Hylianhero777
353 Reviews liked by Hylianhero777
Streets of Rage 2
1992
I have beaten Streets of Rage 2 a bunch of times since completing Streets of Rage 4 a bunch of times, because Streets of Rage 4 more or less trains you on how to play Streets of Rage 1, 2 & 3 correctly.
Game fans, myself included, often bounce off of old arcade-style beat ‘em ups because they can initially appear impossible to beat without reaching for the save-state. But we often forget Streets of Rage 2 and its contemporaries were designed to be appreciated again and again until you reached some state of mastery. Streets of Rage 2 was designed to be bought by your mum for £50 and played by you every day after school until Mr. X finally ate dirt. Streets of Rage 2 was not designed to be included in a 40-game Mega Drive all-you-can-game buffet that you can buy on Steam for £2.49 right now or enjoy for “free” as part of the Nintendo Switch Online Sega Mega Drive Expansion Package Plus for Nintendo Switch or whatever it’s called. You don’t have time to try Stage 3 of Streets of Rage 2 again - you need to go over there and play ToeJam & Earl 2 in its original Japanese translation, for some reason!
No, I say! Stay here and learn your Streets of Rage, kid. Because mastering a beam ‘em up always feels great! A good beam ‘em up often boils down to something between a fighting game and a puzzle game - figuring out what each enemy’s weakness is, considering the order in which to exploit these weaknesses, and then executing the correct badass moves under pressure from the advancing mob. It’s like Tetris, but the blocks are made out of punches and broken bottles. It’s beautiful.
This time round on Streets of Rage 2, I sleepwalked through the opening few stages without taking a single hit. I didn’t even realise I’d done it until I checked out how many lives I’d accumulated. Apparently I’d just been effortlessly side-stepping Galsias and out-ranging Donovans without even consciously doing it, applying some hybrid martial art that stands somewhere between the so-called “Tetris effect” and that bit in The Matrix Reloaded where Neo is just effortlessly ducking and stepping those Agent Smiths. Pro Gamer Shit.
Just kidding. I don’t consider myself a pro at Streets of Rage 2 by any stretch - but after playing through the game six or seven times with my brain turned on, I realised Streets of Rage 2 had trained me so well that I’d internalised all the natures and patterns of the game’s opening enemies. Folks, that’s some Good Game Design! And we haven’t even talked about the Good Design of the music or the artwork yet!
One thing this play-through of Streets of Rage 2 made me think about was how well Streets of Rage 2 serves as a perfect historical relic of its era and specific place in that era - a pixel-art tableau of early 1990s house/rave/hip hop culture on the east coast of America. More specifically, early 1990s house/rave/hip hop culture on the east coast of America as viewed by an incredibly talented, classically-trained Japanese designer and composer who could see that computers and video games represented the future. Streets of Rage 2 is how people outside of America saw this side of America in this era, and every era since - through film and music and video games. It’s fascinating to see what essential truths and dreams made it across the ocean to us. I think this game has genuine cultural worth that scholars in halls grander than Backloggd’s will one day celebrate.
About 8 years after Streets of Rage 2 made its own history, Japan’s Takeshi Kitano made a film called Brother. Brother was Takeshi Kitano’s first film outside of Japan, and was set in Los Angeles with a half-American, half-Japanese cast. As a hands-on director, writer and actor, there’s no doubt that Brother represents Kitano’s vision of Los Angeles and America at large. Check it out! It’s good! Exactly like Streets of Rage 2, Brother serves as a celluloid time capsule of America’s international cultural impact and influence at a specific point in time - and it’s quite striking how much had changed in the space of the 8 years between 1992 and the year 2000. Brother is one of Kitano’s lesser-appreciated films, but I think that film has genuine cultural worth that scholars in halls grander than Letterboxd’s will one day celebrate.
So, there you have it - an arcade beat ‘em up game with beautiful, artistic complexity of beat ‘em up game design, sharing bytes in the same cartridge with one of the most important cultural artefacts of the early 1990s. Still wanna fuck around with Toe Jam & Earl? C’mon man.
Game fans, myself included, often bounce off of old arcade-style beat ‘em ups because they can initially appear impossible to beat without reaching for the save-state. But we often forget Streets of Rage 2 and its contemporaries were designed to be appreciated again and again until you reached some state of mastery. Streets of Rage 2 was designed to be bought by your mum for £50 and played by you every day after school until Mr. X finally ate dirt. Streets of Rage 2 was not designed to be included in a 40-game Mega Drive all-you-can-game buffet that you can buy on Steam for £2.49 right now or enjoy for “free” as part of the Nintendo Switch Online Sega Mega Drive Expansion Package Plus for Nintendo Switch or whatever it’s called. You don’t have time to try Stage 3 of Streets of Rage 2 again - you need to go over there and play ToeJam & Earl 2 in its original Japanese translation, for some reason!
No, I say! Stay here and learn your Streets of Rage, kid. Because mastering a beam ‘em up always feels great! A good beam ‘em up often boils down to something between a fighting game and a puzzle game - figuring out what each enemy’s weakness is, considering the order in which to exploit these weaknesses, and then executing the correct badass moves under pressure from the advancing mob. It’s like Tetris, but the blocks are made out of punches and broken bottles. It’s beautiful.
This time round on Streets of Rage 2, I sleepwalked through the opening few stages without taking a single hit. I didn’t even realise I’d done it until I checked out how many lives I’d accumulated. Apparently I’d just been effortlessly side-stepping Galsias and out-ranging Donovans without even consciously doing it, applying some hybrid martial art that stands somewhere between the so-called “Tetris effect” and that bit in The Matrix Reloaded where Neo is just effortlessly ducking and stepping those Agent Smiths. Pro Gamer Shit.
Just kidding. I don’t consider myself a pro at Streets of Rage 2 by any stretch - but after playing through the game six or seven times with my brain turned on, I realised Streets of Rage 2 had trained me so well that I’d internalised all the natures and patterns of the game’s opening enemies. Folks, that’s some Good Game Design! And we haven’t even talked about the Good Design of the music or the artwork yet!
One thing this play-through of Streets of Rage 2 made me think about was how well Streets of Rage 2 serves as a perfect historical relic of its era and specific place in that era - a pixel-art tableau of early 1990s house/rave/hip hop culture on the east coast of America. More specifically, early 1990s house/rave/hip hop culture on the east coast of America as viewed by an incredibly talented, classically-trained Japanese designer and composer who could see that computers and video games represented the future. Streets of Rage 2 is how people outside of America saw this side of America in this era, and every era since - through film and music and video games. It’s fascinating to see what essential truths and dreams made it across the ocean to us. I think this game has genuine cultural worth that scholars in halls grander than Backloggd’s will one day celebrate.
About 8 years after Streets of Rage 2 made its own history, Japan’s Takeshi Kitano made a film called Brother. Brother was Takeshi Kitano’s first film outside of Japan, and was set in Los Angeles with a half-American, half-Japanese cast. As a hands-on director, writer and actor, there’s no doubt that Brother represents Kitano’s vision of Los Angeles and America at large. Check it out! It’s good! Exactly like Streets of Rage 2, Brother serves as a celluloid time capsule of America’s international cultural impact and influence at a specific point in time - and it’s quite striking how much had changed in the space of the 8 years between 1992 and the year 2000. Brother is one of Kitano’s lesser-appreciated films, but I think that film has genuine cultural worth that scholars in halls grander than Letterboxd’s will one day celebrate.
So, there you have it - an arcade beat ‘em up game with beautiful, artistic complexity of beat ‘em up game design, sharing bytes in the same cartridge with one of the most important cultural artefacts of the early 1990s. Still wanna fuck around with Toe Jam & Earl? C’mon man.
In high school, one of my friends bought me a copy of Morrowind for the Xbox when he found out I got an Xbox. He really liked Morrowind, and wanted me to like Morrowind too.
This was 2005, and Morrowind for the Xbox had been out for a while; so had the Xbox itself. Most people had traded in their Xbox by this point, because Halo 2 had been out for quite a while and there was nothing else to play on the Xbox; this sent the cost of Xbox games through the proverbial floor, and ironically resulted in there being lots of games to play on the Xbox, even if you didn’t have a ton of money to spend because you were 16 years old. I played Marvel vs Capcom 2, Capcom vs SNK 2 EO, Guilty Gear X2 #Reload, Knights of the Old Republic 2, Burnout 3, Fable, Psychonauts, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Jet Set Radio Future, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, Ninja Gaiden Black and a whole load of other really good games that did not really cost a lot of money. I did not, however, play The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, because The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is really boring. It’s a game about walking between Wikipedia pages.
Despite the fact that Xbox games were very cheap and The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind was very boring, I was still touched by my friend’s gesture of buying me a video game. As such, I spent about four months of my life reading about other people playing The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind so that I could convincingly lie to my friend about playing The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. That’s how much I liked my friend. That’s how boring The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is.
I played The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind again tonight via the weird time-travel magic of the original Xbox emulator, and I was unsurprised to find that The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is still really boring, despite the fact that you can now see further than before and the textures look nicer (or so I’m told) and the game loads really fast (gotta load all that text!). I’m sorry, friend from the past - but if you somehow showed up on my doorstep tomorrow with a new copy of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind for me, I’d still lie to you about The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind being really not boring. Some things never change!
This was 2005, and Morrowind for the Xbox had been out for a while; so had the Xbox itself. Most people had traded in their Xbox by this point, because Halo 2 had been out for quite a while and there was nothing else to play on the Xbox; this sent the cost of Xbox games through the proverbial floor, and ironically resulted in there being lots of games to play on the Xbox, even if you didn’t have a ton of money to spend because you were 16 years old. I played Marvel vs Capcom 2, Capcom vs SNK 2 EO, Guilty Gear X2 #Reload, Knights of the Old Republic 2, Burnout 3, Fable, Psychonauts, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Jet Set Radio Future, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, Ninja Gaiden Black and a whole load of other really good games that did not really cost a lot of money. I did not, however, play The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, because The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is really boring. It’s a game about walking between Wikipedia pages.
Despite the fact that Xbox games were very cheap and The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind was very boring, I was still touched by my friend’s gesture of buying me a video game. As such, I spent about four months of my life reading about other people playing The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind so that I could convincingly lie to my friend about playing The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. That’s how much I liked my friend. That’s how boring The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is.
I played The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind again tonight via the weird time-travel magic of the original Xbox emulator, and I was unsurprised to find that The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is still really boring, despite the fact that you can now see further than before and the textures look nicer (or so I’m told) and the game loads really fast (gotta load all that text!). I’m sorry, friend from the past - but if you somehow showed up on my doorstep tomorrow with a new copy of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind for me, I’d still lie to you about The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind being really not boring. Some things never change!
Sin and Punishment
2000
holy fuck
No More Heroes III
2021
you cannot kill suda51. you cannot kill art for art's sake and you most definitely cannot kill the past - but fuck, man, you better learn how to fall in love with the present. it's kind of ironic how the act of "not giving a fuck" in turn breeds an indestructible lust for life and passion. art is sex, you can't get enough once you know exactly what you can get from it. no more heroes 3 does it for the fuckin' art.
ok, let's put aside the fact that i totally did take a months-long break in the middle of playing this game and only got back to it just tonight to finish up the entire second half in one sitting. this is the most self-confident, balls-out, high on itself video game ever made. this knows every single thing that it wants to be and it absolutely refuses to compromise for anything.
travis strikes again was effectively goichi suda's personal method of coming back to directing video games after nearly a decade of being absent - his personal acknowledgment of the past, wherein he could go through all of the painful emotions and experiences he had experienced in his time away from his home. appropriately, no more heroes 3 is him reaffirming to both himself and the world that this is the thing he loved and he's absolutely fucking crazy about it. this is his world and nothing can change it, and fuck you if you take it away from him. i'm certainly no major proponent of auteur theory given the fact that i know there's plenty more than a director when it comes to large-scale art like this, but i honestly do feel like this is maybe the single greatest in favor of it simply for how blatantly this goes out of its way to do things and call into mind the things that suda loves and wears on his sleeve. absolute legend.
ok, let's put aside the fact that i totally did take a months-long break in the middle of playing this game and only got back to it just tonight to finish up the entire second half in one sitting. this is the most self-confident, balls-out, high on itself video game ever made. this knows every single thing that it wants to be and it absolutely refuses to compromise for anything.
travis strikes again was effectively goichi suda's personal method of coming back to directing video games after nearly a decade of being absent - his personal acknowledgment of the past, wherein he could go through all of the painful emotions and experiences he had experienced in his time away from his home. appropriately, no more heroes 3 is him reaffirming to both himself and the world that this is the thing he loved and he's absolutely fucking crazy about it. this is his world and nothing can change it, and fuck you if you take it away from him. i'm certainly no major proponent of auteur theory given the fact that i know there's plenty more than a director when it comes to large-scale art like this, but i honestly do feel like this is maybe the single greatest in favor of it simply for how blatantly this goes out of its way to do things and call into mind the things that suda loves and wears on his sleeve. absolute legend.
maaaan i really wanted to get into this but its mostly another nah from me. Little Hope still on top, I'm afraid, and its not a high peak! i feel like a lot of people are going to prefer this to the prior episodes bc it doesnt klutzily trauma metaphorize/bad tripify most of its horror away, but it kinda replaces that genre-disinterested sloppiness with several sins i might find even less tolerable. REALLY hated the sanctimonious and frankly gross both sidesy iraq war enemy of my enemy shit starring a truly heinous and visually indistinct cast that's not even fun to root against. sadly the legitimately fun stunt-casting of Ashley Tisdale is mostly wasted, as her role feels pretty joyless and minor and whatever happened with her wonky bobblehead character model animation is deeply rude to her tbh!! still some camp value to be derived from her wannabe The Descent cosplay bits but eh). The creature design is a huge step down from Little Hope in terms of conceptual inventiveness and setpiece choreo imo, and all the relationship/personality stat mechanics are back to feeling mostly pointless and unintegrated into anything structurally valuable. The pacing might also be the worst in the series... after a splattery and fun enough second act closer, the game totally flatlines during its pre-finale with some awful and overlong attempts at relationship building/EXPLORATION OF "THEMES", and the plodding infodumpery is just a mess. Pretty sure the overall playtime is comparable to the rest of the series at around 4-5 hrs, but the group i was playing with all got so fatigued at this point that any atmosphere completely deflated and things really began to feel bloated and tiresome. The whole escape/epilogue is an enormous whatever.
Idk, at this point it feels fair to say that doing a one year production cycle for these wildly ambitious, modular, and asset intensive games is unrealistic and borderline harmful to the team--I am rooting for this corny lil studio and think theres a lot of talent here but its clear they're not being given the time to script, sequence, and execute any of these potentially fun ideas with the care they deserve. Cant imagine the stress Covid placed on top of this already untenable work pipeline! Its just awful to think about and I feel bad even critizing something that so clearly suffers from being a product of directorial ignorance and project management bordering on abuse. I still value this series as enjoyable enough little spectator-friendly B games to get drunk and play through with friends--its still a rather untapped niche and this team does have an undeniable signature I find charming despite it all--and I might be being especially hard on this one bc the character i played literally did almost nothing aside from that snoozeville "breathe slowly and dont get detected" button press minigame for the entire story! Still leagues better than man of medan even so. I really recommend that anyone with brain worms like me who still inexplicably wants to endure each installment of this series check out Supermassive's way less visible murder mystery side game Hidden Agenda because, while still a mess in many ways, its absolutely superior to any of these!
Idk, at this point it feels fair to say that doing a one year production cycle for these wildly ambitious, modular, and asset intensive games is unrealistic and borderline harmful to the team--I am rooting for this corny lil studio and think theres a lot of talent here but its clear they're not being given the time to script, sequence, and execute any of these potentially fun ideas with the care they deserve. Cant imagine the stress Covid placed on top of this already untenable work pipeline! Its just awful to think about and I feel bad even critizing something that so clearly suffers from being a product of directorial ignorance and project management bordering on abuse. I still value this series as enjoyable enough little spectator-friendly B games to get drunk and play through with friends--its still a rather untapped niche and this team does have an undeniable signature I find charming despite it all--and I might be being especially hard on this one bc the character i played literally did almost nothing aside from that snoozeville "breathe slowly and dont get detected" button press minigame for the entire story! Still leagues better than man of medan even so. I really recommend that anyone with brain worms like me who still inexplicably wants to endure each installment of this series check out Supermassive's way less visible murder mystery side game Hidden Agenda because, while still a mess in many ways, its absolutely superior to any of these!
The original Tetris Effect is one of the best games ever made, to the point that it was all I played for a few months straight when it originally released; I forewent a heap of other big 2018 releases just so I could keep playing it again, again and again again. That’s the mark of a good fuckin’ game right there! Maybe a perfect game, even…
If the original Tetris Effect had a flaw, though, it was that the experience could be quite isolating. It had a certain aura of loneliness that stood in stark contrast to its uplifting core message that humanity is a single-stacked mass of glowing, breathing blocks that deserve to be together in instrumentality, not held alone and apart. Singing “it’s all connected” is all well and good, but the sound of that voice can ring hollow when it’s bouncing off the walls of your empty living room.
I think Tetsuya Mizuguchi and his team may have been aware of this, too - because Connected is all about making the original Effect’s promises into a reality. It’s hard to know when this update was actually conceived of, but announcing it a few months into the original lockdown and delivering it during that harsh 2020 winter feels like a heartfelt gift from Monstars and Resonair to the planet. A puzzle game’s plea for love and mercy at a time when it was most needed.
I feel kinda guilty about ignoring the gift, though. This DLC/v1.5/whatever-it-is primarily focused on multiplayer, and not since Tetris Battle Gaiden have I seen a game actively innovate on what communal Tetris could be. I doubted this would be any different than other Tetris games that had tried and failed to unite players in the past. I checked it out for a bit at launch last year, but kinda left the Connected content by the wayside for a long time. I thought it wouldn’t be my kind of thing; only after watching three Tetris Pros absolutely demolish the Co-Op Journey did I begin to understand what I was missing out on.
The non-competitive multiplayer in this is a total delight, so much so that I beat the whole thing in one sitting with two random online dudes from Brazil and Japan in the middle of a random Sunday morning/Saturday night/Sunday night. We worked together to battle the stars and keep the galaxy’s light alive, all from our respective corners of our world. It was awesome to see three people span continents to co-operate and communicate via the medium of Tetris Ghost Pieces. “Put your S block here!” “Rotate the line!” “Put down your T piece here, and then I’ll put my square on top!” - I heard these people saying these things without ever registering a word. That’s crazy. That’s cool. That’s connected. And arguably it’s all the more powerful when played online with players across the globe.
Tetris Effect: Connected is the change it wants to see in the world. If you liked the original game - or are just a fan of Tetris in general - I highly recommend checking the online content out. Who knows? We might see each other out there, beyond the time.
If the original Tetris Effect had a flaw, though, it was that the experience could be quite isolating. It had a certain aura of loneliness that stood in stark contrast to its uplifting core message that humanity is a single-stacked mass of glowing, breathing blocks that deserve to be together in instrumentality, not held alone and apart. Singing “it’s all connected” is all well and good, but the sound of that voice can ring hollow when it’s bouncing off the walls of your empty living room.
I think Tetsuya Mizuguchi and his team may have been aware of this, too - because Connected is all about making the original Effect’s promises into a reality. It’s hard to know when this update was actually conceived of, but announcing it a few months into the original lockdown and delivering it during that harsh 2020 winter feels like a heartfelt gift from Monstars and Resonair to the planet. A puzzle game’s plea for love and mercy at a time when it was most needed.
I feel kinda guilty about ignoring the gift, though. This DLC/v1.5/whatever-it-is primarily focused on multiplayer, and not since Tetris Battle Gaiden have I seen a game actively innovate on what communal Tetris could be. I doubted this would be any different than other Tetris games that had tried and failed to unite players in the past. I checked it out for a bit at launch last year, but kinda left the Connected content by the wayside for a long time. I thought it wouldn’t be my kind of thing; only after watching three Tetris Pros absolutely demolish the Co-Op Journey did I begin to understand what I was missing out on.
The non-competitive multiplayer in this is a total delight, so much so that I beat the whole thing in one sitting with two random online dudes from Brazil and Japan in the middle of a random Sunday morning/Saturday night/Sunday night. We worked together to battle the stars and keep the galaxy’s light alive, all from our respective corners of our world. It was awesome to see three people span continents to co-operate and communicate via the medium of Tetris Ghost Pieces. “Put your S block here!” “Rotate the line!” “Put down your T piece here, and then I’ll put my square on top!” - I heard these people saying these things without ever registering a word. That’s crazy. That’s cool. That’s connected. And arguably it’s all the more powerful when played online with players across the globe.
Tetris Effect: Connected is the change it wants to see in the world. If you liked the original game - or are just a fan of Tetris in general - I highly recommend checking the online content out. Who knows? We might see each other out there, beyond the time.
EarthBound
1994
When EarthBound arrived on Wii U in 2013, my oldest friend and I made a day of it. I mean we took the time to walk over to the local GameStop down by the bagel shop and pick up a physical download code. We'd both seen and heard references to EarthBound from time to time alluding to its weirdness, its hidden layers, and its mythical status, but redeeming the purchase revealed something else. We settled on the default names (though I can't say I recommend it), sat on the carpet in front of the TV, and spent all afternoon strolling through Onett and hanging out with its characters. There was something eerily comfortable about this little cartoon suburb, with its restaurants, hotels, and nonsense-spewing adults. What I now realize is that, despite there being psychic powers and talking alien bees, I'd never experienced a setting in a videogame, or possibly anywhere, with an atmosphere as earnest or authentic. We didn't so much as reach the Titanic Ant before my friend had to go home, resolving then to download the game for himself, but that first afternoon with the game had already burrowed deep inside my memory.
EarthBound's mundanity is as core to its identity as any of the wild idiosyncrasies it's known for. To wander its familiar towns, talk with weirdos and pick up friends and souvenirs and memories is to gaze into a heightened mirror of reality, exaggerated in its warmth and darkness. It somehow manages to achieve this while also being as playful and thorough an RPG adventure as any, packed with color and variety and laugh-out-loud surprises and genuine scares. With a hilarious sense of humor that manifests in quirky, sometimes endearingly inconvenient game mechanics, excellent taste in music, and an equal degree of world-wisdom, playing EarthBound always feels like hanging out with another person who's been places and seen things that you or I might only imagine. It's the only game I could believe might actually possess a living soul.
I was in middle school when I started EarthBound, and I wouldn't finish it until the summer before college (what can I say, time flies). I'd moved away from our neighborhood by the time I reached the endgame, and invited my oldest friend to join me. Sure enough, he did. We sat down on the couch in front of the TV. I don't remember if I exactly cried during the finale, but even now, after more replays than I care to admit, it resonates. I felt back then this burning realization that, in some cosmic way, EarthBound had probably understood me more than I did, all along. Maybe it still does.
EarthBound's mundanity is as core to its identity as any of the wild idiosyncrasies it's known for. To wander its familiar towns, talk with weirdos and pick up friends and souvenirs and memories is to gaze into a heightened mirror of reality, exaggerated in its warmth and darkness. It somehow manages to achieve this while also being as playful and thorough an RPG adventure as any, packed with color and variety and laugh-out-loud surprises and genuine scares. With a hilarious sense of humor that manifests in quirky, sometimes endearingly inconvenient game mechanics, excellent taste in music, and an equal degree of world-wisdom, playing EarthBound always feels like hanging out with another person who's been places and seen things that you or I might only imagine. It's the only game I could believe might actually possess a living soul.
I was in middle school when I started EarthBound, and I wouldn't finish it until the summer before college (what can I say, time flies). I'd moved away from our neighborhood by the time I reached the endgame, and invited my oldest friend to join me. Sure enough, he did. We sat down on the couch in front of the TV. I don't remember if I exactly cried during the finale, but even now, after more replays than I care to admit, it resonates. I felt back then this burning realization that, in some cosmic way, EarthBound had probably understood me more than I did, all along. Maybe it still does.
I genuinely barely even understand who this guy is, but he made a bunch of my fully-grown adult friends admit to crying about him, which means he holds a special power that deserves a certain disdainful respect. Also, I like his three-hit neutral air attack.
(Lil chibi Doomguy costume that came with this pack is great.)
(Lil chibi Doomguy costume that came with this pack is great.)
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.
Metroid Dread
2021
This review contains spoilers
My first few hours with Dread had the slightest twinge of disappointment to them. Mechanically, this is almost certainly the best 2D Metroid game. Samus is a joy to control, with a perfect blend of agility and weight, and movement options like the dash and grapple that build and stack on each other wonderfully. Combined with all the little animation details and comfortable controls, the simple act of moving has never been better. The combat is also probably the series best, since even if the counter mechanic reduces many individual enemies into simple parry fodder, and the bosses all feel just a little too slow for how spry and agile you now are, there’s lots of fun and fairly difficult boss fights that balance the badass interactive cinematic moments with actual 2D fast paced combat well (this is also arguably the only 2D Metroid with a good final boss. And it’s a great final boss.) The aesthetics, particularly in music, have a few missteps, but the amount of background details in the fauna of the world and their reaction to you was consistently dazzling to look at, and some of its sparser foreground lit tunnels and caves look almost painterly.
But I don’t like the Metroid games because they’ve had great combat, or even exploration. I like them because their ability to convey an empty, alien, and hostile mood is unparalleled, and the ability to (in the few of them that have ventured to do it) tell more traditional and involved stories that tie in perfectly to their mechanical and structural decisions. Dread grasps the former right away. The initial jolt of panic the first couple EMMIs induce is perfection, and the knowledge of their impending presence because of specially marked barriers is a perfect cause of momentary panic. Hell, even when the EMMIs fail to really keep up with your own advancement and very quickly become rather trivial, it feels like the game showing off its understanding of Metroid’s repeated story as ultimately one of gaining control over your surroundings from within, of using the hostile world’s own weapons and history against it. Even the little details of environmental storytelling, like empty and mechanical EMMI zones being reclaimed by the natural life or the forest zones slowly thinning out, hit beautifully. Where it seemingly falters, though, is in the overt narrative.
The set up is sound. Instead of a deep venture into the world to then escape it, as usual, the intent is escape from the outset. The idea of helplessness is underscored to a near comical degree from the very beginning, including from a suspiciously out of character speech from ADAM. But as Dread dumps more and more lore drops about past warring tribes and pulls the Chozo from the dead yet again, it’s a bit hard not to feel like the writing here has lost the theme in favor of pure plot. The idea of ending conflicts long past and Samus saying goodbye to her entire history once and for all is an admirable one, but one begins to get the sense that there was a little more lore dumping happening to let any of it sit. The Fusion-esque structure of getting instruction from ADAM begins to feel purposelessly rehashed, a needless attempt at harkening back to the much more narratively cohesive game’s story of breaking free from control.
And as it turns out, that’s exactly what it is. Moments before the game’s final boss, Samus pops the false shadow of ADAM like a balloon, to reveal the game’s overarching villain behind it. The hollow recreation of Fusion clicks into place. In Dread, the classic Samus self-actualization formula of the series is in and of itself the villain’s scheme, a controlled illusion of power and freedom to extract Samus at her most powerful and seemingly free in an underestimation of her will and ability. Moments before its ending, Dread’s story comes alive as not just a story of gaining the strength to grasp one’s own autonomy, but also one of the many obfuscating layers and levels in which the resistance to self-realization manifests.
TL;DR
Fusion is The Matrix. Dread is Matrix Reloaded.
But I don’t like the Metroid games because they’ve had great combat, or even exploration. I like them because their ability to convey an empty, alien, and hostile mood is unparalleled, and the ability to (in the few of them that have ventured to do it) tell more traditional and involved stories that tie in perfectly to their mechanical and structural decisions. Dread grasps the former right away. The initial jolt of panic the first couple EMMIs induce is perfection, and the knowledge of their impending presence because of specially marked barriers is a perfect cause of momentary panic. Hell, even when the EMMIs fail to really keep up with your own advancement and very quickly become rather trivial, it feels like the game showing off its understanding of Metroid’s repeated story as ultimately one of gaining control over your surroundings from within, of using the hostile world’s own weapons and history against it. Even the little details of environmental storytelling, like empty and mechanical EMMI zones being reclaimed by the natural life or the forest zones slowly thinning out, hit beautifully. Where it seemingly falters, though, is in the overt narrative.
The set up is sound. Instead of a deep venture into the world to then escape it, as usual, the intent is escape from the outset. The idea of helplessness is underscored to a near comical degree from the very beginning, including from a suspiciously out of character speech from ADAM. But as Dread dumps more and more lore drops about past warring tribes and pulls the Chozo from the dead yet again, it’s a bit hard not to feel like the writing here has lost the theme in favor of pure plot. The idea of ending conflicts long past and Samus saying goodbye to her entire history once and for all is an admirable one, but one begins to get the sense that there was a little more lore dumping happening to let any of it sit. The Fusion-esque structure of getting instruction from ADAM begins to feel purposelessly rehashed, a needless attempt at harkening back to the much more narratively cohesive game’s story of breaking free from control.
And as it turns out, that’s exactly what it is. Moments before the game’s final boss, Samus pops the false shadow of ADAM like a balloon, to reveal the game’s overarching villain behind it. The hollow recreation of Fusion clicks into place. In Dread, the classic Samus self-actualization formula of the series is in and of itself the villain’s scheme, a controlled illusion of power and freedom to extract Samus at her most powerful and seemingly free in an underestimation of her will and ability. Moments before its ending, Dread’s story comes alive as not just a story of gaining the strength to grasp one’s own autonomy, but also one of the many obfuscating layers and levels in which the resistance to self-realization manifests.
TL;DR
Fusion is The Matrix. Dread is Matrix Reloaded.
Metroid: Other M
2010
This review contains spoilers
Holy fucking shit!
Did you know that if you take the "M" and switch it's place with "Other" the title becomes
Metroid Mother!?!?
Just wait until you read the initials.
Did you know that if you take the "M" and switch it's place with "Other" the title becomes
Metroid Mother!?!?
Just wait until you read the initials.
Metroid Dread
2021
Super Metroid usually has sequence breaks that are quickly digestible and the moments where you say "They knew!" were short and quick. Metroid Dread pushes one of those moments further than any in Super Metroid. I did a sequence break to get the Gravity Suit early and skip the space jump and another new upgrade. Then I thought I was stuck as I progressed, then I shinesparked, and it worked. Another moment later, I did some wall jump jumbo when I needed the Space Jump and it also worked. There were no glitches involved. This was fucking deliberate. They fucking knew about this route and the fact that they made the story route work for the casual playthrough and one like this made me bump my rating up to 5 stars. That moment was more mindblowing than any moment in Super Metroid.
Metroid Dread
2021
It's been 19 years since the release of Metroid Fusion, the last major installment of the 2D games, and Metroid Dread picks up exactly where we left off Samus Aran after killing the entire X parasite species, or so she believed. On a mission to the planet ZDR, she'll have to deal with the new, terrible threat of the E.M.M.I., very agile robots of frightening power. The huntress becomes prey again.
Metroid Dread is the new chapter designed to be a valid start for anyone who has never touched the series (also thanks to a brief introduction on previous events) while also being able to give an experience worthy of its name to those who already had the opportunity to play all the others. Dread contains all the features that made its predecessors great: the disturbing atmospheres and the strong narrative imprint of Fusion, the huge, complex and interconnected game maps typical of Super Metroid, the 360° aiming mechanic of Samus Returns and a really satisfying control feedback.
Throughout the adventure we'll find ourselves exploring rooms and corridors that make up a large map, divided into many areas all connected to each other by teleportation and rapid navigation systems. MercurySteam has created a game world full of secrets, where the player will probably want to return to explore even after completing the story (about 8 hours), and its immensity is not intimidating to navigate: with or without the help of marks that can be positioned at will on the map, the main objective will never escape from our eye, and the sense of progression flows at a constant pace; those moments of frustration and total loss are decimated here, without appearing excessively linear. As in Fusion, the instructions and orders are given by Adam, the AI we find in specific rooms of the map, but unlike the previous game, he leaves more freedom to roam without marking the precise place of destination, but giving only an idea of where to go to continue. It is also given an idea of the position of the points that hide a secret through flashing areas on the map: in this sense the player is perhaps too helped in finding all the hidden objects, but this does not detract from the general "pleasure of discovery".
Obviously like all the other Metroid games it is necessary to reacquire all the abilities in order to progress, and in Dread in addition to the classic, iconic abilities there are new ones, which expand the possibilities of attack and movement. A fluid movement that is very highlighted by introducing the possibility of sliding while running and shooting at the same time, thanks to the free aim. From Samus Returns it also inherits the possibility of performing a parry, whose execution window is so wide that it can forgive a slight delay in pressing X, even if in any case it is not that easy to do especially in boss battles, where the attacks are very fast.
A huge part of the map is formed by the "E.M.M.I. zone", an area where the robots run undisturbed, in order to find and hunt Samus, who can only escape or hide. They are agile, fast and indestructible, and can only be defeated with a particular single-use weapon. If Samus is captured, the player has only two chances of being able to free himself via a parry, but, cleverly, the timing required is extremely precise (but not impossible), and the window for the parry is random. Once you have defeated one E.M.M.I., it's up to the next one, even more powerful than the other. A repetitiveness that fortunately does not persist throughout the game, since starting from the second half the threats and the stakes become even higher, and there is room for a greater variety of bosses.
Not all boss or miniboss battles are memorable, but one thing is certain: they are fast-paced, intense and make spectacularity their strong point. It can be said that Metroid Dread is very scenic and full of cutscenes, enhanced by a shining artistic direction, thanks to different settings and an aggressive use of colors. The technical side is also remarkable: the animations are incredible, and the game runs at 900p and 60 fps in docked mode, and at 720p in handheld, but (personal note) the frame rate drops during the cutscenes bothered me, and these are the cases that make me want a Switch hardware upgrade to enjoy these jewels to the fullest.
So, Metroid Dread enters into the list of the best Switch exclusives: fast-paced, strong replayability, damn fun gameplay and a great atmosphere.
Metroid Dread is the new chapter designed to be a valid start for anyone who has never touched the series (also thanks to a brief introduction on previous events) while also being able to give an experience worthy of its name to those who already had the opportunity to play all the others. Dread contains all the features that made its predecessors great: the disturbing atmospheres and the strong narrative imprint of Fusion, the huge, complex and interconnected game maps typical of Super Metroid, the 360° aiming mechanic of Samus Returns and a really satisfying control feedback.
Throughout the adventure we'll find ourselves exploring rooms and corridors that make up a large map, divided into many areas all connected to each other by teleportation and rapid navigation systems. MercurySteam has created a game world full of secrets, where the player will probably want to return to explore even after completing the story (about 8 hours), and its immensity is not intimidating to navigate: with or without the help of marks that can be positioned at will on the map, the main objective will never escape from our eye, and the sense of progression flows at a constant pace; those moments of frustration and total loss are decimated here, without appearing excessively linear. As in Fusion, the instructions and orders are given by Adam, the AI we find in specific rooms of the map, but unlike the previous game, he leaves more freedom to roam without marking the precise place of destination, but giving only an idea of where to go to continue. It is also given an idea of the position of the points that hide a secret through flashing areas on the map: in this sense the player is perhaps too helped in finding all the hidden objects, but this does not detract from the general "pleasure of discovery".
Obviously like all the other Metroid games it is necessary to reacquire all the abilities in order to progress, and in Dread in addition to the classic, iconic abilities there are new ones, which expand the possibilities of attack and movement. A fluid movement that is very highlighted by introducing the possibility of sliding while running and shooting at the same time, thanks to the free aim. From Samus Returns it also inherits the possibility of performing a parry, whose execution window is so wide that it can forgive a slight delay in pressing X, even if in any case it is not that easy to do especially in boss battles, where the attacks are very fast.
A huge part of the map is formed by the "E.M.M.I. zone", an area where the robots run undisturbed, in order to find and hunt Samus, who can only escape or hide. They are agile, fast and indestructible, and can only be defeated with a particular single-use weapon. If Samus is captured, the player has only two chances of being able to free himself via a parry, but, cleverly, the timing required is extremely precise (but not impossible), and the window for the parry is random. Once you have defeated one E.M.M.I., it's up to the next one, even more powerful than the other. A repetitiveness that fortunately does not persist throughout the game, since starting from the second half the threats and the stakes become even higher, and there is room for a greater variety of bosses.
Not all boss or miniboss battles are memorable, but one thing is certain: they are fast-paced, intense and make spectacularity their strong point. It can be said that Metroid Dread is very scenic and full of cutscenes, enhanced by a shining artistic direction, thanks to different settings and an aggressive use of colors. The technical side is also remarkable: the animations are incredible, and the game runs at 900p and 60 fps in docked mode, and at 720p in handheld, but (personal note) the frame rate drops during the cutscenes bothered me, and these are the cases that make me want a Switch hardware upgrade to enjoy these jewels to the fullest.
So, Metroid Dread enters into the list of the best Switch exclusives: fast-paced, strong replayability, damn fun gameplay and a great atmosphere.
Metroid Dread
2021
If you gave me enough beers, put this on a boxy CRT and told me "This is the secret Metroid Nintendo made in 2005 for the gamecube", I'd like to think I'd believe you. The kindest thing I can say about Dread is that it really just feels like a natural successor to Fusion without... caveats. Mercurysteam have got their own flair in parts (dear lord do they love their parry QTEs), but the thing I was worried with most about Dread - that it'd feel like this unnatural weird growth on the core Metroids, was unfounded. Dread really just in Fusion 2.
And the core of that is the control I feel. Fusion, to this day, is still one of the nicest 2D games to just move about and do stuff in. It's gamefeel is just spectacular. I'm not convinced Dread is better, but it's close enough for this to just feel like a wonderful game to just run about in. It's absolutely wonderfully animated too, with loads of little things - Samus putting her hand above morph ball holes when you're nearby them, for instance - that add up to the game just feeling wonderful to play outright.
As a Search-Action game, it takes much more from Fusion than any of the other Metroids, with more of a focus in putting the player in areas to puzzle through rather than leaving more of the map open at any one time. There's plenty of points of no return and theres way fewer means to sequence break, and lot more square hole-square peg problems than in Super, at least from what I can tell. Which is fine. What it loses in the sheer freedom, it gains a lot in pacing and direction, and does a much better job of conveying the goals and "plot" than Super does.
And clumped in the middle of all that is the EMMI. They're pretty good! Whilst they never get close to the sheer fear of death the SA-X put in my 8 year old's heart, they provide a good degree of tension and a neat obstacle in the middle of the zones. The generous respawns the game has undercuts it, and the (mostly pretty great) boss fights a bit, but I think it's a reasonable concession to the fairly difficult nature of both the EMMI encounters and portions of the game in general.
The way the game ups the power of the EMMI, through letting them start seeing through walls, freeze samus and walk freely through water she can't, is pretty good, but the facade definetly does wear thin towards the end of the game when samus has about a dozen different movement options and can easily outpace them, especially after you get Gravity suit and Space jump. Fortunately though, they take a backseat in the last few hours and honestly they're not as much of the game as it seems.
Honestly the best thing they offer in my opinion is the psychological effect. Triumphing over an EMMI basically completely gives you the reins to each zone, especially as they're tied to key progression items. It helps create a great flow of rising and lowering tension throughout the game, and help reinforce your progress in a game that has nothing else like Super Metroid's 4 bosses to kill or Fusion's sectors.
There are faults here. I'm not going to pretend to care about the Metroid storyline, but I think it's fair to say it lacks one of the exceptionally strong beats which kinda characterises Metroid 2 and Super in particular, outside of some pretty good characterisation of Samus through her actions. There's not enough new abilities really, and the placement of some powerups is extremely strange to the point they almost feel like they're put in out of obligation. I really like what the game does in mixing up the original item order but it does feel kinda stupid to get Power bombs so damn late and they're near completely useless, for instance. And it would have been nice if they could have gotten rid of the loading screens and elevators between zones, which feels like a pure technical constraint.
But honestly, I don't really care. I just know first time I stopped playing it, I realised I felt exactly the same way Fusion made me feel all those years ago. There's a certain thrill to a wonderfully paced, fun controlling search action game. Countless devs have tried in the wake of Metroid. Some of them have managed to scratch that itch, most of them fall pretty dang flat. There's frankly just not enough games that feel like Fusion and Super. That drip feed of satisfaction and thick tension thats so wonderful, that knows not to overstay its welcome. I honestly did not think that the developers of Castlevania Lords of Shadow 2 could come close. I am very happy to be wrong.
Dread probably isnt going to be my favourite Metroid. But if someone told me it was - I'd get it. It's a game that slots right in among some of the best games Nintendo have ever made in Fusion and Super. And that's really something.
And the core of that is the control I feel. Fusion, to this day, is still one of the nicest 2D games to just move about and do stuff in. It's gamefeel is just spectacular. I'm not convinced Dread is better, but it's close enough for this to just feel like a wonderful game to just run about in. It's absolutely wonderfully animated too, with loads of little things - Samus putting her hand above morph ball holes when you're nearby them, for instance - that add up to the game just feeling wonderful to play outright.
As a Search-Action game, it takes much more from Fusion than any of the other Metroids, with more of a focus in putting the player in areas to puzzle through rather than leaving more of the map open at any one time. There's plenty of points of no return and theres way fewer means to sequence break, and lot more square hole-square peg problems than in Super, at least from what I can tell. Which is fine. What it loses in the sheer freedom, it gains a lot in pacing and direction, and does a much better job of conveying the goals and "plot" than Super does.
And clumped in the middle of all that is the EMMI. They're pretty good! Whilst they never get close to the sheer fear of death the SA-X put in my 8 year old's heart, they provide a good degree of tension and a neat obstacle in the middle of the zones. The generous respawns the game has undercuts it, and the (mostly pretty great) boss fights a bit, but I think it's a reasonable concession to the fairly difficult nature of both the EMMI encounters and portions of the game in general.
The way the game ups the power of the EMMI, through letting them start seeing through walls, freeze samus and walk freely through water she can't, is pretty good, but the facade definetly does wear thin towards the end of the game when samus has about a dozen different movement options and can easily outpace them, especially after you get Gravity suit and Space jump. Fortunately though, they take a backseat in the last few hours and honestly they're not as much of the game as it seems.
Honestly the best thing they offer in my opinion is the psychological effect. Triumphing over an EMMI basically completely gives you the reins to each zone, especially as they're tied to key progression items. It helps create a great flow of rising and lowering tension throughout the game, and help reinforce your progress in a game that has nothing else like Super Metroid's 4 bosses to kill or Fusion's sectors.
There are faults here. I'm not going to pretend to care about the Metroid storyline, but I think it's fair to say it lacks one of the exceptionally strong beats which kinda characterises Metroid 2 and Super in particular, outside of some pretty good characterisation of Samus through her actions. There's not enough new abilities really, and the placement of some powerups is extremely strange to the point they almost feel like they're put in out of obligation. I really like what the game does in mixing up the original item order but it does feel kinda stupid to get Power bombs so damn late and they're near completely useless, for instance. And it would have been nice if they could have gotten rid of the loading screens and elevators between zones, which feels like a pure technical constraint.
But honestly, I don't really care. I just know first time I stopped playing it, I realised I felt exactly the same way Fusion made me feel all those years ago. There's a certain thrill to a wonderfully paced, fun controlling search action game. Countless devs have tried in the wake of Metroid. Some of them have managed to scratch that itch, most of them fall pretty dang flat. There's frankly just not enough games that feel like Fusion and Super. That drip feed of satisfaction and thick tension thats so wonderful, that knows not to overstay its welcome. I honestly did not think that the developers of Castlevania Lords of Shadow 2 could come close. I am very happy to be wrong.
Dread probably isnt going to be my favourite Metroid. But if someone told me it was - I'd get it. It's a game that slots right in among some of the best games Nintendo have ever made in Fusion and Super. And that's really something.