CherryLambrini
159 Reviews liked by CherryLambrini
Splatoon
2015
The me who bounced off this in 2015 was a fool.
I decided to give it another go on a whim and got sucked all the way in. It's one of the most stylish things I've ever played. I saw the first boss and said "Oh shit, I'm gonnae end up buying the artbook", and dear reader I did, before even finishing it. I caught myself at work making quiet squid noises like I was singing the lyrics to the songs. I think I might be a fan of this thing.
I decided to give it another go on a whim and got sucked all the way in. It's one of the most stylish things I've ever played. I saw the first boss and said "Oh shit, I'm gonnae end up buying the artbook", and dear reader I did, before even finishing it. I caught myself at work making quiet squid noises like I was singing the lyrics to the songs. I think I might be a fan of this thing.
Metroid Dread
2021
This review contains spoilers
With the new Dune movie debuting this week, bookreaders and brainhavers around the world will no doubt be imminently descending upon your timeline to inform you that well, actually, you see, Paul Atreides isn’t actually the hero of Frank Herbert’s seminal science-fiction fantasy series. No! He’s an a colonial-imperialist, a mass-murderer, a crazed-socio/psychopathic killing machine. Annoyingly, these know-it-alls are totally right. The hero of the book is (as much as he can be within the moral fog of the Dune universe) the bad guy.
Annoyingly, I'm about to make the same argument with regards to the other sci-fi monolith that's been excavated from beneath the sands of time this October. With the new Metroid game debuting this month, gameplayers and Backloggers will now no doubt be imminently descending on your Activity Feed to inform you that well, actually, you see, Samus Aran isn't actually the hero of Nintendo's seminal science-fiction fantasy series. And this know-it-all is convinced that he's totally right!
I mean, for starters, let's check out this list:
https://metroid.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_locations_in_the_Metroid_series
Destroyed locations are denoted by ☠. A quick scroll up and down shows that there's more skull and crossbones here than on a Space Pirate's frigate! That's a lot of ☠! What the hell, Samus? Why do you blow up every planet you go to?! How many times in your life have you flown away from a planet at the last second, only to watch it be reborn as an asteroid shower in your gunship's rear view mirror? That's the kind of ice cold that only a Gravity Suit can withstand, man! Samus Aran, you did a racism. You did an imperialism. You did a colonialism. You did a xenophobia. This makes it clear you don't even understand the intersectional nature of the multiplicity of your offenses!!
Metroid Dread comes tantalisingly close to fully exploring the idea of Samus as a remorseless kill-bot and the reconciliation of this image with our personal legend of Samus, the hero. One thing that's been consistently praised about the game is its depiction of Samus, the character - she idly charges her beam cannon while unflinchingly facing her old nemesis, Kraid; she slowly stalks around a wounded beast after breaking its hind legs with rockets and plasma bolts; she even trains a suspicious reticule between the glowing eyess of the bird-people who raised her; in short, she's a fucking badass in this game - but I think Sakamoto, MercuryStream and their respective teams wanted to explore the implications of that beyond mere fanservice.
It's fair to say that obtaining the Gravity Suit in Dread is probably the game's most stark inflection towards your ultimate goal of supreme badassery (as suggested/commanded by ADAM/Mr. Beak). In the first two thirds of the game, water poses a greater threat to Samus than most of the (admittedly very tough) bosses - water prevents further exploration, seals off escape routes, and makes you easy prey for the EMMI. Whereas most powerups in Dread really only afford you the ability to open new doors or crawl into new spaces, the Gravity Suit is the first step towards truly uninhibited exploration of ZDR's caverns, lakes and techbases. It's also the keys to the Screw Attack - which is, as ever, the Metroid item that makes you essentially untouchable by 80% of the planet's lifeforms. Once you have the Gravity Suit and ADAM begins coaching you for your ultimate showdown with daddy, you begin to sense that Samus Aran is an unstoppable force of anti-nature who will stop for nothing and no one. But does it have reason beyond orders? Probably not. It's just a killing machine - as she's always been.
I don't think it's a coincidence, then, that the game's final (gameplay) EMMI is a giant purple robot too. Running from a robot that can crawl into 1-block high tunnels and fire wall-penetrating ice beams is a nice bit of Video Game Storytelling that gets you thinking about who or what Samus is, and how different she actually is from the EMMI - a thematic continuation of an idea that the SA-X introduced 19 years ago. Samus Aran shows up on the surface of planets at the behest of her galaxy-ruling imperialist overlords, locates the valuables, and then leaves the local ecosystem in sub-atomic ruin. It's kind of her thing. Only by understanding the nature of her perceived natural enemy at the molecular level has Samus begun to understand what she's done and who she is.
I don't think it's a coincidence, then, that the game's final (cutscene) EMMI dies by the hand of Samus's fledgling Metroid powers, rather than another beam cannon upgrade or mechanical modification. It feels like a suggestion that Samus is beginning to reject who Raven Beak, ADAM and all the other wily old men in her life have been building her to be; a 35-year tool of the Galactic Federation could finally be writing her own story, the next logical step on a personal journey that Super implied with the death of Baby Metroid and presence of The Animals, and Fusion began in earnest with... everything it did? In Dread, Samus's (quite literal) Guiding Hand of Metroid is a creative bit of mostly-unspoken storytelling that shows MercuryStream probably understand the (thankfully scant) Metroid lore a whole lot better than Team Ninja did. Or perhaps this is all Yoshio Sakamoto? Has he spent his time in captivity reflecting on where Other M all went wrong? Either way, Dread ends on an exciting new note for the franchise - one that's sadly tempered by the foreknowledge that Retro Studios are likely gonna drop us right back into the boring old bounty hunter continuity for Prime 4.
If the runaway success of Metroid Dread gives Sakamoto and MercuryStream a blank cheque to write the future of the Metroid franchise as they see fit, I'd really love to see them explore the idea of Samus as a symbiotic force of technology and nature - a jungle-lawful-good bounty hunter who goes around doing terrorist deeds for good of the galaxy, blowing up Federation space stations and research facilities and mining frigates instead of, y'know, not saving the animals every time she sets foot on the surface of another acronymically-named planet that's teeming with cool little blob guys and armadillos with razor teeth or whatever. C'mon! Make Samus into a futuristic cyber-eco-warrior! Samus Aran knows that fear is the mind-killer. The X must flow!
I've written a whole lot there about what amounts to relatively little in-game content... This game is, rightfully, more concerned with tactile experiences than spooned cinematic storytelling, and the Dread gameplay experience is fittingly all-encompassing for a Metroid game that is presumably placing a capstone on 35 years of 2-dimensional history and also trying to please Metroid fans from 1986, 1994 and 2002.
I'd argue that what makes the game so impressive - it's ability to juggle theme, tone and content from every 2D game in the franchise - is also it's most glaring weakness. It has plenty of creepy, quiet moments - but they sit literally next-door to frantic speedrunning challenges and monster-slaughters that whiplash any feelings of dread from your brain; it allows for ample exploration and puzzling-out - but is constantly guiding and bull-penning you towards your next objective; there's an impressively huge sprawl to explore - but it only truly becomes available when you're literally minutes away from the exciting climax of Samus's pre-determined destiny. This push-and-pull of varying gameplay and presentation modes is balanced right, for the most part, but also robs the game of a unique identity - Metroid was the original template; Return of Samus was the claustrophobic genocide run; Super Metroid is the huge one with the swiss army knife of tools; Fusion is the creepy horror movie - but how would you succinctly summarise Dread's contribution to the canon beyond its ability to perform resurrections of a long-dead series? This is arguably the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate of Metroid games, to slightly damn and highly praise the game in one statement.
"But what about the melee counter shit!!!" can be heardly faintly from the back of the audience at this point in the review, and I'd be inclined to agree that it's probably the most stand-out element Dread has going for it. Sure, it was in Samus Returns (not to be confused with Return of Samus), but in comparison to Dread, Returns kinda feels like an audition tape - does it really count? Especially now that we're living in the era of Metroid Plenty? For all intents and purposes, this is the 3rd Strike parry's debut in the Metroid Mainline. MercuryStream have done an admirable job of reining in the counter on their second attempt - there's nothing as deeply offensive as the Ridley fight here this time - but it still often and ultimately feels like an unwelcome piece in the jigsaw puzzles that each Metroid boss fight represents, and the final boss is a perfect representation of its awkward nature. Having so many runs at Daddy Beak ruined by a need to wait for a specific animation kinda sapped all the tension out of what (14 year old me thinks) is otherwise a totally badass cool awesome boss battle. That animation of Samus sidestepping a laser and flipping over a claw-swipe is no longer cool to me because MercuryStream have burned the images of it onto my cortex like a plasma screen that's been left on the Home screen too long. But that's a relatively minor bummer on a journey that I otherwise thoroughly enjoyed.
Ultimately, Metroid Dread feels like a crowd-pleaser that really had the potential to be a crowd-shocker. It's unwillingness to carve out its own identity is something of a letdown coming cold on the long-dragged heels of the barn-burning Metroid Fusion, but hey! When you're coming back after almost 20 years, you probably want to introduce yourself to a whole new generation of gamers out there and show them what Metroid's all about. If Returns was the application form, Dread is the first day on the job - and it looks like MercuryStream is gonna get top marks on the performance review for successfully taking Project Dread down from the top shelf. You never know - this could be the Force Awakens to a potential Metroid 6's The Last Jedi! C'mon, Nintendo! MercuryStream's part of the family now!! Let them go apeshit!!! We wanna see something wild!!!!
Annoyingly, I'm about to make the same argument with regards to the other sci-fi monolith that's been excavated from beneath the sands of time this October. With the new Metroid game debuting this month, gameplayers and Backloggers will now no doubt be imminently descending on your Activity Feed to inform you that well, actually, you see, Samus Aran isn't actually the hero of Nintendo's seminal science-fiction fantasy series. And this know-it-all is convinced that he's totally right!
I mean, for starters, let's check out this list:
https://metroid.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_locations_in_the_Metroid_series
Destroyed locations are denoted by ☠. A quick scroll up and down shows that there's more skull and crossbones here than on a Space Pirate's frigate! That's a lot of ☠! What the hell, Samus? Why do you blow up every planet you go to?! How many times in your life have you flown away from a planet at the last second, only to watch it be reborn as an asteroid shower in your gunship's rear view mirror? That's the kind of ice cold that only a Gravity Suit can withstand, man! Samus Aran, you did a racism. You did an imperialism. You did a colonialism. You did a xenophobia. This makes it clear you don't even understand the intersectional nature of the multiplicity of your offenses!!
Metroid Dread comes tantalisingly close to fully exploring the idea of Samus as a remorseless kill-bot and the reconciliation of this image with our personal legend of Samus, the hero. One thing that's been consistently praised about the game is its depiction of Samus, the character - she idly charges her beam cannon while unflinchingly facing her old nemesis, Kraid; she slowly stalks around a wounded beast after breaking its hind legs with rockets and plasma bolts; she even trains a suspicious reticule between the glowing eyess of the bird-people who raised her; in short, she's a fucking badass in this game - but I think Sakamoto, MercuryStream and their respective teams wanted to explore the implications of that beyond mere fanservice.
It's fair to say that obtaining the Gravity Suit in Dread is probably the game's most stark inflection towards your ultimate goal of supreme badassery (as suggested/commanded by ADAM/Mr. Beak). In the first two thirds of the game, water poses a greater threat to Samus than most of the (admittedly very tough) bosses - water prevents further exploration, seals off escape routes, and makes you easy prey for the EMMI. Whereas most powerups in Dread really only afford you the ability to open new doors or crawl into new spaces, the Gravity Suit is the first step towards truly uninhibited exploration of ZDR's caverns, lakes and techbases. It's also the keys to the Screw Attack - which is, as ever, the Metroid item that makes you essentially untouchable by 80% of the planet's lifeforms. Once you have the Gravity Suit and ADAM begins coaching you for your ultimate showdown with daddy, you begin to sense that Samus Aran is an unstoppable force of anti-nature who will stop for nothing and no one. But does it have reason beyond orders? Probably not. It's just a killing machine - as she's always been.
I don't think it's a coincidence, then, that the game's final (gameplay) EMMI is a giant purple robot too. Running from a robot that can crawl into 1-block high tunnels and fire wall-penetrating ice beams is a nice bit of Video Game Storytelling that gets you thinking about who or what Samus is, and how different she actually is from the EMMI - a thematic continuation of an idea that the SA-X introduced 19 years ago. Samus Aran shows up on the surface of planets at the behest of her galaxy-ruling imperialist overlords, locates the valuables, and then leaves the local ecosystem in sub-atomic ruin. It's kind of her thing. Only by understanding the nature of her perceived natural enemy at the molecular level has Samus begun to understand what she's done and who she is.
I don't think it's a coincidence, then, that the game's final (cutscene) EMMI dies by the hand of Samus's fledgling Metroid powers, rather than another beam cannon upgrade or mechanical modification. It feels like a suggestion that Samus is beginning to reject who Raven Beak, ADAM and all the other wily old men in her life have been building her to be; a 35-year tool of the Galactic Federation could finally be writing her own story, the next logical step on a personal journey that Super implied with the death of Baby Metroid and presence of The Animals, and Fusion began in earnest with... everything it did? In Dread, Samus's (quite literal) Guiding Hand of Metroid is a creative bit of mostly-unspoken storytelling that shows MercuryStream probably understand the (thankfully scant) Metroid lore a whole lot better than Team Ninja did. Or perhaps this is all Yoshio Sakamoto? Has he spent his time in captivity reflecting on where Other M all went wrong? Either way, Dread ends on an exciting new note for the franchise - one that's sadly tempered by the foreknowledge that Retro Studios are likely gonna drop us right back into the boring old bounty hunter continuity for Prime 4.
If the runaway success of Metroid Dread gives Sakamoto and MercuryStream a blank cheque to write the future of the Metroid franchise as they see fit, I'd really love to see them explore the idea of Samus as a symbiotic force of technology and nature - a jungle-lawful-good bounty hunter who goes around doing terrorist deeds for good of the galaxy, blowing up Federation space stations and research facilities and mining frigates instead of, y'know, not saving the animals every time she sets foot on the surface of another acronymically-named planet that's teeming with cool little blob guys and armadillos with razor teeth or whatever. C'mon! Make Samus into a futuristic cyber-eco-warrior! Samus Aran knows that fear is the mind-killer. The X must flow!
I've written a whole lot there about what amounts to relatively little in-game content... This game is, rightfully, more concerned with tactile experiences than spooned cinematic storytelling, and the Dread gameplay experience is fittingly all-encompassing for a Metroid game that is presumably placing a capstone on 35 years of 2-dimensional history and also trying to please Metroid fans from 1986, 1994 and 2002.
I'd argue that what makes the game so impressive - it's ability to juggle theme, tone and content from every 2D game in the franchise - is also it's most glaring weakness. It has plenty of creepy, quiet moments - but they sit literally next-door to frantic speedrunning challenges and monster-slaughters that whiplash any feelings of dread from your brain; it allows for ample exploration and puzzling-out - but is constantly guiding and bull-penning you towards your next objective; there's an impressively huge sprawl to explore - but it only truly becomes available when you're literally minutes away from the exciting climax of Samus's pre-determined destiny. This push-and-pull of varying gameplay and presentation modes is balanced right, for the most part, but also robs the game of a unique identity - Metroid was the original template; Return of Samus was the claustrophobic genocide run; Super Metroid is the huge one with the swiss army knife of tools; Fusion is the creepy horror movie - but how would you succinctly summarise Dread's contribution to the canon beyond its ability to perform resurrections of a long-dead series? This is arguably the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate of Metroid games, to slightly damn and highly praise the game in one statement.
"But what about the melee counter shit!!!" can be heardly faintly from the back of the audience at this point in the review, and I'd be inclined to agree that it's probably the most stand-out element Dread has going for it. Sure, it was in Samus Returns (not to be confused with Return of Samus), but in comparison to Dread, Returns kinda feels like an audition tape - does it really count? Especially now that we're living in the era of Metroid Plenty? For all intents and purposes, this is the 3rd Strike parry's debut in the Metroid Mainline. MercuryStream have done an admirable job of reining in the counter on their second attempt - there's nothing as deeply offensive as the Ridley fight here this time - but it still often and ultimately feels like an unwelcome piece in the jigsaw puzzles that each Metroid boss fight represents, and the final boss is a perfect representation of its awkward nature. Having so many runs at Daddy Beak ruined by a need to wait for a specific animation kinda sapped all the tension out of what (14 year old me thinks) is otherwise a totally badass cool awesome boss battle. That animation of Samus sidestepping a laser and flipping over a claw-swipe is no longer cool to me because MercuryStream have burned the images of it onto my cortex like a plasma screen that's been left on the Home screen too long. But that's a relatively minor bummer on a journey that I otherwise thoroughly enjoyed.
Ultimately, Metroid Dread feels like a crowd-pleaser that really had the potential to be a crowd-shocker. It's unwillingness to carve out its own identity is something of a letdown coming cold on the long-dragged heels of the barn-burning Metroid Fusion, but hey! When you're coming back after almost 20 years, you probably want to introduce yourself to a whole new generation of gamers out there and show them what Metroid's all about. If Returns was the application form, Dread is the first day on the job - and it looks like MercuryStream is gonna get top marks on the performance review for successfully taking Project Dread down from the top shelf. You never know - this could be the Force Awakens to a potential Metroid 6's The Last Jedi! C'mon, Nintendo! MercuryStream's part of the family now!! Let them go apeshit!!! We wanna see something wild!!!!
Conker's Bad Fur Day
2001
Played as part of Rare Replay.
In the hands of a more sophisticated writer and more than two voice actors, this could have been something special. The Rare Replay documentary about the game explains that it was essentially Rareware’s Rage Against the Dying Light moment - power players within the company were sick of gluing googly eyes onto broomsticks and bedknobs and wanted to deconstruct their own irreverent image by gluing googly eyes onto pints of beer and making them say FUCK instead.
It's an exciting concept, and one that's appealed to me for some 20 years - as someone who religiously purchased Nintendo Official Magazine in the late 90s (even when there were no Nintendo games to read about), Conker's Bad Fur Day has always occupied a special place in my mind - during some of Nintendo’s worst droughts, this game was repeatedly trotted out as a “COMING SOON!” attraction to stop people trading in for the PlayStation - and it did work, to some extent. I (thought I) was far too young for it and that my parents would cast me out for even suggesting that we buy it, but was nonetheless inextricably drawn to the idea of a Banjo-Kazooie game where I could see boobs and drink pints. I'd 100%'d Kazooie, Tooie, and Kong 64, and really wanted to try on my big boy pants with this game - as someone who only owned an N64 for most of the fifth generation of consoles, I was emotionally starved of pseudo-mature gaming content. In the end, I forgot about it in the same way most people did - by watching it be crushed under the arrival of the GameCube only a few months later. It's only because Rare Replay pretty much handed this game to me on a plate that I've even bothered to give it a try.
Bad Fur Day does manage to achieve its "NOT FOR KIDZ" destructive-deconstructive goals to some extent - the first few hours are genuinely eye-popping in the way they very unsubtly put Banjo-Kazooie in the crosshairs. Even the game’s strict adherence to a “no collectibles at any time” policy (aside from an admittedly funny cutscene that tries to explain why these games have floating pieces of honeycomb everywhere) feels like a self-inflicted attack on the house Rare had built by the turn of the century. Bribing scouser beetles (who are all voiced by one guy who can barely stifle his own giggles on the production track) with wads of shrieking sentient cash is an initially novel experience that I genuinely can't compare to any other game I've played, but by the third time you’ve done a fetch-quest for yet another a drunken inanimate object with big tits, it kinda becomes apparent that Chris Seavor and his surprisingly small team were more or less just thrashing around a playground with very little direction. There wasn't all that much of an image for them to deconstruct.
The Conker team's admission in the Rare Replay documentary that Bad Fur Day was more or less a directionless mess of sandboxes until someone on the team decided to incorporate a series of movie parodies is an altogether unsurprising admission. It was the year 2000, and this is the video game equivalent of Scary Movie. I was there! I remember! Referencing pop-films by just straight-up recreating them with your own characters was peak comedy at the time! After a certain point, though, the game is essentially just chaining parody cutscenes of varying humour and quality together using stiff player movement that makes Banjo's mobility look like Mirror's Edge or Metroid Dread in comparison. You can probably imagine how poorly a bullet-time parody handles on 64-bit hardware, even with the power of the mighty Expansion Pak behind it.
The final cutscene (I watched it on YouTube after becoming all too tired of carrying around slices of cheese with Yorkshire accents) - where Conker fruitlessly negotiates with God/The Programmer to get his girlfriend back - is a rare bit of introspective deviation from a game that is otherwise all too content to lean on 6-vertice polygonal gore and a fart soundboard for its content, and I wish the game had done more things like it instead of what we got. If the game leaned more into questioning its own existence and the value of Rare's house-style in general, I think Bad Fur Day could really have struck a chord with those of us who grew up snatching jiggies in Tik Tok Woods or whatever those Banjo levels were called. The "no collectibles" rule is a striking statement of intent at first, but ultimately Rare prove themselves wrong by demonstrating that grabbing bananas and musical notes are an intrinsic part of what made their mascot platformers so satisfying - without those cute little distractions, all you really have here is a drunk-walking simulator set in a muddy 3D world that's been stripped back to its threadbare essentials in order to make room on the cartridge for as many crude voice lines as Robin Beanland could scavenge from the cutting room floor of an early-2000s South Park recording room.
As a developer who’s also made a game that heavily leaned on “British” “humour” at the arguable expense of gameplay, I should probably be more charitable to this game than I’m being right now - but there’s only so many times you can hear Conker call a female-coded pile of faeces a huge bitch before reaching for the Home button. While I admire Chris Seavor for having the audacity to make Yamauchi-era Nintendo publish a video game as deeply offensive and provocative as this (the Rare Replay documentary mentions that Nintendo financed a recreation of a tacky British pub at Spaceworld to promote the game, and even Miyamoto checked it out!), I think provocative art should have a sense of purpose (I am kinda repeating my Twelve Minutes review here, sorry), and it's clear that Rare's C-team were kinda scrambling haplessly to turn their pet "what if a squirrel said CNT" concept into something that players could spend a couple dozen hours with.
With Bad Fur Day*, I feel Rare squandered a perfect opportunity to rudely set the sun on their goofy Saturday-morning SNES and N64 era and move ahead to something new. This could have been their Kill the Past moment, but instead it's more of a Vague, Lengthy Gesture Towards the FUCKING Past moment. As I'm always saying on Backloggd, it kinda pisses me off when developers try to send-up or tear-down genres by making stodgy, broken or tedious imitations of said genre. What's the point? Maybe I'm asking too much of an N64 mascot platformer, but I can see the same potential my child-self imagined in there somewhere. Sadly, another of my Rareware white whales has been slain.
In the hands of a more sophisticated writer and more than two voice actors, this could have been something special. The Rare Replay documentary about the game explains that it was essentially Rareware’s Rage Against the Dying Light moment - power players within the company were sick of gluing googly eyes onto broomsticks and bedknobs and wanted to deconstruct their own irreverent image by gluing googly eyes onto pints of beer and making them say FUCK instead.
It's an exciting concept, and one that's appealed to me for some 20 years - as someone who religiously purchased Nintendo Official Magazine in the late 90s (even when there were no Nintendo games to read about), Conker's Bad Fur Day has always occupied a special place in my mind - during some of Nintendo’s worst droughts, this game was repeatedly trotted out as a “COMING SOON!” attraction to stop people trading in for the PlayStation - and it did work, to some extent. I (thought I) was far too young for it and that my parents would cast me out for even suggesting that we buy it, but was nonetheless inextricably drawn to the idea of a Banjo-Kazooie game where I could see boobs and drink pints. I'd 100%'d Kazooie, Tooie, and Kong 64, and really wanted to try on my big boy pants with this game - as someone who only owned an N64 for most of the fifth generation of consoles, I was emotionally starved of pseudo-mature gaming content. In the end, I forgot about it in the same way most people did - by watching it be crushed under the arrival of the GameCube only a few months later. It's only because Rare Replay pretty much handed this game to me on a plate that I've even bothered to give it a try.
Bad Fur Day does manage to achieve its "NOT FOR KIDZ" destructive-deconstructive goals to some extent - the first few hours are genuinely eye-popping in the way they very unsubtly put Banjo-Kazooie in the crosshairs. Even the game’s strict adherence to a “no collectibles at any time” policy (aside from an admittedly funny cutscene that tries to explain why these games have floating pieces of honeycomb everywhere) feels like a self-inflicted attack on the house Rare had built by the turn of the century. Bribing scouser beetles (who are all voiced by one guy who can barely stifle his own giggles on the production track) with wads of shrieking sentient cash is an initially novel experience that I genuinely can't compare to any other game I've played, but by the third time you’ve done a fetch-quest for yet another a drunken inanimate object with big tits, it kinda becomes apparent that Chris Seavor and his surprisingly small team were more or less just thrashing around a playground with very little direction. There wasn't all that much of an image for them to deconstruct.
The Conker team's admission in the Rare Replay documentary that Bad Fur Day was more or less a directionless mess of sandboxes until someone on the team decided to incorporate a series of movie parodies is an altogether unsurprising admission. It was the year 2000, and this is the video game equivalent of Scary Movie. I was there! I remember! Referencing pop-films by just straight-up recreating them with your own characters was peak comedy at the time! After a certain point, though, the game is essentially just chaining parody cutscenes of varying humour and quality together using stiff player movement that makes Banjo's mobility look like Mirror's Edge or Metroid Dread in comparison. You can probably imagine how poorly a bullet-time parody handles on 64-bit hardware, even with the power of the mighty Expansion Pak behind it.
The final cutscene (I watched it on YouTube after becoming all too tired of carrying around slices of cheese with Yorkshire accents) - where Conker fruitlessly negotiates with God/The Programmer to get his girlfriend back - is a rare bit of introspective deviation from a game that is otherwise all too content to lean on 6-vertice polygonal gore and a fart soundboard for its content, and I wish the game had done more things like it instead of what we got. If the game leaned more into questioning its own existence and the value of Rare's house-style in general, I think Bad Fur Day could really have struck a chord with those of us who grew up snatching jiggies in Tik Tok Woods or whatever those Banjo levels were called. The "no collectibles" rule is a striking statement of intent at first, but ultimately Rare prove themselves wrong by demonstrating that grabbing bananas and musical notes are an intrinsic part of what made their mascot platformers so satisfying - without those cute little distractions, all you really have here is a drunk-walking simulator set in a muddy 3D world that's been stripped back to its threadbare essentials in order to make room on the cartridge for as many crude voice lines as Robin Beanland could scavenge from the cutting room floor of an early-2000s South Park recording room.
As a developer who’s also made a game that heavily leaned on “British” “humour” at the arguable expense of gameplay, I should probably be more charitable to this game than I’m being right now - but there’s only so many times you can hear Conker call a female-coded pile of faeces a huge bitch before reaching for the Home button. While I admire Chris Seavor for having the audacity to make Yamauchi-era Nintendo publish a video game as deeply offensive and provocative as this (the Rare Replay documentary mentions that Nintendo financed a recreation of a tacky British pub at Spaceworld to promote the game, and even Miyamoto checked it out!), I think provocative art should have a sense of purpose (I am kinda repeating my Twelve Minutes review here, sorry), and it's clear that Rare's C-team were kinda scrambling haplessly to turn their pet "what if a squirrel said CNT" concept into something that players could spend a couple dozen hours with.
With Bad Fur Day*, I feel Rare squandered a perfect opportunity to rudely set the sun on their goofy Saturday-morning SNES and N64 era and move ahead to something new. This could have been their Kill the Past moment, but instead it's more of a Vague, Lengthy Gesture Towards the FUCKING Past moment. As I'm always saying on Backloggd, it kinda pisses me off when developers try to send-up or tear-down genres by making stodgy, broken or tedious imitations of said genre. What's the point? Maybe I'm asking too much of an N64 mascot platformer, but I can see the same potential my child-self imagined in there somewhere. Sadly, another of my Rareware white whales has been slain.
What a lovely thing this is. A gorgeous world to explore. Got that throwback adventure game feel, but looks incredible.
The environments are so lush and everything feels real. Like naturally occurring, if that makes sense. You're not spotting assets copy and pasted all over. It truly comes across like villages built through a gigantic forest. The land itself dictating where you can and can't have houses and roads. Beautiful.
The story is nothing incredible and combat is serviceable, but for some reason this just got its hooks into me. Kickin' about with yer wee pals The Rot. Clearing corruption and freeing trapped spirits. It's feelgood stuff. Nae cynicism, and not overly boohoo manipulative shit. Just a properly nice time.
I'm eager to see what Ember Lab comes out with next. This as their first game is very promising.
The environments are so lush and everything feels real. Like naturally occurring, if that makes sense. You're not spotting assets copy and pasted all over. It truly comes across like villages built through a gigantic forest. The land itself dictating where you can and can't have houses and roads. Beautiful.
The story is nothing incredible and combat is serviceable, but for some reason this just got its hooks into me. Kickin' about with yer wee pals The Rot. Clearing corruption and freeing trapped spirits. It's feelgood stuff. Nae cynicism, and not overly boohoo manipulative shit. Just a properly nice time.
I'm eager to see what Ember Lab comes out with next. This as their first game is very promising.
Blast Corps
1997
Played as part of Rare Replay.
Ever read a book, watch a film or play a video game way too late and feel huge pangs of regret that it didn't reach you in a formative moment? Of course you have - you're on Backloggd. Like me, you probably spend half your adult life trying fill in the blanks of the childhood you really wanted to have.
Blast Corps is now one such game for me - it was a staple of my local video and game rental shop in the 90s, but it never made it home with me because I preferred real N64 classics like... uhhh... Nagano Winter Olympics '98 and South Park Rally. Gah!! Dang it! Why did I never pick this certified banger instead?! If I'd played this back in the day, I'd absolutely now be a guy who goes "...and don't forget Blast Corps!" any time someone recommends Nintendo 64 games.
Blast Corpse (I am 99% certain this is what I called it in 1998, much like my brother called the Formula 1 game for SNES F1: Grand Pricks) can be quite simply described as a really fucking good game of Action Figures. As far as I know, it's gotta be one of the first "toybox" games on the market - while there are objectives and tasks to undertake, the meat of the game is simply about driving machines around and wrecking shit without much forethought or reflection. It's like GMod gone wild, or those afternoon sessions of GTA: San Andreas where you just put all the cheats on and went on tank rampages. When it's running on all cylinders, the game kinda feels like one of those frantic Action Man adverts that used to get wedged straight down the middle of new episodes of Pokemon and Samurai Pizza Cats - time is running out, chaos keeps unfolding, and the only solution is more Big Cars with Big Rocket Launchers that do Big Explosions. It's the romance at the core of every little boy's heart.
My favourite level is the game has you driving a digger (straight) through Coronation Street until you find a mech suit that has the vertical height necessary to Mario 64 butt-slam a skyscraper. Butt-slamming the skyscraper clears the road for a runaway nuclear missile carrier, but watch out! The bridge over those train tracks hasn't been finished and the nuke is heading straight for it! Time to fly your mech suit over some mountains and hijack a flatbed train in the next town over that can be used as a platform! Phew! But now, how do you get back to your mech suit? Don't worry - that flatbed train was carrying a Ferrari! Nice... b-but wait! After flattening some more hospitals to make a path, there's now a rushing river up ahead! Shit!! Better fly your mech suit downstream and take over that Evergiven container ship to do a Suez manoeuvre so that there's something for the carrier to land on! How are you gonna get outta there in time, though?! Don't worry - Evel Knievel's car was onboard the ship! Hop in!! Vrrrroooooooooooommmm!!!! MISSION COMPLETE
Fuck yeah, man. Video games - a real good time.
Ever read a book, watch a film or play a video game way too late and feel huge pangs of regret that it didn't reach you in a formative moment? Of course you have - you're on Backloggd. Like me, you probably spend half your adult life trying fill in the blanks of the childhood you really wanted to have.
Blast Corps is now one such game for me - it was a staple of my local video and game rental shop in the 90s, but it never made it home with me because I preferred real N64 classics like... uhhh... Nagano Winter Olympics '98 and South Park Rally. Gah!! Dang it! Why did I never pick this certified banger instead?! If I'd played this back in the day, I'd absolutely now be a guy who goes "...and don't forget Blast Corps!" any time someone recommends Nintendo 64 games.
Blast Corpse (I am 99% certain this is what I called it in 1998, much like my brother called the Formula 1 game for SNES F1: Grand Pricks) can be quite simply described as a really fucking good game of Action Figures. As far as I know, it's gotta be one of the first "toybox" games on the market - while there are objectives and tasks to undertake, the meat of the game is simply about driving machines around and wrecking shit without much forethought or reflection. It's like GMod gone wild, or those afternoon sessions of GTA: San Andreas where you just put all the cheats on and went on tank rampages. When it's running on all cylinders, the game kinda feels like one of those frantic Action Man adverts that used to get wedged straight down the middle of new episodes of Pokemon and Samurai Pizza Cats - time is running out, chaos keeps unfolding, and the only solution is more Big Cars with Big Rocket Launchers that do Big Explosions. It's the romance at the core of every little boy's heart.
My favourite level is the game has you driving a digger (straight) through Coronation Street until you find a mech suit that has the vertical height necessary to Mario 64 butt-slam a skyscraper. Butt-slamming the skyscraper clears the road for a runaway nuclear missile carrier, but watch out! The bridge over those train tracks hasn't been finished and the nuke is heading straight for it! Time to fly your mech suit over some mountains and hijack a flatbed train in the next town over that can be used as a platform! Phew! But now, how do you get back to your mech suit? Don't worry - that flatbed train was carrying a Ferrari! Nice... b-but wait! After flattening some more hospitals to make a path, there's now a rushing river up ahead! Shit!! Better fly your mech suit downstream and take over that Evergiven container ship to do a Suez manoeuvre so that there's something for the carrier to land on! How are you gonna get outta there in time, though?! Don't worry - Evel Knievel's car was onboard the ship! Hop in!! Vrrrroooooooooooommmm!!!! MISSION COMPLETE
Fuck yeah, man. Video games - a real good time.
I think this one is the most template one I've played. Not to suggest that's a bad thing at all, if anything it speaks to how great the series can be when THIS is the baseline. I think it's a really good one to point at as being The Basic Format of these games. Plus it's not incredibly difficult, though the fucking card drop rates being so low makes me want to whip myself in the baws.
Jetpac
1983
Played as part of Rare Replay.
"We have Balloon Fight at home"-ass game that is surprisingly not that difficult for a Spectrum title - but that may be down to fact that I already completed it as a young lad who wanted the 100.1% completion stat for Donkey Kong 64. This time, I completed it to unlock a video about Banjo-Kazooie! It was a good video! Happy to perpetuate Jetpac's legacy as "that game you have to play in other Rare games to unlock stuff".
"We have Balloon Fight at home"-ass game that is surprisingly not that difficult for a Spectrum title - but that may be down to fact that I already completed it as a young lad who wanted the 100.1% completion stat for Donkey Kong 64. This time, I completed it to unlock a video about Banjo-Kazooie! It was a good video! Happy to perpetuate Jetpac's legacy as "that game you have to play in other Rare games to unlock stuff".
Sable
2021
Using the framework of the self-directed open world adventure game as metaphor for the great directionless unknown of fresh adulthood is a great idea, and the first few hours of this soar - not since Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild have I found so much genuine pleasure and emotion in just moving a character around a big "you can go there!" sandbox.
That probably has something to do with the fact that Raw Fury and Shedworks have unashamedly lifted and shifted every aspect of Breath of the Wild's traversal mechanics, right down to the stamina wheel that gets a little outline as you upgrade it. In a weird way, it's refreshing to see a developer just openly admit (within the limits of copyright law) that they can't beat another game's implementation of certain mechanics and would rather just borrow them to tell their truth. Combine Breath of the Wild's climbing and gliding with the sparrow from Destiny, and you essentially have a complete picture of Sable's core game-feel.
There are a ton of other influences worn proudly on Sable's sleeve - Prince of Persia (2008), Shadow of the Colossus, Journey and The Last Guardian were the ones that immediately came to mind for me - but once the game was done intentionally wowing me and had settled into the real meat of its experience, I found myself thinking about Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker the most often. Sable shares that game's conflicted feelings of mindlessly traversing a big beautiful wide open virtual space for so long that everything that was initially unique and mesmerising about it eventually falls away by hand of tedium; you stop looking at cliffs and dunes because they delight you, and instead only see the little technical nit-picks that lie beneath the surface because there's nothing all that interesting to look at on the horizon.
Don't get me wrong - Sable lives up to its promise of being a playable Moebius comic (in aesthetic terms, if not content - my favourite Moebius comic has a dude harness his sexual love for a woman into a beam sword, and that sadly does not happen here), but keeping the artistry of this world together seems to have caused a ton of technical issues to leak out. Inventory management is messy, with items sometimes disappearing or becoming unsellable for no apparent reason. The YA novel thought/dialogue system is cute, until the point where it starts giving characters the wrong names and splicing different pages together. The aesthetic decision to have everything move in simple frame-by-frame animation is a delight, but when it starts to clash with genuine frame-rate issues, it's a one-way ticket to a headache - and in a game that so badly wants to induce introspection, that's the very last thing you want.
Complaining about technical problems in a beautiful BOTW-like made by a indie team with a double-digit staff roster feels a bit like criticising your grandmother for laying out a Michelin-quality ten-course tasting menu for you, but at the same I so badly wanted to be fully immersed in this experience and never could be because of its weird bugs, quirks and issues. The open world is beautifully crafted, but often reveals itself to be made in a hurry - a breathtaking Land Before Time graveyard of dinosaur bones amazes from afar, but quickly falls foul of frustration when it's revealed that trying to walk along the skeleton bridges to your objective triggers a ton of awkward jerked-together movement animations. Certain areas don't feel like they were play-tested quite so much as they were designed by an artist who was hurriedly prioritising form over function.
As a big fan of Japanese Breakfast, the soundtrack was one of the things that initially drew me to Sable, and the more vocal and melodic compositions here are a real treat - the game's big "Link runs up and stands on the edge of the Great Plateau" moment is given a superb bit of pop pomp, and certain character leitmotifs really sell the alien-ness of the experience; but just like with the gameplay, it feels like Michelle Zauner has played a bit too much Breath of the Wild and let it seep into her work a bit too often, and that prevents the more atmospheric notes from making their mark. Some tracks sadly just feel like preset drum loops on a keyboard or random notes being hit a few dozen beats apart - and as someone who soundtracks most of their work days with abstract-ambient music, I don't say that lightly. I'm still holding out for the day Brian Eno soundtracks a new video game.
I might come back and finish this at some point if the technical stuff can be flattened out, but at the moment the detractions sting too hard. I want to love this game, but every so often it does something to irritate me hard enough for my soul to leave the controller.
That probably has something to do with the fact that Raw Fury and Shedworks have unashamedly lifted and shifted every aspect of Breath of the Wild's traversal mechanics, right down to the stamina wheel that gets a little outline as you upgrade it. In a weird way, it's refreshing to see a developer just openly admit (within the limits of copyright law) that they can't beat another game's implementation of certain mechanics and would rather just borrow them to tell their truth. Combine Breath of the Wild's climbing and gliding with the sparrow from Destiny, and you essentially have a complete picture of Sable's core game-feel.
There are a ton of other influences worn proudly on Sable's sleeve - Prince of Persia (2008), Shadow of the Colossus, Journey and The Last Guardian were the ones that immediately came to mind for me - but once the game was done intentionally wowing me and had settled into the real meat of its experience, I found myself thinking about Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker the most often. Sable shares that game's conflicted feelings of mindlessly traversing a big beautiful wide open virtual space for so long that everything that was initially unique and mesmerising about it eventually falls away by hand of tedium; you stop looking at cliffs and dunes because they delight you, and instead only see the little technical nit-picks that lie beneath the surface because there's nothing all that interesting to look at on the horizon.
Don't get me wrong - Sable lives up to its promise of being a playable Moebius comic (in aesthetic terms, if not content - my favourite Moebius comic has a dude harness his sexual love for a woman into a beam sword, and that sadly does not happen here), but keeping the artistry of this world together seems to have caused a ton of technical issues to leak out. Inventory management is messy, with items sometimes disappearing or becoming unsellable for no apparent reason. The YA novel thought/dialogue system is cute, until the point where it starts giving characters the wrong names and splicing different pages together. The aesthetic decision to have everything move in simple frame-by-frame animation is a delight, but when it starts to clash with genuine frame-rate issues, it's a one-way ticket to a headache - and in a game that so badly wants to induce introspection, that's the very last thing you want.
Complaining about technical problems in a beautiful BOTW-like made by a indie team with a double-digit staff roster feels a bit like criticising your grandmother for laying out a Michelin-quality ten-course tasting menu for you, but at the same I so badly wanted to be fully immersed in this experience and never could be because of its weird bugs, quirks and issues. The open world is beautifully crafted, but often reveals itself to be made in a hurry - a breathtaking Land Before Time graveyard of dinosaur bones amazes from afar, but quickly falls foul of frustration when it's revealed that trying to walk along the skeleton bridges to your objective triggers a ton of awkward jerked-together movement animations. Certain areas don't feel like they were play-tested quite so much as they were designed by an artist who was hurriedly prioritising form over function.
As a big fan of Japanese Breakfast, the soundtrack was one of the things that initially drew me to Sable, and the more vocal and melodic compositions here are a real treat - the game's big "Link runs up and stands on the edge of the Great Plateau" moment is given a superb bit of pop pomp, and certain character leitmotifs really sell the alien-ness of the experience; but just like with the gameplay, it feels like Michelle Zauner has played a bit too much Breath of the Wild and let it seep into her work a bit too often, and that prevents the more atmospheric notes from making their mark. Some tracks sadly just feel like preset drum loops on a keyboard or random notes being hit a few dozen beats apart - and as someone who soundtracks most of their work days with abstract-ambient music, I don't say that lightly. I'm still holding out for the day Brian Eno soundtracks a new video game.
I might come back and finish this at some point if the technical stuff can be flattened out, but at the moment the detractions sting too hard. I want to love this game, but every so often it does something to irritate me hard enough for my soul to leave the controller.
A solid remake that feels like they're doing the best they can with the framework they had to use. It somehow comes across as twice the size of the GB original, and not in a good way.
The cinematic boss moments are nice, and work to remind you that Samus has that rep for a reason, but the regular combat is a bit of an inconvenience. They're insistent on this new parry mechanic, meaning almost every single jobber enemy desperately wants you to do it and then shoot them once to win. It gives basic exploration a real START STOP vibe that can get tedious quickly. So I understand why most folk dropped it, especially with the repetitive metroid fights being only slightly improved.
I first had a go on this game in September 2017 while my gran was in hospital following a stroke and a second heart attack (aye it's one of those reviews). I couldnae focus, and put it off to the side. She got home in mid October, and I went to stay with her for a few months as a carer. I didn't bring any consoles to her place, and decided the 3DS would be best. I played in wee bursts while she slept on the couch. It was comfy. A nice environment despite the circumstances. We were always close so none of it felt out of the ordinary. She was just weaker. Now, this isnae gonnae be some shite about an imagined correlation between Samus getting upgrades and my gran's recovery. I'm a prick, but I'm not THAT prick. She never got better. Never got back to herself. She died in 2019. But something about wee shots of the game are forever tied to that time and place. So despite all the wee shit things about this, I cannae bring myself to hate it because if I focus hard enough on the screen, I'm in that house with the familiar smells, and my gran is just out of my peripheral vision, asleep on the couch.
The cinematic boss moments are nice, and work to remind you that Samus has that rep for a reason, but the regular combat is a bit of an inconvenience. They're insistent on this new parry mechanic, meaning almost every single jobber enemy desperately wants you to do it and then shoot them once to win. It gives basic exploration a real START STOP vibe that can get tedious quickly. So I understand why most folk dropped it, especially with the repetitive metroid fights being only slightly improved.
I first had a go on this game in September 2017 while my gran was in hospital following a stroke and a second heart attack (aye it's one of those reviews). I couldnae focus, and put it off to the side. She got home in mid October, and I went to stay with her for a few months as a carer. I didn't bring any consoles to her place, and decided the 3DS would be best. I played in wee bursts while she slept on the couch. It was comfy. A nice environment despite the circumstances. We were always close so none of it felt out of the ordinary. She was just weaker. Now, this isnae gonnae be some shite about an imagined correlation between Samus getting upgrades and my gran's recovery. I'm a prick, but I'm not THAT prick. She never got better. Never got back to herself. She died in 2019. But something about wee shots of the game are forever tied to that time and place. So despite all the wee shit things about this, I cannae bring myself to hate it because if I focus hard enough on the screen, I'm in that house with the familiar smells, and my gran is just out of my peripheral vision, asleep on the couch.