Did you know that this game simulates the weight of each guest, and it can affect your coasters? Each person can weigh between forty-five and seventy-six kilograms, and if a cart is filled up with low-weight guests, it will lose speed more quickly than if guests had high weight values, where it will maintain speed for much longer. It won’t make a difference most of the time, but in coasters like the bobsleigh, it can be the reason a cart flies off the track after working flawlessly for years. This is never explained or mentioned in-game, but it’s a useful thing to know when designing coasters.

Did you know that each coaster type has hidden criteria that, if not met, incur severe stat penalties? The most common requirements are hitting certain benchmarks for drop height, number of drops, maximum speed, ride length, and maximum negative or lateral G forces. For each missed criteria, the coaster’s excitement, intensity, and nausea ratings are usually cut in half, so failing just one of them can make for a cost-inefficient coaster, and missing two leaves you with a money sink. However, the game never mentions any of these stat requirements, nor the fact that they even exist. It can be useful to look them up before designing a coaster, so reloading a save or aimlessly making random tweaks isn’t required.

Did you know that guests will regularly pay more than $10 for a ride on each coaster? The price they'll pay isn't just affected by the excitement, intensity, and nausea ratings, but the age of the ride and whether there’s another of the same type in the park. Also, each stat weighs differently into the price calculation depending on the coaster type, so there isn’t an easy formula to figure out how much each ticket should cost. However, the bonus given to a new and exciting ride is significant enough that visitors will often pay the full $20, way more than anyone would actually pay in real life, especially when framed with the knowledge that this game came out in 2002. The way the optimal price is determined isn’t explained anywhere in-game and is mostly figured out through trial-and-error, but once you get the hang of it, even the toughest scenarios become trivial.

You may have discovered a little pattern in these facts, in how Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 is a simulation game that’s uninterested in explaining how its simulation works. Players are just told to build a park with so many guests or earn a certain amount of money per month, and that's it. It’s fine to let players discover some things on their own, with ride prices probably being the best example, but when designing a compelling coaster can take so much fine-tuning, it would be helpful to give players an understanding of how they’re being evaluated. It’s good to know why coasters might randomly crash, it would be nice to know how scenery actually affects your park, and so on. Since so much is left totally ambiguous, it makes sense that the majority of players simply ditched scenario challenges and made the most lethal or silly coasters they possibly could. I suppose that might be true to the game’s title, being “Roller Coaster Tycoon” instead of “Theme Park Tycoon”, with the most fleshed-out elements being those that surround the coasters themselves, and the rest of the game is just a shallow framework to let you keep building. If you wanted to revisit this game after remembering it fondly from your childhood, the coaster madness absolutely holds up, but if you were looking at it as a tycoon game, there are much better choices out there.

Addendum: I found the best information about how RCT2’s mechanics work from an excellent Youtuber named Marcel Vos. He has videos breaking down all the interesting little details about the game which go otherwise unexplained, and they're definitely worth checking out. Also, for running it on modern systems, check out OpenRCT2, an open-source re-implementation of the game with some light-touch new features, bug fixes, and compatibility improvements. It’s probably the best way to play the game nowadays.

Aaahhhhhh, that’s better. We have subweapons back, the controls work, it’s everything The Adventure should have been. At least, it’s everything a first attempt at a Game Boy Castlevania should have been, since it still has some flaws. The only subweapons to return are the axe and the holy water, the cast of enemies is still unimpressive, and there are a couple stages that aren’t great. Allowing players to tackle the first four levels in any order sounds like a great idea, especially for a portable game, but it’s questionable when a password system exists. It trades out the advantages of a linear difficulty structure in favor of allowing people to just turn on the game and play the stage they want immediately, which was usually reserved for games without save systems like Mega Man. It leaves the game feeling like it has four versions of “level two” strung together before the finale, instead of a traditional escalation in difficulty. Of course, these are all pretty understandable problems and workarounds given the limitations of the hardware, so that’s what keeps me positive on Belmont’s Revenge despite its mediocrity. It’s not a favorite, but if I played this back in the day after beating the first Castlevania, I wouldn’t have been disappointed.

Having a great soundtrack is a common reason for games to be considered memorable, but what “great” really means in this context can be complicated. There’s the obvious quality of being catchy and fitting for the action on screen, but music can also be evaluated for its mechanical conveyance. If a player is dropped into a graveyard with a gun, the sound of whispering wind and mournful violins will probably make them walk slowly and cautiously, but the player who hears heavy drums will start swiveling around looking for the demons to pop in. While that’s an obvious example, the principle of using different tracks in this way applies even within a singular game to help players understand the pace. That’s where Ape Out succeeds with its soundtrack, even in the absence of music that most people will find catchy. It’s dynamically generated jazz, where the loud, chaotic, all-percussion soundtrack reacts to the player’s actions by changing the intensity, adding crashing cymbals, and matching the speed based on the player’s own pace through the level. While it doesn’t lend itself well to listening to individual tracks, the freeform nature of the music encourages players to take the same approach, and rely on improvisation more than the methodical iteration common to top-down action games. Most other titles in the genre have your character dying to one bullet, but Ape Out lets you take a decent amount of punishment before facing a restart, recognizing that as soon as players stop feeling like a rampaging ape and start tactically checking corners, the energy of the music and flow of the gameplay would immediately become discordant. It’s a fascinating little system to experience, but in a way, the interactive nature of the soundtrack is let down by the limited options you have to actually experience it. Running through rooms and smashing people as a gorilla is a silly enough little concept, but your entire agency boils down to punch, grab, and move. I was left wanting gameplay that was fittingly special for a game this unique with its visuals and sound, even while understanding that it makes sense to give players a simple bedrock to ground the more unfamiliar aspects. It’s good enough to hold up its hour-and-a-half runtime, but not enough to turn the stylistic successes into a true great.

The Evil Within 2 was a sequel that seemed conceptually out of order. All the first game tried to be was a pastiche of B-movie horror, but it would be followed up by a game that actually established the characters. Sebastian Castellanos was originally just meant to be a basic horror protagonist, and while he had a backstory and some details to pick up on, his only real job was to be sympathetic enough for the story to function. Then, the second game starts and immediately throws on the emotional baggage: he was living a troubled family life and trying to raise his daughter when tragedy struck, resulting in the loss of his wife and his child being taken from him. It’s a decent enough way to motivate a character to go put his life on the line against terrible monsters overrunning a small town, but after playing an entire game where he was a blank slate, is there really a reason for people to care? Shouldn’t the character-heavy stuff have been introduced in the first game instead, so we could enjoy a more action-packed followup without all the introductions?

Somehow though, it pulled it off. While our hero’s goal is to rescue a daughter you have no personal attachment to, she isn’t just used as an object to chase, so she doesn’t drag down the plot as a human macguffin. Instead, the weight of the plot falls on the protagonist himself, and it’s his character that receives the most attention. While it may have been nice to get more details in the first game, his characterization here is complete enough to make up for the lost time. The villains are all designed to reflect on the hero, or highlight some aspect of his personality or past, which makes his journey feel that much more personal. It’s another case where it would have been incredibly easy to just rely on the strength of the tried-and-true horror tropes, but instead, they’re used thoughtfully to enhance the themes of the narrative. They aren’t the equivalent of robot masters in Mega Man, leading you through themed areas before a predictable showdown, they build on each other to form a cohesive adventure, and a complete characterisation as a result.

In the downtime between fighting the big bads though is one of the other big additions to the sequel, being a small town that serves as a hub between major areas. While this could easily become repetitious, the atmosphere never lets up with how constantly the hub keeps evolving. You don’t just clear it out in the first half then use it as a glorified level-select menu, the ambience changes, the roster of enemies changes, it’s a fleshed-out centerpiece that ends up feeling like a character unto itself. The shift from the previous game’s linearity to this one’s comparative openness didn’t end up creating the sort of empty downtime of collecting baubles one might expect to pad out a linear formula, but instead rewarded players with a respectable amount of real side content.

Side content in a survival horror game may seem like an odd inclusion, when a key part of strategy is minimizing risks to maximize effectiveness with your limited supplies. However, the core gameplay here really isn’t about survival in that way. It works more like an action game, where you’re encouraged to seek out challenges in order to gain rewards that further increase your capabilities. You gain new tools that can change how you play, and enemies have a suitable level of variety that make them fun targets, so you're not stuck with an incredibly basic shooter for the entire duration. Neither you nor the enemies are stuck with the usual slow movement that’s found in horror games, so combat is about constantly moving around and switching weapons instead of backpedaling and mindlessly popping headshots.

When you put all these elements together, you get an action-horror game that avoids all the normal pitfalls. It doesn’t lazily try to motivate you with personal stakes you have no reason to care about, it doesn’t rely on tropes to characterize its villains, the combat is deep, the progression is more than tweaking damage numbers, and through all that effort, it pulls you into its world in every possible way. By the end, players are absorbed in the conflict, even if they didn’t originally care about this protagonist, since so much effort went into establishing the challenges of the journey both personally and physically. It wrapped up at the perfect moment, letting the hard-earned payoff of its conclusion have its moment, and I’m glad it didn’t end on a huge cliffhanger for the sake of paid DLC, or cheapen the resolution by introducing the conflict for a future sequel. I’m happy it’s been recognized as a horror game that did things right, and hasn’t been passed up in favor of many of today’s horror games, which may have excellent style, but very little substance.

Rod Serling might not be a name you recognize, but you probably know his voice. He was the creator of the original Twilight Zone series and the narrator of its famous intro, ushering viewers into a world between light and shadow, science and superstition. His unique cadence was a perfect way to open the show, since it’s clear and understandable, but also a little… off. It’s hard to describe, it’s like he speaks in a slightly different time signature to the rest of us, friendly but faintly suspicious. When each episode begins, he often appears on screen in a tidy black suit and introduces the characters, who are obliviously going about their lives as the man in black hints at the intersection of the supernatural that’s about to occur. While he's not jarringly out of place, he doesn’t quite belong either, which is a great way of conveying the feel of many of the show's conflicts. They’re the sort of things that might occur in a dream, not limited by mundane logic, but are still real enough to hold truth. Sometimes they’re scary, sometimes they’re tragic, but through them all is a message that speaks to the feelings we all share.

That’s what makes The Twilight Zone so special to me. It’s not just cheap twists and pulp, there are real messages, ideas, and emotions here, just with a lair of the supernatural and sci-fi that bring life to the fiction. It’s a quality that Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors shares as a visual novel, presenting a mystery that seems steeped in convoluted and cheap sci-fi, but at the center of it is a story with a message and heart. It uses those elements as tools to help you connect with the characters, who are often just as confused as you are, and experiencing the same dreamlike horror you might be feeling as you read. It captures everything I love about that sixty-year-old show with its mysterious atmosphere, relatably flawed characters, and the sort of tragic story that gives you a lot to think about.

However, I also have to confess that it encapsulates some of what people don’t like about The Twilight Zone too. The experience of atmosphere is highly subjective, stories will never resonate with everyone, and a visual novel requires a much greater time commitment, lasting nine hours instead of twenty-five minutes. Also just like the show, it’s a bit dated. Other works have been inspired from it and played off the same ideas, and it may come off as feeling tired or obvious to genre fans who started with something else. It’s a game that, unlike most when I try to recommend them, comes down almost entirely to personal taste. I can’t highlight a certain mechanic or describe how it uses the fundamentals of good game design, it’s just a story I love and want people to give an honest chance.

Bonus Content:
Since I talked about the show so much, and love it so dearly, here are a few episodes I might recommend for people interested in the show. If you end up watching/enjoying it, you absolutely earn a place in my treehouse club for cool dudes:

Where is Everybody? (season 1, episode 1)
As a Star Trek fan, terrible first episodes are something I've come to expect, but this one does a great job at establishing the atmosphere of the series. It's quiet and tense, with shots that remind you of movies like "I Am Legend", even with comparatively primitive filmmaking tools. You could use this episode as an example for how far you can take a story without computers or a high budget, using creative methods to tell a gripping story of total isolation.

What You Need (season 1, episode 12)
While The Twilight Zone is primarily known for its horror, this episode shows the other side of the series with a cautionary tale. This is a natural fit for a show where the variables of reality are unreliable, putting people into unrealistic scenarios which test their character in a way that still feels realistic. When watching this episode in particular, it's natural to wonder how you would react if you were put in the shoes of the main character, and it's this thought-provoking nature that makes the show more than the sum of its parts.

The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street (season 1, episode 22)
I said that "Where Is Everybody?" is a good taste of what The Twilight Zone is all about, and if that's true, this episode is the main course. It's considered one of the best in the series for good reason, mixing the horrific, moralistic, cautionary, and even political elements together to deliver a story that will still resonate with modern viewers. If I had only one episode to convince someone that this series is still relevant, it would be this one.

The Shelter (season 3, episode 3)
If you're a fan of that realistic and morally-focused side of the show, this also episode is for you. With how plainly the story is told, it feels like a direct message from Serling about how insane society can be. It's a straightforward story with an obvious message, but that realness makes it one of the most relatable episodes in the entire series. You can easily see the events of this episode happening in real life, and that's what makes it uniquely terrifying.

The Midnight Sun (season 3, episode 10)
This is my favorite episode of the series, even if it's not popularly considered one of the best. The horror in this episode is unlike anything else in the show, with a threat that isn't hidden in the shadows or behind the supernatural. Other episodes may give you the creeps, but this one is set up to give an oppressing sense of dread. If you have anxiety problems and need to explain to someone what it's like, make them watch this episode. It's about as close to the real thing as you can get.

Imagine you’re chatting with friends about your favorite restaurants. One person mentions the fish market, another talks about a tucked-away little Thai place, and then someone says Olive Garden. The first impulse might be to laugh, but at that moment, my number one wish would be to go with them and see what’s good. I mean, how many people have the integrity to go against the grain like that, to be unembarrassed and unapologetic with their taste, and not lie or make excuses like I probably would. Even if I ended up not enjoying it, I would at least get to hang out with someone who has a unique take on things and expand my perspective.

That’s how I ended up playing this game. On my recommendations list, user Lot0 mentioned that they were in the minority for appreciating it, which piqued my interest. Even as a huge Castlevania fan, I rarely heard people talk about it, and the few times they did were decisively negative. But a lot of people think even Castlevania on NES is bad, so why should I trust them on their assessment of The Adventure? After all, these platformers are simple games, there’s not much you could do to ruin the formula, as long as it all functions properly it should still be a pretty enjoyable game.

However, the operative phrase there is “as long as it all functions properly”. The movement is pitifully slow, jumping from a standing position seems to not work sometimes, inputs randomly drop, it just has an inexcusably bad game-feel. A couple stages have some neat concepts, but mixed in with the fun parts are challenges that border on unfair. That’s certainly not a unique problem within the series, but since this game has no subweapons, there’s no room to strategize your way around it. In the original game, bosses were designed to be weak to certain weapons, so by removing them, bosses in The Adventure are all about finding a spot where you just can’t be hit. It’s like playing a Castlevania title as explained by people who don’t like the series, who would tell you it’s just clunky controls and unfair difficulty set to a decent soundtrack. That’s why I'm so curious about the people who enjoy it, I want to see what they love in something I found to be a comedic exaggeration of the series’ problems. There doesn’t have to be a formal reason for loving it of course, everyone’s entitled to what they enjoy and don’t need to justify themselves, but I would love to give the game a second look from the perspective of a fan. Maybe after that we could go get some nasty breadsticks.

There are three common explanations for beginner’s luck. The first is how novices feel no pressure when going up against experts, but experts overthink their strategy to avoid losing to a newcomer. The second is centered around problem spaces: novices don’t know what actions are typically ineffective, so they’re open to more possibilities than the limited set internalized by a veteran. Finally, the most common of the bunch is that experts try to predict what the other player is doing, and when a novice breaks their heuristics, the game plan begins to break down. At the root of all these explanations is an asymmetry between mindsets, where the ordered thinking that comes with experience clashes against chaos, which can lead to some amazing upsets. You might expect I’m trying to explain how I got through a difficult game with no trouble, but instead, my goal is the reverse: explaining how this game used asymmetry to beat me.

So, how is luck possible when a game is a machine with set rules? Well, consider this scenario the game presents you with: a poetry competition breaks out in your little journeying caravan and you have the option to either join in with a verse of your own, just cheer from the crowd, ignore it and listen for danger, or break it up and tell everyone they should be on guard. If you’re concerned about the safety and morale of your people, the best compromise is probably ignoring it and staying vigilant. However, that’s the second worst decision you can make. The actual best possible decision is joining in with a verse of your own. Now consider a second scenario: you encounter wild fruit that no one recognizes and apparently tastes funny, but people want to collect it for the food supplies. Do you just start eating it anyway, or discourage people from doing so? If you thought it might be best to exercise caution, you’ve picked the worst option. Admittedly, not even the majority of the game’s events work with such questionable logic, but the inconsistency is high enough to disrupt informed decision making regardless. The developers were able to construct events with full knowledge of what would motivate me as a player, but the inconsistent results give me no comparable understanding of how they're thinking. It creates the sort of asymmetrical mindset that makes me feel like the game is just getting lucky shots against me, with the ordered approach failing against a chaotic system. The counterargument might be that the entire point of the game is overcoming a harsh situation, and how real-life choice and consequence is never cut-and-dry. However, I think a good response to this comes from another game about leading a wagon through the dangerous wilderness: The Oregon Trail. When reaching a river crossing, the choices would be to ford straight through, caulk the wagon, hire a ferry, or wait for conditions to change. All these options carry their own risks and tradeoffs, but as a player, I understand all of them. If I decide to go straight through and lose many of my supplies, it feels completely justified. When hiring a ferry, I fully understand that the loss of cash could impact me later. The Banner Saga succeeds in creation of a bleak tone with its chaos, but how am I supposed to feel connected to my decisions, when the decisions themselves aren’t consistently connected to certain consequences?

The combat has the same sort of asymmetrical chaos that makes it hard for me to connect. With its turn-based grid combat one might recognize from Fire Emblem, some restarts and failures are expected, but the logic behind the enemy behavior is a tactical black box. Enemies might completely ignore a powerful caster one shot from death to go target someone at full health, turning their imminent victory into a defeat. Sometimes they do the opposite, immediately focusing their fury on a single strong hero and crippling my strategy in the first few turns. Fire Emblem may seem random with its percent chances to hit, but enemies will reliably chase down the hero they would be most effective against, and that’s something I can at least plan around. Meanwhile, in The Banner Saga, sometimes it feels like I’m the AI and the game is the player. I’m making consistent decisions based on which enemy unit moves next and what they’re weak against, but the AI follows a logic known only to itself, breaking my heuristics and creating chaos. Sometimes I beat difficult fights with ease, sometimes the AI would happen upon genius tactical gambits, and another disconnect begins to form as a result. How am I supposed to feel connected to these battles, when my tactical choices don’t have consistent results?

As questions like these kept recurring to me, the best answer I could come up with was to just… let go. Let the AI occasionally get lucky upsets. Let some events play out in ways that seem illogical. I forced myself to fully embrace it as a set-character RPG, where I simply made the choices I thought the player character might make, even if they seemed wrong. The art and well-constructed drama still made that a pleasant enough way to play, but it’s disappointing how the potential for sharing the journey with the characters was lost thanks to chaotic rules and inconsistency. The question I’m left asking myself after that ruling though is whether I’ll go on to play The Banner Saga 2 and 3, since this first game isn’t a self-contained story; the plot is far from resolved and many decisions only pay off in subsequent games. If each of them were unrelated stories, I would probably skip out, but the promise of refinement and a payoff to the drama is a concept that interests me. The Banner Saga was a Kickstarter game from an entirely new studio, so I can understand some of its floundering when trying to establish something as complex as a choice-focused trilogy of RPG's. Beginners may not always be lucky, but I have some faith that their skill will shine through in the end.

Note: This was another game taken from my recommendations list, from user Ninjabunny. I’m sorry that this review came out sounding so negative! I hope there’s consolation in the fact that I enjoyed it enough to mentally commit to the sequel, and that I already owned the game anyway, but had never gotten around to it. Like you mentioned in the recommendation, the aesthetic was incredible, and I loved a couple characters like Oddleif and Iver. Maybe now that I have my bearings, the sequels will be much more pleasant.

Mega hits like Celeste or Undertale paint a much friendlier picture of the indie scene than what really exists. For every game that turns into a classic, there’s at least ten more that are just as good, but won’t sell more than a hundred copies. Then, for each of those, there are probably thousands that have some niche appeal, but won’t sell more than ten units. Even a free game like Dear Devere, which has a nice story, some fun artwork, and a price tag of zero dollars, has an all-time peak of three concurrent players. The team went to the effort of giving it quality voice acting and accessibility features like a dyslexic-friendly font, only to then release it for free, fully realizing their work probably wouldn’t be rewarded with becoming an indie darling. This is the first review of it on Backloggd, and it’s doubtlessly in the company of many other unknown greats that don’t have one at all. The point I want to make here isn’t that everyone should necessarily go out and play this one game, even if it is a nice short little romance that can be enjoyed in under an hour, it’s to try and be the sort of hero who seeks out these unknown games and lets the passion that went into them find ground with a new audience. It could be this game, it could be one I’ve never heard of, and even if you don't always love what you pick out, appreciating art that was created entirely for its own sake is always worthwhile.

Speaking of which, this is another game that was recommended to me on my dedicated list, by user AlexaLily, who is exactly the sort of hero I’m talking about. She’s always playing and reviewing games like these which deserve attention, and has been a supporter (enabler is perhaps the better word) of my reviews not just since day 1, but years before day 1, when I was just occasionally posting stuff in a pastebin from Twitter. It proves the point that one person showing a little appreciation can make an impact, whether that be for indie games or dumb little reviews.

When someone plays a game you’ve recommended, don’t you get a warm and fuzzy feeling? It’s an odd thing to get excited about, but it makes sense in a way, since it shows a level of trust in you. That person took the time out of their day, chose not to play the games they were certain of, and committed to the investment that goes into starting up a new game, all because you assured them it would be worth it. That’s why I take recommendations fairly seriously, both in giving a chance to the ones I receive, and carefully specifying the audience when giving them out myself.

I recommend Crazy Taxi.

I feel like I can do that without the usual parentheticals because this is a game that was designed to recommend itself. An arcade game had no other option but to try and be the flashiest, easiest to pick up, and most exciting attraction in a room full of competitors doing the same thing, and as one of the most enduring titles from that setting, it naturally excels at all the criteria. You just push start and immediately have fun, the 90’s jams start blasting, your wheels screech towards your first passenger, there’s no wasted time where the game tells you to invest your patience to hopefully get a return later on. The controls require no explanation if you’ve seen a car before, you don’t have to memorize locations around town when a giant arrow points the way, picking up and dropping off passengers on a timer is a simple premise understandable to anyone, it all just makes sense and feels good no matter where you are on the skill curve. Importantly, rounds also only last a matter of minutes, so no one needs to commit their time to getting oriented or in the zone; you can pick it up and put it down no matter how much free time you have.

So, if the formula for a recommendation is weighing the time investment and learning commitment against the possible payoff, how can I do anything but recommend it when the former side of the equation is nearly zero? The risks are low, but the return is high. I can speak from experience, this was another game taken from my “Games YOU want more people to play” list, suggested by users LukeGirard and DustyVita, with the former even taking the time to explain some of the optional techniques from the manual as I streamed my first play session. Connections like that are why we’re on this site after all, so go give some crazy games a chance!

I only played Morrowind for the first time fairly recently, and I just replayed Skyrim for its tenth anniversary, so I decided to complete the set with the Elder Scrolls game I love the most. Well, I remember loving it at least, but this replay made me realize some things.

Oblivion is… wrong. It’s just wrong. Wrong in ways I find it shocking an RPG could ever be. The genre is at its best when hitting the perfect mix between progression and expression, letting players slowly become a part of the world through finding new places and getting stronger, but Oblivion carelessly throws both these aspects out the window. Players won’t find getting stronger to be satisfying when increasing major skills, on the whole, actually makes you weaker. Since the enemies scale so quickly, if you aren’t heavily focusing on your damage-dealing abilities, you’ll be left in the dust. Gaining a level also grants attribute bonuses based on which types of skills you leveled, so you have to play a horrid game of tracking every single skill point to ensure you get the optimal attributes to keep up with the enemy scaling. The most common scenario is to start the game on the baseline difficulty, and slowly move the slider farther and farther to the left so the game isn’t a damage-sponge safari.

The exploration seems like it would be exempt from this, but strangely enough, it’s just as poorly considered as the leveling. Your very first moment of exploring the sandbox puts you right next to the biggest, most impressive city in the game, which has everything you could ever need. There’s a reason why Morrowind starts you in the backwater outpost of Seyda Neen and not the towering metropolis of Vivec, and there’s a reason Skyrim starts you in the cozy little town of Riverwood instead of Solitude. The best example of why this normally isn’t done comes from New Vegas, where the context you gain from starting in a dusty, forgotten town makes the moment you reach the shining lights of The Strip feel that much more impactful. All of Oblivion’s cities have a unique feel to them, but there’s never a reason to get attached or fall in love with any of these places when you know they're objectively lesser places to be than the Imperial City. To further lessen their uniqueness, fast travel is available even before visiting them for the first time. You don’t get a sense of their surroundings or how each region of Cyrodiil is unique, just that they’re jumping off points to reach the nearest cave where your quest objective is. It becomes an adventure without an actual sense of adventure, where there’s little discovery for players to take joy in, either in the places they find or in the questing process where new places are found.

As you might imagine, discovering those things about the game I said was the best in the series for years was a little heartbreaking. My first few hours of wrangling with these issues made me start to think that my love had been misplaced, and that this was the worst of the bunch, but little by little, it made a comeback. In most RPG’s, jumping into someone’s dream to save them might be a huge highlight, but in Oblivion, it’s just one of many. You might find yourself visiting a town of invisible people like you got caught in a fairy tale, busting ghosts, solving a murder mystery, or even causing a murder mystery. I hope that the way I tore into its core systems wards off accusations of rose-tinted glasses when I say it easily has the best spread of quests of any RPG I’ve ever played. While they lack the sort of choice and expressiveness that make the genre unique, their quality is still enough to save the experience for me. While there’s no good reason to get attached to a glorified shanty town like Bravil compared to the glittering Imperial City, who knows what kind of weird quest I might find there? I may have no reason to hang around a little hamlet on the way to the next quest, but I’ll always poke my head in and see if anything weird is going on. The level scaling may be terrible, but since the majority of side-quests don’t rely on combat, you still get to enjoy them without much interruption. If you can let go of the drive to constantly increase your stats and hoard the best gear, and instead let yourself be a leaf on the wind, uncovering hidden little locations and quests, it might end up being amazing, even in spite of its myriad issues. Taking on this sort of playstyle, my love for the game was rekindled, albeit more as a torch than the bonfire it was before.

Addendum on the DLC (here we go again, you saints who have read my Skyrim/New Vegas reviews):
Oblivion was a pioneer in coercing payments with the same gentleness used to shake a bag of chips from a broken vending machine, and had a total of ten DLC packs. However, the two major expansions were Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles, so the rest will just be grouped as “the other DLC”.

Since this “other” stuff was released first though, it’s first on the block. The elephant in the room is, of course, the horse armor. The obvious point people make is how a $2.50 DLC would hardly raise an eyebrow today, but even after all this time, there’s still something that feels tasteless about this DLC and the other similar ones. They include just enough stuff that you wish they were included in the base game, like an unlimited version of the game’s famously silly poisoned apples, but actually paying for these features is another matter entirely. Remember, these DLC’s came out in the era of Microsoft points, where you couldn’t just pay directly, you had to buy points in increments of 400 at a baseline cost of $5. If you wanted the Vile Lair DLC with the fun poison and vampirism features, you couldn’t just pay $1.89, you had to spend $5 for the points. The DLC would cost 150 of your 400, leaving you with 250 to either spend on one of the other little DLC’s, or just let it rot in your account. If you wanted to then buy Knights of the Nine for 800 points, one more increment of 400 wouldn’t be enough, you had to spend $10 anyway and still be left with that annoying remainder. I’m not just cherry picking one oddly-priced DLC here either, the only three DLC’s that cost a number of points cleanly divisible by 400 were Horse Armor, Knights of the Nine, and Shivering Isles. The other seven cost 80, 150, or 250, in an attempt to force you into spending the remainder of one purchase on others you might not really want. The content itself may be nice on its own, but the blatant money grubbing makes me resent the black mark it represents on a game I enjoy.

Knights of the Nine meanwhile ended up surprising me. It’s the DLC no one really talks about, since it didn’t enrage anyone nor blow anyone’s socks off like Shivering Isles did. It was just a quick, cheap little adventure using existing locations, and I ended up enjoying it a lot more than I expected to. The first objective was the exact point where I discovered the advice I gave in the main review, that Oblivion is best enjoyed when you play as a leaf on the wind, since I decided to visit all nine of the shrines dotted across Cyrodiil in one journey without using fast travel. Since the DLC is meant to invoke Arthurian legends of questing knights, I helped every NPC who required assistance along my circuit around the entire map. Just having a reason to enjoy the world and take pride in the tiniest victories was a nice experience, and I highly recommend doing it that way instead of simply fast traveling from spot to spot to get it done in one tenth of the time. The dungeons and subsequent quests were also surprisingly nice, with a clear Indiana Jones influence shining through the clever puzzles and traps along the way to the holy relics. It’s a thoroughly pleasant little adventure, and fits nicely with a game that already has some legendarily nice quests to discover.

Shivering Isles is considered one of the best expansion packs ever, but the passage of time has been unkind to it. Just as the humor in New Vegas’ Old World Blues DLC resonated with people in 2011, but not in 2021, the same could be said of the humor in Shivering Isles. That would usually be pretty easy to forgive, but the way that the DLC is centered around the real-world issue of mental illness makes the whole thing a little dicey. You’ll get one quest that actually discusses the topic of addiction fairly competently, then you get one where you have to coordinate sleeping spaces between mentally ill homeless people, which someone in 2007 apparently thought should be played for laughs. You get occasional commentary on how obsessive behaviors really work, then you get a character who wants you to bring him 100 useless sets of tongs because isn’t that just hilarious. Just as the Isles themselves are split into the lands of Mania and Dementia, the expansion is split between great content and borderline (if not outright) offensive content. For me, the rest of the game’s fairy-tale atmosphere and general lack of cynicism prevent the feeling of ire I directed at its DLC pricing scheme, but I can easily see this expansion becoming recognized as an uncomfortable time capsule as the years go by. Again, the good parts are worth checking out, but the low points create a stain that’s impossible to talk your way around.

That’s the Oblivion experience in a nutshell, really. This part is great, it has some great quests, but please ignore this gigantic flaw that could understandably wreck the experience for you. I enjoy the game overall, and I think it’s still worth playing for those quality moments, but… I can’t blame people who think it’s the worst of the modern Elder Scrolls games. I guess I’ll reevaluate when TES6 comes out, and I hope to see you all then!

Contrary to what you may have heard, this game is not about tracking down monsters in the Louisiana bayou. It’s not even about hunters killing each other with old timey weapons. It’s about economics. Of course, it’s communicated in the language of monsters and gunfights, but the whirlpool of risk, reward, human psychology, and limited resources make it feel like an imaginative economic allegory. To outline the rules of the competition, maps have up to twelve players fighting for a maximum of four bounty tokens, with each boss monster dropping two. Players start out on the far edges of the map, and their goal is to locate a series of clues to reveal a boss’ lair, kill it, and then run to an extraction point. However, if everyone decided to queue as a team of three, half the teams in that match won’t be able to go home with a prize, and if you queued solo, the contention for the bounties is even more cutthroat. Not only do bosses not drop the tokens instantly, they alert everyone on the map when the harvesting process begins, marking the lair’s location. Gunshots ring across the entire map, crows and barking dogs signal movement, and after players pick up the bounty tokens, their general location can be seen by everyone else, who then set up ambushes to try and steal the reward. All these mechanics are oriented to ensure that players clash at every opportunity, and the ways that players plan around these systems is where some interesting psychology comes into play.

If you’re like me, you might have wondered “If players can be killed by the boss, are revealed by the harvesting process, and highlighted by carrying the bounty token, why bother being the one to go for the kill?”. Surely enough, that’s a common thought, and many players choose to quietly observe the bosses’ lair from afar and pick off would-be hunters, or wait in a central location until the harvesting has begun to capitalize as the others try to escape. Some people just pick an extraction point and hang there for the entire game, a slow but steady way to pick up some cash, both from killing hunters extracting their tokens and from those who just chicken out without a bounty. After all, players can run for extraction at any time, just taking the meager returns from killing generic enemies, and choosing not to risk their pricey loadout of weapons and tools. Since your character can be used in multiple rounds until they die, accruing useful skills and weaponry along the way, people might not want to risk their investment if things start to go south.

So, now you get the picture of the game’s economy: you have an incredibly risky strategy of moving right into the heart of conflict to kill a boss and get out, weighed against the safer path of essentially being a hyena, picking up the scraps and taking down wounded players in relative safety. However, just like a real economy, the balance of this risk and reward is constantly fluctuating. You’ll find yourself mentally keeping tabs on how many players you think are left in the game, since you’re never told how many have died, extracted, or were even in the game in the first place. You may see that one team is harvesting tokens, then hear gunshots in the distance, and know you killed one team on the way in, so you figure that you can get your bounty in relative safety. Sometimes you stumble across a boss’ lair in the first minute of a round, and the calculus flips to where you want to fight the boss immediately and frantically capitalize on your head start. It may seem like the gameplay is just about hunting monsters and shooting people, but this capacity for cleverness and planning, thoughtfulness and risk-taking, that’s what makes Hunt: Showdown a very special sort of experience.

...However, in-game economics and scarcity aren’t the only things you have to worry about, there’s the real world, and whether this game is worth your $40 is a bit harder to determine. As exciting as the thrill of the hunt can be, it’s still a game with 95% of its content in multiplayer, with the usual downsides. It’s reliant on unreliable servers, the groups you’re matched with, and the patience you have for the times where you hide in a bush for minutes on end, excitedly waiting for your chance at an ambush, only to be brained by someone 250 meters away. My personal experience wasn’t that great when playing solo, but when playing with a friend who’s a stealth game master, it hit some of the highest peaks I’ve had in multiplayer games in general. If you can find a patient friend who’s interested in the game, first of all, cherish them, and secondly, wait for a sale. Consider it a little practice for holding back on the trigger, waiting for the perfect moment to get yourself more than you bargained for.

I never would have suspected that the Game Boy version of an early arcade classic would be something that I could call “ahead of its time”. Early portable games were often just heavily stripped-down ports, and even the standalone titles usually felt like they would be too shallow for a wider release, but Donkey Kong actually fulfilled the potential of the format. It’s important for portable games to be something you can pick up and put down easily, and unlike many Game Boy titles, this one delineates its content in a way that makes this work. Levels are kept to bite-sized, focused challenges, and you’re actually allowed to save at any time, a rarity for games of that era. It also doesn’t feel like a stripped-down experience in the slightest, constantly introducing more challenges, mechanics, and levels long after players think they’ve seen everything. A good example of this is in the title itself, with players being slightly misled about what the game even is. You start out playing a fairly direct replication of the arcade game, but after completing the original four levels, the presentation shifts to a new style, and you’re given an entire new world of content. You might expect more levels of standard Donkey Kong, but you get puzzles and item usage akin to Mario 2, and later on you’re introduced to the vine climbing from Donkey Kong Junior. Then, you get platforming challenges that require the sort of acrobatic maneuvers associated with Mario 64, like Mario’s backflip and an early version of the triple jump. It’s almost strange how a game from 1994 was ahead of the curve in pretty much every respect, with its mobile-friendly presentation, the way it keeps rewarding players with new stuff, and the smoothness of Mario’s control, which come together to eclipse Nintendo’s modern portable efforts like Super Mario Run. Really, the only part that keeps this game from being a favorite is how the ideas dry up towards the end, with originality and clever puzzling being taken over by platforming challenges that throw out the same old blowing wind and slippery ice that you've seen a million times before. Even with those little issues though, I can still easily recommend it, both for its forward-thinking sensibilities, and its status as a vastly underappreciated part of the Mario canon.

Addendum: I played this game thanks to the recommendations of users BeachEpisode and Mellorine, so they get a special shoutout. Also, I decided to play the original beforehand to ensure I had the full context and ended up enjoying it too, so they each get two gold stars.
If you have any games to recommend, contribute to the list at:
https://www.backloggd.com/u/Uni/list/games-you-want-more-people-to-play-comment-some-suggestions/

When I was sixteen, I bought tickets to see what was one of my favorite bands at the time, a symphonic metal group called Epica. These tickets included a meet-and-greet, where you could get stuff signed and chat with the band before the show. My plan was to tell them how their music was so eye-opening for me and how awe-inspiring it was compared to the music I grew up with, but when I made it to the show, it all immediately went out the window. Normally for a story like this, the specifics of the band aren’t important, but this is an exception, because the image that sticks out in my mind is of seeing the band’s vocalist, Simone Simmons. She looked amazing in the videos, but as the sort of cynical teen who would go on to criticize games for fun, I expected that a lot of a rock star’s coolness was the result of editing. However, this was far from the truth, and a fuse blew in my sixteen-year-old brain when she was a few feet away and even more of a super rockstar in real life than in the videos. I had started as a guy with a script, but became a monkey in the cockpit of a fighter jet; I had no capacity for comprehension, and the only way things weren’t going to go terribly wrong was if I exerted all my self control to just do nothing.

And that’s exactly what I did. I didn’t say a single word, I had completely shorted out, and I felt pretty embarrassed by that at the time. I felt like I wasted my one opportunity, but over the years, I’m increasingly glad I didn’t spout the same tired praise that fans always do. Just the fact that I was a youngster who used his minimal resources to get a meet-and-greet pass, only to visibly shut down when the time came, said everything that needed to be said.

The first two spoken words in Alan Wake are “Stephen King”. Spooky television sets play a parody version of The Twilight Zone as you walk by. Alan himself mentions H.P. Lovecraft stories, The Shining, and the general points of how horror stories tend to be written. It makes sense for a game about a horror writer to include these things, but this is where the audience is put into Simone’s shoes. Would you rather have someone use your captive attention to tell you all about what influenced them, or have the creative inspiration speak for itself? What makes its adulation even more questionable is how it takes the time to explain how horror is at its best when it avoids excessive explanations and leaves the mystery for the audience, to then just turn around and break that rule at every opportunity. After each chapter, there are recap cutscenes in the style of a TV show which highlight the details that players may have missed, along with occasional noir-style narration where Alan thoroughly explains what’s going on, as if to reassure his audience that everything’s following the script. Even if these things were taken out though, the narrative itself doesn’t foster a sense of mystery until the final moments, and the mood ends up being more of an action movie than anything else.

The irony of it all is what makes me down on Alan Wake, the idea that the team was so passionate about their inspirations that they ended up making something untrue to what they loved. It’s such a relatable way to fall on your face that it gives me sympathy pains, reminding me of how I ended up learning that lesson so many years ago. I understand it's hard to give up an opportunity to share your love, but the best way to say it is usually the way that requires no words at all.

Even people who enjoy playing old games can be guilty of looking at them patronizingly, like they’re just cave paintings that formed the basis of the renaissance art which deserves the real analysis. However, as a programmer and a games analyst, I wanted to highlight the amount of work that went into designing these seemingly primitive games, and what better way is there to do so than looking at decompiled source code. Specifically, this will be the code at the heart of Donkey Kong’s difficulty: the movement of the barrels.

If you haven’t played Donkey Kong before, you might be wondering what makes barrels rolling down slopes so difficult. They all go at the same speed, they’re the same size, and there isn’t a restrictive timer that forces you into hasty mistakes. However, sometimes they go straight down the ladders between each of the slopes, and this is what makes the game so tricky. Ladders are incredibly useful, letting you quickly reach the next level and reliably dodge barrels underneath you, but the slow climbing speed and potential for getting hit by a falling barrel leads to a lot of quick decision making at each ladder. At first, it may seem like the falling is entirely random, but here’s the exact logic of how it works:

(Decompiled and commented by Don Hodges. If you've never seen Assembly code before, yes, it really is this nightmarish)
2178 3A4863 LD A,(#6348) ; get status of the oil can fire
217B A7 AND A ; is the fire lit ?
217C CAB221 JP Z,#21B2 ; no, always take ladders before oil is lit
217F 3A0562 LD A,(#6205) ; else load A with Mario's Y position + 5
2182 D604 SUB #04 ; subtract 4
2184 BA CP D ; is the barrel already below or same level as Mario ?
2185 D8 RET C ; yes, return without taking ladder
2186 3A8063 LD A,(#6380) ; else load A with difficulty from 1 to 5.
2189 1F RRA ; divide by 2, result can be 0, 1, or 2
218A 3C INC A ; increment. result is now 1, 2, or 3
218B 47 LD B,A ; store into B
218C 3A1860 LD A,(#6018) ; load A with random timer
218F 4F LD C,A ; store into C for later use
2190 E603 AND #03 ; mask bits. result now random number between 0 and 3
2192 B8 CP B ; is it greater than modified difficulty?
2193 D0 RET NC ; yes, return without taking ladder
2194 211060 LD HL,#6010 ; else load HL with player input.
2197 3A0362 LD A,(#6203) ; load A with Mario's X position
219A BB CP E ; compare with barrel's X position
219B CAB221 JP Z,#21B2 ; if equal, then go down ladder
219E D2A921 JP NC,#21A9 ; if barrel is to right of Mario, check for moving to left
21A1 CB46 BIT 0,(HL) ; else is Mario trying to move right ?
21A3 CAAE21 JP Z,#21AE ; no, skip ahead
21A6 C3B221 JP #21B2 ; yes, make barrel take ladder
21A9 CB4E BIT 1,(HL) ; is Mario trying to move left ?
21AB C2B221 JP NZ,#21B2 ; yes, make barrel take ladder
21AE 79 LD A,C ; else load A with random timer computed above
21AF E618 AND #18 ; mask with #18. 25% chance of being zero
21B1 C0 RET NZ ; if not zero, return without taking ladder
21B2 DD3407 INC (IX+#07) ; else increase barrel animation
21B5 DDCB02C6 SET 0,(IX+#02) ; set barrel to take the ladder
21B9 C9 RET ; return

The line that may stand out is the “load A with difficulty 1 to 5” command, when the game never explicitly states a difficulty level. This is a value hidden from the player that simply increments every thirty-three seconds, or when the player reaches a new level number that’s higher than the difficulty value. To oversimplify the minutiae of the exact math, this is used for comparison with a random number between zero and three to decide if the barrel goes down the ladder. For the player, this means that on the lowest difficulty (the first thirty-three seconds of level one), barrels go down the ladder 25% of the time, but this increases by 25% either when thirty-three more seconds pass or the player goes to the next level before such an increase, until it reaches a maximum of 75%. However, there are two cases where barrels will always choose to use the ladder, either when Mario is directly underneath the barrel, or when Mario is actively moving towards a barrel that's going the same way.

So, the question now is why Nintendo bothered to put so much detail into something people could easily dismiss as token-taking randomness. The reason is a concept that anyone who does a lot of cooking understands well: that just because something can’t be consciously detected, doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant to the experience. The best example might be how barrels moving in the same direction you’re walking towards will always go down the ladder. That might not be a rule you’re directly conscious of, but it ensures that thoughtlessly walking towards a ladder will always result in punishment. Similarly, barrels always dropping on top of you if you’re on the ladder itself forces you to be mindful of where you stand, and not use them as a safe zone. Players begin to understand these mechanics implicitly, and this mix of reliability and randomness creates difficulty in a way that makes the game more tense even without a change in the player’s control. Consider the alternative methods of raising the difficulty: boosting the speed of the barrels would make them harder to react to, but easier to jump over, and slower barrels would have the opposite effect, making the difficulty adjustment more of a lateral shift than a direct increase. Throwing more obstacles could lead to cases where barrels clump up and become impossible to jump over, and randomly mixing up fast and slow barrels could cause the same issue.

Despite how this barrel logic is just a small part of the game, considering its implications reveals just how thoughtfully it was designed. Randomness is an easy way to make games harder, but when coupled with the deterministic rules which enforce proper play, players will never fail directly due to the randomness itself. Few games handle randomness and difficulty as cleanly as this, even forty years after the fact. It’s a reminder to take even the oldest, most seemingly primitive games seriously, and that there’s always something left to be learned, especially from the ultimate classics.