Ace Attorney Investigations 2 is an oddity. A never-localised sequel to the worst entry in the series, it held many conflicting expectations for me before I went into it. I certainly didn't hate the first game, it was often painfully mediocre and overly drawn out but it went some way to satisfying that Ace Attorney itch. The sequel though had been sold to me as the potentially the best in the series, a landmark achievement in fan-localisation and and a total improvement on its predecessor. After over thirty hours, I'm not sure I can entirely agree...

I really, really wanted to love this game. There was plenty of stuff in the first Investigations that was interesting, but what that game needed more than anything was refinement. The new mechanics weren't fleshed out enough and there were too many characters, and too much arguing on technicality rather than substantial gotchas.AAI2 does not agree though, instead adding more of everything. As well as the logic system and deeper investigations from the first game, we now have logic chess - a system that boils down to a really crappy version of the psychic locks from the AA trilogy. It never felt like a substantial challenge, always playing out like a glorified flow chart where victory was all but confirmed. The puzzles in Ace Attorney are usually at their weakest when they rely on multiple choice questions, so having a puzzle mechanic that is entirely comprised of them is such an awful idea.

Perhaps I'm being harsh there, logic chess definitely does not comprise much of the game's runtime. You don't spend more than two to three hours in it over the whole game, but honestly, that is part of the problem with it. The same problem exists for the investigations and logic connection systems (both returning from AAI). You simply don't use them enough for them to ever advance in complexity. I maybe had to use the deduction mechanic less than ten times across the whole game, no more than two or three times per case, and the logic system is always so easy it feels like a patronising attempt at making me feel included. Difficulty is a big problem here across the board, with constant flashbacks and hint dialogue bombarding you every other time you're called upon to solve a tricky puzzle. AAI2 is far and away the easiest game in the series, while still having twists that feel convoluted and at times nonsensical.

But puzzles are only one ingredient of the Ace Attorney recipe, perhaps less important than the other major component: the story. Improvements have been made from the first game, but at a cost. There are more characters than in any other AA game, with genuinely interesting new characters like Ray Shields being joined by a cavalcade of familiar faces. It's admittedly quite nice seeing returning characters like Frank Sahwit, but some of the choices are odd to say the least. Was anyone crying out for the return of Lotta Hart or Regina Berry? They're pleasant surrpises, but they detract from the stories and arcs of the new arrivals like Justine Courtney and Sebastian Debeste. The final case suffers the most from this bloating, the final scenes of which have a comedically large ensemble stuffed on to the DS screen. As much as I love them, did Franziska and Lang need to return? Why is Kay still so prominent when Ray is supposed to be the new foil to Miles? I like fan service (when it's done well) as much as anyone, and I tolerate it more than I would normally with the Ace Attorney games, but here it actively detracts from the story being told and the arcs we're supposed to be invested in.

This is normally where I would say at least the presentation is at its best as usual. Apollo Justice is a very flawed game, but it still has best-in-show music, character design and animation. I'm afraid that AAI2 is a mixed bag. Some stuff here is great, better than the previous game at least, but some sprites here are awful. Blaise Debeste and the President are particularly horrible designs, featuring ridiculous muscles in skin tight suits for seemingly no reason other than "look cool", and both have breakdowns that beggar belief. The Ace Attorney games normally feature designs that are a little silly and over the top, but in AAI2 they're downright cartoonish. Don't even get me started on Justine Courtney's gravity-immune boobs.

It probably sounds like I hate this game, but I honestly didn't. The translation work here is astounding, it feels completely in line with the style of the first game and I didn't notice any lines that felt out of place (nor even any typos). You can tell how much love has gone into this fan-effort and I'm glad that it exists, because I don't think Capcom will ever localise the game officially. Outside of that, it's really the third case in the game that saves it for me, and is leagues better than the other four. It's almost entirely new characters and has a totally new structure for the series, with a constant switching back and forth between past and present. The conclusion is still a little convoluted and silly, but it was a great case that only makes the rest seem all the worse by comparison. Play this if you've played every single other Ace Attorney game and are still dying for more, otherwise, probably give it a miss.

What a shitload of fuck! This game, Subahibi, is one of the weirdest and most messed up games I've ever had the displeasure of playing.

So you start off as this average Joe named Takumi, and from there, it's like stepping into a never-ending fever dream! Seriously, the game just flips characters and timelines like it's going out of freakin' style, making it a nightmare to follow.

And let me tell ya, the dialogue in this game is as pretentious as a turd claiming it won the Pulitzer Prize! These characters think they're fuckin' philosophers, spouting off lines that don't make a lick of sense. All I wanted was to play a game, not be dragged through the mud by a bunch of whiny-ass punks!

That being said, for all its craptastic dialogue and confusing-as-hell plot, I'd be lying if I said I didn't find some things intriguing about this dumpster fire. The visuals are pretty snazzy, and the whole bizarre story actually starts to grow on you after a while.

Alright, bottom line: Subahibi is a convoluted shitstorm that may appeal to some of you sick twisted gamers out there. But for me and my sanity, I'm going to refrain from any further experience with this game and go throw a couple of ice-cold beers down my gullet to wash away that mind-fuckery experience.

After hours. I am a single line across which all other lines unfold, slick, slipping. Going so fast the strands slide through the cracks of the emulator.

2:00 am. My automobile body funnelled into video-tunnels that stretch without end to the rhythm of nu-jazz beats. A drama that plays on repeat for my Pearl Blue Soul.

Someway, somehow, R4 reminds me of a Hong Sang-soo film.

It's a senseless comparison, played-out across mediums and genres but every time I come back to these tracks it persists, blends-in along the city lights and tire marks in my rear-view mirror.

There's a tension in this philosophy of drift, the joyous longing of century's sunset, that makes me pause for thought at the end of every race. The stories are so simple, the game presented with such expert straightforwardness, as to blur the feeling itself in Camarro-yellows.

Still, where I think this iteration of Ridge Racer joins the cinema of the author is in that insistence to make flows coexist - rub emotion and expression against one another in ways most often hidden - and leave the outbursts at the edges of the screen.

The speed of Ridge Racer is the pace of life itself but for all its glamour breathlessness the moments that truly stir are those near-misses, the curves in a length of road where the vehicle goes slightly out of control and you brush past a rival. The little encounters. The seconds where the heart stops. I wish I could've held-on to your hand a horizon longer.

Type 4s and margaritas, that’s all I want for the summer.

A word for Guillaume Ferran's musical delicacy: This world is full of visual wind. Pastel minerals and all that jazz. Sound quarrels with space. The stone is teeming with human voices, humane thoughts. But he brings a throughline. A clarity of purpose to the evocative building blocks of culture put in place here. Nature is not a phantasm - it is a constant object of animated dialogue. Breath after breath. All we need do is listen.

Jusant does not care for the pain of the ascension. All it sees is a dark passage - the colours held within. Good. Dwell too long and you lose sight of what truly matters: Our toil, imagined or otherwise, will always bring us closer to shape. Memory is nothing but fickle, watery matter. We bend and love leaks. The dead and the unborn watch us. Time ebbs and flows in my body - this house of all houses.

Storm gathers. This other place. This unmoored Babel. It's not coming back. Our efforts were in vain and only we remain. Waiting for rain to hit the shore - soaked by association. That kind of primeval sensation software could only recreate in the aggregate. But that's the beauty of memory. There isn't a single drop of rain in Jusant. Yet here I am.

Souvenirs d'une éclaboussure.

The cutscene that plays when using the dynamite on a battle is the single best thing ever implemented in any videogame in all of human history and I’m only mildly exaggerating.

A macabre festival where the dance never ends, a fever dream made out of bones and clay; Hylics manages to perfectly capture the feeling of a nightmare that seems to be completely absurd, yet it manages to craft meaning within the spiral of chaos. Places with random names located in islands that make no sense; mazes and entire worlds inside machines down ladders that somehow connect, and half of the odd weirdos you come across seem to speak in riddles and the other half take the insanity of this realm as another Tuesday, but all share the incredibly exaggerated animations, that range from the smoothest hand and clay movement you could think of in battles to just three frames for each walk cycle, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

If Hylics delivers something in spades, it’s definitively a sense of style, of harsh clay figurines and contrasting colors, of poems and jokes, with mountaintops populated by cone-shaped cultists and an afterlife full of fishes and a couch. I could list every single area and enemy in this game and say, ‘’WoAH! That was pretty weird and cool!’’, but I think the fact the game is just that, an avalanche of nonsense and weird shapes—and somehow finds a way to make an actually pretty simple tale and a world that has some sort of meaning and makes sense—is far more impressive than the weird moments themselves.

The harsh and quiet melodies, the special moves you get by watching the TVs, the pals you meet along the way; it’s really hard to talk about individual aspects of Hylics because everything seems intrinsically connected with each other and totally unique at the same time, which ironically makes it so some of the moments that stand out like a sore thumb are those in which it feels like the game doesn’t go nuts enough with its ideas.

The combat system, as crazy as some of the attacks get, is still pretty light; there are some cool things about it, like how it connects to the afterlife, some item interactions, and how the game’s own openness makes meeting allies and gaining abilities completely up to you. But I think that’s where the interest peaks, in how the combat is pretty determined by what you do outside of it, and when it comes to battles themselves, while there are some interesting bosses, it soon became pretty clear others are just damage sponges and that you can become pretty powerful very easily, and that plus how the areas are designed often makes combat seem more like a chore you sometimes do to get past a certain point or gain meat and money, and that otherwise evading conflict is often the faster, less annoying option.

And again, it’s in these battles where some of the more abstract and impressive animations can be found, and if anything, the final area and boss fight will ask of you to have gotten many special secret moves and quite the amount of bucks, so it isn’t completely valueless to engage in combat, but in a game with such a crazy atmosphere and universe, I was hoping for something far more engaging.

I was hoping to see more of the party members, who seem to lose their mouths the moment they join you. I was hoping for some of the puzzles to be more out there. I was hoping for more of its insane style to slip into other areas, like the menus or the secrets… Hylics presents an impossibly creative world, and even if it doesn’t last longer than it needs to and it's full of amazing stuff, it feels as if its full potential has yet to be achieved.

But what was accomplished is unforgettable; despite wishing I got to see more of their personalities, the yellow devil and his three friends singing and playing in a bar in the middle of nowhere and plowing through the forces of the moon before facing the final fiend are some amazing moments that made me laugh despite no words being said. Wade is a menace, but not one that has to be locked up; in fact, it should be let out even more wild. Godspeed, you crazy bastard…

Also, big fan of Somsnosa, it’s always nice to see another hat with horns appreciator…

Nintendo tributes Super Mario Bros. 3, one of the most inventive, joyously meaningful leaps they've ever taken, by taking a bunch of iconography from it for their kinda lame advertisement for a side gimmick most people turned off anyway.

Ok it's not as bad as that makes it sound, but we're scraping the barrel of Nintendo's game design here. Literally one of the first ? blocks has the raccoon suit in it for you to fuck around with. The easy criticism is that they want you to remember old thing to feel good, but the real problem is that this game has a lack of progression. You don't get the cape in Super Mario World until the second area for a reason; that game had design principles and ideas to introduce and wanted you to get to grips with the basic movement before unleashing you with the cool shit. This is so important to the game that when I watched people play that lovely SMW ROM hack where it was remade from memory, one of the first big things that jumped out to people was that they gave you a cape in the first area. And yeah that's because we've all played it 1000 times, but also because it fucks with the progression in a clear way. I shouldn't have this. In 3D Land you get that item within 10 steps because there's nothing they want or need to teach you. We're all on autopilot and everyone knows all you need to do is run and jump.

There's no concept of how the disparate levels fit together through theming or design, just some vague idea of gradually increasing difficulty and making sure there aren't like two Ghonst Houses in a row. It's a linear sequence of level ideas Shigru Miyamo had inbetween giving bad instructions to the Paper Mario guys for fun. The thing is, a lot of those levels are pretty fun, even though Mario's moveset is by far the lamest it's ever been. It turns out the minimum viable product baseline Nintendo platformer is still enjoyable because they know basic movement, momentum, and how to direct you through a level. They know too much to fuck it up but weren't ambitious enough to make it good.

In conclusion: play 3D World instead. I really like that game despite a fair number of these criticisms also applying to that. Does that mean I'm full of shit? Probably. But presentation means a lot. Plus it has more everything AND that more is higher quality. It brings my brain electricity to higher than 0, which is what I want in life and love.

I have a love/hate relationship with idle games, and the hate portion can be summed up with my ardent belief that the creator of NGU Idle shouldn't be allowed near a computer ever again. The ideal idle experience for me is one that takes the purity of manipulating numbers that all other genres obfuscate and mashes it with engaging upgrades, strategy, and an endearing concept. First and foremost, Gnorp Apologue is on the good side of incremental gaming. It has a very simplistic art style, with your little hardworking gnorps being like 6x5 pixels, but it's fun and satisfying to see those busybodies busybodying around, doing your bidding. Certain upgrades and gnorp professions have synergies which keep you strategizing and not just blindly clicking upgrades, but at the same time it's relatively forgiving; at worst, a bad strategy will have you waste some time.

Here we come to the elephant in the room: does this game respect your time? Yes and no. I truly believe the ideal idle game not only possesses the qualities I listed above, but can also be completed within less than a day of play. All idle games I've played that pass this time limit I find are extending their length beyond what interesting content they have. Prestiging is a basic concept of the genre, but so many have you go through an hours long cycle to make a tiny upgrade, and then you do it all again. Repeat for weeks of your life. Gnorp Apologue is definitely better than most at this - I still felt that I was experimenting and learning new things with each cycle even if all I got for my troubles was one or two more prestige points - but it's undoubtable that the rate of new content thrown at you lowers dramatically after the first few hours.

Here we come to the elephant within the elephant within the room (the first one was hungry): you have to pay for this game to play it. I think this game is worth the money, but all paid incremental games hit this wall. A game about manipulating numbers can only have so many systems and layers until it becomes ungodly complicated and/or require an unworthy amount of dev time. So the rate at which this content is introduced inevitably slows down at a certain point of complexity until you've prestiged enough times to beat it. It took me just over 17 hours (with a fair amount of idling) to do so. I believe if the numbers were fudged so that it took more like 10 hours instead, it would be a more consistently engaging experience. But I don't regret any time I spent with this game. After finishing, I went back to get some more prestige points to see the endgame of my overarching strategy, then got the rest of the achievements, which I don't do that regularly. So overall it won't change your opinion on idle games but, if your views on them align with mine, I think you'll get your money's worth. End of review. Nothing else to say. Nope.




gnorp

They’ve got the sauce!

It’s not enough of the sauce, and it takes a little while before they actually start doling the sauce out, but by God, they’ve got the sauce! Undertale Yellow actually gets it, and what a triumph that is. It manages to avoid a lot of the pitfalls which plague fangames and have resulted in them getting such a broadly negative perception as being lesser forms of media, and it does so with an impressive amount of finesse. There are more than a couple of misfires here, and it can’t manage to be something that meets nor succeeds the original Undertale, but they’ve got the sauce. It’s a very big swing to take, and just about as big a hit.

What I appreciate most about Undertale Yellow is the sheer amount of restraint that the developers showcase. You only see Toriel for a grand total of about two minutes before she’s out of the game for good, and Mettaton, Alphys, and Asgore are mentioned a few times; apart from that, the only returning character who actually sticks around for most of the runtime is Flowey, and he acts differently enough that a large part of the narrative is trying to figure out what angle he’s playing at. There’s no Sans. He doesn’t even get namedropped! What? Can you imagine releasing an Undertale fangame and not bringing up Sans? When I got to the Snowdin Town bridge and released that Sans wasn’t going to show his face, I got pumped. It’s brave. A group far less confident in themselves would have just made this a second lap through the extant Underground, going on a little adventure to essentially experience Undertale all over again in a world where you could just play Undertale again if that was what you wanted to do.

The first impressions when the game starts branching off of Undertale aren’t especially strong. The first original NPC that you meet in the Ruins — Darv or Darm or Darl, whatever his name is — very much looks like someone’s Adventure Time self-insert that they drew to be Marceline the Vampire Queen’s boyfriend. Picture me retching as I type this. His character isn’t particularly good, mostly just muttering about some betrayal from long past and talking about how he wants to be left alone, and the game seems to agree with me in this respect; he drops off the face of the earth for the remainder of the runtime, only showing up again at the very end to make sure that the player hasn’t forgotten about him. The other new characters are significantly better: Martlet is a strong and obvious standout among the rest of the cast, North Star and his posse aren’t as consistent in their designs nor personalities but are still good, and Ceroba seems a lot like someone’s fursona but not in an especially bad way. I ended up liking more of the principle cast than I didn’t, so they’re definitely doing something right on the design and writing front.

The average enemy encounter is fine; there’s nothing especially interesting about most of them, though some do offer a couple of interesting gimmicks. Making the “floor slippery” so that the soul glides around or the music enemies blasting you with waveforms that you need to dodge are cute. Most of the boss fights don’t offer anything especially interesting, though. While Pacifist Ceroba does manage to get a few interesting gimmicks going in the form of giving the player the Big Shot, the overwhelming majority of the boss fights are just clicking Spare over and over and over again; your ACT commands often do nothing besides give the same line of flavor text every time you select them, which is a fairly boring way to handle these big encounters. I found the Guardener to be the best fight simply because it required you to hack away at vines blocking your options which then led into an ACT chain, giving you some freedom in the form of selecting which of your options you want to be available to you first. El Bailador is fine, turning the game into a rhythm section for a few minutes, but it doesn’t do much for me. So many of these fights are just about dodging bullets and slamming Mercy over and over again, and that’s never really been the draw of Undertale.

Similarly ranging from alright to forgettable are the music tracks. There’s nothing truly offensive here, and there are a couple that I like, but it's important for us to remember that Toby Fox was a composer long before he was a game designer. I can still hum the melodies to just about every track from Undertale, but I don’t think I could do the same for a single song from Undertale Yellow — at least, not from the ones that don’t lift one of Toby’s leitmotifs. While I do admire the developers’ willingness to get out from under the Undertale narrative trappings of returning characters walking in like sitcom guest stars for the audience to whoop and applaud to, I can’t extend the same praise to their composing. Ceroba’s fight plays a remix of Hopes and Dreams that the game absolutely hasn’t earned, and it took me right out of a battle that I was digging up until then. There are quite a few instances of obvious musical recycling in places where they don’t belong, and the songs that are wholly original don’t interest me much. They're far from anything terrible, but they feel a bit lazy in a game where there isn’t much else that does.

Undertale Yellow is ultimately a good fangame, and that is perhaps deserving of more celebration than anything else. It is very clearly made by a team of passionate and creative people, and I don’t think that their time spent on this would have been better spent on an original IP, instead. With that said, I would prefer for the next thing that this team releases to be something entirely of their own design; with all of the eyes that they’ve got on them now, I’m sure they’ve cultivated an audience that would be glad to see more.

And the sprites look too good. It’s all wrong. Part of the appeal of Undertale is that it looks like hot shit.