cowboyjosh
BACKER
1991
I really liked the art of this one and the general outlandishness of the designs. Like you can play as a knife-wielding mummy in trousers or a baby piloting a mech suit. All while moving through colorful environments of escalating wackiness. And it has vehicles which I always like in games like this, even if these are pretty clunky.
I wish there was a super power, though; it’s just attack, grab and jump which while they have nice animations and a few interesting combos, just don’t offer enough variety for my taste. There are weapons, but those all feel pretty overpowered and are balanced around only lasting a few seconds. The core combat just felt simplistic compared to other beat-em-ups I’ve played. It really makes me appreciate the more expressive move sets of the newer ones like Shredder’s Revenge.
Fortunately it’s short, and has infinite continues in the Capcom Beat ‘Em Up bundle, which was enough motivation to see it through to the end in one sitting. Overall not particularly interesting combat-wise but a goofy and eye catching diversion.
I wish there was a super power, though; it’s just attack, grab and jump which while they have nice animations and a few interesting combos, just don’t offer enough variety for my taste. There are weapons, but those all feel pretty overpowered and are balanced around only lasting a few seconds. The core combat just felt simplistic compared to other beat-em-ups I’ve played. It really makes me appreciate the more expressive move sets of the newer ones like Shredder’s Revenge.
Fortunately it’s short, and has infinite continues in the Capcom Beat ‘Em Up bundle, which was enough motivation to see it through to the end in one sitting. Overall not particularly interesting combat-wise but a goofy and eye catching diversion.
2023
To be fair, I did not play this very long. I was expecting it to be extremely corporate and predatory, which it is. What I did not expect was for it to be very poorly made, which it also is. It crashed within the first 30 minutes. Character models are unreadable, homogenous blobs. Action animations look incredibly stiff and artificial. Environments are drab gray smears. The cutscenes... oh my god the cutscenes are SO UNBELIEVABLY SLOW. The characters are so torpid they make Geralt of Riviera look like Sonic the Hedgehog. It's like they inserted a 5 second pause before every line to give it dramatic weight. The actual result is that this action game simply has no energy; the whole thing seems like it's on the verge of a heroin overdose. Combine that with all the on-screen movement consisting of these blobby characters shuffling randomly back and forth, and the writing and voice acting being bottom of the barrel bad, and this whole package looks incredibly amateurish.
Making this some kind of MMO is a weird choice too. What is gained by taking away my ability to pause the game? How is my experience enhanced by seeing "xXxHOTBABESLAYERxXx" running in circles around my armor vendor? Maybe it's just a nod to Sartre; hell really is other people.
I don’t think it's too much of a stretch to say that Diablo invented the loot box. You kill a monster and something might pop out; it might be incredible or it might be total trash. When such tension was novel it was exciting and addictive. Now every live service game has embraced this mechanic as a means of padding out a game's playtime. A regular playthrough of Dark Souls might see you walk away with, what, 30 or 40 cool weapons? A playthrough of any given Diablo, though, will have you looting literally thousands of weapons, each with a minuscule chance of being cool. One of these models perfectly slots into a live service game's carefully calibrated withholding of joy. Too little and you get frustrated, too much and you get bored and/or consume the content too quickly. With the "Shop" tab prominently on display in the main menu, this feels less like a game and more like a mail-order catalog.
I guess what I'm getting at is that I have enjoyed these games in the past, but this really does feel like Diablo in its inevitable final form: a corporate IP with no soul, fashioned into a treadmill of monetizable nonsense (like $65 mounts!). Content mash, to be drip fed forever.
Making this some kind of MMO is a weird choice too. What is gained by taking away my ability to pause the game? How is my experience enhanced by seeing "xXxHOTBABESLAYERxXx" running in circles around my armor vendor? Maybe it's just a nod to Sartre; hell really is other people.
I don’t think it's too much of a stretch to say that Diablo invented the loot box. You kill a monster and something might pop out; it might be incredible or it might be total trash. When such tension was novel it was exciting and addictive. Now every live service game has embraced this mechanic as a means of padding out a game's playtime. A regular playthrough of Dark Souls might see you walk away with, what, 30 or 40 cool weapons? A playthrough of any given Diablo, though, will have you looting literally thousands of weapons, each with a minuscule chance of being cool. One of these models perfectly slots into a live service game's carefully calibrated withholding of joy. Too little and you get frustrated, too much and you get bored and/or consume the content too quickly. With the "Shop" tab prominently on display in the main menu, this feels less like a game and more like a mail-order catalog.
I guess what I'm getting at is that I have enjoyed these games in the past, but this really does feel like Diablo in its inevitable final form: a corporate IP with no soul, fashioned into a treadmill of monetizable nonsense (like $65 mounts!). Content mash, to be drip fed forever.
I just sampled this as part of the Xbox beta test, since I've always been curious how a game like this works on console and just generally how a Final Fantasy MMO was implemented.
My first impression was how flawless and smooth everything ran. I don't know why I expected bugginess or sub-optimal performance, maybe because it's a beta test but everything looks fantastic with tons of frames and I didn't experience any kinds of bugs or roughness.
My second impression was how totally they just lifted basically everything in this game directly out of World of Warcraft. WoW did more or less the same thing with Everquest, but at least made major improvements with elements like maps, quests and NPC interaction. In the opening hours at least this feels much less like an evolution of the formula and more like a reskin.
Speaking of skins, the UI is really bad. I had heard a lot of good things about how they managed to make this PC game playable on a controller. I can confidently report those things were wrong; this is a terrible experience. You can really tell this UI was designed with a mouse in mind; everything on the screen -- which is A LOT OF THINGS -- is "clickable" which is an unnatural and counterintuitive interaction on a controller. It seems like they haven't done anything to simplify the UI or cut down on the superfluous interactable elements. I was very disappointed with this aspect but I'm sure that with enough practice one could git gud enough with it to move around the world confidently. I can't imagine it's a ever particularly fluid experience, though, everything just takes way too many steps.
Years of EQ and WoW completely depleted my love for MMORPGs so I was never going to start an FFXIV account and really dive in, but I'm super glad I got the chance to try it out finally. It's awesome they're finally bringing this to Xbox and that the dozens of Final Fantasy fans that don't own a Playstation will finally be able to join their friends.
My first impression was how flawless and smooth everything ran. I don't know why I expected bugginess or sub-optimal performance, maybe because it's a beta test but everything looks fantastic with tons of frames and I didn't experience any kinds of bugs or roughness.
My second impression was how totally they just lifted basically everything in this game directly out of World of Warcraft. WoW did more or less the same thing with Everquest, but at least made major improvements with elements like maps, quests and NPC interaction. In the opening hours at least this feels much less like an evolution of the formula and more like a reskin.
Speaking of skins, the UI is really bad. I had heard a lot of good things about how they managed to make this PC game playable on a controller. I can confidently report those things were wrong; this is a terrible experience. You can really tell this UI was designed with a mouse in mind; everything on the screen -- which is A LOT OF THINGS -- is "clickable" which is an unnatural and counterintuitive interaction on a controller. It seems like they haven't done anything to simplify the UI or cut down on the superfluous interactable elements. I was very disappointed with this aspect but I'm sure that with enough practice one could git gud enough with it to move around the world confidently. I can't imagine it's a ever particularly fluid experience, though, everything just takes way too many steps.
Years of EQ and WoW completely depleted my love for MMORPGs so I was never going to start an FFXIV account and really dive in, but I'm super glad I got the chance to try it out finally. It's awesome they're finally bringing this to Xbox and that the dozens of Final Fantasy fans that don't own a Playstation will finally be able to join their friends.
2023
I thought this was fantastic. A bite sized walking sim with a solid story that reeled me in at just the right pace. It does that narrative thing I really like where they start the story basically in the middle, and the first half is getting caught up with where we even are and what we're doing. To me that makes for really fun storytelling because I like being given small clues and then time to guess at what they might mean. Ended up finishing the whole thing in one sitting!
Gameplay wise this is basically exploration and audio logs and that's it; normally this wouldn't appeal to me but Return to Grace has some fantastic voice acting backed up by strong, memorable characters. These have some obvious influences and there were some other pop culture references sprinkled throughout that I thought were great; they were thematically appropriate and felt like homages.
The slow walking speed is the biggest frustration, but it's kind of understandable since so much of the game is walking and talking that they don't want you blasting past like 3 scripted events while you're still listening to the first recording. But it really puts the damper on exploration and was a huge pain the one time I got turned around.
I can't stress enough what a big deal it is for me that the plot and worldbuilding are what drove me forward in this, because that's not usually what grabs me about games. The ideas presented were all pure, old-school, head-full-of-big-ideas science fiction and I was really impressed with the pacing and execution overall.
I've been to Canada a bunch of times and have friends there, so it warmed my heart to hear so many Canadian voices in one place. I suppose we should say thanks to the taxpayers of Ontario for this one as well, and yeah support the arts guys.
Gameplay wise this is basically exploration and audio logs and that's it; normally this wouldn't appeal to me but Return to Grace has some fantastic voice acting backed up by strong, memorable characters. These have some obvious influences and there were some other pop culture references sprinkled throughout that I thought were great; they were thematically appropriate and felt like homages.
The slow walking speed is the biggest frustration, but it's kind of understandable since so much of the game is walking and talking that they don't want you blasting past like 3 scripted events while you're still listening to the first recording. But it really puts the damper on exploration and was a huge pain the one time I got turned around.
I can't stress enough what a big deal it is for me that the plot and worldbuilding are what drove me forward in this, because that's not usually what grabs me about games. The ideas presented were all pure, old-school, head-full-of-big-ideas science fiction and I was really impressed with the pacing and execution overall.
I've been to Canada a bunch of times and have friends there, so it warmed my heart to hear so many Canadian voices in one place. I suppose we should say thanks to the taxpayers of Ontario for this one as well, and yeah support the arts guys.
2012
I was really having fun with this. It's set up like a TV show; broken into episodes complete with recaps and previews and credits for each chapter. It's a lot of fun, over the top nonsense, like a guy punching a guy so hard it breaks the entire planet in half. Even though it has a lot of QTE-laden cutscenes I was really enjoying the wild characters and art style.
Uuuuuuntil chapter 10. In this scene, apropos of nothing, our hero visits some sort of hot springs resort. There the player is treated to a first-person interactive scene in which he first spends time ogling the staff, then moves quickly on to exposing himself, before finally just straight up sexually assaulting a service worker. But don't worry, because it's all played for laughs! Technically it's only an attempted assault, because he's comically punched by his father figure as a "Denied!" achievement pops.
I just don't know. This is so normalized I couldn't even find mention of it in any reviews. The IGN review, written by a woman, specifically mentions the scene but carefully leaves out the attempted assault. Instead it's described as "the objective is to stop Asura from staring for too long at the generous assets of a hot-springs attendant" which as far as I can tell is completely false; you cannot progress in the game until you've gone through the whole menu of sex pest behaviors.
Like I didn't just fall off the fucking redneck truck I know women have always had it bad. But the misogyny in some of these Japanese games in particular feels almost compulsory. It's like there's some regulatory body that comes through and is like, "You allowed the player to go 5 hours without being horrible in some fucked up regressive way to a woman. Back to the drawing board!" From my many minutes of googling about it I know everything about how shitty it is to be a woman in Japan. Obviously nothing I do is going to change any of that, I just wish we as gamers were, like, slightly less inured to it.
Anyway, in Chapter 9, you're a badass demigod going through a wild narrative. In Chapter 11, you're a badass demigod going through a wild narrative, and for no particular reason, a hilarious wannabe rapist! Somehow the experience lost its luster once I realized I was playing as Donald Trump's self-image.
Uuuuuuntil chapter 10. In this scene, apropos of nothing, our hero visits some sort of hot springs resort. There the player is treated to a first-person interactive scene in which he first spends time ogling the staff, then moves quickly on to exposing himself, before finally just straight up sexually assaulting a service worker. But don't worry, because it's all played for laughs! Technically it's only an attempted assault, because he's comically punched by his father figure as a "Denied!" achievement pops.
I just don't know. This is so normalized I couldn't even find mention of it in any reviews. The IGN review, written by a woman, specifically mentions the scene but carefully leaves out the attempted assault. Instead it's described as "the objective is to stop Asura from staring for too long at the generous assets of a hot-springs attendant" which as far as I can tell is completely false; you cannot progress in the game until you've gone through the whole menu of sex pest behaviors.
Like I didn't just fall off the fucking redneck truck I know women have always had it bad. But the misogyny in some of these Japanese games in particular feels almost compulsory. It's like there's some regulatory body that comes through and is like, "You allowed the player to go 5 hours without being horrible in some fucked up regressive way to a woman. Back to the drawing board!" From my many minutes of googling about it I know everything about how shitty it is to be a woman in Japan. Obviously nothing I do is going to change any of that, I just wish we as gamers were, like, slightly less inured to it.
Anyway, in Chapter 9, you're a badass demigod going through a wild narrative. In Chapter 11, you're a badass demigod going through a wild narrative, and for no particular reason, a hilarious wannabe rapist! Somehow the experience lost its luster once I realized I was playing as Donald Trump's self-image.
2015
Played since the alpha and loved it pretty much the whole time. Internet people can be a bummer but if you have a good group of 5 to go in with there's a ton of fun to be had. I still play intermittently; in fact I just got off a great five stack and this game is just as fun as ever, even if it's missing a bunch of the old maps and modes.
Here's hoping some of that Microsoft money revives it. I want to see it become Microsoft's MOBA; put Master Chief, Marcus Fenix, Alduin, Senua... could be a hell of a thing. In the meantime I'm just grateful Blizzard keeps the light on for those of us still enjoying it.
Abathur main for life.
Here's hoping some of that Microsoft money revives it. I want to see it become Microsoft's MOBA; put Master Chief, Marcus Fenix, Alduin, Senua... could be a hell of a thing. In the meantime I'm just grateful Blizzard keeps the light on for those of us still enjoying it.
Abathur main for life.
2023
There was a couple weeks there where I was playing this pretty compulsively. The moment to moment gunplay feels fantastic and the baddies are interesting and varied. I even didn't hate the crafting system very much which is about the highest praise I ever give a crafting system. At least on the difficulty I played on, there was no real penalty for dying which I found to be a nice tweak to the Souls formula; I felt much more free to explore.
Unfortunately, exploration was consistently unfulfilling. I really dislike the randomly-generated levels. It's never bothered me in 2D games like Diablo or Dead Cells. But in full 3D it really drives home what artificial nonsense these spaces are. There's no sense of place; you can't tell if you're in a room or a hallway most of the time much less distinguish between dining room, bedroom, bathroom, etc. It's just wall textures and decorative doodads strewn haphazardly about. From a gameplay perspective this actually kind of works; the environments just sort of melt out of focus and it's like fighting monsters in a featureless void with no distractions. As background these levels work great, but as a setting, they fall short.
Eventually I hit a boss that was a huge difficulty spike and it didn't feel worth it based on what I'd seen so far. I'm pretty sure it gets better further in, so I'd be interested in returning to this again especially if I find a co-op partner; I bet it's a whole different experience with friends.
Unfortunately, exploration was consistently unfulfilling. I really dislike the randomly-generated levels. It's never bothered me in 2D games like Diablo or Dead Cells. But in full 3D it really drives home what artificial nonsense these spaces are. There's no sense of place; you can't tell if you're in a room or a hallway most of the time much less distinguish between dining room, bedroom, bathroom, etc. It's just wall textures and decorative doodads strewn haphazardly about. From a gameplay perspective this actually kind of works; the environments just sort of melt out of focus and it's like fighting monsters in a featureless void with no distractions. As background these levels work great, but as a setting, they fall short.
Eventually I hit a boss that was a huge difficulty spike and it didn't feel worth it based on what I'd seen so far. I'm pretty sure it gets better further in, so I'd be interested in returning to this again especially if I find a co-op partner; I bet it's a whole different experience with friends.
Played via the Trilogy collection on Xbox.
I found this game to be mechanically unpleasant to the point of being nearly unplayable. One game design element I have never understood is the practice of animating text boxes, where instead of giving you all the text at once, you have to sit there and watch each letter appear one after another. I have no idea what this is meant to accomplish, but for me its effect is extreme irritation. How is making me read the text piecemeal, at a sluggish pace, supposed to help me enjoy the game?
I'm a pretty slow reader, but I still read faster than the text appears. The designers must have known this is a horrible feature that everyone will hate, because they gave us a workaround. You can hit the "continue" button while the text is animating to make the text animate faster. This mostly works, except that Ace Attorney is full of filler lines like "..." and "Hngh?!" and it's easy to get out of rhythm and accidentally skip a line because you're trying to get through at a normal reading speed. And of course, there's no way to go back and check your log to see what was said previously. To top it all off, the text animation is accompanied by a piercing, hyper beeping sound like a mosquito with a jackhammer. This is a game where dialog is a central mechanic, and they seem to have gone out of their way to make it maximally irritating.
I probably could have gotten past this if I could find anything else to enjoy. Nothing about the gameplay grabbed me at all. The investigation phase is a pure checklist; there are no skill checks or mechanical tension of any kind. The trial phase is essentially a trial (ha) and error affair. They want you to select the prompts that reveal inconsistencies in the witness's stories, but the prompts are so vague and unrelated to the dialog that I found blindly clicking options to be more effective than actually trying to engage with the story in any way. Pretty much everything that came out of Phoenix's mouth in response to my own commands was a complete surprise to me, which seemed like a pretty bad sign considering this is a game ostensibly about winning arguments through logic. At least the trial phase has a way to fail so there is some kind of tension. However when I learned that losing at trial meant simply restarting the entire case from the beginning and having to trudge through every stupid dialog again, I basically stopped wanting to play the game.
And then, of course, are the character designs and writing. This looks like yet another one of those games that's obsessed with sex, but can only manage to engage with it at the level of a poorly-educated pubescent boy. The first woman you meet is your boss, some kind of super lawyer who seems to be wearing a bustier as both an undergarment and overgarment. She hilariously accessorizes it with a suit coat, you know, because she's a professional.
The next woman I met continued the inevitable trend line and that pretty much killed the game for me. The character is a by-the-numbers trope; the sexually liberated woman who won't fuck you so of course she's evil. She's also cartoonishly stupid (of course). I've played too much of this crap lately and my patience for it is thoroughly exhausted.
I didn't even get to the end of the second case in this game. This was a huge disappointment as I've heard so much praise for it but I couldn't find a single redeeming quality.
I found this game to be mechanically unpleasant to the point of being nearly unplayable. One game design element I have never understood is the practice of animating text boxes, where instead of giving you all the text at once, you have to sit there and watch each letter appear one after another. I have no idea what this is meant to accomplish, but for me its effect is extreme irritation. How is making me read the text piecemeal, at a sluggish pace, supposed to help me enjoy the game?
I'm a pretty slow reader, but I still read faster than the text appears. The designers must have known this is a horrible feature that everyone will hate, because they gave us a workaround. You can hit the "continue" button while the text is animating to make the text animate faster. This mostly works, except that Ace Attorney is full of filler lines like "..." and "Hngh?!" and it's easy to get out of rhythm and accidentally skip a line because you're trying to get through at a normal reading speed. And of course, there's no way to go back and check your log to see what was said previously. To top it all off, the text animation is accompanied by a piercing, hyper beeping sound like a mosquito with a jackhammer. This is a game where dialog is a central mechanic, and they seem to have gone out of their way to make it maximally irritating.
I probably could have gotten past this if I could find anything else to enjoy. Nothing about the gameplay grabbed me at all. The investigation phase is a pure checklist; there are no skill checks or mechanical tension of any kind. The trial phase is essentially a trial (ha) and error affair. They want you to select the prompts that reveal inconsistencies in the witness's stories, but the prompts are so vague and unrelated to the dialog that I found blindly clicking options to be more effective than actually trying to engage with the story in any way. Pretty much everything that came out of Phoenix's mouth in response to my own commands was a complete surprise to me, which seemed like a pretty bad sign considering this is a game ostensibly about winning arguments through logic. At least the trial phase has a way to fail so there is some kind of tension. However when I learned that losing at trial meant simply restarting the entire case from the beginning and having to trudge through every stupid dialog again, I basically stopped wanting to play the game.
And then, of course, are the character designs and writing. This looks like yet another one of those games that's obsessed with sex, but can only manage to engage with it at the level of a poorly-educated pubescent boy. The first woman you meet is your boss, some kind of super lawyer who seems to be wearing a bustier as both an undergarment and overgarment. She hilariously accessorizes it with a suit coat, you know, because she's a professional.
The next woman I met continued the inevitable trend line and that pretty much killed the game for me. The character is a by-the-numbers trope; the sexually liberated woman who won't fuck you so of course she's evil. She's also cartoonishly stupid (of course). I've played too much of this crap lately and my patience for it is thoroughly exhausted.
I didn't even get to the end of the second case in this game. This was a huge disappointment as I've heard so much praise for it but I couldn't find a single redeeming quality.
2008
Lost holds a special place in my heart. It came out at a time in my life when I really needed some good escapism, and by the time it concluded, I was in a much better place. I love its constant plot twists and drama bombs, and the fact that it wasn't shy about just killing off main characters. It always felt like anything could happen, and it was fun to think about even when I wasn't watching it. I didn't go on message boards or listen to podcasts or anything, but all the good feelings it gave me when I needed them most made it my favorite show and I've watched it more times than I can count.
My wife knows all this about me which is why she got me Lost: Via Domus for my birthday. It jumped immediately to the top of my list and took just a couple days to roll credits. I'm glad it worked out that way because it feels appropriate to end the year with something I'm kind of uniquely qualified to appreciate.
The main reason for that, of course, is that Via Domus is pretty rough as a game. Dialog is checklist-style question-response with no consequences. There are like 4 minigames which comprise the majority of the gameplay (outside of just walking around looking at stuff; more on that below), and all of them are pretty simplistic. There's one scripted shooting segment that took me like 15 tries because you get one hit killed and the guys have laser accuracy and fire instantly. The controls in general are super sluggish and imprecise. You're constantly fighting the auto-centering camera, since most of what you interact with is on the ground. The checkpointing is dreadful, often immediately before a long unskippable cutscene.
And you know this may be the only time I ever say this: I really didn't care about the gameplay. As clunky and shallow as it was, I was having too much fun playing around on Lost Island to pay it any mind. As a game it might be bad, but as fan service, Via Domus hits a whole lot more high notes.
Several major locations from the show are lovingly recreated in the kind of meticulous detail you'd expect from a rabid fan working closely with the show's creators. The characters and locations are presented with admirable fidelity to the source material. I wish they had gotten more of the voice actors from the show's cast, but I get the impression they didn't have the budget for that and the stand-in cast they did have stepped up admirably.
Stand-in actor or not, when Jack started pulling his Mr. Bossypants routine my wife and I both said "Ugh, fuck Jack" and it was just like watching the show again. It's even structured the same; with each act set up like an episode of the show with a synopsis, cold open, title card, series of escalating clusterfucks interspersed with flashbacks, smash cut to the logo, rinse and repeat. It all feels completely authentic.
Just having the opportunity as a fan to explore those iconic spaces from the show, and type commands into the cryptic Dharma Initiative computers and see everything from new angles is very satisfying and specifically rewards those of us nerds that would notice little details like how the vent in the vault ceiling is boarded shut (because after Kate escaped through there Locke briefly mentioned off hand that he sealed it up. Obviously).
It's also fun to see the cast through the eyes of someone who isn't in the main cast, as they're all a bunch of suspicious elitist assholes. It's completely consistent characterization but isn't as big of a factor in the show since it focuses mainly on the main cast.
That's my biggest takeaway on the game's value for me as a fan: a look back with an alternative perspective. I get to revisit this warm thing from my past and see it in a new light.
I've always been a fan of New Year's; I like that it's a secular holiday and the idea of taking a little time to both reflect and anticipate resonates with me. I got some life goals done in 2023. Got off the cigarettes. Had some losses. Kept my brilliant and beautiful wife happy. Got a little sloppy writing done!
I have a lot of fun here and I appreciate everyone who shares their great reviews. And the hearts are nice; holla to my core crew who heart every ramble. Here's to 2023, a year we're never going to forget; and to 2024, another year of balls-to-the-wall backlogging!
My wife knows all this about me which is why she got me Lost: Via Domus for my birthday. It jumped immediately to the top of my list and took just a couple days to roll credits. I'm glad it worked out that way because it feels appropriate to end the year with something I'm kind of uniquely qualified to appreciate.
The main reason for that, of course, is that Via Domus is pretty rough as a game. Dialog is checklist-style question-response with no consequences. There are like 4 minigames which comprise the majority of the gameplay (outside of just walking around looking at stuff; more on that below), and all of them are pretty simplistic. There's one scripted shooting segment that took me like 15 tries because you get one hit killed and the guys have laser accuracy and fire instantly. The controls in general are super sluggish and imprecise. You're constantly fighting the auto-centering camera, since most of what you interact with is on the ground. The checkpointing is dreadful, often immediately before a long unskippable cutscene.
And you know this may be the only time I ever say this: I really didn't care about the gameplay. As clunky and shallow as it was, I was having too much fun playing around on Lost Island to pay it any mind. As a game it might be bad, but as fan service, Via Domus hits a whole lot more high notes.
Several major locations from the show are lovingly recreated in the kind of meticulous detail you'd expect from a rabid fan working closely with the show's creators. The characters and locations are presented with admirable fidelity to the source material. I wish they had gotten more of the voice actors from the show's cast, but I get the impression they didn't have the budget for that and the stand-in cast they did have stepped up admirably.
Stand-in actor or not, when Jack started pulling his Mr. Bossypants routine my wife and I both said "Ugh, fuck Jack" and it was just like watching the show again. It's even structured the same; with each act set up like an episode of the show with a synopsis, cold open, title card, series of escalating clusterfucks interspersed with flashbacks, smash cut to the logo, rinse and repeat. It all feels completely authentic.
Just having the opportunity as a fan to explore those iconic spaces from the show, and type commands into the cryptic Dharma Initiative computers and see everything from new angles is very satisfying and specifically rewards those of us nerds that would notice little details like how the vent in the vault ceiling is boarded shut (because after Kate escaped through there Locke briefly mentioned off hand that he sealed it up. Obviously).
It's also fun to see the cast through the eyes of someone who isn't in the main cast, as they're all a bunch of suspicious elitist assholes. It's completely consistent characterization but isn't as big of a factor in the show since it focuses mainly on the main cast.
That's my biggest takeaway on the game's value for me as a fan: a look back with an alternative perspective. I get to revisit this warm thing from my past and see it in a new light.
I've always been a fan of New Year's; I like that it's a secular holiday and the idea of taking a little time to both reflect and anticipate resonates with me. I got some life goals done in 2023. Got off the cigarettes. Had some losses. Kept my brilliant and beautiful wife happy. Got a little sloppy writing done!
I have a lot of fun here and I appreciate everyone who shares their great reviews. And the hearts are nice; holla to my core crew who heart every ramble. Here's to 2023, a year we're never going to forget; and to 2024, another year of balls-to-the-wall backlogging!
Played as part of my backlog-trimming project.
I'm absolutely awful at these kinds of games, but kind of enjoyed brute forcing my way through all the bosses. I so strongly remember the feeling as a kid of looking across the rows and rows of machines, each coyly blinking and bleeping its promises and temptations. I remember how meager my little stack quarters felt and the Sophie's Choice of having to decide which was worthy of my time. I was almost always wrong; the stack would dry up with alarming speed, and I would spend the rest of the visit gazing with remorseful longing at the missed connections, promising myself next time I'd do better.
I feel as though Baby Josh's feelings are being redeemed every time I click the "add credit" button in one of these emulated arcade games. I don't even really like shmups all that much, but just imagining feeding my younger self quarter after quarter brings me right back to those transactional days when a video game meant "give me 25 cents worth of distraction." It puts me in the moment in a way modern games don't; I'm not worrying about the plot or the pacing or min/maxing or my giant backlog, I'm focused entirely on what's happening right now and in the next five seconds. It crowds out all other concerns, such as my dwindling stack of quarters or the shitty kids at school.
So that's how I beat it: a short burst of zen-like concentration (sometimes very short) followed by a moment of cackling glee at being a grown-up in the 21st century, rinse and repeat. I really liked how when you run out of health, your little pilot ejects and when you respawn your new plane flies over and you can catch them out of midair for points and items. I got to do that a lot haha and it was always fun.
I also thought the art all looked really good, and I like all the wild giant ships and tanks that were the bosses. They even got cool title card intros. It did have dimming sprites when things were busy which exacerbated my natural inability to follow complex bullet hell type action.
No idea really how this matches up against similar games, but I got quite a bit of satisfaction out of it and maybe just a little bit of catharsis.
I'm absolutely awful at these kinds of games, but kind of enjoyed brute forcing my way through all the bosses. I so strongly remember the feeling as a kid of looking across the rows and rows of machines, each coyly blinking and bleeping its promises and temptations. I remember how meager my little stack quarters felt and the Sophie's Choice of having to decide which was worthy of my time. I was almost always wrong; the stack would dry up with alarming speed, and I would spend the rest of the visit gazing with remorseful longing at the missed connections, promising myself next time I'd do better.
I feel as though Baby Josh's feelings are being redeemed every time I click the "add credit" button in one of these emulated arcade games. I don't even really like shmups all that much, but just imagining feeding my younger self quarter after quarter brings me right back to those transactional days when a video game meant "give me 25 cents worth of distraction." It puts me in the moment in a way modern games don't; I'm not worrying about the plot or the pacing or min/maxing or my giant backlog, I'm focused entirely on what's happening right now and in the next five seconds. It crowds out all other concerns, such as my dwindling stack of quarters or the shitty kids at school.
So that's how I beat it: a short burst of zen-like concentration (sometimes very short) followed by a moment of cackling glee at being a grown-up in the 21st century, rinse and repeat. I really liked how when you run out of health, your little pilot ejects and when you respawn your new plane flies over and you can catch them out of midair for points and items. I got to do that a lot haha and it was always fun.
I also thought the art all looked really good, and I like all the wild giant ships and tanks that were the bosses. They even got cool title card intros. It did have dimming sprites when things were busy which exacerbated my natural inability to follow complex bullet hell type action.
No idea really how this matches up against similar games, but I got quite a bit of satisfaction out of it and maybe just a little bit of catharsis.
2023
I originally abandoned this and didn't plan to go back to it, but eventually it occurred to me that I could just switch to easy mode for the bitchass fight that was making me rage out, and see what the rest of the game had to offer.
I had really high hopes going into this. It landed with no fanfare whatsoever and immediately disappeared beneath the wheels of the parade of once-in-a-generation releases this year. It looks really cool; the magic effects are bright and colorful, like fireworks. I figured in a stacked year like this it's like James Bond vs Godzilla; it doesn't matter how good you look in a tux when you're just gunk between a giant lizard's toes. I saw hidden gem potential and on balance I think it more or less delivered on this.
My first impression was quite good, as well. The characters are all memorable and likable, and the worldbuilding felt plausible and fleshed out without being cumbersome. The combat takes its cues from Doom 2016 and Eternal and all the pieces are in place for a really strong movement shooter.
I love the active shield mechanic. I think this is the most innovative and potentially impactful new idea I've seen in a shooter for a long time. The way it works is you can toggle your shield on and off. When it's on, you move slower (maybe like 60% speed?) but you don't take health damage. Health damage requires consumables to replenish and you can only carry a few at a time, so preventing it is a big deal. The shield has its own health, kinda like Halo's shield; if you take a few hits and turn off the shield, it will regenerate quickly. However if you keep the shield up long enough for it to lose all of its health, it will break, meaning it recharges quite slowly.
As you can imagine this quickly becomes a big part of combat. This isn't a cover shooter, and you're usually being flanked if not completely surrounded, so avoiding damage entirely just through movement is usually a losing battle. Knowing when to activate your shield and when to let it recharge is a really fun skill to build and knob to tweak your playstyle. You can pursue upgrades that add effects like damage or a knockback when the shield breaks that give you even more options.
Unfortunately, I found it hard to use the shield optimally. This is a game with a lot of buttons to juggle. It also has awful default controls that seem to depend on the player having two right thumbs, and does not offer any options for button remapping. I put two paddles on my Xbox Elite controller and this made things much more playable. It didn't solve the big problem, though, which is that there's just too many actions the player has to be constantly cycling through. I found the manual health and mana replenishment in particular to be a real chore. I remember a Diablo 3 dev once talking about how they wanted to give the player fewer, but more interesting choices. Manually clicking a button when my mana or health gets low may add tension and difficulty, but it's not interesting, and it distracts from the genuinely fun stuff like the shield and weapon swapping.
When I go full sweat mode and put on four paddles for high level Doom Eternal it's because I genuinely need all ten fingers for that experience. Every digit has a different, mission-critical tool for its flexible combat loop. The high complexity makes the game fill my brain like a gas, occupying every space; when it all comes together it's downright euphoric. Unfortunately, Immortals of Aveum gums up its toolset with chores. Manually sprinting, reloading and replenishing resources just slows everything down, and gives you really deflating ways to mess up (like dying with a bunch of unused health crystals).
I also had problems with the movement options. I found the blink teleport to be extremely unsatisfying. For one thing, the distance is laughably paltry. I kept waiting for an upgrade that never came. It's so short that in first person perspective, when everything close to you is off-camera so you have no easy frame of reference, it often looks like you're not moving at all. The worst part, though, is that it's a simple teleport and imparts no additional speed or momentum. And it cancels your already-finicky sprint, making it a really unreliable escape tool.
I never realized how critical the mantle is to Doom Eternal's moveset until I tried playing without it. It makes precision platforming much, much easier, because you can just aim your camera at a ledge and dash toward it. In Immortals, you can only guess when you're above a platform, unless you point your camera straight down at the floor which you never want to do in a game like this, especially midair, with a thumbstick. I was constantly over- and under-shooting ledges that I was aiming for.
Incomplete information wasn't just a problem with the platforming. In later levels fast-moving enemies are introduced, and they're dark-colored against a dark background with HDR-reinforced bright fireworks effects for the magic constantly flashing around. It got very hard to read the action in these fights.
It's also a looter shooter, which I find tedious. I don't like spending time dinkin around in my inventory. Ditto for the crafting and upgrade systems. I heard an interview with Bret Robbins, the game's director, who said he pretty much just threw in everything he thinks is fun in video games. Which, you know, fair enough that's probably exactly how I'd do it. But it also explains why it felt so crowded with mechanics. I felt like in this loot stuff there were too many choices that weren't different enough from each other to be interesting.
I would love to see this game iterated on more because it really does have some cool stuff going on. And Gina Torres, come on. It's absolutely unfair of me to compare this to Doom Eternal so much, and I definitely think there's plenty of room for movement-based shooters that aren't quite as tuned. And honestly if you're a shooter mechanics nerd like me it's probably worth picking up on sale to mess around with the shield; it is super cool. Come for the fireworks, stay for the crunchy shooter mechanics.
At the end of the day, though, I think what I appreciate most about Immortals of Aveum is that they went so all-out with the production values on a brand-new IP. Pretty sure I've said it before but it bears repeating: gusto goes a long way for me. I don't think big swings all need to be home runs. I think Immortals of Aveum, despite its terrible name and other flaws, earns its place in the canon kind of on the Duke3D side of the shooter tree, alongside The Darkness, Riddick and Bulletstorm: blemished but still brilliant gems that were made with a lot of grit and passion. I'd buy another Aveum game.
I had really high hopes going into this. It landed with no fanfare whatsoever and immediately disappeared beneath the wheels of the parade of once-in-a-generation releases this year. It looks really cool; the magic effects are bright and colorful, like fireworks. I figured in a stacked year like this it's like James Bond vs Godzilla; it doesn't matter how good you look in a tux when you're just gunk between a giant lizard's toes. I saw hidden gem potential and on balance I think it more or less delivered on this.
My first impression was quite good, as well. The characters are all memorable and likable, and the worldbuilding felt plausible and fleshed out without being cumbersome. The combat takes its cues from Doom 2016 and Eternal and all the pieces are in place for a really strong movement shooter.
I love the active shield mechanic. I think this is the most innovative and potentially impactful new idea I've seen in a shooter for a long time. The way it works is you can toggle your shield on and off. When it's on, you move slower (maybe like 60% speed?) but you don't take health damage. Health damage requires consumables to replenish and you can only carry a few at a time, so preventing it is a big deal. The shield has its own health, kinda like Halo's shield; if you take a few hits and turn off the shield, it will regenerate quickly. However if you keep the shield up long enough for it to lose all of its health, it will break, meaning it recharges quite slowly.
As you can imagine this quickly becomes a big part of combat. This isn't a cover shooter, and you're usually being flanked if not completely surrounded, so avoiding damage entirely just through movement is usually a losing battle. Knowing when to activate your shield and when to let it recharge is a really fun skill to build and knob to tweak your playstyle. You can pursue upgrades that add effects like damage or a knockback when the shield breaks that give you even more options.
Unfortunately, I found it hard to use the shield optimally. This is a game with a lot of buttons to juggle. It also has awful default controls that seem to depend on the player having two right thumbs, and does not offer any options for button remapping. I put two paddles on my Xbox Elite controller and this made things much more playable. It didn't solve the big problem, though, which is that there's just too many actions the player has to be constantly cycling through. I found the manual health and mana replenishment in particular to be a real chore. I remember a Diablo 3 dev once talking about how they wanted to give the player fewer, but more interesting choices. Manually clicking a button when my mana or health gets low may add tension and difficulty, but it's not interesting, and it distracts from the genuinely fun stuff like the shield and weapon swapping.
When I go full sweat mode and put on four paddles for high level Doom Eternal it's because I genuinely need all ten fingers for that experience. Every digit has a different, mission-critical tool for its flexible combat loop. The high complexity makes the game fill my brain like a gas, occupying every space; when it all comes together it's downright euphoric. Unfortunately, Immortals of Aveum gums up its toolset with chores. Manually sprinting, reloading and replenishing resources just slows everything down, and gives you really deflating ways to mess up (like dying with a bunch of unused health crystals).
I also had problems with the movement options. I found the blink teleport to be extremely unsatisfying. For one thing, the distance is laughably paltry. I kept waiting for an upgrade that never came. It's so short that in first person perspective, when everything close to you is off-camera so you have no easy frame of reference, it often looks like you're not moving at all. The worst part, though, is that it's a simple teleport and imparts no additional speed or momentum. And it cancels your already-finicky sprint, making it a really unreliable escape tool.
I never realized how critical the mantle is to Doom Eternal's moveset until I tried playing without it. It makes precision platforming much, much easier, because you can just aim your camera at a ledge and dash toward it. In Immortals, you can only guess when you're above a platform, unless you point your camera straight down at the floor which you never want to do in a game like this, especially midair, with a thumbstick. I was constantly over- and under-shooting ledges that I was aiming for.
Incomplete information wasn't just a problem with the platforming. In later levels fast-moving enemies are introduced, and they're dark-colored against a dark background with HDR-reinforced bright fireworks effects for the magic constantly flashing around. It got very hard to read the action in these fights.
It's also a looter shooter, which I find tedious. I don't like spending time dinkin around in my inventory. Ditto for the crafting and upgrade systems. I heard an interview with Bret Robbins, the game's director, who said he pretty much just threw in everything he thinks is fun in video games. Which, you know, fair enough that's probably exactly how I'd do it. But it also explains why it felt so crowded with mechanics. I felt like in this loot stuff there were too many choices that weren't different enough from each other to be interesting.
I would love to see this game iterated on more because it really does have some cool stuff going on. And Gina Torres, come on. It's absolutely unfair of me to compare this to Doom Eternal so much, and I definitely think there's plenty of room for movement-based shooters that aren't quite as tuned. And honestly if you're a shooter mechanics nerd like me it's probably worth picking up on sale to mess around with the shield; it is super cool. Come for the fireworks, stay for the crunchy shooter mechanics.
At the end of the day, though, I think what I appreciate most about Immortals of Aveum is that they went so all-out with the production values on a brand-new IP. Pretty sure I've said it before but it bears repeating: gusto goes a long way for me. I don't think big swings all need to be home runs. I think Immortals of Aveum, despite its terrible name and other flaws, earns its place in the canon kind of on the Duke3D side of the shooter tree, alongside The Darkness, Riddick and Bulletstorm: blemished but still brilliant gems that were made with a lot of grit and passion. I'd buy another Aveum game.
2022
I played this as part of my backlog-thinning project. It's been a really great kick in the pants to try some stuff that would otherwise languish.
I finished this in one sitting, which is something I basically never do. It had its hooks in me early. It's low budget enough that you know it's could go anywhere, story-wise, and that kept me interested through the sometimes-stilted dialogue and minimal gameplay segments. This is barely a game; it's as though it's all caught up in telling its story and then remembers "oh, you're here too. Well, have a button to push, I guess." Nevertheless, these moments always seemed to be added thoughtfully and I liked how they gave some tactility to the world.
The story is a relentless barrage of every kind of tragedy and injustice, to the point where it's almost comical. I spent most of the playtime asking myself "Is it earning this?" It pulls out all the stops when it comes to heaviness, and doesn't really examine any of these topics in any depth. But it's not a game about terminal illness, or racism, or poverty; those are just a few of the many dangers in this game's hostile, unpredictable world (and, I might add, the most mundane; I don't want to spoil all the wild shit that goes down in this game). Nor does it seem to be a game about processing trauma and healing, as I kind of expected in the opening hours.
I think this is a game about the big fuzzy line between childhood and adulthood. When playing as the mom most of your gameplay choices focus on the tension between setting a good, principled example for the kid and doing what needs to be done to find some kind of safety for the two of you in the short term. Playing as the kid most of the choices involve how tuned in you are to the things the adults mean but don't say. He wants (and needs) to grow up fast; she wants him to grow up right.
That's the part of it that felt the most relatable. Not directly to my experience, but just the idea that sometimes an unbelievable amount of terrible things happen all at once, and the choices you make as you navigate those moments provide the foundation that you'll build from once the worst has passed.
At the end of the game you get a little wrap-up explaining what kind of adult the kid grows up to be based on your choices. The ending I got was pretty satisfying and it did make me curious to see other forks. The game being so short makes it much more likely for that to happen, but so many heavy topics crammed into a 3 and a half hour game means I probably won't be revisiting it for a while.
That's ok though because this game definitely left an impact. Visually this reminded me of Silent Hill in the way they leveraged the low poly characters and limited environments into a very unique style with some truly beautiful scenes. Because the models are so low fi, there are no close-ups. Everything is shot from a sort of medium distance, giving it a detached, almost voyeuristic quality. The presentation is incredibly simple and sometimes feels like watching a play. The English voice acting is hit or miss, but it seems like a they did a good job prioritizing the important characters on that front so it didn't bother me. For how short and simple of a game this was, it has a huge cast. The localization wasn't always fantastic and there were some weirdly loud foley effects, but at the end of the day the arresting visuals, likable main characters and wild unpredictable story won me over.
I finished this in one sitting, which is something I basically never do. It had its hooks in me early. It's low budget enough that you know it's could go anywhere, story-wise, and that kept me interested through the sometimes-stilted dialogue and minimal gameplay segments. This is barely a game; it's as though it's all caught up in telling its story and then remembers "oh, you're here too. Well, have a button to push, I guess." Nevertheless, these moments always seemed to be added thoughtfully and I liked how they gave some tactility to the world.
The story is a relentless barrage of every kind of tragedy and injustice, to the point where it's almost comical. I spent most of the playtime asking myself "Is it earning this?" It pulls out all the stops when it comes to heaviness, and doesn't really examine any of these topics in any depth. But it's not a game about terminal illness, or racism, or poverty; those are just a few of the many dangers in this game's hostile, unpredictable world (and, I might add, the most mundane; I don't want to spoil all the wild shit that goes down in this game). Nor does it seem to be a game about processing trauma and healing, as I kind of expected in the opening hours.
I think this is a game about the big fuzzy line between childhood and adulthood. When playing as the mom most of your gameplay choices focus on the tension between setting a good, principled example for the kid and doing what needs to be done to find some kind of safety for the two of you in the short term. Playing as the kid most of the choices involve how tuned in you are to the things the adults mean but don't say. He wants (and needs) to grow up fast; she wants him to grow up right.
That's the part of it that felt the most relatable. Not directly to my experience, but just the idea that sometimes an unbelievable amount of terrible things happen all at once, and the choices you make as you navigate those moments provide the foundation that you'll build from once the worst has passed.
At the end of the game you get a little wrap-up explaining what kind of adult the kid grows up to be based on your choices. The ending I got was pretty satisfying and it did make me curious to see other forks. The game being so short makes it much more likely for that to happen, but so many heavy topics crammed into a 3 and a half hour game means I probably won't be revisiting it for a while.
That's ok though because this game definitely left an impact. Visually this reminded me of Silent Hill in the way they leveraged the low poly characters and limited environments into a very unique style with some truly beautiful scenes. Because the models are so low fi, there are no close-ups. Everything is shot from a sort of medium distance, giving it a detached, almost voyeuristic quality. The presentation is incredibly simple and sometimes feels like watching a play. The English voice acting is hit or miss, but it seems like a they did a good job prioritizing the important characters on that front so it didn't bother me. For how short and simple of a game this was, it has a huge cast. The localization wasn't always fantastic and there were some weirdly loud foley effects, but at the end of the day the arresting visuals, likable main characters and wild unpredictable story won me over.
What do you get when you put together DMC combat, OOT-like world design, weird controls, impenetrable lore and progression systems and a map you can't zoom? A pretty fun little adventure game it turns out.
I always forget Darksiders isn't an Xbox first party franchise; it's just got that look. It feels like it exists in the same world as Killer Instinct and Gears of War. Everyone has massive limbs, sword blades are six inches thick, everything is pointy, and the weapons and environments all have that heavy metal "put a bunch of skulls on it" aesthetic.
I heard a cool interview with a couple of the guys behind this game and basically they had never made anything like it before. This is apparent when you play it, but in both good and bad ways. It's bad because everything needs some more polish and there's a lot of fat that could be trimmed. There are simply way too many mechanics; actually there's really too much of everything. Puzzles always have twice as many steps as it feels like they should and battles tend to outstay their welcome with wave after wave of spongy baddies. The environments are all kind of lackluster, and I think if they were smaller and there were fewer of them, they could have given them a lot more attention.
It's kind of like... you know that new season of Twin Peaks where nobody ever told David Lynch "no"? This is like that; an unfiltered glimpse into the creator's brain because it's hard to imagine much of anything being left on the cutting room floor.
At the same time, it is admirable how committed this game is to its goals. The character action combat feels very nice (although I would have appreciated a couple more moves). The environmental and traversal puzzles are no joke; some of the "guide the beam of light through corridors" puzzles felt like they took over an hour. If that is your bag, Darksiders is 110% ready to fill it. There are a million different character interactions and affordances. I was constantly going "Wow I'm doing this now?"
Mostly due to the terrible maps, there were quite a few times I got hopelessly lost. That, the incredibly long puzzles and the combat tuning were the main points of friction I experienced. When the game was firing on all cylinders, though, I really was having a blast.
Apparently I'm on some kind of Mark Hamill kick; I just finished the Batman game a few days ago and here he is again hamming (Hamill-ing?) it up alongside the fantastic Liam O'Brian of Naruto and Warcraft fame and Phil LaMarr from Futurama and a million other things. Everyone's having a great time and it helped me get past the rougher spots and learn to love the game for what it has to offer.
It's got gusto! And gusto goes a long way with me.
I always forget Darksiders isn't an Xbox first party franchise; it's just got that look. It feels like it exists in the same world as Killer Instinct and Gears of War. Everyone has massive limbs, sword blades are six inches thick, everything is pointy, and the weapons and environments all have that heavy metal "put a bunch of skulls on it" aesthetic.
I heard a cool interview with a couple of the guys behind this game and basically they had never made anything like it before. This is apparent when you play it, but in both good and bad ways. It's bad because everything needs some more polish and there's a lot of fat that could be trimmed. There are simply way too many mechanics; actually there's really too much of everything. Puzzles always have twice as many steps as it feels like they should and battles tend to outstay their welcome with wave after wave of spongy baddies. The environments are all kind of lackluster, and I think if they were smaller and there were fewer of them, they could have given them a lot more attention.
It's kind of like... you know that new season of Twin Peaks where nobody ever told David Lynch "no"? This is like that; an unfiltered glimpse into the creator's brain because it's hard to imagine much of anything being left on the cutting room floor.
At the same time, it is admirable how committed this game is to its goals. The character action combat feels very nice (although I would have appreciated a couple more moves). The environmental and traversal puzzles are no joke; some of the "guide the beam of light through corridors" puzzles felt like they took over an hour. If that is your bag, Darksiders is 110% ready to fill it. There are a million different character interactions and affordances. I was constantly going "Wow I'm doing this now?"
Mostly due to the terrible maps, there were quite a few times I got hopelessly lost. That, the incredibly long puzzles and the combat tuning were the main points of friction I experienced. When the game was firing on all cylinders, though, I really was having a blast.
Apparently I'm on some kind of Mark Hamill kick; I just finished the Batman game a few days ago and here he is again hamming (Hamill-ing?) it up alongside the fantastic Liam O'Brian of Naruto and Warcraft fame and Phil LaMarr from Futurama and a million other things. Everyone's having a great time and it helped me get past the rougher spots and learn to love the game for what it has to offer.
It's got gusto! And gusto goes a long way with me.
I had very little familiarity with Batman when I bought this game years ago. I tried playing it once and was put off by all the references I didn't get. I didn't have access to comics as a kid, and my only understanding of Batman was from the Adam West series. I remember when the Michael Keaton one came out thinking "Wait, they're trying to make a serious Batman?"
Still, it's the only super hero franchise I have any connection to at all, and with it being such a beloved game I thought I should give it its fair due. This time around, to prime the pumps a bit, I watched the first season of Batman: The Animated Series. This was extremely helpful to get a bunch of the backstory and feel like I was in on the references.
It's a ton of fun to see how many gadgets and activities from Batman's escapades they were able to translate into gameplay. I don't remember him crawling through quite this many vents though; seriously the guy spends more time in ducts than Harry Tuttle, heating engineer. I don't normally like stealth gameplay; it makes me feel weak and I feel like you spend all your time waiting for something. But here they did a great job making me feel like a predator. I like the way the chatty enemies slowly getting more and more freaked out as you thin their numbers gives you a sense of power even when you're hiding in a drain.
Both the gameplay and the stakes of the plot built up at a nice steady pace that kept me moving forward. I really liked how Batman looked more haggard and unkempt as the game progressed. The voice work is amazing; I know it's been said a million times but this is the performance of a lifetime for Mark Hamill. His voice is in every scene but I never got sick of it because it was always in flux. He's constantly sliding between high and low, rough and smooth, fast and slow, loud and soft; he uses his full vocal and emotional range and through all of it never lets up on the energy. It's like 10 straight hours of him dialed to 11.
All in all it was a grand old romp; the combat was sweet, the bosses were a little iffy, the environment was amazing, the stealth was exciting and it really made me feel like ductman. I'm looking forward to the second one!
Still, it's the only super hero franchise I have any connection to at all, and with it being such a beloved game I thought I should give it its fair due. This time around, to prime the pumps a bit, I watched the first season of Batman: The Animated Series. This was extremely helpful to get a bunch of the backstory and feel like I was in on the references.
It's a ton of fun to see how many gadgets and activities from Batman's escapades they were able to translate into gameplay. I don't remember him crawling through quite this many vents though; seriously the guy spends more time in ducts than Harry Tuttle, heating engineer. I don't normally like stealth gameplay; it makes me feel weak and I feel like you spend all your time waiting for something. But here they did a great job making me feel like a predator. I like the way the chatty enemies slowly getting more and more freaked out as you thin their numbers gives you a sense of power even when you're hiding in a drain.
Both the gameplay and the stakes of the plot built up at a nice steady pace that kept me moving forward. I really liked how Batman looked more haggard and unkempt as the game progressed. The voice work is amazing; I know it's been said a million times but this is the performance of a lifetime for Mark Hamill. His voice is in every scene but I never got sick of it because it was always in flux. He's constantly sliding between high and low, rough and smooth, fast and slow, loud and soft; he uses his full vocal and emotional range and through all of it never lets up on the energy. It's like 10 straight hours of him dialed to 11.
All in all it was a grand old romp; the combat was sweet, the bosses were a little iffy, the environment was amazing, the stealth was exciting and it really made me feel like ductman. I'm looking forward to the second one!
2014
This is pretty much everything I look for in a game, and then some. It's bright and colorful. It's got a giant pile of incredibly wacky guns, like an acid sprinkler and bowling ball launcher. It's unique, with its own voice. Its core mechanics are polished to a shine. It's bombastic and surprising. It's funny. Like, really really funny.
Unfortunately it's the kind of comedy that occasionally veers into being completely annoying, but generally you only have to tolerate these detours for a moment before the genuine guffaws start again. Parts of it are very much "of a time," but that doesn't bother me. I've done a bit of comedy writing, enough to recognize that this sheer volume of jokes only happens with lots of work and iteration. Video games are the hardest medium to be funny in; every element both technical and artistic has to be tuned just right. My hat is off to the whole team, here; the animations, sound design and snappy load times all bolster the writing in what I found to be a truly jaw-dropping display of artistic prowess.
The biggest flaw is one that a lot of games fall prey to: absurdly aggressive hinting. There was one quest where I had to get into a factory. "The front door is blocked; see if you can find another way in." Literally 3 seconds later: "Try looking around the yard for something that you could use to get in the factory!" Literally 2 seconds later: "Use the crane to smash the wall of the factory!" Literally 4 seconds later: "What's taking so long? Use the crane to smash the wall!" Like at this point I'm still getting my bearings trying to figure out what building they're talking about. It's an incredibly common problem and for a game of its era it's not surprising to see, but it is one that I've always been baffled by.
The repetitive voice lines during missions only got super bad during a couple moments. The final boss fight in particular I had to disable dialog for because it was purposely written to be grating, and the fight was challenging enough that I had to retry it a few times and hear those same grating lines over and over. Again, forgivable, but annoying nonetheless.
The voice acting is top notch; I played with the female protagonist and voice actor Stephanie Lemelin brought an incredible energy and bravado to the character. She simultaneously sounded like she was born of this weird world while also being the most relatable part of it, a tricky needle to thread that had me cheering for even her most eye-rolling quips and one-liners. Her voice felt like mine.
The traversal is fantastic. I think this is the only open world game I've ever played where I basically never used fast travel because just getting from point A to B is so much goddamn fun. Bouncing, wall-running and grinding my way across this city never got old. The stunt scoring system that enhances your damage output ties it all together in a multiplicative way.
In a lot of games it feels like they give you the fun parts to get through the challenging parts. In Sunset Overdrive, they give you fun parts to have more fun with the other fun parts. There's still plenty of challenge, especially in the boss fights and base defense segments, but even when I'm dying it's usually because I'm so overwhelmed with weird guns to shoot, barrels to explode, and cars to bounce off of. If Assassins Creed is like a gumball machine, giving you one piece of candy at a time at a steady consistent pace, and Dark Souls is like crawling through a bombed-out munitions factory looking for the last grimy jawbreaker, Sunset Overdrive is like diving head-first, mouth open into the candy vault, Scrooge McDuck style.
Unfortunately it's the kind of comedy that occasionally veers into being completely annoying, but generally you only have to tolerate these detours for a moment before the genuine guffaws start again. Parts of it are very much "of a time," but that doesn't bother me. I've done a bit of comedy writing, enough to recognize that this sheer volume of jokes only happens with lots of work and iteration. Video games are the hardest medium to be funny in; every element both technical and artistic has to be tuned just right. My hat is off to the whole team, here; the animations, sound design and snappy load times all bolster the writing in what I found to be a truly jaw-dropping display of artistic prowess.
The biggest flaw is one that a lot of games fall prey to: absurdly aggressive hinting. There was one quest where I had to get into a factory. "The front door is blocked; see if you can find another way in." Literally 3 seconds later: "Try looking around the yard for something that you could use to get in the factory!" Literally 2 seconds later: "Use the crane to smash the wall of the factory!" Literally 4 seconds later: "What's taking so long? Use the crane to smash the wall!" Like at this point I'm still getting my bearings trying to figure out what building they're talking about. It's an incredibly common problem and for a game of its era it's not surprising to see, but it is one that I've always been baffled by.
The repetitive voice lines during missions only got super bad during a couple moments. The final boss fight in particular I had to disable dialog for because it was purposely written to be grating, and the fight was challenging enough that I had to retry it a few times and hear those same grating lines over and over. Again, forgivable, but annoying nonetheless.
The voice acting is top notch; I played with the female protagonist and voice actor Stephanie Lemelin brought an incredible energy and bravado to the character. She simultaneously sounded like she was born of this weird world while also being the most relatable part of it, a tricky needle to thread that had me cheering for even her most eye-rolling quips and one-liners. Her voice felt like mine.
The traversal is fantastic. I think this is the only open world game I've ever played where I basically never used fast travel because just getting from point A to B is so much goddamn fun. Bouncing, wall-running and grinding my way across this city never got old. The stunt scoring system that enhances your damage output ties it all together in a multiplicative way.
In a lot of games it feels like they give you the fun parts to get through the challenging parts. In Sunset Overdrive, they give you fun parts to have more fun with the other fun parts. There's still plenty of challenge, especially in the boss fights and base defense segments, but even when I'm dying it's usually because I'm so overwhelmed with weird guns to shoot, barrels to explode, and cars to bounce off of. If Assassins Creed is like a gumball machine, giving you one piece of candy at a time at a steady consistent pace, and Dark Souls is like crawling through a bombed-out munitions factory looking for the last grimy jawbreaker, Sunset Overdrive is like diving head-first, mouth open into the candy vault, Scrooge McDuck style.