Scale
40 Reviews liked by Scale
Lethal Company
2023
Victoria 3
2022
There's a frustrating mix of genuinely clever ideas that improve upon the framework left behind by Victoria 2, and an overall experience that is just glaringly half-baked. The player is given a lot more fine tuned control over the economy now, regardless of economic laws, with the result that every country plays out the same repetetive loops of construction queues. The AI economy seems insensitive to the profit potential of critical commodities, with the result that the mechanisms of indirect economic hegemony feel useless; You need to directly invade and occupy territory to make sure oil rigs and rubber plantations are actually built. AI nations will attempt to pursue their relevant ambitions, but if they hit a speed bump they can't figure out how to recover or develop a backup plan, and fall into holding patterns for the rest of the game. The Balkans never destabilize, China never collapses properly, there's never a proper World War, and none of the alternate histories these outcomes entail are lively or dynamic. And so on.
I do genuinely like the war system. This kind of indirect strategic control, where preparation is key and the national government doesn't directly command the movements of every soldier, is exactly what I wanted from this game in general. It's baffling to me that they reigned in player management on the war system only to give us direct control over where every infrastructure building in our nation goes.
I do genuinely like the war system. This kind of indirect strategic control, where preparation is key and the national government doesn't directly command the movements of every soldier, is exactly what I wanted from this game in general. It's baffling to me that they reigned in player management on the war system only to give us direct control over where every infrastructure building in our nation goes.
Undertale
2015
With every new rpg maker game I play it makes me look back on Undertale and I realize I have no real fond memories of this game outside of the Sans fight. I never really even liked half the cast but it's actual game play was fun and all this really was as a game was a meme game to me.
Kid Icarus: Uprising
2012
blah blah blah controls blah blah blah this game could inject me with aids every time i get hit and i'd still call it peak
easily the most fun and imaginative 2d mario since super mario world. grappling vine badge is freaking awesome btw
This review contains spoilers
Kaleidoscope manages to be both minimalistic and excessive. Its so anti itself in many ways i cant help but respect it.
Its "death game" isnt about interesting scenarious enabled by the game rule sets, its about characters having conflict enabled by idea of "death game" existing.
"Death game" itself is short, 5 minutes in the game world, which obviously translates into around 30 minutes for the player. And it will reset and repeat until it serves its goal.
Many death game stories are about characters beating the game, beating the system and cracking this "death game" apart. Those expectations are futhered by the player input, in Kaleidoscope player distributes cards with "roles" to the characters, and sees how match ups they created will play out. One may expect that player must solve the puzzle: figure out the characters relationships to each other and create a match up where characters will work together to survive.
However it is ultimately impossible as player will soon discover, conflicts will arise not from any consistent logic, but just because they are expected. In one game character may be genius manipulator who will kill everyone, in another they will be noble martyr who will sacrifce themselves for the sake of their friends.
Player will simply be there exhausting all options while watching farce a play out. It doesnt feel like "death game" does unmasking of the characters dark side, it feels like a performance - all these ways we can all be awful to each other and create dramatic narrative about suffering and unfairness.
The game states plainly in text that it pursues to create disillusionment with its cute girls main characters. Idea of idealisation that hurts someone being idolised and also dehumanises them is compelling one and i think to tackle it by using moe and cute character designs courtesty of Hinoue Itaru was a good match.
However i think it falls apart in several ways. It claims that this idolisation of female world is born from viewing it on a surface level, by imagining it to be flowery sugary, when in fact its more complex. But text engagement with gender aspect is itself surface level. For exaple to deromanticize women it goes for kinda extreme antagonisation of them that borderlines on sexists anecdotes told by an awful stand up comedian on mainstream tv. Simiarly this idea of "those cute girls doing faces that feel wrong on them" while correct on a surface and executed in the very interesting way of Itaru characters doing Ryuskishi's facial expressions (twisted faces one may encounter in Higurashi and Umineko), it kinda treats Itaru as cutesy cute artist and nothing else, despite her having drawn stuff thats actually more graphic and hecked up than Kaleidoscope.
Despite that i still feel like narrative about hurting someone by idolising them and in that non considering their opinions/emotions delievers a point across and has emotional narrative to go along with it.
Its obviously pretty difficult to be emotionally invested in "death games" playing on loop and becoming the noise. Some of them manage to be somewhat more compelling dramatic narratives, but largely they are the noise of vomiting and dying groans. Structure around repition is obviously is deeply rooted in bishoujou games in particular, however instead of long form storytelling, Kaleidoscope does those bite size chunks than be treated almost like episodes of TV show.
Rules of choosing heroine whose story players wants to see even somewhat still apply, however real story is happening under all the noise.
As mentioned before characters behave largely inconsistently and will create conflict just because it needs to happen, however there are some consistencies that can be spotted. It kinda feels like mystery solving, not unlike cross examination of several witnesses testimonies.
"Death games" are pretty utilitarian in this, even if someone would to escape by sacrificing their close friend, the game wont show future with some sort of epilogue with them living after "death game" - it will show past of those characters, their idyllic mundane life.
The game shows flashbacks before and after "death game", sometimes even in the middle. At first they are inconsequantial slice of life scenes that feel like something to act as contrast to vulgarity of "death games", something to give characters humanity and make player feel bad about them. But over the course of the game it develops into overarching narrative of another character - of the boy who idolises those cute girls for their surface level sugary flowery qualities.
Its obvious when you play the game, but game contexualises player input of giving girls cards via a boy sitting in a cade in the room where "death game" is taking place. Via this contextualisation it creates assosiation between this character who exists inside of the story and us the player who experiences this story by engaging with gaming software. If this boy is meant to be disillusioned with cute girls, surely we also should be disillusioned with moe characters.
However interestingly enough the game doesnt attempt to present this as a first person POV that watches over "death games", it just shows those events in normal "camera is where it needs to be at any given time", which be considered just contrivence of presentation (even games with first person POV have full screen illustrations in third person), but there is a background where boy in the cage can be seen.
Whatever this disconnect creates something interesting is up to debate, i have no particular opinion on it, but figured ill write up this observation.
So for what do girls suffer? Or for who?
In somewhat of inverse of how meta angle of those stories can be "characters are being tortured for the entertainment of the audience" Kaleidoscope instead seeks to torture its audience with 12 short stories where characters arent really much of the characters.
However by having to bear this noise for so long, by being front loaded with their awful qualities, by sorting out inconsistencies and discovering consistencies - you discover the characters.
In a way the game tries to say that we have to accept people for who we are, not project our own idolised version on them. However it drowns that in noise of treating gender related issues as binary things, sometimes the game doesnt only feel like it lacks female perspective, but male one as well.
it trully is frustrating how disconnected from understanding how people of different genders exist and interact in a real society.
But also feel like its writer Ryukishi is himself a person on whom ideolised version of himself is being projected by fans he aquired over the years. A person some of whose works are really beloved, but others are dismissed because they dont meet this idolised idea of Ryukishi.
Maybe Ryukishi was a kaleidoscope too.
Its "death game" isnt about interesting scenarious enabled by the game rule sets, its about characters having conflict enabled by idea of "death game" existing.
"Death game" itself is short, 5 minutes in the game world, which obviously translates into around 30 minutes for the player. And it will reset and repeat until it serves its goal.
Many death game stories are about characters beating the game, beating the system and cracking this "death game" apart. Those expectations are futhered by the player input, in Kaleidoscope player distributes cards with "roles" to the characters, and sees how match ups they created will play out. One may expect that player must solve the puzzle: figure out the characters relationships to each other and create a match up where characters will work together to survive.
However it is ultimately impossible as player will soon discover, conflicts will arise not from any consistent logic, but just because they are expected. In one game character may be genius manipulator who will kill everyone, in another they will be noble martyr who will sacrifce themselves for the sake of their friends.
Player will simply be there exhausting all options while watching farce a play out. It doesnt feel like "death game" does unmasking of the characters dark side, it feels like a performance - all these ways we can all be awful to each other and create dramatic narrative about suffering and unfairness.
The game states plainly in text that it pursues to create disillusionment with its cute girls main characters. Idea of idealisation that hurts someone being idolised and also dehumanises them is compelling one and i think to tackle it by using moe and cute character designs courtesty of Hinoue Itaru was a good match.
However i think it falls apart in several ways. It claims that this idolisation of female world is born from viewing it on a surface level, by imagining it to be flowery sugary, when in fact its more complex. But text engagement with gender aspect is itself surface level. For exaple to deromanticize women it goes for kinda extreme antagonisation of them that borderlines on sexists anecdotes told by an awful stand up comedian on mainstream tv. Simiarly this idea of "those cute girls doing faces that feel wrong on them" while correct on a surface and executed in the very interesting way of Itaru characters doing Ryuskishi's facial expressions (twisted faces one may encounter in Higurashi and Umineko), it kinda treats Itaru as cutesy cute artist and nothing else, despite her having drawn stuff thats actually more graphic and hecked up than Kaleidoscope.
Despite that i still feel like narrative about hurting someone by idolising them and in that non considering their opinions/emotions delievers a point across and has emotional narrative to go along with it.
Its obviously pretty difficult to be emotionally invested in "death games" playing on loop and becoming the noise. Some of them manage to be somewhat more compelling dramatic narratives, but largely they are the noise of vomiting and dying groans. Structure around repition is obviously is deeply rooted in bishoujou games in particular, however instead of long form storytelling, Kaleidoscope does those bite size chunks than be treated almost like episodes of TV show.
Rules of choosing heroine whose story players wants to see even somewhat still apply, however real story is happening under all the noise.
As mentioned before characters behave largely inconsistently and will create conflict just because it needs to happen, however there are some consistencies that can be spotted. It kinda feels like mystery solving, not unlike cross examination of several witnesses testimonies.
"Death games" are pretty utilitarian in this, even if someone would to escape by sacrificing their close friend, the game wont show future with some sort of epilogue with them living after "death game" - it will show past of those characters, their idyllic mundane life.
The game shows flashbacks before and after "death game", sometimes even in the middle. At first they are inconsequantial slice of life scenes that feel like something to act as contrast to vulgarity of "death games", something to give characters humanity and make player feel bad about them. But over the course of the game it develops into overarching narrative of another character - of the boy who idolises those cute girls for their surface level sugary flowery qualities.
Its obvious when you play the game, but game contexualises player input of giving girls cards via a boy sitting in a cade in the room where "death game" is taking place. Via this contextualisation it creates assosiation between this character who exists inside of the story and us the player who experiences this story by engaging with gaming software. If this boy is meant to be disillusioned with cute girls, surely we also should be disillusioned with moe characters.
However interestingly enough the game doesnt attempt to present this as a first person POV that watches over "death games", it just shows those events in normal "camera is where it needs to be at any given time", which be considered just contrivence of presentation (even games with first person POV have full screen illustrations in third person), but there is a background where boy in the cage can be seen.
Whatever this disconnect creates something interesting is up to debate, i have no particular opinion on it, but figured ill write up this observation.
So for what do girls suffer? Or for who?
In somewhat of inverse of how meta angle of those stories can be "characters are being tortured for the entertainment of the audience" Kaleidoscope instead seeks to torture its audience with 12 short stories where characters arent really much of the characters.
However by having to bear this noise for so long, by being front loaded with their awful qualities, by sorting out inconsistencies and discovering consistencies - you discover the characters.
In a way the game tries to say that we have to accept people for who we are, not project our own idolised version on them. However it drowns that in noise of treating gender related issues as binary things, sometimes the game doesnt only feel like it lacks female perspective, but male one as well.
it trully is frustrating how disconnected from understanding how people of different genders exist and interact in a real society.
But also feel like its writer Ryukishi is himself a person on whom ideolised version of himself is being projected by fans he aquired over the years. A person some of whose works are really beloved, but others are dismissed because they dont meet this idolised idea of Ryukishi.
Maybe Ryukishi was a kaleidoscope too.
Edit: I added some details about bad reads on this game if you'd like to spoil yourself
Solid little horror work with a neat gimmick and top-tier voice acting. Deals with similar themes and concepts that you'd expect from 07th Expansion works, and unlike prior console release games written by Ryukishi -- this one is actually technically a proper 07th Expansion title.
It's extremely evident Ryukishi worked closely with the sound design and with the facial expressions seen in the game, which are brought perfectly to life by Itaru's wonderfully cute artwork. The two are really an ideal pairing and I hope they work together again in the future.
Also, this has the added benefit of not having the same bloated content as his WtC games or RGD, with each "round" only being around 30 minutes or so long.
The setting is essentially a vehicle for the girls to have heated conversations with each other until they show their hidden feelings for each other, all of which is brought to life via the stellar performances and art direction. There's also plenty of SoL flashback scenes where you get to see the girls interact in a less constricting environment
As for gender roles, it's very in line with with his previous works with very stereotypical, almost old-timey traits (Remember Umineko's whole white horse deal with Battler?)
I think it's very exaggerated and misconstrued, but Umineko fans be like that /shrug
tl;dr: Pretty neat, albeit kinda gimmicky game about girls trapped in a death game. Anyway, cool game!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Spoilers from this point about bad reads on the game
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A major plot point in this game is completely misconstrued in an attempt to smear it as an awful, nasty little transphobic game, but it feels like a complete misinterpretation of the work.
A center theme is that women/girls are not this idealized, pure image that many men have.
The character this relates to most, being one of the biggest spoilers in the game, relates to the mysterious boy character. This character, who we later learned in named Sora, spent some time with all the main girls and grew close. Being around them he came to a misunderstanding about these girls, in that they are pure beings incapable of anything that isn't butterflies and sunshine. This misunderstanding/idealition leads Sora to wishing for this world he's imaged in his head -- the world of girls.
Things get a bit muddier her, but it's important to realize Sora's wish doesn't come from a place of dysphoria, or even gender dysmorphia -- but under the false pretense that women and girls do not fight or have conflict, that they are always happy and get along, unlike men who only fight. There isn't a crises of gender identity or anything actually associated with the aforementioned. Realizing that is a must.
The work is essentially a criticism of narrowminded views on women, from certain men. The idea is that women are just as complicated, hence the "Kaleidoscope" that Ryukishi beats you over the head with.
Also, the conversation in which most of this happens in is such a batshit setting piece
Basically, Gerosaku is a greatly misunderstood work, that likely had its reputation due to bad reads.
I think if you've enjoyed the themes and elements of his previous work, you'd probably like this.
Solid little horror work with a neat gimmick and top-tier voice acting. Deals with similar themes and concepts that you'd expect from 07th Expansion works, and unlike prior console release games written by Ryukishi -- this one is actually technically a proper 07th Expansion title.
It's extremely evident Ryukishi worked closely with the sound design and with the facial expressions seen in the game, which are brought perfectly to life by Itaru's wonderfully cute artwork. The two are really an ideal pairing and I hope they work together again in the future.
Also, this has the added benefit of not having the same bloated content as his WtC games or RGD, with each "round" only being around 30 minutes or so long.
The setting is essentially a vehicle for the girls to have heated conversations with each other until they show their hidden feelings for each other, all of which is brought to life via the stellar performances and art direction. There's also plenty of SoL flashback scenes where you get to see the girls interact in a less constricting environment
As for gender roles, it's very in line with with his previous works with very stereotypical, almost old-timey traits (Remember Umineko's whole white horse deal with Battler?)
I think it's very exaggerated and misconstrued, but Umineko fans be like that /shrug
tl;dr: Pretty neat, albeit kinda gimmicky game about girls trapped in a death game. Anyway, cool game!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Spoilers from this point about bad reads on the game
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A major plot point in this game is completely misconstrued in an attempt to smear it as an awful, nasty little transphobic game, but it feels like a complete misinterpretation of the work.
A center theme is that women/girls are not this idealized, pure image that many men have.
The character this relates to most, being one of the biggest spoilers in the game, relates to the mysterious boy character. This character, who we later learned in named Sora, spent some time with all the main girls and grew close. Being around them he came to a misunderstanding about these girls, in that they are pure beings incapable of anything that isn't butterflies and sunshine. This misunderstanding/idealition leads Sora to wishing for this world he's imaged in his head -- the world of girls.
Things get a bit muddier her, but it's important to realize Sora's wish doesn't come from a place of dysphoria, or even gender dysmorphia -- but under the false pretense that women and girls do not fight or have conflict, that they are always happy and get along, unlike men who only fight. There isn't a crises of gender identity or anything actually associated with the aforementioned. Realizing that is a must.
The work is essentially a criticism of narrowminded views on women, from certain men. The idea is that women are just as complicated, hence the "Kaleidoscope" that Ryukishi beats you over the head with.
Also, the conversation in which most of this happens in is such a batshit setting piece
Basically, Gerosaku is a greatly misunderstood work, that likely had its reputation due to bad reads.
I think if you've enjoyed the themes and elements of his previous work, you'd probably like this.
Team Fortress 2
2007
Hopefully, after 9 years in development, etcetera etcetera. Launch TF2 is pretty boring to play now after the layers of updates its gotten adding the best maps and gameplay nuances, and I honestly think at some point in 2010-2012 it peaked more than it did at launch. Had tons of developer support creating gameplay additions, art assets and witty/genuinely funny writing for its promotional material (shorts, trailers, blog posts, whatever). It's aged pretty poorly due also to lackluster updates and pretty shitty additions as well, some really baffling stuff as Valve just slowly gave up on the delicate years-long dance of balancing and let it settle to be what it is now.
Art wise, this is probably the most fulfilled and uniquely specific concept in video games to ever come out of America. It has such a fantastic western setting and sensibility and Valve really stood out from other game developers with how mature yet indulgent the humor and style of this game is. Not completely unique as elements on their own, the Norman Rockwell / Leyendecker character designs, the impressionistic painterly environments, the decision to give game-play-distinct classes in a first-person shooter strongly defined archetypes that interact with each other in context-sensitive ways... How unbelievably immersive and transporting! There's a reason people call it timeless, they usually say something like "cel-shaded cartoon graphics," It's not just cel shading. its gooch shading and half lambertian terms and a lot of view-dependent stuff like rim lighting. its not a cartoon its a painting, DAD. It excels in a period of time in technology when, coming recently out of the more restrictive disk space and graphics capabilities of 2004's Half Life 2, the hype of maximizing the potential of systems was still in full swing, so the best of its engine was being harnessed to fully realize a live playable 3d artwork.
Gameplay, the most visceral and immediately noticeable element of the video games medium, is honestly a mixed bag. On launch there was still a lot for everyone to learn coming from the established mechanics of Team Fortress and the new quirks and intended systems of the Source engine, and also plenty of people who were new to either shooters or multiplayer shooters or just the degree of differences between each class, emphasized even more now by art direction. To skip an odd decade of balancing changes and learning and heartache, it's a lot of highs and lows.
Rocket jumping, the exhilarating, conceptually nonsensical and mechanically rich inheritance from Quake, flips one of the slowest characters into one of the scariest characters while granting you amazingly fun ways to traverse and explore an already fun to experience world. You can spend maybe hundreds or thousands of hours exploring the source engine's method of Quake Physics through just one mechanic through just one character's gun, the rocket launcher. And the sticky launcher, and the grenade launcher, and the wrangler, and the detonator, to varying degrees of success. Or take, for example, the Spy, a completely mechanically broken and easily-abused mess of hit registration problems and dated mechanics (why do backstabs not account for the Z-facing direction of either two players. This is a 3D game) that makes an easy to comprehend one-hit-kill pick class into a monstrously deep and unpredictable frustration to fight against... Assuming he doesn't miss the first hit. It's fun when you catch him with his pants down and have to play a battle of wits over the computer. Or when you come back for round two and try to suss out your own weaknesses in perception to catch him in the act. Or when you play him at all, honestly.
...On the other hand, you have a class like the Sniper. You scope in, you shoot shapely designed characters' shapely designed heads, you kill them. It's pretty simple, it doesn't even have scope sway or bullet drop-off (or any bullet physics for that matter, owing to the engine's method of bullet damage, an instantaneous laser that simply "makes damage" where it ends), and it's such a mechanically simple class that its mere existence defines and counters the rest of the games roster based purely on the player's own level of execution. Then you have the Heavy, the stalwart, moves-slow-and-shoots-a-lot tank of the cast, who protects his team by shooting... Moving... And eventually dying. (Hey, at least he's honest.) Or the Pyro, who, at launch, could only do meager damage per second and meek after-burn to someone who turned a corner without expecting him, being killed by the surprised someone anyway and hopefully, maybe, killing them because they didn't know where a health pickup was. If you see a Pyro, you walk away. If you play a Pyro, you walk that-away. Improvements like Air-blast and other more interesting unlockables contribute to this feeling that TF2, despite its long development time, still hadn't fully matured in its Gameplay until a while after release.
The maps, the world environments these individual pieces get to interact with each other in, also experienced years of maturity. While being artistically fantastic and interesting, they each stood still while the rest of the game's systems evolved without them. A sniper stands stiff on the balcony of 2Fort while an engineer turtles in the intel room. Dustbowl crowds flock through a single narrow hallway. Goldrush crowds flock through a single narrow mine-shaft. Badwater Basin... Why do people even like Badwater Basin? I just don't see the appeal. I think there's a large amount of people who, using the new "Casual" matchmaking system, only ever queue for games on half a dozen of the some-hundred maps there are to play. This is unfortunate because lobbies empty out when one game is over or vote for the same maps over and over again whether you like it or not, making you re-queue as well. Seriously, you had the system figured out already with quick play and the server browser! Official servers with map rotations where you can call a vote if a majority of everyone else is feeling up for something crazy. Community servers where whatever rules and gameplay changes they want are always going to be there. I guess I just have to be glad that still exists despite how insular, inhospitable, glitchy, barren and worn-out they all are.
Lots of people have plenty of things to say about the grace of TF2, and lots more have scathing remarks to say about its fall from said grace. The ultimate reality of the game is that, no complaining or whining or nagging or pining for a future of the game really matters, because its development cycle is done. The people who conceived it and worked on it for years leading up to release are not the same people who worked on it and maintained it for years afterwards who are also not the same scant person or two who log on to the blog to write a post about the newest workshop items added to the game. 15 years is a long time. People change, their lives change, their visions and goals for what they want to do in life and what they want to do for the world change. Even if the exact same people who all contributed to TF2's ideas, characters, shorts, maps, modes, from it's launch to its most ambitious updates, all unanimously decided to work on the game out of nowhere again with each other, they wouldn't even be the same people they were from 15 years ago, or 12 years ago, or 9 years ago, or 6 years ago. "B-b-but the community!" Is mostly stupid and weird, so no, I don't trust them to have even 1% of the tact or the resources necessary to test even the stupidest things Valve added to the game while also understanding the aesthetic and broad appeal or even the humor of the game's developers. Sorry!
Not to be a downer, it's just how it is: An almost completely perfect experience which fell to the wayside and was "finished" by its developers, not out of malice or incompetence, but mostly just that Valve was... done with it. Done with the whole game thing too I guess, lol. Now it's just VR and BCIs. Maybe the nightmare hellworld Matrix simulation will look just like my funny conga heavy game! :-D
Anyway, some things I couldn't weave into my review:
- ROBOTS! is the best part of the soundtrack and MVM is incredibly soulful and captivating as a concept and has tons of great assets made for it but doesn't really meet its full gameplay potential until you play the community maps
- The predatory gambling practices that this game did not invent but nonetheless popularize negatively influenced the entire gaming industry and created an inhospitable in-game culture around digital items which is gross and sucks. Unusual effects all look incredibly stupid and goofy and are worth HOW much money? What? Oh and now your rocket launcher costs that much too because it glows green and gives you pink horns? What?
- No one ever realizes how incredible it is that TF2 as a Triple-A company expenditure is genuinely funny. The people who worked on this game are funny and tell very funny jokes. This game from one of the highest points of a laughably openly evil industry is just made by real normal people and is largely unimpeded by boardroom politics like its contemporaries. This is a huge reason why all of its competitors fail to replicate, assume influence of or even just mimic it when what it "is" was just naturally manifested by its working conditions at Valve trying to bring a Quake mod into the current generation of video games.
- No amount of redditors singing its praises to the moon and back will trigger my contrarian reflex to say it is a bad game
Art wise, this is probably the most fulfilled and uniquely specific concept in video games to ever come out of America. It has such a fantastic western setting and sensibility and Valve really stood out from other game developers with how mature yet indulgent the humor and style of this game is. Not completely unique as elements on their own, the Norman Rockwell / Leyendecker character designs, the impressionistic painterly environments, the decision to give game-play-distinct classes in a first-person shooter strongly defined archetypes that interact with each other in context-sensitive ways... How unbelievably immersive and transporting! There's a reason people call it timeless, they usually say something like "cel-shaded cartoon graphics," It's not just cel shading. its gooch shading and half lambertian terms and a lot of view-dependent stuff like rim lighting. its not a cartoon its a painting, DAD. It excels in a period of time in technology when, coming recently out of the more restrictive disk space and graphics capabilities of 2004's Half Life 2, the hype of maximizing the potential of systems was still in full swing, so the best of its engine was being harnessed to fully realize a live playable 3d artwork.
Gameplay, the most visceral and immediately noticeable element of the video games medium, is honestly a mixed bag. On launch there was still a lot for everyone to learn coming from the established mechanics of Team Fortress and the new quirks and intended systems of the Source engine, and also plenty of people who were new to either shooters or multiplayer shooters or just the degree of differences between each class, emphasized even more now by art direction. To skip an odd decade of balancing changes and learning and heartache, it's a lot of highs and lows.
Rocket jumping, the exhilarating, conceptually nonsensical and mechanically rich inheritance from Quake, flips one of the slowest characters into one of the scariest characters while granting you amazingly fun ways to traverse and explore an already fun to experience world. You can spend maybe hundreds or thousands of hours exploring the source engine's method of Quake Physics through just one mechanic through just one character's gun, the rocket launcher. And the sticky launcher, and the grenade launcher, and the wrangler, and the detonator, to varying degrees of success. Or take, for example, the Spy, a completely mechanically broken and easily-abused mess of hit registration problems and dated mechanics (why do backstabs not account for the Z-facing direction of either two players. This is a 3D game) that makes an easy to comprehend one-hit-kill pick class into a monstrously deep and unpredictable frustration to fight against... Assuming he doesn't miss the first hit. It's fun when you catch him with his pants down and have to play a battle of wits over the computer. Or when you come back for round two and try to suss out your own weaknesses in perception to catch him in the act. Or when you play him at all, honestly.
...On the other hand, you have a class like the Sniper. You scope in, you shoot shapely designed characters' shapely designed heads, you kill them. It's pretty simple, it doesn't even have scope sway or bullet drop-off (or any bullet physics for that matter, owing to the engine's method of bullet damage, an instantaneous laser that simply "makes damage" where it ends), and it's such a mechanically simple class that its mere existence defines and counters the rest of the games roster based purely on the player's own level of execution. Then you have the Heavy, the stalwart, moves-slow-and-shoots-a-lot tank of the cast, who protects his team by shooting... Moving... And eventually dying. (Hey, at least he's honest.) Or the Pyro, who, at launch, could only do meager damage per second and meek after-burn to someone who turned a corner without expecting him, being killed by the surprised someone anyway and hopefully, maybe, killing them because they didn't know where a health pickup was. If you see a Pyro, you walk away. If you play a Pyro, you walk that-away. Improvements like Air-blast and other more interesting unlockables contribute to this feeling that TF2, despite its long development time, still hadn't fully matured in its Gameplay until a while after release.
The maps, the world environments these individual pieces get to interact with each other in, also experienced years of maturity. While being artistically fantastic and interesting, they each stood still while the rest of the game's systems evolved without them. A sniper stands stiff on the balcony of 2Fort while an engineer turtles in the intel room. Dustbowl crowds flock through a single narrow hallway. Goldrush crowds flock through a single narrow mine-shaft. Badwater Basin... Why do people even like Badwater Basin? I just don't see the appeal. I think there's a large amount of people who, using the new "Casual" matchmaking system, only ever queue for games on half a dozen of the some-hundred maps there are to play. This is unfortunate because lobbies empty out when one game is over or vote for the same maps over and over again whether you like it or not, making you re-queue as well. Seriously, you had the system figured out already with quick play and the server browser! Official servers with map rotations where you can call a vote if a majority of everyone else is feeling up for something crazy. Community servers where whatever rules and gameplay changes they want are always going to be there. I guess I just have to be glad that still exists despite how insular, inhospitable, glitchy, barren and worn-out they all are.
Lots of people have plenty of things to say about the grace of TF2, and lots more have scathing remarks to say about its fall from said grace. The ultimate reality of the game is that, no complaining or whining or nagging or pining for a future of the game really matters, because its development cycle is done. The people who conceived it and worked on it for years leading up to release are not the same people who worked on it and maintained it for years afterwards who are also not the same scant person or two who log on to the blog to write a post about the newest workshop items added to the game. 15 years is a long time. People change, their lives change, their visions and goals for what they want to do in life and what they want to do for the world change. Even if the exact same people who all contributed to TF2's ideas, characters, shorts, maps, modes, from it's launch to its most ambitious updates, all unanimously decided to work on the game out of nowhere again with each other, they wouldn't even be the same people they were from 15 years ago, or 12 years ago, or 9 years ago, or 6 years ago. "B-b-but the community!" Is mostly stupid and weird, so no, I don't trust them to have even 1% of the tact or the resources necessary to test even the stupidest things Valve added to the game while also understanding the aesthetic and broad appeal or even the humor of the game's developers. Sorry!
Not to be a downer, it's just how it is: An almost completely perfect experience which fell to the wayside and was "finished" by its developers, not out of malice or incompetence, but mostly just that Valve was... done with it. Done with the whole game thing too I guess, lol. Now it's just VR and BCIs. Maybe the nightmare hellworld Matrix simulation will look just like my funny conga heavy game! :-D
Anyway, some things I couldn't weave into my review:
- ROBOTS! is the best part of the soundtrack and MVM is incredibly soulful and captivating as a concept and has tons of great assets made for it but doesn't really meet its full gameplay potential until you play the community maps
- The predatory gambling practices that this game did not invent but nonetheless popularize negatively influenced the entire gaming industry and created an inhospitable in-game culture around digital items which is gross and sucks. Unusual effects all look incredibly stupid and goofy and are worth HOW much money? What? Oh and now your rocket launcher costs that much too because it glows green and gives you pink horns? What?
- No one ever realizes how incredible it is that TF2 as a Triple-A company expenditure is genuinely funny. The people who worked on this game are funny and tell very funny jokes. This game from one of the highest points of a laughably openly evil industry is just made by real normal people and is largely unimpeded by boardroom politics like its contemporaries. This is a huge reason why all of its competitors fail to replicate, assume influence of or even just mimic it when what it "is" was just naturally manifested by its working conditions at Valve trying to bring a Quake mod into the current generation of video games.
- No amount of redditors singing its praises to the moon and back will trigger my contrarian reflex to say it is a bad game
Pikmin
2001
A lot more fun than Smash Bros. portrayal of Olimar would have you think
Garry's Mod
2004
Attended a wedding, two funerals, and a 5 year anniversary celebration on here. Needless to say this game is peak fiction.