level set do a lot to characterize them and the diversity they offer makes them feel distinct more than visually; all my homies hate level 4 (complimentary), this is natural. My favorite detail though, is the enemy placement, which feels innocuous on a first playthrough but once you unlock a second character (after finishing the game once) who doesn't have a triple jump or an attack and who dies in one hit, suddenly the entire geometry of the game is radically transformed. Where before you almost always had a convenient breather between bits of levels, now almost all of those are populated by seeking enemies you can't do anything but run from, and previously simple gaps and platforms are now occupied by guys who exist only to make your margin for error tiny (and it's not like later levels are TERRIBLY generous; Lunistice offers a pleasantly ramping challenge).

I don't think the writing that's here does much for me, kind of a situation where what's here is pretty thin and there's not actually enough of it to evoke much to begin with, but if you engage with all of it you get the rough sketch of a story that does sort of inform what's going on, and I think more importantly is enriched itself by the game that props it up.

I've put a solid five hours into Lunistice so far, having maxed most of the content on one character, a fair bit for a second, and nothing for a third, so I think I could easily squeeze fifteen hours out of it overall. The spark to make my times better and top off my scores hasn't diminished with completion, which usually happens to me, and I think that's a sign of something that's really clicked with me.

During a month-long marathon of streaming bad games to my friends, Battlefield Hardline wormed its way out from a dark, dark, neglected corner of my memory. We'd all collectively forgotten about it, and when I mentioned that it was next up on the docket, everyone was giddy. We knew we were going to be in for a middling, designed-by-committee piece of copaganda garbage; a game about rough cops doing whatever it takes to get their man, tastefully developed and advertised at the same time as the murder of Eric Garner and the subsequent go-nowhere trial of the man who murdered him under the guise of justice. It was a terrible idea from the outset, and it was going to be hilarious. And it was.

Two-thirds of the way through the game, something changes.

The game goes off the rails. Retelling the plot doesn't do the sudden, massive swerve any justice; after going through milquetoast cop procedural cases where people are being extra-judicially executed by our brave heroes on the force, your character is framed, arrested, and shipped to prison for several years. One timeskip later, while being transported to another prison, a drug dealer you busted earlier pulls up to the side of the bus you're in and blows it up with a backpack full of C4. You immediately go rogue, gun your way through a Korean mafia car shop, get kidnapped by trailer park preppers and kill them in a tank showdown, and then storm a Scarface-tier mansion seated in the Miami swamps to kill your corrupt ex-captain. There's a part where you swing on a rope through a penthouse window, faced with several armed goons on police payroll, and order them to freeze before being dragged back out by the ankles to the streets below. You fight an alligator in a quick time event. After you put a bullet in the police captain's head, the player character opens his personal vault and is rewarded with a mountain of gold bars. I want a development documentary on this game more than any other, because I have no idea how or why it was decided to try to make all of these pieces fit together like this. It...works? Kind of? The first two-thirds is complete garbage, but the prison bus exploding is a marked shift towards the game actually being fun, and interesting, and reminding you that this game was made by Visceral, not DICE.

I have a pet theory that everyone at Visceral who worked on this hated it. I don't have any concrete proof to back it up, but there are more than a few circumstances that line up a bit too neatly to discredit it entirely. This was the last thing that Visceral was given to work on before they were shuttered by EA for "under-performing" in sales, infamously being instructed under threat of studio dissolution to sell more copies of Dead Space 3 on launch than the previous two games combined. Studio morale had to have been low in 2015 with EA dangling a sword over their heads. When a character in Battlefield Hardline throws a house party, some henchmen with Xbox controllers in the living room are playing Dead Space 2. The second Dead Space game was four years old at this point, and the third entry had just released. If this was meant to be promotional, why not the newest game? If it was mandated that an ad for a real game needed to be included by the publisher, why not something like FIFA 2016? Dead Space 2, as my theory goes, is the last game that Visceral as a whole was actually proud to have worked on. Stick with me, I've got more.

Pressing continue from the title screen leads into a recap of earlier story events, introduced with the line "Previously, on Hardline". Note the lack of "Battlefield". The game never once calls itself "Battlefield". It seems ashamed of the franchise. The dirty cop strongman garbage with the casually racist supporting cast (three racial jokes at the Cuban-American protagonist's expense in the first minute of gameplay!) gets completely dropped by the third act in favor of the ridiculous 80's B-movie action schlock that happens in the final third of story. The longer the game goes on, the further into development it goes, the closer to Visceral's dissolution it gets — it feels less and less like EA was breathing down their necks. It feels like the publisher gave up, knowing that the studio wouldn't exist a few months after release, and then decided they didn't care enough to monitor everyone who was about to be out of work. And Visceral went all-out with it! It's complete chaos! Why is any of this happening? Who gives a shit? It's so far beyond the garbage that came hours before that it feels like your head is breaching up from beneath dark, cold water and into open air. It's your final reminder of what Visceral was capable of pulling off, right before they got cannibalized by their publisher. It's the last thing they were allowed to make, and it sucks that their legacy gets tarnished by blatant studio meddling on their final two games before they were killed.

Battlefield Hardline is not a good game, but it becomes enough of an oddity to earn a recommendation. It's hardly deserving of scorn. It feels more pitiable than anything else. It's an impotent, flailing narrative with stock FPS gameplay that finds its footing just in time for it to end two hours later. I would have loved to play an independent Visceral's Hardline, before it could be shoved through the filter of DICE's Battlefield and EA's interference; ultimately, the game's narrative that we're left with can only mirror the studio's history and abrupt end. Visceral deserved a swan song. We all got Battlefield Hardline.

After about fifty hours I think I’ve seen enough to conclude that everything I like here is stuff that I can get more fully formed in previous souls games and everything that’s new and unique here is actively subtractive from the experience.

I could write a lot here but this game feels like it’s been discussed to death already and honestly I just want to stop thinking about it.

I’m like 30% of the way through a Dark Souls 1 character on my switch. Might get back to that.

This game really is a time capsule from the 2000s.

This game is pretty much a ps2 game plucked out of time and cleaned up with some nicer graphics, obviously the developers have a lot of reverence for the gungraves of old alot of character comes from it's rough edges; when paired with the amount of passion poured into this it really makes for a charming experience.
My biggest issue with this game is it's too long...
31 stages is kind of ridiculous, that's just over double both of the original gungraves combined.

also where was rocketbilly redcadillac. :(