This game is the best argument that could ever possibly exist for why Doom Eternal should not have a "style meter".

Ufouria/Hebereke 2 was developed by a small team from a new development studio called Tasto Alpha, the heads appear to mostly be Grasshopper Manufacture alumni. From what I can tell this is only their second game, the first being a card-based RPG from last year. The sound director for Ufouria 2 was one of the composers on Godhand, the director was one of several planners on Rule of Rose. The game has a charming aesthetic, great new remixes of tunes from the original game, and a good sense of humor. It's structured less like the "search action" style of the original, and more like a scaled down Amazing Mirror with extremely lite Rogue elements. The game is about 3 hours long and the last chunk is mostly mirrored versions of previous levels.

2 months into 2024, this is the most fun I've had with a new game this year. In fairness, there are a lot of games that I would be unsurprised if I had more fun with them when I eventually play them, and some of those games are already out. Maybe I'll like Infinite Wealth more than this, but I want to play other games in the series first. Maybe I'll like Relink more than this, but when that game launched it wasn't on my radar.

A couple weeks ago Penny's Big Breakaway "shadow dropped". I don't want to be too hard on it, because it's definitely an interesting game, because I think I could reasonably speculate on what could possibly be going on in the games industry climate for them to want to rush a sellable product out the door as soon as possible, and because some of the issues I have with it could be patched. One of the main things I've found myself thinking as I try to make more progress through the game is whether or not I would care about the game's collision issues, audio problems, and general "jank" if it were a PS2 game. Next to the latest Nintendo platformers Breakaway falls a little short, but it's clear sense of style and sheer amount of content for a game of its type would have made it a must-buy a couple decades ago. It's the exact kind of game you could imagine Treasure making if they were still around today, but the standards a lot of players have today are likely part of the reason Treasure's future exists mostly in rumors.

Ufouria 2 is a much easier game than the original, but could a game with those kinds of expectations still appeal to the intended audience of the IP? We're stuck with a classic problem of bringing back a piece of media like this, is it hard enough for returning adult fans while being easy enough for the possible new generation? A longplay of the original NES game is about half the length of my playthrough of the new one; even if the game's semi-random level layouts offer a bit of padding, it's definitely of comparable length, probably just a bit bigger. If Ufouria 2 was an NES game, or a SNES game like the many Japan-only spin-offs, would we remember it? Does Ufouria: The Saga already give us the answer to that question?

Would I recommend Ufouria 2? Do I think you should wait for a sale? These are absurd questions. If enough small teams existed around the world making games of this exact scope that one game like this released every week, I know exactly how I would spend Friday night every weekend. I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less. I hope these guys were paid well.

The gameplay left a first impression that had me pacing around my apartment with my head in my hands wondering why nobody talks about this game. My second session mostly consisted of watching the live action TV show portion, which is for some reason presented via streaming instead of being stored as local video files, buffer and eventually tell me my internet was too bad to watch it.

Looks and runs pretty good, core mechanics feel nice but the tone and structure are all over the place. On first boot it gave me a warning that my nonexistent save had corrupted and then hard crashed the first time I died.

A while ago I was talking with a friend about the best-selling video games of all time. I was initially shocked that Borderlands 2 sold better than almost every Call of Duty, until I realized that I hate everything about this game and still somehow bought it 3 separate times over the past decade.

I wasn't bothered by FFXVI's side-quests in the way that some people were, and I could tell just from seeing that the concept was going into another Fallen ruin that this was basically just going to be a budget DLC. Something that they could put together quick enough to have it ready for the trailer, so people would buy the season pass with something new to play now, while mostly anticipating Leviathan. Despite going in with this expectation, I was still sort of shocked by how... nothing... this is?

The main appeal here is the new boss, with a few other new fights along the approach. The rest of the DLC is basically an hour of remixed assets from the base game, and an hour of literally just walking through the Rosaria overworld, with a fight in the deadlands (i.e. a battle where literally the only thing you can do is basic sword swings) between these two segments. If it weren't for the boss, this wouldn't just be a normal sidequest, it would be a low-tier sidequest. The base game already having this dungeon's entrance modeled and the towers in its skyboxes really just makes it feel like this was haphazardly cut to meet a deadline.

Playing this to get back into FFXVI after having finished it months ago wasn't bad, but I think someone buying this before finishing the game, finally unlocking this, and playing it as part of their normal playthrough is a sort of hilarious concept.

I boot this game up about once a year to just haphazardly clear a few random levels in my mostly finished save file; I've never beaten it, let alone gotten anywhere near 100%, and I have no particularly urgent plans of doing so.

I love everything about the game's presentation, not just the visuals, but the menu design, the soundtrack. A lot of games have a sort of general "air" resulting from the total audiovisual experience, the way that the music and sound effects play together, and this is as pleasant as it gets.

The Yoshi games have always been sort of confusing to me, because the core mechanics are more constrained and clunky than the Mario games they spun off of, but for what the games are they have a ridiculous amount of content and absolutely evil collectables. These aren't like Kirby games where you can easily sit down and make it to the end in an afternoon; blowing through levels is unsatisfying, but hunting all the optional stuff is a chore. It's best played in a sort of lackadaisical meandering way, but that requires either a specific state of mind or a disciplined approach.

I'm tired of spinning my wheels.

Mario Kart 8 has been the pack-in, the default Nintendo game, the Wii Sports of our era, for nearly a decade, for the entire time that I've been an adult. I think it's the last game I first played in a store at a demo kiosk. At this point it's a bizarre amalgam of years of Nintendo iconography and design principles; the online menus featuring Mii avatars and the sort of skeuomorphism of online communication being represented by all the players standing on a globe feel like a relic of the original Wii era, we have widgets on the main menu for Amiibo and Labo. Tracks now range from remakes of the SNES original's tracks, to the brand new courses made for this game, everything in between, and levels from the more recent mobile game. Mario Kart 8 feels completely anachronistic.

Minutes before writing this I finished 3-starring every cup in the grand prix mode, finally clearing those few DLC cups I didn't quite perfect the first time. There's something absurd about playing this game single-player, and something perverse about getting good at it. Despite the fact that I have probably played more local multiplayer of this game, and with a wider variety of family and friends, than any other game released since, I can't help but feel utterly alone in playing it. Maybe it's because when I was a kid everyone I knew played games, everyone had a Game Boy, several families on my street had a GameCube, everyone had a Wii, when I was starting college everyone had a 3DS and a few people even had a Wii U. Despite now outselling most of those systems, the only Switch I've ever seen that wasn't mine was one I gifted to a family member. The sheer amount of content in this game makes me feel how a certain Minecraft developer must have felt when all his candy started rotting.

You leave the solar system and, before you even regain control of your vessel, the song explodes.

Intense breakbeats and ethereal synthesizers soon accompanied by acid bass, synthetic pizzicato strings and twinkling digital chimes. The entire screen is filled with a deep, blood red; the same red that envelops the Earth, the force field which serves as a prison here serves to protect your ship. The space around your craft is filled with bursts and streaks of light, what are they? Are they stars whizzing past as you speed by? Are they other ships coming in and out of warp? Are they projectiles volleyed back and forth between the combatants in the war against the Ur-Quan? It stimulates the imagination in a way that more literal or realistic representations couldn't.

Nearly a minute in, after a brief lull, the main theme is re-introduced, the lead instrument slightly detuned, the rest of the instruments now accompanying it; it still signifies danger, but with newfound confidence, adventure. The drums leave the mix completely, bells come in, their sustained reverb buried deep in phaser or chorus. The song has taken on a more meditative quality. The sounds beneath the music have transformed from high pitched whirling wisps to deep growls. Nearly two and half minutes into the song the main theme once again repeats, but now transposed (I don't have a good enough ear to tell if its a key change or different mode or what), it now takes on a sense of pure heroism.

But you won't hear that the first time you hear this song. If you attempt to leave the Sol system before completing the introductory quest, you'll find yourself with insufficient fuel to get anywhere, and nowhere near enough firepower or maneuverability to survive a fight; additionally it seems like at this point in the game the encounter rate is cranked up specifically to discourage you from skipping the opening missions. Even once you can fabricate parts and train crew for your ship, you'll inevitably be making short enough trips at first that you'll only hear the more "dangerous" parts of the song. Even once you upgrade your fuel tanks and start making longer voyages, encounters with enemies will interrupt the music and make the song play from the beginning before you have time to hear the later segments. The player's relationship with the song develops as they progress through the game in what I think is genuinely one of the most magical fusions of gameplay, narrative, and audiovisual artwork in any video game, ever.

I'm utterly shocked that this game isn't more widely known. I myself only found it by chance: a podcast I listen to recommended Ars Technica's "War Stories" interview with one of the developers of Crash Bandicoot, and I decided to watch all of the interviews in the series. Most of these interviews are about technical aspects of the game, challenges faced during development, personal histories of the developers, or behind-the-scenes of the business end of game production. The interview with Paul Reiche and Fred Ford, founders of Toys For Bob, is just them gushing for two hours about a game I had never once heard of beforehand. I look the game up to find that despite its seeming obscurity, it was once often considered in "best game of all time" lists, is widely praised by high profile games industry personnel, and has been free and open source for over twenty years.

This game has the sprawling map and incredible dialogue of a game like Fallout, but is so much more intuitive that it could be played with an NES controller without issue. It has some of the best writing, most memorable characters, and most entertaining voice acting I've ever seen in games; I genuinely cannot even imagine how mind blowing this game must have been in 1994 when this version was released on 3DO. It has one of the best intro sequences of any game from this era, I was instantly hooked. I feel like I've barely dipped my toes into it, its scope is so ridiculous; knowing what happens as time passes in the game I'm genuinely not sure if I could ever beat it without following a walkthrough, but even so I'd say it's worth starting out by exploring blindly and learning about the world. Some day I'm going to actually hunker down and try and squeeze this gem for all it's worth, and it's going to absolutely own my life. Even now, with what relatively few hours I've spent with it, Star Control 2: The Ur-Quan Masters has already had an immense impact on how I view games.

Grappin’ is a first person platformer made by former (?) Game Freak and Nintendo staff, and I’m the kind of freak who spends time looking up game credits on MobyGames to see what people are up to, which is how this ended up on my Steam wishlist. It has a soft-lit low poly aesthetic. You shoot a grappling hook at clay bricks, then you zip towards those bricks and gain a bit of upward momentum. The game looks and feels nice.

The level design is fine, but the progression is just annoying. Each area of the game is gated by a wall, each area of the game has a number of gold skull collectibles that must be obtained to pass that wall. An area might have 10 skulls, and you may only need 3; the problem is that these collectibles are not fungible. That is, the game doesn’t care about how many you have, it cares whether or not you found certain specific ones. All that you get is vague hints like “it’s in a cave” or “it’s near trees” so the level design itself is not the challenge, and is not what the player is going to actually interact with most of the time. You’re going to be doing a lot of wandering.

It's more Toree, it's fun. The idea of replaying a stage and getting a sort of "advent calendar" treat every time you finish it is nice in theory. The rewards are pretty cool, but the actual process of replaying the level is monotonous; the only thing you really have to aim for as a player is an S-rank time, but if you're like me, you'll hit that ceiling by your second or third run, and everything beyond that will be identical. I got a C rank, a bunch of S-ranks, and nothing in between. Playing as 4 characters simultaneously was a neat challenge but the rest of the available modifiers to the main mode seem to be purely visual.

It's honestly miserable to play but there's a menu where you can watch short FMV's describing all the different aircrafts and it's all narrated by a guy trying to sound like the Halo announcer saying shit like "The SWAT CRUISER has been perfectly engineered to make all enemies VERY DEAD" and it's so bad it's good. I love the doughy early 00's CGI characters, the whole aesthetic is like if Rescue Heroes was trying to be edgy.

More games should give you a lot of things to pick up just for fun. I wish tea was real.

Free Running doesn't commit to the jump.

Despite its continued prevalence in the 00's, the growth of "skater culture" in the popular consciousness was more of a 90's phenomenon; the 00's were all about parkour. Parkour-style maneuvers continue to be a feature in a wide variety of video games today. Parkour is virtually never the actual focus of these games, just one mechanic in a game with many others, always with a more fantastical setting and stakes than athleticism itself. Somewhere in the middle, during the extreme sports game boom, there surely should have been a game focused squarely on parkour.

Free Running, from the studio best known for Sniper Elite, is the only game of this type that I could find. It appears to have initially released only in Europe and Australia, not making to the US until it was ported to the Wii in 2010, and was eventually released on Steam in 2019. In 2007 the game was already a little late, a PS2 game in a post-PS3 world, coming out the same year that Assassin's Creed would basically declare parkour itself insufficient to carry a game on its own. Compare the box art of the PS2 and PSP versions to the new art that has been used since the Wii (the box art used on this page). Not only does this mark the general cultural shift, in only a few short years the public idea of parkour changing, but also it's another example of what I talked about in my review of The Sky Crawlers; trying to find hidden gems in the Wii library is basically impossible because even "core" titles try to blend in with party and fitness games.

Not that Free Running is a hidden gem by any means, frankly it's pretty rough. The game sort of takes on the control scheme, structure, and format of the post-Tony Hawk extreme sports games that came before it, but does so completely without grace or style. The simple function of each button is up for debate: X is a sort of "balance" button, A is a sort of "grab" button, Y is usually jump, and the shoulders are for special moves, but beyond this you may as well be memorizing random patterns. The difficulty in platforming doesn't come from actually performing any maneuver, it comes from managing the impact, but how you do this is completely inconsistent. Some actions (grabbing poles, for example) will happen completely automatically, others will happen automatically but penalize you for not timing a button press, and others won't happen at all without that button press. Sometimes you need to press the X button (such as recovering from a fall), sometimes you need to press the A button (such as when grabbing ledges) but there is no intuitive rhyme or reason to most of the expected inputs.

The sort of atemporal product design of the Wii release's packaging betrays the actual aesthetic of the game, in retrospect it paints a surprisingly bleak picture, intentionally or otherwise. The very implication of the term "free" running, as opposed to some other kind, should make one consider what kinds of shifts had to occur in our society for the space once occupied by skateboarding, usually characterized as a form of both self-expression and rebellion, is now taken up by normal human movement. Pro Skater has the player begin in abandoned warehouses, schools, malls. Outside of the tutorial gymnasium, the first level of Free Running is a city rooftop. The freeway is visible in the skybox, traffic is at a standstill, blocked by police cars. The name of the level is simply "home".