JohnHarrelson
2023
Inessential.
Despite the many quality-of-life changes meant to bring this more in line with the rest of the series, like updating the Zero-G sections and letting you use your kinesis more offensively, the broad strokes of the game are surprisingly close to the original. A change I was really looking forward to was the “Intensity Director” which is meant to dynamically alter the mood of areas and what enemies will spawn, but in practice, this mostly seems to determine whether or not you’ll get ambushed while backtracking instead of radically altering the major combat encounter. It’s a nice thrill to occasionally get surrounded by enemies, but as with so many of the new features of the remake, it doesn’t wholly commit to this idea, more a proof-of-concept that could be really transformative if it was expanded on somewhere else. Basic Necromorphs are also substantially less threatening due to the fact that it’s surprisingly easy to stunlock them by stomping on them once their legs have been shot out, and for the sheer effectiveness of these newly revamped kinesis powers (encounters and the ammo economy needed to be dramatically changed to make threats meaningful the player).
Given that this production seems to owe so much to the success of the recent Resident Evil remakes, I wish it would’ve taken a cue from them and include some bolder pieces of design and pacing- throw in an extra Regenerator fight, change the order of levels, or go all the way and pull the best enemies from the entire series to give these fights an extra edge. There are earnest discussions to be had about what function the RE remakes serve (if they’re replacements or reimaginings) but at least they’re distinct- I’m compelled to go back to them from time to time!
Really, I think the hesitance to change to radically alter the structure and encounter design speaks to the real intent of this remake, which seems far more interested in making the narrative flow more seamlessly between this and Dead Space 2. Isaac Clarke more or less had to be invented as a character in the sequel, and that made the amount of screentime that was devoted to his guilt over Nicole all the more weightless- retconned baggage that hardly landed. The attempt to expand their relationship mostly works, the revelations here about how their relationship ended are much better about setting the groundwork for their arc in the sequel. For as strong as this dynamic, it seems to have come at the cost of much of the supporting cast; compared to their original versions, everyone on the Ishimura comes as the lifeless versions of themselves. Dr. Kyne and Dr. Mercer were amazing presences thanks to great performances by Keith Szarabajka and Navid Negahban respectively, but without that prior context, I’m not sure these new iterations of the characters will stay in the minds of those who’ve only played the remake.
The biggest sin is that the remake ends up being dreadfully boring to play through in practice, the threats so similar to the original that the horror doesn’t land and the action so easy to break that it actively feels like a regression from the constraints of the earlier version of combat design. There’s obvious passion for the project here, especially in some of the granular details, but seemingly not the broader vision needed to successfully combine the old and new ideas together.
Despite the many quality-of-life changes meant to bring this more in line with the rest of the series, like updating the Zero-G sections and letting you use your kinesis more offensively, the broad strokes of the game are surprisingly close to the original. A change I was really looking forward to was the “Intensity Director” which is meant to dynamically alter the mood of areas and what enemies will spawn, but in practice, this mostly seems to determine whether or not you’ll get ambushed while backtracking instead of radically altering the major combat encounter. It’s a nice thrill to occasionally get surrounded by enemies, but as with so many of the new features of the remake, it doesn’t wholly commit to this idea, more a proof-of-concept that could be really transformative if it was expanded on somewhere else. Basic Necromorphs are also substantially less threatening due to the fact that it’s surprisingly easy to stunlock them by stomping on them once their legs have been shot out, and for the sheer effectiveness of these newly revamped kinesis powers (encounters and the ammo economy needed to be dramatically changed to make threats meaningful the player).
Given that this production seems to owe so much to the success of the recent Resident Evil remakes, I wish it would’ve taken a cue from them and include some bolder pieces of design and pacing- throw in an extra Regenerator fight, change the order of levels, or go all the way and pull the best enemies from the entire series to give these fights an extra edge. There are earnest discussions to be had about what function the RE remakes serve (if they’re replacements or reimaginings) but at least they’re distinct- I’m compelled to go back to them from time to time!
Really, I think the hesitance to change to radically alter the structure and encounter design speaks to the real intent of this remake, which seems far more interested in making the narrative flow more seamlessly between this and Dead Space 2. Isaac Clarke more or less had to be invented as a character in the sequel, and that made the amount of screentime that was devoted to his guilt over Nicole all the more weightless- retconned baggage that hardly landed. The attempt to expand their relationship mostly works, the revelations here about how their relationship ended are much better about setting the groundwork for their arc in the sequel. For as strong as this dynamic, it seems to have come at the cost of much of the supporting cast; compared to their original versions, everyone on the Ishimura comes as the lifeless versions of themselves. Dr. Kyne and Dr. Mercer were amazing presences thanks to great performances by Keith Szarabajka and Navid Negahban respectively, but without that prior context, I’m not sure these new iterations of the characters will stay in the minds of those who’ve only played the remake.
The biggest sin is that the remake ends up being dreadfully boring to play through in practice, the threats so similar to the original that the horror doesn’t land and the action so easy to break that it actively feels like a regression from the constraints of the earlier version of combat design. There’s obvious passion for the project here, especially in some of the granular details, but seemingly not the broader vision needed to successfully combine the old and new ideas together.
Really charming Indiana Jones-themed Doom total conversion, fighting through waves of Nazis and undead guardians in ruins around the world. Biggest surprise for me was the strength of the scenario design and pacing- fully expected to see everything the game had to offer by the end of the first episode, but there’s steady introduction of new enemies and weapons, alongside some nice breaks in the formula to keep things interesting. A definite highlight is the start of the Egypt episode, a dense shootout full of destructible props in a museum that’s far more open to exploration than the linear action of much of the rest of the game- and which also demonstrates how strong and varied the roster of hitscan enemies here are.
While I think Venturous is a little too conservative with it’s Doom II analogs, only rarely making you fight Revenant and Archvile equivalents- and usually at the end of episodes- having to prioritize heavy-machine gunners or grenadiers goes a long way in spicing up the action. The best trick it pulls that really capitalizes on this variety is ambushing you whenever you’ve just cleared out an area, foot soldiers pouring in right as you’ve gotten a handle on the undead hordes. It should get stale after a while, but the steady alternation and escalation of these threats more than carries the combat for the duration, bread-and-butter arena fights against monsters and more tactical shootouts against humans.
Ended up wrapping up a playthrough of the 1.3 release right as the newest update dropped, which includes an additional episode in Greece and generally fills out the game really nicely- with an extra visual pass and remixed level arrangements. One of my original criticisms was how weak the ending was, fighting a simplistic boss that you could circle-strafe around and lock down with machine gun fire, now traded out for one where you’re only armed with the magically-infused weapons, the boss now able to use attacks from the entirety of the enemy roster. I didn’t die on either encounter, and it still functionally boils down to circle-strafing it until you deplete its health bar, this newest version is unambiguously the fuller experience- and is a microcosm for the ways the game has been bolstered overall, visually sharper and more novel mechanically.
Even with all the positive changes, levels can still get kind of homogeneous by the end. You can only delve into lost tombs and ancient ruins so many times before it all starts to blur together- as unusual as it may sound from me, probably a sign that the game could’ve used some breaks from all the combat: a couple of gimmick levels, like some kind of teleporter puzzle or a proper labyrinth map could’ve gone a long way at selling the adventurer fantasy in a way combat tunnels just don’t provide (or really go for broke and make a besieged town built over some ruins as a hub area, similar to other shooters like Afterglow and Hedon).
Otherwise, amazing to see the jump in quality from the 1.3 to the 1.5 release- gave me the unusually good problem of having to throw out a bunch of my criticisms on the game, and the newly-included cliffhanger ending has me eager to see what this developer decides to tackle next.
While I think Venturous is a little too conservative with it’s Doom II analogs, only rarely making you fight Revenant and Archvile equivalents- and usually at the end of episodes- having to prioritize heavy-machine gunners or grenadiers goes a long way in spicing up the action. The best trick it pulls that really capitalizes on this variety is ambushing you whenever you’ve just cleared out an area, foot soldiers pouring in right as you’ve gotten a handle on the undead hordes. It should get stale after a while, but the steady alternation and escalation of these threats more than carries the combat for the duration, bread-and-butter arena fights against monsters and more tactical shootouts against humans.
Ended up wrapping up a playthrough of the 1.3 release right as the newest update dropped, which includes an additional episode in Greece and generally fills out the game really nicely- with an extra visual pass and remixed level arrangements. One of my original criticisms was how weak the ending was, fighting a simplistic boss that you could circle-strafe around and lock down with machine gun fire, now traded out for one where you’re only armed with the magically-infused weapons, the boss now able to use attacks from the entirety of the enemy roster. I didn’t die on either encounter, and it still functionally boils down to circle-strafing it until you deplete its health bar, this newest version is unambiguously the fuller experience- and is a microcosm for the ways the game has been bolstered overall, visually sharper and more novel mechanically.
Even with all the positive changes, levels can still get kind of homogeneous by the end. You can only delve into lost tombs and ancient ruins so many times before it all starts to blur together- as unusual as it may sound from me, probably a sign that the game could’ve used some breaks from all the combat: a couple of gimmick levels, like some kind of teleporter puzzle or a proper labyrinth map could’ve gone a long way at selling the adventurer fantasy in a way combat tunnels just don’t provide (or really go for broke and make a besieged town built over some ruins as a hub area, similar to other shooters like Afterglow and Hedon).
Otherwise, amazing to see the jump in quality from the 1.3 to the 1.5 release- gave me the unusually good problem of having to throw out a bunch of my criticisms on the game, and the newly-included cliffhanger ending has me eager to see what this developer decides to tackle next.
2011
When I was younger, I thought Dead Space 2 was the usual case of a horror game starting incredibly strong and then weakly limping to the finish, but this most recent playthrough has totally inverted my opinion; while the first half gets all the nicest areas and flashiest setpieces, it’s the second half, where you’re funneled through the metal guts of the station, that the encounters start to pick up, with a wider range of enemies to deal with and a playful sense of meanness to the combat design- like a memorable room where the game spawns an explosive enemy right next to a breakable window that’ll send you out into the vacuum of space if you so much as touch it. The final section is amazing as well, chased by a regenerating necromorph that gets the best use out of your busted kit out of all the challenges in the game, forced to push through hordes of enemies while this unstoppable enemy is constantly shadowing you.
But all this should be couched in the fact that many of its best moments here hover around the opening 30 minutes of RE4- you’ll be really lucky if you’re fighting multiple waves of enemies or have to make meaningful decisions of who to prioritize first in combat, the designers seemingly all too comfortable to throw the standard melee and acid-spitting necromorphs at you and a haphazard assortment of the other enemy types as a little bit of flavor. Some of this flattening is due to how powerful your Stasis ability is: because so many of the encounters take place in this tiny corridors and cramped hallways, it’s really easy to negate the threat of an ambush or poor positioning by freezing an enemy and dismembering them with little thought on your part, aided by how generous the game is with dropping stasis packs and doling out recharge stations. It’s something especially felt with the Stalker enemies, a standout addition deemed so important that they get their own dedicated rooms, but they end up being some of the simplest in practice- boiling down to hunkering in a corner and waiting for them to run at you, a cool enemy type that feels unfinished when fought on their own. (The fact that you never fight these guys while dealing with your O2 meter is a massive shame, something that might’ve curbed how easy it is to passively engage them.)
Maybe the most damning thing here is that the weightlessness of the new additions to the bestiary highlight just how well-considered the original’s enemies were, testing you on the applications of the dismemberment system and on third-person shooting in a way none of the new creatures do- the frantic, vertical movement of the scorpion-like Leapers or the surgical precision demanded for the Pregnant necromorphs, diluted here with a lot of stuff that swarms you and that can be beaten out more simply with direct damage. A lot of the discussion about the two games centers on the weakening of the survival horror elements from the first entry to the second, but I think this less defined mechanical identity is probably the bigger loss for the series.
Still, a hard game for me to really dislike- nails the feedback for combat (even reloading looks cool!) and I’m not sure if another game has had a better justification and visualization for the combat tunnel/amazing skybox/combat tunnel structure than working your way through the various sectors of a dystopian mining station. Was ultimately reminded a lot of my time going through Titanfall 2 a few years ago, a strong string of setpieces and a great-feeling avatar not able to shake the feeling that the encounter design never really pushed the mechanics far enough.
Extra thoughts:
- Played through the game on Zealot, and got about halfway through on the limited-save Hardcore difficulty before losing a couple of hours of progress when I clipped through the floor of a tram and opted to call it there. Otherwise, I think these are pretty admirable difficulty modes, the increased lethality and reduced ammo of the former and the endurance needed for the latter do a nice job at recontextualizing the game. Granular bits of optimization, like being able to use random kinesis objects to slowly bludgeon enemies to death and getting a free refill on ammo and health when you upgrade their capacity, turn into run-saving maneuvers when you're under so much pressure. Good stuff.
- The Severed DLC is slightly more respectable than I remembered- the stasis enemies from Dead Space 1 aren’t a super-noticeable addition, but going backwards through old areas is far less egregious than it sounds, both due to some nice enemy arrangements (probably has the best Stalker encounter in the game) and for the fact that the player character comes with a predefined loadout that might get you to see a different side of the arsenal. Would never have used the Seeker rifle otherwise, for instance.
But all this should be couched in the fact that many of its best moments here hover around the opening 30 minutes of RE4- you’ll be really lucky if you’re fighting multiple waves of enemies or have to make meaningful decisions of who to prioritize first in combat, the designers seemingly all too comfortable to throw the standard melee and acid-spitting necromorphs at you and a haphazard assortment of the other enemy types as a little bit of flavor. Some of this flattening is due to how powerful your Stasis ability is: because so many of the encounters take place in this tiny corridors and cramped hallways, it’s really easy to negate the threat of an ambush or poor positioning by freezing an enemy and dismembering them with little thought on your part, aided by how generous the game is with dropping stasis packs and doling out recharge stations. It’s something especially felt with the Stalker enemies, a standout addition deemed so important that they get their own dedicated rooms, but they end up being some of the simplest in practice- boiling down to hunkering in a corner and waiting for them to run at you, a cool enemy type that feels unfinished when fought on their own. (The fact that you never fight these guys while dealing with your O2 meter is a massive shame, something that might’ve curbed how easy it is to passively engage them.)
Maybe the most damning thing here is that the weightlessness of the new additions to the bestiary highlight just how well-considered the original’s enemies were, testing you on the applications of the dismemberment system and on third-person shooting in a way none of the new creatures do- the frantic, vertical movement of the scorpion-like Leapers or the surgical precision demanded for the Pregnant necromorphs, diluted here with a lot of stuff that swarms you and that can be beaten out more simply with direct damage. A lot of the discussion about the two games centers on the weakening of the survival horror elements from the first entry to the second, but I think this less defined mechanical identity is probably the bigger loss for the series.
Still, a hard game for me to really dislike- nails the feedback for combat (even reloading looks cool!) and I’m not sure if another game has had a better justification and visualization for the combat tunnel/amazing skybox/combat tunnel structure than working your way through the various sectors of a dystopian mining station. Was ultimately reminded a lot of my time going through Titanfall 2 a few years ago, a strong string of setpieces and a great-feeling avatar not able to shake the feeling that the encounter design never really pushed the mechanics far enough.
Extra thoughts:
- Played through the game on Zealot, and got about halfway through on the limited-save Hardcore difficulty before losing a couple of hours of progress when I clipped through the floor of a tram and opted to call it there. Otherwise, I think these are pretty admirable difficulty modes, the increased lethality and reduced ammo of the former and the endurance needed for the latter do a nice job at recontextualizing the game. Granular bits of optimization, like being able to use random kinesis objects to slowly bludgeon enemies to death and getting a free refill on ammo and health when you upgrade their capacity, turn into run-saving maneuvers when you're under so much pressure. Good stuff.
- The Severed DLC is slightly more respectable than I remembered- the stasis enemies from Dead Space 1 aren’t a super-noticeable addition, but going backwards through old areas is far less egregious than it sounds, both due to some nice enemy arrangements (probably has the best Stalker encounter in the game) and for the fact that the player character comes with a predefined loadout that might get you to see a different side of the arsenal. Would never have used the Seeker rifle otherwise, for instance.
2010
Honestly, having finally finished Dead Rising 2, it’s kind of a wash as to which of the games is better- there’s an admirable attempt to shore up some of the balancing issues of the first but it never really lands with the same force of its predecessor.
I guess the major thing is the setting itself- Fortune City feels like a fundamentally less compelling location to learn, its layout is too massive to be inviting to casually explore, and most of your objectives clustered around the eastern side and center of the map. Most crucially, it’s a location that provides less of the escapist thrill that Dead Rising 1 so neatly tapped into by giving you free reign over a shopping mall. In that, there was a great feel to window shopping for your next improvised weapon or collectible- what would you do in a zombie apocalypse?- here it’s way less interesting to run through the blur of the different casinos and exotic stores, big chunks of the map feeling redundant to explore when they offer such similar items and attractions.
It’s ostensibly made up for by the new combo weapon system, where two random items can be combined to make some freakish killing tool, but it ends up being a little flat in practice- instead of picking up a sledgehammer or an ax for their crowd control and damage, you pick up both and combine the two into one weapon that’s good for crowd control and damage, a tunnel vision setting in where you should only grab items designated with the blue “combo” icon and can safely disregard the rest.
Despite all that, its fundamental interactions are a lot stronger this time around. You’re given the same open-ended objectives of killing psychopaths and rescuing groups of survivors, but because there’s nothing so dominant as the chainsaws from DR1 (at least, that I could find) fights demand a bit more thought: of carving out enough time to actually fight them properly, and doing enough prep work in terms of weapons and healing items to successfully outlast the boss. Actually describing the process of the fights-“you have to avoid their telegraphed attacks! and find space to heal!”- is no great thing, but this simple process is something you need to engage with much more honestly, and is a consistent source of tension throughout. Even the survivors, who are so docile and durable as to remove most of the challenge of escorting them entirely, get some extra utility if you opt to use them as extra firepower on some of the tougher encounters. Doesn’t have some of the near-transcendent upsets of the original, but is able to maintain a steady pulse for the duration.
There are some other good additions to the setting as well, with inclusion of cash and the doses of the drug Zombrex serving as meaningful resources to work towards in the longer stretches of downtime, and speak to a game that nicely follows-up the chaos of the original; a national tragedy turned into a routine protocol that’s been co-opted and monetized from every angle- where the first game descended into complete anarchy, here it’s business a semi-usual, hitting up slot machines in the hopes of winning big, and agonizing over a system that makes grotesque profits on a life-saving drug. The story proper is a little dry, and Chuck with his more defined history and motivation, doesn’t fit as neatly into the role of a player avatar as Frank did, but as with the rest of the game it's bolstered by these smart background details.
A big missed opportunity that’s really going to stick with me is with the "Terror is Reality" gameshow that appears briefly in the intro and serves as an excuse for the supplemental online mode- easy to imagine how it could’ve been interwoven with the rest the game, serving as an easy justification to flood the map with a new horde of adrenaline-junkie psychos in the later days, and doubly a waste given how nicely it could’ve played homage the gladiatorial setting of Dead Rising’s spiritual predecessor, Shadow of Rome. And, semi-related, but Chuck’s BMX background feels similarly underused as well, the Fortune City strip not offering a great playspace for tricks, and the big, climatic-feeling setpiece where you chase after a train coming far too early in the story. Would be a much better lead-in to the finale than the repeated fetch quest in overtime mode.
Still floored that the best climax to any of these games is in the Case Zero DLC, where you’re pulled away to help save another father-daughter pair with only minutes to spare before your own race through a quarantine checkpoint. Ties together all its themes and honors the mechanical identity of the series in a way no other Dead Rising game manages to.
I guess the major thing is the setting itself- Fortune City feels like a fundamentally less compelling location to learn, its layout is too massive to be inviting to casually explore, and most of your objectives clustered around the eastern side and center of the map. Most crucially, it’s a location that provides less of the escapist thrill that Dead Rising 1 so neatly tapped into by giving you free reign over a shopping mall. In that, there was a great feel to window shopping for your next improvised weapon or collectible- what would you do in a zombie apocalypse?- here it’s way less interesting to run through the blur of the different casinos and exotic stores, big chunks of the map feeling redundant to explore when they offer such similar items and attractions.
It’s ostensibly made up for by the new combo weapon system, where two random items can be combined to make some freakish killing tool, but it ends up being a little flat in practice- instead of picking up a sledgehammer or an ax for their crowd control and damage, you pick up both and combine the two into one weapon that’s good for crowd control and damage, a tunnel vision setting in where you should only grab items designated with the blue “combo” icon and can safely disregard the rest.
Despite all that, its fundamental interactions are a lot stronger this time around. You’re given the same open-ended objectives of killing psychopaths and rescuing groups of survivors, but because there’s nothing so dominant as the chainsaws from DR1 (at least, that I could find) fights demand a bit more thought: of carving out enough time to actually fight them properly, and doing enough prep work in terms of weapons and healing items to successfully outlast the boss. Actually describing the process of the fights-“you have to avoid their telegraphed attacks! and find space to heal!”- is no great thing, but this simple process is something you need to engage with much more honestly, and is a consistent source of tension throughout. Even the survivors, who are so docile and durable as to remove most of the challenge of escorting them entirely, get some extra utility if you opt to use them as extra firepower on some of the tougher encounters. Doesn’t have some of the near-transcendent upsets of the original, but is able to maintain a steady pulse for the duration.
There are some other good additions to the setting as well, with inclusion of cash and the doses of the drug Zombrex serving as meaningful resources to work towards in the longer stretches of downtime, and speak to a game that nicely follows-up the chaos of the original; a national tragedy turned into a routine protocol that’s been co-opted and monetized from every angle- where the first game descended into complete anarchy, here it’s business a semi-usual, hitting up slot machines in the hopes of winning big, and agonizing over a system that makes grotesque profits on a life-saving drug. The story proper is a little dry, and Chuck with his more defined history and motivation, doesn’t fit as neatly into the role of a player avatar as Frank did, but as with the rest of the game it's bolstered by these smart background details.
A big missed opportunity that’s really going to stick with me is with the "Terror is Reality" gameshow that appears briefly in the intro and serves as an excuse for the supplemental online mode- easy to imagine how it could’ve been interwoven with the rest the game, serving as an easy justification to flood the map with a new horde of adrenaline-junkie psychos in the later days, and doubly a waste given how nicely it could’ve played homage the gladiatorial setting of Dead Rising’s spiritual predecessor, Shadow of Rome. And, semi-related, but Chuck’s BMX background feels similarly underused as well, the Fortune City strip not offering a great playspace for tricks, and the big, climatic-feeling setpiece where you chase after a train coming far too early in the story. Would be a much better lead-in to the finale than the repeated fetch quest in overtime mode.
Still floored that the best climax to any of these games is in the Case Zero DLC, where you’re pulled away to help save another father-daughter pair with only minutes to spare before your own race through a quarantine checkpoint. Ties together all its themes and honors the mechanical identity of the series in a way no other Dead Rising game manages to.
2006
Despised this when I originally played it, thought it was an underrated gem when I gave it another shot a couple of years ago, and now I’ve finally cooled on it- still a really admirable title, especially as one that was meant be Capcom’s leap into the 7th generation, but it’s decidedly frontloaded upon further inspection. So many of the offputting design choices, like the ever-present timer and weapon durability system, only really matter for the first couple of days when you’re still fumbling around, learning the layout of the mall, and dealing with the constant upsets the game throws at you just as think you’ve gotten a handle on everything.
Even coming back to it now, there’s an impressive streak of early-game roadblocks: the convicts, the gun-store owner, zombies that are deadlier and more numerous at night, and the infamous fight against Adam the Clown, each of which feels like catastrophe incarnate. But this also means these early hours necessitate, and are gratifyingly open to, experimentation. Was able to trivialize the Cletus fight by bringing in the LMG from the convict’s truck, and snowballed that into a much easier fight against Adam by handing out shotguns to a couple of survivors and having them stunlock him in place- a far cry from some of my initial attempts to tackle these fights while eating at away my time to complete objectives. If you value games for the little emergent stories they provide, the near misses and disastrous failures, then Dead Rising’s opening hours alone are well worth the price of admission. Could rattle on about the interesting moments borne out of the pressure to make the best use of your time, like a moment on this playthrough where I had to ferry two incapacitated survivors through the mall in the dead of night- anti-fun in practice, but a fantastically memorable challenge.
Once you get some of the busted boss weapons and deeper into the game, so much of that initial thrill is pared down, with little planning needed to prep for bosses and less overlapping case files to try and optimize. By its final unlockable section, the “Overtime” mode, the game has regressed into something out of the Simple Series: a threatless fetch quest through the mall carried only by the fact that you now have the opportunity to perform you newly-unlocked wrestling moves on hapless groups of Zombies. It’s a disappointing arc for a title that begins so well, definitely something where its most widely-criticized choices are really what brings the game together, and it's the deeper stuff, the scenario design and balancing, that needed further examination.
Would be much easier to let the campaign’s flaws slide if it coexisted with a mode that was totally centered on trying to save as many survivors as possible under a dramatically shortened timer- the game’s additional “Infinite Mode,” where you have to survive as long as possible in the mall while your health slowly drains also seems an inversion of what the real draw of the game is- just a total slog in practice- and even more of a shame given that Capcom normally excels at making supplemental modes that can highlight the best of a game’s mechanics. (Was an ardent RE6 defender for the longest time due to the relative strength of Mercenaries, for instance.)
At the same time, it’s got a million little cool details that are easy to latch onto, like it’s opening, where you learn the photography controls while doing a fly-by of Willamette’s main street, which handily beats Half-Life out as far as atmospheric intros are concerned- a great intro that offers you some early-game experience if you get the most lurid shots of the disaster unfolding on the ground, and crucially, is entirely optional. Or managing to run into the surprising number of optional scenes where Frank is stripped of gear and has to break out of captivity- tense moments I had completely missed on my first time through. And this to say nothing of the mall proper, which might rank as one of the best-realized locations in the medium, with a huge number of unique storefronts to explore. Easy to lose time just rummaging through and exploring the place, a mundane location given real life through sheer craft of world design.
I’m a couple of hours into Dead Rising 2 as of writing this, and it already seems like a more measured and evenly-paced experience, but the first is still worth a try- it’s a deeply flawed game, but it never seems half-hearted in its attempts to pull so many weird directions.
Even coming back to it now, there’s an impressive streak of early-game roadblocks: the convicts, the gun-store owner, zombies that are deadlier and more numerous at night, and the infamous fight against Adam the Clown, each of which feels like catastrophe incarnate. But this also means these early hours necessitate, and are gratifyingly open to, experimentation. Was able to trivialize the Cletus fight by bringing in the LMG from the convict’s truck, and snowballed that into a much easier fight against Adam by handing out shotguns to a couple of survivors and having them stunlock him in place- a far cry from some of my initial attempts to tackle these fights while eating at away my time to complete objectives. If you value games for the little emergent stories they provide, the near misses and disastrous failures, then Dead Rising’s opening hours alone are well worth the price of admission. Could rattle on about the interesting moments borne out of the pressure to make the best use of your time, like a moment on this playthrough where I had to ferry two incapacitated survivors through the mall in the dead of night- anti-fun in practice, but a fantastically memorable challenge.
Once you get some of the busted boss weapons and deeper into the game, so much of that initial thrill is pared down, with little planning needed to prep for bosses and less overlapping case files to try and optimize. By its final unlockable section, the “Overtime” mode, the game has regressed into something out of the Simple Series: a threatless fetch quest through the mall carried only by the fact that you now have the opportunity to perform you newly-unlocked wrestling moves on hapless groups of Zombies. It’s a disappointing arc for a title that begins so well, definitely something where its most widely-criticized choices are really what brings the game together, and it's the deeper stuff, the scenario design and balancing, that needed further examination.
Would be much easier to let the campaign’s flaws slide if it coexisted with a mode that was totally centered on trying to save as many survivors as possible under a dramatically shortened timer- the game’s additional “Infinite Mode,” where you have to survive as long as possible in the mall while your health slowly drains also seems an inversion of what the real draw of the game is- just a total slog in practice- and even more of a shame given that Capcom normally excels at making supplemental modes that can highlight the best of a game’s mechanics. (Was an ardent RE6 defender for the longest time due to the relative strength of Mercenaries, for instance.)
At the same time, it’s got a million little cool details that are easy to latch onto, like it’s opening, where you learn the photography controls while doing a fly-by of Willamette’s main street, which handily beats Half-Life out as far as atmospheric intros are concerned- a great intro that offers you some early-game experience if you get the most lurid shots of the disaster unfolding on the ground, and crucially, is entirely optional. Or managing to run into the surprising number of optional scenes where Frank is stripped of gear and has to break out of captivity- tense moments I had completely missed on my first time through. And this to say nothing of the mall proper, which might rank as one of the best-realized locations in the medium, with a huge number of unique storefronts to explore. Easy to lose time just rummaging through and exploring the place, a mundane location given real life through sheer craft of world design.
I’m a couple of hours into Dead Rising 2 as of writing this, and it already seems like a more measured and evenly-paced experience, but the first is still worth a try- it’s a deeply flawed game, but it never seems half-hearted in its attempts to pull so many weird directions.
2000
For the person in your life who thinks Armored Core is too character-focused and well-produced; as I understand it, this an outlier amongst the other GunGriffon games for its arcade style, putting a major emphasis on replaying levels on different difficulty levels, chasing high scores and amassing an massive collection of weapons and gear- playing out something like EDF in practice. This comes with a familiar catch: While each of the pilotable mechs has a base loadout, taking an optional third weapon or any upgrades uses them up in your inventory. Combined with a cumulative progression system that rewards you with more weapons and better versions of old upgrades, grinding out easy missions and dipping into higher difficulties to unlock more gear to use in your legitimate attempts becomes a pretty clear strategy.
The idea of using up gear isn’t even terrible in theory: rework the structure so you couldn’t farm for extra parts and had to plan around a single playthrough, choosing when and where to use them could be a great challenge- and might also be a clever way of getting you to see the full range of the game’s arsenal in comparison to the tunnel vision brought on investment in your build seen in something like Armored Core.
Definitely a disappointing consideration for a game with such nice fundamentals- controlling your AWGS has a great heft to it, with a turning speed so slow that you’ll need to factor it in when approaching engagements or dedicate one of your upgrade slots to making yourself more mobile. Any attempt I made to dive into groups of enemies was met with a quick game over and so I spent a surprising amount of time trying finding a vantage point to attack enemies before they ever became a threat. (And makes the mission timer all the more important, as it would be so tempting to stay in place otherwise.) I imagine it’s just as true for other GunGriffon games, but the result is that it feels decidedly more like an exceptionally-adaptable weapons platform than as a high-speed mecha, taking pot-shots at armored columns in the distance.
The six missions here nicely reinforce this unique feeling, half focused on assaulting enemy fortifications and half seeing you protect allies from waves of enemy attackers. It’s a good balance, with the escort missions being particular highlights, forcing you to move around different points on the map to cut off enemy reinforcements and trying to get the most value out of your limited-use jump as you mitigate the damage done to your allies. I don’t think they’re so transcendent as to warrant the amount of time you’ll spend in them, but that speaks to the problem of the game more broadly- something whose limitations seem mostly owed to being a budget title, and one seemingly made in part to hit the launch window of the PS2.
Not great, not terrible: think its lean, blue-sky wargaming will carry it for anyone who’s really curious, but its emphasis on sifting through an ever-growing collection of gear ended up souring my experience a bit. Despite its sparseness, it still could benefit from some cuts! (Feels like with some rebalancing it could’ve made a great cabinet, especially with the unorthodox controls where you aim with the left analog stick and move and strafe with the right stick- the kind of unwieldy scheme that’d be totally sold by a mock-up cockpit and some gaudy peripherals.)
The idea of using up gear isn’t even terrible in theory: rework the structure so you couldn’t farm for extra parts and had to plan around a single playthrough, choosing when and where to use them could be a great challenge- and might also be a clever way of getting you to see the full range of the game’s arsenal in comparison to the tunnel vision brought on investment in your build seen in something like Armored Core.
Definitely a disappointing consideration for a game with such nice fundamentals- controlling your AWGS has a great heft to it, with a turning speed so slow that you’ll need to factor it in when approaching engagements or dedicate one of your upgrade slots to making yourself more mobile. Any attempt I made to dive into groups of enemies was met with a quick game over and so I spent a surprising amount of time trying finding a vantage point to attack enemies before they ever became a threat. (And makes the mission timer all the more important, as it would be so tempting to stay in place otherwise.) I imagine it’s just as true for other GunGriffon games, but the result is that it feels decidedly more like an exceptionally-adaptable weapons platform than as a high-speed mecha, taking pot-shots at armored columns in the distance.
The six missions here nicely reinforce this unique feeling, half focused on assaulting enemy fortifications and half seeing you protect allies from waves of enemy attackers. It’s a good balance, with the escort missions being particular highlights, forcing you to move around different points on the map to cut off enemy reinforcements and trying to get the most value out of your limited-use jump as you mitigate the damage done to your allies. I don’t think they’re so transcendent as to warrant the amount of time you’ll spend in them, but that speaks to the problem of the game more broadly- something whose limitations seem mostly owed to being a budget title, and one seemingly made in part to hit the launch window of the PS2.
Not great, not terrible: think its lean, blue-sky wargaming will carry it for anyone who’s really curious, but its emphasis on sifting through an ever-growing collection of gear ended up souring my experience a bit. Despite its sparseness, it still could benefit from some cuts! (Feels like with some rebalancing it could’ve made a great cabinet, especially with the unorthodox controls where you aim with the left analog stick and move and strafe with the right stick- the kind of unwieldy scheme that’d be totally sold by a mock-up cockpit and some gaudy peripherals.)
Only found out about House of the Dying Sun after reading interviews with some of the Project: Wingman developers citing it as an inspiration. Might explain why my problems ended up feeling so similar between the two, but it’s an easy game to casually recommend: a lean space-flight action title that offers a surprising amount of interlocking systems to mess around with- a strong flight model coupled with a transformative loadout system, squad commands and the ability to swap between your growing fleet fighters, all in service of dismantling the remains of a dying empire.
It's at once intensely impressive, especially given that so much of the game seems to be owed to a single developer, but also comes off feeling a little light- coming off more as a fantastic proof-of-concept by its conclusion than a complete experience in its own right.
Some of that is probably owed to how short and discrete each of the missions are; once you warp into a map, what you see is generally what you get. They can contain hyper-lethal challenges that’ll have you throwing a small armada in order to come across a winning strategy, but when you do, missions only take a few minutes at their max- further enforced by an enemy frigate that warps in if you stick around too long. Structurally it's a little deceptive too, the Star Map that frames each of the missions and apocalyptic backdrop of the setting seeming to gesture towards a game where you’ll need to really consider your choices long-term, but that isn’t the case. If a challenge is too much for you, you can opt to retry old missions on a higher difficulty to unlock some upgrades, and regardless of how poorly your strategy on mission, your fleet is back to normal when you return to the map screen.
The silver lining to providing a series of such intensely small-scale challenges is that it highlights the distinct strategies you can adopt- had an incredibly difficult time on one mission trying assassinate a fighter pilot on one side of the map and a heavily-armed carrier on the other, and slowly found myself refining a plan to send my squad to bombard the HVT and manually targeting the carrier’s bridge with a kamikaze fighter, before swapping over and taking control of one of the remaining fights. It was a moment that meaningfully utilized all the game’s systems, and one that felt wonderfully grim: an interstellar war where the loss of a body is a little more than a slight annoyance.
Also want to say that the hardest difficulty is well worth a try, limiting your fleet to a mere three fighters. While the end of the game originally felt a little easy, snowballing past objectives with frigates and destroyers of your own, having to complete objectives with such a small force really shows the systems in their best light- showcasing what a surprisingly blend of strategy and reflex is hidden just beneath the surface here.
Wish it landed with a bit more weight, but it's a striking game while it lasts.
(The fact that the Homeworld developers never reached out to work with Marauder Interactive to expand the concepts set forth here is a total shame- you can feel the inspiration of the series throughout House of the Dying Sun, and seems like a great template for a spin-off.)
///
Works Cited:
Gearburn: What other videogame inspirations did you have when creating Project Wingman?
Abi Rahmani: Ah, there has been a lot of other inspirations when creating Project Wingman. So far we’ve taken inspirations from other games including Energy Airforce, Aero Elite, Airforce Delta strike, House of the Dying Sun and other games that aren’t even in the same genre such as Risk of Rain and Battlefield in various departments of the game.
- https://memeburn.com/gearburn/2018/01/interview-project-wingman-dev/
It's at once intensely impressive, especially given that so much of the game seems to be owed to a single developer, but also comes off feeling a little light- coming off more as a fantastic proof-of-concept by its conclusion than a complete experience in its own right.
Some of that is probably owed to how short and discrete each of the missions are; once you warp into a map, what you see is generally what you get. They can contain hyper-lethal challenges that’ll have you throwing a small armada in order to come across a winning strategy, but when you do, missions only take a few minutes at their max- further enforced by an enemy frigate that warps in if you stick around too long. Structurally it's a little deceptive too, the Star Map that frames each of the missions and apocalyptic backdrop of the setting seeming to gesture towards a game where you’ll need to really consider your choices long-term, but that isn’t the case. If a challenge is too much for you, you can opt to retry old missions on a higher difficulty to unlock some upgrades, and regardless of how poorly your strategy on mission, your fleet is back to normal when you return to the map screen.
The silver lining to providing a series of such intensely small-scale challenges is that it highlights the distinct strategies you can adopt- had an incredibly difficult time on one mission trying assassinate a fighter pilot on one side of the map and a heavily-armed carrier on the other, and slowly found myself refining a plan to send my squad to bombard the HVT and manually targeting the carrier’s bridge with a kamikaze fighter, before swapping over and taking control of one of the remaining fights. It was a moment that meaningfully utilized all the game’s systems, and one that felt wonderfully grim: an interstellar war where the loss of a body is a little more than a slight annoyance.
Also want to say that the hardest difficulty is well worth a try, limiting your fleet to a mere three fighters. While the end of the game originally felt a little easy, snowballing past objectives with frigates and destroyers of your own, having to complete objectives with such a small force really shows the systems in their best light- showcasing what a surprisingly blend of strategy and reflex is hidden just beneath the surface here.
Wish it landed with a bit more weight, but it's a striking game while it lasts.
(The fact that the Homeworld developers never reached out to work with Marauder Interactive to expand the concepts set forth here is a total shame- you can feel the inspiration of the series throughout House of the Dying Sun, and seems like a great template for a spin-off.)
///
Works Cited:
Gearburn: What other videogame inspirations did you have when creating Project Wingman?
Abi Rahmani: Ah, there has been a lot of other inspirations when creating Project Wingman. So far we’ve taken inspirations from other games including Energy Airforce, Aero Elite, Airforce Delta strike, House of the Dying Sun and other games that aren’t even in the same genre such as Risk of Rain and Battlefield in various departments of the game.
- https://memeburn.com/gearburn/2018/01/interview-project-wingman-dev/
Amazing first impression thanks to a great vertical slice of an opening and a rousing soundtrack but ends up settling into something lesser than those early hours. The fundamentals here- the driving, the shooting, the world design- quickly reveal themselves to be mediocre (straining at serviceable) with the systemic flexibility being its saving grace and binding everything here together. With the exception of being unable to select some of the busted vehicles for delivery on some of the bigger setpiece missions, you’re free to utilize all the tools at your disposal to bust open the game, able to undercut the obvious intent of certain objectives by simply commandeering a helicopter to make a beeline to a target or avoiding incurring any faction penalty by stealthily destroying objectives- the embodiment of that one NakeyJakey video on that GTA III stretched out for an entire game.
Don’t have anything too cohesive to say, so an assortment of stray thoughts:
- Continually appreciated that air-lifting targets is an on-demand invitation for chaos: Simply killing and verifying anyone in the Deck of 52 isn’t much trouble, but the process of going for a non-lethal takedown, of finding a safe area to call in a helicopter, and then extracting the HVT is consistently tense. The chopper can get shot down, enemies can commandeer your vehicle, and there’s the chance that the target will still get killed in the process. Easily one of the best “moments” generators in the entire game.
- Stick with the Russian Mafia missions when possible, there's definite sense that they were authored with a better understanding of the systems at play. Where the other factions send you on generic missions to destroy X number of targets with few complications, the Mob will have you assassinating high-value targets from other factions and dealing with their internal politics, and is far better about throwing curveballs in with its secondary objectives. If the rest of the game was on this level, it’d be far easier to praise it as an underrated classic- the one set of missions that lives up to the title by asking you to do questionable things under unreasonable conditions.
- I played a ton of Mercenaries 2 as a kid and the ability to destroy buildings was a huge draw for me, so it was a little weird playing this, where so much of the action takes place on barren mountain sides and next to humble, single-story structures. The ability to destroy buildings is still appreciated, but lacks a lot of the raw catharsis you’d expect from something framed as a centerpiece mechanic- ends up being more of a tactile flourish in practice.
- Admire the general structural flexibility here as well, as once you complete the initial circuit of missions to get acquainted with the factions, you’re free to work your way to each of the four “Ace” contracts by either taking on missions with the various organizations to get more intel or just combing over the map to get at the scattered members of the Deck of 52. Your approach will inevitably be a combination of the two, but it’s cool to have the freedom to not engage with certain factions or have to be obliged to extract every single member in a suit.
- Forgot there was a time when an open-world was divided up into multiple zones instead of being a single gargantuan one. The game is split into two maps, the first of which ends up being a real pain to navigate, with lots of dead-ends and a lack of easy access to helicopters making your trips between the various HQ’s feel like genuine commutes. Second map is a lot better to navigate, thanks to some more thoughtful road design, but there’s still stretches where your eyes are going to glaze over as you get from A to B. (and in the process, is a great reminder at how load-bearing the radio stations are in the GTA games)
- As with so many game economies, eventually reached a point where money stopped mattering, functionally being able to call in whatever I’d need for a particular mission, and more than enough to bribe officials to get back into the graces of a given faction. Still nice as something to latch onto as a metric for your success, but it’s an element that could’ve been greatly expanded on, with more expenditures to sap from your war chest and less support from your allies- the gear they supply you with at the beginning of missions feeling especially unnecessary given that so many objectives can be beaten with some salvaged explosives and a commandeered tank.
Still, better than most other open-world titles: equal parts a pleasantly-boring podcast game and a genuinely great sandbox, and a reminder that, with a playthrough took a little under ten hours, this genre doesn't have to be a life-consuming timesink. Ended up being weirdly compelled by it, and I’m still tempted to go back- while the different factions and character choices aren’t drastically different from each other, they speak to a better understanding of the chaos and player freedom that should be the main draw of this style of game.
Don’t have anything too cohesive to say, so an assortment of stray thoughts:
- Continually appreciated that air-lifting targets is an on-demand invitation for chaos: Simply killing and verifying anyone in the Deck of 52 isn’t much trouble, but the process of going for a non-lethal takedown, of finding a safe area to call in a helicopter, and then extracting the HVT is consistently tense. The chopper can get shot down, enemies can commandeer your vehicle, and there’s the chance that the target will still get killed in the process. Easily one of the best “moments” generators in the entire game.
- Stick with the Russian Mafia missions when possible, there's definite sense that they were authored with a better understanding of the systems at play. Where the other factions send you on generic missions to destroy X number of targets with few complications, the Mob will have you assassinating high-value targets from other factions and dealing with their internal politics, and is far better about throwing curveballs in with its secondary objectives. If the rest of the game was on this level, it’d be far easier to praise it as an underrated classic- the one set of missions that lives up to the title by asking you to do questionable things under unreasonable conditions.
- I played a ton of Mercenaries 2 as a kid and the ability to destroy buildings was a huge draw for me, so it was a little weird playing this, where so much of the action takes place on barren mountain sides and next to humble, single-story structures. The ability to destroy buildings is still appreciated, but lacks a lot of the raw catharsis you’d expect from something framed as a centerpiece mechanic- ends up being more of a tactile flourish in practice.
- Admire the general structural flexibility here as well, as once you complete the initial circuit of missions to get acquainted with the factions, you’re free to work your way to each of the four “Ace” contracts by either taking on missions with the various organizations to get more intel or just combing over the map to get at the scattered members of the Deck of 52. Your approach will inevitably be a combination of the two, but it’s cool to have the freedom to not engage with certain factions or have to be obliged to extract every single member in a suit.
- Forgot there was a time when an open-world was divided up into multiple zones instead of being a single gargantuan one. The game is split into two maps, the first of which ends up being a real pain to navigate, with lots of dead-ends and a lack of easy access to helicopters making your trips between the various HQ’s feel like genuine commutes. Second map is a lot better to navigate, thanks to some more thoughtful road design, but there’s still stretches where your eyes are going to glaze over as you get from A to B. (and in the process, is a great reminder at how load-bearing the radio stations are in the GTA games)
- As with so many game economies, eventually reached a point where money stopped mattering, functionally being able to call in whatever I’d need for a particular mission, and more than enough to bribe officials to get back into the graces of a given faction. Still nice as something to latch onto as a metric for your success, but it’s an element that could’ve been greatly expanded on, with more expenditures to sap from your war chest and less support from your allies- the gear they supply you with at the beginning of missions feeling especially unnecessary given that so many objectives can be beaten with some salvaged explosives and a commandeered tank.
Still, better than most other open-world titles: equal parts a pleasantly-boring podcast game and a genuinely great sandbox, and a reminder that, with a playthrough took a little under ten hours, this genre doesn't have to be a life-consuming timesink. Ended up being weirdly compelled by it, and I’m still tempted to go back- while the different factions and character choices aren’t drastically different from each other, they speak to a better understanding of the chaos and player freedom that should be the main draw of this style of game.
2020
Took me a little bit to settle into Project Wingman: Divided into two halves, the conquest and campaign feel like they contain the missing element of the other mode- conquest is a rougelike, with a constantly rising alert level and a stingy economy forcing you to consider if it’s worth it to fight tougher and tougher enemies for the sake of a better payout at the end of a mission, but the maps are massive and barrain. The campaign has a number of massive and well-produced battles, but it doesn’t have any kind of meaningful scoring system that could force you to rethink your approach to old levels: clear something once and you're done, a far cry from the nice balance of the two the Ace Combat titles are generally able to strike. While I don’t think it would’ve been as easy as merging the two sides into one to fix some of my broader problems with the game, it’s still striking to see the two appeals acknowledged, but not combined.
Gets a lot better with time though- was going to write a lot more about the flatness of the early levels in the Campaign, but the transformative quality of the unlockable “Mercenary” difficulty addressed a lot of my problems, serving as the best kind of New Game +. You keep your fleet of planes and fight through remixed enemy placements, doubly addressing the slow pace and bog-standard engagements that dragged out the action of the early levels. Think that Project Wingman is most in its element when it’s dialing up the scale of the battles, cutting through armies of fantasy weapons-platforms, the screen crammed with sky-carriers and super-tanks and an absurd number of fighters.
It’s surreal imagery and a great threat, your missile warning constantly blaring out, and traces of railgun fire making for a distinct threat, their presence further complicating your ability to break line-of-sight with enemies. This increased difficulty also addressed one of my other initial problems with the game, which is the lack of resource-management compared to Ace Combat. You’ll pretty quickly have access to a surplus of missiles and special weapons, and the only limits on flares are a 10-second cooldown. It ends up being pretty easy to play thoughtlessly against the standard enemy arrangements, but the scope and length of the fights in this new mode made me much more conscious of my loadout and ammo supply. I knew I was going to finish the Mercenary mode when I had to really start experimenting with weapons on the fourth mission, forced to optimize and consider how to best use the newly-finite resources against lethal super-tanks that require you to destroy all their weapon emplacements first. Trying the pick them apart normally ended up being too dangerous, and I ended up refining my loadout to successfully incorporate heavier bombs over a number of failed attempts.
Good changes overall, but still wish the mission structure was more varied- would never have guessed I’d pine for the filler sections of Ace Combat 4, but being tasked to “kill everything” gets understandably old after 20 missions with no break in sight. The few times where it does break from the norm, like one mission where civilian planes are interspersed with enemies and shooting them down will fail the objective highlight how slight the modifiers could’ve been to transform the action. It’s a seemingly minor consideration, but it means you can’t fire away with your surplus of multi lock-on missiles and have to factor these neutral planes into your angle-of-approach. A time limit on a mission, some radar jammers that would impact your mini-map, or a few objectives you needed to protect could’ve similarly gone a long way as pace-breakers.
On the mind because it affects the game narratively too: An early-game mission where Cascadian forces are retreating from a major city is never able to land with the weight the presentation clearly wants, this supposed tactical failure preceded by gameplay where you’ve just spent the last 15 minutes annihilating every enemy on the map. Same goes for a solo mission which is framed as a smaller op before a larger offensive, but sees you clearing an enemy force that’s as massive as any of the regular encounters, and doubly annoying when you don’t have your Wingmen to chip away at some of the scattered emplacements.
Don’t want to be too dour though: haven’t had a chance (or the means to play it) but the Frontline 59 expansion seems to address a lot of the pacing issues I had with the main campaign of Project Wingman, and the strongest moments here make some of the more repetitive missions here easier to overlook. “Cold War” is the obvious highlight, a massive, mission-long dogfight that highlights the tenacity of the enemy pilots AI, and caps off with a great rematch against Crimson 1, your main rival throughout the game. Also one of best examples of how the great the energy of the presentation can be when everything here is firing on all cylinders: lively radio chatter and an inspired setting really managing to sell what a turning point this is for the world (and not to mention what a stellar opening this is). Could even see the somewhat lax mission design being a strength long-term, only rarely having to spend time hitting your marks in a choreographed set piece.
Rarely want to hit someone with the “It gets good X hours in,” but that’s exactly what happened here- really comes into its own over the course of the campaign and ends up being a great challenger to the normally uncontested throne of arcade flight-action.
Gets a lot better with time though- was going to write a lot more about the flatness of the early levels in the Campaign, but the transformative quality of the unlockable “Mercenary” difficulty addressed a lot of my problems, serving as the best kind of New Game +. You keep your fleet of planes and fight through remixed enemy placements, doubly addressing the slow pace and bog-standard engagements that dragged out the action of the early levels. Think that Project Wingman is most in its element when it’s dialing up the scale of the battles, cutting through armies of fantasy weapons-platforms, the screen crammed with sky-carriers and super-tanks and an absurd number of fighters.
It’s surreal imagery and a great threat, your missile warning constantly blaring out, and traces of railgun fire making for a distinct threat, their presence further complicating your ability to break line-of-sight with enemies. This increased difficulty also addressed one of my other initial problems with the game, which is the lack of resource-management compared to Ace Combat. You’ll pretty quickly have access to a surplus of missiles and special weapons, and the only limits on flares are a 10-second cooldown. It ends up being pretty easy to play thoughtlessly against the standard enemy arrangements, but the scope and length of the fights in this new mode made me much more conscious of my loadout and ammo supply. I knew I was going to finish the Mercenary mode when I had to really start experimenting with weapons on the fourth mission, forced to optimize and consider how to best use the newly-finite resources against lethal super-tanks that require you to destroy all their weapon emplacements first. Trying the pick them apart normally ended up being too dangerous, and I ended up refining my loadout to successfully incorporate heavier bombs over a number of failed attempts.
Good changes overall, but still wish the mission structure was more varied- would never have guessed I’d pine for the filler sections of Ace Combat 4, but being tasked to “kill everything” gets understandably old after 20 missions with no break in sight. The few times where it does break from the norm, like one mission where civilian planes are interspersed with enemies and shooting them down will fail the objective highlight how slight the modifiers could’ve been to transform the action. It’s a seemingly minor consideration, but it means you can’t fire away with your surplus of multi lock-on missiles and have to factor these neutral planes into your angle-of-approach. A time limit on a mission, some radar jammers that would impact your mini-map, or a few objectives you needed to protect could’ve similarly gone a long way as pace-breakers.
On the mind because it affects the game narratively too: An early-game mission where Cascadian forces are retreating from a major city is never able to land with the weight the presentation clearly wants, this supposed tactical failure preceded by gameplay where you’ve just spent the last 15 minutes annihilating every enemy on the map. Same goes for a solo mission which is framed as a smaller op before a larger offensive, but sees you clearing an enemy force that’s as massive as any of the regular encounters, and doubly annoying when you don’t have your Wingmen to chip away at some of the scattered emplacements.
Don’t want to be too dour though: haven’t had a chance (or the means to play it) but the Frontline 59 expansion seems to address a lot of the pacing issues I had with the main campaign of Project Wingman, and the strongest moments here make some of the more repetitive missions here easier to overlook. “Cold War” is the obvious highlight, a massive, mission-long dogfight that highlights the tenacity of the enemy pilots AI, and caps off with a great rematch against Crimson 1, your main rival throughout the game. Also one of best examples of how the great the energy of the presentation can be when everything here is firing on all cylinders: lively radio chatter and an inspired setting really managing to sell what a turning point this is for the world (and not to mention what a stellar opening this is). Could even see the somewhat lax mission design being a strength long-term, only rarely having to spend time hitting your marks in a choreographed set piece.
Rarely want to hit someone with the “It gets good X hours in,” but that’s exactly what happened here- really comes into its own over the course of the campaign and ends up being a great challenger to the normally uncontested throne of arcade flight-action.
1994
Potentially the best Tengo Project/Natsume title and easily my favorite of the bunch. Know I’m intensely biased towards Wild Guns, as it represented one of the first arcade (or, maybe more accurately, arcade-inspired) games I ever put any amount of time into, but it’s one I’ve only grown more fond of as I’ve played through it over the years.
If there’s anything close to a lynchpin mechanic here, it’s the Vulcan Meter- shoot down enemy bullets and you’ll build up towards a mode that allows for a brief period of invincibility and extra damage, crucial for some of the tougher bosses. The catch is that it triggers automatically, so the process of managing it upends some of your dominant defensive strategies: it’d be easy to get complacent and shoot down every bullet, but because this will leave you exposed on some of the tougher fights, tools like jumping, rolling, and bombing all get their place in the defensive hierarchy- anything to avoid unnecessarily activating it. It additionally helps in keeping some of the repeat fights engaging thanks to inherent variance brought on by these shifting priorities: fight the dualist miniboss on the first stage, and there’s little reason not to try and stun him to build a bit of extra meter, but later encounters will have you re-examining those same strategies, frantically jumping around shots you’d be otherwise tempted to counter.
It’s a system that also speaks to the game’s uncommon generosity among arcade titles, the combination of the game-changing nature of the Vulcan Meter and the way an extra life is always in reach thanks to the low scoring threshold making for runs where pushing through attempts, instead of endlessly resetting them, is encouraged. Improvisational too! Aside from the deviations of the brought on the player’s fluctuating resources, there are also randomized item drops, sometimes granting you extra-powerful weapons, sometimes saddling you with the near-useless “P-Shooter.” The result is a game where multiple runs can vary wildly from one another- and given that a successful clear only takes about 30 minutes to complete, makes the prospect of going for another one endlessly inviting.
I could go on: the way the scoring system encourages you to stay one place and keep firing to build and maintain your multiplier, eating through your special weapon’s ammo in the process, or the constant temptation to lasso and stun targets- a move that'll leave you momentarily vulnerable, but can be so, so worthwhile on some of the deadlier fights.
Remarkable that everything here gels so well together, especially given that many of the other Natsume titles at the time had the benefit of being based on older titles and the tight window of time for the game’s development. Would never have guessed its origin would be so unromantic, but regardless, the end result is one of my favorite titles of all time- if you’ve been thinking of jumping into this style of game, I’m hard-pressed to think of a better entry point.
///
While we were waiting for our next subcontracted work to begin, our boss told us to develop a new game with two conditions: quickly and cheaply. I believe from the initial planning to the finished app it took us about five months. I’m sorry the answer is so boring!
Wild Guns creator Shunichi Taniguchi https://shmuplations.com/wildguns/
If there’s anything close to a lynchpin mechanic here, it’s the Vulcan Meter- shoot down enemy bullets and you’ll build up towards a mode that allows for a brief period of invincibility and extra damage, crucial for some of the tougher bosses. The catch is that it triggers automatically, so the process of managing it upends some of your dominant defensive strategies: it’d be easy to get complacent and shoot down every bullet, but because this will leave you exposed on some of the tougher fights, tools like jumping, rolling, and bombing all get their place in the defensive hierarchy- anything to avoid unnecessarily activating it. It additionally helps in keeping some of the repeat fights engaging thanks to inherent variance brought on by these shifting priorities: fight the dualist miniboss on the first stage, and there’s little reason not to try and stun him to build a bit of extra meter, but later encounters will have you re-examining those same strategies, frantically jumping around shots you’d be otherwise tempted to counter.
It’s a system that also speaks to the game’s uncommon generosity among arcade titles, the combination of the game-changing nature of the Vulcan Meter and the way an extra life is always in reach thanks to the low scoring threshold making for runs where pushing through attempts, instead of endlessly resetting them, is encouraged. Improvisational too! Aside from the deviations of the brought on the player’s fluctuating resources, there are also randomized item drops, sometimes granting you extra-powerful weapons, sometimes saddling you with the near-useless “P-Shooter.” The result is a game where multiple runs can vary wildly from one another- and given that a successful clear only takes about 30 minutes to complete, makes the prospect of going for another one endlessly inviting.
I could go on: the way the scoring system encourages you to stay one place and keep firing to build and maintain your multiplier, eating through your special weapon’s ammo in the process, or the constant temptation to lasso and stun targets- a move that'll leave you momentarily vulnerable, but can be so, so worthwhile on some of the deadlier fights.
Remarkable that everything here gels so well together, especially given that many of the other Natsume titles at the time had the benefit of being based on older titles and the tight window of time for the game’s development. Would never have guessed its origin would be so unromantic, but regardless, the end result is one of my favorite titles of all time- if you’ve been thinking of jumping into this style of game, I’m hard-pressed to think of a better entry point.
///
While we were waiting for our next subcontracted work to begin, our boss told us to develop a new game with two conditions: quickly and cheaply. I believe from the initial planning to the finished app it took us about five months. I’m sorry the answer is so boring!
Wild Guns creator Shunichi Taniguchi https://shmuplations.com/wildguns/
Someone with more sense would have probably started with Most Wanted or Unbound, but the premise here, an expert driver on the run from the mob entering a cross-country race, had too much of a magnetic pull on me to try any other NFS title. For my many problems with the game, it succeeds on a very basic and immediate level: The Run looks and sounds fantastic, a sense of speed so profound that I’d emote to an embarrassing degree while playing, yelping at every head-on collision and holding my breath until I managed to clear the finish line. Its bigger ideas are sadly where it stumbles, the obvious cinematic ambitions of its story and gestures towards the arcade framing of the race feeling half-finished and compromised- there’s an amazing game you can squint and occasionally see for brief glimpses at a time, but it’s a rare thing.
Ultimately its main issue is the rigidity of the whole campaign, setpieces and scripting that are so predetermined, that in this illegal underground race, trying to cut through a median is enough a faux paus that the game will cut to black and reset your position on the road- and fully embodied with a final race that's so devoted to spectacle, that your position doesn't matter until the last 10 seconds of the race. It’s all the usual problems with 7th gen blockbusters, rules and expectations changing scene-to-scene, and even met on its own terms, this hyper-linear, directed experience can’t always maintain a consistent pace for its bombast.
I had originally started playing this a couple of years ago having just come off playing the Ace Combat games for the first time, and going from those titles, where radio chatter is near-constant and helps to add some gravitas to even the most mundane missions, to this, where stretches of the game are spent commuting between one set piece to the next in near-total silence, was a deeply deflating realization. There’s a pervasive sense that it was a budgetary issue more than anything else: I doubt the rival races, where you face off against a named character and get a brief synopsis of them, were meant to play out without any chatter- hard not imagine the game playing out more smoothly if there was more reactions throughout, more drama to the races. (Might’ve also helped to distract from the fact the back half of the game has you going backwards through old courses as well.)
This mechanical starkness isn’t wholly a terrible thing though- if you’re a fiend, the harder difficulties do offer some new perspectives on the underlying systems. The time trials seemed impossibly difficult at first, demanding that you corner near-perfectly while also driving dangerously enough to generate enough NoS meter to keep your speed up, and doing all this to still only clear checkpoints with milliseconds to spare. Other events, like the standard races also massively benefit from some of of these changes, other racers now able to take shortcuts and boost on their own, so you're further encouraged to drive aggressively and knock them into hazards where possible.
There’s amazing tension when it comes together, especially when cops and mobsters are added in, all contributing to a game where it can feel like you're on the razor's edge for stages at a time, but the margins for error are so tight that it really bring into focus some of the random elements, like the traffic and the other racers behavior- sometimes getting good patterns that let you consistently weave between cars to build meter, other times so catastrophically unlucky that both lanes of a two-lane road are occupied at once, and so you end up swerving away as your competitors speed off into the distance. I’m far more inclined towards the liveliness brought by these deviations than if the game had fixed traffic patterns, but it’s one of the reasons I think the game plays best if you alternate between Extreme and Very Hard.
While more time with the game got me to appreciate some of the particulars of its systems, it also helped me realize that the actual core of the game is totally inverted from its initial appeal- this cinematic coast-to-coast race revealing itself as a series of segmented challenges, with a surprising lack of narrative framing throughout. Still a killer premise, and the flashes of the arcade design, like the constant reminders of your IGT and number of resets that you’ve used, or the fact there seem to be some legitimate routing opportunities given that you can only switch out vehicles at certain designated points, feel like they speak to the potential that’s just under the surface. Admittedly, you’d be crazy to devote yourself to this in the here and now, with its unskippable cutscenes and long load times, but the beating heart of it is always there.
I can’t muster the energy to say that it’s some forgotten gem and a rage on about the amnesiac nature of the industry and games preservation, but it might be something to give a chance when trying out other delisted titles like Outrun 2 or Driver: San Francisco. For all its flaws, I’ve always enjoyed my time playing and writing about The Run- catastrophe and excellence in equal measure.
Ultimately its main issue is the rigidity of the whole campaign, setpieces and scripting that are so predetermined, that in this illegal underground race, trying to cut through a median is enough a faux paus that the game will cut to black and reset your position on the road- and fully embodied with a final race that's so devoted to spectacle, that your position doesn't matter until the last 10 seconds of the race. It’s all the usual problems with 7th gen blockbusters, rules and expectations changing scene-to-scene, and even met on its own terms, this hyper-linear, directed experience can’t always maintain a consistent pace for its bombast.
I had originally started playing this a couple of years ago having just come off playing the Ace Combat games for the first time, and going from those titles, where radio chatter is near-constant and helps to add some gravitas to even the most mundane missions, to this, where stretches of the game are spent commuting between one set piece to the next in near-total silence, was a deeply deflating realization. There’s a pervasive sense that it was a budgetary issue more than anything else: I doubt the rival races, where you face off against a named character and get a brief synopsis of them, were meant to play out without any chatter- hard not imagine the game playing out more smoothly if there was more reactions throughout, more drama to the races. (Might’ve also helped to distract from the fact the back half of the game has you going backwards through old courses as well.)
This mechanical starkness isn’t wholly a terrible thing though- if you’re a fiend, the harder difficulties do offer some new perspectives on the underlying systems. The time trials seemed impossibly difficult at first, demanding that you corner near-perfectly while also driving dangerously enough to generate enough NoS meter to keep your speed up, and doing all this to still only clear checkpoints with milliseconds to spare. Other events, like the standard races also massively benefit from some of of these changes, other racers now able to take shortcuts and boost on their own, so you're further encouraged to drive aggressively and knock them into hazards where possible.
There’s amazing tension when it comes together, especially when cops and mobsters are added in, all contributing to a game where it can feel like you're on the razor's edge for stages at a time, but the margins for error are so tight that it really bring into focus some of the random elements, like the traffic and the other racers behavior- sometimes getting good patterns that let you consistently weave between cars to build meter, other times so catastrophically unlucky that both lanes of a two-lane road are occupied at once, and so you end up swerving away as your competitors speed off into the distance. I’m far more inclined towards the liveliness brought by these deviations than if the game had fixed traffic patterns, but it’s one of the reasons I think the game plays best if you alternate between Extreme and Very Hard.
While more time with the game got me to appreciate some of the particulars of its systems, it also helped me realize that the actual core of the game is totally inverted from its initial appeal- this cinematic coast-to-coast race revealing itself as a series of segmented challenges, with a surprising lack of narrative framing throughout. Still a killer premise, and the flashes of the arcade design, like the constant reminders of your IGT and number of resets that you’ve used, or the fact there seem to be some legitimate routing opportunities given that you can only switch out vehicles at certain designated points, feel like they speak to the potential that’s just under the surface. Admittedly, you’d be crazy to devote yourself to this in the here and now, with its unskippable cutscenes and long load times, but the beating heart of it is always there.
I can’t muster the energy to say that it’s some forgotten gem and a rage on about the amnesiac nature of the industry and games preservation, but it might be something to give a chance when trying out other delisted titles like Outrun 2 or Driver: San Francisco. For all its flaws, I’ve always enjoyed my time playing and writing about The Run- catastrophe and excellence in equal measure.
2023
Double caveat for this write-up, because this is still in Early Access and because I have the nagging sense that I’ve missed some critical aspect of the game that’ll tie everything together (got a “B” rank on both missions, for example.) Speaks to how hard this is to pin down- with the devs citing immersive sims like Deus Ex and E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy as inspirations, and a kit that includes wall running, an extensive melee system, akimbo guns, and a host of inventory items. Not sure if the Early Access section quite capitalizes on all these elements though, a trek through an impressively-realized space station (akin to a miniature Talos-1) that’s a little too claustrophobic to be a great sandbox. The cramped environments make incorporating your movement and getting bold with your more complex melee attacks hard to pull off, especially given how hyper-lethal the combat is.
Catch a stray round of projectiles, and it’s game over, the game heavily encouraging you to quick-save often and to use your slo-mo power to correct your positioning. Despite being tutorialized, it took me a long time to appreciate that it’s not something that’ll carry you through gun fights, and is far more similar to something like MGSV’s brief window of slo-mo upon being detected. This punishing approach had me shooting through a lot of this section- especially during the bosses, which seem to be some of the most interesting encounters in theory, with the potential to weave between and deflect their shots, and to get some real use out of your melee attacks, but I oscillated between instantly dying to them and breaking the fight entirely.
Felt especially bad in the last fight, which I was never able to legitimately beat, just stunlocking it with the shotgun on my first attempt and getting it to trap itself in a section of the arena on another playthrough. Don’t know if it's simply a matter of a skill issue on my part, the kind of steep challenge that players will love and rise to the challenge of, or if it speaks to a game that’ll need to be reinvented at some point down the line, altering some of aspect of the game to help everything gel together.
It wasn’t until trying the ‘22 demo, which has been rolled into the Early Access release, that I felt comfortable dipping into the range of systems, the verticality of its cyberpunk sprawl and wider range of enemy types, including a shield-wielding SWAT unit that’s vulnerable to kicks, bringing everything into focus. Level design in general also seems more open, with crenelated environments offering a wider range of paths to the objectives, and set against a backdrop of two rival factions in massive shootout against each other. So, if you are getting the Early Access release, I’d encourage you to try this section out as well- it even seems to be the next portion of the game chronologically, just yet to be re-worked to reflect the narrative changes.
Weird one, but nice to see a game of this ambition in active production, even if its ideas don’t fully coalesce yet. Would rather catch up to wherever this is headed, than drag it back down into the familiar.
Catch a stray round of projectiles, and it’s game over, the game heavily encouraging you to quick-save often and to use your slo-mo power to correct your positioning. Despite being tutorialized, it took me a long time to appreciate that it’s not something that’ll carry you through gun fights, and is far more similar to something like MGSV’s brief window of slo-mo upon being detected. This punishing approach had me shooting through a lot of this section- especially during the bosses, which seem to be some of the most interesting encounters in theory, with the potential to weave between and deflect their shots, and to get some real use out of your melee attacks, but I oscillated between instantly dying to them and breaking the fight entirely.
Felt especially bad in the last fight, which I was never able to legitimately beat, just stunlocking it with the shotgun on my first attempt and getting it to trap itself in a section of the arena on another playthrough. Don’t know if it's simply a matter of a skill issue on my part, the kind of steep challenge that players will love and rise to the challenge of, or if it speaks to a game that’ll need to be reinvented at some point down the line, altering some of aspect of the game to help everything gel together.
It wasn’t until trying the ‘22 demo, which has been rolled into the Early Access release, that I felt comfortable dipping into the range of systems, the verticality of its cyberpunk sprawl and wider range of enemy types, including a shield-wielding SWAT unit that’s vulnerable to kicks, bringing everything into focus. Level design in general also seems more open, with crenelated environments offering a wider range of paths to the objectives, and set against a backdrop of two rival factions in massive shootout against each other. So, if you are getting the Early Access release, I’d encourage you to try this section out as well- it even seems to be the next portion of the game chronologically, just yet to be re-worked to reflect the narrative changes.
Weird one, but nice to see a game of this ambition in active production, even if its ideas don’t fully coalesce yet. Would rather catch up to wherever this is headed, than drag it back down into the familiar.
2002
Thought this would be a fun one to clear in a weekend, but it quickly spilled out into something I’ve had to chip away at over the course of the last month or so, each session revealing some new layer to the game. It may not seem like much at the outset, with SkyGunner’s base difficulty being pretty relaxed, other aerial targets flying lazily around the screen and death being a genuine rarity- taking enough damage only sends you into a “crashing” animation you’ll need to button-mash to pull out of. Combined with the breezy story and charming visuals, and it makes for a very inviting game if you just want to “see” it, (a nice contrast from the initial hostility of many arcade games) but if you’re really taken with it, going for score more than makes up for the initial ease of everything.
There’s a great balancing act in trying to build up your multiplier and keeping your combo timer alive, taking down enemy squadrons to build-up your resources and cashing out by destroying ground targets for their destructive and extremely lucrative “chaining” properties. At the same time you need to prevent your engine from overheating by overusing your abilities, so you have to use your special moves and fully-charged weapons judiciously or plan around the movement penalty incurred by maxing out your gauge, and doing all this while completing its quickfire succession of different objectives; It’d be easy to build up a decent score in a vacuum, but the real test is if you can do it under the pressure of a timer or while protecting an ally, making risky maneuvers to try and clear the skies as quickly as possible. The result is something where you always feel challenged to further optimize your play, where even something as basic as firing your standard machine guns can send you into the red, as it eats away your score- one more great consideration of many to add to your mental stack.
To be honest, chasing high scores is rarely the main appeal of a game for me, but it’s framed particularly well here: you may not care too much about it in the abstract, but SkyGunner frames this is as a competition between the main trio, the minimal threat of the objectives revealing itself to be a race to see who can get to the highest value targets first. Earn a “D” rank at the end of the game and it might not matter so much, but lose the lead in a simulated competition and that might be enough to spark some interest in the scoring system. And, as an added bonus, the extras are only unlocked after getting first place with each of the characters, another nice incentive to see how well the game flows together.
I mention it a lot, but the pacing here really is phenomenal: 5 stages that come in at around 45 minutes if you skip all the cutscenes. No scene here drags out too long or has a chance to outstay its welcome, and even an endgame stretch that initially felt a little dull can be dramatically shortened by helping your companions complete their own objectives for them (thanks for the tip Caim!)
I also want to mention its unique approach to difficulty: instead of a standard set of difficulty modes, it's instead divided up into different characters, who in addition to having planes with unique stats and moves, also end up tackling their own scenarios at specific points in the story. The second mission, for instance, can see you fighting off additional waves of standard enemies as Femme, the game’s easy mode, to destroying volleys of incoming missiles as Copain, the game’s hard mode. Outside of something like The Ninja Warriors: Once Again, I’m hard-pressed to think of a title where your choice of character can so dramatically recontextualize your understanding of the game, the combination of their remixed arsenals and deviations in their stories making for something where successfully finishing it once only leaves you with the realization of how much more there is to experience.
That said, there is one convergence point for all of the characters that I do think is kind of weak: all of them have to contend with the upset that is the final boss, Ciel and Femme the tasked with performing the surprisingly tricky maneuver of hitting it with three fully-charged missiles in a short window of time, a task that asks you to keep track of your ammo and heat meter in a way that no other section of the game outright mandates. On the other hand, Copain gets the much easier objective of simply landing one fully-charged bomb on him and then continuing the fight as normal. It's manageable with some practice, but it’s the one point in where the game feels really inelegant, throwing newer players into a set piece that demands a surprising amount from them, and a strangely flat way to close out the game, dramatically. It might also be the downside of having such a tightly-paced game, it’s one misstep given prominence in a way a longer game might never invite.
There are a few other hang-ups worth mentioning to: the lack of a first-person view has been discussed by the devs as a feature that was experimented with before being cut, but there a few targets where it’s easy to lock-on to some vestigial turret and a waste your shot due to the lack of a more precise aiming option (again, a small thing brought into more pronounced focus on the final boss). Can totally see the art style being a dealbreaker too; reminds me a lot of the self-reflection Jason Rubin had on the Jak games, caught between aesthetics in a way that might be intensely appealing to some, but seems like it’ll ward off just as many. Also easy to imagine another game using the multiple perspectives here to tell a more layered story- for the most part you’re getting different insights into what charming detour each of the characters went on, with only the unlockable character’s story offering some real intrigue.
It’s been hard to articulate why I’ve enjoyed this so much- know a trend in the past for me has been a sense of “completeness,” no ideas left unexplored and where the prospect of mastering the game feels limitless. That quality is probably the reason the lack of a sequel (well, a true sequel) is easier to live with, a sense that developer PixelArt truly understood their own game, successfully creating a title meant for newcomers and hardcore players alike. A rare and excellent thing.
///
References
2001 Developer Interview for SkyGunner, https://shmuplations.com/skygunner/
Interview with Jason Rubin (Timestamped for the discussion on the aesthetics of Jak), https://youtu.be/0EkRT7qOMq0?si=qrzfYN9VGL1JEChr&t=2150
There’s a great balancing act in trying to build up your multiplier and keeping your combo timer alive, taking down enemy squadrons to build-up your resources and cashing out by destroying ground targets for their destructive and extremely lucrative “chaining” properties. At the same time you need to prevent your engine from overheating by overusing your abilities, so you have to use your special moves and fully-charged weapons judiciously or plan around the movement penalty incurred by maxing out your gauge, and doing all this while completing its quickfire succession of different objectives; It’d be easy to build up a decent score in a vacuum, but the real test is if you can do it under the pressure of a timer or while protecting an ally, making risky maneuvers to try and clear the skies as quickly as possible. The result is something where you always feel challenged to further optimize your play, where even something as basic as firing your standard machine guns can send you into the red, as it eats away your score- one more great consideration of many to add to your mental stack.
To be honest, chasing high scores is rarely the main appeal of a game for me, but it’s framed particularly well here: you may not care too much about it in the abstract, but SkyGunner frames this is as a competition between the main trio, the minimal threat of the objectives revealing itself to be a race to see who can get to the highest value targets first. Earn a “D” rank at the end of the game and it might not matter so much, but lose the lead in a simulated competition and that might be enough to spark some interest in the scoring system. And, as an added bonus, the extras are only unlocked after getting first place with each of the characters, another nice incentive to see how well the game flows together.
I mention it a lot, but the pacing here really is phenomenal: 5 stages that come in at around 45 minutes if you skip all the cutscenes. No scene here drags out too long or has a chance to outstay its welcome, and even an endgame stretch that initially felt a little dull can be dramatically shortened by helping your companions complete their own objectives for them (thanks for the tip Caim!)
I also want to mention its unique approach to difficulty: instead of a standard set of difficulty modes, it's instead divided up into different characters, who in addition to having planes with unique stats and moves, also end up tackling their own scenarios at specific points in the story. The second mission, for instance, can see you fighting off additional waves of standard enemies as Femme, the game’s easy mode, to destroying volleys of incoming missiles as Copain, the game’s hard mode. Outside of something like The Ninja Warriors: Once Again, I’m hard-pressed to think of a title where your choice of character can so dramatically recontextualize your understanding of the game, the combination of their remixed arsenals and deviations in their stories making for something where successfully finishing it once only leaves you with the realization of how much more there is to experience.
That said, there is one convergence point for all of the characters that I do think is kind of weak: all of them have to contend with the upset that is the final boss, Ciel and Femme the tasked with performing the surprisingly tricky maneuver of hitting it with three fully-charged missiles in a short window of time, a task that asks you to keep track of your ammo and heat meter in a way that no other section of the game outright mandates. On the other hand, Copain gets the much easier objective of simply landing one fully-charged bomb on him and then continuing the fight as normal. It's manageable with some practice, but it’s the one point in where the game feels really inelegant, throwing newer players into a set piece that demands a surprising amount from them, and a strangely flat way to close out the game, dramatically. It might also be the downside of having such a tightly-paced game, it’s one misstep given prominence in a way a longer game might never invite.
There are a few other hang-ups worth mentioning to: the lack of a first-person view has been discussed by the devs as a feature that was experimented with before being cut, but there a few targets where it’s easy to lock-on to some vestigial turret and a waste your shot due to the lack of a more precise aiming option (again, a small thing brought into more pronounced focus on the final boss). Can totally see the art style being a dealbreaker too; reminds me a lot of the self-reflection Jason Rubin had on the Jak games, caught between aesthetics in a way that might be intensely appealing to some, but seems like it’ll ward off just as many. Also easy to imagine another game using the multiple perspectives here to tell a more layered story- for the most part you’re getting different insights into what charming detour each of the characters went on, with only the unlockable character’s story offering some real intrigue.
It’s been hard to articulate why I’ve enjoyed this so much- know a trend in the past for me has been a sense of “completeness,” no ideas left unexplored and where the prospect of mastering the game feels limitless. That quality is probably the reason the lack of a sequel (well, a true sequel) is easier to live with, a sense that developer PixelArt truly understood their own game, successfully creating a title meant for newcomers and hardcore players alike. A rare and excellent thing.
///
References
2001 Developer Interview for SkyGunner, https://shmuplations.com/skygunner/
Interview with Jason Rubin (Timestamped for the discussion on the aesthetics of Jak), https://youtu.be/0EkRT7qOMq0?si=qrzfYN9VGL1JEChr&t=2150
1997
Seems like a twisted joke that one of the action games from this era that ends up controlling the most fluidly is the one where you’re piloting a spider-tank- it’s the humans of this generation that you’ll need to get a license to operate. Finds a very particular balance between rigidity of tank controls and the ease of circle strafing, and combined with the ability to transition between (almost) every surface, it’s ended up being some of the most fun I’ve had just controlling a character in 3D space. Came away really liking the conspiratorial feeling of dodging enemy fire by totally inverting my angle-of-approach and entering fights by walking in on the ceiling (would love to see another game pick up where this left off).
Think the highlights are some of the densely-packed later stages, which hold up remarkably well thanks to the fact that the game will seamlessly transition from 3rd to 1st person if the area you’re in gets too cramped, and an early-game level where you’ll race against the clock to destroy explosive barrels in an open-ended environment. The timer here is tight enough that there’s some genuine decision-making in finding the best ways to cut through the level and in deciding what shot type to use: spend a few seconds and charge your lock-on or use a limited-use grenade to clear the objective? It’s a great pressure that’s surprisingly absent in the rest of the levels, free to move through them as cautiously as you want. Doubly weird given how the narrative keeps presenting these ticking clocks, with escaping suspects to catch and reactor meltdowns to avert, that have no bearing on the scenarios themselves.
Speaks to a general sense that this great movement was slotted into a game that didn’t quite know how to test it: Hard to believe that the fight against a rival Fuchikoma, which can scale walls as nimbly as you can and cycles through a number of projectile attacks that can track the player, is in the same title where so many of the bosses only entail that you circle-strafe around them and hold the lock-on button to win- not even leading their shots to throw off the player’s movement: just complete non-entities.
It’s further illustrated by its last level, a straightforward gauntlet through a bunch of enemies and a final boss that could function in almost any other action game, none of the hazards capitalizing on the unique qualities here. Probably a lot to expect from a licensed game, but the action is so far removed from any facet of the Ghost in the Shell series that I sort of wished that the devs had been able to ditch the IP entirely, free to construct whatever abstract and outlandish obstacles they wanted.
As with a lot of the middle-of-the-road arcade games I’ve talked about, the fact that its best ideas are still lying dormant isn’t some cardinal sin; start this in the evening, and let its novel movement system and pulsing DnB soundtrack hold you over till sunrise- maybe daydream about what it could be in the aftermath.
Think the highlights are some of the densely-packed later stages, which hold up remarkably well thanks to the fact that the game will seamlessly transition from 3rd to 1st person if the area you’re in gets too cramped, and an early-game level where you’ll race against the clock to destroy explosive barrels in an open-ended environment. The timer here is tight enough that there’s some genuine decision-making in finding the best ways to cut through the level and in deciding what shot type to use: spend a few seconds and charge your lock-on or use a limited-use grenade to clear the objective? It’s a great pressure that’s surprisingly absent in the rest of the levels, free to move through them as cautiously as you want. Doubly weird given how the narrative keeps presenting these ticking clocks, with escaping suspects to catch and reactor meltdowns to avert, that have no bearing on the scenarios themselves.
Speaks to a general sense that this great movement was slotted into a game that didn’t quite know how to test it: Hard to believe that the fight against a rival Fuchikoma, which can scale walls as nimbly as you can and cycles through a number of projectile attacks that can track the player, is in the same title where so many of the bosses only entail that you circle-strafe around them and hold the lock-on button to win- not even leading their shots to throw off the player’s movement: just complete non-entities.
It’s further illustrated by its last level, a straightforward gauntlet through a bunch of enemies and a final boss that could function in almost any other action game, none of the hazards capitalizing on the unique qualities here. Probably a lot to expect from a licensed game, but the action is so far removed from any facet of the Ghost in the Shell series that I sort of wished that the devs had been able to ditch the IP entirely, free to construct whatever abstract and outlandish obstacles they wanted.
As with a lot of the middle-of-the-road arcade games I’ve talked about, the fact that its best ideas are still lying dormant isn’t some cardinal sin; start this in the evening, and let its novel movement system and pulsing DnB soundtrack hold you over till sunrise- maybe daydream about what it could be in the aftermath.
2003
Sands off much of the rough edges of the first, but doesn’t innovate massively either, mostly ending up as a more comfortable trek through old ideas.
For instance, I didn’t mention the issues with screen crunch with the original, with lots of blind drops into instant-death spike traps, but it’s mostly remedied here with much of the stage design leaning into the hazards that will damage you and eat away at your overall rank- but not kill you. While getting bombarded by offscreen enemies is still a pain, overall the threats here a much better fit for the dimensions of the GBA screen and the tremendous mobility of your character. Gimmicks like timing your jumps to avoid geysers of frozen air or speeding across a minefield are relatively simple, but they are a huge step up from the first game, which seemed almost willfully designed not to account for any of these limitations.
The idea of tying your score at the end of levels to gaining new moves is a cool one too, and while its another system that the series would toy around with further (in this iteration it’s an all-or-nothing: you have to come into a level with an “A” rank or above to unlock a new move) it’s a powerful incentive to replay and really learn levels. With so many scoring systems, there’s a fundamental question of “why even engage with it,” and this gives clear answer to that: because you’ll miss out on the full range of your kit if you decide not to (and also because you’ll get called mean names like [SLUGGISH EDGE])
That said, for the mechanical improvements it does make, 2 is way too familiar in its scenarios- retreading through much of the first game only without the same curveballs in its mission design, and further compounded by the fact that it’s hitting all the notes of a regular Megaman title. Realizing that the back half of the game was going to be spent fighting the Guardians from 1, and then going into the formality of its boss rushes and final gauntlet made the game feel deeply inessential- like a Black Label version of the first. (This all might be due to the fact that the first Zero was meant to be a self-contained game, while 2 and 3 were developed together, the sophomore effort seemingly saddled with the baggage of vindicating its own existence in the wake of the first and laying the foundation for more interesting titles ahead.)
The best moment here is probably its midpoint, with a pair of missions where you’ll first run through the wreckage of the failed assault on Neo Arcadia, a pretty easy but very atmospheric section that calls to mind some of the best upsets of 1, and then racing your way through an airborne armada to defuse a bomb before it hits the resistance base, rapidly working your way through a succession of boss fights and some of the better platforming sections. This sequence doesn't just work because of the strong execution, but because it feels like the game is finally throwing off its comfortable template for a moment and really committing to a standout set of levels that are totally their own.
Otherwise, it’s a decent obstacle course, but not an essential one.
///
References:
"When we first created Mega Man Zero, we were not planning to make sequels," says Aizu. "After Zero's release, the sales were strong enough that Capcom wanted us to create the sequel. When we began planning the sequel, we decided to make two games. So as we began developing Mega Man Zero 2, we also had the story for Mega Man Zero 3 in mind for the series." - From "Companions Through Life and Death: The Story of Inti Creates and Mega Man," Jeremy Parish, writing for USGamer
For instance, I didn’t mention the issues with screen crunch with the original, with lots of blind drops into instant-death spike traps, but it’s mostly remedied here with much of the stage design leaning into the hazards that will damage you and eat away at your overall rank- but not kill you. While getting bombarded by offscreen enemies is still a pain, overall the threats here a much better fit for the dimensions of the GBA screen and the tremendous mobility of your character. Gimmicks like timing your jumps to avoid geysers of frozen air or speeding across a minefield are relatively simple, but they are a huge step up from the first game, which seemed almost willfully designed not to account for any of these limitations.
The idea of tying your score at the end of levels to gaining new moves is a cool one too, and while its another system that the series would toy around with further (in this iteration it’s an all-or-nothing: you have to come into a level with an “A” rank or above to unlock a new move) it’s a powerful incentive to replay and really learn levels. With so many scoring systems, there’s a fundamental question of “why even engage with it,” and this gives clear answer to that: because you’ll miss out on the full range of your kit if you decide not to (and also because you’ll get called mean names like [SLUGGISH EDGE])
That said, for the mechanical improvements it does make, 2 is way too familiar in its scenarios- retreading through much of the first game only without the same curveballs in its mission design, and further compounded by the fact that it’s hitting all the notes of a regular Megaman title. Realizing that the back half of the game was going to be spent fighting the Guardians from 1, and then going into the formality of its boss rushes and final gauntlet made the game feel deeply inessential- like a Black Label version of the first. (This all might be due to the fact that the first Zero was meant to be a self-contained game, while 2 and 3 were developed together, the sophomore effort seemingly saddled with the baggage of vindicating its own existence in the wake of the first and laying the foundation for more interesting titles ahead.)
The best moment here is probably its midpoint, with a pair of missions where you’ll first run through the wreckage of the failed assault on Neo Arcadia, a pretty easy but very atmospheric section that calls to mind some of the best upsets of 1, and then racing your way through an airborne armada to defuse a bomb before it hits the resistance base, rapidly working your way through a succession of boss fights and some of the better platforming sections. This sequence doesn't just work because of the strong execution, but because it feels like the game is finally throwing off its comfortable template for a moment and really committing to a standout set of levels that are totally their own.
Otherwise, it’s a decent obstacle course, but not an essential one.
///
References:
"When we first created Mega Man Zero, we were not planning to make sequels," says Aizu. "After Zero's release, the sales were strong enough that Capcom wanted us to create the sequel. When we began planning the sequel, we decided to make two games. So as we began developing Mega Man Zero 2, we also had the story for Mega Man Zero 3 in mind for the series." - From "Companions Through Life and Death: The Story of Inti Creates and Mega Man," Jeremy Parish, writing for USGamer