psychbomb
BACKER
2022
Fun with friends and nothing more.
Ember Knights was gifted to me, which was good, because it's the exact kind of game that asks a bit too much for what it offers. $25.99 CAD is a premium for a game with as small a scope as this, and, regrettably, what I think is an equally small amount of ambition.
There’s something about the visual style of Ember Knights that sits weirdly with me. I look at all of this lavish pixel art and all of the frames of complex animation required to make these more massive enemies move around the screen and I get this vague feeling of corporate sludge lingering over the whole thing. It’s a difficult feeling to articulate, but it’s certainly something of a trend that I’ve noticed. We’ve collectively come a long, long way from games like Braid in all of their shitty, incredibly amateur pixelated glory, and between games like this, and Eastward, and Dead Cells, and Owlboy, I’m almost starting to feel like indie titles are just expected to look like this now. A large part of what I find interesting about the indie scene — insofar as you can call it that, given that “single-A” would be a more accurate term to describe how nearly all of them release now under the banner of newer, smaller publishing houses — is the lack of inherent convention. When you make a game as an individual or a team of individuals that don’t need to answer to anyone but yourselves, you have an obscene amount of freedom to make a game exactly as you want to. There’s something about this art style and the way that everything looks that doesn’t feel as though it was made because the team thought it was an inherently good idea, but rather because it’s become convention in this space to have ridiculously lavish pixel art with constantly moving parts and Cintiq-breaking amounts of detail.
It’s certainly a little funny to see how the indie scene is mirroring the larger games industry at the turn of the millennium; devs initially made 2D pixel art games because that’s what the hardware could support. As 3D tools hit the market and became easier to use, more devs moved to 3D; the ones that didn’t used the more powerful systems they now had access to in order to hone the pixel art even further. I suppose I’m less impressed now simply by virtue of the fact that we’ve already been through all of this about twenty-five years ago. Anything that defies convention rather than adhering to a quarter-century-old dogma is going to be inherently more interesting, I feel, and Ember Knights largely seems like it looks the way that it does because “that’s just how indie games look now”. Sure, this would have blown the socks off of your feet if you saw this in 1998, but you could put screenshots from about twenty different indie games with a moderate budget next to this and not be able to notice a difference between them all. Ember Knights isn't the first to do it, and it also isn't the best, which leaves it in this strange milieu of having something incredibly technically impressive looking kind of bland.
If you've ever played Hades, this is what Hades would be if it didn't have a single memorable character. Some of you out there are cringing at that statement hard enough for me to feel it in the past as I write this. Hades is as much a story game as it is a gameplay game, and arguably more of the former than the latter; I dropped Hades the second the credits rolled because I was just that satisfied with how the post-game wrapped up. I didn't feel any need to start playing on a story-less endless mode, because I was both happy with the ending and I didn't think the gameplay was deep nor engaging enough to play strictly for its own sake. It still provides a great framework that remains enjoyable all the way until the story ends, but I felt no compulsion to return for more.
Without wanting to dedicate any more time to talking about Hades in this Ember Knights review, I'll say that Ember Knights left me completely unsatisfied. Having the two piece combo of a start-nowhere go-nowhere story with characters that barely exist and incredibly rudimentary gameplay biting off something shallow and managing to make it even shallower is just kind of sad. The game really isn't hard, and every run plays the same with very minor changes based on whether you've got a ranged or melee weapon; if ranged, sit back and flick projectiles until you have energy to cast spells. If melee, spam the dodge roll with a hundred thousand invincibility frames and smack your foes as you come out of your roll, and then spam spells. Most of the arsenal is completely worthless anyway, with the wand being the obviously-best ranged weapon and the scythe being the obviously-best melee. Half the spells wind up being useless, too. Nobody is taking the fucking ballista. Upgrades are all minor side-grades that all accomplish the vaguely similar goals of "monsters in the room die faster" or "you die slower", only really offering stat bonuses rather than new mechanical depth. Whether you're doing a lightning build or a poison build or a fire build or an armor build or a crit rate build, your dual strategies of "pick ranged and sit back while flicking spells" or "pick melee and dodge roll while flicking spells" never change in any meaningful way. All it determines are which items you're going to prioritize picking up during a run. If you swapped the names and the colors for fire and poison, nobody would notice. They do the exact same thing. It's all just numbers changes.
Ultimately, Ember Knights just looks and feels and plays like too many other things, all without actually differentiating itself from its contemporaries. You can't say that it was some sort of effortless hack-job, because there's clearly been an obscene amount of work pumped into this, but that just makes it sting all the worse when the final work comes out to be this bland. It's like spending a year in the kitchen to make a loaf of Wonder Bread. It's an awful lot of time spent on making something that can only manage to offer an experience you'll get both better and cheaper elsewhere.
This is the Golden Corral of video games.
Ember Knights was gifted to me, which was good, because it's the exact kind of game that asks a bit too much for what it offers. $25.99 CAD is a premium for a game with as small a scope as this, and, regrettably, what I think is an equally small amount of ambition.
There’s something about the visual style of Ember Knights that sits weirdly with me. I look at all of this lavish pixel art and all of the frames of complex animation required to make these more massive enemies move around the screen and I get this vague feeling of corporate sludge lingering over the whole thing. It’s a difficult feeling to articulate, but it’s certainly something of a trend that I’ve noticed. We’ve collectively come a long, long way from games like Braid in all of their shitty, incredibly amateur pixelated glory, and between games like this, and Eastward, and Dead Cells, and Owlboy, I’m almost starting to feel like indie titles are just expected to look like this now. A large part of what I find interesting about the indie scene — insofar as you can call it that, given that “single-A” would be a more accurate term to describe how nearly all of them release now under the banner of newer, smaller publishing houses — is the lack of inherent convention. When you make a game as an individual or a team of individuals that don’t need to answer to anyone but yourselves, you have an obscene amount of freedom to make a game exactly as you want to. There’s something about this art style and the way that everything looks that doesn’t feel as though it was made because the team thought it was an inherently good idea, but rather because it’s become convention in this space to have ridiculously lavish pixel art with constantly moving parts and Cintiq-breaking amounts of detail.
It’s certainly a little funny to see how the indie scene is mirroring the larger games industry at the turn of the millennium; devs initially made 2D pixel art games because that’s what the hardware could support. As 3D tools hit the market and became easier to use, more devs moved to 3D; the ones that didn’t used the more powerful systems they now had access to in order to hone the pixel art even further. I suppose I’m less impressed now simply by virtue of the fact that we’ve already been through all of this about twenty-five years ago. Anything that defies convention rather than adhering to a quarter-century-old dogma is going to be inherently more interesting, I feel, and Ember Knights largely seems like it looks the way that it does because “that’s just how indie games look now”. Sure, this would have blown the socks off of your feet if you saw this in 1998, but you could put screenshots from about twenty different indie games with a moderate budget next to this and not be able to notice a difference between them all. Ember Knights isn't the first to do it, and it also isn't the best, which leaves it in this strange milieu of having something incredibly technically impressive looking kind of bland.
If you've ever played Hades, this is what Hades would be if it didn't have a single memorable character. Some of you out there are cringing at that statement hard enough for me to feel it in the past as I write this. Hades is as much a story game as it is a gameplay game, and arguably more of the former than the latter; I dropped Hades the second the credits rolled because I was just that satisfied with how the post-game wrapped up. I didn't feel any need to start playing on a story-less endless mode, because I was both happy with the ending and I didn't think the gameplay was deep nor engaging enough to play strictly for its own sake. It still provides a great framework that remains enjoyable all the way until the story ends, but I felt no compulsion to return for more.
Without wanting to dedicate any more time to talking about Hades in this Ember Knights review, I'll say that Ember Knights left me completely unsatisfied. Having the two piece combo of a start-nowhere go-nowhere story with characters that barely exist and incredibly rudimentary gameplay biting off something shallow and managing to make it even shallower is just kind of sad. The game really isn't hard, and every run plays the same with very minor changes based on whether you've got a ranged or melee weapon; if ranged, sit back and flick projectiles until you have energy to cast spells. If melee, spam the dodge roll with a hundred thousand invincibility frames and smack your foes as you come out of your roll, and then spam spells. Most of the arsenal is completely worthless anyway, with the wand being the obviously-best ranged weapon and the scythe being the obviously-best melee. Half the spells wind up being useless, too. Nobody is taking the fucking ballista. Upgrades are all minor side-grades that all accomplish the vaguely similar goals of "monsters in the room die faster" or "you die slower", only really offering stat bonuses rather than new mechanical depth. Whether you're doing a lightning build or a poison build or a fire build or an armor build or a crit rate build, your dual strategies of "pick ranged and sit back while flicking spells" or "pick melee and dodge roll while flicking spells" never change in any meaningful way. All it determines are which items you're going to prioritize picking up during a run. If you swapped the names and the colors for fire and poison, nobody would notice. They do the exact same thing. It's all just numbers changes.
Ultimately, Ember Knights just looks and feels and plays like too many other things, all without actually differentiating itself from its contemporaries. You can't say that it was some sort of effortless hack-job, because there's clearly been an obscene amount of work pumped into this, but that just makes it sting all the worse when the final work comes out to be this bland. It's like spending a year in the kitchen to make a loaf of Wonder Bread. It's an awful lot of time spent on making something that can only manage to offer an experience you'll get both better and cheaper elsewhere.
This is the Golden Corral of video games.
2014
If you ever feel useless, just remember that someone at PlatinumGames had to program the shoot button in Bayonetta 2.
Bayonetta 2 starts off really refreshing, because it’s purely concerned with being fun. A lot of character action games are fun, but they’re conditionally fun; provided you’re able to get good at them, to master the systems, to use everything to your advantage and be the coolest guy in the arena, you’ll have fun. Bayonetta 2 isn’t especially interested in that. Bayonetta 2 is a remarkably simple, remarkably easy game, largely just encouraging the player to participate in spectacle over everything else. Combos are flashy, there’s almost always some sort of fight between giant monsters happening in the background, enemies keep getting introduced one after the other, and Bayonetta herself is borderline invincible provided that you know how to press the dodge button within a week’s notice of the enemy indicating they’re going to hit you.
But as the game wears on, it starts to become very apparent why so many character action games lock a lot of the fun and style behind mastering complex systems. Bayonetta 2 isn’t just easy, but it’s so easy that it’s boring. I found the absolute most efficient strategy to just hit the punch-kick-punch wicked weave until I could get enough magic for Umbran Climax, and then just mash punch until it wore off. Rinse and repeat. There was nothing in the game that could counter this. Dodge offset makes this even more consistent. I was getting pure platinum medals every single encounter. It was stunningly easy and it was the most rewarding way to play the game; if the other options give me worse combo scores, worse times, or make me more likely to take a hit, why would I ever use them? Love is Blue breaks the game in half from the word go and requires almost zero execution ability to use all four guns optimally. This is a starting combo, too, so there's almost no reason to invest your halos in anything other than Witch Hearts and Moon Pearls.
The Gaze of Despair helps somewhat to mitigate the easiness, but I started running into a bit of a Goldilocks problem the longer the game went on. The Gaze of Despair essentially puts enemies into a permanent enrage state, making them significantly more dangerous. They attack faster, they have armor that prevents them from being juggled, and you only get a small fraction of the Witch Time you would normally get if you dodge them. However, giving them juggle protection means that some enemies like Sloth wind up being fucking ridiculous; there’s nothing stopping them from keeping up the pressure while evading yours, meaning that using Gaze of Despair against these especially agile enemies mostly just leaves you chipping away with single hits for several minutes. By contrast, 3rd Climax is such a dead simple difficulty that I mostly wound up sleepwalking through the entire thing. The hardest difficulty available on a first playthrough is way too easy, and equipping the Gaze of Despair makes it too hard. There’s nothing here that feels just right.
Bayonetta 2 mostly just comes across like Bayonetta, but worse. Bayonetta was still a really good game, mind, so there are far worse things to be than a worse version of Bayonetta. A lot of this is just a retread. Bayonetta goes to a far-off city and becomes the ward of another kid. Bayonetta has to do another incredibly lengthy shooter section before she gets to the final boss. Bayonetta goes back in time and spends a few chapters literally going through beat-for-beat copies of levels from the first game. There’s no individual element of Bayonetta 2 that I can really point to and confidently say “yeah, that was a lot better than it was in the last one”. The bosses really suck in this. You do a lot of repeat fights against the Lumen Sage, with him taking the role of the Jeanne battles, but his moveset isn’t up to par with even Jeanne 1’s. You can’t even see most of what he’s doing because the game keeps pulling focus to kaiju fights happening in the background. The final boss is an especially egregious anticlimax, nowhere even in the same realm as Jubileus. There are just so many woefully simple movesets possessed by enemies who die too quickly to make full use of the few options even available to them.
The long shadow of Bayonetta remains cast over Bayonetta 2, and there’s largely no reason to play the latter over the former unless you’re really dying to experience more Bayonetta. Even then, I’d suggest that you exhaust Non-Stop Infinite Climax and Jeanne Mode from the original before bothering to tackle this, and that alone is probably going to be more than enough to satisfy your Bayonetta urges.
This is right after the beginning of the PlatinumGames flop era, circa 2013 – present.
Bayonetta 2 starts off really refreshing, because it’s purely concerned with being fun. A lot of character action games are fun, but they’re conditionally fun; provided you’re able to get good at them, to master the systems, to use everything to your advantage and be the coolest guy in the arena, you’ll have fun. Bayonetta 2 isn’t especially interested in that. Bayonetta 2 is a remarkably simple, remarkably easy game, largely just encouraging the player to participate in spectacle over everything else. Combos are flashy, there’s almost always some sort of fight between giant monsters happening in the background, enemies keep getting introduced one after the other, and Bayonetta herself is borderline invincible provided that you know how to press the dodge button within a week’s notice of the enemy indicating they’re going to hit you.
But as the game wears on, it starts to become very apparent why so many character action games lock a lot of the fun and style behind mastering complex systems. Bayonetta 2 isn’t just easy, but it’s so easy that it’s boring. I found the absolute most efficient strategy to just hit the punch-kick-punch wicked weave until I could get enough magic for Umbran Climax, and then just mash punch until it wore off. Rinse and repeat. There was nothing in the game that could counter this. Dodge offset makes this even more consistent. I was getting pure platinum medals every single encounter. It was stunningly easy and it was the most rewarding way to play the game; if the other options give me worse combo scores, worse times, or make me more likely to take a hit, why would I ever use them? Love is Blue breaks the game in half from the word go and requires almost zero execution ability to use all four guns optimally. This is a starting combo, too, so there's almost no reason to invest your halos in anything other than Witch Hearts and Moon Pearls.
The Gaze of Despair helps somewhat to mitigate the easiness, but I started running into a bit of a Goldilocks problem the longer the game went on. The Gaze of Despair essentially puts enemies into a permanent enrage state, making them significantly more dangerous. They attack faster, they have armor that prevents them from being juggled, and you only get a small fraction of the Witch Time you would normally get if you dodge them. However, giving them juggle protection means that some enemies like Sloth wind up being fucking ridiculous; there’s nothing stopping them from keeping up the pressure while evading yours, meaning that using Gaze of Despair against these especially agile enemies mostly just leaves you chipping away with single hits for several minutes. By contrast, 3rd Climax is such a dead simple difficulty that I mostly wound up sleepwalking through the entire thing. The hardest difficulty available on a first playthrough is way too easy, and equipping the Gaze of Despair makes it too hard. There’s nothing here that feels just right.
Bayonetta 2 mostly just comes across like Bayonetta, but worse. Bayonetta was still a really good game, mind, so there are far worse things to be than a worse version of Bayonetta. A lot of this is just a retread. Bayonetta goes to a far-off city and becomes the ward of another kid. Bayonetta has to do another incredibly lengthy shooter section before she gets to the final boss. Bayonetta goes back in time and spends a few chapters literally going through beat-for-beat copies of levels from the first game. There’s no individual element of Bayonetta 2 that I can really point to and confidently say “yeah, that was a lot better than it was in the last one”. The bosses really suck in this. You do a lot of repeat fights against the Lumen Sage, with him taking the role of the Jeanne battles, but his moveset isn’t up to par with even Jeanne 1’s. You can’t even see most of what he’s doing because the game keeps pulling focus to kaiju fights happening in the background. The final boss is an especially egregious anticlimax, nowhere even in the same realm as Jubileus. There are just so many woefully simple movesets possessed by enemies who die too quickly to make full use of the few options even available to them.
The long shadow of Bayonetta remains cast over Bayonetta 2, and there’s largely no reason to play the latter over the former unless you’re really dying to experience more Bayonetta. Even then, I’d suggest that you exhaust Non-Stop Infinite Climax and Jeanne Mode from the original before bothering to tackle this, and that alone is probably going to be more than enough to satisfy your Bayonetta urges.
This is right after the beginning of the PlatinumGames flop era, circa 2013 – present.
2008
Fumbled.
We are gathered here today not to mourn the passing of Free Radical, but to celebrate the fact that Free Radical once lived. We are, however, here to mourn Haze, which is a middling-at-best shooter whose story carries it until it crashes and burns just in time for the game to end. There is a wonderful, biting, powerful game tucked away inside of Haze's DNA, but it ultimately isn't the version of Haze that we got.
Haze is not an especially good game, which is okay, because Haze is a remarkably interesting game. I have no idea where Free Radical were getting off putting something this explicitly anti-American-invasion in a 2008 Playstation shooter, because the people who would have bought this game at launch would have been the exact kind of people too stupid to understand the sentiment. Six Days in Fallujah got announced the year after this came out. The War on Terror was cool, provided that you were from a certain subset of people who benefitted directly from the War on Terror. That person was the target demographic for Haze, and they weren't ready for it.
But for the overwhelming majority of a playthrough, the interweaving of narrative and gameplay in Haze leaves something like Spec Ops: The Line face-down dead in a ditch. Rather than the systems of play and story being at war with one another as they are in Spec Ops, Haze wants you to find the act of killing fun. Pressing L2 gives you a boost of Nectar, which makes you run faster, makes enemies glow, gives you a little rumble on your controller whenever you get a kill, and gives you an extra little dose every time you gun an enemy down. This encourages fast, aggressive play, always making sure you stay hopped up on Nectar; Nectar makes you better at killing, and killing gives you more Nectar. The actual gunplay is a little lacking, and you've got a remarkably limited selection of weapons, but the ones that feel good to use feel really good to use. Starting you off with a magnum with a report like thunder that practically blows the rebels in half when you shoot them is an inspired choice.
Your squadmates are similarly drugged out of their minds on Nectar, their bloodstreams flooded with enough stimulants to make E3-era Adam Sessler blush. I have to give praise to the writing for making me hate US troops even more than I already did. I imagined what it would be like to be an Afghani or Iraqi soldier, holding a rifle and tucked behind a blown-out brick wall, knowing that my country is being occupied by the stupidest fucking military the world has ever known. A battalion of jackboot dipshits, each of them spouting memes and quoting movies while they unload a hundred million dollars worth of munitions into an empty field. Tens of thousands of morons who never learned that they can breathe through their noses rather than their mouths, all getting into headbutt fights and giggling as they mow down civilians. It's not enough that they're evil, but they're also embarrassing, which might be the worse of the two. Getting killed by them isn't even dignified. It's like losing a footrace to a dog that someone bolted rocket thrusters to. If you also had the rocket thrusters, you'd win every single time, because you're a smart human. But you've got the misfortune of not being owned by a very rich and very committed master.
I'm getting off track. The point is that the narrative is sound, and the gameplay, while stunted, is still operating in harmony with the story. It works even better when you can't kill anything for a little bit, and the Nectar fades, and it becomes very suddenly clear how shit this all is. Not the game, neccessarily, but the act of gunning people down. The music stops playing. The rebels start screaming. You can see their corpses splayed out on the ground after you kill them. You have to commit to hiding and cowering when the bullets start flying, rather than sprinting out into the gunfire with bazookas under each arm and the hardest dick anyone has ever had. It's excellent. It's such a flawless integration of story into gameplay, but it ultimately can't keep it going for the entire runtime.
Free Radical were lined up for an Aaron Gordon backboard-shatterer, but they finished like 2005 Slam Dunk Contest Chris Andersen. The narrative was good for a while, if a little obvious — it was 2008 and you needed to be very obvious to hammer into the heads of Americans that war was bad — but it manages to trip over its own shoelaces by Bioshock Infinite-ing this shit and saying that the rebels are just as bad as the imperial pharmaceutical company invading their country for drug money. To Haze's (very) slim credit, it ends literally the moment before you find out if the entire rebel army is bad, or if it's just their leader. But it leaves a remarkably sour taste in the mouth that Free Radical felt the need not only to pull a punch, but to outright swing in all directions. It leaves you feeling not like this was a pointed takedown of capitalistic expansion and propaganda, but rather that it was Bart Simpson windmilling his arms and declaring that it's every side's own fault if they get hit.
When the narrative falls to pieces, it gets harder to justify excusing the way in which you interact with this world, because it's now clunky gameplay in service of a stupid story. The control mapping is completely unhinged. Losing access to Nectar is fine, but the feign death mechanic that replaces it literally requires you to lay on your back doing nothing for about fifteen seconds before you can get back up and rejoin the fight. Sit there and count fifteen seconds to yourself before you read any further. It's that long. You will be doing this multiple times per shootout. Black ops soldiers who are immune to Nectar frenzies get introduced, meaning that the only way to deal with them is to abandon your fun weapons and settle for whatever bullet hose gets the most rounds downrange the fastest.
At some point while playing a game and getting frustrated with some design decisions, you start wondering what the developers were thinking. This is a dangerous line of thought, because it's one bred from anger; the answer is almost always that an "obvious flaw" was something they were either compelled to include or forbidden from removing, often leaving the blame on the shoulders of the publisher. But no, Free Radical seemed genuinely pleased with every aspect of the game they released. They made their own graphics engine and proudly declared that the game was locked at 30 FPS because first-person shooters don't need to run at 60. It looks like shit, too, so it's not like this was a compromise being made for visual fidelity. Truly and honestly, what the fuck were they thinking?
Here's the Psychbomb cut of Haze. For one, we cut out the stupid subplot about the rebel leader secretly being a bad guy. Yes, there's historical precedent for opportunists rising up against tyranny during times of crisis and themselves becoming tyrannical, but that's not the character that we've been dealing with for 95% of the runtime. Get rid of the evil all along twist and keep him otherwise as is. Focus a bit more on the individual rebels, too; just as you had a squad of Mountain Dew-chugging bros in the first act, give us a squad of principled guerillas in the next.
Secondly, Nectar remains a factor for the whole game. We drop the whole "feign death" mechanic. Carpenter stays hopped up on Nectar and remains clad in his glowing armor and turns it back against Mantel. We recontextualize this in the second act not as a cool power-up, but as a twisted, tragic bit of neccessity. We make a shift over to guerilla tactics, focusing on traps and sabotage and making Mantel soldiers overdose on Nectar so that they kill each other, and we bust out our own Nectar boost in times of great crisis when there are no other options. We do an Edgerunners thing, basically; Carpenter is addicted to the Nectar, he knows it's going to kill him, but he can't stop taking it because it's his nuclear option that he needs to bust out against Mantel when shit really hits the fan. Mantel soldiers hopped up on Nectar should be borderline-unkillable juggernauts that need to be outwitted and not outgunned as they are in the current game.
Lastly, rather than the rebel leader accidentally firing a rocket at the carrier while you're still on it and then coming in with a helicopter to extract you, Carpenter volunteers to sacrifice himself. The Nectar is going to kill him within days at best no matter what he does, and he opts to do something truly good in his final moments. He busts out every dose of Nectar he has, rampages through the carrier in a horrifying whirlwind, slugs it out with his former squad leader just as he does in the current game, and makes sure that the carrier blows up with him and every other Mantel soldier in it. The Promise Hand clean up the rest of Mantel, successfully defend their homeland, and then burn down the Nectar fields so that nobody can ever use them again.
Sure, this one ends a little white savior-y rather than both sides-y, but there's no reason we can't just make it so Carpenter's ethnic background is from the same country he's invading. He's a fucking nothing character in the current game, so why not? It'd introduce some cognitive dissonance where he has to square what he believes or knows about his ancestral country with what he's being told about it. That's solid motivation for him to be hesitant and kick off his squad's doubts about his commitment to Mantel. It might not be a perfect idea, but I'm confident that it's better than the narrative we have here, brought to you from the same mind who gave us the stories of The Division and Rambo: The Video Game.
But now I'm writing fix fics for Haze, which should be the ultimate sign that I'm too far gone.
This might be the most well-known pieces of box art for a game that nobody played.
We are gathered here today not to mourn the passing of Free Radical, but to celebrate the fact that Free Radical once lived. We are, however, here to mourn Haze, which is a middling-at-best shooter whose story carries it until it crashes and burns just in time for the game to end. There is a wonderful, biting, powerful game tucked away inside of Haze's DNA, but it ultimately isn't the version of Haze that we got.
Haze is not an especially good game, which is okay, because Haze is a remarkably interesting game. I have no idea where Free Radical were getting off putting something this explicitly anti-American-invasion in a 2008 Playstation shooter, because the people who would have bought this game at launch would have been the exact kind of people too stupid to understand the sentiment. Six Days in Fallujah got announced the year after this came out. The War on Terror was cool, provided that you were from a certain subset of people who benefitted directly from the War on Terror. That person was the target demographic for Haze, and they weren't ready for it.
But for the overwhelming majority of a playthrough, the interweaving of narrative and gameplay in Haze leaves something like Spec Ops: The Line face-down dead in a ditch. Rather than the systems of play and story being at war with one another as they are in Spec Ops, Haze wants you to find the act of killing fun. Pressing L2 gives you a boost of Nectar, which makes you run faster, makes enemies glow, gives you a little rumble on your controller whenever you get a kill, and gives you an extra little dose every time you gun an enemy down. This encourages fast, aggressive play, always making sure you stay hopped up on Nectar; Nectar makes you better at killing, and killing gives you more Nectar. The actual gunplay is a little lacking, and you've got a remarkably limited selection of weapons, but the ones that feel good to use feel really good to use. Starting you off with a magnum with a report like thunder that practically blows the rebels in half when you shoot them is an inspired choice.
Your squadmates are similarly drugged out of their minds on Nectar, their bloodstreams flooded with enough stimulants to make E3-era Adam Sessler blush. I have to give praise to the writing for making me hate US troops even more than I already did. I imagined what it would be like to be an Afghani or Iraqi soldier, holding a rifle and tucked behind a blown-out brick wall, knowing that my country is being occupied by the stupidest fucking military the world has ever known. A battalion of jackboot dipshits, each of them spouting memes and quoting movies while they unload a hundred million dollars worth of munitions into an empty field. Tens of thousands of morons who never learned that they can breathe through their noses rather than their mouths, all getting into headbutt fights and giggling as they mow down civilians. It's not enough that they're evil, but they're also embarrassing, which might be the worse of the two. Getting killed by them isn't even dignified. It's like losing a footrace to a dog that someone bolted rocket thrusters to. If you also had the rocket thrusters, you'd win every single time, because you're a smart human. But you've got the misfortune of not being owned by a very rich and very committed master.
I'm getting off track. The point is that the narrative is sound, and the gameplay, while stunted, is still operating in harmony with the story. It works even better when you can't kill anything for a little bit, and the Nectar fades, and it becomes very suddenly clear how shit this all is. Not the game, neccessarily, but the act of gunning people down. The music stops playing. The rebels start screaming. You can see their corpses splayed out on the ground after you kill them. You have to commit to hiding and cowering when the bullets start flying, rather than sprinting out into the gunfire with bazookas under each arm and the hardest dick anyone has ever had. It's excellent. It's such a flawless integration of story into gameplay, but it ultimately can't keep it going for the entire runtime.
Free Radical were lined up for an Aaron Gordon backboard-shatterer, but they finished like 2005 Slam Dunk Contest Chris Andersen. The narrative was good for a while, if a little obvious — it was 2008 and you needed to be very obvious to hammer into the heads of Americans that war was bad — but it manages to trip over its own shoelaces by Bioshock Infinite-ing this shit and saying that the rebels are just as bad as the imperial pharmaceutical company invading their country for drug money. To Haze's (very) slim credit, it ends literally the moment before you find out if the entire rebel army is bad, or if it's just their leader. But it leaves a remarkably sour taste in the mouth that Free Radical felt the need not only to pull a punch, but to outright swing in all directions. It leaves you feeling not like this was a pointed takedown of capitalistic expansion and propaganda, but rather that it was Bart Simpson windmilling his arms and declaring that it's every side's own fault if they get hit.
When the narrative falls to pieces, it gets harder to justify excusing the way in which you interact with this world, because it's now clunky gameplay in service of a stupid story. The control mapping is completely unhinged. Losing access to Nectar is fine, but the feign death mechanic that replaces it literally requires you to lay on your back doing nothing for about fifteen seconds before you can get back up and rejoin the fight. Sit there and count fifteen seconds to yourself before you read any further. It's that long. You will be doing this multiple times per shootout. Black ops soldiers who are immune to Nectar frenzies get introduced, meaning that the only way to deal with them is to abandon your fun weapons and settle for whatever bullet hose gets the most rounds downrange the fastest.
At some point while playing a game and getting frustrated with some design decisions, you start wondering what the developers were thinking. This is a dangerous line of thought, because it's one bred from anger; the answer is almost always that an "obvious flaw" was something they were either compelled to include or forbidden from removing, often leaving the blame on the shoulders of the publisher. But no, Free Radical seemed genuinely pleased with every aspect of the game they released. They made their own graphics engine and proudly declared that the game was locked at 30 FPS because first-person shooters don't need to run at 60. It looks like shit, too, so it's not like this was a compromise being made for visual fidelity. Truly and honestly, what the fuck were they thinking?
Here's the Psychbomb cut of Haze. For one, we cut out the stupid subplot about the rebel leader secretly being a bad guy. Yes, there's historical precedent for opportunists rising up against tyranny during times of crisis and themselves becoming tyrannical, but that's not the character that we've been dealing with for 95% of the runtime. Get rid of the evil all along twist and keep him otherwise as is. Focus a bit more on the individual rebels, too; just as you had a squad of Mountain Dew-chugging bros in the first act, give us a squad of principled guerillas in the next.
Secondly, Nectar remains a factor for the whole game. We drop the whole "feign death" mechanic. Carpenter stays hopped up on Nectar and remains clad in his glowing armor and turns it back against Mantel. We recontextualize this in the second act not as a cool power-up, but as a twisted, tragic bit of neccessity. We make a shift over to guerilla tactics, focusing on traps and sabotage and making Mantel soldiers overdose on Nectar so that they kill each other, and we bust out our own Nectar boost in times of great crisis when there are no other options. We do an Edgerunners thing, basically; Carpenter is addicted to the Nectar, he knows it's going to kill him, but he can't stop taking it because it's his nuclear option that he needs to bust out against Mantel when shit really hits the fan. Mantel soldiers hopped up on Nectar should be borderline-unkillable juggernauts that need to be outwitted and not outgunned as they are in the current game.
Lastly, rather than the rebel leader accidentally firing a rocket at the carrier while you're still on it and then coming in with a helicopter to extract you, Carpenter volunteers to sacrifice himself. The Nectar is going to kill him within days at best no matter what he does, and he opts to do something truly good in his final moments. He busts out every dose of Nectar he has, rampages through the carrier in a horrifying whirlwind, slugs it out with his former squad leader just as he does in the current game, and makes sure that the carrier blows up with him and every other Mantel soldier in it. The Promise Hand clean up the rest of Mantel, successfully defend their homeland, and then burn down the Nectar fields so that nobody can ever use them again.
Sure, this one ends a little white savior-y rather than both sides-y, but there's no reason we can't just make it so Carpenter's ethnic background is from the same country he's invading. He's a fucking nothing character in the current game, so why not? It'd introduce some cognitive dissonance where he has to square what he believes or knows about his ancestral country with what he's being told about it. That's solid motivation for him to be hesitant and kick off his squad's doubts about his commitment to Mantel. It might not be a perfect idea, but I'm confident that it's better than the narrative we have here, brought to you from the same mind who gave us the stories of The Division and Rambo: The Video Game.
But now I'm writing fix fics for Haze, which should be the ultimate sign that I'm too far gone.
This might be the most well-known pieces of box art for a game that nobody played.
2003
Devil May Cry at its worst is still better than most of the shit I played for fun as a kid.
Real videogamers don’t skip Devil May Cry 2, I’ve heard, so I figured it was high time I actually took a look at it for myself. I’d heard for years — decades! — that this was one of the most historically impressive pieces of shit ever put to market, and so I avoided it like it was a nuclear waste disposal site. This was not a place of honor, the signs warned me, and I wasn’t about to go digging for treasure against their advice. But now, with all of the pretentious gamethinker wind at my back, I wanted to see for myself how it really was. I actually started thinking that it would be immensely funny if it turned out to be the greatest game I’d ever played, so I could come on here and parade the fact that I liked it in front of all of you stuffy sheeple, all of you blindly following the opinions of whoever told you it was bad.
That was wrong of me, and I’d like to apologize. Devil May Cry 2 is bad.
But it’s not that bad, and that’s kind of where the problem is. You compare this to Devil May Cry, and it’s really bad. You compare it to Devil May Cry 3, and it’s unforgivable. But we live in a world where, somehow, this didn’t completely kill Devil May Cry as a series. I legitimately have no idea how it survived. Better games have killed better franchises for less. Even so, when something this bad exists but it doesn’t murder the series, it becomes kind of hard to really hate it. Capcom released three more mainline Devil May Cry games after this one, and they’re all ridiculously good (Devil May Cry 4 haters need not respond). You’ve always got the option to not play this one, pretend it doesn’t exist, and just experience the rest of the series without noticing anything different. If Devil May Cry 2 got It’s a Wonderful Life’d out of existence tomorrow, nobody would even think to ask if there was anything different. You know that joke about releasing three pigs with the numbers 1, 3, and 4 painted onto them, and then watching everyone freak out when they can’t find the fourth pig? I know the person who came up with that joke wasn’t a big Devil May Cry fan, because nobody who cares about Devil May Cry ever gives a shit where Pig #2 went. Hell, we even got a fifth pig a little while ago, and everyone was more than content to continue pretending this one didn’t exist.
But I stuck it out, because real videogamers don’t skip Devil May Cry 2. I saw the Stinger animation and ignored the saliva that filled my mouth, warning me that I was about to puke. I beat the Infested Chopper by spamming the square button so hard my thumb went numb. I swung at the switches to open the sliding door and auto-focused on the flying enemies instead and I promised the universe that I would keep going no matter how much I was starting to hate myself. You know, if you force yourself to play Devil May Cry 2 for long enough, it actually kind of starts feeling like a Devil May Cry game. I know this is just me eating the grey slop from The Matrix and pretending it’s a juicy steak so I can keep it down, but some of the small-scale, tightly-packed room fights feel remarkably complete. It’s no secret that this game only had about six months in the oven, if that, so it’s mostly a mess. Even so, you can still get a pulse every now and then to remind yourself that both you and the game are still alive.
Anyway, after slogging through the boring encounters and the frustrating level layouts and the way that Dante lifelessly stares into the camera during cutscenes with those indescribably weird eyes, I managed to get to the final boss. Unsurprisingly for a game rushed out the door this quickly, the final boss is actually a boss rush, followed by a piss-easy final form that gets completely blown apart the second you press the Devil Trigger button. Unfortunately for me, I took my very first death on this boss fight, and decided that I would just start the level from scratch to avoid incurring a continue penalty. The game asked me if I wanted to continue. I said no. The game asked me if I wanted to go to the main menu, or if I wanted to save. I didn’t want to save. I wanted to restart. I went back to the main menu. I was then prompted to load a save. My last save was about forty minutes before the final boss. I decided that it wasn’t such a bad thing to lose to Devil May Cry 2.
It would probably reflect worse on me if I’d actually taken the time to beat it.
We have no record of who the original director of this game was before Itsuno took over.
Real videogamers don’t skip Devil May Cry 2, I’ve heard, so I figured it was high time I actually took a look at it for myself. I’d heard for years — decades! — that this was one of the most historically impressive pieces of shit ever put to market, and so I avoided it like it was a nuclear waste disposal site. This was not a place of honor, the signs warned me, and I wasn’t about to go digging for treasure against their advice. But now, with all of the pretentious gamethinker wind at my back, I wanted to see for myself how it really was. I actually started thinking that it would be immensely funny if it turned out to be the greatest game I’d ever played, so I could come on here and parade the fact that I liked it in front of all of you stuffy sheeple, all of you blindly following the opinions of whoever told you it was bad.
That was wrong of me, and I’d like to apologize. Devil May Cry 2 is bad.
But it’s not that bad, and that’s kind of where the problem is. You compare this to Devil May Cry, and it’s really bad. You compare it to Devil May Cry 3, and it’s unforgivable. But we live in a world where, somehow, this didn’t completely kill Devil May Cry as a series. I legitimately have no idea how it survived. Better games have killed better franchises for less. Even so, when something this bad exists but it doesn’t murder the series, it becomes kind of hard to really hate it. Capcom released three more mainline Devil May Cry games after this one, and they’re all ridiculously good (Devil May Cry 4 haters need not respond). You’ve always got the option to not play this one, pretend it doesn’t exist, and just experience the rest of the series without noticing anything different. If Devil May Cry 2 got It’s a Wonderful Life’d out of existence tomorrow, nobody would even think to ask if there was anything different. You know that joke about releasing three pigs with the numbers 1, 3, and 4 painted onto them, and then watching everyone freak out when they can’t find the fourth pig? I know the person who came up with that joke wasn’t a big Devil May Cry fan, because nobody who cares about Devil May Cry ever gives a shit where Pig #2 went. Hell, we even got a fifth pig a little while ago, and everyone was more than content to continue pretending this one didn’t exist.
But I stuck it out, because real videogamers don’t skip Devil May Cry 2. I saw the Stinger animation and ignored the saliva that filled my mouth, warning me that I was about to puke. I beat the Infested Chopper by spamming the square button so hard my thumb went numb. I swung at the switches to open the sliding door and auto-focused on the flying enemies instead and I promised the universe that I would keep going no matter how much I was starting to hate myself. You know, if you force yourself to play Devil May Cry 2 for long enough, it actually kind of starts feeling like a Devil May Cry game. I know this is just me eating the grey slop from The Matrix and pretending it’s a juicy steak so I can keep it down, but some of the small-scale, tightly-packed room fights feel remarkably complete. It’s no secret that this game only had about six months in the oven, if that, so it’s mostly a mess. Even so, you can still get a pulse every now and then to remind yourself that both you and the game are still alive.
Anyway, after slogging through the boring encounters and the frustrating level layouts and the way that Dante lifelessly stares into the camera during cutscenes with those indescribably weird eyes, I managed to get to the final boss. Unsurprisingly for a game rushed out the door this quickly, the final boss is actually a boss rush, followed by a piss-easy final form that gets completely blown apart the second you press the Devil Trigger button. Unfortunately for me, I took my very first death on this boss fight, and decided that I would just start the level from scratch to avoid incurring a continue penalty. The game asked me if I wanted to continue. I said no. The game asked me if I wanted to go to the main menu, or if I wanted to save. I didn’t want to save. I wanted to restart. I went back to the main menu. I was then prompted to load a save. My last save was about forty minutes before the final boss. I decided that it wasn’t such a bad thing to lose to Devil May Cry 2.
It would probably reflect worse on me if I’d actually taken the time to beat it.
We have no record of who the original director of this game was before Itsuno took over.
2022
Still raw in the middle.
Backpack Hero is a game that is immensely fun for the first couple of hours. Make no mistake, it’s still far from a game of the year contender even at its highest peaks, but it’s still managed to nail down an incredibly addictive gameplay loop that managed to sap about five hours of my time in what felt like one. There's an obscene amount of promise in these early stages, just as everything is starting to open up to you, and it really seemed like it was going to be solid for the entire runtime.
It’s regrettable, then, that the remaining ten hours I’ve spent with it have been little but tedious retreads, the game long having since run out of fresh things to show me. I’d estimate I’ve got at least another ten hours before I can finish the story mode, and I really don’t feel like putting too much more effort into trying for it. Backpack Hero doesn’t have long enough legs.
The two main factors I’d blame for how rapidly stale the game gets as it goes along come down to repetitious grinding and a total lack of challenge. Backpack Hero offers what would theoretically be dozens of builds — shurikens, gemstones, fish, magic wands and staves — but nothing is as anywhere near as effective as passively tanking up with shoe hats and leather caps and finding any weapon that does eight or more damage per energy. The most viable builds all share the exact same core of gaining dozens of armor on your first turn; after that, you can choose to deal a whole bunch of damage at once, or you can choose to apply statuses that deal damage over time. The best weapons can do both, and it’s exceptionally easy to forge a sword that hits for 11 and applies four poison with every swing while you’re still on the second of nine floors. There’s no incentive whatsoever to go for anything other than a tank-physical damage or tank-damage status playstyle: magic items require mana, which requires committing to manastones, which each take up a bag slot; Satchel’s lutes and triangles are such ridiculously strong status-appliers that you can throw away your starting weapons and spam your shield while passively building charm; Pochette’s minions deal damage for her, so she can just sit up front and click on her shield for the half hour it takes to complete a run.
This is probably the easiest roguelite I’ve ever played. In addition to being the most obviously powerful way to play the game, tank-physical damage (read: sword and board) builds are so easy to set up that you have to intentionally go out of your way not to play them. Passive armor and small-but-powerful shields are everywhere, mostly stepping on each others toes with incredibly minor trade-offs between them (one shield takes up two spaces and gives eight block; another takes up two spaces and gives seven, but also gives an additional passive block for every adjacent piece of armor), so you’re never going to be at a point where you’re left without obscene damage and obscene block outside of the starting one or two fights where you still have default gear. I only ever died once in fifteen hours to a starting fight that was literally impossible to win due to how bad my initial items were relative to how quickly the enemies scaled up against them. The run may as well end the second that you get to the stairs going to the second floor, because there won’t be anything further down that’ll even have a chance to kill you. The ninth-floor boss is universally easier to clear than the first floor introductory fight.
The town building mechanics between runs is almost universally reviled, and with good reason; it’s shallow, and it quickly falls out of importance in exchange for how much micro-management it asks of the player. Realistically, the best way to handle it is to just plop down houses and farms far away in the distance, and build every single shop as close as you can to the path leading back to the dungeon so that you don’t need to walk too far to get your upgrades. Resources for new unlocks are tight in the early stages of the game, but you’ll be completely overflowing with food and construction and treasure to the point that you literally won’t be able to spend it all unless you’re really dying to set up non-crate decorations around town. Putting up building-appropriate decorations increases the “efficiency” of said buildings, which seems to do nothing besides lower the resource costs for the upgrades of that particular building. Directly unlocking the upgrades without the discount requires spending the exact same resources. You’re better off skipping the extra step and just buying the unlocks at MSRP. I’m sure they look nice, but you’re not going to be spending more than a couple minutes in town for every half hour you spend in the dungeon. The decorations are barely useful mechanically, and you aren’t in town often enough to appreciate them visually. It’s a very messy, tacked-on idea that serves only to pad out an already incredibly-padded story mode.
What broke my will, though, was trying to unlock the character Tote. Tote won’t join you unless you carry her totem through six floors of the dungeon and two boss fights, and her totem takes up a slot. Hardly a problem after the first two fights, since you'll have more than enough backpack space for it by then, but it means you’ll be giving up at least one of Purse’s starting items and a bonus boon from Matthew to fit it into your 3x3 starting backpack. Regardless, I got to the bottom of the swamp, showed Tote the totem, beat the fucking tar out of her, and then finished the run. When I got back to town, there was no Tote. I went back into the dungeon, saw that her totem was still there, figured I hadn’t met some condition to unlock her yet, and went back to the swamp. No Tote. Finished the run, went back in, carried the totem to the bottom, still no Tote. I did the exact same run to the end of the swamp with my other two characters, and there still wasn’t any sign of Tote. I looked it up to see if I was missing something, and the closest thing I could find to an answer was a group of people in the Steam forums who said that Tote showing up at all was a random occurrence, and that it took one of them twenty runs before he could recruit Tote. I'd like to remind you here that the average run lasts about twenty to thirty minutes. Even so, I had already met Tote, and I had already fought Tote, and Tote had already agreed to join me, so I think the game just bugged out and didn’t give her to me when it should have. Normally I wouldn’t care about not being able to play a new character — Tote is apparently pretty bad relative to the rest of the cast, anyway — but you need to clear all nine floors with every character in order to actually beat story mode. No Tote means no ending. It seems like my best course of action would be to delete my fifteen-hour save and start from scratch in the hopes that it doesn’t happen again and she actually gets unlocked when she’s supposed to.
No thanks. I’m good.
This is one more game that’s out of early access purely by technicality.
Backpack Hero is a game that is immensely fun for the first couple of hours. Make no mistake, it’s still far from a game of the year contender even at its highest peaks, but it’s still managed to nail down an incredibly addictive gameplay loop that managed to sap about five hours of my time in what felt like one. There's an obscene amount of promise in these early stages, just as everything is starting to open up to you, and it really seemed like it was going to be solid for the entire runtime.
It’s regrettable, then, that the remaining ten hours I’ve spent with it have been little but tedious retreads, the game long having since run out of fresh things to show me. I’d estimate I’ve got at least another ten hours before I can finish the story mode, and I really don’t feel like putting too much more effort into trying for it. Backpack Hero doesn’t have long enough legs.
The two main factors I’d blame for how rapidly stale the game gets as it goes along come down to repetitious grinding and a total lack of challenge. Backpack Hero offers what would theoretically be dozens of builds — shurikens, gemstones, fish, magic wands and staves — but nothing is as anywhere near as effective as passively tanking up with shoe hats and leather caps and finding any weapon that does eight or more damage per energy. The most viable builds all share the exact same core of gaining dozens of armor on your first turn; after that, you can choose to deal a whole bunch of damage at once, or you can choose to apply statuses that deal damage over time. The best weapons can do both, and it’s exceptionally easy to forge a sword that hits for 11 and applies four poison with every swing while you’re still on the second of nine floors. There’s no incentive whatsoever to go for anything other than a tank-physical damage or tank-damage status playstyle: magic items require mana, which requires committing to manastones, which each take up a bag slot; Satchel’s lutes and triangles are such ridiculously strong status-appliers that you can throw away your starting weapons and spam your shield while passively building charm; Pochette’s minions deal damage for her, so she can just sit up front and click on her shield for the half hour it takes to complete a run.
This is probably the easiest roguelite I’ve ever played. In addition to being the most obviously powerful way to play the game, tank-physical damage (read: sword and board) builds are so easy to set up that you have to intentionally go out of your way not to play them. Passive armor and small-but-powerful shields are everywhere, mostly stepping on each others toes with incredibly minor trade-offs between them (one shield takes up two spaces and gives eight block; another takes up two spaces and gives seven, but also gives an additional passive block for every adjacent piece of armor), so you’re never going to be at a point where you’re left without obscene damage and obscene block outside of the starting one or two fights where you still have default gear. I only ever died once in fifteen hours to a starting fight that was literally impossible to win due to how bad my initial items were relative to how quickly the enemies scaled up against them. The run may as well end the second that you get to the stairs going to the second floor, because there won’t be anything further down that’ll even have a chance to kill you. The ninth-floor boss is universally easier to clear than the first floor introductory fight.
The town building mechanics between runs is almost universally reviled, and with good reason; it’s shallow, and it quickly falls out of importance in exchange for how much micro-management it asks of the player. Realistically, the best way to handle it is to just plop down houses and farms far away in the distance, and build every single shop as close as you can to the path leading back to the dungeon so that you don’t need to walk too far to get your upgrades. Resources for new unlocks are tight in the early stages of the game, but you’ll be completely overflowing with food and construction and treasure to the point that you literally won’t be able to spend it all unless you’re really dying to set up non-crate decorations around town. Putting up building-appropriate decorations increases the “efficiency” of said buildings, which seems to do nothing besides lower the resource costs for the upgrades of that particular building. Directly unlocking the upgrades without the discount requires spending the exact same resources. You’re better off skipping the extra step and just buying the unlocks at MSRP. I’m sure they look nice, but you’re not going to be spending more than a couple minutes in town for every half hour you spend in the dungeon. The decorations are barely useful mechanically, and you aren’t in town often enough to appreciate them visually. It’s a very messy, tacked-on idea that serves only to pad out an already incredibly-padded story mode.
What broke my will, though, was trying to unlock the character Tote. Tote won’t join you unless you carry her totem through six floors of the dungeon and two boss fights, and her totem takes up a slot. Hardly a problem after the first two fights, since you'll have more than enough backpack space for it by then, but it means you’ll be giving up at least one of Purse’s starting items and a bonus boon from Matthew to fit it into your 3x3 starting backpack. Regardless, I got to the bottom of the swamp, showed Tote the totem, beat the fucking tar out of her, and then finished the run. When I got back to town, there was no Tote. I went back into the dungeon, saw that her totem was still there, figured I hadn’t met some condition to unlock her yet, and went back to the swamp. No Tote. Finished the run, went back in, carried the totem to the bottom, still no Tote. I did the exact same run to the end of the swamp with my other two characters, and there still wasn’t any sign of Tote. I looked it up to see if I was missing something, and the closest thing I could find to an answer was a group of people in the Steam forums who said that Tote showing up at all was a random occurrence, and that it took one of them twenty runs before he could recruit Tote. I'd like to remind you here that the average run lasts about twenty to thirty minutes. Even so, I had already met Tote, and I had already fought Tote, and Tote had already agreed to join me, so I think the game just bugged out and didn’t give her to me when it should have. Normally I wouldn’t care about not being able to play a new character — Tote is apparently pretty bad relative to the rest of the cast, anyway — but you need to clear all nine floors with every character in order to actually beat story mode. No Tote means no ending. It seems like my best course of action would be to delete my fifteen-hour save and start from scratch in the hopes that it doesn’t happen again and she actually gets unlocked when she’s supposed to.
No thanks. I’m good.
This is one more game that’s out of early access purely by technicality.
2008
Pivotal.
Funny that this has "pistol" in the title when it erupts with the force and bombast of a shotgun by your ear, explosive and unyielding, leaving you reeling as you try to reorient yourself. Constantly moving, never wasting a single breath, ensuring you can't look away. Tragedy as banality as comedy. Love is rainbow.
Heisei Pistol Show is a work that I have both no words and far too many words for. Rarely can anything — anything — strike a balance between sorrow and joy this effortlessly, bouncing the audience back and forth between having their hearts rended and making them double over with laughter. Slaughtering your way through Heart’s former assassin colleagues and then having your pistol say “I’m Pistol” in the Microsoft Sam voice every time it talks is the sort of thing that doesn’t sound like it works when it’s described to you, but flows perfectly when it’s actually experienced. I’m tempted to say that it’s all over the place tonally, but it really isn’t; nothing ever drifts too far from the through-line, with these shifts being core to the holistic affair.
Most notable about Heisei Pistol Show, however, is how it handles queer characters in a way that’s nothing short of masterful. Heart is a wonderful, awful character, both a victim of circumstance and someone who causes his own problems. Heart suffers because he is gay, but Heart also suffers and he is gay. Heart is abused by his father not because he is gay, but because he reminds his father of his mother. Heart is exiled by his family not because he is gay, but because he isn’t religious. Heart loses his friends not because he is gay, but because he refuses to accept their platonic love for him. Heart can’t find love because he is gay and thus limits himself exclusively to his clients that he serves as a rentboy, none of whom love him back. Heart can’t find love because he is gay and he’s lived his entire life in a society that hates him and his kind, and makes every attempt to hide what healthy gay relationships look like. Heart suffers because he is gay. Heart suffers and he is gay.
I’ll echo a common sentiment I see shared about this game and say that it makes so many pieces of queer media look toothless by comparison, especially in more recent years. Many of these works are made by and for queer creatives, but so many fail to strike balance. Either queer trauma is used, is weaponized, is swung like a baseball bat to cripple and wound any gays in the audience so the straights can feel like they did something by "experiencing something hard", or queer trauma is ignored wholesale in order to keep up the "comfy vibes". I played The Big Con earlier this year and dropped it because it was billed me to as a solid piece of queer media and instead existed as this soft, mealy blob-thing seemingly designed for people who say “be gay do crimes” and “FALGSC” online and then get sweaty palms when they think about shoplifting a pack of gum. Nobody in that world had ever had a single negative thought, ever, about queer people in 90’s North America. I don’t mean to turn this into a rant where I’m just shitting on a different work, but it really illustrates how many worlds of finesse apart a creator like Parun was long before it was even remotely popular to be tackling subject matter anywhere even approaching this in video games.
I wouldn't dare erase the experiences of these other creators by suggesting that these aren’t accurate to lived experiences — there are enough dipshits out there doing that already — but it always leaves me a little raw to never see me on the screen. Characters who aren't living their saccharine, gumdrop lives where everything in their world is completely fine and without conflict, but neither are they defined exclusively by external traumas and hatred, never possessing the agency to do anything besides be abused. Where are the characters who have lived complex lives? Who have suffered, but have found joy? Even if it ends in tragedy, where are those who have found catharsis in themselves and their loved ones in the quiet moments? Are they all locked away in Japanese RPG Maker games from 2008?
The messaging can be a bit clumsy in terms of what it's trying to get across, even after some scrutiny; Tokimeki's song calls out to "Indians" in feather hats who all look like T. Hawk, "Slums" made up entirely of dark-skinned characters, and Koreans, whose history of being discriminated against in Japan has been well-documented for decades. I'm still uncertain if this is simply a bit of off-color humor inserted into the bit or if it's a genuine and well-intentioned call of solidarity from one oppressed group to a few others; knowing what I know about Parun and his other work, I'm inclined to believe it's the latter. I'd like that to be the case, too.
After I beat the game, I saw Parun say that he liked reading fan theories of his work, and that he hoped the players of Heisei Pistol Show would come up with some for him to check out. I’m at least a decade and a half late to the party, but allow me to try, regardless.
The game is Heart's dying dream; a fantasy land conjured up in his final moments, flashing through vignettes of his life. Heart, in reality, is the rentboy Matsumoto tells his friend about, who contracted herpes, killed his friend, and committed suicide by cop. The dying dream itself is hyperreal, in the Baudrillardian sense. It's a simulacrum of reality that Heart escapes to — or perhaps is forced to escape to, his hallucinations resulting from his herpes meningoencephalitis — wherein he relives a version of his life as a musical, as kabuki theater. His friends are there, and he metaphorically guns them down, abandoning them in reality. His unrequited lover is there, and Heart actually guns him down, just as he does in reality. At the end of the dream, Heart is shot, told he's never known love because he was so desperate for it that he would latch onto anyone and everyone, and then he's out of memories. He imagines himself at the concert from his childhood once more, now the starring princess he always dreamt he would become, and he quietly passes away with a smile on his face.
At least, that’s the way I saw it all play out. I thought it was a remarkably straight-forward story once all of the ending reveals wrapped up, but then I got to a dev room where Parum’s authorial mouthpiece character told me that he thought I was dull if I believed that I had it all figured out after a single playthrough. He then gave me a list of Mulholland Drive-tier questions that I needed to answer if I wanted to have a real shot at deciphering everything that happened. It ruled. I wonder if I’m close to what he intended.
There's a bitter irony that the one person who might know all of this for certain is the one person that we can no longer ask.
Funny that this has "pistol" in the title when it erupts with the force and bombast of a shotgun by your ear, explosive and unyielding, leaving you reeling as you try to reorient yourself. Constantly moving, never wasting a single breath, ensuring you can't look away. Tragedy as banality as comedy. Love is rainbow.
Heisei Pistol Show is a work that I have both no words and far too many words for. Rarely can anything — anything — strike a balance between sorrow and joy this effortlessly, bouncing the audience back and forth between having their hearts rended and making them double over with laughter. Slaughtering your way through Heart’s former assassin colleagues and then having your pistol say “I’m Pistol” in the Microsoft Sam voice every time it talks is the sort of thing that doesn’t sound like it works when it’s described to you, but flows perfectly when it’s actually experienced. I’m tempted to say that it’s all over the place tonally, but it really isn’t; nothing ever drifts too far from the through-line, with these shifts being core to the holistic affair.
Most notable about Heisei Pistol Show, however, is how it handles queer characters in a way that’s nothing short of masterful. Heart is a wonderful, awful character, both a victim of circumstance and someone who causes his own problems. Heart suffers because he is gay, but Heart also suffers and he is gay. Heart is abused by his father not because he is gay, but because he reminds his father of his mother. Heart is exiled by his family not because he is gay, but because he isn’t religious. Heart loses his friends not because he is gay, but because he refuses to accept their platonic love for him. Heart can’t find love because he is gay and thus limits himself exclusively to his clients that he serves as a rentboy, none of whom love him back. Heart can’t find love because he is gay and he’s lived his entire life in a society that hates him and his kind, and makes every attempt to hide what healthy gay relationships look like. Heart suffers because he is gay. Heart suffers and he is gay.
I’ll echo a common sentiment I see shared about this game and say that it makes so many pieces of queer media look toothless by comparison, especially in more recent years. Many of these works are made by and for queer creatives, but so many fail to strike balance. Either queer trauma is used, is weaponized, is swung like a baseball bat to cripple and wound any gays in the audience so the straights can feel like they did something by "experiencing something hard", or queer trauma is ignored wholesale in order to keep up the "comfy vibes". I played The Big Con earlier this year and dropped it because it was billed me to as a solid piece of queer media and instead existed as this soft, mealy blob-thing seemingly designed for people who say “be gay do crimes” and “FALGSC” online and then get sweaty palms when they think about shoplifting a pack of gum. Nobody in that world had ever had a single negative thought, ever, about queer people in 90’s North America. I don’t mean to turn this into a rant where I’m just shitting on a different work, but it really illustrates how many worlds of finesse apart a creator like Parun was long before it was even remotely popular to be tackling subject matter anywhere even approaching this in video games.
I wouldn't dare erase the experiences of these other creators by suggesting that these aren’t accurate to lived experiences — there are enough dipshits out there doing that already — but it always leaves me a little raw to never see me on the screen. Characters who aren't living their saccharine, gumdrop lives where everything in their world is completely fine and without conflict, but neither are they defined exclusively by external traumas and hatred, never possessing the agency to do anything besides be abused. Where are the characters who have lived complex lives? Who have suffered, but have found joy? Even if it ends in tragedy, where are those who have found catharsis in themselves and their loved ones in the quiet moments? Are they all locked away in Japanese RPG Maker games from 2008?
The messaging can be a bit clumsy in terms of what it's trying to get across, even after some scrutiny; Tokimeki's song calls out to "Indians" in feather hats who all look like T. Hawk, "Slums" made up entirely of dark-skinned characters, and Koreans, whose history of being discriminated against in Japan has been well-documented for decades. I'm still uncertain if this is simply a bit of off-color humor inserted into the bit or if it's a genuine and well-intentioned call of solidarity from one oppressed group to a few others; knowing what I know about Parun and his other work, I'm inclined to believe it's the latter. I'd like that to be the case, too.
After I beat the game, I saw Parun say that he liked reading fan theories of his work, and that he hoped the players of Heisei Pistol Show would come up with some for him to check out. I’m at least a decade and a half late to the party, but allow me to try, regardless.
The game is Heart's dying dream; a fantasy land conjured up in his final moments, flashing through vignettes of his life. Heart, in reality, is the rentboy Matsumoto tells his friend about, who contracted herpes, killed his friend, and committed suicide by cop. The dying dream itself is hyperreal, in the Baudrillardian sense. It's a simulacrum of reality that Heart escapes to — or perhaps is forced to escape to, his hallucinations resulting from his herpes meningoencephalitis — wherein he relives a version of his life as a musical, as kabuki theater. His friends are there, and he metaphorically guns them down, abandoning them in reality. His unrequited lover is there, and Heart actually guns him down, just as he does in reality. At the end of the dream, Heart is shot, told he's never known love because he was so desperate for it that he would latch onto anyone and everyone, and then he's out of memories. He imagines himself at the concert from his childhood once more, now the starring princess he always dreamt he would become, and he quietly passes away with a smile on his face.
At least, that’s the way I saw it all play out. I thought it was a remarkably straight-forward story once all of the ending reveals wrapped up, but then I got to a dev room where Parum’s authorial mouthpiece character told me that he thought I was dull if I believed that I had it all figured out after a single playthrough. He then gave me a list of Mulholland Drive-tier questions that I needed to answer if I wanted to have a real shot at deciphering everything that happened. It ruled. I wonder if I’m close to what he intended.
There's a bitter irony that the one person who might know all of this for certain is the one person that we can no longer ask.
It’s okay when FromSoft does it.
Sekiro is guilty of everything that its staunchest defenders attack other games for. An unforgivably bad camera, bosses with surprise second phases, dreadfully simple and overpowered parrying, a near-complete lack of depth both artistically and mechanically, and a thematic retread of what the studio has been doing for fifteen years now all culminates to create something that can peak at the heights of interesting but mostly just lingers in the trenches of bland.
I knew that I wasn’t going to like Sekiro about an hour into it, but I also knew that it would be incredibly easy for someone to point out that I'm a quitter and say that I just didn’t like it because I was bad at the game. You get that a lot, with FromSoft’s titles: the implication being that the difficulty is the sole reason why anyone could ever dislike it. Set aside the red-headed stepchildren that are titles like Dark Souls II and Dark Souls III, where the premier Soulsheads are often pretty harsh on them, and look instead to the darlings like Bloodborne, and Elden Ring, and Sekiro. There are a certain amount of criticisms that you’re allowed to make — farming for blood vials or spirit emblems is boring, certain builds or weapons are imbalanced compared to others — but start pointing out flaws in the underlying systems themselves, and watch the wagons get circled as you’re told that you just need to git gud to appreciate them. I’ll outline what I disliked about the game itself in a bit, but all of this preamble is required to explain why I felt so compelled to finish Sekiro, in the hopes that it’d allow me to speak with some degree of authority.
I have to wonder if Hidetaka Miyazaki ever feels like Victor Frankenstein looking at the monster he's created. The ethos of the earliest Souls games were largely about strangers coming together to overcome the challenges imposed by the brutal and uncaring world they inhabited. Miyazaki famously said that he was inspired by an icy road on a hill that he needed a stranger's help to get over, and that he himself also helped a stranger get over; it was "a connection of mutual assistance between transient people", he said, because he couldn't stick around to thank them or else he'd get stuck again. This laid the foundations not just for the jolly co-operation summons of the original Dark Souls, but certainly reflected players on a more meta level, as well. We're all transient people to one another online, and we'll talk about these games for tips and guides and then dip out to take on the challenges with new information, often to never hear from the other players again. We get what we can and give what we're able.
Yet there's been an inarguable change, I feel, in the way that fans of the newest games talk about them. The seeds were certainly first sown with the whole "PREPARE TO DIE" garbage from the western Dark Souls marketing campaign, but there's been a marked shift in the way that people discuss these games. Complain that it's too hard, and you'll now immediately be met with derision instead of advice: well, you're just bad, you need to git gud, you just don't get it. God help you if you decide to drop the game because you're not having fun. There's no faster way to prove that you're a casual who hasn't earned the right to talk about it. Sekiro discussion in particular is especially noxious, with the community that exists today largely believing that anyone who has any complaints whatsoever is just mad because bad. Even if you beat the game, complaining about it is unjustified because you're actually still bad. If you were good, you would have liked it. Your complaints are because you're bad, thus they're invalid; any praise must then be because you're good, and thus valid. I complained about the shitty camera to a friend and he immediately shot back that it was my fault for being near a wall, and that it's actually intended behavior for it to fuck up near terrain because it'll push clever players to the middle of rooms where they'll be safer. This is the level of discourse we're operating at here. A decade and a half of making these third-person action-adventure games and they still can't fix the fucking cameras, but it's actually because they're playing 4D chess against the player. Can you imagine anything else getting this much leniency?
The camera is really the thing I want to hammer home as the worst element here, because it alone has killed me more than any other enemy in the game. I don’t know how FromSoft still haven’t figured this out. I intentionally sped through most of the game, skipping a lot of the optional content primarily just because I wanted to roll credits, and even most of the mandatory bosses introduced new problems with the camera. Guardian Ape would throw me into a wall that the camera couldn’t phase through, which meant that it tried to go for a birds-eye view and got me killed because I couldn’t see what was happening in time to block the follow-up; Summoner Monk similarly backed me into a wall and brought us both so close to the camera that our models turned invisible and I had to guess what the pattern was, effectively with my eyes closed; Sword Saint Isshin’s Phase 2 jumping attack would break the lock-on whenever I dodged under it, because the camera couldn’t keep up with where he was going. Mini-bosses like the Lone Shadow Longswordsman and the Lone Shadow Vilehand would similarly eat the camera with some of their dashing moves, and bounding off the head of the latter after dodging his sweep caused the camera to get stuck in the ceiling so hard that it started flashing Electric Soldier Porygon at me for a few seconds until it freed itself. It’s so blatantly wrong that I’m astonished both that it made it to production in the state that it’s in and that it isn’t a complete dealbreaker for significantly more people than it is.
I mentioned to another friend that I was having some trouble with Owl and that I was going to call it quits for the night there, and he excitedly mentioned that Owl had his favorite boss theme in the game. It was at this exact moment that I realized that I couldn’t actually recall a single track from the entire ten or so hours I had played up to that point. Even after rolling credits, I still don’t remember anything aside from the fact that I thought Divine Dragon had a cool theme. Music is constantly playing over every sequence of the game, ambient tracks and combat tracks alike; if you aggro an enemy, kill them, and then immediately aggro another, the combat track will start, fade out, and then start from the beginning again. Moving through an area to quickly cut down enemies who don’t alert the others when they aggro can make the combat track start itself over what I managed to get about five times in a row. It’s kind of funny in how sloppy it is.
The narrative is dreck, of course, and I doubt anyone was expecting much different. It’s the same story FromSoft has been telling for years now — unnatural life and resurrection, it’s all cyclical, you can choose to either break the cycle or keep it going, blah blah blah — with the added twist of “honor culture is actually dishonorable”, which has been massively oversaturated for longer than anyone reading this has been alive, and Sekiro has absolutely nothing interesting to add to the conversation. It’s certainly present. Owl shows up after seemingly dying, decides to be evil, actually dies unceremoniously, and the game just kind of moves along without really being interested in how or why any of that happened. I’ve seen praise for the story, and I can’t honestly believe that anyone is cheering this on. This is the fourth time FromSoft has shown that time is a flat circle in class, and the irony of how they keep doing it over and over again is really kind of giving me a kick as I type it out. You certainly can’t say they don’t believe in it.
Souls combat was never mechanically deep, but made up for it predominately just by giving you a lot of options. Sekiro throws this out in favor of exclusively allowing the player to play as a squishy, dex-based katana-wielder who dies in two hits on a good day and has to perfect parry the world or be crushed beneath it. I respect, in a way, the sheer commitment to this singular playstyle, but I also don’t think there’s any depth here to actually make me want to play this over any other similar action game. You get a parry and you get some basic sword swings, and if you’re a really good boy, you get to do Ichimonji Double. The actual parrying itself is ridiculously forgiving, and you’ll just end up psyching yourself out if you read online that spamming it will reduce your parry window to about seven frames; it’s active for so long and you’re actionable again so quickly after you use it that you’re in no real danger so long as you just keep hammering away at L1 fast enough. The fact that this got a port for the Stadia — with its inherent input lag that you can count in geologic time — should indicate how core these so-called “strict reaction times” actually are. What you’re left with once you get past that mental barrier is a game where you hit R1 until orange sparks fly, hit L1 until orange sparks stop flying, and then repeat the process from the start. When the kanji for danger occasionally appears, you get to hit either the jump button or the dash button. It is fucking boring. I managed to no-hit all three phases of Isshin not because I had downloaded him and completely figured out a perfect counter for every single one of his combos, but because his AI broke and he kept spamming the thrust attack in Phase 2 and the lightning sweep in Phase 3. I was getting rolled before that, because he was actually using his entire arsenal. I didn’t outskill him, I just got lucky that he kept picking the exact same attack over and over again. It’s like I got double-perfected by a world-class Zangief player and then in game two he just sat in neutral and spammed SPD. Sure, I’ll take the win, but it’s not because I earned it. I didn’t win, he just lost. Sekiro occupies an incredibly awkward middle ground between something slow and simple like Dark Souls and something fast and complex like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta. The game is instead fast and simple, and I can’t think of anything that is less for me.
Speaking of, I think FromSoft has indicated with their last few releases that they’re no longer interested in catering to players like me. That’s fine. I say this with my teeth gritted and steam coming out of my ears, but, really, it is fine. They’ve clearly found a new audience who loves them dearly, and every new game they put out sells millions of copies and sweeps the Game of the Year awards from every publication giving them out. This beat Death Stranding and Resident Evil 2 at The Game Awards! It’s the fifth highest-rated game on Backloggd of all time! It’s sold over ten million copies as of September of this year! Clearly I’m the odd man out, here. What use is it even to complain? What reason would they have to listen?
I’ve been getting this sort-of old man doom sense lately — not just for game discussion, mind, but for a lot of things — about how saying what you feel about something doesn’t actually accomplish anything if you’re not in a position of power to change it. It’s got a purpose to just let others know how you feel about any given topic, but what does it actually do? If I find a group of like-minded individuals who think I nailed it with this review and agree that FromSoft ought to return to the good old days where they made shitty, clunky games that launched blatantly unfinished, what does that accomplish? If a group of Sekiro fans come in and dunk on me for just not understanding the game, what does that accomplish? I put myself through the ringer beating a twenty hour-long game that I hated, and for what? So that I’d be more credible when I said it was a pile of shit? What does that accomplish, then, when someone comes in and says that beating the game doesn’t mean anything and I’m still bad and that’s the only reason I hated it? Without anyone involved actually being in a position to change anything, what use is discussing it at all?
A large part of what bothers me is that I don't feel I've really gotten anything I value from my time with Sekiro. It's not just because of the difficulty; I do plenty of difficult things, play plenty of difficult games, and it's all given me something I value. Every piece I write makes me feel like I'm a little bit better at writing, and it helps me appreciate the writing of others more. Every fighting game I play tends to have wildly differing mechanics between them, but the fundamentals of squaring off against another player are transferable. Every song I compose makes me feel like I've got a deeper understanding of music. What I get from playing Sekiro is that I'm now better at Sekiro, which is a game I have no desire to ever touch again. There's hardly anything that plays quite like this — which is a massive point of support for those who love it — so I may as well have gotten nothing for all my time spent. There's nothing wrong with what I'll affectionately call "junk media", where there's no value to the piece besides what you feel in the exact moments where you're actively experiencing it, but you'd hope that what you feel is a sense of fun or reward. I felt neither from Sekiro. I thought it was boring, and it didn't give me anything I value. I could have gone to work and felt equally bored and unfulfilled, but at least work pays me.
It’s telling that the parts that I thought were most interesting — the Divine Dragon, the Armored Knight — are the parts that either go completely overlooked or disparaged by the broader fanbase. There’s a clear disconnect between me, this game, and everyone else. People all over the place online said to keep playing until the combat clicks, and that’s when you start having fun. I felt the combat click, and I felt bored. People said to play until Genichiro before you say you don’t like it, and I beat Genichiro and was still bored. People said you can’t call the game bad if you haven’t beaten it, and I have, and I still think it’s bad. Do I have the right to dislike it yet, or is there still something that I’ve missed?
Seeing a monkey in a conical hat firing a rifle was almost enough for me to justify giving this five stars.
Sekiro is guilty of everything that its staunchest defenders attack other games for. An unforgivably bad camera, bosses with surprise second phases, dreadfully simple and overpowered parrying, a near-complete lack of depth both artistically and mechanically, and a thematic retread of what the studio has been doing for fifteen years now all culminates to create something that can peak at the heights of interesting but mostly just lingers in the trenches of bland.
I knew that I wasn’t going to like Sekiro about an hour into it, but I also knew that it would be incredibly easy for someone to point out that I'm a quitter and say that I just didn’t like it because I was bad at the game. You get that a lot, with FromSoft’s titles: the implication being that the difficulty is the sole reason why anyone could ever dislike it. Set aside the red-headed stepchildren that are titles like Dark Souls II and Dark Souls III, where the premier Soulsheads are often pretty harsh on them, and look instead to the darlings like Bloodborne, and Elden Ring, and Sekiro. There are a certain amount of criticisms that you’re allowed to make — farming for blood vials or spirit emblems is boring, certain builds or weapons are imbalanced compared to others — but start pointing out flaws in the underlying systems themselves, and watch the wagons get circled as you’re told that you just need to git gud to appreciate them. I’ll outline what I disliked about the game itself in a bit, but all of this preamble is required to explain why I felt so compelled to finish Sekiro, in the hopes that it’d allow me to speak with some degree of authority.
I have to wonder if Hidetaka Miyazaki ever feels like Victor Frankenstein looking at the monster he's created. The ethos of the earliest Souls games were largely about strangers coming together to overcome the challenges imposed by the brutal and uncaring world they inhabited. Miyazaki famously said that he was inspired by an icy road on a hill that he needed a stranger's help to get over, and that he himself also helped a stranger get over; it was "a connection of mutual assistance between transient people", he said, because he couldn't stick around to thank them or else he'd get stuck again. This laid the foundations not just for the jolly co-operation summons of the original Dark Souls, but certainly reflected players on a more meta level, as well. We're all transient people to one another online, and we'll talk about these games for tips and guides and then dip out to take on the challenges with new information, often to never hear from the other players again. We get what we can and give what we're able.
Yet there's been an inarguable change, I feel, in the way that fans of the newest games talk about them. The seeds were certainly first sown with the whole "PREPARE TO DIE" garbage from the western Dark Souls marketing campaign, but there's been a marked shift in the way that people discuss these games. Complain that it's too hard, and you'll now immediately be met with derision instead of advice: well, you're just bad, you need to git gud, you just don't get it. God help you if you decide to drop the game because you're not having fun. There's no faster way to prove that you're a casual who hasn't earned the right to talk about it. Sekiro discussion in particular is especially noxious, with the community that exists today largely believing that anyone who has any complaints whatsoever is just mad because bad. Even if you beat the game, complaining about it is unjustified because you're actually still bad. If you were good, you would have liked it. Your complaints are because you're bad, thus they're invalid; any praise must then be because you're good, and thus valid. I complained about the shitty camera to a friend and he immediately shot back that it was my fault for being near a wall, and that it's actually intended behavior for it to fuck up near terrain because it'll push clever players to the middle of rooms where they'll be safer. This is the level of discourse we're operating at here. A decade and a half of making these third-person action-adventure games and they still can't fix the fucking cameras, but it's actually because they're playing 4D chess against the player. Can you imagine anything else getting this much leniency?
The camera is really the thing I want to hammer home as the worst element here, because it alone has killed me more than any other enemy in the game. I don’t know how FromSoft still haven’t figured this out. I intentionally sped through most of the game, skipping a lot of the optional content primarily just because I wanted to roll credits, and even most of the mandatory bosses introduced new problems with the camera. Guardian Ape would throw me into a wall that the camera couldn’t phase through, which meant that it tried to go for a birds-eye view and got me killed because I couldn’t see what was happening in time to block the follow-up; Summoner Monk similarly backed me into a wall and brought us both so close to the camera that our models turned invisible and I had to guess what the pattern was, effectively with my eyes closed; Sword Saint Isshin’s Phase 2 jumping attack would break the lock-on whenever I dodged under it, because the camera couldn’t keep up with where he was going. Mini-bosses like the Lone Shadow Longswordsman and the Lone Shadow Vilehand would similarly eat the camera with some of their dashing moves, and bounding off the head of the latter after dodging his sweep caused the camera to get stuck in the ceiling so hard that it started flashing Electric Soldier Porygon at me for a few seconds until it freed itself. It’s so blatantly wrong that I’m astonished both that it made it to production in the state that it’s in and that it isn’t a complete dealbreaker for significantly more people than it is.
I mentioned to another friend that I was having some trouble with Owl and that I was going to call it quits for the night there, and he excitedly mentioned that Owl had his favorite boss theme in the game. It was at this exact moment that I realized that I couldn’t actually recall a single track from the entire ten or so hours I had played up to that point. Even after rolling credits, I still don’t remember anything aside from the fact that I thought Divine Dragon had a cool theme. Music is constantly playing over every sequence of the game, ambient tracks and combat tracks alike; if you aggro an enemy, kill them, and then immediately aggro another, the combat track will start, fade out, and then start from the beginning again. Moving through an area to quickly cut down enemies who don’t alert the others when they aggro can make the combat track start itself over what I managed to get about five times in a row. It’s kind of funny in how sloppy it is.
The narrative is dreck, of course, and I doubt anyone was expecting much different. It’s the same story FromSoft has been telling for years now — unnatural life and resurrection, it’s all cyclical, you can choose to either break the cycle or keep it going, blah blah blah — with the added twist of “honor culture is actually dishonorable”, which has been massively oversaturated for longer than anyone reading this has been alive, and Sekiro has absolutely nothing interesting to add to the conversation. It’s certainly present. Owl shows up after seemingly dying, decides to be evil, actually dies unceremoniously, and the game just kind of moves along without really being interested in how or why any of that happened. I’ve seen praise for the story, and I can’t honestly believe that anyone is cheering this on. This is the fourth time FromSoft has shown that time is a flat circle in class, and the irony of how they keep doing it over and over again is really kind of giving me a kick as I type it out. You certainly can’t say they don’t believe in it.
Souls combat was never mechanically deep, but made up for it predominately just by giving you a lot of options. Sekiro throws this out in favor of exclusively allowing the player to play as a squishy, dex-based katana-wielder who dies in two hits on a good day and has to perfect parry the world or be crushed beneath it. I respect, in a way, the sheer commitment to this singular playstyle, but I also don’t think there’s any depth here to actually make me want to play this over any other similar action game. You get a parry and you get some basic sword swings, and if you’re a really good boy, you get to do Ichimonji Double. The actual parrying itself is ridiculously forgiving, and you’ll just end up psyching yourself out if you read online that spamming it will reduce your parry window to about seven frames; it’s active for so long and you’re actionable again so quickly after you use it that you’re in no real danger so long as you just keep hammering away at L1 fast enough. The fact that this got a port for the Stadia — with its inherent input lag that you can count in geologic time — should indicate how core these so-called “strict reaction times” actually are. What you’re left with once you get past that mental barrier is a game where you hit R1 until orange sparks fly, hit L1 until orange sparks stop flying, and then repeat the process from the start. When the kanji for danger occasionally appears, you get to hit either the jump button or the dash button. It is fucking boring. I managed to no-hit all three phases of Isshin not because I had downloaded him and completely figured out a perfect counter for every single one of his combos, but because his AI broke and he kept spamming the thrust attack in Phase 2 and the lightning sweep in Phase 3. I was getting rolled before that, because he was actually using his entire arsenal. I didn’t outskill him, I just got lucky that he kept picking the exact same attack over and over again. It’s like I got double-perfected by a world-class Zangief player and then in game two he just sat in neutral and spammed SPD. Sure, I’ll take the win, but it’s not because I earned it. I didn’t win, he just lost. Sekiro occupies an incredibly awkward middle ground between something slow and simple like Dark Souls and something fast and complex like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta. The game is instead fast and simple, and I can’t think of anything that is less for me.
Speaking of, I think FromSoft has indicated with their last few releases that they’re no longer interested in catering to players like me. That’s fine. I say this with my teeth gritted and steam coming out of my ears, but, really, it is fine. They’ve clearly found a new audience who loves them dearly, and every new game they put out sells millions of copies and sweeps the Game of the Year awards from every publication giving them out. This beat Death Stranding and Resident Evil 2 at The Game Awards! It’s the fifth highest-rated game on Backloggd of all time! It’s sold over ten million copies as of September of this year! Clearly I’m the odd man out, here. What use is it even to complain? What reason would they have to listen?
I’ve been getting this sort-of old man doom sense lately — not just for game discussion, mind, but for a lot of things — about how saying what you feel about something doesn’t actually accomplish anything if you’re not in a position of power to change it. It’s got a purpose to just let others know how you feel about any given topic, but what does it actually do? If I find a group of like-minded individuals who think I nailed it with this review and agree that FromSoft ought to return to the good old days where they made shitty, clunky games that launched blatantly unfinished, what does that accomplish? If a group of Sekiro fans come in and dunk on me for just not understanding the game, what does that accomplish? I put myself through the ringer beating a twenty hour-long game that I hated, and for what? So that I’d be more credible when I said it was a pile of shit? What does that accomplish, then, when someone comes in and says that beating the game doesn’t mean anything and I’m still bad and that’s the only reason I hated it? Without anyone involved actually being in a position to change anything, what use is discussing it at all?
A large part of what bothers me is that I don't feel I've really gotten anything I value from my time with Sekiro. It's not just because of the difficulty; I do plenty of difficult things, play plenty of difficult games, and it's all given me something I value. Every piece I write makes me feel like I'm a little bit better at writing, and it helps me appreciate the writing of others more. Every fighting game I play tends to have wildly differing mechanics between them, but the fundamentals of squaring off against another player are transferable. Every song I compose makes me feel like I've got a deeper understanding of music. What I get from playing Sekiro is that I'm now better at Sekiro, which is a game I have no desire to ever touch again. There's hardly anything that plays quite like this — which is a massive point of support for those who love it — so I may as well have gotten nothing for all my time spent. There's nothing wrong with what I'll affectionately call "junk media", where there's no value to the piece besides what you feel in the exact moments where you're actively experiencing it, but you'd hope that what you feel is a sense of fun or reward. I felt neither from Sekiro. I thought it was boring, and it didn't give me anything I value. I could have gone to work and felt equally bored and unfulfilled, but at least work pays me.
It’s telling that the parts that I thought were most interesting — the Divine Dragon, the Armored Knight — are the parts that either go completely overlooked or disparaged by the broader fanbase. There’s a clear disconnect between me, this game, and everyone else. People all over the place online said to keep playing until the combat clicks, and that’s when you start having fun. I felt the combat click, and I felt bored. People said to play until Genichiro before you say you don’t like it, and I beat Genichiro and was still bored. People said you can’t call the game bad if you haven’t beaten it, and I have, and I still think it’s bad. Do I have the right to dislike it yet, or is there still something that I’ve missed?
Seeing a monkey in a conical hat firing a rifle was almost enough for me to justify giving this five stars.
The best way to play Resident Evil 4.
There’s a lot to talk about with the HD Project, but most of it has already been said, and certainly better than I could hope to. What I will say is that the story behind it — of taking eight years to find all of these lost textures, of flying out to locations across Europe to take real photos to port back into the game, of re-adding the silencer in a dev room tucked away in a famously-inaccessible area — is nothing short of inspirational. The final product is a ridiculously thorough recreation of what you remember Resident Evil 4 looking like, rather than how it actually did. The 45-ish gigabytes of texture files that come with this slot into the base game’s sub-10 gigs so poorly that you need a patch just to get it all running. It’s the impressive kind of work and dedication that will rightfully be remembered in the highest echelons of fan projects.
What was most interesting to me, though, was the fact that the aforementioned patch came bundled with the texture pack, and included a suite of options within. “re4_tweaks”, as it calls itself, is exactly what it claims to be; a wealth of options for the player to fiddle with, all made up of sliders and buttons, each one letting you change the game just enough to make some obvious changes without feeling like you’re playing something different.
The new FOV slider is a big one; the base game of Resident Evil 4 has a claustrophobic camera angle, cozied right up against Leon’s juicy delts, and it makes it genuinely kind of difficult to see what the fuck is going on. There’s an artistic intent here, and it’s an obvious one — Resident Evil had defined itself though claustrophobia for three games leading up to this, so it’s practically a series mainstay — but I never felt that it worked all that well here. Bringing the camera out a bit helps immensely in letting you get a better understanding of what’s going on around you, and it actually helps to deepen the tension when you can see just how massive the swarm of enemies closing in on you actually is.
“Balanced Chicago Typewriter” was one that I needed to check out immediately. It doesn’t do much besides nerf the damage of the thing and require you to find ammo pickups, but it’s an immensely interesting way of adding a new weapon for new game plus players who aren’t interested in breaking the game completely in half. Capcom already locked the Matilda behind NG+, and that thing was a complete piece of shit, so there’s at least precedent for it. I’ve always thought it was a bit of a missed opportunity that Resident Evil 4 had all of these different ammo types and so few weapons that actually used them; only the TMP takes TMP ammo, only the the mine thrower takes mines, you’ve only got two rifles and the semi-auto is almost a strictly better version of the bolt-action. The remake did a decent enough job of adding in new weapons, but both there and here I find myself reverting back to a handgun/shotgun/sniper core even when I’m trying to experiment and play around with the more neglected weapons. It’s a problem of power versus fun; the TMP is probably the strongest gun in the game, constantly giving you easy access to suplexes and kicks, but it’s fucking boring to pop an enemy once, hit them, back off, and then do it again. Anything that allows you to shake it up a little, such as the balanced Chicago Typewriter, is a more than welcome addition.
Of course, the Typewriter itself is locked behind Separate Ways, which is fucking boring in this. It’s an absolute slog of backtracking and mowing through wave after wave of enemies without really experiencing anything new. It takes a long, long while before you start hitting new areas with new bosses, and trudging through the muck to get to that point isn’t at all worth it. The remake blows this version of Separate Ways out of the water — and it should, considering that it costs an extra ten bucks.
But the main campaign is as fun as ever, still complete with all of the areas that the remake omitted. Certainly for the worse, I’d say. The lava room in the castle is an obvious highlight, along with the giant Salazar robot and Ashley driving through walls in a bulldozer. The setpieces aren’t the only thing I think are done better here; the writing is a lot sharper, which is funny when you consider how fucking corny it is. There are a lot of digs at the War on Terror, at poking holes in the great American fantasy of swooping in and saving the day and leaving everything right with the world. Of course, it’s all played pretty straight, and Leon naturally saves the day and leaves everything right with the world, but it’s refreshing to see how quick a lot of characters are in this. Everyone is so sassy. Leon accusing Salazar of being a terrorist and him shooting back that terrorist is “a popular word these days” is so perfect. The main villains in this just laugh whenever Leon gets a good dig in at them, often recognizing the fact that he got their asses. It’s a lot of fun. The music is more varied and textured, the acting is generally a lot better, Ashley still has her big monkey ears, everything about this is still as fresh and as perfect as it was eighteen years ago. But I’m just gushing at this point. Of course it’s all good. It’s Resident Evil 4.
Really, I just wanted an excuse to review this again now that I’ve played the remake. I think it was clear from the outset that the team remaking Resident Evil 4 never actually had a chance to succeed the original, but they did a really good job. After all, they had this to follow, and what an absurdly tough act it is. In the end, the original is still one of the single greatest games ever produced, and it’s a testament to how ahead of its time it was that it still feels inimitable to this day.
Ashley should be able to glide down from the tops of ladders and ledges like Dumbo instead of waiting around for Leon to catch her.
There’s a lot to talk about with the HD Project, but most of it has already been said, and certainly better than I could hope to. What I will say is that the story behind it — of taking eight years to find all of these lost textures, of flying out to locations across Europe to take real photos to port back into the game, of re-adding the silencer in a dev room tucked away in a famously-inaccessible area — is nothing short of inspirational. The final product is a ridiculously thorough recreation of what you remember Resident Evil 4 looking like, rather than how it actually did. The 45-ish gigabytes of texture files that come with this slot into the base game’s sub-10 gigs so poorly that you need a patch just to get it all running. It’s the impressive kind of work and dedication that will rightfully be remembered in the highest echelons of fan projects.
What was most interesting to me, though, was the fact that the aforementioned patch came bundled with the texture pack, and included a suite of options within. “re4_tweaks”, as it calls itself, is exactly what it claims to be; a wealth of options for the player to fiddle with, all made up of sliders and buttons, each one letting you change the game just enough to make some obvious changes without feeling like you’re playing something different.
The new FOV slider is a big one; the base game of Resident Evil 4 has a claustrophobic camera angle, cozied right up against Leon’s juicy delts, and it makes it genuinely kind of difficult to see what the fuck is going on. There’s an artistic intent here, and it’s an obvious one — Resident Evil had defined itself though claustrophobia for three games leading up to this, so it’s practically a series mainstay — but I never felt that it worked all that well here. Bringing the camera out a bit helps immensely in letting you get a better understanding of what’s going on around you, and it actually helps to deepen the tension when you can see just how massive the swarm of enemies closing in on you actually is.
“Balanced Chicago Typewriter” was one that I needed to check out immediately. It doesn’t do much besides nerf the damage of the thing and require you to find ammo pickups, but it’s an immensely interesting way of adding a new weapon for new game plus players who aren’t interested in breaking the game completely in half. Capcom already locked the Matilda behind NG+, and that thing was a complete piece of shit, so there’s at least precedent for it. I’ve always thought it was a bit of a missed opportunity that Resident Evil 4 had all of these different ammo types and so few weapons that actually used them; only the TMP takes TMP ammo, only the the mine thrower takes mines, you’ve only got two rifles and the semi-auto is almost a strictly better version of the bolt-action. The remake did a decent enough job of adding in new weapons, but both there and here I find myself reverting back to a handgun/shotgun/sniper core even when I’m trying to experiment and play around with the more neglected weapons. It’s a problem of power versus fun; the TMP is probably the strongest gun in the game, constantly giving you easy access to suplexes and kicks, but it’s fucking boring to pop an enemy once, hit them, back off, and then do it again. Anything that allows you to shake it up a little, such as the balanced Chicago Typewriter, is a more than welcome addition.
Of course, the Typewriter itself is locked behind Separate Ways, which is fucking boring in this. It’s an absolute slog of backtracking and mowing through wave after wave of enemies without really experiencing anything new. It takes a long, long while before you start hitting new areas with new bosses, and trudging through the muck to get to that point isn’t at all worth it. The remake blows this version of Separate Ways out of the water — and it should, considering that it costs an extra ten bucks.
But the main campaign is as fun as ever, still complete with all of the areas that the remake omitted. Certainly for the worse, I’d say. The lava room in the castle is an obvious highlight, along with the giant Salazar robot and Ashley driving through walls in a bulldozer. The setpieces aren’t the only thing I think are done better here; the writing is a lot sharper, which is funny when you consider how fucking corny it is. There are a lot of digs at the War on Terror, at poking holes in the great American fantasy of swooping in and saving the day and leaving everything right with the world. Of course, it’s all played pretty straight, and Leon naturally saves the day and leaves everything right with the world, but it’s refreshing to see how quick a lot of characters are in this. Everyone is so sassy. Leon accusing Salazar of being a terrorist and him shooting back that terrorist is “a popular word these days” is so perfect. The main villains in this just laugh whenever Leon gets a good dig in at them, often recognizing the fact that he got their asses. It’s a lot of fun. The music is more varied and textured, the acting is generally a lot better, Ashley still has her big monkey ears, everything about this is still as fresh and as perfect as it was eighteen years ago. But I’m just gushing at this point. Of course it’s all good. It’s Resident Evil 4.
Really, I just wanted an excuse to review this again now that I’ve played the remake. I think it was clear from the outset that the team remaking Resident Evil 4 never actually had a chance to succeed the original, but they did a really good job. After all, they had this to follow, and what an absurdly tough act it is. In the end, the original is still one of the single greatest games ever produced, and it’s a testament to how ahead of its time it was that it still feels inimitable to this day.
Ashley should be able to glide down from the tops of ladders and ledges like Dumbo instead of waiting around for Leon to catch her.
2023
Perfect, but the original already was.
I imagine that my reaction to hearing about a Resident Evil 4 remake was pretty similar to most: confusion. What about Resident Evil 4 needed to be remade, really? The game was about a decade ahead of its time when it dropped in 2005, and virtually every third-person shooter made since then has had some of Leon Kennedy’s sharp-jawed, Bingo-quipping DNA inside of it somewhere. Moreover, the idea of trying to do Resident Evil 4 but again — or God forbid, better — is still kind of laughable. You’re going to remake one of the greatest and most influential games ever made on a lark to see if you can do it too? Good luck.
But, lo and behold, they did it. Resident Evil 4 Remake is a fucking phenomenal game. The combat is heavy and satisfying, it’s a delight to look at, the characters are all enjoyable, and I put thirty hours into it over the course of about a week and a half without really even noticing. I finished one playthrough, finished Separate Ways, and then immediately started another run on a harder difficulty. When I'm done with that run, I'm going to play it again, and again. It’s perfect.
How much does it deserve to be celebrated, though, when what it’s based off of was that good to begin with?
I’ve heard people talk about “remake culture” quite a bit in recent years in relation to video games, and I don’t think it’s an entirely wrong observation that the same games seem to be releasing a lot lately. Naughty Dog is perhaps the easiest studio to point and laugh at over this — The Last of Us is a series that’s about to have a higher number of remakes of its original games than the actual amount of original games — but it is something of a trend in the industry right now. Granted, we’ve been getting high-profile remakes and remasters of games for about fifteen fucking years now, so it’s hardly new, but people seem to be, for whatever reason, noticing it more lately. Common criticisms drifting up now are that remakes are lazy, and overly safe, and cash-grabby. I agree insofar as the fact that I’d vastly prefer if more games could look forward, rather than back. There are a lot of very talented creators out there with a lot of fresh concepts that ought to be allowed to flourish, and it’s stifling the maturity of the medium to insist that we just keep playing the hits every night with a different band.
Despite this, it remains evident that not all remakes are created equal. I found the Dead Space remake to be a complete bastardization of the original, with slippery, weightless gunplay and animations, and little actually improved aside from bringing back Gunnar Wright and some more technically impressive lighting effects. By contrast, I was surprised at how much Resident Evil 4 Remake impressed me, introducing much more committal combat into the original’s stage design and vastly expanding a lot of the systems that went woefully underused back in 2005. Both games have exceptional scores in both popular games coverage and right here on Backloggd, so either I missed something major in Dead Space, or people are just so predisposed to celebrating something good and old being new again that they just hand it a high score without really thinking about it. I’m sure it’s reductive, but I’m willing to bet it’s the latter. If you don’t trust me to say it, I’m certain that these high-profile, mega-budget companies making the fucking things would take my position; why would they be cranking these things out with the massive budgets and marketing campaigns that they’ve had if they weren’t confident people were going to drop everything to get a copy on release day? Saying you’re going to take something that people enjoyed and just make it again is an almost surefire way to guarantee a boatload of sales from those so caught in the hype cycle that they won’t even wait to see if it’s been fucked with before they buy it.
Anyway, I’m getting off-track. The point to make here is that I think there’s a single element that really makes Resident Evil 4 Remake stand out from among its more cynical contemporaries.
It was very clearly made by people who love the original.
“Yeah, yeah, the multi-million dollar game was made with goddamned love”, I know. But there are so many small changes here that I seriously doubt you’d be able to make or notice without having a deep appreciation and understanding for what the original was doing. EA never had a clue what made Dead Space great. Yasuhiro Anpo and company down at Capcom, however, get it.
Early on, during the village fight, there’s this tall tower standing down by the church entrance. There’s not much in there — just a herb and a ladder leading up — but this was an immensely safe spot to hide in the original. You could climb all the way up to the top, hang out for a few seconds, hop back down before the ganados started throwing molotovs at you, and then repeat. You could wait out the entire fight just by doing a simple loop of climbing up, dropping down, and then climbing back up again, and they couldn’t do a thing to stop you. Naturally, knowing about this safe spot, I went up the ladder and prepared to dig in. It was at this point that the floor gave out under Leon’s feet and dropped him right into the middle of the crowd congregating at the bottom.
To come up with a trap like this requires a few things on the part of the developers:
a) to know about the safe spot in the original game,
b) to expect the player to also know about the safe spot in the original game,
c) to bait the player into attempting to use the safe spot in the remake (by making the fight significantly more demanding)
It doesn’t sound like much, but take a second to consider the amount of understanding you need to have about Resident Evil 4 to be aware that the safe spot actually existed in the first place. It’s a decently-known exploit — enough so that the original developers accounted for it when they put out the game — but it’s nothing that a casual player would be aware of. It’s a remarkably small change in the grand scheme of things, but there’s a constant stream of these equally small changes throughout that add up to truly distinguish this from its predecessor. It’s just enough to keep old players disoriented while still being able to recognize what’s here. It’s a bit less of a remake and more of a remix. It feels like a very high-budget fangame, and I mean that in a good way.
With the release of Separate Ways adding back in a little more story context and some previously-excluded areas that I missed — the sewers, my beloved, are back — Resident Evil 4 Remake feels like a complete experience. I imagine that you’ll have a worse time without the DLC, and that kind of sucks when that shit came free with the original as long as you didn’t buy it on Gamecube. I managed to cop the base game and Separate Ways on sale for about fifty bucks, and they added Mercenaries mode to this in a patch at some point in the past couple months; this is definitely a game that is significantly better now than it was when it came out, which I think is kind of regrettable. It’s barely been out for eight months and I’m having a way better time for less money than people who picked it up on day one. This is a broader condemnation of the industry, I suppose. I like it when games come out feature-complete, and I'd argue this didn't. But hell, what does, anymore?
I do have my quibbles with the game. Unarmed enemies are the most dangerous fuckers alive because of that unblockable lunge they do that covers about two miles of distance and has to be ducked under at a precise time if they don’t flinch from being shot, which happens a lot on the harder difficulties. Knife parries are exceptionally overpowered and essentially give you a “get-out-of-bad-positioning free” card for a significant portion of the game. A lot of the music has been changed from its original synth-y sound to more of a Hans Zimmer-esque orchestral score, and that’s a major disappointment; the sequence where Mike comes down in his chopper is easily the worst offender of the lot, sounding like something pulled directly off of the Dark Knight Rises soundtrack. The reticle sway when Leon aims is a little extreme and definitely should have been tuned down a little. There’s something intangible that I feel was lost in getting rid of the tank controls and the stationary aiming; Resident Evil 4 definitely controls a bit more like everything else now, rather than controlling like what inspired everything else.
Even with those complaints, this is still a phenomenal title. I think the developers of this remake understood way more about what fans of the original wanted than anyone was expecting them to, and they’ve created something that stands alongside one of the greatest games ever made. By no means does it replace nor exceed the original, but it’s on the same level, and that alone is a borderline unthinkable achievement.
And they didn’t “make the mine thrower good” in this. It was always good, you cowards.
I imagine that my reaction to hearing about a Resident Evil 4 remake was pretty similar to most: confusion. What about Resident Evil 4 needed to be remade, really? The game was about a decade ahead of its time when it dropped in 2005, and virtually every third-person shooter made since then has had some of Leon Kennedy’s sharp-jawed, Bingo-quipping DNA inside of it somewhere. Moreover, the idea of trying to do Resident Evil 4 but again — or God forbid, better — is still kind of laughable. You’re going to remake one of the greatest and most influential games ever made on a lark to see if you can do it too? Good luck.
But, lo and behold, they did it. Resident Evil 4 Remake is a fucking phenomenal game. The combat is heavy and satisfying, it’s a delight to look at, the characters are all enjoyable, and I put thirty hours into it over the course of about a week and a half without really even noticing. I finished one playthrough, finished Separate Ways, and then immediately started another run on a harder difficulty. When I'm done with that run, I'm going to play it again, and again. It’s perfect.
How much does it deserve to be celebrated, though, when what it’s based off of was that good to begin with?
I’ve heard people talk about “remake culture” quite a bit in recent years in relation to video games, and I don’t think it’s an entirely wrong observation that the same games seem to be releasing a lot lately. Naughty Dog is perhaps the easiest studio to point and laugh at over this — The Last of Us is a series that’s about to have a higher number of remakes of its original games than the actual amount of original games — but it is something of a trend in the industry right now. Granted, we’ve been getting high-profile remakes and remasters of games for about fifteen fucking years now, so it’s hardly new, but people seem to be, for whatever reason, noticing it more lately. Common criticisms drifting up now are that remakes are lazy, and overly safe, and cash-grabby. I agree insofar as the fact that I’d vastly prefer if more games could look forward, rather than back. There are a lot of very talented creators out there with a lot of fresh concepts that ought to be allowed to flourish, and it’s stifling the maturity of the medium to insist that we just keep playing the hits every night with a different band.
Despite this, it remains evident that not all remakes are created equal. I found the Dead Space remake to be a complete bastardization of the original, with slippery, weightless gunplay and animations, and little actually improved aside from bringing back Gunnar Wright and some more technically impressive lighting effects. By contrast, I was surprised at how much Resident Evil 4 Remake impressed me, introducing much more committal combat into the original’s stage design and vastly expanding a lot of the systems that went woefully underused back in 2005. Both games have exceptional scores in both popular games coverage and right here on Backloggd, so either I missed something major in Dead Space, or people are just so predisposed to celebrating something good and old being new again that they just hand it a high score without really thinking about it. I’m sure it’s reductive, but I’m willing to bet it’s the latter. If you don’t trust me to say it, I’m certain that these high-profile, mega-budget companies making the fucking things would take my position; why would they be cranking these things out with the massive budgets and marketing campaigns that they’ve had if they weren’t confident people were going to drop everything to get a copy on release day? Saying you’re going to take something that people enjoyed and just make it again is an almost surefire way to guarantee a boatload of sales from those so caught in the hype cycle that they won’t even wait to see if it’s been fucked with before they buy it.
Anyway, I’m getting off-track. The point to make here is that I think there’s a single element that really makes Resident Evil 4 Remake stand out from among its more cynical contemporaries.
It was very clearly made by people who love the original.
“Yeah, yeah, the multi-million dollar game was made with goddamned love”, I know. But there are so many small changes here that I seriously doubt you’d be able to make or notice without having a deep appreciation and understanding for what the original was doing. EA never had a clue what made Dead Space great. Yasuhiro Anpo and company down at Capcom, however, get it.
Early on, during the village fight, there’s this tall tower standing down by the church entrance. There’s not much in there — just a herb and a ladder leading up — but this was an immensely safe spot to hide in the original. You could climb all the way up to the top, hang out for a few seconds, hop back down before the ganados started throwing molotovs at you, and then repeat. You could wait out the entire fight just by doing a simple loop of climbing up, dropping down, and then climbing back up again, and they couldn’t do a thing to stop you. Naturally, knowing about this safe spot, I went up the ladder and prepared to dig in. It was at this point that the floor gave out under Leon’s feet and dropped him right into the middle of the crowd congregating at the bottom.
To come up with a trap like this requires a few things on the part of the developers:
a) to know about the safe spot in the original game,
b) to expect the player to also know about the safe spot in the original game,
c) to bait the player into attempting to use the safe spot in the remake (by making the fight significantly more demanding)
It doesn’t sound like much, but take a second to consider the amount of understanding you need to have about Resident Evil 4 to be aware that the safe spot actually existed in the first place. It’s a decently-known exploit — enough so that the original developers accounted for it when they put out the game — but it’s nothing that a casual player would be aware of. It’s a remarkably small change in the grand scheme of things, but there’s a constant stream of these equally small changes throughout that add up to truly distinguish this from its predecessor. It’s just enough to keep old players disoriented while still being able to recognize what’s here. It’s a bit less of a remake and more of a remix. It feels like a very high-budget fangame, and I mean that in a good way.
With the release of Separate Ways adding back in a little more story context and some previously-excluded areas that I missed — the sewers, my beloved, are back — Resident Evil 4 Remake feels like a complete experience. I imagine that you’ll have a worse time without the DLC, and that kind of sucks when that shit came free with the original as long as you didn’t buy it on Gamecube. I managed to cop the base game and Separate Ways on sale for about fifty bucks, and they added Mercenaries mode to this in a patch at some point in the past couple months; this is definitely a game that is significantly better now than it was when it came out, which I think is kind of regrettable. It’s barely been out for eight months and I’m having a way better time for less money than people who picked it up on day one. This is a broader condemnation of the industry, I suppose. I like it when games come out feature-complete, and I'd argue this didn't. But hell, what does, anymore?
I do have my quibbles with the game. Unarmed enemies are the most dangerous fuckers alive because of that unblockable lunge they do that covers about two miles of distance and has to be ducked under at a precise time if they don’t flinch from being shot, which happens a lot on the harder difficulties. Knife parries are exceptionally overpowered and essentially give you a “get-out-of-bad-positioning free” card for a significant portion of the game. A lot of the music has been changed from its original synth-y sound to more of a Hans Zimmer-esque orchestral score, and that’s a major disappointment; the sequence where Mike comes down in his chopper is easily the worst offender of the lot, sounding like something pulled directly off of the Dark Knight Rises soundtrack. The reticle sway when Leon aims is a little extreme and definitely should have been tuned down a little. There’s something intangible that I feel was lost in getting rid of the tank controls and the stationary aiming; Resident Evil 4 definitely controls a bit more like everything else now, rather than controlling like what inspired everything else.
Even with those complaints, this is still a phenomenal title. I think the developers of this remake understood way more about what fans of the original wanted than anyone was expecting them to, and they’ve created something that stands alongside one of the greatest games ever made. By no means does it replace nor exceed the original, but it’s on the same level, and that alone is a borderline unthinkable achievement.
And they didn’t “make the mine thrower good” in this. It was always good, you cowards.
2023
I always wanted to play the original Dead Space, but I thought that its animations were too good and the gameplay felt too satisfying. Thankfully, this remake decides to overhaul those prior issues: Isaac and the enemies now slide around the Ishimura like they're on skates; the guns mostly just flash bright lights at the necromorphs until they remember that they're supposed to have their limbs fly off; and they added raytracing. Now I can enjoy Dead Space the way that Visceral always intended. Thank you, EA!
Dead dove, do not eat.
I’d like to believe that I’ve been living in my own personal Silent Hill the last few years. It would explain a lot, really. Konami has done a wonderful job of threading puppet strings through the arteries of Silent Hill and making the corpse dance, turning it into all manner of pachislot machines and skateboard decks, but they seem like they’re really trying to bring the franchise back this time. No more minor entries. We’re handing out the license and making some real goddamned Games this time. We’ve got a Ryukishi07 Silent Hill on the way, something we don't know much about called Townfall, and Bloober Team are even sticking their dirty, dirty fingers in the pie with a Silent Hill 2 remake. Silent Hill is finally back. But those are all coming later. We’re getting the first taste of the revitalized Silent Hill now, and it’s here in the form of Silent Hill: Ascension. Get hyped. This is the first marker being driven into fresh, virginal earth. This is Silent Hill from here on out.
This is the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.
Genuinely, I mean that. I want to be funnier about it, but I can’t. It’s the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played. I wish I could say that I’ve played anything worse than this, but I haven’t. It is the worst fucking thing I have ever played in my stupid goddamned life. Sorry. Every time I try typing something else, my brain just shuts itself off and my fingers move on the keyboard of their own volition to produce the phrase “this is the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life”. This is the first cognitohazard ever put to market.
IGDB was trying to protect me from writing about this any further. I appreciate them doing that, now. When I first made a page for Silent Hill: Ascension, they rejected it on the grounds of this “not being a game”. Naturally, I kicked my feet and made a fuss about it in the email appeals — we’ve got RPG Maker and Polybius and Spell Checker and Calculator on here, and I know those definitely fucking aren’t games — and the admin staff eventually relented. But they were only trying to help, I think. I should have just accepted their ruling and let this slip into the ether. Now we’ve got a Backloggd page for it, which means that now I have to think about this again, and it’s still the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.
This is the kind of bad that’s hard to explain without experiencing it yourself. It’s like childbirth, or the smell of rotting meat. You don’t want anyone else to have to deal with it, but how could they know what it’s like without going through it? You can show them the season pass being sold for $22.99, you can show them the “It’s Trauma!” sticker, you can show them the wholly unmoderated chat bar where you can’t say “Playboy Carti” but you can say the n-word, but none of that is the same as experiencing it. They’re visible symptoms of the disease running through Silent Hill: Ascension’s blood, but the pain of another doesn’t exist unless you feel it yourself. It’s ethereal. I’ve got a sore on my lip right now, but you don’t feel it, do you? You understand that it hurts, and you can empathize with that, but it doesn’t actually exist to you. If I stopped talking about it, you’d assume I was fine, and nothing would change for you. Meanwhile, I’m still over here suffering through this shit, and it’s the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.
The game is streamed live every night at 9 PM EST, and you can show up to vote on what’s going to happen to the characters. The choices themselves are very clearly labelled with the outcomes; you’ve got Salvation, Suffering, and Damnation choices, helpfully color-coded as blue, white, and red respectively, just so you can still know which one is the “good” choice and which one is “bad” in the event that you forgot how to read. Mass Effect's Paragon, Neutral, and Renegade system lives on, strong and proud. This, of course, means that every single fucking choice made thus far has been heavily in favor of Salvation, because it’s clearly the good option. If you don’t like that, you can vote for something else. In an especially impressive bit of social commentary, however, the only votes that matter come from those rich and stupid enough to buy them.
To vote, you need to wager a set amount of Influence Points, or IP. I haven’t found a way to cast a vote for anything less than 200 IP, so either that’s the minimum spend needed to vote, or the UI is just so badly designed that I can’t fucking find the free vote option. You can buy IP in one of three differently-priced bundles, each one more expensive than the last; one of the IP packs is about twenty-five bucks for 26,400 IP, and the second decision of the game is currently for "Salvation" by roughly twenty-five million points. If you really want a choice to go a certain way, then you had better get to spending. By my math, you’ll be out a little over $23,650 if you decide that you’re going to stick it to those Salvation voters. Of course, with the audience shrinking every night after they see how fucking stupid this whole thing is, it’ll only get easier and easier to sway the vote with less money invested. If you’re as much of a moron as I am and you decide to stick around past your first watch just to see where this goes, then you’ll have a decent opportunity to roleplay as a real government lobbyist soon enough.
But buying IP for real money isn’t the only way to get it. Lucky enough for the impoverished, filthy masses, you can earn IP at a massively reduced rate simply by playing minigames. You don’t get much — maybe a thousand or two per day, resetting every twenty-four hours — but it’s enough to cast a couple votes. Doing your daily and weekly quests certainly helps to boost your IP gains, and if you just felt something cold run down your back after you read the phrase “daily and weekly quests” in a Silent Hill game, don’t worry. That just means you’re still alive. Unfortunately, though, the minigames are on a set rotation; you get one puzzle and one “mindfulness” game per day, each awarding a small pittance of IP if you manage to successfully complete them.
By the way, I’m glad you’re curious about what the minigames actually are. I’m really excited to talk about them, so knowing that you’re enthusiastic to hear more really encourages me to do my best in explaining them to you. They’re the worst fucking things I’ve ever played in my stupid fucking life. Most egregious of the lot is the rhythm minigame, which doesn't require you to have any rhythm nor timing whatsoever. There's no penalty for hitting wrong notes (the game even encourages you to "just jam along" should you feel like it), every note needs to be individually clicked, and every click produces a sound from what I think is a literal Garageband guitar VST. Since there's no warning for when the notes are going to show up or leave, you have to click them all as fast as possible, resulting in a complete cacophony of instruments playing over each other if you want to guarantee a good score. Worst of all is the fact that the selection of songs is exclusively limited to Akira Yamaoka's more famous works, meaning you get to listen to some of the greatest video game music ever composed get completely butchered in one of the worst minigames you've ever played, in service of gaining points to vote on what happens next in the dumbest narrative ever written. I think if you're a killer or kidnapper or whatever in life, this is what you have to do forever after you die as punishment.
Here's a video of me getting the highest rank possible on the theme of Silent Hill. I want to stress that this is optimal play.
Anyway, this is all in service of giving you votes for the completely fucking incomprehensible story. It's hard to call it a narrative. There's some old lady who sucks, and then she dies, and her family kind of cares about it, but not really. There's a girl who gets initiated into some cult called The Foundation that seems to worship the Otherworld monsters, and she dies, and a couple people seem a little bothered by it. There's some drunk guy who really hates that the girl is dead and she's also haunting him and calling him a fuckup. The grandson of the old lady who sucked and died speaks entirely in the spooky child language that only exists in bad horror movies where he talks about how he plays pretend with "the man in the fog". I've long said that stories should strive to be more than events happening in sequence. This is more like events. They're not really happening in any given order, they're just kind of shown to the player and then quietly shuffled off so another event can happen.
At the end of the show proper is a canned animation of a character getting lost in the Otherworld, and the live viewers do QTEs that don't actually do anything. If they collectively fail, you get the message that the character "failed to endure" and they lose hope, but I don't know what losing hope actually entails. If you collectively pass, which happened for the first time during tonight's November 2nd show, the game bugs out and assumes that you failed anyway. The CEO of the company has gone out of his way to specify that the QTE sequences are for live viewers only and, as such, don't actually do anything because it wouldn't be fair to people who watch the VODs. Imagine a Jerma Dollhouse stream where the commands didn't work because it wouldn't have been fair to people who watched the whole thing on YouTube later. You're the one insisting on a livestream and you're not going to fucking use it? Why? Seriously, why? What reason does this have to be live at all?
And speaking of the CEO, Weatherby is absolutely correct that the best part of all of this is the aftershow. For whatever fucking reason, Jacob Navok feels an incredible need to come out on his shitty laptop camera (you can tell it's a laptop camera because it keeps shaking while he passionately swings his arms around) and rant about how they're definitely not scamming people. You can tell you've got a good product when the actual episode is about eight minutes long and the CEO takes half an hour in the post-show to complain about how unfair everyone is being towards one of the shittiest fucking things ever made. It's bordering on performance art.
I cannot fucking wait to watch more of this. It's the most excited I've been for a recent release in years.
I’d like to believe that I’ve been living in my own personal Silent Hill the last few years. It would explain a lot, really. Konami has done a wonderful job of threading puppet strings through the arteries of Silent Hill and making the corpse dance, turning it into all manner of pachislot machines and skateboard decks, but they seem like they’re really trying to bring the franchise back this time. No more minor entries. We’re handing out the license and making some real goddamned Games this time. We’ve got a Ryukishi07 Silent Hill on the way, something we don't know much about called Townfall, and Bloober Team are even sticking their dirty, dirty fingers in the pie with a Silent Hill 2 remake. Silent Hill is finally back. But those are all coming later. We’re getting the first taste of the revitalized Silent Hill now, and it’s here in the form of Silent Hill: Ascension. Get hyped. This is the first marker being driven into fresh, virginal earth. This is Silent Hill from here on out.
This is the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.
Genuinely, I mean that. I want to be funnier about it, but I can’t. It’s the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played. I wish I could say that I’ve played anything worse than this, but I haven’t. It is the worst fucking thing I have ever played in my stupid goddamned life. Sorry. Every time I try typing something else, my brain just shuts itself off and my fingers move on the keyboard of their own volition to produce the phrase “this is the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life”. This is the first cognitohazard ever put to market.
IGDB was trying to protect me from writing about this any further. I appreciate them doing that, now. When I first made a page for Silent Hill: Ascension, they rejected it on the grounds of this “not being a game”. Naturally, I kicked my feet and made a fuss about it in the email appeals — we’ve got RPG Maker and Polybius and Spell Checker and Calculator on here, and I know those definitely fucking aren’t games — and the admin staff eventually relented. But they were only trying to help, I think. I should have just accepted their ruling and let this slip into the ether. Now we’ve got a Backloggd page for it, which means that now I have to think about this again, and it’s still the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.
This is the kind of bad that’s hard to explain without experiencing it yourself. It’s like childbirth, or the smell of rotting meat. You don’t want anyone else to have to deal with it, but how could they know what it’s like without going through it? You can show them the season pass being sold for $22.99, you can show them the “It’s Trauma!” sticker, you can show them the wholly unmoderated chat bar where you can’t say “Playboy Carti” but you can say the n-word, but none of that is the same as experiencing it. They’re visible symptoms of the disease running through Silent Hill: Ascension’s blood, but the pain of another doesn’t exist unless you feel it yourself. It’s ethereal. I’ve got a sore on my lip right now, but you don’t feel it, do you? You understand that it hurts, and you can empathize with that, but it doesn’t actually exist to you. If I stopped talking about it, you’d assume I was fine, and nothing would change for you. Meanwhile, I’m still over here suffering through this shit, and it’s the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.
The game is streamed live every night at 9 PM EST, and you can show up to vote on what’s going to happen to the characters. The choices themselves are very clearly labelled with the outcomes; you’ve got Salvation, Suffering, and Damnation choices, helpfully color-coded as blue, white, and red respectively, just so you can still know which one is the “good” choice and which one is “bad” in the event that you forgot how to read. Mass Effect's Paragon, Neutral, and Renegade system lives on, strong and proud. This, of course, means that every single fucking choice made thus far has been heavily in favor of Salvation, because it’s clearly the good option. If you don’t like that, you can vote for something else. In an especially impressive bit of social commentary, however, the only votes that matter come from those rich and stupid enough to buy them.
To vote, you need to wager a set amount of Influence Points, or IP. I haven’t found a way to cast a vote for anything less than 200 IP, so either that’s the minimum spend needed to vote, or the UI is just so badly designed that I can’t fucking find the free vote option. You can buy IP in one of three differently-priced bundles, each one more expensive than the last; one of the IP packs is about twenty-five bucks for 26,400 IP, and the second decision of the game is currently for "Salvation" by roughly twenty-five million points. If you really want a choice to go a certain way, then you had better get to spending. By my math, you’ll be out a little over $23,650 if you decide that you’re going to stick it to those Salvation voters. Of course, with the audience shrinking every night after they see how fucking stupid this whole thing is, it’ll only get easier and easier to sway the vote with less money invested. If you’re as much of a moron as I am and you decide to stick around past your first watch just to see where this goes, then you’ll have a decent opportunity to roleplay as a real government lobbyist soon enough.
But buying IP for real money isn’t the only way to get it. Lucky enough for the impoverished, filthy masses, you can earn IP at a massively reduced rate simply by playing minigames. You don’t get much — maybe a thousand or two per day, resetting every twenty-four hours — but it’s enough to cast a couple votes. Doing your daily and weekly quests certainly helps to boost your IP gains, and if you just felt something cold run down your back after you read the phrase “daily and weekly quests” in a Silent Hill game, don’t worry. That just means you’re still alive. Unfortunately, though, the minigames are on a set rotation; you get one puzzle and one “mindfulness” game per day, each awarding a small pittance of IP if you manage to successfully complete them.
By the way, I’m glad you’re curious about what the minigames actually are. I’m really excited to talk about them, so knowing that you’re enthusiastic to hear more really encourages me to do my best in explaining them to you. They’re the worst fucking things I’ve ever played in my stupid fucking life. Most egregious of the lot is the rhythm minigame, which doesn't require you to have any rhythm nor timing whatsoever. There's no penalty for hitting wrong notes (the game even encourages you to "just jam along" should you feel like it), every note needs to be individually clicked, and every click produces a sound from what I think is a literal Garageband guitar VST. Since there's no warning for when the notes are going to show up or leave, you have to click them all as fast as possible, resulting in a complete cacophony of instruments playing over each other if you want to guarantee a good score. Worst of all is the fact that the selection of songs is exclusively limited to Akira Yamaoka's more famous works, meaning you get to listen to some of the greatest video game music ever composed get completely butchered in one of the worst minigames you've ever played, in service of gaining points to vote on what happens next in the dumbest narrative ever written. I think if you're a killer or kidnapper or whatever in life, this is what you have to do forever after you die as punishment.
Here's a video of me getting the highest rank possible on the theme of Silent Hill. I want to stress that this is optimal play.
Anyway, this is all in service of giving you votes for the completely fucking incomprehensible story. It's hard to call it a narrative. There's some old lady who sucks, and then she dies, and her family kind of cares about it, but not really. There's a girl who gets initiated into some cult called The Foundation that seems to worship the Otherworld monsters, and she dies, and a couple people seem a little bothered by it. There's some drunk guy who really hates that the girl is dead and she's also haunting him and calling him a fuckup. The grandson of the old lady who sucked and died speaks entirely in the spooky child language that only exists in bad horror movies where he talks about how he plays pretend with "the man in the fog". I've long said that stories should strive to be more than events happening in sequence. This is more like events. They're not really happening in any given order, they're just kind of shown to the player and then quietly shuffled off so another event can happen.
At the end of the show proper is a canned animation of a character getting lost in the Otherworld, and the live viewers do QTEs that don't actually do anything. If they collectively fail, you get the message that the character "failed to endure" and they lose hope, but I don't know what losing hope actually entails. If you collectively pass, which happened for the first time during tonight's November 2nd show, the game bugs out and assumes that you failed anyway. The CEO of the company has gone out of his way to specify that the QTE sequences are for live viewers only and, as such, don't actually do anything because it wouldn't be fair to people who watch the VODs. Imagine a Jerma Dollhouse stream where the commands didn't work because it wouldn't have been fair to people who watched the whole thing on YouTube later. You're the one insisting on a livestream and you're not going to fucking use it? Why? Seriously, why? What reason does this have to be live at all?
And speaking of the CEO, Weatherby is absolutely correct that the best part of all of this is the aftershow. For whatever fucking reason, Jacob Navok feels an incredible need to come out on his shitty laptop camera (you can tell it's a laptop camera because it keeps shaking while he passionately swings his arms around) and rant about how they're definitely not scamming people. You can tell you've got a good product when the actual episode is about eight minutes long and the CEO takes half an hour in the post-show to complain about how unfair everyone is being towards one of the shittiest fucking things ever made. It's bordering on performance art.
I cannot fucking wait to watch more of this. It's the most excited I've been for a recent release in years.
Embarrassing.
Way back about a decade and a half ago, in the salad days of the seventh-generation of console shooters, debates raged in high schools all across the West. The teenaged gaming masses congregated around their lunch tables and pounded back Monster energy drinks, each one more certain in their position than the last. ”Halo or Call of Duty?”, they would ask. It was a challenge more than it was an actual question; are you with us, or are you against us? Call of Duty was a bit faster, and Halo was a bit more rewarding for tactical play, but the games were so fundamentally different that there wasn’t much real point to the arguments. Nobody was about to have their mind changed. Black Ops and Halo: Reach dropped around the same time and subsequently marked the conflict’s denouement; everyone had chosen and then dug into their respective sides. Lines had been drawn, and that was that. There was nobody left who could still be converted to the other side. With that, games discussion eventually moved on to other and more intellectually-stimulating topics, such as which Mass Effect girl was the most fuckable, or who had the coolest fatality in Mortal Kombat 9.
You know what nobody ever fucking talked about? Battlefield.
Honestly, given the glut of shooters and the intensity of the arguments surrounding them, you’d think there would have been at least one guy at one lunch table somewhere who interrupted the Call of Duty vs. Halo talk to mention that he preferred Battlefield 2142. But no, there wasn’t. Not really. Not until Battlefield 3, at least, but that was long after the debates had started fading into background noise. Battlefield was just kind of hanging out in its own weird lane, a little bit too arcade-y for the simulator fans, and a little bit too fucking annoying with the bullet drop for the twitchy, greasy teenagers. As someone who grew up in that period and went to war with my friends over how Halo was gay and how Call of Duty was badass (it had Ghost), Battlefield had the vibe of something my dad would have enjoyed, and not in a cool way. It was the Kid Rock American Badass of shooters.
Anyway, much like my dad, Bad Company 2 has a bit of a complex about looking old and lame next to contemporary early-10s shooter slop. One sequence where you’re lost in the snow has a character say that they can’t turn back because they’ll be replaced by guys with pussy-ass heartbeat monitors on their guns, like in Modern Warfare 2. Another set piece where you race quad bikes with your squad has a guy complain that he would be winning if you were on snowmobiles, to which another character quips that snowmobiles are for pussies. You know, like in Modern Warfare 2. There’s a sequence where an EMP goes off, fries all of the surrounding technology, makes helicopters fall out of the sky, and has your squad leader mention that all of the electronics are broken, like in Modern Warfare 2. Unlike in Modern Warfare 2, however, your holographic sights still work just fine, making the whole sequence feel both like a complete ripoff and lazy to boot.
There’s nothing wrong with stealing ideas. Really, I don’t think it’s as much of a crime to be unoriginal as a lot of people make it out to be. What I do have a problem with, however, is when you intentionally keep drawing comparisons to other media, brag about how much better or cooler you are, and then wind up being unquestionably the worse of the two. Don’t be a poser. It’s embarrassing. Bad Company 2 has what I’d like to call ”Duke Nukem Forever syndrome”. Yeah, I sure do hate Valve puzzles. Power armor really is for pussies. Hey, Duke, while you’ve got a minute, your game fucking sucks. Can you try and make it better before you start taking shots at things that are infinitely more exciting, enjoyable, and sincere than you are? The same applies here. Please, shut the fuck up about how much better you are than Modern Warfare 2. You aren't, and if you stopped talking about Modern Warfare 2, I wouldn't be sitting here wishing I was playing that instead. You don't get points for preempting criticisms people are going to make of your game and then leaving them in there anyway. If you're aware enough to point out that what you're doing isn't distinct enough to distance yourself from your competition on its own, then why aren't you changing anything?
The answer, really, is that this was a strange time in which everything that was releasing had some publisher-ordered mode hanging off of it like a vestigial bone. It was the era of the tack-on. Games couldn’t just be single-player. They needed to have a shitty afterthought multiplayer mode that shipped with it. They couldn’t just be multiplayer, either, so you needed to hook a shitty afterthought single-player mode onto it, too. I don’t get the feeling that DICE wanted to make a campaign. Hell, I don’t think anyone really cared about it. I’ve got some buddies who owe their friendship to Bad Company 2 purely because it was where they all met, and every single one of them I talked to about this game expressed surprise that it even had a single-player mode. I suppose that’s the greatest indictment anyone could give; for anything to be so forgettable that the people it's most important to can’t even remember it existing.
On that note, one of those same friends said he was going to kill me if I gave this a bad score, because the multiplayer was "just that good". Regrettably, then, the multiplayer for this game is completely in the grave due to EA taking it off of their digital storefronts months ago and announcing that the servers will be gone by this time next month. By 2024, the only part of this game you’ll actually be able to play is the campaign, and it’s definitely not the mode that I would have wanted to preserve if I was the EA executive who had to make that call. What a shame. Oh, well.
This is written like someone told an eighth grader to make a story about the military.
Way back about a decade and a half ago, in the salad days of the seventh-generation of console shooters, debates raged in high schools all across the West. The teenaged gaming masses congregated around their lunch tables and pounded back Monster energy drinks, each one more certain in their position than the last. ”Halo or Call of Duty?”, they would ask. It was a challenge more than it was an actual question; are you with us, or are you against us? Call of Duty was a bit faster, and Halo was a bit more rewarding for tactical play, but the games were so fundamentally different that there wasn’t much real point to the arguments. Nobody was about to have their mind changed. Black Ops and Halo: Reach dropped around the same time and subsequently marked the conflict’s denouement; everyone had chosen and then dug into their respective sides. Lines had been drawn, and that was that. There was nobody left who could still be converted to the other side. With that, games discussion eventually moved on to other and more intellectually-stimulating topics, such as which Mass Effect girl was the most fuckable, or who had the coolest fatality in Mortal Kombat 9.
You know what nobody ever fucking talked about? Battlefield.
Honestly, given the glut of shooters and the intensity of the arguments surrounding them, you’d think there would have been at least one guy at one lunch table somewhere who interrupted the Call of Duty vs. Halo talk to mention that he preferred Battlefield 2142. But no, there wasn’t. Not really. Not until Battlefield 3, at least, but that was long after the debates had started fading into background noise. Battlefield was just kind of hanging out in its own weird lane, a little bit too arcade-y for the simulator fans, and a little bit too fucking annoying with the bullet drop for the twitchy, greasy teenagers. As someone who grew up in that period and went to war with my friends over how Halo was gay and how Call of Duty was badass (it had Ghost), Battlefield had the vibe of something my dad would have enjoyed, and not in a cool way. It was the Kid Rock American Badass of shooters.
Anyway, much like my dad, Bad Company 2 has a bit of a complex about looking old and lame next to contemporary early-10s shooter slop. One sequence where you’re lost in the snow has a character say that they can’t turn back because they’ll be replaced by guys with pussy-ass heartbeat monitors on their guns, like in Modern Warfare 2. Another set piece where you race quad bikes with your squad has a guy complain that he would be winning if you were on snowmobiles, to which another character quips that snowmobiles are for pussies. You know, like in Modern Warfare 2. There’s a sequence where an EMP goes off, fries all of the surrounding technology, makes helicopters fall out of the sky, and has your squad leader mention that all of the electronics are broken, like in Modern Warfare 2. Unlike in Modern Warfare 2, however, your holographic sights still work just fine, making the whole sequence feel both like a complete ripoff and lazy to boot.
There’s nothing wrong with stealing ideas. Really, I don’t think it’s as much of a crime to be unoriginal as a lot of people make it out to be. What I do have a problem with, however, is when you intentionally keep drawing comparisons to other media, brag about how much better or cooler you are, and then wind up being unquestionably the worse of the two. Don’t be a poser. It’s embarrassing. Bad Company 2 has what I’d like to call ”Duke Nukem Forever syndrome”. Yeah, I sure do hate Valve puzzles. Power armor really is for pussies. Hey, Duke, while you’ve got a minute, your game fucking sucks. Can you try and make it better before you start taking shots at things that are infinitely more exciting, enjoyable, and sincere than you are? The same applies here. Please, shut the fuck up about how much better you are than Modern Warfare 2. You aren't, and if you stopped talking about Modern Warfare 2, I wouldn't be sitting here wishing I was playing that instead. You don't get points for preempting criticisms people are going to make of your game and then leaving them in there anyway. If you're aware enough to point out that what you're doing isn't distinct enough to distance yourself from your competition on its own, then why aren't you changing anything?
The answer, really, is that this was a strange time in which everything that was releasing had some publisher-ordered mode hanging off of it like a vestigial bone. It was the era of the tack-on. Games couldn’t just be single-player. They needed to have a shitty afterthought multiplayer mode that shipped with it. They couldn’t just be multiplayer, either, so you needed to hook a shitty afterthought single-player mode onto it, too. I don’t get the feeling that DICE wanted to make a campaign. Hell, I don’t think anyone really cared about it. I’ve got some buddies who owe their friendship to Bad Company 2 purely because it was where they all met, and every single one of them I talked to about this game expressed surprise that it even had a single-player mode. I suppose that’s the greatest indictment anyone could give; for anything to be so forgettable that the people it's most important to can’t even remember it existing.
On that note, one of those same friends said he was going to kill me if I gave this a bad score, because the multiplayer was "just that good". Regrettably, then, the multiplayer for this game is completely in the grave due to EA taking it off of their digital storefronts months ago and announcing that the servers will be gone by this time next month. By 2024, the only part of this game you’ll actually be able to play is the campaign, and it’s definitely not the mode that I would have wanted to preserve if I was the EA executive who had to make that call. What a shame. Oh, well.
This is written like someone told an eighth grader to make a story about the military.
2014
Alright, fuck. I was wrong. Sometimes you do get it perfect on your first try.
Of course, this is pretty far removed from the original release of Resident Evil; it’s a remaster of a remake of Resident Evil with plenty of bits shuffled around and new mechanics stretched overtop. Still, though, these new trappings are just a couple extra layers of flesh. This is Resident Evil deep in the marrow of its bones. Slow, shuffling zombies taking up just too much space in cramped corridors, creaky floors, doors that fall apart, giant man-eating plants and a very silly conspiracy centered around the most obviously evil man alive that nobody suspects until he reveals himself at the end; this is what you ought to be thinking of when someone says the phrase “survival horror” around you.
It’s been an open secret for quite a while (even if Shinji Mikami refused to acknowledge it for decades) that this game is more-or-less a Japanese take on 1992’s Alone in the Dark; same creepy mansion, same spooky monsters, same arcane puzzles, same unconventional camera angles that obscure the action to throw the player off. It’s all present here, just as it was about four years before the original Resident Evil dropped; what sets (and continues to set) Resident Evil apart, however, is entirely in how it constructs an atmosphere. Unlike how Alone in the Dark had Edward Carnby slapping the shit out of every zombie he came across like that one Sonic video, Resident Evil plays the whole thing much more reservedly. This game is tense, and deep, and fucking scary. I sat awake late in bed one night after playing, trying to come up with a safe route through the mansion, and getting progressively more and more panicked when I realized just how few options I actually had. This was after I had stopped playing for the night. Resident Evil sticks to your insides. It goes down hard and it refuses to digest easily. You will play on its terms, and it will kill you anyway.
I wasn’t especially hot on the game by the time I’d finished Jill Mansion 1. I was constantly getting lost, constantly getting bogged down by too many inventory items, constantly failing to figure out what I even needed to do to make any progress. I kept drawing unfavorable comparisons to my beloved Silent Hill: why can’t I carry all this ammo at once? Why can’t I have unlimited slots for key items? Why can’t the map give me some information as to what the rooms actually are instead of just giving me unlabelled floor plans? I knew it was all intentional, but there was something about the execution that felt sloppy. I understood it, but I didn’t really get it, if that makes any sense.
The minute I gained access to the courtyard, though, I felt something click. Maybe it was just getting a moment outside on the most linear path imaginable that gave me a much-needed break to clear my head. I cleaned out the area, blitzed through the puzzles, broke Lisa Trevor’s ankles like she was Wesley Johnson screening Harden, and walked right back into the mansion like I owned the place. The hunters spawned in, giving me more than enough incentive to start spending all of the ammo I’d been hoarding, and I realized just how much easier I could have made the early game on myself once I killed every single one of them and still had buckets of grenades and shotgun shells to spare. Don’t let the speedrunning, invisible-enemies, knife-only people trick you; you’ve gotta play this game carefully, but you really don’t need to be that careful.
The big trick of it all was that I’d fallen entirely for the brutal design of the mansion and allowed my nerves to muck up my decision-making. Every zombie I’d encountered took so many bullets to go down, and other zombies would stumble in from the other rooms, and some of them would even get back up stronger than ever if I forgot to burn the bodies. I put my pistol away and sprinted through the rooms and just prayed I wouldn’t get grabbed around a corner. That was all a part of the trick, though; it’s actually shockingly easy and reliable to kill just about every zombie in the game so long as you’re careful about how you budget your resources. It’s the layout of the mansion on your first go that fucks you up; all of the obfuscatory angles and hallways that lead to locked doors and dead ends that loop around on themselves with a zombie blocking the only way back. The architect must have been an axe murderer. It’s an evil fucking residence, hence the title. When you finally have your Kevin McCallister “I’m not afraid anymore!” moment, you realize that the zombies can only hurt you if you let them. The second half of the Kevin McCallister moment where he runs and screams and hides under the covers comes when a hunter pounces on you from behind and you remember that you are, in fact, still incredibly afraid.
I beat the game with newfound confidence, immediately booted it back up as Chris, and breezed through the first part of the mansion in a fraction of the time it had originally taken me. I cleared out all of the rooms, stuffed my pockets with items, burned every corpse I left, and found myself with more green herbs sitting in my item box within the first hour than I could ever possibly use before credits rolled. The design wasn't sloppy, I was just playing it wrong. I wasn't engaging with enough of the game's systems; I had all of these tools that were provided to me, and I cowered against Resident Evil's glare. What I should have done was square my shoulders and fight back, and never once did that click for me on my first trip through the mansion. Going back through it as Chris proved that idea: all I needed to do was not be so afraid.
Horror as a genre has something of an inherent problem to it, where that sense of fear is often wholly dependent on surprise. This isn't to imply that it's all reliant on jump scares, but a scary movie is always going to be the same every time you go through it. You can be shit-your-pants terrified on your first watch, but pop the same film in again and you'll start anticipating the moments that got you the last time around. This is a big part of the reason why a lot of people like to "beat" horror media; they laugh, they rewatch, they dissect it and break it down, because horror is a lot less scary once we understand it. Rather than passively accept this, though, the Resident Evil team leans into it. You stumble through the game once, groping at the walls and frantically checking every doorknob in the hopes that you accidentally discover progression. You boot it up for the second time, and you turn into Arnold Schwarzenegger. You know where the zombies are, you know where the items are, you know how many you can afford to kill in a given moment, you know how to juke around zombies and make them grab air instead of you. People lament the loss of this type of survival horror game and how something like Resident Evil 4 completely actionized the franchise, but that wasn't a move that came out of nowhere.
It starts here. It's genius.
Chris in this looks kind of like a very sad monkey with a bad haircut and I laugh a little whenever he gets a dramatic close-up.
Of course, this is pretty far removed from the original release of Resident Evil; it’s a remaster of a remake of Resident Evil with plenty of bits shuffled around and new mechanics stretched overtop. Still, though, these new trappings are just a couple extra layers of flesh. This is Resident Evil deep in the marrow of its bones. Slow, shuffling zombies taking up just too much space in cramped corridors, creaky floors, doors that fall apart, giant man-eating plants and a very silly conspiracy centered around the most obviously evil man alive that nobody suspects until he reveals himself at the end; this is what you ought to be thinking of when someone says the phrase “survival horror” around you.
It’s been an open secret for quite a while (even if Shinji Mikami refused to acknowledge it for decades) that this game is more-or-less a Japanese take on 1992’s Alone in the Dark; same creepy mansion, same spooky monsters, same arcane puzzles, same unconventional camera angles that obscure the action to throw the player off. It’s all present here, just as it was about four years before the original Resident Evil dropped; what sets (and continues to set) Resident Evil apart, however, is entirely in how it constructs an atmosphere. Unlike how Alone in the Dark had Edward Carnby slapping the shit out of every zombie he came across like that one Sonic video, Resident Evil plays the whole thing much more reservedly. This game is tense, and deep, and fucking scary. I sat awake late in bed one night after playing, trying to come up with a safe route through the mansion, and getting progressively more and more panicked when I realized just how few options I actually had. This was after I had stopped playing for the night. Resident Evil sticks to your insides. It goes down hard and it refuses to digest easily. You will play on its terms, and it will kill you anyway.
I wasn’t especially hot on the game by the time I’d finished Jill Mansion 1. I was constantly getting lost, constantly getting bogged down by too many inventory items, constantly failing to figure out what I even needed to do to make any progress. I kept drawing unfavorable comparisons to my beloved Silent Hill: why can’t I carry all this ammo at once? Why can’t I have unlimited slots for key items? Why can’t the map give me some information as to what the rooms actually are instead of just giving me unlabelled floor plans? I knew it was all intentional, but there was something about the execution that felt sloppy. I understood it, but I didn’t really get it, if that makes any sense.
The minute I gained access to the courtyard, though, I felt something click. Maybe it was just getting a moment outside on the most linear path imaginable that gave me a much-needed break to clear my head. I cleaned out the area, blitzed through the puzzles, broke Lisa Trevor’s ankles like she was Wesley Johnson screening Harden, and walked right back into the mansion like I owned the place. The hunters spawned in, giving me more than enough incentive to start spending all of the ammo I’d been hoarding, and I realized just how much easier I could have made the early game on myself once I killed every single one of them and still had buckets of grenades and shotgun shells to spare. Don’t let the speedrunning, invisible-enemies, knife-only people trick you; you’ve gotta play this game carefully, but you really don’t need to be that careful.
The big trick of it all was that I’d fallen entirely for the brutal design of the mansion and allowed my nerves to muck up my decision-making. Every zombie I’d encountered took so many bullets to go down, and other zombies would stumble in from the other rooms, and some of them would even get back up stronger than ever if I forgot to burn the bodies. I put my pistol away and sprinted through the rooms and just prayed I wouldn’t get grabbed around a corner. That was all a part of the trick, though; it’s actually shockingly easy and reliable to kill just about every zombie in the game so long as you’re careful about how you budget your resources. It’s the layout of the mansion on your first go that fucks you up; all of the obfuscatory angles and hallways that lead to locked doors and dead ends that loop around on themselves with a zombie blocking the only way back. The architect must have been an axe murderer. It’s an evil fucking residence, hence the title. When you finally have your Kevin McCallister “I’m not afraid anymore!” moment, you realize that the zombies can only hurt you if you let them. The second half of the Kevin McCallister moment where he runs and screams and hides under the covers comes when a hunter pounces on you from behind and you remember that you are, in fact, still incredibly afraid.
I beat the game with newfound confidence, immediately booted it back up as Chris, and breezed through the first part of the mansion in a fraction of the time it had originally taken me. I cleared out all of the rooms, stuffed my pockets with items, burned every corpse I left, and found myself with more green herbs sitting in my item box within the first hour than I could ever possibly use before credits rolled. The design wasn't sloppy, I was just playing it wrong. I wasn't engaging with enough of the game's systems; I had all of these tools that were provided to me, and I cowered against Resident Evil's glare. What I should have done was square my shoulders and fight back, and never once did that click for me on my first trip through the mansion. Going back through it as Chris proved that idea: all I needed to do was not be so afraid.
Horror as a genre has something of an inherent problem to it, where that sense of fear is often wholly dependent on surprise. This isn't to imply that it's all reliant on jump scares, but a scary movie is always going to be the same every time you go through it. You can be shit-your-pants terrified on your first watch, but pop the same film in again and you'll start anticipating the moments that got you the last time around. This is a big part of the reason why a lot of people like to "beat" horror media; they laugh, they rewatch, they dissect it and break it down, because horror is a lot less scary once we understand it. Rather than passively accept this, though, the Resident Evil team leans into it. You stumble through the game once, groping at the walls and frantically checking every doorknob in the hopes that you accidentally discover progression. You boot it up for the second time, and you turn into Arnold Schwarzenegger. You know where the zombies are, you know where the items are, you know how many you can afford to kill in a given moment, you know how to juke around zombies and make them grab air instead of you. People lament the loss of this type of survival horror game and how something like Resident Evil 4 completely actionized the franchise, but that wasn't a move that came out of nowhere.
It starts here. It's genius.
Chris in this looks kind of like a very sad monkey with a bad haircut and I laugh a little whenever he gets a dramatic close-up.
Seventeen years ago, Nintendo released New Super Mario Bros., and they fucking meant it when they said “new”.
The company may as well have struck crude oil for the sheer amount of money that they printed after its release; thirty million copies sold served as the clearest sign they were ever going to get that this was the way the series needed to be from here on out. A decade and a half later, and almost literally every single 2D Mario game we’ve gotten since has been a member of the New sub-franchise — New Super Mario Bros. Wii, New Super Mario Bros. 2, there was even a New Super Luigi U. You can argue that Super Mario Maker breaks the pattern, but I’d argue back that dropping a glorified level editor and telling the players to design the games themselves doesn’t count for much. Besides, Mario Maker is still a lateral step at best; it’s playing the same hits as before, just rolling four previously-released games together to be swapped around as needed. The New Super Mario Bros. mode, funnily enough, turned out to have the most advanced movement tech, meaning that the most serious players and level designers effectively found themselves with yet another New game fairly early into Mario Maker’s lifespan.
Nintendo’s modus operandi seemed to be that if you somehow weren’t sick of New Super Mario Bros. yet, then they’d make sure that you would be. Every subsequent game seemed to scrape a couple of extra flakes of wood off of the bottom of the barrel, desperate to find something else they could extract from this fucking sub-series. New Super Luigi U was a download-only level pack for New Super Mario Bros. U that starred exclusively Luigi, because at least that was different enough from starring Mario to warrant its own game; New Super Mario Bros. 2 put an obscene emphasis on the act of collecting coins, which is almost universally the least exciting part of any Mario game. The 3D entries — Galaxy, 3D World, Odyssey — seemed to be the place where Nintendo was still experimenting and innovating what Mario could be, while the 2D games quietly shuffled along in rote stagnancy for two decades like retirees towards death. There was no zest, nothing fresh, just an endless series of “bah-bah”s and maybe one or two new power-ups every couple years so you didn’t start thinking that you spent sixty dollars for the exact same game again (you did).
Super Mario Bros. Wonder gives 2D Mario a personality again, and it’s a complete triumph for that fact alone.
How truly great it is to play a game like this without any positive expectations, and instead come away with full confidence that it’s some of the best that Mario has ever been. Of course, maybe that’s not saying much — 2D Mario has been almost exclusively New Super Mario Bros. for about half of the entire franchise’s lifetime now — but Super Mario World and Super Mario Bros. 3 are often hailed as the best platformers ever made, so anything that can stand next to them is doing something very right. If I’m being completely honest, I think it clears both of them easily. Call it recency bias, but it’s been a long, long time since I’ve been this impressed by anything Nintendo’s put out.
The game managed to get all the way through prototyping without a deadline, and it unquestionably shows. Wonder has a whole box full of toys that it's eager to show the player, and it almost never lingers on any of them; the majority of level gimmicks here get used just a single time and never again, while the most common returning gimmicks really only appear maybe three times before vanishing forever. All of them feel about as realized as they could be; while it may sound a bit like the game is just throwing out everything in the hope of something sticking, most of these concepts are really only fun for one or two levels, and it wouldn't be wise to try making a full game out of them.
It revels in being strange. As strange as Mario is ever going to be allowed to be, at least. It took me a little bit to make a decision on whether I thought the talking flowers were charming or annoying, but I eventually ended up liking them; as the game goes on, they get progressively more and more unhinged, dropping the "you did such a good job" schtick to just start saying strange shit. One level is filled with green goo that you need to swim through to progress, and the flowers won't stop talking about how much they want to eat it. When you get the wonder seed, turn into a goo ball, and then pass by one of the flowers, he audibly licks you and then says how delicious you are. I think about that flower a lot. What a little fucking freak he was.
The badge system serves mostly to trivialize an already easy game, giving the player the option to get extra mid-air jumps, or a free rescue from a bottomless pit, or adding exclamation point blocks everywhere that cover basically every hazard you could ever possibly deal with in a given stage. It definitely feels designed more to provide an experience than a challenge, and I think that's fine. I would love to see a level pack for this that ramps up the difficulty so I'm not constantly walking around with 99 lives and 999 flower coins, but I'm probably not the target audience for this anyway. Mario is for kids, after all. We've gotta wean them off of this before we start hitting them with the Celeste C-sides. Regardless, though, the badges mostly offer some unique ways to engage with these levels, and there are tons of secret paths in every single one that you can only access by snooping around off the top of the screen or behind brick-covered passageways. There's a shocking amount to explore here, which is extra surprising considering how inherently linear a 2D sidescrolling stage is going to be.
I had an absurd amount of fun with Wonder, and the ten or so hours it took me to breeze through it just melted away without me even noticing. Fingers crossed that this completely buries New Super Mario Bros. from here on out. If this is the way that Nintendo is going to be developing 2D Mario games, then I'm absolutely going to be here for it.
I have to be careful about asking for more like this, though. Nintendo might spend the next twenty years making nothing but Super Mario Bros. Wonder sequels.
The company may as well have struck crude oil for the sheer amount of money that they printed after its release; thirty million copies sold served as the clearest sign they were ever going to get that this was the way the series needed to be from here on out. A decade and a half later, and almost literally every single 2D Mario game we’ve gotten since has been a member of the New sub-franchise — New Super Mario Bros. Wii, New Super Mario Bros. 2, there was even a New Super Luigi U. You can argue that Super Mario Maker breaks the pattern, but I’d argue back that dropping a glorified level editor and telling the players to design the games themselves doesn’t count for much. Besides, Mario Maker is still a lateral step at best; it’s playing the same hits as before, just rolling four previously-released games together to be swapped around as needed. The New Super Mario Bros. mode, funnily enough, turned out to have the most advanced movement tech, meaning that the most serious players and level designers effectively found themselves with yet another New game fairly early into Mario Maker’s lifespan.
Nintendo’s modus operandi seemed to be that if you somehow weren’t sick of New Super Mario Bros. yet, then they’d make sure that you would be. Every subsequent game seemed to scrape a couple of extra flakes of wood off of the bottom of the barrel, desperate to find something else they could extract from this fucking sub-series. New Super Luigi U was a download-only level pack for New Super Mario Bros. U that starred exclusively Luigi, because at least that was different enough from starring Mario to warrant its own game; New Super Mario Bros. 2 put an obscene emphasis on the act of collecting coins, which is almost universally the least exciting part of any Mario game. The 3D entries — Galaxy, 3D World, Odyssey — seemed to be the place where Nintendo was still experimenting and innovating what Mario could be, while the 2D games quietly shuffled along in rote stagnancy for two decades like retirees towards death. There was no zest, nothing fresh, just an endless series of “bah-bah”s and maybe one or two new power-ups every couple years so you didn’t start thinking that you spent sixty dollars for the exact same game again (you did).
Super Mario Bros. Wonder gives 2D Mario a personality again, and it’s a complete triumph for that fact alone.
How truly great it is to play a game like this without any positive expectations, and instead come away with full confidence that it’s some of the best that Mario has ever been. Of course, maybe that’s not saying much — 2D Mario has been almost exclusively New Super Mario Bros. for about half of the entire franchise’s lifetime now — but Super Mario World and Super Mario Bros. 3 are often hailed as the best platformers ever made, so anything that can stand next to them is doing something very right. If I’m being completely honest, I think it clears both of them easily. Call it recency bias, but it’s been a long, long time since I’ve been this impressed by anything Nintendo’s put out.
The game managed to get all the way through prototyping without a deadline, and it unquestionably shows. Wonder has a whole box full of toys that it's eager to show the player, and it almost never lingers on any of them; the majority of level gimmicks here get used just a single time and never again, while the most common returning gimmicks really only appear maybe three times before vanishing forever. All of them feel about as realized as they could be; while it may sound a bit like the game is just throwing out everything in the hope of something sticking, most of these concepts are really only fun for one or two levels, and it wouldn't be wise to try making a full game out of them.
It revels in being strange. As strange as Mario is ever going to be allowed to be, at least. It took me a little bit to make a decision on whether I thought the talking flowers were charming or annoying, but I eventually ended up liking them; as the game goes on, they get progressively more and more unhinged, dropping the "you did such a good job" schtick to just start saying strange shit. One level is filled with green goo that you need to swim through to progress, and the flowers won't stop talking about how much they want to eat it. When you get the wonder seed, turn into a goo ball, and then pass by one of the flowers, he audibly licks you and then says how delicious you are. I think about that flower a lot. What a little fucking freak he was.
The badge system serves mostly to trivialize an already easy game, giving the player the option to get extra mid-air jumps, or a free rescue from a bottomless pit, or adding exclamation point blocks everywhere that cover basically every hazard you could ever possibly deal with in a given stage. It definitely feels designed more to provide an experience than a challenge, and I think that's fine. I would love to see a level pack for this that ramps up the difficulty so I'm not constantly walking around with 99 lives and 999 flower coins, but I'm probably not the target audience for this anyway. Mario is for kids, after all. We've gotta wean them off of this before we start hitting them with the Celeste C-sides. Regardless, though, the badges mostly offer some unique ways to engage with these levels, and there are tons of secret paths in every single one that you can only access by snooping around off the top of the screen or behind brick-covered passageways. There's a shocking amount to explore here, which is extra surprising considering how inherently linear a 2D sidescrolling stage is going to be.
I had an absurd amount of fun with Wonder, and the ten or so hours it took me to breeze through it just melted away without me even noticing. Fingers crossed that this completely buries New Super Mario Bros. from here on out. If this is the way that Nintendo is going to be developing 2D Mario games, then I'm absolutely going to be here for it.
I have to be careful about asking for more like this, though. Nintendo might spend the next twenty years making nothing but Super Mario Bros. Wonder sequels.
Dumped a bunch of API files and the Rockstar launcher into the root of my games folder, which then revoked write privileges on every file in every subfolder, presumably as some sort of anti-cheat. It then proceeded to break several programs in the games folder because they couldn't actually write any data without being run as admin. I spent a few days wondering why so many of my programs were suddenly breaking, and thought I was staring down the barrel of a hard drive failure. No, it was just Rockstar Social Club and the accumulated ~150mb of files that didn't get deleted after I uninstalled. Had to manually clean everything up and reset permissions myself.
Would still be fucking boring even if it wasn't malware.
Would still be fucking boring even if it wasn't malware.