Uncategorized

5 Favorite Video Game Soundtracks

/ atomicbobomb / Leave a comment

Music has to be the most universal thing in the world. While people have different tastes in music, I don’t think there is a single person that doesn’t like any music. Music and video games have gone hand in hand since the very beginning and people were aware that video game music could be something great ever since Koji Kondo composed the music for Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda. After recently playing Bastion and falling in love with the soundtrack, I got to thinking which video games actually had my favorite music in them.

A few quick things before getting to the list though. First, I am only considering original soundtracks specifically composed for games. So games like Tony Hawk Pro Skater or Guitar Hero will not be considered since the music remembered from those series were curated, but not made for the game. Secondly, I’ve never been a huge fan of orchestral music in games. I like the grandiose feeling they tend to bring, but orchestral music is something I have to focus on to truly appreciate and there’s too much taking away my focus while I’m playing a game. And lastly, there are some games known for their soundtracks that I just haven’t played yet–games like Jet Set Radio or Katamari Damacy are both series with beloved soundtracks that will not appear on this list. With all that out of the way, let’s drum up the band.

5) Pokémon  (Generations 1 & 2)

I’ll admit, this entry is here largely due to nostalgia. I played so much Pokémon  Red and Pokémon  Gold as a kid that they are permanently ingrained in my DNA. Hearing these soundtracks transport my back to summer breaks playing Pokémon  with friends in a treehouse. But apart from the nostalgia factor, I do think generations one and two of Pokémon   have incredible music. They have those old school 8-bit boops I love and I’ve always been impressed with the range of emotions the tracks encompass while working within the Game Boy’s limitations. The battle themes are hectic and tense, Lavender Town’s theme is notoriously eerie, Goldenrod City’s music is upbeat and cheery, and the short walk down the hall to the champion is foreboding but triumphant. While each of the generations have received remakes for future consoles with more varied instrumentation, I still prefer the originals for their pure simplicity. The music in the Game Boy Pokémon  games is so good, that composer Junichi Masada would go on to direct future games in the series.

4) Undertale

It’s crazy to me that Undertale is nearly a decade old at this point. What’s crazier is that I never actually played the game until this year. I watched playthroughs of the game when it first came out and it looked alright, but it’s definitely a game that should be gone into blind. After watching the game played, I didn’t feel a need to try it out for myself. The music, however, has stuck with me ever since the first time I saw it. Created solely by Toby Fox, the soundtrack is filled with memorable tracks ranging from the goofy battles with Papyrus and the dog knights, atmospheric town themes, and the climactic battle theme Megalovania, which is honestly one of the best pieces of video game music ever. Toby Fox gained instant critical acclaim when Undertale released and a lot of the highest praise was showered upon the soundtrack. It’s no wonder then that Toby Fox has gone on to compose musical tracks for games like Pokémon  Sword & Shield and Super Smash Bros Ultimate.

3) Cuphead

While I never feel like I fully appreciate orchestral music in video games, big band jazz is a different story. With Cuphead being a game that strives to look like a 30’s rubber hose cartoon, they needed a soundtrack that felt as authentic. Composer Kristofer Maddigan got a band of brass horns, woodwind instruments, piano, drums, and upright bass to lay down some killer tracks for the game. From kinetic and fast-paced battle themes and boppy overworld tracks to the King Dice theme with Louis Armstrong styled vocals, it’s all a great listen and truly heightens the feeling that you are controlling an old Fleischer cartoon. Cleverly, tracks for bosses were all recorded with different instrument solos that will change as you die over and over again to the bosses, adding just a little bit of variety to prevent the music from going stale.

2) Mother 3

The Mother series (Earthbound in the west) is synonymous with excellent music. While the soundtrack of Earthbound has its bops, there are too many tracks that are just strange soundscapes for me to put on this list. Especially since its sequel, Mother 3’s soundtrack blows it out of the water for me. Composed by Shogo Sakai, the tracks don’t avoid the strange and otherworldliness that the previous game delved into, but it has more recognizable and catchy melodies. While the Game Boy Advance’s sound chip is similar to the SNES’s, Mother 3’s soundtrack is so much more crisp and clean than its predecessor. I’m always amazed how much the acoustic guitars sound like guitars, how the bongos sound like bongos. It’s one of the most varied and clean soundtracks, not only on the system, but of all time.

1) Persona 5

Persona 5 has my favorite video game soundtrack of all time–there’s no contest. As Joker and his friend dive into people’s subconscious and steal their hearts, they are accompanied but banger after banger. Composer Shoji Meguro masterfully blends jazz, techno, disco, and heavy metal into a soundtrack that is robust, varied, and extremely catchy. Every palace theme gets better and better from “Sweatshop” to “Whims of Fate” to “Arc.” Each location you visit outside of the dungeons have unique themes that worm their way into your head and the battle track “Last Surprise” never gets old after hundreds of battles. The vocal work by Lyn Inaizami is absolutely stellar, heightening any track she appears on. There are tracks that are less memorable than others, sure, but I wouldn’t say there is a bad song in the entire game. And for a game that takes over 100 hours to beat, that is just incredible. 

Yoshi’s Island – Critical Miss #37

/ atomicbobomb / Leave a comment

No Yoshi is an Island

Is it just me or is anyone sad that the idea of a “virtual console” seems to be dead and buried? It seems like the halcyon days of the 7th generation digital game markets with the likes of the Playstation Network and the Xbox Live Arcade forgotten relics. Even Nintendo–who jumped started the trend and coined the term with their online marketplace, the Virtual Console–seems to be struggle with giving gamers their past legacy titles now that studios have seen how much money is to be made by carving their titles into serfdoms and releasing them as separate packages. I found myself about this as I used the Nintendo Switch Online to play Yoshi’s Island. 

Upon booting up Yoshi’s Island, the player is greeted with a music box styled song, complete with winding sound, and a short cutscene of a stork carrying a couple babies in bindles. The stork is ambushed by Kamek on his broom. He snatches one of the babies, but the other falls to the ground, landing on the back of a Yoshi, and is revealed to be a baby Mario. The Yoshis of the island decide to help Mario reunite with his brother Luigi and the adventure starts!

The charm of the game hits the player immediately. The graphics are done in a cartoony style, with everything having thick black outlines, bright and vivid colors, and a slight crayon texture on everything–a style that Kirby’s Dream Land 3 would later adopt. All the sprites of the game are very expressive, especially the Yoshis who have a variety of frames of animations for running, jumping, throwing eggs, and everything else they do. The enemies are also lively as Shy Guys jump and dance and the giant ghost boogers hanging from the ceiling look genuinely hurt and sad when Yoshi attacks them. Adding to the whole presentation is one of the best soundtracks on the SNES. Koji Kondo expertly blends island percussion, toy instruments, and some extremely groovy bass lines to make songs that are catchy, atmospheric, triumphant, and upbeat. The completed tracking of the level select screen is one of my all time favorite video game songs and gets stuck in my head at least once a week.

Even though the full title is Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, the game is a completely different beast from Super Mario World. While Super Mario World refined Mario’s move set by giving him a few moves and powers to use in the game, Yoshi’s Island just added a bunch of gameplay features since the new playable character was a cool cartoon dinosaur. While the game is still a platformer like Super Mario World, Yoshi as a character has enough of a different move set for the game to feel completely unique.

For starters, Yoshis are either part chameleon or part frog since they can grab enemies with their long tongues and pull them back into their mouths to be spit out as projectiles or swallowed and turned into eggs. Throwing these eggs to hit distant enemies, collect coins or flowers, and hit question mark clouds to create new platforms is the biggest new gameplay mechanic to Yoshi’s Island. Making sure you are well stocked with eggs is always something to consider when running through levels since some sections may require a minimum number to use to make progress or discover a secret. Yoshi’s Island also adds a flutter jump for platforming. If you hold down the button after jumping, Yoshi does a sort of kicking motion, straining to get higher in a way that can only be described as them doing their best. While this flutter jump offers slightly more height at the end of a jump, it works best as a sort of extender to jump further or better position yourself midair. This is extremely useful because Mario must be a chonky baby since Yoshi drops like stone when falling out of a jump. It’s strange since the start of a jump and the flutter feels very floaty, but once it’s over, all momentum is lost and Yoshi just plummets. It’s something you get used to, but it did lead to falling into pits more often than it should have.

Yoshi’s Island also expands on the idea of power-ups from the Mario series. Yoshi can eat a few different watermelons throughout the game that gives them different breath powers from ice to fire to just spitting out the seeds rapid fire like a gatling gun. Besides these, Yoshi can also transform into a variety of different forms like a car, mole, submarine, or helicopter. I’m not a big fan of these sections since none of these forms control as tightly as just playing as Yoshi, especially the sub and helicopter which feel way too loose. Even baby Mario gets some play time during the adventure. Grabbing a star turns him into super baby Mario, where he is completely invincible and can over spikes and up walls. These sections are fun because they are all about going fast enough to get to the next star before the power up wears off.

The gameplay is solid, typical for a Nintendo developed platforming, and likewise there is also a huge amount of creativity on display in Yoshi’s Island. While all levels have aspects of platforming, there are still different types of levels in the game. Sometimes they’re the basic get to the end, sometimes they’re a winding maze that must be navigating, and sometimes still they’re more puzzle focused, requiring you to find keys to unlock doors. The levels’ themes are about as varied as they can be with the game being set on a sole island. The real creativity is found in the boss fights, which all differ greatly from each other and focus on different aspects of gameplay to defeat. From throwing eggs at a turtle to knock them on their back in order to attack to running around a tiny moon fighting a bird to knocking a flower pot off a ledge to exorcise the ghost inside to playing a game of break out in order to make a boss fall into lava, the bosses are a highlight of the game that consistently challenge the player in new ways. The fact that all bosses are just regular enemies that Kamek enlarged just adds so much charm to the game. Not all levels are great, but they are always interesting to play through to set what new ideas will pop up. That’s why it’s such a shame that I will never see all of them in the game.

Yoshi’s Island is a game built for completionists. Every level has three objectives in them besides just living and making it to the end: collect twenty red coins, grab the five happy flowers, and end the level with thirty star points. At the end of a level, you are scored on how much you collected and you need a score of one hundred on all eight levels in a world to unlock bonus levels. While collecting the red coins and flowers isn’t too bad, it is still tedious and bogs down the pace of the game to scouring the entire level to find them. The real annoyance comes with ending the level with thirty star points. See, these basically work as Yoshi’s life, but really they are a timer. If you get hit in a level, Mario will fly of Yoshi’s back, float around in bubble, and cry until he is caught–and I know a lot of hatred is directed at baby Mario because of the crying and, while it can be annoying, I don’t find it that terrible and see it as a good incentive not to get hit. Anyways, the star points are the amount of time you have to collect Mario before Kamek’s minions come down and spirit him away. This system seems weirdly punishing to the player, especially on levels with bosses, since it requires close to perfect play. I would make a bigger deal of it if great perfect scores in levels were required to progress through the game, but since they are only needed to unlock bonus levels, I find it fine. 

Overall, Yoshi’s Island is still a great game and a worthy sequel to Super Mario World–the objective best 2D Mario game. It is so charming and filled with creativity that I think anyone can pick it up and enjoy it. It’s a perfect example of the easy to learn, hard to master mentality since unlocking the bonus levels takes time and patience to do. But even without them, there are loads of levels to play, enemies to beat, charm to be found, and memories to be made. 

Elden Ring & Open World

/ atomicbobomb / Leave a comment

“The world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”

–Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

I’m not the biggest fan of open world games. That’s not meant to be the blanket statement it sounds like. There are games in the genre like Insomniac’s Spider-Man and The Witcher 3 I do enjoy quite a bit, but open word games are hardly my favorite type of game overall. I usually find myself overwhelmed with the size of the world and get burnt out by the length of the games. So when I heard FromSoft’s new game Elden Ring was basically going to be Dark Souls but open world, I was a little concerned. I had faith in the company and director Miyazaki to deliver a great game, but how would they adapt the brutal combat and intricate level design of their Souls games into an open world? In short, they succeeded expertly.

I will state upfront that I have not finished Elden Ring at the time of writing. I’m about 60 hours in, have two Great Runes, and have uncovered about half of the map to my best estimate. But even though I have not beaten the game, I have gathered a good sense of the world that FromSoft wanted to create with the Lands Between. You get a taste of what’s to come from the moment you leave the tutorial cave and see the world spread out before you, the wide open fields,the crumbling ruins, the giant Erdtree shining golden in the distance. It has the trademark rotting splendor of the other Souls game but stretched to a size far bigger than any previous game. But that first glimpse of the Lands Between is like looking at the entrance of a cave. You can see it there, possibly even see a ways in, but you can fathom how deep it goes until you explore further in.

It cannot be understated how large the world of Elden Ring is. The opening areas of Limgrave and the Weeping Peninsula to the south are very large in of themselves. Walking across them takes forever if you are not one for fast traveling, but luckily the game gives you Torrent, a horse/yak hybrid creature, for faster travel. You start out a map that is covered in clouds. Traveling into new areas and finding map fragments will fill areas in with more detail. But even spreading hours in these areas collecting maps doesn’t give you a good sense of the full scale of the world. New to Elden Ring are entrapment chests. If you open certain chests in the game and are enveloped by the smoke that spews from it, you will be transported to another area on the map. At least twice, I have opened my map in the game to see where I was only to discover it’s size had doubled, as if your Tarnished never thought to unfold it completely before. But like an ultra greatsword, size isn’t everything if you do not know how to wield it. So what does Elden Ring do with its massive map? Turns out, a lot.

We’ve all heard the phrase “wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle” referring to game worlds that are massive in scale, but with little to do with them. Oftentimes, games like a Ubisoft open world will just have the same types of missions copy and pasted around the map. ER is a different beast. Sure, you will often see the same types of broken ruins around the map and more than once you will fight repeated bosses, but with a game world this large and an estimated 100+ unique bosses, some reused assets are to be expected. What excites me about the Lands Between is the sheer density in which content is packed. There are things to do and find everywhere. Besides groups of the enemies to fight, there are caves and catacombs to spelunk, castles and ruins to explore, and a load of bosses to fight. Every named ruin in the world has a staircase somewhere in it leading to useful items, chest, or NPC to talk to and every stagecoach you find will have a treasure chest to loot to grab. However, the biggest reward you will often get after clearing out a dungeon is another boss fight and seeing how these are the bread and butter of FromSoft, it’s a fitting reward. 

A lot of these bosses will grind you into ash when you encounter them, so it’s smart to leave them be for a while, whether it be until you level up, get better gear, or just feel like fighting them again. In these times, you will want to remember where they are at. Elden Ring only saves icons for places you discover, not merchants* nor bosses nor stone imps that require a Stone Sword Key to unlock a fog wall. Instead, Elden Ring takes cues from Breath of the Wild and makes the players mark notable places in the world by placing their own markers on the map. It’s a small addition, and one that might irritate other players, but it’s one I love thanks to the sense of agency, discovery, and interactivity. The worst thing an open world game can do for me to lose interest is provide markers and icons for everything on the map. What’s the point and exploring if I know what I will find beforehand? By restricting the information the map shows the player until they discover it and making them mark the map themselves, Elden Ring stays surprising and rewarding to explore well past other games in the genre. 

But a larger world needs something to fill it. With the massive world of the Land Between, there can be a lot of bosses to fight and things to explore, but still have a lot of down time while traveling between them. Here is where FromSoft falls victim to rather standard open world trap: they added crafting. I understand why crafting has been so prevalent in the genre in recent years: a bigger world has more walking to do in it, so why not give the player things to collect constantly while traveling? Crafting is a mechanic that can be done well or poorly depending on the game. Well I wouldn’t say it is handled poorly in Elden Ring, it does come off feeling token and unnecessary. It’s useful to be able to craft things like poison heals and different greases (the game’s version of resins), most of the craftable items are different arrows and things that give you negligible buffs to things like robustness and magic deference. It’s not something I find egregious since you can ignore the materials in a world and not collect them, but it is disappointing when you survive a classic FromSoft item trap–where you grab an item and a bunch of enemies jump to attack you–only to find you fought for your life for a mushroom or something.

I was worried that Elden Ring being open world would lose the FromSoft intricate level design the company has been known for with the Souls game–with shorts opening up to bonfires, pathways leading to previous sections of the maps, and many nooks and crannies hidden in areas. Luckily, this type of level design does return in many castles and dungeons of the game, but like everything else, it’s just on a more expanded scale. Stormveil castle was an absolute delight to explore with its blend of shortcuts, multiple paths to explore, and Anor Londo style progression of walking along roofs and buttresses. It’s always amazing to me when I see a small ledge in a wall and edge along it only to find that FromSoft has put an item or area at the end to explore. Something that would just be part of the building model or without a hitbox to crawl on in any other game is a viable path in a Souls game. Of course, to get to Stormveil, you have to fight through Margit first, and that is no easy feat.

After leaving the tutorial cave, the Guidances of Grace point the player toward Stormveil castle and right into Margit’s lap. Margit watches over the gate entering Stormveil castle and he acts as the game’s first skill check. So the game purposefully leads players into a fight that it knows they are woefully unprepared for, and that is actually a great and very FromSoft bit of design. Basically, the game is showing the player that it is not always best to grit your teeth and run your head in the wall that is the current boss fight you have found. It is not one of the more linear Souls games. This is Elden Ring, a game with a huge open world to explore. So go explore. You will get more gear to use, level up a bit if you manage to keep hold of your Runes, and naturally get better at the game through experience. 

I am so happy to see Elden Ring doing so well both critically and financially. As a huge fan of FromSoft, I’m glad they made a hit and will be able to make games for the next foreseeable future. But beyond that, I’m happy that the game is clicking with so many players. Between Elden Ring and Breath of the Wild, I hope the industry takes notice of how their open worlds are designed–being deeply explorative and letting the player discover things on their own without automatically plastering markers on the map, giving them a ton of things to find and do. Much like how Dark Souls created a seachange for games because it was unique and fresh, I truly hope that Elden Ring does the same for the homogenized open world genre.

*This was updated in a patch while writing and now the map does show the locations of merchants.

God of War (PS2) – Critical Miss #36

/ atomicbobomb / Leave a comment
Photo by Greyhem. Found at godofwar.fandom.com

Growing up, the video game consoles were always in my older brother’s room, from the Genesis to the Playstation to the Playstation 2. That is, until I got a Playstation 2 for my room. It was a slim model and I remembered playing the hell out of the Pandemic Star Wars Battlefront games, a Godzilla fighting game that was either Save the Earth or Unleashed, and a random Hulk game. I wasn’t into video games enough to know what to look for besides licenses I was already interested in. At some point though, I picked up a Greatest Hits copy of God of War. I remember wanting it because it was $20 and rated mature–a big deal to someone in their mid teens. Released in 2005, it gave Sony a new mascot to flaunt in Kratos, but I personally don’t remember anything from playing the game itself from that time. All I remember is that I never finished which makes it more than qualified for a Critical Miss. 

The start of the story finds Kratos in the typical Greek myth position: fucked over by the Gods. Specifically Ares, whom Kratos sold his life to in order to win a battle and save him from death by the hands of barbarians. After Ares decimates Kratos’s enemies, Kratos is enslaved to him in some way–it’s never clearly defined, mostly being shown through flashback montages, but Kratos seems forced to work as a warrior for Ares. One night, however, Ares tricks Kratos into slaying his wife and children, a cackling oracle curses Kratos by fusing the ashes of his dead loved ones forever upon his skin, and now the only thing on his mind is killing Ares for revenge. 

It is a very standard plot, but it suits this type of action game as it provides just enough reason for Kratos to journey from the Aegean Sea to Athens to Pandora’s Temple and it provides solid context for who Kratos is and what drives him. As a character, Kratos isn’t very likable, an anti-hero at best, since he is angry, shouty, and all too ready to kill innocent people to progress on his quest or even to just get a little bit of health. The player can still have some sympathy for him, however, since genuinely mourns the loss of his family in his own violent way and he is a mere plaything of the Gods above him. 

The visuals help Kratos feel insignificant to the Gods too. The game looks great, but there is an amazing sense of grandiose with some of the areas you visit. While running through Athens, you will often see Ares looming in the bay outside the city. The titan that carries Pandora’s Temple on their back is also enormous and there’s an incredible moment while Kratos is scaling the cliffs outside the temple that you can see the titan crawling below. The music is bombastic too, but is rather forgettable to me, feeling like the standard heroic orchestra brass and boom that accompanies this type of warrior’s journey.  

Photo by Greyhem. Found at godofwar.fandom.com

As a warrior, Kratos is extremely capable. The Blades of Chaos chained to his arms are fast with great range and coverage while the Blade of Artemis is big fuck-off sword that is slow and hits like a minotaur. Throughout the game the Gods also bestow Kratos with magical spells. These range from throwing Zeus’s lightning to summoning an army of spirits from the depths of Hades. All weapons and spells can be upgraded with the use of red orbs that spew from defeated beasts and broken jars so Kratos will get consistently stronger as you play. This is a good thing because the God of War strives to continually challenge the player in combat.

It’s uncommon that you will be fighting just one enemy at a time in God of War–unless the game is introducing a new monster and wants you to learn their patterns before complicating things. Enemies always come in hordes so learning attacks with wide coverage and which beasts need to be targeted first is key to survival. The agents of Ares include undead foot soldiers, minotaurs, gorgons, harpies, and more. There is a decent variety in enemies–even if the game falls back on tougher, recolored ones by the end–and they all fill a niche in combat to harass the player. An interesting mechanic in combat is how killing certain enemies using the quick time prompts will reward you with different orbs mid-fight. For example, gorgons will drop blue orbs to replenish magic and minotaurs will always drop green orbs for health. 

Simply put, the combat in God of War is great. It’s easy to see why games like Dante’s Inferno copy/pasted it wholesale into their games. But the influence of God of War is a double edged Chaos Blade because it–along with Resident Evil 4 from earlier the same year–can be blamed for the infestation of quick time events in mainstream gaming that followed for years after. I’ve always been rather neutral toward QTEs. They work in some games, but don’t work in others, and I think they mostly work in God of War. Early in the game, the timing to hit the QTEs is generous enough that it never feels frustrating and the colored orbs you get from killing enemies with them in battle are a good enough reward to use them. By the end of the game though the timing becomes so strict that I found it just easier to not use them in fights. 

Photo by GabrielPacia. Found at godofwar.fandom.com

Besides fighting, Kratos will also have to solve some light puzzles during his journey. Since Kratos isn’t characterized much besides being strong, these puzzles almost always involve pushing a block or statue somewhere. Sometimes you have to push a statue to block a crack in the wall where harpies continuously spawn, sometimes you have to push a block on a button to hold it down, and even once you have to push a caged soldier into a fire to progress. They are the lightest puzzles imaginable, hardly ever testing your smarts, choosing instead to test how well you can push a block while fighting off enemies at the same time. The game often forces Kratos through sections where he has to balance across beams. These sections are slow, tedious, and very annoying since they just bog down the pace. 

Along with the light puzzles, there is also light exploration to be done in God of War. Secrets are hidden behind cracked walls, portraits, and down hidden paths. They will usually be a chest full of red orbs for upgrading, Gorgon Eyes used to increase Kratos’s health, and Phoenix Feathers that increase his magic bar. These are easy to find if you have a knack for checking things off the obvious path forward. The upgrades are worth finding, but the game doesn’t spread them out enough. All but a few Gorgon Eyes are found before Pandora’s Temple leaving only the Phoenix Feathers to find. I had to look up to make sure I had found them all because the health and magic bars still looked shorter than intended when fully upgraded. 

Lackluster puzzles and pretty standard story aside, I had a blast playing through God of War with its fluid, but tough combat, larger than life visuals, and it’s rewards for thorough exploration. I was a little disappointed by the small number of bosses in the game–three in all–but they were so large and momentous that I didn’t find it necessary to complain. And that’s kinda the feel of God of War on the PS2 anyways: it’s not the longest game with the most ideas in it, but it’s so large and in charge with the stuff it does get right. It’s a truly fun game that I can easily recommend to anyone, mortal or God alike.

Photo by BlackPill. Found at godofwar.fandom.com

BioShock Infinite & Elizabeth

/ atomicbobomb / Leave a comment

A fact about that I don’t think I’ve ever shared on this blog: I love birds. I think they are very cute, silly, and interesting creatures. One thing that’s helped me through the pandemic is putting bird seed out on my apartment’s window ledge and watching the sparrows, pigeons, and cardinals come and go as I work. So when I first when BioShock Infinite when the HD collection released, I was thrilled to learn I could utilize the power of birds with the Murder of Crows vigor. With a simple press of a button, I could fire a blast from my hand and watch as my unholy crow army pecked my enemies to death. It is by far my favorite vigor in the game and one of my favorite powers in any game I’ve played. But BioShock Infinite is such a fantastic game, that summoning birds to fight with me isn’t even my favorite thing about the game. That honor goes to the character of Elizabeth.

When Booker DeWitt (an absolutely fantastic 1912 name) finds himself in the floating city of Columbia and at odds with its leader, Comstock, he has one mission: find the girl and wipe away the debt. The girl in question is Elizabeth, daughter of Comstock, who is found locked in a giant statue with observation windows and science equipment watching and monitoring everywhere she goes, everything she does. This is because she can open up tears, or rips in the fabric of reality, to other places and times, or possibly completely different parallel universes. The majority of the game is played after breaking Elizabeth out of her prison, trying to escape, being caught up in class war, confronting Comstock, and ultimately discovering secrets about Booker and Elizabeth. 

At first, Elizabeth seems like she is just going to be designated as BioShock Infinite’s damsel in distress, a mere MacGuffin to chase after. Surprisingly though, you rescue her from her tower imprisonment within the first 3rd of the game. While Booker is the main character, the playable character, Elizabeth is the protagonist of the game. They both have the common goal of escaping Columbia alive, but their reasons are different. Booker wants to wipe away his nebulous debt, and Elizabeth wants to escape active captivity and dreams of seeing Paris. But the reason that I find Elizabeth a stronger character than Booker, the reason that my eyes and ears are always on her when important story moments happen, is because she is the heart of the story. Booker is the extension of the player, he is the muscle and does what must be done in order to survive and escape, but Elizabeth is the of the game, the one questioning the morals of what they are doing, and the more interesting character for it.

Elizabeth starts out the story very naive. Being locked in her tower all her life, she has never experienced the outside world for herself, only having read about it in books. She more closely matches the player’s own curiosity and wonder while exploring Columbia throughout the game–taking quiet moments to look around, examine things, and comment on the propaganda plastered over all the walls. She is a well defined character who is caring, intelligent, resourceful, and helpful, and she is characterized in a multitude of ways through her speech and actions. When you enter the slums of Finkton, where the poor working class people live, she wonders what system has led to such wealth disparity and what they can do to help. When she sees Booker gun down Comstock’s men for the first time, she is openly shocked and that uneasiness with killing never really goes away, but is more accepted as necessary to survive. Even when Elizabeth kills Fitzroy in order to save an innocent child, she is appalled with herself, shredding her bloodstained clothes and cutting her hair in mourning. A trope, yes, but effective since it shows her conflict with her actions and is one of the major turning points in her arc.

There is a bitterness in Elizabeth during the middle of the story. Coming out of her tower bright-eyed and hopeful, she is faced with a world full of cruel people–Comstock, her own father, studied her and was seemingly prepping her as a weapon, Fink exploits the poor for cheap labor, Booker himself lies to her to get her to come willingly on an airship saying that he will take her to Paris. She is rightfully angry, jaded, and seeking revenge against the ones who kept her imprisoned. But something happens when she and Booker destroy the siphon and she has the use of the full extent of her reality altering power. She is now able to open ways into other universes without the need of a tear, she can seemingly see all universes at once, she understands that choices that were or will be made are already made, and she understands that Booker will become Comstock at some point in the future. She accepts the weight of her powers, accepts the consequences of her actions. Multiple Elizabeths from across the multiverse come together to drown Booker–the only friend she has ever had that wasn’t a giant bird thing–and the game ends in one final piano note.

It is a dramatic, sorrowful way to end a game that offers some truly fun and bombastic gameplay. On the surface, BioShock Infinite looks to be just another BioShock, but there are subtle differences. The original game leaned more into the horror element and was a much slower game as a result, Booker can only hold two guns at a time and will need to pick up new ones dropped by enemies when out of ammo, and, while they fulfill the same function, there are less vigors than there were plasmids and all the vigors are combat focused. However, the biggest difference in the gameplay again lies with Elizabeth.

BioShock Infinite’s gameplay can basically be divided into two types: exploration and combat. During the quiet moments of exploration, the game moves the story and characterization of Booker and Elizabeth further. They chat about the things they see, what events just happened, and what they need to do to achieve their current goal. They will often come across locked doors or safes and Booker relies on Elizabeth to pick them, her having read up on lock picking during her time in the tower. These will often lead to more money, a fusion for upgrading Booker’s health, or a new piece of gear to equip. It’s worth picking every lock you come across because the game gives you more than enough lock picks and any door necessary for progression needing to be picked will not consume any of your resources. Elizabeth can help find useful things laying around too, often pointing out a lock pick or more ammo and a glowing halo will illuminate them for the player. She also helps decipher code books for Booker, leading to more stashes of goodies, and will occasionally throw money to him that she found laying around. It’s not a lot of money ever, but it’s endearing seeing Elizabeth flip a coin and Booker catching it. Exploring with Elizabeth is always a pleasant time, but it’s in combat where she really shines.

Elizabeth is not an escort that needs to be protected like Ashley in RE4. She can look after herself in a battle so the player can focus on the enemies trying to kill them. Much like the money, Elizabeth will often shout to Booker in a fight and throw him something useful. It’s determined on what is running lower, but Elizabeth can give Booker more health, salts, or ammo when he needs it. It is on some sort of cool down though–seems like she can throw the player two things in a fight before needing time to do it again–so you cannot rely on it too heavily. She will also revive Booker if he falls during battle, getting him back on his feet a safe distance away so he can get back to the fray quickly. Elizabeth is a great ally to have in scrap, especially when you remember she has Omega level reality warping powers.

Littering most combat arenas are tears that Elizabeth can open to bring something into the world to help Booker. Whether it is some cover to hunker down behind while you get your bearings, some much needed medkits or a weapon, a skyhook to get a better vantage, or an automaton in a good position to flank the enemies, a well timed tear can change the flow of battle dramatically. It’s a brilliant way to tie gameplay and story together, and it’s only a shame that there are no fights to be had when Elizabeth has access to the full extent of her power and is going all Dr. Manhattan on time and space.

Although Booker DeWitt is ex-union busting, Pinkerton scum, he’s an enjoyable character to control with his cynical, jaded outlook, his pragmatic and nonsense approach, and his truly awesome name. But he is not the reason I play BioShock Infinite. It is Elizabeth that I find the most interesting and endearing character of the game. She could have just been another damsel in distress, another escort the player has to throw themselves in front of in battle to protect, but she isn’t. She is a fully realized character–a determined, intelligent, and also tragic one. And the fact that she is not just relegated to be part of the story, but also aids the player in the gameplay is a great bit of design that makes the player feel even more attached to her. It worked on me, at least, since Elizabeth is one of my favorite characters in any video game ever.

Chrono Trigger & Techs

/ atomicbobomb / Leave a comment
Image by Notmyhandle. Found at strategywiki.org/wiki/Chrono_Trigger

I’ve been on a strange Akira Toriyama kick lately. I’ve been watching a lot of Dragon Ball Super, which is pretty good, and replaying Chrono Trigger, which is incredible. Toriyama created all the designs for the characters and monsters in the game, and I found myself wanting to play it again while I watched DBS. I bought the DS version of the game around 2014-15, soon after I bought my 3DS and was just getting back into video games. I thought the game was amazing, but I haven’t played it since that first playthrough over a decade ago. So I picked up Chrono Trigger once again to see why it’s still so lauded as one of the best games ever made. And, honestly, there are a lot of reasons–the charming characters and surprising well written and realized story for a SNES game, the incredible soundtrack and chunky, satisfying sound effects, and the unique, engaging battle system that forces players to think on their feet. To me, it was this battle system that drew my attention most in my recent playthrough, especially the tech mechanic. The closer I looked at these techs in the game, the more I realized how much of the rest of the game was designed around them.

The techs in Chrono Trigger are the character’s special abilities. These range from strong attacks, buffs and party heals, and magic attacks that can exploit elemental weaknesses. These add a huge amount of variety to a playthrough of Chrono Trigger. Each of the seven characters can learn eight individual techs (for a total of 56), each character combination have three double techs they can perform (for a total of 45), and there a total of fifteen triple techs, ten with Chrono and five that can be performed without Chrono but instead requiring special gems that have to be equipped. This means there are a total of 116 techs in all that can be unlocked and used in the game. It’s always exciting and fun to unlock new techs and try them out. However, more interesting than the vast variety the techs bring to the games, is how these mechanics affect the design of the gameplay, both in and out of battle.

Each tech has a certain attack pattern. Whether it’s a magic spell that can hit one or all enemies, a spinning sword swing that can hit a group of bad guys in a certain proximity to each other, or Frog flying through the air and dropping bombs along a line of monsters, learning what shapes attacks take and utilizing them effectively is the key to winning in battle. Chrono Trigger places emphasis on patience during fights. Since the game uses an active battle system, enemies will wander around when not using an attack. Knowing when best to use techs that hit in a certain pattern of enemies is important to gain the upper hand. This adds a risk/reward element to fights when you consider whether it is better to attack immediately or wait for the enemies to get into a better position where you might be able to hit multiple at once.

Image by Notmyhandle. Found at strategywiki.org/wiki/Chrono_Trigger

Another addition to the risk/reward dynamic of battles in Chrono Trigger is the fact that techs can be combined. When two or three party members fight alongside each other, they can perform a combo tech, where they each perform a certain attack or spell together. This encourages experimentation with your party composition since different characters combine their techs in different ways. Lucca can set Chrono’s sword on fire for a devastating attack, Marle can create an iceberg for Ayla to throw at an enemy for massive damage, or Frog and Robo can use their healing techs together to provide a huge amount of health back to the whole party. Since each character has a different speed stat that dictates how fast their battle meter fills up, you get a similar situation with waiting for enemies to get into a good position. Is it better to wait for two party members to be ready to use a combo tech, or is it better to do damage or heal now? These considerations help the battles in Chrono Trigger feel very strategic, but still fast paced since the enemies won’t stop attacking you while you think of your next move. 

At the end of a battle, the party will receive some experience to gain levels and some Tech Points (TP) to gain new techs. While party members that do not take place in the battle will still gain exp, they will not gain any of the TPs. This is the game’s way of encouraging the player to switch up their party members to gain all the different techs and their combinations. The game is designed around having the player switch up their party in a few interesting ways. First is how the story is told. Each of the party members have unique personalities and ways of speaking, so they will comment on events in the story in different ways. This can add a little variety to a game and keeps it from going stale during repeat playthroughs.

Image by Notmyhandle. Found at strategywiki.org/wiki/Chrono_Trigger

Next is that the game never requires the player to grind, allowing players to switch around their team without having to stop and get the new member up to level. During my last playthrough, I switched party members every time they learned a new tech for someone who was closest to learning their next one. Due to this constant switching, I unlocked every tech and combination in the game with ease. I would face off with bosses using whatever team I was running at the time, and while some were definitely tougher than others, none felt insurmountable. That’s one of the most admirable things I find about Chrono Trigger, bosses require the player to think up better strategies than grind up some more levels when against a tough fight. 

Switching around characters at a consistent pace will also ensure you almost always have a new tech or combo to try out. And you will want to try them out too because they all look and sound so cool. Trying out all the combos will also help you understand what all the characters true potentials are and lead to a deeper appreciation for them. During my first playthrough of Chrono Trigger, I hardly ever used Ayla because I didn’t like that she couldn’t learn magic. During this recent playthrough, however, she was in my party more than anyone since her combo techs can deal some of the highest damage in the game. Likewise, I used Robo more during this playthrough once I learned his Heal Beam tech can be combined with most of the other characters’ healing spells for full party effect. In the end, I excluded Chrono from my party all together and fought Lavos with Frog, Marle, and Ayla as my party.

Chrono Trigger has the best problem an RPG can ever have and that is not knowing who should be in your party because you want to use all the characters. It’s another strength of the game that I didn’t appreciate until I played through ago with the intention of unlocking all the techs. It’s an amazing game that tells a compelling story and has an engaging battle system with the use of the Tech mechanic. I could honestly write many more posts about different aspects of the game and how well done they are, but I wanted to focus on techs because they are so foundation to the game’s design, both in and out of combat. I implore you to pick up Chrono Trigger if you haven’t. And if you have already, I implore you to pick it up again.

Top 5 Critical Miss Games of 2021

/ atomicbobomb / Leave a comment

If you read my Top 5 Games of 2021 list (or if you haven’t, check it out here), you know that I thought 2021 was a pretty unimpressive year for new games. Sadly, this is also true of the games I played for Critical Miss this year. While I enjoyed most of the games I played to some extent, only a few really leapt out at me, shook me awake, blew my mind, and reminded me why I love video games. Most of the games I played for the blog were on the same level of me thinking “Yea, that was pretty good,” so this list was still pretty tough to narrow down.

Let’s get a couple quick honorable mentions out of the way. I decided to disqualify Pokémon Platinum from this list immediately. I had played through about half of it years ago and seeing as Pokémon is probably my favorite video game series, I wanted to take this time to honor other games. Likewise, Pokémon Snap didn’t make the cut, even though it was a very chill and pleasant experience. Lastly, while I loved the charm and central gameplay loop of Ape Escape, it just barely missed the cut. So now, out of all the games I played for Critical Miss this year, these are my favorite five.

5) Metroid Prime

Metroid Prime was the series debut in 3D. Since that wasn’t risky enough, I guess, Retro Studios also made the game a 1st person shooter. It was a huge gamble, but it seemed to have paid off. Prime retains all the lonely atmosphere, exploration for power-ups, and branching maps of the series 2D roots, but lets the players experience it from the eyes of Samus Aran herself. It does some good work to actually heighten the isolated feeling of the game, but it suffers from some archaic controls, tedious switching of visors, and the map getting bottle-necked between areas. When I eventually get around to looking at Prime 2, I will try to look at the Wii port since I hear that version handles like a dream.

4) Super Mario Galaxy

Speaking of the Wii, Super Mario Galaxy has to be one of the best games on the system. That’s not really saying anything too stunning since it’s Mario, but Galaxy was something special. It shook up the formula of previous 3D Mario games with its gravity mechanics and more linear, obstacle course levels, but the charm and movement controls are as great as ever. It’s a fun world to live in for a bit and every level brings new ideas so the game never gets stale. However, Galaxy never reached the same heights of pure joy that 64 or Odyssey got to as I just prefer the bigger, more dense level designs of those games. But Galaxy is in no way a bad game, in fact it’s great and everyone should give it a go at some point.

#3) Quake

Since Quake was the last review I did, I feel kinda talked out on it. But to reiterate why I like it so much: it’s a great fast-paced old school shooter with varied monsters to fight and tons of secrets to find. As much as I like Doom, Quake slightly surpasses in my eyes by feeling more modern. Since it’s a true 3D, and not a sprite based pseudo 3D game, aiming at enemies on higher ground is necessary and the levels have more verticality then Doom and are just brilliantly designed. Despite the disappointing lack of weapon variety and the absurd difficulty spike in the last episode, Quake is still a hell of a good boomer shooter.

2) Portal

What is there to be said about Portal, the game that’s been discussed and memed to death on the internet? Not much more than it is truly great. Not a surprising take by any means, but Portal really is as good as everyone says. With a mind-breaking but still easy to understand central mechanic with the portal gun, the gameplay is tricky, clever, and very fun. The writing is top-notch too. The dry humor and deadpan performance for GLaDOS is some of the best written, performed, and funniest I’ve seen in video games. The game is rather short, but that just means there is no extra fat on it. Everything in the game is well thought out and necessary. It might be one of the tightest and well designed games I’ve ever played. However, one game I played this year barely managed to beat out Portal for the top spot.

1) Psychonauts

Out of all the games I’ve played for Critical Miss this year, Psychonauts is the one I find myself thinking back on the most. There is such a huge amount of creativity displayed in the levels of the game that is not often seen in platformers. From dodging charging bulls down a narrow Latin American street to playing a board game against Napoleon Bonaparte to helping a struggling director put on a play, each level brings new ideas and gameplay styles to them while still fitting well into the core loop of platforming. The writing is brilliant with humorous, charming, and heartfelt characters, wacky plot developments, and levels representing the minds of different characters. The game does struggle a lot with controls, which always feel clunky and unresponsive, but the slight blemishes on the game somehow make it seem more human in my eyes. It feels like it was made by passionate, but limited and flawed human beings. While I do think Portal is the much better designed game, it came off as feeling impersonal to me. Psychonauts, on the other hand, feels very personal, like Tim Schaffer and his team had an idea for a story they felt they had to tell and a game that they thought was generally fun. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait another sixteen years for the next sequel. 

Top 5 Games of 2021

/ atomicbobomb / 1 Comment

2021 was a pretty meh year for games. It makes sense with the pandemic still raging and messing anything up. Even in the face of that, I managed to play more new games this year than I did in 2020. But I say this year is lacking in terms of video games because not much really gripped me as years passed. Most games I played from this year I did enjoy, but nothing really blew me away. I’m a categorizer at heart though, so every year I like to look back and sort out how I feel about the games I played. These are almost guaranteed to change as time goes on, but at this moment, these are my top five favorite games of 2021.

But first, a few honorable mentions. Like I said, I did manage to play a good chunk of games from this year, but there are a few noticeable absences. Firstly, any next gen game. I still haven’t gotten my hands on a PS5, so no game exclusive for it will appear on this list; no Renturnal, no Rachet & Clank, no Deathloop. I also haven’t found the time to play Loop Hero, although it is on my list to check out. Beside those, here are a few games I played this year that didn’t quite make the cut:

  • Psychonauts 2 – Pretty much everything I wanted it to be, having all the creativity and heart of the original, but controlling so much better. This almost made my top five, but didn’t solely on the fact that I’m only about a third of the way through it. Not nearly enough to form a full opinion on it.
  • Unsighted – A clever blend of Metroidvania and top down Zelda-style adventure games with a very interesting central mechanic of using a very limited resource to keep your NPC friends alive. However, this mechanic was not as deep as I hoped it would be and the exploration didn’t really engage me.
  • Bowser’s Fury – Released alongside the port of Super Mario 3D World, this game is a brilliant combination of 3D Mario level design and power-ups from the 2D games. It has all the polish and fun to be expected from a Mario title, but the choice to make one giant level with 100 shines in it makes the game feel spread too thin and with too many empty spaces.

But with those out of the way, let’s get to the list proper!

5) Super Auto Pets

I never got into the auto battler genre, nothing about it really piqued my interest, until Super Auto Pets. At first, it was the cute animals–just emojis ripped from the Android keyboard–but once I started playing, I discovered a deceptively simple game with a wealth of depth and strategy. All the different animal units have different effects from buffing themselves or others, providing more gold to spend in the shop, or copying other units’ abilities. Learning these effects and how they interact with others has all the fun of a deck building game, but runs are significantly shorter, making it a great pick up and play game. I don’t spend hours playing Super Auto Pets at a time, but I have been putting a few runs in here and there daily for the past few months. The reason it is at the bottom of the list is only because it is still in beta, with patches that change up the meta coming out pretty consistently, so who knows where the game will be a few months or years from now.

4) Monster Hunter Rise

As noted before on this very blog, I am a big fan of the Monster Hunter series. So I was excited when Monster Hunter Rise was announced for the Switch. It looked like a great blend of the games from the series I played on the 3DS and the newer World formula. And that is exactly what the game was. Visually, Rise looks like a slightly more polished Generations, but it has the quality of life changes that were introduced in World–weapon upgrade trees, notes on monsters’ weaknesses and drops in game, seamless environments. The combat is as deep as ever, the monsters as big, imposing, and creative as ever, and the weird goofiness of characters is as charming as ever. But with the addition of the wire bugs and Palimutes, the game is more fast-paced and kinetic than any other game in the series. It’s low on the list because I only ended up putting around 30 hours into it overall, about a 3rd of what I put into World and Generations each.

3) Resident Evil Village

What do you get when you mix together RE4 and RE7? Well, you get Resident Evil Village. The game takes the 1st person perspective, characters, and plot from RE7 and adds in the more combat focus, weapon upgrades, European village setting, and more camp tone of RE4. And it works surprisingly well. The pacing is fantastic with combat being fast and frantic, spookier moments being effective, and there being enough quiet moments between them that it doesn’t get repetitive. While I like Village more than RE7, I think the more isolated, focused setting of the Baker’s home worked much better. Village swings from gothic castle to Lovecraftian flooded village to machine zombie factory. It can feel like you are playing several, small games as opposed to one cohesive whole at times. But Village also has Lady Dimitrescu, a shining beacon of goth waifuness that brought the country together at a time where we feel more divided than ever. And I think we can all agree that’s a good thing.

2) Metroid Dread

The fact this game even came out is crazy since it’s been hinted at since the DS era. The fact that Metroid Dread came out and is great is even crazier. I’ve played a good chunk of Metroid games at this point, and Dread is easily my favorite now. A lot of this has to do with the controls because Samus has never felt so good to move around with. Exploration, item hunting, and secret finding is as satisfying as ever, but this game takes the bosses fights to a whole other level. I love a game with good boss fights–ones with clear but tricky attack patterns to learn, ones with unique ways of fighting them without feeling to gimmicky, ones where you know the next hour or two in the game will be just on this boss, learning its ins and outs, until you finally beat it–and Metroid Dread has some great, tough, and sticky boss fights. The game is pretty linear when you take a broad look at it, with the developers cleverly using points of no returns and transporters to guide the player in the right direction, but it’s this mix of exploration and guidance that makes Dread the most accessible game in the Metroid series.

1) The Binding of Isaac: Repentance

I agonized a bit on whether or not I was going to put Repentance on this list since it’s only an expansion of a game. But I decided it not only belonged on the list, but also at the top spot, for a few reasons. Mainly, Repentance more than doubles the content in The Binding of Isaac–two new alternate routes, 14 new characters, and a lot of new items, trinkets, cards, enemies, etc. Repentance could easily have been a standalone game. There is also what this expansion means to Isaac as a game and me as a player. It is the final expansion, the last hurrah of my favorite game, the culmination of years of waiting and excitement, and the last time I will get to honor it in a list like this. Most importantly, though, Repentance is the only game I played this year that I want to keep playing. Once I finished Resident Evil Village and Metroid Dread, I was done, but I am still putting time into Repentance pretty much daily. Some days, it’s all I play and I play it for hours. After the shakiness with Afterbirth+, Repentance have brought The Binding of Isaac to the best place it’s been in years, possibly ever, and it is easily my favorite game of 2021.

Quake – Critical Miss #34

/ atomicbobomb / 1 Comment

Ok, Boomer Shooter

Id Software blew peoples’ minds like a shotgun under the chin with the release of Doom. While not a true 3D game, and not even the first shooter of the style they released, it was such a huge release and its effects on 1st person shooters can still be seen today. The game holds up extremely well today as I discussed in an early Critical Miss. Id would again help shape the foundations of the FPS genre in 1996 with the release of Quake. While it feels rather similar to Doom, the leap forward in technology in just three years meant that Quake could be bigger, more complicated, and, most importantly, truly 3D.

I usually start off these reviews with a short story description. Unfortunately, I cannot begin to say what the story of Quake is. Not because it’s overly complicated, but because I just didn’t pay attention to it. The story comes as text dumps in between episodes, text dumps that come with painfully slow scrolling. I tried reading the first one when it appeared, but quickly got bored and skipped it to get to the next level. I was never concerned about the lack of story because the lack of context it could provide was easily made up in atmosphere.

The sound design of the game is great. Gunshots are impactful and crunchy as they rip monsters apart. Each unearthly creature has their own growl and cry when hit. The soundtrack is ambient and layers on the atmosphere in droning waves. Composed by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, it fits the game perfectly, but tends to be too atmospheric to be memorable to me. 

I played the new remaster of Quake on my Switch and the visuals cleaned up extremely well. Textures are crisp, enemy models are clear, but the simple polygons and repeating stones in the wall help retain the charm of the original game. All the levels have a heavy atmosphere, whether it be a dark castle dungeon, bright castle great hall, or a dank courtyard of a castle. Quake has a lot of castle levels in it. 

The levels themselves are a blast to play through. They are massive and sprawling, able to have pathways run above and below others creating a sense of verticality not present in Doom. This isn’t staying much nowadays, but seeing how Quake was one of the first truly 3D shooters, the fact that the levels are so well designed is incredible. They are deeply explorative, requiring the player to scour the map for keys to progress. There are secrets hidden behind puzzles and sneaky switches lead to better weapons, power-ups, and caches of ammo and health to find. Most levels have unique set pieces and obstacles in them to give them their own identity, but they tend to blur together since they all use similar brown and tan color palettes and locations–again, mainly castles. Sadly, level themes are not the only thing Quake repeats.

While exploring a level and searching for secrets, there will be hordes of enemies to fight through. And the combat in Quake is honestly great. It’s as fast and frantic as Doom, but with the invention of the z-axis, enemies on higher ground now actually have to be aimed at to hit. It’s a small thing, but it makes the game feel that bit more modern than its predecessors. All the enemies fill different roles in the game, ranging from harassing you up close with melee attacks, attacking from afar with ranged explosives and fireballs, or being completely annoying and borderline unfair like the Vores, who shoot homing, exploring balls. Luckily, you have a range of weapons, from shotguns to nail guns to grenade launchers, that work best against different enemy types. Unfortunately, weapon variety leaves a lot to be desired. First you will get a shotgun, then a double barrel shotgun; a nail gun and then a super nail; grenade launcher then a missile launcher. These similar weapons will use the same ammo type, but use that ammo at double the rate. I think the intention was for the players to use the weaker weapons on weaker enemies to converse ammo, but the stronger weapons kill them faster so you’re not actually saving anything in the long run. It’s not a big deal at all, it is just disappointing that half the weapons in the game are copies of other ones.

Like the combat, the pacing in Quake is absurdly fast. The character glides around more than walks like a hockey player barrelling down the rink, the enemies are relentless once they spot you, and the difficulty curve is near perfect. The game is great at introducing trickier puzzles, harder enemies, and better weapons as the player progresses through levels. Until the fourth episode, that is. I don’t know what happened, but the difficult spike between episode three and four is ridiculous and a little obnoxious. The levels in episode three were getting tough, but nothing insurmountable, but episode four gets stupid hard. Strong enemies being brought out before you have strong enough weapons to comfortably deal with them, more limited ammo and armor, puzzles that feel more obtuse than clever, and more of the goddamned Vores with their hellish homing bombs and Spawns that rush you down, can jump clear across a room in an instant, and explode when killed. Levels in episode three usually took about ten minutes with thorough exploration. Levels in episode four were ending at close to twenty minutes of just fighting tooth and nail to get through–and that’s not even accounting for all the time quick saving and quick loading. These levels are not completely unfun, but I found myself getting more frustrated with them than anything.

In the end though, I still thoroughly enjoyed Quake. The difficult spike at the end goes through the roof and I wish there was more weapon variety overall, but the game is still a great cathartic, fast as hell shooter that has aged incredibly well, especially with a coat of high-res paint over it. The game is also massive. If you buy the new remaster, you get the base games, the expansion packs that came out in the 90’s, the Honey level pack made by the studio that developed the new Wolfenstein games, a horde mode, and Quake 64, the original Nintendo 64 port of the game. I didn’t have time to play any of these except a little bit of Honey for this review because I underestimated how large the base game was, but I may have to go back to give this extra content a spin. I’ve discovered since starting this blog that I am a fan of Boomer Shooters, and Quake is the exemplar of the genre I’ve played so far.

Video Games & Capitalism

/ atomicbobomb / Leave a comment

Media as Ads

Last week, the Game Awards took place. While I didn’t watch the show, there was a moment I read about and saw online that was a complete summarization of the show. Geoff Keighley, creator and host of the award show, stood on stage in his suit jacket/t-shirt combination, under the lights and in front of the cameras, and told the audience that he and the Game Awards condemn harassment in the offices of video game studios. Then he introduced a trailer for a new Quantic Dream game, a studio notorious for an abusive workplace culture that includes sexual harassment and bigotry from its higher ups, including CEO David Cage. This sardonic moment was not too surprising, honestly. The Game Awards have seemed concerned in being a vehicle for commercials and hype—pretty much just wanting to be a mini E3—then actually celebrating video games, their accomplishments of the years, and their creators. Video games are a billion dollar industry and, like anything making that incomprehensible amount of money, it is in the pocket of capitalism overlords sucking their workers and consumers dry while getting fat and bloated with obscene wealth. 

I said the Game Awards being a platform for ads isn’t surprising. That’s because game companies have had a long history of treating game media and journalism as a source of advertising for them. From blacklisting reviewers or media outlets for not reviewing a game positively or making reviewers sign NDAs saying they will not mention bugs in reviews or have to show pre-approved gameplay footage. Cyberpunk 2077 recently used NDAs to gloss over known issues with the game prior to release. It is estimated that CD Projekt Red spent almost twice as much on marketing Cyberpunk as it did actually developing it, which is absurd frankly. That is, until you realize that it worked. Advertising the game, hyping it up as much as possible, making everyone think they needed to have it at launch, was the plan and it led to over 10 million copies of the game being bought in its first month. Publishers will use hype culture to try to squeeze as many day one sales of a game as they can, especially when they know the game is going to launch broken to all hell or is just plain awful. 

But that is just to get money when the game is released. Capitalism isn’t satisfied just making money once on a product, no matter how much profit it brings in. Capitalism is only interested in infinite growth, infinite profits. So how do you continue to make profit on a product that’s already been bought?

To Feed Off Whales

When a whale dies in the ocean, its body sometimes sinks to the sea floor where its decaying corpse will attract and be fed on by scavengers and fauna. This is called a whale fall. It can create unique and localized ecosystems among the sands since plants and animals can survive for decades off the nourishment taken from the dead whale. In nature, this is a fascinating, grotesquely beautiful thing, but as a business practice, it is simply grotesque.

Sadly, in-game purchases like loot boxes, microtransactions, and gacha mechanics are standard now, even in full priced games. More often than not, they have a direct impact on a game’s quality. When the purpose of a game is to push additional payments from the player, they have to be designed around microtransactions. They become grindier to incentivize purchasing experience boosters, they create FOMO by offering limited time cosmetics, and they offer new characters or weapons only from random chance pulls instead of letting the player pick and choose what they might most want. But if a developer or publisher wants to bend a game til breaking just to fit money grubbing schemes into them, that’s their choice. It’s stupid, but it’s their choice. I’m not going to bemoan a game for what it could have been without extra monetization because, at the end of the day, it is just a product to be sold. However, I will always rage against the cost these in-game purchases have on actual human lives.

Loot boxes and microtransactions often use gambling mechanics like flashy animations during unlocks, randomized odds to get what you actually want, and confusing menus with the purchase button always being the easiest one to find. They are built to prey on people with gambling addictions, OCD, or other mental illnesses. There are countless stories out there of recovering gamble addicts or people compelled to complete things having to stop playing their favorite games because they felt targeted and pressured to buy in-game purchases, of adults and even kids spending thousands of dollars on a single game through microtransactions, and of folks falling down a pit of loot boxes just trying to get a character or skin they want. It’s easy to say “Well just don’t spend the money” if you don’t feel that pull, if you do not have an issue with gambling or mental illness, but the fact that games make it so easy to do, so easy just to put spend a little more money with the click of button, is the real problem here. 

Of course, not every player is dropping hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars into a single game. The vast majority are not, but, in a sick reversal of the richest 1% elite, the burden of cost on these games are often put on very few players–the whales. This dehumanizing term refers to the small percentage of players that spend the most amount of money in a game–the biggest fish in the shallowest pond. These games can strip these players bare, lead them to economic disaster, and continue to build their digital empires upon their bones.

Bloody and Bruised, Crunched and Abused

Capitalism’s contempt doesn’t end just at the consumers buying their products, but also the workers making them. Since companies will do anything to make even a little more money, an easy way to achieve this is to limit costs in production and this often comes from exploiting their employees. This is true in the video game industry and the most egregious manifestation is with crunch.

Crunch in terms of game development refers to the time when employees are working in overdrive to meet a release. It can take many forms, but the common thread is long days and weeks without time off. Think of any major game from the last decade or so and it’s pretty much guaranteed the developers had to rely on crunch to ship it–twelve or more hour days, six or seven days a week, for months at a time. This overworking can have severe effects on the workers’ mental and physical health. It shouldn’t have to be explained why crunch is wrong. No one should be working so long and hard that they become ill, no one should have to go weeks at a time without seeing their family to finish any project, no one should ever feel obligated to sleep under their desk. It’s inhuman. Crunch is abuse to workers. Sadly, it’s not the only type they will have to face.

The past few years have been terrible in terms of abuse at video game studios. Both Ubisoft and Activision Blizzard have had many employees come out with their stories of being sexually harassed by people in the companies, many of them managers, and often seemingly being protected by other higher ups. Activision Blizzard laid off hundreds of employees both in 2019 (even after making record breaking profits in 2018) and just this month when many members of the Ravensoft team were let go after being told for months that pay increases were in the works. These layoffs are often argued to be necessary to balance the costs of game development. This also strikes as incongruous though since the easiest way to reduce costs at one of these companies would be to reduce the outrageously bloated salaries of their CEOs (especially at Activision Blizzard where Bobby Kotick is already a billionaire).

The Ethical Consumption of Video Games

Before promoting the product of an abusive company at the Game Awards, Geoff Keighley said we should show companies our true values and “vote with our wallets.” And this is the only true thing he probably said all night. Was is tone-deaf and out of touch? Maybe. Was it well meaning? Probably. Was it a mealy mouthed, idle threat of a weak puppy dog in a den of hungry wolves? Absolutely. But it is true. The best thing you can do as a consumer to show companies their practices are not ok is to not purchase their products. Boycotts can be an effective way to tell a company to fuck off since the consumers’ purchases are what give them the money and power to continue to exist.

Video games are in a unique position for consumer goods since the second hand market is so accessible and thriving for them, meaning that boycotting a company and never having to purchase their product only has to last until their games appear on the shelf of your local used store. Since companies do not see any additional revenue from the purchase of a used game, you can buy a game you might want without having to worry about that money going to companies that are overworking and underpaying their staff. As someone who prefers collecting physical copies of games, this is how I buy a lot of them. I have a long list–too long to get into here–of developers and publishers whose games I refuse to buy new. I will wait to find a used copy of their games if I know crunch was used in making it. I completely understand the preference for digital copies of games and if you prefer those, I suggest waiting for sales so terrible companies see less profit from them. In the end, everyone will have to decide for themselves which companies they feel alright to support and they will have to draw their own lines in the sand.

Apart from boycotting companies that are practicing harmful business practices, you can also do the opposite and support good companies. Show some appreciation for companies that do rely on crunch and treat their workers with respect–this is why I have purchased every Supergiant Games, even though I’ve only really played Hades so far. And support video game workers attempts to unionize. Follow social media pages like ABetterABK and Game Workers Unite. Educate yourself on the more nasty practices of the industry–personally, I’m a big fan of the Jimquistion and Matt McMuscle’s Wha Happun? series on YouTube. I know it can be a bummer–hell, it can be downright depressing and disheartening–but the industry will never get better if we all turn a blind eye to the capitalist hands pulling the string–exploiting workers, preying off their own fans, releasing half-completed, broken games. Remember that we all do better when we all do better and in this case “we” stands for us the consumers, the workers in trenches, and the games we love.