Critical Miss

Bastion – Critical Miss #35

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“War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

A Safe Place Amongst the Ruins

When I first got my PS4 in 2014, I had already been devouring gaming content on the internet and was aware of some of the big indie games. Super Meat Boy, Nuclear Throne, Fez–hell, I had already played Cave Story on my 3DS by then–all these games I was super excited to play once I got my shiny new console. Only thing is, I never finished any of them. Call it decision paralysis, but I bought so many games when I first got the console that I spent maybe an hour in each of these games before moving on to something else. Another game I bought right around the same time was Bastion, the indie darling of 2011, and first game made by now legendary developer, Supergiant Games. I liked Bastion enough from what I played of it, but nothing about it really grabbed me and pulled me in. Looking back, I’m not sure why, because Bastion is truly a special game. And, well, every proper blog is supposed to start at the beginning…

A narrator introduces the main character as he wakes up in a bed on a chuck of floor floating in the sky. The character is only ever referred to as the Kid–in a very Blood Meridian way–and the narrator speaks of the Calamity that has broken up and wiped out most of the city you live in, Caelondia. They speak of the Bastion, the place your people have agreed to meet at in times of trouble, and you head out for it. As you do, fragments of ground will suddenly fly up to create a path in front of your feet. The visuals of Bastion are immediately striking. The game uses hand-drawn art–a staple of Supergiant’s games–and it is all extremely detailed, vividly colorful, and absolutely gorgeous. The art helps make everything in the game interesting to look at, but mixed with the isometric camera, I found it hard to tell where the edges of the world was and often fell off due to it. That is a common problem with any isometric game, but the insane lushness of the art only made determining what was a safe piece of land to stand on harder. Luckily, falling off the edge of the world is only penalized with a second of wasted time as you fall back on the level and a small bit of damage being taken. Like the art, the music in the game is also great. An interesting mix of twangy folk, fuzzy and distorted rock, and trippy hip hop beats–my favorite track in the game being “Brusher Patrol.”

The short journey to the Bastion will take the player through a tutorial level where you can get a feel for the combat and the isometric view of the game, all while the narrator comments on the player’s actions and provides small details about the world around you. Once you reach the Bastion, the Kid meets the narrator himself, an old man named Rucks, and is informed that to rebuild and repower the Bastion, the Kid will have to adventure out into the world to collect cores. The game is broken up into rather short levels, all with unique visuals and gimmicks to them. Of course, there are enemies to fight through in order to get to the Core you’ve come to find. Be them wild creatures, members of the Gasfellow race, or soldiers from the enemy Ura people, the Kid must get through them all in order to get what he came for in hopes of saving his community. 

The combat in the game is serviceable–nothing amazing, but it doesn’t do anything wrong either–but the game shines with the variety of weapons and the customizability offered to the player. Weapons are divided into melee and long range weapons, all varied with how they handle, and all with different strengths and weaknesses. You can also learn special techniques that can help in battle. Some of these require certain weapons to perform, while others are agnostic, like the ability to summon a Squirt to fight alongside you or throw grenades. Weapons can be upgraded once a Forge is built in the Bastion and they can be swapped around to choose a loadout at an Arsenal in the Bastion or in a level. 

Building structures in the Bastion is what the Cores are used for in the game. There are six buildings to create and they all aid the player in levels. Passive perks can be equipped at the Distillery, items can be bought at the Lost and Found, the Memorial gives the player objectives to complete in the game for rewards, and the Shrine allows the player to pray to different gods. Doing this will give the player more exp and money in levels, but also adds a difficulty modifier to the game. Enemies may hit harder or move fast, they might leave little bombs behind that explode a second after they die, or the Kid’s movement speed might be reduced if hit. This difficulty system is really interesting due to its tactileness, how it allows the player to change up the game feel as they see fit and benefit from it. The Shrine mechanic tied with the customizability of weapons and loadouts add a ton of replayability to the game.

But, as much as I am a mechanics driven player, gameplay isn’t everything. Supergiant Games has been constantly praised for making games with not only satisfying gameplay, but engaging and emotional storytelling, and it clearly started here with Bastion. 

Along his travels, the Kid will meet a couple survivors and bring them back to the safety of the Bastion. They are from the Ura people, the same ones the Caelondians were warring with before the Calamity. The young man, Zulf, was an ambassador to Caelondia trying to bring peace between the two nations. The woman is Zia, an Ura woman who was born and raised in Caelondia. The player can learn more about them and the history of the world surrounding them by asking them about items they find while exploring levels or by fighting in Who Knows Where, a gauntlet level where the play fights through hordes of enemies as the Rucks tells the backstory of characters and the world of the game. The differences in nationality or the fact that they were at war with each other, does nothing to prevent Zulf and Zia making fast friends with the Kid and Rucks. All is well in the Bastion for a bit. That is, until the Kid finds a journal from Zia’s father out in the world and Zulf reads the true cause behind the Calamity.

Without wanting to spoil the twists and turns of the plot in the second half of Bastion, all I will say is that the Calamity has similarities to the Manhattan Project. It is a story of trying to rebuild after destruction, attempting to make sense of a world blow to bits, and accepting responsibility for things out of your control. Because the characters in the game had nothing to do with the Calamity, except maybe Rucks, but they are left shouldering the burden of what to do in response to it. Some seek revenge, some seek only the truth, and the ultimate decision of reversing the Calamity in hopes it will not happen again or accepting the world as it now is and trying to move past the atrocity is left up to the Kid, and therefore the player. 

Bastion is a strange game to talk about because there’s not one thing I can point to and say is done better than any other game I’ve played. But I still came out of it extremely positive and I would recommend it to anyone interested in video games. It’s not one thing the game does well, but everything, from gameplay, to world building (both story- and mechanic-wise), to narrative structure, to the tactileness the game offers the player, to the gorgeous art and incredible soundtrack. It’s done with equal attention and given equal importance, it’s all melded into one, and the game feels stronger for it. Bastion is a game that wants to engage the player both on a fun level and on an emotional level, and it succeeds at both. At the end of the day, that is the best thing I can ever hope to say about a game.

MediEvil – Critical Miss #32

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Spooky, Scary Skeleton

It’s Halloween. The kids are trick or treating, the jack-o’-lanterns are alight, and the sheet ghosts are looking for souls to steal. I didn’t play a horror game this year for Critical Miss, but I did play a horror-themed game. MediEvil is an action platformer that released on the PS1 in 1998 and Sony decided that over 20 years was long enough of a slumber and resurrected the game in 2019 with a remake. I played this remake for PS4 and it was a great choice to play during the Halloween season. As we all know, skeletons are the spookiest thing imaginable—well, besides a bad port perhaps.

The story in MediEvil is very simple, but charming. Sir Daniel Fortesque is hailed as Gallowmere’s greatest hero after he led his army against and defeated the evil wizard Zarok and his undead hordes. Only thing is, Sir Daniel was the first to perish in that battle with an arrow through his eye. He never even faced Zarok, but has been falsely remembered in history as the hero of the day. So when Zarok returns and green misty magics the land of Gallowmere to shit again, Sir Daniel rises from his grave as a skeleton and has a second chance at being the hero he failed to be. As far as a redemption story goes, it is extremely bare, but it works well because Sir Daniel is such a pitiable character. The first action he takes upon waking from death is to pull cobwebs out of his empty eye socket, he mumbles and is misunderstood constantly while talking to others because he is missing his jaw, and his armor looks at least three sizes too large for him. Everyone you come across in the story like the ghosts of other heroes and gargoyle statues know the fraud Sir Daniel truly is and constantly shit on him about it. All this adds to give the put upon skeleton a true underdog feel and it’s hard not to relate with him.

While the art style is strong, I found myself less impressed with the graphics in MediEvil as I was with other remakes of PS1 games like the N. Sane Trilogy and the Spyro remakes. It is partly due to the MediEvil remake’s graphical style feeling so similar to those other games and I am starting to feel fatigued with it. But there are also the issues with the performance of the game. Character models are covered in jaggies, the frame rate plummets when the screen is busy, and textures pop in constantly. I played this on an original PS4 model so that contributed to these issues being ever present, but the game doesn’t seem to be well optimized at all based on reviews I’ve read saying the game doesn’t run great on the PS4 Pro either. It’s a shame too because underneath all these issues, the core game is still rather solid.

Sir Daniel feels right at home in the lands of Gallowmere which are dipping with the classic gothic horror atmosphere. Crumbling castles, flooded battlefields, medieval villages, asylums, and graveyards all need to be explored to complete the game. Most levels are linear with paths criss-crossing each other or opening up with the help of different colored runes à la Doom, but the goals and gimmicks of the levels vary a lot. One level you just have to make it to the end, another you’ll solve riddles in a hedge maze or just fight waves of enemies, or you will have to collect the souls of fallen soldiers. Although the levels can be so different, the game still feels like a cohesive whole since Gallowmere is perfectly suited to these areas and the gameplay never strays far from the basic mechanics for any new gimmick to feel out of place.

The core gameplay of MediEvil is exploration, some light platforming, and combat, and boy I wish the combat was more engaging. It’s not terrible, just some of the most bare bones combat I’ve ever played. Sir Daniel doesn’t swing his sword as much as he just wipes it in front of him like he’s boringly painting a wall. There’s no feedback when hitting an enemy—no grunt from them, no slight pause as the weapon hits flesh and bone, nothing except some enemies get knocked back to a comical degree. I can deal is lackluster combat in a game, good game feel isn’t absolutely everything, but when there is no indication from the game when I get hit, no rumble or crunching sound, and my health mysteriously drains to zero in fight because I couldn’t tell I was being hit, that sends a fire of frustration up my lungs.

You don’t only have to deal with the combat in order to progress through the game, but also to unlock the Hero Chalices in each level. You’ll notice that sometimes after you kill an enemy that their soul will float up and dart away. This goes to help fill a chalice hidden somewhere in the level and, after killing enough foes, can be collected before exiting the level. Usually, the chalice is hidden somewhere near the level exit or along the path you would need take to the end, but sometimes it is at the very beginning. This requires you to backtrack across the entire level before leaving to grab it and, with all the enemies dead, it’s very boring.

The chalices are the best way to upgrade yourself throughout the game. If you beat a level after collecting its chalice, you will be taken to the Hall of Heroes before returning to the map screen. Here in the Hall, you can find the glowing statue of a hero and they will talk to you a little bit before giving you an award for collecting the chalice. The reward is sometimes an extra life bottle or some gold, but it is usually a weapon. These weapons are important to collect for the higher damage output because the ghouls and monsters you fight in levels just continue to get tankier. It’s extremely disappointing that all the weapons feel like all the others in their types—swords all swing the same, hammers and axes slam on the ground, all the range weapons like throwing knives, bows, and crossbows all feel like the same weapon with different firing speeds. As someone who relishes games with many different weapons and combat styles, I was disappointed every time I got a new weapon in MediEvil only to find it’s just a copy of a weapon I had already been using. 

The only real time I felt I was strategizing in the game was with the Life Bottles. Once Sir Daniel’s HP hits zero, he will automatically heal with a Life Bottle, provided you have one to use. These bottles can be filled at Life Fountains or by picking up smaller Life Vials. The rub comes when getting a game over or moving onto a new level because your health and Life Bottles do not refill—so if you limb to a level exit on death’s door with no back up bottles, that’s how you will be starting the next one. I found myself having to plan out when to grab health on the tougher levels in order to most efficiently fill my Life Bottles. This could be tricky though in the later levels since they start getting pretty stingy with healing items available.

Apart from combat, MediEvil also challenges the player with some platforming, but not a whole lot of it. This is smart of the game because controls are dreadful for it. Sir Daniel is surprisingly agile for a dusty old skeleton in a giant suit of armor. He is fairly fast and shockingly light, but he also has some strange momentum behind his movement. This makes sections where you have to jump on small platforms infuriating. Even if you line up the jump right, Dan will often just slide off the ledge due to the momentum you don’t have a good feel for. The collision dictation in general is garbage. Jumps get cut short cause Dan’s feet get caught on an invisible ledge on a small step, he slips off ledges that he is clearly on, and I got trapped more then once in a haystack or a step, leaving Dan floating off the ground in a perpetual animation of falling until I restarted the level. 

To use a pun, MediEvil is a fine game in its bones, but all the issues and annoyances in the game left me feeling pretty low on it. The frame rate dips and terrible collision detection, the lackluster combat and samey weapons, and the frustrating controls when having to platform all led to a pretty irritating time with the game. I often agonize over whether I should play the original versions of the games I review here, but I most often choose the most available version, be that a remake or just a port on modern consoles. I want to review the games most people are able to play and, while I do like collecting and playing old games, a lot of them are too expensive or hard to find for me to get. I found myself thinking about this more often while playing this MediEvil remake. I can’t help but wonder if my time with the game would have been enjoyed more if I played the original. Maybe someday I’ll find a copy and see how it stacks up to this remake, but, for now, all I can say is the remake is fine, but very clunky. It stumbles around and trips over itself like a dead body reanimated to life.

Psychonauts – Critical Miss #30

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Ra-Ra-Razputin

I never went to summer camp as a kid. Closet thing I had growing up was a thing called P.I.T.S., Parks in the Summertime, where kids from the town would go to the park on Thursdays and a group of volunteers would have games and activities for them to do. Even this I didn’t attend very often, always being a more indoor, bookish kid. So I’m glad I got to experience summer camp vicariously through Psychonauts. Released upon the world in 2005 from the brain of Tim Schafer, the game received critical acclaim, but disappointing sales led it to be one of the most famous cult classics in video games.

Whispering Rock in the game is no ordinary summer camp. It’s actually a camp for psychic children—a place that trains and nurtures the psychic abilities in the campers and a place the main character, Razputin, dreams about attending. He is so determined that he runs away from his acrobatic, circus-performing family to sneak into the camp. The counselors at Whispering Rock inform Raz he only has one day at the camp until his father comes to pick him up. So Raz decides to get as much psychic training as he can in that single day. Along the way he will meet new friends, make new bullies, and unravel an evil plot to steal children’s brains in the works. 

Psychonauts’ art direction is a great balance of ugly yet charming. It takes inspiration from movies like A Nightmare Before Christmas with its darker color palette and grotesque character models—all unnaturally, sickly skin tones, uneven teeth, and lopsided, bulging eyes. Usually I’m not a fan of this type of character design, but there’s something about Psychonauts that makes it work. Possibly due to how charming and well-written the characters themselves are and possibly just due to how well the humor is done in the game. I laughed a lot while playing Psychonauts. The strong character designs also lead to strong level themes since the levels in the game take place inside different characters’ minds.

Much like the characters in the game, levels vary wildly in Psychonauts in terms of art style, mechanics, skills used, and puzzles to solve. The game is constantly changing things up with each and every level and the art style chosen for each one perfectly represents the personality whose mind you are exploring. Levels range from more combat focus in Sasha’s Shooting Gallery, which has a sort of 50’s retro style, to pure platforming challenges like the 60’s inspired dance party of Milla’s mind. A lot of levels are more based on solving puzzles than platforming or combat. Gloria’s Theater has the player finding the right play scene and mood to put on in order to gain access to the cat walks and Waterloo World has Raz shrink down in order to act as a piece in a board game. These more puzzle focused levels were my favorite in the game because when the game demanded quick or precise platforming, it started to show cracks.

Razputin comes from a family of acrobats and inherently has a moveset for fun platforming. He can walk and bounce on tight ropes, swing around and leap off poles and trapeze swings, and can grind down railings. For the most part, the controls work fine, but there is a clunkiness to them that’s a little hard to explain. There is a sort of lag that needs to be accounted for when trying to string moves together. This makes simple things like jumping off poles or railings touchy since it’s a crapshoot whether or not the double jump will work. As Raz does more psychic training, he learns how to enhance his physical abilities with his psychic powers. He can use his mind to double jump, levitate and move faster, and let himself float slowly to the ground when falling. These abilities help with some of the trickier platforming and the camera in the game, which also feels like it’s fighting the player, but the weird lag is still present when trying to combo these moves together. It’s only a real problem in certain parts of the game where platforming challenges get tricky. Levels like Black Velvetopia and The Meat Circus are terrible for these moments, but pretty much every level seemed to have a section that took me much longer than it should due to the controls. It was frustrating, but not so much that I ever wanted to quit the game. However, the controls were the major reason why I decided early on in the game not to 100% complete it.

Every level has many collectibles to grab. Figments are the stand-ins for the common collectible like Mario’s coins or Sonic’s rings, there is emotional baggage that need a corresponding tag to open, and repressed memories to be discovered that are represented by locked safes. Collecting these items help Raz level up in camp rank, rewarding the player with new skills and upgrades to existing skills, concept art, and back story on the character whose mind you are playing around in. But figments are just too faint and hard to see since they are paper thin and transparent to spot easily in the busy levels of the game. A lot of baggage and safes are hiding in plain sight along the main path, but some are tucked away in sections that require precise platforming to find. While it’s a nice thought that you are helping someone clear out their emotional baggage, it would have been great to see that reflected in the character themselves once you leave the level. There is a theme of helping people through their trauma or mental blocks in the game’s story, so I feel having characters improve the more baggage you clear out in their mind would be a great tie between story and gameplay.

The story in Psychonauts is very enjoyable, even if it suffers from some weird pacing issues. The game feels very episodic with how characters, themes, and mechanics are picked up for a single level and then nearly forgotten for the rest of the game. By the halfway point of the game, all the children at camp have had their brains stolen and turned into drooling mindless zombies that only moan out to watch TV. Even Milla and Sasha, the two teachers who have been helping Raz train, disappear at this point, only to return for the conclusion of the game. I use this term to describe a colorful art style a lot, but Psychonauts’ story feels very much like a Saturday morning cartoon: episodic, character’s coming and going in each episode and hardly having a bearing on the overall plot, and setting changing up as needed with every adventure. This isn’t a bad thing though, it works extremely well for the story being told, but it did make me wish we could spend more time with the characters I liked like Dogen, Milla, and Lili. 

While the clunky controls made playing Psychonauts more frustrating than it had to be in the moment as I was playing, I still ended the game extremely positive on it. There is so much creativity and clever design in the game not to like it. From the juxtaposition of the mundane setting of the summer camp and the fantastic world of psychics and people’s individual mindscapes to the varied mechanics and puzzles in the level, Psychonauts is too unique not to try out. It’s not the best 3D platformer I’ve ever played, but it has some of the most interesting levels and charming, fleshed out characters of any. The game can be picked up for pretty cheap now on most modern consoles, so check it out. 

Ape Escape – Critical Miss #28

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Image by KFHEWUI. Found at gamefaqs.gamespot.com

Just Monkeyin’ Around!

Over the past few years, there have been a slew of remakes of PS1 games coming out. Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, and even MediEvil all have seen great success with updating their PS1 games with modern graphics—hell, Crash just got a brand new game in the series focused around its classic gameplay after the success of the N. Sane Trilogy. It’s a trend I’ve honestly been loving. While I did have a PS1 growing, I didn’t really have the classic games one would associate the console with so it’s been great experiencing these games with modern graphics. There are a lot of games from the console that would be great to see remade, but one series always seems to dominate the conversation when PS1 remakes are discussed and that is Ape Escape. Released in 1999, Ape Escape was an in-house Sony developed 3D platformer closely tied to the Playstation for being a console exclusive and being the first game to require a DualShock controller to play. While I agree that it would be amazing to see a modern remake of this first game (or, better yet, the series as a whole), after playing it, I think I understand why it hasn’t happened yet or may not ever happen.

The story of Ape Escape is very straightforward. A little white monkey named Specter gets his hands on a helmet that makes him super intelligent and he hands out similar helmets to all his monkey friends. Using the Professor’s time machine, he sends all these annoying apes throughout time in order to rewrite history in their favor and make them the dominant species on Earth. It’s up to Spike, a neighborhood boy who is friends with the Professor, to travel through different time periods to capture all the menacing monkeys before they can cause too much mayhem. 

The set up is enjoyable and very silly, feeling like a goofy Saturday morning anime, but it’s not particularly engaging. This is due partly to cut scenes between levels being rather static and just dropping exposition, and partly due to the rather odd audio mixing in the game. Characters all seem to speak at different volumes with the likes of Spike and the Professor’s assistant, Natalie, being perfectly fine, while Specter and the Professor are distractingly quiet. I’m not sure if it was due to bad recording or direction given to the actors, but it makes some lines incredibly hard to hear at a normal volume.

The time travel set up is a great idea, lending itself naturally to a huge variety of possible level settings, but it’s never explored to its fullest. You start in the prehistoric ages with dinosaurs and lust jungles then move on to the ice age, all snow and mammoths and glittering white. From there you find yourself in feudal times, a few Japanese castles and a European one, then go into the modern age where you explore a Japanese town and a tall television station tower. These are the really the only time periods you explore spread out across over twenty levels and I feel like the idea could have been expanded more. I would have loved to see some see some other periods with more human structures for the monkeys to mess around with, like an ancient Egypt or Greek level, a pirate level, or a cowboy level—besides the one room in Specter Land, which feels more like the developers were reusing a scraped idea from earlier in development.

Image by TerrorOfTalos. Found at apeescape.fandom.com

The lack of time periods to explore is really only disappointing because the levels themselves are mostly well designed and fun to explore. There are a handful of apes to capture in each level, but only about half of which are needed to move on to the next level, with only a few needing new gadgets from later in the game to nab. This gives the player options in which monkeys they want to go after so it’s never too stressful if a particular monkey is giving you trouble or you miss any while exploring. The art direction is colorful and pleasant, seemingly taking inspiration from kids anime like Samurai Pizza Cats and Pokémon, giving the game a strong sense of identity within the confines of the limited hardware. 

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the draw distance. Limited draw distance is not uncommon for fully 3D games in the fifth generation, with structures popping in when close enough as if coming out of a fog (or sometimes literally with games like Superman 64 and Silent Hill). While poor draw distance is hardly ever a deal breaker, especially in older games with more limitations, I have never found it so distracting as in Ape Escape. Anything more than fifteen feet away will pop in and out of existence as you move around—trees, walls, platforms, even enemies themselves. It’s only slightly immersion breaking when the world seems to materialize around you, but the biggest problem with this is it can make the levels hard to navigate since it can be difficult to know if a path leads to a new part of the level or a dead end until the walls pop in to block you. 

The core gameplay loop of running around level to catch monkeys is still very fun and engaging. It feels a natural evolution to 3D collectathons like Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie since now the collectables will try to evade you or fight back. Each level offers a good balance of deliberate platforming and fast-paced monkey catching. You will be equipped with many gadgets throughout your journey across time—starting with just a net and stun baton, but acquiring more as you progress through the levels—and this is what gives Ape Escape its unique selling point.

As said before, Ape Escape was the first game that required the DualShock controller to be played and this is because it necessitated the use of both joysticks. The left stick is used to move your character around like any other 3D game, but the right stick is used to control your gadgets, which are selectable with the face buttons. This means you swing your club or net by flicking the right stick, the Dash Hoop and the Sky Flyer by rotating the stick in a circle, and slingshot by pulling back on the right stick. It adds a lot of unique charm to the game as well as control since items like the baton can be used in any direction at a moment’s notice. However, this unique control method also leads to some strange choices. Since the face buttons are where you equip the gadgets to be swapped at any time, the jump button is relegated to the R1 button. This is a little clunky at first, but I got used to it in time and really only suffered from muscle memory pressing the X button to jump in the beginning of the game. The camera can be pretty awful at times, though, with the only real way to control it being with the L1 button that immediately swings it behind the character. This isn’t a huge deal to me since bad cameras are pretty much synonymous with 3D platformers of the time—especially on the N64 with it’s weird, single-joysticked trident controller. 

The gameplay could become repetitive to some since you are only catching monkeys, but I found that each monkey offers a fun and frantic little challenge to nab. The game’s pacing is quick and fairly easy throughout the playthrough. At least, until the end. Specter Land, the final level in the game, is just too long, taking me around two hours to beat. It’s just a gauntlet of monkeys to catch and platforming challenges to beat. These challenges are where the game’s poor draw distance and stiff camera decide to team up for a final desperate attack of frustration. The only saving grace of this final level is the amount of checkpoints and the fact that shortcuts you unlock are still active after a game over. If this was not the case, I may have pitched my controller out the window—but most likely I would have just stopped playing.

Ape Escape is still a fun, charming game. I liked running after the monkeys, bonking them over the head and scooping them up in the net. I enjoyed the different locations you visit even if I would have liked to see more. I went into the Monkey Book after every level to see the names of the apes I caught and the few word descriptors the game gives them. But I’m not sure it will ever get a modern remake like Crash or Spyro’s games did. The video game industry has become more homogenized since the Wild Western days of the PS1 with more conventions that player’s expect, especially with controls. I can just imagine the backlash an Ape Escape remake would get if the right stick was kept for controlling gadgets and not the camera, if the jump button was still mapped to R1. There are ways around this—as the version on the PSP can show—but for a big shiny new remake I think the game should stay as close as possible to the original. I still hope Sony does remake the series. I would gladly pick it up whether they remake all the games or just the first one. But I’ll be a monkey’s uncle if they ever do. 

Image by Golden Spect. Found at apeescape.fandom.com

Batman: Arkham Asylum – Critical Miss #27

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Photo by Dark Lord 21. Found at arkhamcity.fandom.com

Mook Repellant Batgloves

For some reason, I thought 30 years old was a perfect time to get into comic books. This is partly due to covid and looking for more things to occupy my time inside, but the interest mostly stemmed from my interest in the style of storytelling and the ubiquity of comics. I’ve always seen comics as a sort of modern mythology mixed with soap operas—everyone knows Batman, Spider-Man, Superman; their backstories, characters, and motivations, but they are still products designed to be sold, with ongoing stories and with more twists and turns than a mountain road. But superhero video games have always been a mixed affair with most ranging from terrible to alright and few ever breaking the surface to be considered great. While I have never been the biggest fan of Batman—and even now my knowledge about him comes mostly from the movies rather than the comics—Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Asylum release in 2009 is still considered to be one of the best superhero games ever made.

The game opens with Batman transporting a recently captured Joker through the rain to Arkham Asylum. He has a bad feeling that Joker is plotting something and he is right, for as soon as they bring him to the maximum security cell, Joker springs his trap. He takes control over the facility and escapes, leaving Batman to recapture him, save everyone in danger, and foil his new scheme to creating an army with his Titan formula which turns people into Bane-like monsters—all brawn and no brain, hulking forms of muscle, anger, and spiked bones poking out of flesh. As you unravel the Joker’s plan, you are taken across all of the Arkham Asylum grounds and buildings, meeting friends and foes alike, and seeing some clever references to bad guys not in the game like the cell covered in ice holding Mr. Freeze. 

Overall the story is fine, a little more comic booky than most of the live action movies with more convoluted plot and embrace of Batman’s weirder enemies like Killer Croc. The art design seems like a more grounded take on the Burton with the Asylum being made up of gothic style buildings on an island seemingly drenched in everpresent rain and nighttime. The voice acting varies wildly though. Mark Hamill as the Joker is fantastic, but the Joker himself can get irritating with his constant popping up in Batman’s comms to mock and berate him. The voice acting for Harley Quinn is also extremely well done, but I find myself annoyed with her character overall and Batman sounds bored and silted throughout the adventure. This could be due to the fact that Batman as a character is a poster boy for the term “stick up his ass” and the voice actor was playing into his unbending stoicism. Or it could be due to the fact that the in-game conversions themselves feel very jarring since there’s also a second or two pause between lines as the camera changes speakers. It’s disappointing since the pre-rendered cutscenes are great with the character models being top-notch and the direction flowing smoothly.

There are two major aspects of Batman’s character that Rocksteady seemed eager to explore in Arkham Asylum: Batman’s prowess as the best hand-to-hand combatant in the world and his title of the world’s greatest detective. But while they seemed earnest to show both sides of this Batcoin, neither aspect feels fleshed out enough to ultimately succeed.

Photo by Duel44. Found at arkhamcity.fandom.com

Batman’s line of work means he has to be ready at a moment’s notice to start punching mooks in the face. In Arkham Asylum he can punch, counter, stun enemies with a whoosh of his cape, and use a couple gadgets for long distance stuns. The timing for attacking and countering enemies is strict enough to require concentration, but forgiving enough to not be frustrating. This helps the simplistic combat to stay engaging to some extent, but it does start to feel repetitive and boring near the end of the game. The combat overall just doesn’t feel expressive enough for me. Compared to a spectacle fighter like a Devil May Cry, the combos are lacking with not enough moves to perform for me to carve out my own style. The worst part is the combo meter. It increases to more attacks you make without taking damage or too much time passing between attacks, but there is no way to string attacks together when enemies get spaced out. While games like DMC and Bayonetta offer ranged weapons to keep a combo going while closing the distance from enemies, Arkham Asylum doesn’t offer anything like this, meaning it’s harder than it should be to build a high combo. These issues with combat also bleed into the boss fights—probably the worst past of the game.

Batman has the widest and most well known rogue’s gallery in comics, but most of his foes cannot stand up to him in a fist fight, instead hoping to outsmart him or evade him while orchestrating cunning plans. So how does an action game incorporate enemies like Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy, or Joker into a boss fight? Unfortunately, the answer is poorly. The first boss fight in Arkham Asylum is Bane, a beast of a man juiced up on Venom making his physical strength second to none. While the game never touches on Bane’s intellect that rivals even Batman’s, it’s a fitting first boss in the game because it sets the prototype for the rest of them. With Joker injecting his henchman—and even himself for the final fight—with Titan, most fights are just other hulking pseudo-Banes, usually with a smattering of mooks in the room for good measure. While Harley Quinn’s boss section is fighting round after round of goons and Poison Ivy’s fight is goon-based too, but with a giant plant in the background you sometimes have to toss a Batarang at. Poison Ivy’s boss fight was tedious and boring, but not quite as bad as Killer Croc’s where you walk across floating platforms in the Arkham sewers and smack Croc with a Batarang anytime he pops up like a naughty puppy with a newspaper. Scarecrow’s sections are much better being hallucinatory nightmare sequences as you stealth around a giant version of him trying to find you. But the rest of the boss fights in the game feel much too similar, dull, and overlong with the only positive being that combat feels tricky enough that beating one always feels satisfying.

The detective aspect of Batman’s character feels undercooked as well. Most of the investigations in the game just require the player to switch on detective mode, finding a scent or fingerprint trail, and following it throughout the facility. Detective mode drowns out the art design in a digital blue haze and makes everything look the exact same. There are no logic or detection puzzles for the player to solve while doing investigation, no grand schemes for them to unravel themselves, they just need to follow the trail until the next cutscene advances the story. 

Photo by Duel44. Found at arkhamcity.fandom.com

There are Riddler puzzles to solve and these are a highlight of the games. Riddler, as a character, is only interested in Batman in order to prove he is smarter than him. There are two types of Riddler collectible to find: trophies, which require exploration and using Batman’s gadgets to find, and the puzzles, which the Riddler gives you clues for things in an area to find and requires the player to scan to solve. These can be almost anything: statues, portraits, radios, plaques. These were always fun to look out for and to solve because it felt like a P.I. out on the case and finding clues. I didn’t bother finding them all because the stiff movement in the game was becoming tiring by the end. There seems to be a weightiness in the 7th gen of video games, but I’m not sure if that has to do with the engines or consoles the games were designed for or if it’s just because I’m not used to the chunkier buttons of the 360 controller compared to Playstation’s.

Batman: Arkham Asylum is a good game that didn’t fully click with me. While it’s true I’ve never been super interested in Batman in the past, I have recently started to appreciate the nuance and quirks that make him an interesting character. So I don’t think it is this disinterest in the source material that leads me to feel indifferent to Arkham Asylum. It’s more of a few smaller issues I have with the game that built themselves into mixed experience: the lack of any real investigation for the world’s great detective, combat feeling over-simple while at the same time very strict, stiff controls like Batman used too much starch while cleaning his Batsuit, and the tedious boss fights. I can see why people love this game and can see the seed of something truly great in it. Maybe not surprising then, the sequel. Batman: Arkham City, is possibly even more highly lauded then it’s predecessor. So keep you Batradar tuned for that in future.

Pokémon Snap: Critical Miss #26

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Photo by Kimberly AJ. Found at pokemon.fandom.com

Take Only Pictures, Leave Only Pokémon

I’ve discussed my love for the Pokémon franchise before, both in my Nuzlocke post and my review of Pokémon Platinum. While I’ve been playing the main series since childhood, I’ve hardly spent any time with any spinoff game. Sure, I played a little bit of Pokémon Stadium at friends’ houses as a kid and I dabbled in Pokémon Conquest for a short time, but I’ve never played a Mystery Dungeon game, XD Gale of Darkness, or Pokken. Nintendo is about to give fans a new Pokémon Snap game, something they’ve been clammering for since the original released on the N64 in 1999. I thought now would be a great time to play the game and see what makes it one of the most beloved and well-remembered spinoff games in the Pokémon series. 

Although you can name the character at the beginning of the game, canonically his name is Todd Snap. You play as him after he has an encounter with a rare Pokémon and Prof. Oak asks him to help him with research by taking pictures of wild Pokémon. You travel across Pokémon Island where Pokémon roam wild and carefree. The island reminds me of Monster Island from the sillier of the Shōwa Era of Godzilla movies. Despite the game taking place on a single island, there are many different environments to see from scenic beaches to fiery volcanoes, dank caves to lush jungles. 

Photo by Wagnike2. Found at pokemon.fandom.com

The visuals and music are always colorful, upbeat, and cheery, creating a very peaceful and pleasant experience. The graphics have aged just fine in the over twenty years since Snap’s release with the highlight being the Pokémon models themselves. Pokémon Snap was the first time players got to see Pokémon in 3D and, while the models of the creature suffer from the usual N64 blockiness, they are all charming and well animated in the game. One of the biggest appeals to Snap is just seeing Pokémon in their natural habits, enjoying their days, getting into mischief, and just living their best Pokémon lives. It’s something you just couldn’t portray effectively on the original Gameboy games and it’s an aspect of Pokémon that no other game has really tried since. The closest we’ve seen to a return of watching Pokémon roam free is the Wild Area in Sword and Shield, but the frame rate issue and constant pop-in never made that feel organic. Seeing these creatures frolic through their environments adds to the feeling of Snap being a very peaceful game. And that’s before you even account for the gameplay.

Snap is different from most other Pokémon games because you never battle any Pokémon and the only capturing of them you do is with your camera lens. It’s a very “leave only footprints” mentality—well, besides the tracks Prof. Oak apparently left all over the island for the Zero-One, the tracked vehicle you used to navigate the island. Pokémon Snap is a rail shooter similar to a House of the Dead or a Time Crisis, only with a camera instead of a gun. Pokémon will run around, hide, fly, and perform silly acts and it’s up to you to find the best time to take pictures for Prof. Oak to rate.

Oak’s rating system is a fickle thing. It’s based on the size of the Pokémon, the pose they are making, how centered they are in the frame, and sometimes if they are doing a certain action. The guidelines are simple enough for someone like me, with pretty much no skill or knowledge of visual art, to understand, but it seems a bit inconsistent. When comparing two pictures of the same Pokémon, I swear sometimes the one I honestly thought was better got the lower score. It’s not really a big problem though since the game encourages you to replay levels multiple times so there are always new chances to get better photos of Pokémon. The score in general is mostly used as a way to progress through the game.

Photo by Wagnike2. Found at pokemon.fandom.com

Reaching a certain score on your Pokémon Report will unlock new levels to play and new items to use in those levels. There is an apple for luring Pokémon closer to you or other areas, the pester balls that stun Pokémon with noxious gas, and the Pokéflute whose medley inspires Pokémon to dance and perform actions like Picachu using Thundershock. Getting these new items are always fun because they make you look at already completed levels in new ways. Often, you will see Pokémon hiding amongst the environments, but there will be no way to get a good photo of them. If you lure them close with an apple, it becomes possible. The beach stage has a sleeping Snolax you need to wake up with the Pokéflute for the best photo and the pester balls are great for stopping quick Pokémon long enough to take a picture or draw out Pokémon from their hiding places. While levels can sometimes get dull due to being stuck to one track and the Pokémon acting the same way every time, leading to having to mesmerize the levels and the best times to capture a Pokémon’s good side, there are enough secrets to discover in Pokémon Snap to keep it engaging.

From opening up new levels to performing certain tasks to have Pokémon evolve to just finding hidden Pokémon, there are a lot of secrets to discover in Pokémon Snap. It feels a lot like Star Fox 64 in a way with both games being rail shooters and both having secret requirements to unlock new stuff in them. However, Pokémon Snap is much better at informing the player on how to unlock its secrets with clues in the environments. For example: there’s a carving on the wall of the tunnel level showing a large egg with lightning bolts and musical notes over it. So when you see that egg in the level, you know to lure the nearby Picachu over to it and play the Pokéflute. When Picachu uses Thundershock, the egg will hatch into a glittering Zapdos. 

Photo by Wagnike2. Found at pokemon.fandom.com

I purposely played through as much as Pokémon Snap without looking up any secrets and it was very satisfying discovering things on my own. However, I feel there are some things in the game that an average player would never think to do on their own. Best example of this would be discovering Gyrados. This requires in the valley level knocking a Magicarp up a slope into a Mankey, who will then yeet the fish over a nearby mountain. Later in the level, the Magicarp will fall on land in front of a waterfall and you must quickly knock it into the waterfall where it will evolve into Gryados. It is more obtuse and requires more steps than anything else in the game that it feels sort of out of place—I don’t envy anyone who had to figure this out on their own.

Pokémon Snap is a perfect playground game—a game you and your friends would swap secrets and advice about at school. It’s a breed of game that excelled in the 90’s before the internet was the omnipresent force it is today, where being stuck in a game only lasts as long as it takes to type in the problem into Google. Because of this, I wish I had played Pokémon Snap as a kid more than any other game I’ve reviewed for Critical Miss. The game is still very enjoyable playing today with its serene and chill gameplay and being able to see Pokémon roaming wild in a way we haven’t really seen since. It is a short game, able to be beaten on a first playthrough in a few hours, but that’s becoming less of a fault for me as I grow older and my amount of free time is growing smaller and smaller, like a Lapras swimming into the ocean horizon. 

Photo by Wagnike2. Found at pokemon.fandom.com

Portal & Portal 2: Critical Miss #24

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I’m GLaDOS I Played These

Friends of mine are surprised to learn I never played Portal or Portal 2. The classic games developed and published by Valve were released in 2007 and 2011, respectively. While I had a passing interest in games in 2007, playing Super Mario 64 on my DS and Mario Kart on my Wii, I wasn’t at all up to date on any games releasing. And by 2011, I was in college, playing pretty much no games besides a Pokémon run here and there. The Portal series has just passed me by until now. Even after I learned of the series and its reputation, I never had a computer powerful enough to run it. So when I got my used Xbox 360, I downloaded the games and played through them to fill in the interdimensional hole in my gaming knowledge.

The story of Portal focuses on a woman named Chel who is being forced to run through science tests by GLaDOS, a robot controlling the functions of Aperture Science. It’s a simple story—a story of human vs machine, athleticism vs intelligence, silence vs wit. Even though the player controls Chel, GLaDOS steals the entire show. Impeccably acted by Ellen McLain, she provides the dry, straight-faced, and incredibly sharp humor that the game is praised for, but still manages to be threatening as a unfeeling machine. Early in the game, Chel will be giving a Portal Gun, a machine that creates openings on certain walls that can be used to instantly pass through the space between them.

The portals are an incredible mechanic—technically impressive, amazingly fun, and delightfully disorienting. I never really got used to the camera swinging around as gravity took effect on the character leaving a portal, but those moments are so short that you will quickly adjust. Since momentum is kept while entering and leaving portals, a lot of puzzles rely on that to spring yourself across larger gaps or to higher platforms not reachable through normal means. Other puzzles require holding down buttons with weighted cubes, creating a path for an electrical sphere to meet with a conductor to activate a button, and taking out turrets by knocking them over, either by grabbing them from behind or dropping things on them. 

Some puzzles will test your aiming speed and reflexes by giving you just a few seconds after exiting a portal to shoot another one on to be transported to. These were my least favorite in the game. I had gotten so settled into a comfy state of examining the level design and finding ways to access what I needed through portal placement, that the emphasis on speed and reflexes in the later part of the game didn’t feel like I was being tested on what had been taught to me.

The level design in general is rather rigid due to the fact that portals can only be created on certain surfaces. This is not a bad thing, however, since it helps keep puzzles and the rules of the game consistent and focused. In the last part of the game, you escape the steril test chambers and explore the rusted, grimy maintenance halls of the facility. The puzzles are still as straightforward as before, but the change in scenery goes a long way to freshen up the feel of the games. 

Honestly, Portal is pretty much perfect. The only complaint I have is with minor hit detections issues. I played the Xbox 360 Stay Alive version so I’m not sure if this was an issue with the original PC release, but the rounded edges of the portals seem to catch on the character and cubes while going through portals. This would lead to missed jumps as my momentum was halted or dropped items missing their target as a corner clipped the edge of a portal and physics sent it spinning off course. It’s not a major complaint at all and hardly dampened my opinion of the game, but it was something I kept noticing.

The only other thing I sometimes hear criticized about the game is its short length. The game is about 2-3 hours long, I completed my first playthrough in just an evening, but I think the length is to the game’s benefit. There is no wasted space in Portal, every inch of the game world has a purpose and it comes in, shows off the ideas it has, and ends before it becomes stale or boring. It is such a tightly, perfectly designed game that I couldn’t image it being any longer. That was, however, until I played Portal 2, which is a perfect example of the phrase “bigger isn’t always better.”

Portal 2 is pretty much the same game as the original, but with just more stuff added. Bigger environments, more puzzles, more characters and story—it’s a classic follow up philosophy where the sequel has to be bigger and bolder (the Alien/Aliens effect). While the portal gameplay is still as fun as ever, there were so many more elements added to the puzzles. Instead of just portals with the occasional electric ball or cube to worry about, Portal 2’s puzzles will have you redirecting lasers, creating light bridges, and using three different kinds of gels, each with a unique property, to solve puzzles. All these new mechanics are explained and utilized well enough and pretty fun to use, but their inclusion seemed to necessitate larger rooms and environments for the puzzles to take place in, hurting the tightness and ultrafocus of the original game’s design. Gameplay is not the only thing that has been expanded upon either. The story is chattier than ever in Portal 2.

GLaDOS now has to share the spotlight with robot core named Wheatley, played by Stephen Merchant, and the prerecorded messages of Cave Johnson, played by J. K. Simmons. I found Wheatley pretty annoying, but he is not unfunny, and Simmons as Cave Johnson is just a delight because he seems to be tapping into his J. Jonah Jameson character from the Rami Spider-Man films. There are some very funny bits with Johnson ranting about mantis man and exploding lemons, but the humor of the game expands from the specific dry wit of the first game and becomes sillier and more general. I would say that Portal 2 is funnier than the first, but I’m a sucker for the straight-facedness of the first game’s comedy.

The point of max frustration toward Portal 2 for me came at the end. You have a great bit of (literal) raising action as you climb your way out of the ruined, old facility and you are flushed with victory, ready for the faceoff with Wheatley and the climax of the story. But then the pacing grinds to halt as Wheatley makes you perform more tests to keep his high going. It’s a funny bit at first, but it could have worked with just requiring the player to complete a few more tests. Instead you have to go through about a dozen more. I was ready for the game to end, but it insisted on sticking around for another hour or so after its logical end point. And this is ultimately what Portal has over its sequel. Portal knew exactly when to end before it got stale or ran out of ideas, and Portal 2 went on past the point where it had anything new to share.
Portal and Portal 2 are still some of the most beloved and respected puzzle games to this day and that’s because they are both great, but I find the original far superior to its sequel. The best way I can explain my opinions of the games is to imagine them as a boxer. Portal is the boxer at the prime of their career: in fighting trim with absolute zero fat on them. Portal 2 is the same boxer forty years later, after retirement: a little fatter than they were, but still strong and in better shape than most people. Either way, either game can still beat the crap out of the majority of AAA games releasing nowadays.

Pokémon Platinum – Critical Miss #23

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Turtwig’s All the Way Down

When I decided to play this game and review it for Critical Miss, I had no idea Pokémon’s 25th anniversary was this year, nor did I know that the Pokémon Company was going to announce celebrations for it earlier in the month and Twitter would be swarming over the idea of remaking the fourth generation—those were all happy little accidents. The reason I wanted to play Pokémon Platinum was because I never fully played through any of the fourth generation games. Platinum was released in 2008 (2009 in America) and is the refinement title of Diamond and Pearl released just two years prior. This was just after high school and the beginning of college for me, the period where I probably played the least amount of video games (although I did have a DS and picked up a copy of HeartGold when it was released the next year). I have said before in my Nuzlocke post that Pokémon is probably my favorite game series based simply on how much of it I’ve played and how much I love the core gameplay. So I decided to fill this particular Snorlax size gap in my Pokémon experience and finally finish generation four.

To start with the gameplay: it’s still Pokémon so it’s still solid. The primary loop of catching Pokémon, adding them to your team, and battling with them to help them grow stronger is as fun and satisfying as ever. My team ended up being: Torterra, Crobat, Garchomp, Medichamp, Magnezone, and Houndoom—and I was very happy with this team besides lack of a water Pokémon leading to some frustration in the end game, but more on that later. The sprites in the battles are the best 2D art in the series, very detailed and crystal clear. While the core gameplay loop is as strong as ever, the moment to moment gameplay suffers due to the Slowpoke pace of the game. Everything in Platinum is slow: movement speed, battle animations, text, and even HP draining and the EXP bar filling. I’m used to slow-paced RPGs, but Platinum did start to tire me towards the end. The game feels heavy as a Rhydon, but stays engaging by being one of the toughest Pokémon games I’ve played.

Now, the game is still not extremely hard—I wouldn’t call it the Dark Souls of Pokémon games—but in terms of a Pokémon game, Platinum gave me the meatiest, non-Nozlocke challenge I’ve had with the series in a while. This comes down to two main things and, much like a Doduo’s two heads coming from the same body, they both have to do with the gym leaders. It’s always been true that trainers will have Pokémon a few levels higher than those in the surrounding routes and the gym leaders’ Pokémon will be a level or two higher than the trainers, but this is the largest level gap I can remember in the series. Apparently, the Pokémon of the gym leaders were raised a couple levels from Diamond & Pearl which would account for this. The second reason is because the gym leaders teams are more well balanced than previous, offering better type coverage with their Pokémon and their movesets. I was stuck on Crasher Wake for a while because his ace Pokémon, Floatzel, knew Ice Fang, which one-shot my Torterra, and Crunch, which one-shot the Rotom I was currently using. I had to stop and grind my team a couple levels before finally defeating him. But I didn’t really mind because I was just enjoying a Pokémon game that took a little more thought and effort.

The difficulty really helped me stay engaged with the game even through its Glaceon pacing and, sadly, uninterested story. I never play a Pokémon game for the story—I’m always more invested in the gameplay first and the story can be a fun addition—but I still like to follow it and be engaged. Unfortunately, the plot just becomes a villain team plot standard to Pokémon games, focusing this time on Team Galatic and their leader, Cyrus. They want to remake the world to Cyrus’s desires, but his goals are just too grand, his plan too underdeveloped, and his character and motives too one dimensional for any sort of interesting writing or storytelling. But that’s just the plot, another part of storytelling is setting and, as a region, I think Shinnoh is one of the best designed in the series. 

I’ve always been fascinated by the design of the routes in the Pokémon games: how ledges are used to funnel players into tall grass and into trainer battles, how out of the way areas usually hide useful items, how little nooks and crannies are hidden behind things that need an HM to pass to encourage players to return and explore more. Platinum uses the hardware of the DS to introduce a new aspect to the routes: overlapping layers. With Shinnoh having a mountain range dividing it into two sides, there is a lot of verticality on display. Bridges will pass over canyons and fields of snow, the cycling road covers the entirety of Route 206 underneath it, and the Great Marsh has little hills connected by wood planks to bicycle over to stay out of the muck below. There are caves cutting through the mountains and the peak of Mt. Coronet to reach in the late game.

The verticality is great and adds a new texture not seen before in the series, but I also love the off-the-beaten-path areas on routes. Most routes have areas you cannot reach during the first visit and usually hide powerful TMs or useful items. I always enjoy a reason to revisit an old area to explore for more goodies and must have spent a good few hours combing over each route again before challenging the Elite Four. My only issue with this deeper exploration is tied into the sheer amount of HMs needed to access every area.

HMs, or Hidden Moves, have been the most unpopular part of any Pokémon game since the series introduction because they are needed to explore the world (as in cutting down trees, moving boulders, and surf across water) and, once taught to a Pokémon, the move cannot be unlearned without finding a special NPC. Usually, HMs never really bother me. I like the utility outside of battle and moves like Surf and Fly were good enough to be useful additions to a moveset, but Defog is a thing in Generation Four and it’s absolutely worthless. Its use outside of battle is clearing fog so you can see where you are walking and inside of battle it just lowers your opponents evasion stat, which hardly ever comes into play. 

Shinnoh is the absolute pits when it comes to HMs, not just Defog is a completely useless move, but because there are eight different HMs needed to beat the game. This means if you want to have an HM mule (a Pokémon dedicated to just knowing HMs), you need at least two of them taking up space in your party. This was a real Ferrothorn in my side after climbing to the summit of Mt. Coronet and had to face off with Cyrus in the Distortion World. I had most HMs spread out across my team, but since I was not using a water-type Pokémon, I had to drag along a Biberal who I loaded up with Surf and other HMs. So when I faced Cryus, I was missing my Magneton and his Gyrados was a real wall to be busted through.

The only other issue I have with the fourth generation is a lack of identity with the Pokédex. Since so much of Shinnoh’s new Pokémon are new evolution stages of past generation Pokémon, the roster feels sort of lacking. Platinum increased the regional dex size from Diamond & Pearl, but the region still feels stale for choices of Pokémon to add to your team. This may be a problem unique to me. I always try to use Pokémon I haven’t had on a team before in a new playthrough of any game. Add that to my weird dislike of single type Pokémon and Shinnoh felt very restricted in Pokemon I could choose for my team. Overall, the Pokédex didn’t bother me that much because the challenge in gameplay and unique world more than made up for it; and while I even hesitated to mention it, I thought it important to address because, while a games sense of identity is not really important to me personally, I know it is important to some folks out there.

In all honesty, this was a selfish review. I wanted to play through Platinum simply because it was one of the generations I never finished. I also like to say whether or not I recommend a game after I play it and I definitely would recommend playing Pokémon Platinum. But who could I recommend it to? Pokémon fans most likely have already played it and it is not the first game in the series I would suggest a new player to start with. I would probably place the game in the mid-tier of Pokémon games in my opinion. I still loved my time spent in Shinnoh, but I’m a fan of the series so that is to be expected. I think that is the joy of the Pokémon series though—a series that has spanned 25 years has plenty places for new fans to join in, lots of history and games to explore for people to go back to and discover, and just lots of memories and friendships to be made, both in and outside the games.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past – Critical Miss #21

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Enter the Master Sword

This Critical Miss is a bit of cheat because I have played The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past before. As a kid, I had the Gameboy Advance rerelease of the game. From what I can tell, it’s the exact same game as the 1992 Super Nintendo game, but with a little screen crunch and more washed out colors. I wanted to play it again for this post though because I never actually finished it. When I was younger, I never made it past the Ice Temple and the few times I’ve picked it up since, I never made it much further than the beginning of the Dark World. 

The story is the standard Zelda story: evil being is being evil, find three of something to get the Master Sword to defeat them, things go wrong shortly after gaining the blade, explore more dungeons to collect more items to stop the evil once and for all. It is the same story as any other Zelda game but this time the evil being is the wizard Agahnim, who is actually Ganon in disguise, and he is collecting maidens to open up the Golden Land. Once Link has the Master Sword and defeats Agahnim, he is transported to the Dark World, the Golden Land that has been twisted and corrupted by the wizard’s evil desires.

The story is serviceable but I never found it engaging. The backstory of the Triforce and the Golden Land is mostly told by the maidens after saving them from dungeons. The story is simply told in long text dumps that are not particularly well written or interesting. The reason for the simple style of storytelling is most likely due to the limitations of the SNES, but games like Chrono Trigger managed to tell epic and engaging stories with the same limitations. 

Gameplay has always fared better on the SNES and A Link to the Past’s gameplay is still very fun. The core loop is exploration, fighting enemies along the way, and looking for gear, upgrades, and items gives a great sense of adventure. The overworld is fairly large for a SNES game and it is colorful, has varied locations from deserts to lakes to tall mountains, and is absolutely full of secrets to find. Being transported to the Dark World is a cool moment the first time it happens, but visually, it is not as appealing to look at as the Light World. It’s just kind of drab, filled with mostly browns and yellow, sick looking greens and muted purples. Thematically it is fitting, but after the bright and stunning colors of the main overworld, the muted color pallet of the Dark World gets boring after a while.

The exploration aspect of A Link to the Past is the strongest part of the game for me. Secrets like heart pieces, piles of rupees, and items are scattered everywhere across the map. It’s the type of game where you can spend hours exploring the world in between the critical path dungeons, looking under every rock and bush for hidden passages or items. Some of the most satisfying secrets to find are those that require moving between the Light and Dark Worlds because some areas, like ledges, cannot be accessed unless shifting between the two different maps. Link can teleport back into Hyrule by using the magic mirror and doing so will leave a cloud of magic dust that takes you back to the Dark World. Besides the dust created by the magic mirror, Link can only travel from the Hyrule to the Dark World by finding magic portals. It’s an interesting limitation that makes entering the Dark World a puzzle in and of itself and is used consistently to unlock areas of the map and to discover the entrances to dungeons.

Dungeons are a staple of every Zelda game and utilize a blend exploration, combat, and puzzle solving to complete. They need to be explored thoroughly to find the big key, the item needed to finish, and the lair of the boss at the end. Some dungeons require items found in the overworld to navigate, like the Swamp Palace needing the Zora flippers to swim through the changing water levels. This is great because it requires players to explore the overworld thoroughly. Typically, you will have what you need already to explore a dungeon, but if not, it’s just a matter of finding the item needed in the world. 

The items found in dungeons are often needed to defeat the boss at the end, but not always. For example, you need the magic hammer in the Dark Palace to break the Helmasaur King’s armor before you can damage him. Requiring the items found in the dungeons to defeat the boss is a design choice Nintendo would make more in later Zelda games, but in A Link to the Past most items seem to be designed with exploration and puzzle solving in mind rather than combat. This is not a bad thing, but it does make some of the items feel less impactful, like the cape, if they are only really required to gather a heart piece. This does lead to some odd choices when items in dungeons are optional. I found it very strange that Link finds the blue mail, which reduces damage taken, in the Ice Palace, only to find the red mail, which reduces more damage, three dungeons later in Ganon’s Tower. 

This is, of course, if you are doing the dungeons in the order the game suggests. They can be completed out of order, but many require items from previous dungeons to compete or even unlock the area of the map they are in. I went through the dungeons in the order found on the game map because doing them out of order seemed  frustrating to me as someone who does not know the game like the back of my hand.

The dungeons are fun for the most part because they rely so heavily on the best aspects of A Link to the Past: exploration and collecting items. That being said, however, they can get tedious to do. I think 3D gaming worked wonders on the Zelda series’ puzzle design. It added a much needed sense of spatial reasoning to explore dungeons. In the 2D games, so many of the puzzles rely on killing all the enemies in the room, pushing a certain block, or finding a button underneath a pot in order to unlock the door or make a key appear. While every dungeon has its own gimmick, the Swamp Palace’s changing water levels or Turtle Rock’s floating platform to ride, they tend to lack individual personalities to me. They have slightly different atmospheres and looks to them, but the dungeons still often look and feel too similar for my taste. 

But the game is still great, solidly designed and with a sense of adventure unparalleled by most other SNES games. It was so realized that it became the foundation for pretty much every Zelda to come after it. It introduced the collection to Master Sword to more collection outline common in other games in the series. It was the induction to staple items like the bottles, hookshot, heart pieces, and even the Master Sword itself, as well as abilities like the spin attack. It is the game that made the Zelda series what we think of today while managing to maintain its own identity since it is still a 2D game where most games that came after are 3D.

I think it’s time to admit to myself that I’m just not a huge Zelda fan. I am still a fan, but a casual one as opposed to a die-hard one. I’ve played many games in the series and, while I have enjoyed all of them, I’ve never really fallen in love with any. There’s never anything deal breaking in them that makes me shut them off, but there’s not much I can think back on that I absolutely adored. That is except the wall merging mechanic in A Link Between Worlds. I found that to be a truly genius additional that opened up puzzle and level design to a possibility not seen before in the series. And that game owes everything to A Link to the Past. It is basically its child with how much DNA it shares with A Link to the Past by being a reimagining of the game. If I had to choose a favorite Zelda game, A Link Between Worlds would be high up, probably even the top spot. So even if I did not find A Link to the Past the most engaging game to play nowadays, I will also thank it for helping create one of my favorite games in the series.

Silent Hill 2 – Critical Miss #20

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Photo by AlexShepherd. Found at http://silenthill.fandom.com

Town of Blood and Fog

It’s October which means it’s spooky season. While I love horror movies, I haven’t actually played many horror games. I could make excuses like how they don’t tend to interest me or I find them mechanically light typically, but the truth is horror games freak me the fuck out. It comes down to interactivity. I can sit back, idly watching a movie and judge the characters for making poor decisions, but in a game, I am the one who has to make the poor choices if I want to progress. When it came time to choose a classic scary game for the Halloween Critical Miss this year, there was one game that immediately came to mind.

Silent Hill 2 released in 2001 to immediate commercial and critical success. Even today, it is widely considered to be the high point of the series and one of the scariest games ever made. It’s praised for its atmosphere, psychological horror direction, and symbolism in design. The game centers around James Sunderland coming to the fog shrouded resort town in search of his wife, Mary, who has sent him a letter despite being dead for three years. Walking toward the town, you meet a woman named Angela who warns James not to continue onward because there is something wrong with the town. And she is absolutely right.

The titular town is enveloped in a dense fog making it impossible to see more than ten feet in front of you and is infested with monsters, terrible humanoid shapes with their arms pinned to their torsos like their burnt skin is a straight jacket. When you first make it to Silent Hill, you will spend a good chunk of time wandering aimlessly around, dodging the shapes materializing out of the fog, until you find any indication of where to go. Silent Hill 2 is not afraid to make the player lost. Once you find the thread to follow to destinations, the game is sign-posted well enough, but until then, you are on your own. This is extremely effective in creating fear since you are trapped in this unfamiliar town you can barely see and there are monsters around every corner and hiding under parked cars ready to jump out and maul you.

Photo by AlexShepherd. Found at http://silenthill.fandom.com

All monster encounters are extremely tense since the controls are very stiff and weighty. Combat, when you are forced into it, is especially stiff, sticky, and enemies take a lot of damage before dying. It is always advisable to run away from enemies rather than fight them due to resources needed to kill them, both ammo if you have any or healing items needed to keep James alive. I was very grateful to discover you could turn off tank controls earlier on, but the free movement is still based on a very uncooperative camera. Camera angles change suddenly, leading to running back down the hall you just exited and it swings slowly ,almost drunkenly, around when positioning it behind James. The camera is disorientating and makes the player never feel settled in a place. 

James must find his way through Silent Hill to find Mary and to do that he must navigate its streets and buildings while plunging deeper and deeper (literally at times, as in the prison) into the darkest depths of the horror and misery of his past. You’ll visit four main areas throughout the game that sort of act as dungeons from a Zelda game or a RPG. There are the apartment buildings, the hospital, Silent Hill Historical Building and the prison inexplicably below it, and the hotel. You will have to search rooms for items to either solve puzzles or unlock new rooms to search. The puzzles are typically clever logic puzzles, like the coin puzzle, or have hints somewhere nearby to clue you in to the solution, like the clock puzzle or combination lock. As the game progresses though, I feel the puzzle start becoming more obtuse. The main culprit of this is the block of faces just after the prison. I’m not sure if I missed the hint saying what to do, but I could not for the life of me figure out what was expected of me until I looked up the solution. The puzzles are either clever but solvable, or encourage exploration, both which I enjoy, and they are only really let down by the clunky inventory menu. Overall, the gameplay of Silent Hill 2 is fine, it’s passable, but that’s not the star of the game. The real reason to play this game is the town itself, James, and the complete horror one finds when confronted with their darkest secrets.

Photo by AlexShepherd. Found at http://silenthill.fandom.com

As James gets pulled into Silent Hill, so does the player through the game’s atmosphere. Everything is dank and empty with metal doors rusted, windows broken, and the walls covered in grime. The game takes familiar settings like a hotel or hospital and makes them hellish and alienating by plunging them into darkness and coating everything in rust and filth. The visuals still hold up extremely well today, but the sound design is on a whole other level and is some of the best I’ve ever heard. Sounds range for the loud radio static when monsters are nearby to the quiet barely heard whispers of unknown voices, the constantly pounding of James feet to sudden crying of a baby heard in only one room. Everything sounds chucky and uncanny, real enough to be recognized but odd enough to unnerve anyone hearing them.

Uncanny is how I would describe the characters too. Not in an “uncanny valley” sense where their models invoke an unease in the players (although there is some of that since this is the PS2), but more in their actions and conversations. James is pretty unflappable. Sure, he reacts to the horrific things happening in front of him, but he never seems to react to an appropriate level. His first encounter with Maria is a perfect example: he first mistakes her for his wife because she is Mary’s exact double, but is a sexier outfit. She immediately takes a liking to James and comes on to him very hard, despite the fact that they are trapped in a town full of monsters. James acknowledges Maria’s likeness to Mary, but that’s it. He just accepts it and moves on, no real questions after this interaction. I think James’s cold acceptance to the things he sees mostly has to do with the voice acting, which is not great with flat and stilted delivery, but it honestly works better than expected. It helps add to the other-worldly feeling of the town, as if the characters are too numb, terrified, or simply indifferent to care much about what is going on.

Whether the poor voice acting was intentional or not, it adds so much subtle unease to a game that’s filled to overflowing with subtleties. There are quiet sound effects, like footsteps following you in the beginning of the game and heavy breathing in certain rooms, that only happen in particular areas and are easy to miss. All the enemies represent the larger themes of the game. There are all feminine in nature, like the mannequin enemies that are just too sets of women legs and the nurses, except for Pyramid Head, face of Silent Hill since his introduction in this game. Pyramid Head is a tall, powerful male figure often seen attacking and assaulting the feminine enemies. The enemies represent every thing of James’s guilt of past actions to his frustrated libido since Mary’s passing. It’s so unnerving when you realize this because it adds so much more to the town of Silent Hill itself. It makes the town feel the main antagonist of the game, an alive, thinking entity with its own agenda for James.

Photo by AlexShepherd. Found at http://silenthill.fandom.com

All this builds to a tense and terrifying game. It breeds that special type of anxiety in you, that tightness in your chest, the sense of never feeling completely safe. The dread builds and builds until the very end where the game closes like a quiet door. It doesn’t offer a big, cathartic climax where the secrets of the town are discovered with a big, horrific set piece like many other horror games offer. Instead, the game’s climax is an emotional one, where the player watches James admit to and accept responsibility for his past sins. It’s a quiet, bleak, and heart wrenching moment because it’s not easy to not get invested in James and his suicidal quest in Silent Hill.

When I played, I got the ending that suggests that James commits suicide to be with his wife. You never see it, but it’s very much implied. After watching the other endings, this one feels the most fitting for me and my understanding of the town of Silent Hill. The town doesn’t not exist to redeem or offer any sort of relief to those it chooses, it exists only to punish and to torment. 

I wouldn’t call the game itself very punishing. It checks a player’s overconfidence through stiff combat and having James be quick to die, but mostly the gameplay is just a little stiff and the puzzles oblique. But it works for this type of game and paired with the thick atmosphere and fantastic story. James and his journey through hell will always have a place in the back of my brain, poking at my thoughts like a thorn. I’ve been turning Silent Hill 2 over in my head again and again since completing it, and that’s always the best sign to me that I really loved a game.

Photo by AlexShepherd. Found at http://silenthill.fandom.com