Treasure Stack

March 7, 2019 by Leave a comment

I never really liked Wario’s Woods. When I was still fawning over NES Remix, the moment I realized the series was running out of steam is when the Wario’s Woods shit started during NES Remix 2. Now, considering that the Remix series turned chicken shit like Urban Champion, Clu Clu Land, Baseball, Tennis, and Ice Climber into chicken salad, that really gives you an idea just how bad Wario’s Woods is. It’s horrible. Cynical too. Nintendo had struck gold with Tetris but they didn’t own it and wanted a Tetris-like to call their own. They had Dr. Mario, which was a big hit for reasons I’ll never understand because Dr. Mario is fucking boring. Yoshi’s Cookie is fucking boring. And Wario’s Woods is clunky as all hell AND fucking boring. It’s the worst of that initial Trilogy of Not-Tetris. It was the second-to-last Nintendo-published NES game, with only StarTropics 2 coming out afterwards. Not exactly a riveting send-off for the console that made them famous. If you told me an indie developer would make the Wario’s Woods formula somewhat compelling, I’d say you must be high. But here we are: an indie tribute to one of the worst “major” puzzlers ever, and it’s not bad.

Treasure Stack isn’t great either. For those unfamiliar with the concept: multi-colored treasure chests rain down from the heavens into a well, two boxes at a time. You’re a little dude or dudette at the bottom of the well who has to platform around, grabbing and stacking the chests. Occasionally keys will come down with the treasures. If you match a key to the right color chest, it detonates the chest and all chests of the same color connected to it. The platforming guy/gal controls smoothly and has a grappling hook they can use to grab blocks from high up in the well and quickly bring them down to the base, which is what sets Stack apart from Woods. It’s clever and it works. And there’s special items that automatically clear blocks out. It sounds great, and it would be.. except the garbage blocks.

I’m guessing color-blind players will not enjoy this one as much.

I don’t know why the game needed garbage blocks. The formula for Treasure Stack wasn’t exactly something that lends itself to fast-paced action-puzzling. Without them, the game would still be difficult enough once the chests/keys start dropping faster. Especially since you’re left up to the whims of chance as to whether the game will generate the right color key you need to set-off the elaborate combo you’ve been preparing without having to rethink the whole thing if it doesn’t come fast enough. And even the keys you often can’t count on to be your salvation because I swear to God they constantly come down paired with a treasure chest of the same color, which means the key and the chest that are falling will detonate upon landing and thus you can’t do anything with them. It happened to me all the time and was annoying. They really should rig it so a chest and a key of the same color NEVER come out together. It would make the game ten-fold better. But really, the garbage is the big issue here. Everything about the garbage blocks saps the fun from Treasure Stack. The meter for triggering them fills up too fast. When they activate, they blanket the top spot of each column in the well. Just a couple of minutes into the game, the meter starts filling up quite fast, while the colored chests/keys rain down even faster. It’s just not reasonable to be able to keep up with them even if you had four hands and two brains. And I don’t have four hands.

Even worse is that death is instant if you reach the top of the well. A game like this really called for a Tetris Attack/Pokemon Puzzle League style grace-period where you have a couple of seconds to fix the problem before being declared KOed. You can have a relatively comfortable three-space gap from the top of the well and end up dead a moment later. Hell, I’ve had better conditions and not survived the next ten seconds. And because your character can only leap one block, recovery is next to impossible once you reach a certain point. By five minutes in, Treasure Stack’s action is so fast that it’s well beyond the point of reasonable management. If the blocks fell horizontally instead of being stacked on-top of each other, you’d have a lot more time and the stacks in the well wouldn’t become insurmountable instantly. Treasure Stack, more than any well-based puzzler I’ve ever encountered, feels like it’s designed specifically to smother you.

I can’t remember a well-based puzzler where you can go from feeling nice and relaxed to overwhelmed and defeated in such short order. And not in a good way, either. The tide turns so quickly that you can’t even process how you failed. It just sort of happens.

This probably makes it sound like I didn’t like Treasure Stack at all. And for solo play, I really didn’t. It just does too many core gameplay mistakes to be enjoyable. But Treasure Stack is designed with multiplayer in mind. There, the rules are a bit different and the game absolutely shines. Playing online, you get a lot less garbage blocks, and they only come as the result of your opponent racking up combos and other assorted puzzling shenanigans. I wish it were more clear which actions trigger more garbage blocks so I could try focusing on that. Sometimes I would set up very elaborate combos only to see but a single garbage block drop on my opponent. But still, the way multiplayer is oriented allows for Treasure Stack to be appreciated. You actually have time to experience the thrill of very elaborate combos, something I feel is next to impossible to pull off in solo play.

I won this match. It wasn’t quite the same thrill as winning at Tetris 99, but still, in your face person I beat.

I can’t help but wonder if Treasure Stack released a bit too early. Some fixes have already been done. I bought the game on Friday, and at that time there was no option to play another round of solo play. You had to go all the way back from the starting menu to get another game going. That’s already been fixed, less than a week later. But there’s a lot more patches coming. Maybe Treasure Stack needed a bit more cooking. Especially since the game is so dependent on online multiplayer. You only get one chance to make a good first impression, and players who are turned off by the initial batch of problems might not return after their first play session, thus hurting the game’s online player pool. This is the type of stuff developers should think about but don’t. I get that it must be an exciting and anxious moment to see your game on the marketplace, but if you’re multiplayer focused, remember that multiplayer indies die a miserable death if they can’t cultivate and maintain a sizeable user-base to support the game. If your title is buggy when it comes out, which is when you’ll get most of your sales, you’re handicapping your chances right out of the starting gate. I genuinely believe that Treasure Stack will be good as a solo game eventually, but as of this writing it wins my Seal of Approval strictly for the multiplayer, which is awesome. Whether it’ll ever succeed as a fun and frantic single-player experience is possible but not a certainty.

It’s hard to gauge potential in a game. When something is wrong, we know how much it hurts it, but we can’t know how much the fix of it will improve the overall experience. I do believe the foundation of something really good is here, but how good can it be? I don’t think Treasure Stack will ever have the cerebral elegance of Tetris, the white-knuckle action of Pokemon Puzzle League, or the combo-heavy frenziness of Puyo Puyo. It’s going to be somewhere between those even if it peaks. But, I would have guessed Wario’s Woods was beyond salvaging and that’s clearly not the case. It shows how inspired the development team is that they polished that turd to a golden shine. There’s something here with Treasure Stack. Multiplayer proves that. Get a four player local game going and you’re going to have a blast. There’s cross-play with online multiplayer, which as of this writing has a lively user base. Those modes make Treasure Stack worth a look. Single player might be awesome at some point, but right now it doesn’t, ahem, stack up.

Treasure Stack was developed by Pixelakes
Point of Sale: Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Steam

$19.99 noted “why aren’t there power-ups for the character? Stuff that lets him jump higher? Come on, if you’re going to have a platformer in your puzzler with jumping, you gotta have power-ups for the character!” in the making of this review.

Treasure Stack is Chick-Approved.. Christ, that’s five in a row, maybe I’m going soft.. and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, PC Reviews, Xbox One Reviews, Xbox Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Farm Together (Review)

March 6, 2019 by 2 Comments

I feel really bad for Farm Together. It was set to be my new zen-like gaming addiction. My substitute for Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook, which I used to and play half-engaged while the other half of me thought about work stuff. And, for a few days at least, it was just that. Then Tetris 99 sunk its fangs into me and Farm Together fell completely off my radar. Granted, the two games have nothing in common besides their addictive, veg-out potential. Still, choosing Tetris 99 over Farm Together is like selecting your drug dealer based on which one has the most teeth.

Developed by XBLIG all-star studio Milkstone (whose game Little Racers STREET was featured in my 2013 Indie Royale bundle), Farm Together is a remake of their Xbox Live Indie Game it Avatar Farm. A glossier, more polished, souped-up version of it. It’s not so much a game as much as just a grind-for-the-sake-of-grinding time waster. But hey, those have a place in the big tent of gaming. Basically, you plant crops, wait a while, and then dig up those crops for slightly more resources than you put into planting them. Then you buy and unlock slightly more expensive crops that you plant, wait, and harvest for slightly more resources. Rinse and repeat about two-trillion times, and that’s Farm Together. There’s no real goal or end-game. You just plant, wait, and harvest. You can also buy cattle, birds, and fish that you feed, wait, and harvest. The wait times vary, but the basic concept never changes: place object, tend to object, harvest object. Sometimes the objects are permanent investments that you eventually make a profit on (the cattle, trees, the flowers, or fish). Sometimes they’re a one-time thing (most of the veggies). But the crux of game is grinding to get resources to grind more.

If they start singing, I’m packing my shit and getting out of here.

It’s a fucking grind, and nothing more. But, I kind of admire it. There’s no micro-transactions that speed up the wait times, which probably was very tempting to include because drooling addicts such as myself would have caved in and bought them. And because there’s no ultimate end-goal, you’re free to go about things at your own leisure. I focused on slowly getting permanent resources to blanket my farm. Trees are a permanent investment that will slowly result in a net-profit. Veggies are one-and-done. Flowers are also permanent but require constant watering to yield the best results. Raising animals seemed unbalanced and too expensive, so I avoided it unless it was related to a challenge in the game. I had no interest in watching them just stand around asking for food. I already feel like a monster for letting my Nintendog go 15 years unloved and unattended. OH GOD MUDDY, I’M SO SORRY!

It’s a simple, arcadey/mobiley setup, but one filled with gross limitations. For example, there’s no way to set up an irrigation system to tend to veggies and flowers. Or at least an efficient way. There’s a sprinkler you can purchase, but the sprinklers only tend to two squares. Mind you, your tractor services nine-squares at a time. And that sprinkler, instead of costing a reasonable resource to purchase, costs the relatively rare and valuable pink medals. Having to give those up just to be able to let two squares linger without needing to micro-manage them like the world’s fussiest baby is ridiculous. Given how much emphasis is given to decorative shit to purchase (which you usually spend diamonds on), why aren’t the sprinklers more cost efficient? Hell, they’re listed alongside the fencing items and are, as far as I can tell, the only thing in their category that actually does something besides sitting there. I didn’t even realize they were there at first.

Trees were my primary method of making money. They’re permanent, don’t require watering or any tending to, and some of them bear fruit multiple times during a “year cycle.” If you plan to be playing the game long, they’re the way to go because they’ll eventually be net-positive after a week or so with no effort required. All the crops “level-up” which basically just makes them give you more money. And hey, trees are pretty and they make air and stuff for us.

And that’s where Farm Together fails: it seems to want the grind to be the central focus and does nothing to take the edge off that. For me, one of those “ta-da!” moments in games like this is when you no longer need to grind. What limited options there are in Farm Together for that in theory work, but they’re too expensive and not efficient. I hired a farm hand. The section I marked him for barely clipped the edge of where I kept llamas. What did the farm hand do? Ffed the ffucking llamas. Over and over and over and over and over, completely draining my money. And maintaining him didn’t save me any time or money compared to just doing the work myself. As for the sprinklers, they do the job, but two squares for one medal is not remotely reasonable a price. Really, the sprinklers should cost diamonds, not medals. But that’s the story with Farm Together in general. It seems like whatever option would lead to the game being less tedious is the option that was declined in favor of enhancing the grind.

And there’s so much more missing. You can’t upgrade your tractor, and doing everything nine-squares at a time is too slow and clunky. You need to fill it up with gas, which thankfully doesn’t cost money. But it drains quickly, requiring you to dash back to the pumps every minute or so of harvesting. And the first pumps you get actually are too slow to fill back up themselves, which is a real kick in the ass for impatient types such as myself. Eventually you’ll get a gas station for 25 pink medals, but even a full tank won’t last you very long when you have a LOT of stuff to harvest (which you will because that’s, you know, the point of the fucking game) keeping you dashing back to the gas pumps like they have the only bathroom on the place and you just won a binge eating contest at Taco Bell.

And you never can get the tractor to do more than nine-squares at a time. Why not? I mean, it’s a game about farming. Give me a god-damned combine harvester as opposed to dry-humping my crops nine-squares at a time. Fine, maybe Farm Together aspired to be slow and grueling like real farming is. But I’m not sure that excuse flies. When you place an animal down, they will stay in the square you dropped them in. No fencing required. I wasn’t aware animals operated on the honor system like that. Certain types of crops that you can’t plant side-by-side in real life (such as tomatoes and sunflowers) can be done with no consequence here. You can put predatory fish in the same body of water as the shit they would normally eat with no apparent drawback. I think realism was thrown out the door. Farm Together doesn’t at all present itself as a farm simulator, so to hell with saying “real farming is hard work” and let me have more shortcuts.

I came to dread seeing those little water-needed symbols. Annoyingly, it sometimes rains in the game but the rain doesn’t actually water the plants. Apparently flowers are quite snooty about the water they drink. What am I using? Fiji Water or something?

Which brings us to the big hook. The one that I kept forgetting was the main selling point despite it being in the fucking title: online play. You can go to other farms to help harvest their crops for extra experience points. Whatever you dig up goes to their bank account instead of yours, and safeguards are in place to prevent abuse. The person who wanted me to review this was the one who couldn’t wait to get me playing this, but for me, I guess I’m weird because I wanted to take on the responsibility of harvesting all the stuff I planted myself. I mean, what’s the point of going to all the effort of planting the stuff if you’re not the one getting to see how much your own hard work paid off. If I set up a domino rally, I’m not inviting someone over to push the first block over. That shit was hard work! I want to be the one to do the fun part! Don’t get me wrong, a lot of people are enjoying visiting other farms. For me? When I saw the effort others made it make their farm look like a.. you know.. farm, I felt like a kid who just presented a formless clump of Legos to her mother and said “look, it’s a Transformer!” or something. One dude I visited basically made Seaworld, and here I was thinking my shit looked good because I finally smartened-up and started putting things in clumps of nine for even-harvesting with the useless tractor. I was so embarrassed that I never turned on the ability for others to visit my stuff. My farm wasn’t good-looking. Others have full resorts going. I just shoved shit wherever I could find room. Story of my life. I never was good at decorating cookies during Christmas, either. I just would slather on a large clump of frosting and eat it. That’s basically what I did here.

This dude had a full seaside resort thing going. My cleverness began and ended with me naming my farm “50 Shades of Hay.” And then it turned out there really was no particularly useful hay in the game and I felt like an idiot.

But, for all the bitching I’m doing, I’ll give Farm Together this: it’s cathartic. Farm Together is NOT a game. It’s a Slinky that you shuffle the coils back and forth from one hand to the other because it’s the only activity that’s keeping you from grabbing an automatic rifle, climbing a water tower and taking out the entire town. It’s bubble-wrap that you sit there, slack-jawed, popping one air-pocket at a time like a fucking psychopath. It’s the adult version of that children’s toy with the colored pegs and the hammer that you sit there smacking the pegs down, then turn the thing over and smack them on the other side. I don’t know what that’s called but it’s always my go-to gift for people I hate because their kid will make a lot of noise with it and drive them insane, which makes me happy because fuck them, am I right? What Farm Together is not is Sim City for rednecks. It’s a mobile-style resource grinder, like Clicker Heroes with a farmer’s tan. Those obviously have a place in gaming. That someone as jaded as me can easily lose themselves in something like this has to be indicative of something with merit, or at least I’d think so. And yea, maybe it’s a bit over-priced at $20 and the DLC is lame (it’s just accessories that change your appearance but otherwise accomplish nothing). And there is something undeniably satisfying about completing a mission in the game (which is just harvesting X amount of resources) or reaching the point where previously expensive items can be bought in bulk. I don’t know if I’d call it “fun” or “compelling” but it’s certainly endearing. When I thought I had enough playtime to do this review, I kept turning the game back on to get screenshots and inevitably would put another hour or two into work every time I did. That seems like it’s important to note. So yea, go ahead a try it. It’s dumb and it’s a bit lazy at times, but it’s a perfectly fine time-waster. Certainly better than bubble wrap.

Farm Together was developed by Milkstone Studios
Point of Sale: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Steam

$19.99 ♪♪ Farm Together.. right now.. over me ♪♪ in the making of this review.

Farm Together is Chick-Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard

*A friend purchased a copy of Farm Together for me. Because I chose to do a review of it, I purchased a second copy out of pocket. All games reviewed at IGC are paid for by me.

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, PC Reviews, Xbox One Reviews, Xbox Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Tetris 99

March 2, 2019 by 9 Comments

I was born twenty days before the Game Boy released in the United States. I missed the whole national Tetris craze. Older fans are sickened by the fact that I’d never played the Game Boy Tetris until right before I wrote this sentence. Apparently I’m supposed to be nostalgic for a game that was shat out into the world the same month I was. My first experience with Tetris was a Disney-themed N64 game that was.. alright. It wasn’t no Pokemon Puzzle League, that’s for sure. It wasn’t even a Super Puzzle Fighter. Hell, there was a $10 PS1 drug store budget rack game called Puzzle Star Sweep that nobody remembers or talks about that I put a lot more time into. Probably the best $10 I ever spent on a game before modern indies became a thing.

You can still get Puzzle Star Sweep on PSN for your PlayStation 3, PSP and Vita. It’s the best well-puzzler you’ve never heard of.

I never understood the Tetris obsession. It seemed to come and go like the gaming version of disco. The way people spoke of it, they might as well have been describing events from the bronze age for as far in the distant-past as it seemed. And then when I was seventeen and in the middle of a ten-month, twenty-hour-a-day World of Warcraft bender, I got Tetris DS. It was the sole interruption of probably my worst gaming addiction. Which was sort of like giving a heroine addict methadone, really. It had fun theming (based around Nintendo properties) and I ended up running out my DS’s battery a few dozen times. I’d probably make my DS top 10 if I did such a list. But then Tetris sort of faded away for me. I later got it for PS3, but the thrill was gone. And the recent comeback to relevancy via Tetris Effect meant nothing for me because it’s not epilepsy-compatible. Also, the whole battle royale fad has not been my thing. If Tetris 99 hadn’t been free with my Switch Online subscription, I’d probably never bought it for a variety of reasons. Among them, the special effects are just flashy enough that I can only play it in portable-mode with the back-lighting turned all the way down. It’s not exactly convenient for me. Had I not been insanely bored the night it came out, it might have sat on my Switch, unplayed and unloved.

Here I am, 1,000 games and over seventy-six hours of gameplay later, left in awe. And probably legitimately addicted. My family has, without hyperbole, staged two interventions on my use of this game. Finally, I made a deal with them: let me play my thousandth game, and then I’ll delete it permanently and finish up this review. This review that I’ve been in the process of writing for seventeen days. Really, all I need to say is this: Tetris 99 is the killer app for Switch Online, and the best game on Nintendo Switch. Yep, better than Breath of the Wild or Mario Odyssey. It’s absolutely incredible. And, unlike a lot of battle royale games, you really do need to be good to finish high in the standings. It took me around 60 games to grab my first victory, but when it happened, I literally screamed myself hoarse. It helps that the win came on the heels of the greatest come-from-behind victory in the history of gaming. Well, at least for me.

I won that game. By time I erased Tetris 99 from my Switch, I’d won forty-six more times to go with it. Maybe my love of Tetris 99 has to do with the fact that I’m finally good at one of these fucking BR games. But really, it’s because the idea is just so good. Basically, all 99 players try to throw garbage blocks at each other by stringing together combos while throwing down doubles, triples, and Tetrises. And also doing these things called T-Spins that I never fully got the hang of. Probably the biggest weakness out of the box with Tetris 99 is there’s no instructions and players are left to figure out what exactly everything means on their own. Perhaps this was a nod of the head to those NES era douchebags that never stop bitching about how games back in their days didn’t “hold hands.” Then again, those same players keep coming to me asking how to play the game. Heh.

There really should have been an option to remove the flashy special effects. Not just for epilepsy but because, satisfying as it is to see the shots hit other players, it’s distracting. The same goes for the targets pointed at you. The lines should have been transparent. If a lot of players are on you, you can’t see the bottom of the well.

In a nutshell, Tetris 99 is exactly the same Tetris you grew up with. The seven primary shapes are all back with no newcomers. You move the blocks with the left D-Pad while using the analog sticks to target players to receive whatever garbage blocks you earn. Using the left stick, you can target specific players. But there’s 98 besides yourself and that process will be slow and clunky and should only be used late in the game, if at all. Like, don’t even look at the left-stick until you’ve made at least the top 15. Instead, focus on the right stick. It does a focused-target on one of four groups. Flicking up targets those closest to being knocked out of the game. Flicking left will hit a random person and is only really useful if you’re trying to fly under the radar or trying to shake-off those who are targeting you only because you’re attacking them. Flicking down targets people attacking you. You’ll want to use this one the most if you’re taking a defensive stance. It was my primary play-style. And flicking right will target players who have badges. And my apologies to Blazing Saddles, but you’ll need some stinkin’ badges.

Badges by far seem to confuse players the most. Here’s how they work: you collect a badge every time you knock a player out. If multiple players contributed to knocking the player out, they receive a half-badge. The more badges you have, the stronger your attack power, and the more garbage you send to your opponents. When a player carrying a ton of badges gets knocked out, the player who did it gets all the badges they collected plus one. The badge system was created to assure a player can’t coast under the radar and have any chance at winning during the end-game if they’ve not been aggressive at all. Winning without a single badge, which requires you to win by only knocking out the final player, is the rarest of victories, one that the player would have to be a virtual God among OF COURSE I’VE DONE IT!!

Also, just to be clear: badges do not carry over to the next match. But, I suspect that the auto-targeting at the start of each match might be in part based on how players did in the previous match. Perhaps the top-finishing person of the 99 gets all the targets. Over half my matches I finished in the top 10, and in a remarkably strange amount of matches, I would start with over 20 targets painted on me before the first block dropped. People on my timeline consistently said they’d never experienced anything like the sheer amount of targets I normally got. One time it was fifty-two bullseyes I had painted on me before the first block even started falling. Fifty-two! Usually when people want to throw that much garbage at me, I’m talking about Hollow Knight.

What I love most about Tetris 99 is that this relatively simple setup allows for diverse and complex strategies. You can play aggressively, but risk putting a target on yourself. You can fly under the radar until the herd thins out, but then you risk reaching the end game with no attack power (most of my 2nd – 4th place finishes were a result of this). Tetris was already a game that required quick-wits and improvisation, but Tetris 99 compounds that by having to train yourself to glance over at remaining opponents and quickly, accurately decide how to go about attacking or surviving. Games can swing wildly. I’ve gone from the bottom of my well and in firm control to dead in seconds just by one poorly timed mistake by myself that an opponent on their last rope capitalized on, and vice-versa. Now granted, I have a lot of friends and fans who put a lot of time and hundreds of rounds in Tetris 99 and couldn’t get a win, and I got 47 so I’m pretty proud of myself. But, I should have had a lot more, and I blew it. In 1,000 matches, I probably finished 2nd place over 100 times, easily. I was very much the Jerry West of Tetris 99.

I call this “getting Sarah Huckabeed.”

All is not well in Tetrisville. Besides the fact that the rules and attack patterns are not entirely clear, there’s some horrific glitches that stunt the game’s potential. One in particular can potentially block valid attacks. I preferred to take a defensive posture when I played, focusing on those attacking me. However, sometimes I’d knock-out players who were targeting me, only their target would remain painted on me for the remainder of the game. When using the “attackers” target, if nobody is attacking you, the game defaults to a random target if you manage to hit anything higher than a double. But, since the game believed I was still being targeted, those combos would go to waste since there wasn’t really a player to attack. This glitch has started happening constantly. Like, one out of every four matches. It forced me to move off my defensive stance and instead target random people, since taking an aggressive stance against badge-holders is a good way to get knocked out early. This glitch has been there from the start and there’s no word of a patch coming. It needs to be fixed. Like, now.

(Can you tell I focused on this just to have a Second Chance with the Chick excuse for Tetris 99 so I can play it more? Too obvious?)

Check the circled player who was KOed in 89th place on the right side of the screen. That target should have gone away. But, because of the glitch, the target stayed. If you don’t realize this is happening, you will waste a LOT of garbage blocks. This glitch is not a rarity. It constantly happens and it needs to be fixed.

Beyond that, my biggest complaint is the lack of advanced stats. Like, I’d really like an official number of how many times I finished in the top 10. I can’t tell you exactly how many games I finished 2nd place in, or how many games I won only holding three badges or whatever amount of badges. I would have liked more advanced stats on my scoring too. I had to do the math myself to figure out how many Tetrises I averaged per a match (I finished averaging eight Tetrises a match, off 73 total lines a match). But it would have been way neat if Tetris 99 told me how many lines I averaged per victory, along with how many doubles/triples/Tetrises I needed to achieve those. Besides seeing some absolutely bat shit videos of people who put my skills to shame, I have no clue where I really stood in the grand scheme of things. My ego could have been boosted (or severely wounded) with some online leaderboards. Or, maybe some extra modes. There’s no single-player options (though data-miners have allegedly found the spot for them), or an option to play “traditional” Tetris without the ability to hold blocks. As I neared the end of my time with Tetris 99, I wanted to see how good I really was at it by not holding blocks while the other 98 players presumably did. I did pretty good. I had one game where I finished 10th and another where I finished 2nd. Hell, now I regret the thousand-games promise. I really wanted to see if I could pull off winning without using the hold. This is going to eat at me.

Of all the pop-culture shit this effect could have reminded me of, the one that kept popping in my head was Mr. Destiny.

Anyway, Tetris 99 is awesome. It’s free if you have the subscription to Switch Online. If you don’t, Tetris 99 justifies the cost by itself so much better than the (very limited and not growing fast-enough) NES library you get does. A lot of people consider Tetris to be the best, more pure video game ever made. Tetris 99 is an imperfect spinoff of a perfect formula, but it’s also the most compelling online experience I’ve had since Rocket League. Above every other argument I can make, the best one is that I didn’t grow up with Tetris. It wasn’t important to gamers from my generation. And yet, here we are in 2019, and I’m telling the world that a Tetris game is the best reason to own a Nintendo platform. It’s one of the ten best games I’ve ever played. And, in all the years I’ve played online games, winning at Tetris 99 is by far the most exhilarating. That counts for something.

It might also be a Russian plot to destroy productivity. Let’s not rule this out.

Tetris 99 was developed by Arika
Free with a Nintendo Switch subscription

If you lost to, or beat, someone named Cathy, it was probably me.

Tetris 99 is Chick-Approved but is not an indie and ineligible for ranking on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard. Good thing probably. It’d be #1 if it were.

Filed under Nintendo eShop Reviews, Nintendo Switch Reviews Tagged with , , , , , ,

The Adventures of Elena Temple

February 8, 2019 by 2 Comments

The Indie Gamer Chick Paradox: not being nostalgic for older games, but being drawn to neo-retro games. It’s a strange phenomena, but one I’ve noticed in myself, especially lately. When browsing console or PC marketplaces, if a game is all pixel-arty in a convincing way, I’m much more likely to want to try it. I find that strange, because I’m not exactly telling kids about the glory days when all Mario needed was two buttons, a D-Pad, fireballs, and a flagpole at the end of each stage. Frankly, some of those type of gamers are kind of creepy. Like the ones who say they won’t let their kids play any modern games until they play the games of their childhood and learn to like them, or else. That’s not teaching your kids appreciation. That’s brainwashing. Really unnerving shit that turns what should be a beautiful event into something more like indoctrination into a cult.

Still, if I see something that looks like a lost older game that’s been rediscovered and released again for a new audience, it sticks out to me. The Adventure of Elena Temple takes that a step further: it’s presented to us like it really is a lost game from 1982. One that never found its audience because the hapless developer kept porting their work to generic, off-brand game consoles and personal computers nobody owned (like the Nintengo Some Toy or the Maple Computer, a Canadian Macintosh clone that sold 31 units), thus screwing themselves out ever getting recognition (or payment) for what is actually a decent little game.

I wish I was joking when I say I played XBLIGs that didn’t sell that well.

It’s a cute idea, but one that doesn’t factor into the gameplay at all besides changing the shading of the graphics. That’s a shame, because the meta-joke has legs and probably could have been worked into the concept. Like maybe each port of Elena is busted by era-specific limitations or something along those lines. What could have been a truly inspired gag becomes little more than flavor text for different color palettes of the same game. You can’t even change schemes on the fly. You have to exit out to the main menu, which is frankly inconvenient if you’re someone genuinely looking for what style is the most comfortable to use. And to be honest, because of the comedic framing with the dense creator getting conned into releasing on the wrong platforms, I actually thought each different graphics style was going to be a completely different map or even version of the game. They’re not. There is exactly one map and one map only for Elena Temple that plays the same no matter which version you use. That’s fine, but I wish it had been a bit less ambiguous. Sort of like my last home pregnancy test. It’s surprisingly difficult to interpret whether a tiny line is blue or not when you’re stressing over the effectiveness of condoms.

Also, I had to fixate on that stuff because I really don’t have very much to say about the actual content of Elena Temple. It’s fine. There’s only fifty rooms to explore and gameplay is kept very limited in order to stay true to the 1982-developed-game theme. Exploring is limited to hoping around on platforms, occasionally hitting a button or firing a gun to break jars or knock down walls. I asked myself why she had to shoot jars instead of, you know, just kicking them or picking them up and dropping them or anything really besides busting a cap in them? Who shoots a jar unless you’re a Branch Davidian or something? In fact, guns are the solution to almost everything in Elena Temple. It’s like the NRA’s wet dream. Nearly every puzzle requires shooting it, and sometimes I found myself shooting buttons I could have pressed, but you only get two bullets at a time. There’s refills scattered around the map, some of which respawn without having to leave the room and come back in it. It does work, but it never gets more involved than base-level puzzle elements. You can shoot enemies too, but there’s seriously only two types: snakes and bats, both of which can be plugged with a single bullet. It contributes to the consistent theme of Elena Temple: everything works but there’s not enough of it.

You can zoom in for a closer view if you wish, but then you can’t admire the off-brand equipment you’re playing the game on. Come to think of it, maybe Elena Temple is a scathing commentary on cheapskates buying generic brands. Fair enough, though my father insists that Soni televisions are just as good as the real thing.

To developer GrimTalin’s credit, everything that’s actually here is fun. Each room is over and done with so quickly that you don’t have time to ever get bored despite many of the rooms feeling kind of samey having very little in the way of actual content. It wouldn’t be out of the question for a first-timer to knock the game out in an under-an-hour with a 100% completion. It controls good enough to never be annoying. Jumping takes a bit to get the hang of, especially with the rooms being as claustrophobic as they are, but after ten minutes it becomes instinctive. There’s a few hidden secrets that shows the location of the eight diamonds you need to finish the game, or whether a room is finished (never found that one) or secret passages (never found that one either) but otherwise what you see is what you get. The framing device actually covers for the generic setting, traps, and enemies, which does work in the same way Microsoft claiming bugs are actually features does.

But, what’s here is actually so well made that I can’t help but think almost anyone will walk away feeling a bit unsatisfied. Elena Temple is one of those games that strives for authenticity, achieves it, and it’s not entirely to the game’s betterment. It’s too simple and too straight-forward and doesn’t have enough going for it. And clearly GrimTalin understands that gaming has come a long ways, because without the one modern concession it does make (unlimited lives and thus no game-overing), Elena Temple would have certainly been too frustrating. You know, like 99% of all the games it’s paying homage to. Maybe that’s as far as GrimTalin could take it without betraying the theme, but I don’t know. The most randomly strange thing I could “complain” about in the game is that the Elena character is perhaps too tall. Hear me out: she’s roughly 1/5 the size of the playfield, with the spikes, coins, snakes, etc being half-as-tall as she is. If she was shorter, along with things like the spikes and coins and traps and enemies being smaller, rooms could have been bigger and thus been made more elaborate. I don’t know why, but it’s something that was in the back of mind nearly my entire session with it. Or maybe I’m off my rocker and it just needed more rooms. Probably just more rooms would work. And enemies. And traps. And weapons. And.. really it just needed more.

This is what a sucker I am: I actually found a blue/yellow color scheme to be the easiest on my eyes, but played in the gross Game Boy mock-up because my fans liked the authenticity of it. That’s how it starts. Next thing you know I’ll be dancing on command.

But it doesn’t need more to be fun. Elena Temple already is fun. The stuff I’m suggesting is merely to push it to a higher level. And, while the stages are basic, they’re not exactly crap either. Elena Temple never bores, and is inexpensive enough that you don’t feel ripped-off by the length. Unlike some other shorter titles that have little in the way of innovation, like Sigi, it feels like what we do have here is fully fleshed out. Like a gourmet chef took bland ingredients and made something very delicious with them without resorting to seasoning or other culinary trickery. When I went to determine Elena’s leaderboard position, I was actually taken off guard by how high it ended up. So if I came across like I didn’t like it, it’s only because what was here was so good that I realized Catalin Marcu’s only sin was not aiming higher. Hardly a sin at all, really. What do you call something that is close to a sin but not? I was going to say “a blowjob”, but I looked into it and it turns out that actually is a sin. I didn’t know that! Well, my next confession on Sunday just got awkward.

The Adventures of Elena Temple was developed by GrimTalin
Point of Sale: Switch, Steam

$2.99 (normally $4.99, really $2.99 should be the permanent price) asked why explorers in all these games break the priceless antique vases instead of, you know, gathering them to donate them to a museum in the making of this review?

Elena Temple is Chick-Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard

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TORIDAMA: Brave Challenge

February 1, 2019 by Leave a comment

It’s #DiscoverIndies Friday. But, while I’m the creator of the movement, it’s harder than it sounds for me to actually participate. I’m a game critic who purchases all the indies I review. That requires a lot of marketplace browsing. There’s not too many games I’ve missed. So I have to cruise closely towards new releases. And very, very early this morning, I found my hidden gem. It’s called TORIDAMA: Brave Challenge. It’s a cross between WarioWare and Chicken. Not in the bucket of fried sense, but as in, “how close can you come to dying without actually doing it?” I’m a chain smoker, recovering drug addict, and a video gamer that suffers from epilepsy who is currently running through older, flashier titles. Guys, this game was fucking made for me!

This seems slightly like jabbing the hornet’s nest with a stick.

For example, there’s a game literally based on Chicken with a car. There’s a car. There’s a cliff. You have to hit the break to stop the car as close to the cliff as possible without going over. It sums up the concept of Toridama best. Press button to not die, but come close enough to kick the Grim Reaper in the balls. Which probably should have been a game in it now that I think about it. There’s only nineteen total minigames in Toridama, but really, how many variations of this concept can you possibly squeeze out? As it turns out, not even nineteen. There’s an RPG style minigame where you have to stop a meter as close to the center of a bar as possible. Yes, you can choose to run away, but success requires you to keep trying the meter. It sort of betrays the theme, but really all the games are about timing stuff. Probably the one furthest away from the core concept requires you to cook meat using lava by tapping the button to keep yourself as close to the edge of the lava as possible over the course of ten seconds. Yea, you’re still kinda tempting death and testing your courage, but it doesn’t compare to a game based around waiting to open your parachute as close to the ground as possible. I.. uh.. wasn’t so good at that one.

To be clear: it’s a great theme for a game. It’s clever. But Toridama is relatively light on content and what games we do have wear thin quickly. And some of them are extremely fickle about what constitutes a failure or a pass. Each game has a maximum score of 9,999 points. But with some games, there’s apparently so thin a line between scoring in the 5K range, scoring the 10K, or failing that it feels less like skill and more like sheer luck. And that extends to the online leaderboard, which you land on via “Crazy Mode” that requires you to score 9,000K or more or to advance to the next game. The games are thrown at you in random order and I was fucked more than once over 200+ attempts at posting a big score on the board. Filling a Martini glass with “juice” (uh huh, nice way to dodge that T or M rating), getting it right to the lip and still only scoring in the 5K range? Seriously? Who fills that tall away? Alcoholics don’t. It means more booze you have to slurp from the table. Or the carpet.

TORIDAMA is apparently multiplayer-focused, but unless that’s ALL you use it for, you won’t find it fun.

Toridama starts you with a single player mode that fires three random games at players and rates how big or little a chicken you are. Its only purpose really is to unlock all the games and Crazy Mode. You’ll never want to touch it afterwards, since scoring three really good scores in a row is hard enough. You’ll regret not playing Crazy Mode since those can go towards your online score. And there’s a multiplayer mode, but it suffers the same fate so many games do: the person who owns the game will have a significant advantage over friends trying to compete. One that is probably insurmountable. I played against basically everyone in my family and never lost a single match. My family sucks, as evidenced by the fact that I’m part of it, but still, it’s telling that multiplayer is the focus of the package (2 Player mode being the first option in the menu) and yet the actual multiplayer mode really isn’t very fun.

As of this writing I’m #33 on the global leaderboard. While I wish I could brag about this, it really feels like the ordering of games lucked me into this spot. Still, top ranked American. Could be worse.

Now, take this whole review with a heaping spoonful of salt. I love WarioWare and I’m predisposed to enjoying any collection of microgames. And I did have fun with Toridama. But what’s here feels light on content and destined to get old quickly. It’s satisfying to stop a bomb just 0.03 seconds before it detonates. It is fun to let an alligator come this close to eating your face only to back away at the last possible moment. But Toridama is too random and not tightly enough designed to keep anyone focused on it. Which is ironic, since it counts on people with incredible short attention spans to be its audience in the first place. It took me two-and-a-half hours just to finish this last paragraph!

TORIDAMA: Brave Challenge was developed by G-Mode
Point of Sale: Nintendo Switch

$3.50 (normally $5) noted G-Mode found my G-Spot in the making of this review.

TORIDAMA is Chick-Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard

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Maize, Haunted Island, 99Vidas

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SNK 40th Anniversary Collection v Capcom Arcade Cabinet (IGC Retro Bowl II)

January 28, 2019 by 8 Comments

I really should have started off the IGC Retro Bowl concept with SNK 40th Anniversary Collection v Capcom Arcade Cabinet. The two companies are already linked through some fighting game crossovers. And both these sets are sort of unique among retro compilations because they specifically cover each company’s early efforts before they found real success and notoriety. Also, I’d never played any of these games before I got these sets. Just the NES port of Ghosts ‘N Goblins, which isn’t included. But the real reason I should have led with this match-up is because just how damn similar so many of these games are. It’s truly remarkable. It literally made me feel uncomfortable. Playing these two sets next to each-other was like watching someone actively peaking at a fellow student’s test answers, and you’re the only one who sees it and wonders if they should say something. So, sorry Sega Genesis Collection. You’re going to have to wait. We have a grudge match to settle.

IN THIS CORNER
SNK 40th Anniversary Collection
$39.99 for Nintendo Switch (coming to PS4 in March)
23 Arcade Games and 9 NES games released between 1979 and 1990
Game purchased by me.

IN THE OTHER CORNER
Capcom Arcade Cabinet
$4.99 for Starter Pack (required), $24.99 for “All-in-One” pack (all remaining games) $3.99 for each individual game, or $9.99 for packs of multiple games sorted by year for Xbox One via Xbox 360 backwards compatibility.
17 Arcade Games released between 1984 and 1987
Game supplied by fan.

Before getting started, I want to point out how stupidly convoluted getting some of these games for IGC Retro Bowl has been. To purchase backwards-compatible Xbox 360 games on your Xbox One, you can’t actually use your account’s existing balance. Xbox 360 games require you to have a credit card on record. That is so stupid. I understand it has to do with the agreements made with third-parties for how Microsoft would handle the transition from one console to the next. But I didn’t know that until after a fan had already attempted to purchase Capcom Arcade Cabinet for me while it was on sale. This will actually come into play for more upcoming IGC Retro Bowl games like Rare Replay (which features backwards compatible Xbox 360 ports of N64 games) and Midway Origins (another backwards compatible collection).

ORIGINALITY

Now look, I’m not naive. I know the game industry is a gigantic match of “monkey see, monkey do” done with a series of 1s and 0s. It’s been that way literally from Pong onward. But it’s sort of amazing how many games in SNK’s collection are eerily similar to stuff Capcom already made. Commando came out about seven months before Ikari Warriors. Street Fighter (not included in this set) came out two years before Street Smart. Ghosts N’ Goblins was a smash, and then Athena was shat out by SNK (which I pronounced as SINK for the longest time). But the truly amazing thing is how rare it is that the later SNK versions improve upon the stuff they were aping. Only Psycho Solider, which borrows heavily from Capcom’s SonSon, feels like lots of effort was made to ramp-up the formula. Of course, that came out three years after the game it was, ahem, inspired by. I hope it would be better after that long.

To be honest, even with Psycho Soldier putting in a bigger effort, I liked SonSon more. But, I didn’t enjoy either game so that’s damning praise. Most fans of Psycho Soldier.. that’s apparently a thing that exists.. remember it more for its music than it’s gameplay. I played both sets muted for the most part and no siren call is going to convince me that game of all games isn’t just fucking boring.

Not that Capcom are saints in this category. Pirate Ship Higemaru is basically their version of Sega’s 1982 arcade anti-classic Pengo. And there they somehow made a shitty game even worse with some of the most crappy, unresponsive controls I’ve seen in a game like it. The issue is more that at least some of the Capcom games feel like they were taking existing concepts and trying to evolve them. You don’t get that sense with any of SNK’s 23 primary games, with one exception: Crystalis. Which can be summed up as “SNK’s version of Zelda.” It retains the action-RPG concept of the original Legend of Zelda but throws in actual leveling-up mechanics and other role-playing conventions. Yes, Zelda II did that as well, but that’s a side-scroller. Crystalis feels like a sci-fi version of the game most Zelda fans were hoping Adventure of Link would be and wasn’t.

But that’s the lone exception, and even then, it feels like they’re playing follow-the-leader. All the games in SNK 40th Anniversary can be comfortably described as “SNK’s version of..” fill-in-the-blank. Fantasy is SNK’s version of Donkey Kong. Ozma Wars is SNK’s version of Space Invaders. Sasuke vs Commander is their version of Galaxian or Galaga. The most original game is Paddle Mania, and it really sucks. Capcom wasn’t exactly inventing new genres, but at least it feels like they were building onto them instead of just xeroxing them.
Edge: Capcom Arcade Cabinet

Vanguard is both an example of everything right and wrong with the SNK set. It’s actually one of the more fun games to play, but it’s so generic and so derivative that it’s no wonder it was completely lost to history.

EXTRAS

Gameplay is king. That has been my mantra at IGC since day one. But the special features for SNK 40th are so jaw-droppingly awesomeballs that it almost overrides the actual games. I’m such a hardliner for gameplay over bells and whistles that my friends and family literally can’t believe I’d even have to stop and think about it. SNK has a museum menu with tons of information, sort of like a guided tour. Tiny little factoids, even for dozens of games not included in the set. And there are cabinets and flyers and promotional art assets and concept art. It’s all well sourced, cleaned up, and easy to access. None of it is locked (though the museum stuff did seem to cause my game to crash a lot, like 20+ times since December). More than I can say about Capcom’s set, where everything is locked and what little I was able to get wasn’t remotely impressive. Some of the extra-extra features require putting in as much as 25 hours combined on the 17 games here. If they had aged particularly well, maybe they can justify that. They didn’t, and so Capcom can’t. My friend Garrett was supplying me with more factoids and trivia than they did. They should have just packaged him with every copy.

Apparently the files for Yosaku are mostly lost, and a good dump of it doesn’t exist, or so I’ve been told. As the collection notes, it’s one of the most rare arcade games out there. There’s not TONS of information for each game included with SNK 40th. It feels like a coffee table book in video game form.

That’s enough right there for SNK to win, but they spiked the ball by including the ability to rewind games so that you can undo your mistakes, an increasingly common feature I’d like to see more of in the future. But even that wasn’t enough. SNK 40th has the single coolest feature of any classic set ever made. All the arcade games (along with NES-exclusives Crystalis and Iron Tank) allow players to watch a video of someone (possibly tool-assisted AI) making a perfect run at each game. Now, are you ready to have your mind blown? You can actually stop the video at any time and take over the controls from there out, in the exact same spot the video was at. You really have to see it to believe how cool it is.

This, ladies and gentleman, better be a regular feature in classic collections going forward. If it’s not, I can’t be held responsible for my actions.
Major Edge: SNK 40th Anniversary Collection

BEST GAME

1943 Kai is probably the best overall game from either set. I can already hear Crystalis fans reaching for their keyboards to complain. Well, actually I think the best game in SNK is one I’d never even heard of before buying it. It’s called SAR: Search and Rescue. It’s an early blood-and-guts shooter. The original arcade machine, like several SNK shooters, used a special rotary joystick that allowed you to move in one direction and shoot in another without the need of a second stick (like Robotron used). Without that specialized input, SNK 40th converted the titles to twin-stick shooters for this collection. This is actually a positive, as fans of the era told me the twin stick step-up is less clunky and more intuitive. And SAR is genuinely riveting in a time capsule type of way. It’s just so.. gory. I wasn’t expecting that. Despite being a bit slower than I prefer such a game, it never got boring, plays great with two players, and really feels like they were trying to grab attention. If it had actually been given a decent name, maybe it would have taken off. Search and Rescue for a sci-fi game like this? Lesson learned, kiddies: put more than two seconds thought into your names.

That’s a lot of red stuff for a game that came into the world the same year I did.

Meanwhile, 1943 Kai is a moderately upgraded version of 1943, itself a sequel to 1942. The 19XX series is to gaming what the Fast and Furious franchise is to movies. It initially tried to stay somewhat grounded in reality, but by the third installment they were just out of fucks to give. Kai changes the plane and gives it lasers and other futuristic power-ups. Consequently, it feels more modern and, gasp, fun. Neither compilation has a particularly strong lineup, and I don’t know what it says that I wasn’t truly in love with anything from either set. But if I had to choose one game to play for the rest of my life, I think I’d rather play Kai.
Slight Edge: Capcom Arcade Cabinet

I don’t think this is historically accurate.

WHAT’S MISSING THE LEAST?

Both sets focus on the formative years of the respective companies and both are missing a lot of games. In the case of SNK, the initial release was missing a lot more, but an update added 11 titles. That still leaves several no-shows. Games like Atom Smasher, Satan of Saturn, Lasso, Marvin’s Maze, Vanguard II, Gladiator, Jumping Cross, Main Event, Canvas Croquis, Hal 21, Touch Down Fever, Fighting Golf, Fighting Soccer, Mechanized Attack, Baseball Stars, Sky Adventure, or Touch Down Fever II. Now, I won’t pretend like I’m some kind of SNK aficionado. I’d never heard about most of these games until I read about them. But I did just read about their existence.. in SNK 40th Anniversary Collection, where they are displayed prominently in the game’s museum. While I’m sure it would have been time and resource consuming to port all those as well, the fact that there’s so many of the games missing with no word of more DLC coming, free or otherwise, makes this set feel very incomplete.

None of the games listed in this screenshot from the complete SNK timeline included in the collection are present in the game. That kind of sucks. I thought Vanguard was interesting and now want to play the sequel. Game companies that put these sets out might inadvertently send gamers rushing to MAME to check out the stuff left on the table. It makes me wonder if they would have been better off waiting to release the collection in November of 2019 in order to include more games. But then again, SNK 41st Anniversary Collection doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

Capcom’s heavy hitters can’t be satisfactorily explained away either. Yes, more complete Capcom sets (Capcom Classics Collection Vol 1 & 2) were released for the PS2 and original Xbox. Well, this isn’t those consoles. There’s no original Street Fighter. Or Final Fight. Or Bionic Commando. Or Mercs. Or Tiger Road. Or Forgotten Roads. And yea, some of the games did get a separate release in Capcom Beat-Em Up Bundle. But again, this is actually a backwards compatible game from a previous generation. They didn’t plan the Beat-Em Up set yet. So skipping those games here feels very lazy. What we did get feels like a dumping ground of games nobody in their right mind would actually want as anything but part of a collection. I don’t think that’s true of SNK. Even with so many missing games, I don’t feel anything that is definitively SNK is missing from that compilation. There’s no truly iconic Capcom game in a Capcom collection, and that’s just plain baffling.
Edge: SNK 40th Anniversary Collection

HISTORIC SIGNIFICANCE

The following is an indisputable fact: the Capcom that exists today is, for better or worse, the same linear company that made the games featured in this set. You can’t say the same about SNK. The SNK that published the games in this collection.. well.. died. And that makes perfect sense. I’m guessing diehard fans of the company that are older than me won’t want to hear it, but I always looked at SNK like a cover band that made inferior versions of more popular work. They were making the Dollar Store, off-brand also-ran fighters that didn’t sniff 1/10th the success or reverence Street Fighter II did. I’m sure there are people out there that will swear on a stack of Bibles that King of Fighters or Samurai Showdown were better games than Street Fighter II and its twenty-two billion special editions. But they weren’t making terrible movies with Jean-Claude Van Damme based on King of Fighters. For my generation, we mostly know SNK from generic, red arcade cabinets containing four generic games from franchises they don’t make new games for (mostly) today.

Before buying SNK 40th, the only time I heard of any of the games included in it were from people talking about how bad they were. Like the Angry Game Nerd riffing on the NES version of Ikari Warriors (included in this collection, and yes indeed, it’s truly horrible). Prehistoric Isle is probably the third best game of the set. Not great or anything, but genuinely fun. Good use of theme. But it’s not exactly the type of game that comes up often in casual conversations with Golden Agers. That’s the SNK set in a nutshell: okay games you’ve never heard of and probably will never play again once you finish them once.

But, the issue is none of either company’s truly iconic franchises are here. And trust me, while you’re sitting there stewing that some hateful millennial said tons of mean things about your favorite classic games, I’ve been sitting here for hours positively stumped about how I quantify the historic value of the games we actually have in the set. Ghosts ‘N Goblins is probably the most overall famous title of anything featured today. But it’s famous for all the wrong reasons. It’s not so much a “good ole days” game as much as it was a “games were harder back in the day” crowing point that blowhards point to. Almost none of whom actually beat these games on the developer’s terms. They needed save states or Game Genies or any other laundry list of help to make anything resembling progress. Ghosts ‘N Goblins is famous because it’s a terrible game that lots of kids really wanted to like and actually didn’t. Everything else in the Capcom set barely qualifies as a footnote in gaming history. And the one game that most gamers do remember and still talk about, they talk about in the same tone that they talk about their old high-school friend they reconnected with on Facebook only to find out he’s since become a holocaust denier.

Maybe you can say the same thing about the SNK set, but this is where the extra features provide an assist. Because the games in that collection are framed in a way where the hateful millennial you’re still pissed off at gets education on why these games mattered, and how they laid the groundwork for the company that SNK would become. I didn’t know their first arcade game had intended to use interchangeable cartridges, and even if that game isn’t present here, I think that shit is neat. Like, wow, they actually had something like Neo Geo in mind right from the very foundation of their existence in the 1970s. That’s swell. Maybe Capcom wouldn’t have lasted if they hadn’t found moderate successful with games like Side Arms or Vulgus, but what we do have feels almost unimportant. The games in SNK’s set are displayed with such care and love that it makes them feel more important to our community’s history than they probably are. Plus they included NES ports of the games, as if to say “well if you think Ikari Warriors was shitty in arcades, you should see what people at home had to suffer through.” Both sets feel light on importance, but..
Slight Edge: SNK 40th Anniversary Collection

“Maybe if we just throw all the game artwork into a big pile and use that for a menu, nobody will notice the complete lack of star-power in our set.” Oh, and you can only get Vulgus and 1943 Kai if you buy every other game in the set. They can’t be purchased separately and are “bonus games.” Kai is the best game in the collection and Vulgus is at least decent enough to not be painful. You really dicked fans with this one, Capcom.

PLAY VALUE TODAY

Probably the biggest issue with Capcom Arcade Cabinet is just how maddening the games are. I adjusted every game’s difficulty to easy and I still was losing virtual quarters in under a minute to most of the games. Gun.Smoke I lasted 35 seconds my first attempt. Of course, for Fantasy on the SNK collection, my first play took me 2.3 seconds of actual game-time to lose all my lives. Yes, you read that right: 2.3 seconds. If I had been a teenager in 1981, I’d probably have been arrested for punching out the screen. It’d been my final Fantasy if you catch my drift.

But nothing else in the SNK set fucked me to the degree Fantasy did. And while most of the games underwhelmed me in both sets, the issue with Capcom Arcade Cabinet is how samey it is. Most of the games are some form of a shmup, and all the ones that aren’t I found to be terrible. Ghosts ‘N Goblins? Terrible. Gun.Smoke? Terrible. Avengers? No, not that Avengers. No, not one either. No, an original game called Avengers. It sucks. Trojan and Black Tiger seemed like they could be fun, but even on easy the enemies drained health too fast and the overall design seemed like it was based around taking quarters with little regard for giving players value. I started a life in Black Tiger and in under 30 seconds, I opened a treasure chest that caused an instakill. It’d be like if the old man in Zelda said “it’s dangerous to go alone, take this” and then pulled out a glock and capped Link. Game Over. I somehow doubt Zelda goes down in history as an all-timer if it pulls that stunt.

The most interesting game in Capcom by far was Speed Rumbler, a game so lost to history that it doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page. It plays like a primitive form of the old 2D Grand Theft Auto games and might have been fun. But again, prohibitive difficulty and unresponsive controls sort of make it hard to appreciate that it might have been the unstated inspiration for one of the biggest franchises in gaming history. Or, as a friend pointed out, it might have inspired the NES Roger Rabbit game. (Hey, why not both?) Two games in Capcom’s set I could unambiguously say I enjoyed: Side Arms and 1943 Kai. Out of seventeen games. The rest are either broken, boring, or so underwhelming that my saying “it’s alright” would immediately be followed with a yawn.

Speed Rumbler also suffers from extreme difficulty. It makes me wonder if the “easy” options are purely decorative.

With SNK 40th Anniversary, nothing blew my mind. Both the games that had the highest potential to do so (Crystalis and SAR) have something so wrong with them that it mutes my enthusiasm for further playtime with them. Crystalis controls too loosely and the primary weapon feels weak and unsatisfying to stab stuff with. SAR simply plays too slow and lacks enough wacky weapons to make it truly the spectacle I suspect it was trying to be. The best game with the fewest problems, Prehistoric Isle, is really just another fucking shmup that happens to have an interesting theme and little more going for it. To be clear: these are good games. But, the rest of the set can say what Capcom can’t: the games are playable and never feel demoralizing. Maybe I was underwhelmed with Ikari Warriors 2, but it hardly sucks. Bermuda Triangle isn’t mind-blowing, but it wasn’t worthless either. The two best games in Capcom are probably better than anything in SNK’s set, but SNK has more stuff worth looking at. Gameplay is king, and you just plain get more with SNK.
Edge: SNK 40th Anniversary Collection

WINNER
SNK 40TH ANNIVERSARY COLLECTION

And that makes me happy for one primary reason: Capcom’s set feels like a cynical cash-grab. I’m surprised the emulator isn’t constantly shitting the bed with it. It’s that half-assed and that rushed. It’s such a lazy, uninspired set of games. If they were excluded from a real Capcom’s greatest hits set, I don’t think anyone would actually miss 80% of them. The irony is that SNK’s games all felt about as original as an Asylum film, but there’s nothing about SNK 40th Anniversary Collection that feels soulless or like a cash grab. It’s a labor of love. I can’t imagine this particular collection of games would sell a lot. I’ve even seen people who came close to buying it only to change their minds when they found out Neo Geo era games weren’t along for the ride. Given that none of these games, even Crystalis, are exactly legends, it wouldn’t be reasonable to think a compilation like this would ever grace a top-sellers chart. This seems like a bad investment for SNK to make. And yet, it exists, and it’s actually really beautiful. SNK 40th Anniversary Collection was made as a way for SNK to tell their fans “you know what? We always did appreciate your support.” When do you ever seen that from a major game company anymore? I didn’t even like most of the games in it, but I’d recommend it in a heartbeat to anyone who wants to take a stroll down memory lane with someone who deserves to take that journey with you. And from what I’ve seen here, SNK absolutely should be that company.

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Left-Right: The Mansion

January 26, 2019 by Leave a comment

I’ve played good ideas made badly, and dumb ideas made well. Left-Right: The Mansion is one of those heartbreaking “dumb idea made badly” type of games. Now I’ll be honest: I don’t even remember buying this. I apparently had a seizure afterwards. But going off the marketplace page, I expected one of those “escape room” type of games with puzzle elements. There’s nothing like that here. The idea is you’re given a left door and a right door. One of them leads to another room. One of them leads to a dead-end that forces you to start the sequence of rooms over. That sounds fine, right?

I spent almost $4 on this 🙁

Well, there’s actually no way to tell which door is the correct door and which one is the dead-end. 50-50 odds. A coin-flip. Pure luck. You can’t study the layout of the rooms for clues. There are none. There’s no use for power-of-deduction. It’s completely random chance. The gameplay comes from the fact that the correct order remains the same for each floor, each play-session. So basically you’re playing the Ralph Baer classic Simon with only two options instead of four and without knowing what the next move is. Yea, this is one of the worst ideas for a game I’ve seen in over seven years.

http://twitter.com/IndieGamerChick/status/1089386874626465794

I really don’t have that much to say about this one. I honestly think this wasn’t something designed for grown-ups. The very, very tame horror setting and the concept are more suitable for very young children. I tested this out on a few kids. Ones age 8 and upwards found Left-Right: The Mansion to be boring. The seven-year-old wanted to keep playing, and in fact just came in the room as I was typing this to ask if they could play more of it. Take that for what it’s worth. The issue is I can’t review from the perspective of a seven-year-old. I can only continue to behave like one. Left-Right: The Mansion is one of the worst games on Switch and no amount of infinite modes or “challenge modes” (really the same game with a time limit) help. It’s boring. Who would look at Simon and say “what this really needs is two less buttons and the element of random chance?” I made it about halfway through before finally surrendering to instead do anything else. Shampooing my carpets has never looked more exciting.

Left-Right: The Mansion was developed by Triple Boris
Point of Sale: Nintendo Switch

$3.59 (normally priced $3.99, yea I even pre-ordered this, derp) noted the seven year old REALLY wants the Switch back so parents, this could very well raise your kids for you in the making of this review.

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Dragon’s Lair Trilogy v Sega Genesis Classics (IGC Retro Bowl I)

January 25, 2019 by 6 Comments

Welcome to the first IGC Retro Bowl. Here’s the idea: two classic game collections will be pitted head-to-head with each other in a variety of categories. Whichever game wins the most wins and moves on to face the next challenger. The loser takes their seat somewhere on the IGC Retro Board, which is like the Leaderboard but for Retro Collections instead of indies. That’s coming soon.

By the way, in the interest of full disclosure, this is the first feature in IGC history where I’m not paying for every game featured. These are not indie games, and I really can’t justify buying games that were not remotely aimed at me. Some of these were supplied by fans who wanted me to experience (or suffer) through the games of their childhood. Others have been supplied by the companies themselves. I’ve also bought a few for myself and will continue to buy others if this feature takes off.

What collections to look forward to for IGC Retro Bowl? Here’s what I already have for it, and I expect to get more:

  • Rare Replay
  • Midway Origins
  • SNK 40th Anniversary Collection
  • NES Classic Edition
  • SNES Classic Edition
  • Capcom Arcade Cabinet
  • Capcom Beat ‘Em Up Bundle
  • Atari Flashback Classics (Switch version)
  • Mega Man Legacy Collection
  • Mega Man Legacy Collection 2
  • Disney Afternoon
  • Namco Museum Arcade Pac

And of course, today’s contenders..

IN THIS CORNER
Dragon’s Lair Trilogy
$19.99 for Nintendo Switch
3 arcade games released between 1983 – 1991
Game supplied by a fan.

IN THE OTHER CORNER
Sega Genesis Classics
$29.99 for Switch, PlayStation 4, & Xbox One
53 console games released between 1988 – 1997 (51 on Switch)
Game supplied by Sega.

I hate FMV games. I’m getting that chiseled on my tombstone. Dragon’s Lair wasn’t the first FMV game. Funny enough, Sega barely beat them to the market with Astron Belt, even though work on it was done much sooner than Dragon’s Lair. But while Astron Belt bombed so badly that you’ve probably never heard of it, Dragon’s Lair went on to become a bonafide legend. It’s still fondly remembered today. I had barely played it at all before a fan bought it for me for this feature and really didn’t understand it. But, I go into every game with as open a mind as humanly possible, and this was no exception.

As for the Genesis, it had NOTHING to do with my childhood. My father insisted he did own a Genesis, and eventually we did find one in the attic. It had two games (Altered Beast and Super Monaco GP) and looked like it had barely been touched. My gaming upbringing really didn’t begin until the PlayStation 1 in 1996. Funny enough, the oldest game released in this set came out in North America a year after I got my PS1. Anyway, I’m known for shitting on Sega games, Sonic especially. So imagine my surprise when Sega actually sent me a code (initially from my friend/surrogate little brother Jon). When I finally spoke to them, I was fully open that I wasn’t the biggest fan. But they were smart enough to know that it didn’t matter if I was. Once my fans saw I was playing the set, they’d find out it existed at all and rush out to buy it. And they did. Sega’s message to me was essentially “sock it to us.” Which is pretty much what happened. And my older readers responded by buying the set OUT OF SPITE for me. Sega: they’re smart cookies.

And so, for our first every IGC Retro Bowl, we’re going to pit these two collections featuring games I have no nostalgia for against each other. Which will soar and which will sink?

Yea, this is a tremendous waste of time. Dragon’s Lair has about as much chance as no-armed golfer using his mouth to swing the club at Augusta. But work with me here.

PRESENTATION

Sega Genesis Classics’ menu is themed like a typical 90s child’s bedroom. Well, an idealized, borderline fantasy one. It’s too clean, among other things. Games are displayed on a wooden rack. You can move the games you enjoy into their own section, which is a nice feature. Selecting games sees them inserted into the Genesis. You can even eject the carts afterwards. There’s a huge variety of options to run the emulation too. Of course, it kind of sucks that sometimes the emulator shits the bed, especially displaying text in games like the Phantasy Star and Shining Force titles.

I questioned on Twitter whether children of the 90s really would have a record player. Most people said yea, they would. I still find that hard to believe but they insist. Guess it’s true.

Dragon’s Lair Trilogy has a much fewer options. You can display the games with or without an arcade cabinet. You can turn on and off the movements guides. Turning them off is something only the most sadomasochistic person would ever consider. But really, the most noteworthy aspect is how bad figuring out what’s highlighted on the menus can be. Take a look here and tell me which of the two options is selected?

Believe it or not, CONTINUE is what’s selected right now. I have no clue why they decided to make the duller color the cursor, but they did. And that combines with other issues. There’s no language options, which is weird because you’re watching a movie. I mean, sorta. And while the extra features are nice (more on them later), you can’t skip to different parts of the interview, nor can you rewind or fast forward. You either watch it all at once or not at all. Lame.
Edge: Sega Genesis Classics

HISTORIC IMPORTANCE

Dragon’s Lair is slightly more than a weird anomaly. In 1983, it received the largest order for units in the history of the Chicago Coin convention. It shattered every previous record, by some accounts securing more orders than all other games at the show combined. That order was for $10,000,000. That’s in 1983 dollars, or over $30,000,000 in today’s dollar. For an arcade game. Granted, Dragon’s Lair cost between 3 to 5 times as much as other games did, but still, it’s pretty noteworthy. And that investment did pay off for arcade operators. Arcades were starting to decline, but Dragon’s Lair brought players back and kept them there. Even being the first upright game to charge $0.50 a play didn’t deter gamers.

In a set based on an anomaly, Space Ace is itself an anomaly. Of the three, I think it has the best story and best animation. It certainly has the highest potential to become a property with actual value today. Besides, it’s about emasculating a dude-bro. I heard that’s topical today.

For a few months at least. What Dragon’s Lair really did was attract a crowd to arcades so they could check out the latest titles from other manufacturers. Dragon’s Lair was neat to watch, but players quickly caught on that it wasn’t really interactive. You had no control over Dirk the Daring and once the novelty wore off, so did Dragon Lair’s use. It didn’t help the machines were prone to breaking down. No game from its era displayed “out of order” signs more than Dragon’s Lair. When Space Ace came along, the boom was even briefer. Funny enough, Dragon’s Lair was so uncommon by 1991 that Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp also very briefly caused an arcade resurgence. And once again, the same thing happened: fans quickly caught on that it was a horrible game and moved on to other things. Still, people do remember it for reasons other than being shitty, and that counts for something. I had a gamer from that era tell me that Dragon’s Lair was like a bright, beautiful shooting star. Look away for even a second and you miss it completely, but everyone who saw it will never forget it.

But the historical significance of Dragon’s Lair pales in comparison to the Genesis. They’re polar opposites in terms of their trajectories. Dragon’s Lair made a major impact immediately and then fizzled out quickly. The Genny arrived with little fanfare and support. Gamers of the time wanted to wait on the next new Nintendo console. But then an incredible marketing campaign (Genesis Does What NintenDon’t), an aggressive free-game for early adopters program, competitive pricing and the arrival of Sonic T. Hedgehog turned around the fortunes of the console. By time the SNES launched, the Genesis was legitimate competition for it, and that carried on for the entire generation. The Master System flopped. The Saturn flopped. The Dreamcast, regretfully, flopped. Sega still carries clout and reverence to this day, and the main reason for that is the Genesis.
Major Edge: Sega Genesis Classics

 

Oh my God, Genny fans will hate me for this: I actually liked Toejam & Earl 2 more than the original, which I didn’t like at all. I think the idea for TJ&E was great and this was a case of being ahead of its time. “The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak” type of deal based on the limitations of the Genesis. That’s why I’m excited for the upcoming reboot. It’s going to be what the original wanted to be and wasn’t. UPDATE: Wow was I ever wrong about Back in the Groove. I hated it.

BEST AND WORST GAMES

I blitzed through all fifty-one games in the Switch port of Genny Classics over a two-day period. Twenty of those games got a more in-depth look from me afterwards. But during that initial blitz, only one of the games had me so sucked in that I couldn’t put it down until the credits rolled. That game was Gunstar Heroes. I’d heard the stories of course, but most titles from that era that carry the legend of John Henry’s hammer never live up to their towering reputation. With Gunstar, I was so awed by the marvelous gameplay that I literally started to cry in euphoric elation. It was so fun. I couldn’t believe a game that good was in a collection that had so underwhelmed me up to that point. Not only does it hold up today, but it should be studied by all game design students. It drops all the bullshit and focuses on fun, tight shooting gameplay. It’s one of the 25 best games ever made, and the best Genesis exclusive from its generation. It’s probably worth $29.99 on its own.

Sometimes the legends live up to their reputation.

As for the stinkers, over half the set has games that couldn’t withstand the test of time, but, nothing really stands out as abysmal. Except Sonic Spinball, which was never good for its day. Riddled with slowdown and technical issues (no surprise, it was made in only two months in order to replace Sonic 3 for a Happy Meal tie-in), the game is almost unplayable. Even then, Sonic Spinball has more gameplay at its worst moment than any of the three games in Dragon’s Lair Trilogy has. FMV games are limited in their capabilities, but I can’t let that be an excuse for just how crushingly unfun these relics are. Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp probably plays the best of the collection. It’s more clear which direction you’re supposed to press, which is something you can’t say about a few rooms in Dragon’s Lair or especially Space Ace. I preferred Space Ace to Dragon’s Lair 1 because it has a little more going on with the energize concept, but none of these anti-classics are really all that playable. Plus, they’re so prohibitively difficult that I think the average gamer will never put more than five minutes at most into any one of the three games even if they want to. They’re putrid.
Major Edge: Sega Genesis Classics

 

Dragon’s Lair II was co-written by an author whose initials are L.S.D. if you catch my drift.

EXTRAS

Hey, congratulations Dragon’s Lair Trilogy! You didn’t get shutout! Due to licensing issues, the Genny collection couldn’t include things a true museum-style collection probably ought to, like the iconic Genesis advertising. I can understand that. What I can’t understand is why things like concept art or interviews weren’t included. You do get online play and leaderboards, but I found the co-op to be laggy. There’s also “challenges” on the Switch version which stand-in for achievements from other ports. It’s a low-effort affair, with the best “special” feature being alternate region versions of games like Streets of Rage that differ sometimes in small ways and sometimes in huge ways. It’s a nice touch, one that a lot of my fans were shocked but very happy to learn about.

Dragon’s Lair Trilogy has a few bonuses. There’s a twenty-minute or so interview with Don Bluth, Gary Goldman, and Rick Dyer. It’s not long, but there’s some nice info in it, including plans for a line of thirty (!) FMV games, none of which materialized. An unproduced concept, The Sea Beast and Barnacle Bill, was going to be inspired by vintage Popeye cartoons and even had a promotional flyer made. But, nah, a game based on golden age animation would never succeed.

There’s also the animatics for part of a deleted stage (complete with voice acting) from Dragon’s Lair II, attract screens, and the ability to watch the complete movies without playing them. Those tell you everything you really need to know about Dragon’s Lair: that the best extra feature is the ability to not play the game.
Major Edge: Dragon’s Lair Trilogy

 

The dude in the middle did all the work and got none of the credit. Then he went bankrupt trying to push a Laserdisc-based console. No happy endings here, anyone.

WHAT IS MISSING THE LEAST?

My first exposure to Dragon’s Lair as a franchise came at the age of 13 with the release of Dragon’s Lair 3D: Return to the Lair for Xbox and GameCube (and PS2 if you were in Europe, though I heard it was broken on that platform). When I heard the term “Dragon’s Lair Trilogy”, I honestly thought the third game was going to be that, not Space Ace. It aspired to be what people always wanted to be able to do with the original game: actually play it. With the invention of cel-shaded graphics, it was now possible to take full control over Dirk. Return to the Lair did recreate all the famous set-pieces from the arcade original, and it looked very convincing. But, the game controlled miserably, had a terrible camera, and just still wasn’t very fun. Still, at least it’s a game and not a glorified string of DVD menus. Also missing are more gamey ports of Dragon’s Lair. Data East released one for the SNES. Absolute released Space Ace for the SNES. A Dragon’s Lair III was released on Amiga computers. There’s not even a mention of them here. While getting the rights to these games might have been prohibitive, it’s regretful that there’s nothing here but the three famous laser disc games. Then again, since all these games sucked (the NES Dragon’s Lair is famous for it’s horribleness), we really aren’t missing that much. Thayer’s Quest is probably the biggest omission. It was a conversion kit for Dragon’s Lair and I assume Rick Dyer has to own the rights to it. And at least that has something resembling gameplay and interactivity. But ultimately, nothing important is missing.

The same can’t be said for Sega Genesis Classics. The Genesis was defined by its sports games, but none of those are here. Nor are celebrity games like Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker. None of the three Ecco the Dolphin games are included. Sonic & Knuckles isn’t included. Sonic *3* isn’t included (apparently due to music issues). Eternal Champions isn’t included. It’s not as if these are minor omissions. These are first party Sega games that helped define the platform. Maybe they would have bumped the cost of the set up and that’s why a better effort wasn’t made to secure the rights to them. To which I say: I think most Genesis fans would have paid $10 more to have them involved. It’s not a complete set without them. Even stranger: the Switch version specifically is missing the two Wonder Boy games PS4 and XB1 owners got. Bizarre.
Edge: Dragon’s Lair Trilogy

 

Jokes aside, this would probably KILL upon solo re-release today. Someone really should get on it.

PLAY VALUE TODAY

All games are a product of their time, so perhaps the test of time is an unreasonable one. That doesn’t make it any less real. I didn’t grow up in either set’s respective eras. Their play value to me has to exist without historic context. Under those terms, at least the a few of the Sega Genesis Classics hold up reasonable well and can stand on their own merits. Besides Gunstar Heroes, I think the average gamer will still be able to enjoy games like Sonic 1 and 2 (I literally can’t believe I just said that), Alien Solider, the Streets of Rage games, the Shining Force games, and at least two of the three Phantasy Star Games included. There’s something for everyone here. And if you’re a slobbering 90s fanboy, that precious nostalgia dopamine is bound to hit even for stuff that aged especially poorly. You’ll feel like a kid again. And probably act like one too when you read how much younger people hate your childhood favorites.

A priest wants to “investigate” a bunch of children “to make sure nobody is hurt.” Well, if that’s not timeless, I don’t know what is.

I don’t think the same can be said about Dragon’s Lair Trilogy. No matter how fond your memories of it are, playing these games today is the pits. Putting aside how beautiful Don Bluth’s animation is, they have to also hold up as video games, and they don’t at all. They basically didn’t from the moment they launched. They’re frustrating, quarter-snatching slogs. Even by the low standards of FMV games, badly designed too. I can’t tell you how many times the on-screen indicator was placed in a way where it wasn’t clear if you’re supposed to move one direction or another. It forces you to use a guide that was added to this set in order to know what you’re supposed to do. The greatest irony of Dragon’s Lair and its ilk is that excelling at playing them can only be done by paying as little attention to the artwork and the storylines as possible. Only when you ignore the only possible reason you’d want to play them can they be played well. And that, above all else, makes them some of the absolute worst games ever made.
Major Edge: Sega Genesis Classics

 

WINNER
SEGA GENESIS CLASSICS

And let’s face it: it wasn’t even a fair battle. I had never played Space Ace or Dragon’s Lair II before I got this set, but having spent five minutes previously with a BluRay of Dragon’s Lair, I sort of had. I’m not taking anything away from what these games accomplished. But it’s pretty telling that most of the fondest memories from Golden Agers are not of actually playing Dragon’s Lair itself, but watching others play it on a second monitor most cabinets came with. I’m sure the visuals were mindblowing for their time. It’s not their time anymore. It stopped being their time long ago. Really, did any game lose its relevance faster during that era than Dragon’s Lair?

Sega Genesis Classics is hardly a flawless set. The lack of extras, frequent emulation issues, laggy online play, and perplexing omissions frustrate for sure. But there are games here that have value today, in 2019. More than one. I think there’s even games that initially were shit on, like Sonic 3D Blast, that are actually better than anyone gave them credit for being. Genesis Does indeed.

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kuso (Review)

January 23, 2019 by 1 Comment

Welp, so much for my pledge to update daily in 2019. I did make it a week, but then dealing with the stupid epilepsy thing, running the hugely popular and scene-changing #IndieSelect, working behind the scenes as a community advocate and advisor, and I’m creating a social-media movement to help under-the-radar games to be found and played. Yea, things got busy. But, my passion will always be my work as a critic. And if you want to know why, look no further than this guy.

Adorable, isn’t he?

Doesn’t he look nice? His name is Fred Wood. And he is nice. At least outwardly. But Fred has a darkness about him. We know this because he made a sadistic punisher in 2014 that was littered with blind jumps and living or dying based on pure luck. And he called it “Love” because of course he did. Look at that dude. How can such a nice person make such a cruel game? It’d be like finding out Mother Teresa moonlighted as a taxidermist. One that didn’t wait for the animals to be dead first.

Anyway, I didn’t like Love. It didn’t win the IGC Seal of Approval. But it wasn’t as if I hated it. It had one of the most clever and innovative gameplay mechanics I’d seen up to that point: the ability to place checkpoints anytime. In my book, that’s a hall-of-fame innovation right up there with the ring system in Sonic or the mushrooms causing you to grow in Super Mario. I just didn’t like the unfair level design. For me personally, I want to know that when I die in a game, it’s my fault. I knew Fred was capable of better. So I wasn’t nice to Love and I challenged Fred to step it the fuck up.

He did.

That’s why I’m a game critic. The ones that listen and improve are what makes it worth it.

Levels feel more like a series of exhibits. It’s seriously one of the strangest sensations I’ve ever felt playing a game. It almost defies description, because the levels ARE levels, but they don’t feel like any levels from any game, ever.

Kuso (I absolutely refuse to call it “kuso” with a lowercase k) is the sequel to Love, and it’s one of those rare sequels that rights every wrong with the original. There wasn’t a single blind jump, or any moments where I needed luck to survive. Oh I got lucky a few times, but raw skills could have carried me to victory. I swear. Stop staring.

I suspect I’ll be pointing at Kuso for years to come as an example on how to properly make a punisher. And yeah, that has a lot to do with the fact that Kuso is overflowing with a wide variety of obstacle types, traps, platforms, and room concepts. It never gets old or boring. That stuff matters, but the biggest reason by far is Kuso has some of the most rock-solid play control any game in the genre has. It’s a breeze to control. Movement and jumping physics feel like they were fine-tuned in laboratory conditions. I try not to use the term “perfect” because I used to believe that perfection was unobtainable. But kuso controls perfectly. I can’t stress enough how important that is. If you think of any game as a guided sight-seeing tour, controls are the tour guide. A good one allows you to appreciate everything so much more. If you get a bad one, all you can think about is how much they suck, to the point that you stop paying attention and end up giving it a half-star rating on Yelp. You’d tip your Kuso tour guide. Every death you experience.. and it will be a lot.. will be on you. And you’ll know it.

I have no clue how it pulls this off, since really the stuff that kills you is often just redrawn/reskinned versions of stuff that already killed you, but each Kuso stage feels fresh from what came before it. At least until the last few levels that serve as a montage of all the shit you just got past.

Kuso’s stages are brief and usually focused on one or two types traps. It made me feel like I was running through a series of vignettes more than levels. A weird feeling for sure. Actually, that’s what makes Kuso stand out to me. It feels different from any other game I’ve played. It even looks like the type of game that doesn’t really exist that’d you’d see the charters on a sitcom or movie playing. It’s so stereotypical that it seems unreal. Which is bizarre because it looks and plays almost exactly like Love. But Love’s level design tended to go a little off-the-rails at times, like having to jump from an above platform blindly to one far below you that had a long line of spikes with one and only one safe spot that you didn’t know where it was until you hit it. Well that’s shit design because surviving your first time will come down to luck. It’s “gotcha” gameplay. There’s NO gotcha shit in Kuso. The craftsmanship of the levels, where every single portion of them feels like it was worked and reworked until it was both challenging but fair is exemplary.

There are some complaints. Kuso is the first ever game where I feel you respawn too fast. Often death is such a surprise that you respawn while still holding the direction you were moving when you got killed, leading to you spawning and walking off a ledge and to your death. I guarantee every player will experience at least a dozen “two deaths for the price of one” moments over the course of their first play-through. And even though Kuso is longer than Love in terms of stages, the levels feel a bit shorter. Fred, cool guy that he is, included a remake of Love with Kuso’s tighter controls in the Kuso package. You can even play all 16 of Love’s stages and Kuso’s 25 stages in a row if you wish, but I still don’t love Love. Kuso is the main reason to buy this one, but it falls just short of feeling like it’s the perfect length. It’s the classic issue I’ve had all my life: having guy’s things climax before I’m ready.

I often just straight-up didn’t lay down enough checkpoints. I can’t explain why, since I’m not a speed-runner or even a particularly skilled platform player. I just felt like the game was judging me every time I threw one down. Well, actually it DOES judge you on that once you’re finished. I got an F. Thanks so much, Kuso. There goes my self-esteem.

I must really not like punishers. Because Kuso is near perfect, and yet it doesn’t carry a higher ranking on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard that a game as good as it should. It has perfect controls and, with the clever checkpoint system, is as challenging as you want it to be. With this review, Kuso debuts #13 on the board. That means it’s the thirteenth best indie game I’ve ever reviewed, and this was review #583. That’s really high up there. It’s an astonishing moment in my site’s history. But it’s also weird that a game that I’ll be pointing at as near-flawless for probably the rest of my life doesn’t go higher. Maybe for me, Kuso is the limit of what a game like this can achieve. I don’t get why people like games with high user body-counts. I’ll never understand the appeal in it. But hey, fun is fun, right? And Kuso is really fun. But Kuso still feels like it’s more about the dying, and not the surviving. Perhaps in that sense, its one and only flaw that matters reveals itself. SEE! I TOLD YOU FUCKERS I DON’T HAVE THE PERSONALITY OF A DOMINATRIX!

kuso (goddamn people capitalize your titles) was developed by Fred Wood
Point of Sale: Nintendo Switch, Steam

$0.99 (normally $4.99) cussed Kuso cautiously constantly in the making of this review.

kuso (grumble) is Chick-Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.

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Gris (Switch Review)

January 8, 2019 by 8 Comments

The first level of Gris is a boring, frustrating, annoying slog that overstays its welcome. Gusts of wind hold you back and stunt your progress. You eventually get the ability to turn into a block so that you don’t get thrown backwards and have to wait for the wind to die down. By this point, it was already clear that Gris had more care given to it than your typical art-house symbolism title. The first time I messed around with the jump button, I felt a weight come off me when I realized “oh hey, they actually made sure jumping feels good. That’s a relief.” And then I got to the gusts of wind and was like “oh dear.” This just was not a well-designed section.

Fuck this stage. Fuck it in its ear with a rusty garden rake.

I led off the review talking about that, because if not for that level, Gris might have become the new #1 game on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard. For the rest of this review, it’ll be the elephant in the room. The part where I think, god damn, was there nobody at Devolver Digital who could have taken the Gris team aside and said “you know, that first section really sucks. You should dump it or at least shorten it significantly”? For all the people who think I go too negative on games that I like, I wanted to get that part out-of-the-way. It’s literally the only major complaint I have about this: an absolute indie masterpiece.

Gris is ostensibly about mourning, with the main character going through the five stages of grief. But I’ve got to be honest: a lot of the symbolism was lost on me. And trust me, it’s not because I’m unfamiliar with loss. On Christmas morning in 2017, my service dog of eleven years passed away. I’m sure for some people they think “a dog? Seriously?” Yea, a dog. One that spent eleven straight years by my side. That saved my life multiple times. That made me realize my own capacity to love. You can’t just take that shit away from someone and not have it hurt. In Gris, mourning is symbolized by a loss of voice, and this is the one form of symbolism I can relate to. Because it’s hard to articulate exactly how much you’re hurting. It’s as if your voice has been taken. That part I connected with.

The statues and the returning of color to the world being part of the healing process? Not so much. In fact, I found humor in the idea. I’m sorry to anyone who gets offended by this, but the first color you return to the world of Gris (which is literally the French/Spanish word for “Grey”) is red. And it’s supposed to be this profound, first-step-in-recovery moment in the game. In reality? It totally looks like the girl just had her period.

I’m not joking.

Maybe they should have started with a different color.

Now, at this point in the game, the mourning aspect hadn’t been clear to me. I honestly wasn’t sure if the idea was supposed to be a demented adult version of Rainbow Brite menstruating color back into the world. Your mileage may very on how much the symbolism works for you. It really didn’t do a whole lot for me. I don’t feel any better about Cherry’s death than I did before. I’ve heard from some people who say Gris did help them feel better about a recent loss they experienced. I wish I was with them, but I’m not. So for me, Gris has to make it entirely on its gameplay merit.

And it does.

Gris is a truly special game as a game. And I think that’s getting lost in the discussion. People are obsessing over the gorgeous graphics, the pantheon-level soundtrack, and complex symbolism of the crushing sensation of being in mourning. All those things matter, but if Gris had been your typical artsy platformer, nobody would get to appreciate those things. Trust me, I’ve played a lot of games that aspire to be what Gris pulled off. They don’t do it because they rely on the visuals and the metaphors and forget that they’re supposed to be a video game as well. Gris never forgets what it is, and that’s to everyone’s benefit. It means we get to take in the whole of the experience without the distraction of that vision being horribly executed. Nobody will ever need to make up excuses for Gris because Gris is really fun to play. You know, like a game is supposed to be?

This is supposed to represent “depression” but all I could think of was “who left that banana peel there?”

Controls are a big part of that. Gris is rock-solid in every single aspect of movement. You feel one-to-one with the lead character. Even the clunky joycons of the Switch manage to cease to exist in your hands, allowing for total immersion in the game’s world. Based on my track record with art-house games, I wasn’t expecting that. That for me was the story of Gris from start to finish. My expectations based on the graphics and the concept were low. A swimming section happened and I cringed upon realizing I was in water. Around thirty-seconds later, I realized Gris had the best swimming controls maybe in the entire history of video games. Like.. huh.. I didn’t expect that. I didn’t expect to be rocketed up into the sky like Superman using butterflies that help you super jump, but I really didn’t expect it to control so naturally that I never once messed up any of those jumps. Gris might be the best controlling 2D platformer of its kind. Good controls don’t make a game, but bad controls absolutely will break your game. Gris figured this out, and because it did, we get to appreciate the level design. Aspiring indie devs: this is a game you’ll want to play while taking lots of notes.

If you think of Gris as a 2D version of thatgamecompany’s Journey, you’ll enter Gris with the right mindset. Having said that, I liked Gris more, and people who don’t like Journey at all are digging Gris a lot. That’s because it shows off a lot more creativity. The basic gameplay idea is you walk around collecting stars (Christ, even in indie art-house shit, it is always stars isn’t it?) to form constellations that help guide you to the next section of the game. There’s no fail conditions in Gris and no way of dying. This often ends up meaning “slow-paced and sloggy.” But, besides the first area, Gris is positively brisk and almost perfect in pacing. There were two instances where I realized I wasn’t on the right path, one of which was on me, and one of which I think is a split between being my fault and bad design: an underwater temple has a pathway that takes you to fish that you need to super-jump, which to me implies that you’re supposed to take the fish through that tunnel. But you’re not. As far as I can tell, there’s no reason for that tunnel to be there. Weird.

This is the part mentioned above. I thought I was supposed to take the fish through this extremely twist-and-turny pathway and jump from the right side of the screen up to that column, then hop from it to get to the star. Nope. Actually, you take the fish an entirely different route and get the star by falling from up above onto it. And it begs the question: why is there even a secret tunnel that takes you to the red fish hidden under the middle of the under the center of the underwater building? Because it serves no function. You can get to the red fish that give you the super-jump via a much-more straight forward means. If not for that, I’d never spent 30+ minutes trying to make that (seemingly impossible) jump. Also, can you even see the character in this screenshot? She’s there, I assure you, but visibility becomes an issue many times in Gris.

But otherwise, Gris really just kills it in terms of having some of the best uses of classic gaming conventions. There’s an underwater section. I hate those. But Gris has one of the best ones ever. There’s a section where you lead an NPC creature through a series of platforms. I hate those, but Gris has one of the best ones ever. There’s a section where you switch gravity and have to do everything upside-down on the ceiling. I hate those, but Gris has one of the best ones ever. It feels like the developers set out to take every single crappy gaming cliché and right the wrongs of them to show they can be done in a fun, fresh way. I’ve never seen a game that is this ambitious and yet still feels like it manages to overachieve.

If I want to get nit-picky.. and I sort of have to because, you know, that’s my job.. sometimes the camera pulls too far back and combines with the colors to completely wash out where you are on the screen. At least one time I got a star without even seeing where I was or how I got it. And there’s a section with a giant eel that feels like it could have been an intense, white-knuckle action beat.. but actually it’s a glorified cut-scene and you have as much control over the girl as you do the cars at the Autopia at Disneyland. And I’m not totally in love with the Gris character model, which has spindly appendages that reminded me of a Daddy Long Legs and kind of creeped me out a little bit.

The world has this Ico/Shadow of the Colossus architecture vibe to it and often gave me a wonderful sense of vertigo.

Otherwise, Gris is a masterpiece. I know I used that word already, and it’s a word I normally try to avoid using because it feels overplayed. But, there’s really no descriptor that fits Gris better. Masterpiece. The rest of the game speaks to how bad that first stage is. It just sets a really bad tone for the game. It’s the anti-Limbo. The first stage is the least memorable, and it’s all uphill from there, whereas for Limbo (another game that was about loss and symbolism.. maybe), everyone remembers the spider in the first act, and then it was all downhill from there. If there’s any justice, Gris, a better game that actually has symbolism that means something as opposed to being just pretentious, abstract garbage, will dethrone Limbo as the top artsy indie platformer in the minds of the public.

And when fans of the game spread the word of Gris, sure, talk about the graphics and the sound and the emotions.. but remember to tell people the game is really fun too. It’s the part of the equation nobody is talking about. And they probably should, because it’s the best part of Gris. It’s a tremendous video game, and isn’t that why we’re all here?

Gris was developed by Nomada Studio
Point of Sale: Nintendo Switch, Steam

$16.99 asked “how fucking stupid are you Facebook?” in the making of this review.

Gris is Chick-Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, PC Reviews Tagged with , , , ,

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