Spider-Man (2018) & Web Swinging

/ atomicbobomb / Leave a comment

I’ve loved the character of Spider-Man ever since I was a kid watching the 90’s cartoon. Recently, I’ve been getting into comic books and Spider-Man was one of the first stories I started reading. There’s something about Peter Parker and his superhero alter ego that I find very relatable—his unbreakable spirit and optimism, his genuine joy and fun had with being a superhero, his down-on-his-luck life that will never let him get too far ahead of his problems. He is a very human character to me, much more so than many other popular superheroes. But I’ve never really played a Spider-Man game until Insomniac Games released Spider-Man in 2018. Games with the character always seemed to float around the middle of the road in terms of opinions on them—never truly great, but not often terrible either. It’s strange because Spider-Man as a character has a built in unique selling point that should fit perfectly in the world of video games: his web swinging. And this was the first aspect of Spider-Man that clicked with me and helped me realize what a great game I was about to play.

The most important thing about the web swinging is to be fun and feel good. Since you will be zipping around New York all the time, the game has to make sure that the movement mechanics never feel tedious, stale, or complicated. Luckily, Spider-Man nails this aspect. The web swinging is simple enough for anyone picking up the game to do, but has enough depth and nuance for people who want to spend hours just swinging around and taking in the sights. Continually swinging is as easy as holding down the trigger, but knowing how to get the most speed or distance based on where in the arch you release and jump takes time and focus. 

Once you have mastered the web swinging in the game, it feels satisfying just traversing the city just seeing how fast you can go, how high you can get in a jump, and how long you can go without touching the ground like a extreme sport version of the floor is lava. Perfecting moves like pulling yourself to a corner or pole and immediately jumping off for more speed, the quick turn while running on a wall, and the quick recovery jump takes practice and you really have the sense of getting better and filling out the role of Spider-Man the more you play. Some of these moves have to be bought with skill points after a level up, which is a little disappointing. They help with the flow of web swinging as sort of mid-air combo extenders that I would have liked all of them to be available from the beginning of the game. They are not necessary enough that I ever felt satisfied using the skill points to purchase them, nor are they complicated enough that I see a need to lock them off to players in the beginning. But once you have them, you have more tools in your web swinging Swiss Army knife. And those do come in handy once the game decides to test your skills.

Every once in a while, Spider-Man likes to put you through your paces with web swinging challenges. Some bosses have to be chased through the city and caught before you can punch them. Taskmaster devises a series of challenges for Spider-Man to prove himself at but he appears and you can punch him and a good chunk of these require swinging through hoops while chasing down drones. And, probably my personal favorite series or challenges, Spider-Man can chase after pigeons flying around buildings, but not to punch them, to bring them back to their owner. These challenges test every aspect of web swinging from speed to distance to height. They can be frustrating at first—I had the hardest time catching up to the Shocker when you first fight him early in the game—but they act as a great way to practice web swinging through gameplay and show you how much better you get as the game progresses.

When I first saw Spider-Man, I honestly wasn’t that interested in it. It looked like an Arkham game (which I hadn’t played at the time) dropped into a Ubisoft styled open world. It was the map that really lost me at first. I’ve been growing less and less interested in open world games as I grow older. Ubiosft style worlds are a major reason for this as I’ve grown so sick of accessing towers or certain points on a map only to scatter samey missions and busy work around the world for me to do. But I underestimated how much Peter Parker’s web swinging would help with the tedium that usually comes with this sort of world design.

Web swinging is fast. You can travel hundreds of feet in seconds and you don’t have to worry yourself with traffic, crowds, or stamina like those walking plebs on the ground. You can travel across the entirety of Manhattan in minutes, meaning nothing you could want to do is ever very far away. Unlocking the map in Spider-Man requires hacking a police tower first, revealing that section of the island and giving you a slew of missions and collectibles to hunt down. The web swinging in the game makes these extremely easy to get too, though, both by the speed you can traverse the map and the inherent heights you can reach. Where a collectible high from ground level in an Assassin’s Creed game or even Breath of the Wild requires a lot of fiddling climbing, Spider-Man swings in already stories up and can easily run up any vertical wall to the top. The ease of movement across the game map and the general fun of web swinging meant that I never got bored or burnt out doing everything. In fact, I would often put off going to the next story mission just to swing around, enjoy the view, listen to J. Jonah Jameson rant about Spider-Man, and catch pigeons or foil crimes.

Some crimes that can pop up on your patrol around the city involve chasing after stolen cars as they careen down the  road, but every crime break up ends with punching mooks. The combat in Spider-Man is complex, insanely fast, and provides many tools and techniques to consider in the heat of the moment. I really liked it after I got the hang of it, but it’s the one part of the game that web swinging informs the least. Sure, you can swing around the battles like some sort of spandex clad Tarzan, but it’s not efficient at all. But this doesn’t mean that the webs themselves are not utilized in the heat of battle. Webs are used to get effect as means of disarming distant enemies, incapacitating foes by sticking them to walls and the floor, and, my favorite, as a great way to close the space to mooks to continue a combo. These implications are well executed, but I feel like there could have been more options of movement by web swinging around in the middle of the battle.

There are a few times where swinging and fighting are more closely tied together, mainly when fighting airborne enemies, and it leads to what might be the highlight of the whole game for me: the boss fight with Vulture and Electro. Since both these enemies use their powers to fly high above the ground, you must similarly say high enough to fight them. This leads to an absolutely thrilling fight above a factory where you will be using the smokestacks, cat walks, and tall buildings to continuously swing around stories from the ground, all while keeping tabs on two different enemies, dodging attacks, and dishing out damage until they are defeated. It’s such an intense balancing act of swings, attacks, and last second dodges that had me (to use a much overused phrase) feeling like Spider-Man.

Ape Escape – Critical Miss #28

/ atomicbobomb / Leave a comment
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

5 Favorite Roguelikes

/ atomicbobomb / 1 Comment

The term roguelike is an interesting one. It was originally created to describe games similar to the 1980 game Rogue, a dungeon crawler with randomly generated levels, turn-based combat, and permadeath with nothing carrying over from run to run. Now the term has expanded to include any game with randomly generated levels or encounters and permadeath. Some folks have extreme ire against the term being used in such a sweeping manner, debating online that the term should be roguelite instead. While I do have my own definitions for what both roguelike and roguelite means, they are just my personal definitions. My opinion on the debate as a whole is that it doesn’t really matter. Genre names are more limiting than anything else and language is a continually growing, evolving thing so terms often become bigger than originally intended.

But this is all to say that I love roguelike games. I love when a game in the genre succeeds at still feeling fresh after dozens, or even hundreds, of hours played. I’m fascinated by how the games all have their own sort of gameplay language they use to speak to the player. I adore getting lost in games that are so heavily mechanics driven, playing run after run, and learning a little more about the game each time. I wanted to take some time to discuss a few of my favorite games in the genre. Keep in mind, I haven’t played every roguelike. Some major games I’ve only played little to none of would be FTL, Risk of Rain, and Nuclear Throne. And honorable mentions going out to Darkest Dungeon, Slay the Spire, and Into the Breach—all of which are incredible games, but feel to me to be games with roguelike elements more so than roguelike games. But with all that out of the way, let’s get into my top five favorite roguelikes.

#5) Hades

Hades released last year to instant critical and fan applause. It topped many best of the year lists and has been a commercial smash hit for developer Supergiant Games. And I found myself on the outskirts of this celebration, however. I picked up Hades the day it released on Switch and loved the gorgeous art direction, the intense and lightning quick combat, and expressiveness allotted to the player when building a run from boons offered by the Olympian Gods. However, I found myself less interested in the story and characters as most people seemed to be, preferring to just hop back into the next run. I was disappointed in the lack of gameplay benefits the relationship system brought. Neither of these are bad things really, just things I didn’t particularly care for in the game. Hades is incredible, no doubt, but it came out pretty much the same time as another roguelike in 2020—one you will be seeing later on this list—which devoured all my free time of a few months. 

#4) Streets of Rogue

Streets of Rogue is a fantastic little game with incredible depth. As a top down, 2D immersive sim, each floor tasks you with completing certain missions like neutralizing a target, stealing from a safe, or escorting an NPC to the exit of the level. How you complete these missions, though, are completely up to you. You can hack enemy turrets to fire upon their owners, use vent systems to poison a building full of hostiles, sneak around all guards, or just go in guns blazing and killing everyone in your way. What makes the game great is the options given to the player and how the game world reacts to them. Some classes immediately hate each other and will fight on sight like the members of the opposing gangs, thieves and police, gorillas and scientists. It leads to some of the most chaotic situations a roguelike can offer and some of the highest satisfaction too when everything goes just according as planned.

#3) Enter the Gungeon

Enter the Gungeon probably has the best moment-to-moment gameplay out of any game on this list. It’s face-paced, brutal, and an absolute blast to play. Shooting down enemies, dodging bullets, sliding across tables, and rolling through pots and boxes all feels incredible due to the insane amount of polish in the game. Enemies are all expressive and easy to spot, things explode into clouds of pixels that then cover the floor, and every gun has a unique reload animation. And everything in the game is a gun. The enemies are bullets, the bosses’ names are gun puns, the guns you can pick up are reference guns in movies and games, there’s even guns that shoot smaller guns which in turn shoot bullets. The difficulty is set higher than most roguelikes I would say, but it feels so good to play that you will find yourself loading up another run again and again and a gun and again.

#2) Spelunkey 2

Remember when I said that another roguelike came out around the same time as Hades? Well this is it. After not being able to really get into the first Spelunkey, I was shocked how much I loved Spelunkey 2. It feels like a remixed and perfected version of the first game with tweaks, changes, and new additions to keep things fresh for old players and exciting for new players like myself. I’ve never played another roguelike where the player’s skill matters as much as in Spelunkey 2 due to the fact that the item pool is very limited and the game is obscenely difficult, with death often coming instantly and hilariously and with you cursing Derek Yu. It can feel discouraging to get far into a run only for it to end in a second due to a poor jump or misplace bomb, but if you stick with it there are some of the most satisfying challenges to be overcome in the game. I named Spelunky 2 my game of the year for 2020, so if you are interested in a deeper look at what makes it so great, you can find that here.

#1) The Binding of Isaac

This is it, folks. The big one. The reason I bought a New 3DS and a PS4. The game that started me on the road to loving video games. My favorite game of all time. 

The original flash Isaac was one of the first modern roguelikes and helped popularize the genre. The game has been expanded many times—I personally picked it up during Rebirth and after—which has lead to sine wave of quality, but the game is so vast, with some many secrets to discover, hundreds of things to unlock, nearly unlimited synergies between items to learn, all leading to no two runs feeling the same. The game has its own language that it speaks to the player with and it expects them to learn in order to tilt luck in your favor. What started as developer Edmund McMillen wanting to make a smaller game poking fun at Catholicism blossomed into something bigger, something more personal, and one of the most popular indie games ever made. This game means so much to me, and there is so much I want to discuss about it at any given time, that I find it hard to write about because my thoughts get wiped up and spun around like a hurricane. It is my “forever game,” a game I can pick up anytime and anywhere and still enjoy it. Come Hell or high water, from the beginning of Creation until the moment of Rapture, I will always love The Binding of Isaac.

Batman: Arkham Asylum – Critical Miss #27

/ atomicbobomb / Leave a comment
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.

Katana Zero / Ghostrunner & Instant Kill Combat

/ atomicbobomb / Leave a comment

I recently played through two games that are strikingly similar, those being Katana Zero and Ghostrunner. With Ghostrunner releasing about a year after Katana Zero it’s hard to feel a sense of “hey, can I copy your homework” with the game since it feels like the developers made Katana Zero in 3D. Both games center around cyberpunk narrative where the main character cannot remember their past, both use a katana as the main weapon, and both focus on high speed, precision play. But by far the most important similarity is that both games focus on combat where everybody, both your characters and enemies, die in just one hit. I wanted to see how both games designed themselves around this brutal combat style and see if one outshined the other. 

In my mind, there are three major things you need in a game for this type of franic-paced, one-hit kill combat to work. They are predictable enemy AI, situational awareness in the level design, and extremely tight controls. These help alleviate some of the frustration that can be caused by the high difficulty of games with one-hit deaths. When looking at both games, it becomes clear that Katana Zero is much more successful than Ghostrunner at incorporating these design elements into the game.

Let’s start with enemy AI. Fast-paced, insta-death games, much like stealth games, require enemies to be predictable. This helps the player read them the instant they appear and react occordly. When your character moves fast and death comes even faster, it feels unfair if enemies don’t act in a way you are used to and makes the game feel too reliant on trial and error more so than the player’s skill and reflexes. Both Katana Zero and Ghostrunner have enemies with very predictable AI—if they see you, they try to kill you instantly. While the enemies in Ghostrunner appear to only be alerted by sight, the baddies in Katana Zero will react to shots fired and the crashing of bottles within a certain radius and then immediately go to investigate. This makes them more exploitable, easier to lead into traps or an unexpected fight, but also means you have to take more consideration with your movements. With the level design being all platforms separated by bottomless pits in Ghostrunner, the enemies seem practically welded in place, unable to move enough to lead into ideal positions for the player. There were times in both games too that enemies seemed to respawn in slightly different positions upon retrying a level, completely throwing off the muscle memory rhythm I had built up, but there were times in Ghostrunner where some enemies seemed to fail to spawn at all. This could be a recurring bug, some sort of adaptive difficulty mode, or the dummies just walking off into pits, but it was also baffling and frustrating.

Situational awareness comes from two major things in games like these: the level design and the boldness of the characters. I never felt lost in Katana Zero because the 2D sprites of all characters made them instantly recognizable. Players see what weapons they are holding and will learn quickly how they attack and what will alert the mooks to their presence. At that point, it’s up to the player to react quickly enough and exploit the enemies’ awareness to their advantage. Ghostrunner is more muddy visually with it being a full 3D, cyberpunk dystopia city, where all enemies are guards or robots wearing metallic armor that blend in with the gray steel environments around them. The different types of enemies can be easily discerned after a second, but in a game as fast as Ghostrunner an extra second is death. 

While Katana Zero allows players to use the right analog stick to view the layout of the entire level anytime while playing, Ghostrunner does not let the players preview a level at all. This is a problem because being able to plan out a route is important when only one hit sends you back to the beginning of a level. There’s no way to no what’s coming up in a Ghostrunner beside throwing yourself at it, leading to clearing a section only to be killed by an enemy you did not know about, trying again and again, getting a little further at a time until you’ve seen every challenge in the level, and then you still have to run through it, dodging and slashing enemies apart perfectly, to win. There is so much trial and error in the levels of Ghostrunner, which can work in high difficulty games like Dark Souls or puzzle platformers like Limbo, but in a game that is so focused on speed, it just works as a huge pace killer.

Of course, the most important thing to have in games like these are tight, responsive controls. They are another way to tamper the frustration of instant death since the player will have no one to blame but themselves. Katana Zero controls are as sharp as the blade of the titular katana and feel absolutely great. The character movement speed feels just right, the jump has just the right amount of weight yet floatiness to it, and the sword slash, while having a few frames where you are vulnerable, feels great to master. The only minor issue I have with the controls are the wall jumps. The character has the Super Meat Boy effect where you slide a little up the wall when you jump into one and this leads to leaping on and off walls to feel slightly sticky. It’s not game breaking by any means, but it meant I avoided this technique whenever possible. This slight stickiness, though, is nothing compared to downright frustrating platforming controls of Ghostrunner. 

There are very few FPS games that have done platforming well (Dying Light is probably the best use of it that I’ve seen) and Ghostrunner sadly is with the majority. The inherent problem with platforming in 1st person is the narrow view. When you can only look in one direction at a time, it’s hard to know where a platform is under your feet. You also have no peripheral vision, meaning when you are trying to run up along a wall to run across it, you have no real idea how far you are when you jump. I died countless times in Ghostrunner due to this view. The horse blinders that come with a 1st person view is not so much of an issue in games with more open levels like DOOM or Dying Light since you can quickly choose a different path if you mess up (and more importantly can absorb a few hits before you die), but Ghostrunner’s level feel rather limited. This is partly due to 70% of the areas being bottomless pits like some empty oceans, but the linear feeling is mostly because enemy placements and the stage layouts are placed in very certain locations to encourage an optimal path through them. Even in the more open levels, paths you have to take to keep moving forward and killing enemies feel like set routes. The game has the 3D Sonic problem where the world feels like it was built specifically for the character of the game and not a real, breathing world. The moments where combat is left behind for straight platforming challenges throw the clumsiness of the platforming into sharp relief and it is not flattering; it’s frustrating at best and infuriating at its worst. 

Both games also have one other major similarity and that is a time dilation mechanic—an invaluable power to have when one hit kills you— but again, Katana Zero feels great to use while Ghostrunner stumbles. In Katana Zero, the player can slow down time for a few seconds with the simple press of a button. This works great as a way to more precisely position yourself, deflect a bullet back at an enemy, or just give you an extra second to assess the wave of mooks coming towards you. Ghostrunner, however, uses the ability to slow down time with a few different abilities, most notably the mid-air strafe. This move can only be performed in air. You press a button to slow down time and then you can move your character left or right, but momentum makes any slight tap of a joystick slide you gliding to the side like you were covered in grease. It is so loose and slippery that I found myself being unable to rely on it since my character would slide off further then I expected constantly. 

While both the games are very similar, the gulf of success between how Katana Zero and Ghostrunner pull off designing around instant death is vast and deep and dangerous. Katana Zero feels as disciplined as the samurai that the main character emulates. It truly feels like the designers thought long and hard and reworked and tweaked every aspect of the game to ensure it worked well with the speed, difficulty, and brutal nature of the gameplay. Ghostrunner feels like an honorable attempt at best and hypocritical at best. The game demands precision from the player but shows little in the design of enemy AI or controls. If I were to recommend one of these games, it would obviously be Katana Zero. While the story feels like a pace breaker at the beginning, I slowly got absorbed into it and found myself really engaging with the narrative and characters. They were the perfect break to let my brain cool off between intense combat sections. All Ghostrunner can offer beside it’s combat is a stock standard cyberpunk narrative and some of the most frustrating platforming sections I’ve ever played.

Pokémon Snap: Critical Miss #26

/ atomicbobomb / Leave a comment
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

Vampyr & Eating NPCs

Featured / atomicbobomb / 4 Comments

2020 was something else, wasn’t it? With the pandemic and so much civil unrest, there were parts of the year that seem like a bad dream to me. March marked one year of working from home and I’m one of the lucky ones to have a job that can be done from home. My main hobbies of reading and video games are also inherently solitary ones, so I don’t mind staying inside a lot. But after a year, even I’m starting to go stir crazy. Not helping is that I’ve been playing Dontnod’s Vampyr over the past few months, a game that reflects the pandemic and people’s suffering because of it in a very surreal way. It’s interesting then that the biggest threat to the characters in the game is not the pandemic they face, but the player themselves.

At first glance, Vampyr looks like just a standard pseudo-open world, action RPG. The meat and bones of the game are based around stamina focused combat and exploring London as Johnathan Reid, a doctor turned vampire, while the city is being eaten alive by the effects of the Great War and the Spanish Flu simultaneously. While the setting is fascinating, combat feels clunky and loose, especially in boss fights when it is thrown into focus, the visuals tend to be muddy and character models particularly suffer, and the story is not especially well written, leaving the body of the game feeling malnourished. But the heart of the game is still strong, pumping blood throughout the rest of it and keeping it alive—that being the NPC’s and their lives being subjected to the player’s decisions.

Nearly every NPC in the game can be interacted with and spoken to—all of them have problems they are dealing with, secrets they are keeping, fears, dreams, desires that help them and the city of London both feel alive. They can be killed by Johnathan too, used to feed his vampiric thirst for blood. Feeding on an NPC gives the player a shot of experience points, making it the fastest way to get some quick levels and improve your skills. The trade off is that the character killed is obviously dead, never to be spoken to again, merchants cannot be traded with, and the district’s overall health will suffer. You can also gain experience by completing quests for characters and beating basic mobs and bosses, but the quests and bosses are finite and the common enemies you could grind against give such a pitiful amount of experience that it’s not worth the time. The combat in the game is not complicated enough that you will be at a huge disadvantage if you are under-leveled, but to get a variety of skills and improve them, eating NPCs is by far the most effective way to level up.

The game smartly encourages the player to interact with the story and get to know every character you wish to kill before committing the crime. Every character has aspects of their personality or past that can be discovered through dialogue trees, information learned from other characters, notes and clues scattered around, even spying on them occasionally by using your powerful vampire hearing to listen to their private conversations. Slowly learning about characters through conversations feels natural and makes them feel fleshed out and able to surprise you. A character you initially distrust or dislike turns out to be a good person tried by difficult times. All the while, a character you liked at first might confess to committing some horrible act or hold some disgusting views. It’s up to you as the player to navigate the gray, foggy streets of London and its residents to decide which character is the best (most deserving, in a way) to be fed on. But Johnathan Reid is a man of two opposing ideals and it is also his desire to keep the city alive and healthy.

Before his fate sank its fangs into Johnathan’s neck, he was a doctor and compelled by the Hippocratic Oath to treat all the sick he met. While this is still the case, he is obviously conflicted by his need to feed on the blood of the living, leading to another mechanic in Vampyr. The same way you must converse with and discover all you can about a NPC, you are also incentivized to treat their illnesses. If a character is sick, then their blood is weaker when feeding on them, meaning the player gets less experience points from killing them. The sicker they are, a bigger chunk of experience is missing. So while a player is going around speaking with NPCs and learning more about them, they will also inquire about their medical needs, craft medicines, and dole them out like a health concerned Santa Claus. It’s important to diligently treat the citizens of London and think carefully about who you feed on because the foundation of any community is its citizens and they all have knock-on effects on the city’s health.

It’s easy to think of London in Vampyr as an old cottage and the NPC citizens are the stones in the walls: the more of them you take out, the weaker the house will become overall—susceptible to the outside elements like weather and predators. The city is divided into districts and the health of each is displayed in a scale ranging from sanitized to hostile. A district’s overall health determines the price that merchants will sell their wares at and the amount of enemies that will appear in the streets, along with their levels—the worst the health in a district is, the more high level enemies you will face. During my playthrough, I had only one district fall into hostile and that was due to a choice made about the fate of Aloysius Dawson.

Dawson lived in the wealthy West End district of London. He is the richest man in the city and the pillar of his community. He is terrified of death and thinks his money makes him the most powerful man in the city. A seperatist at heart, he wants to build a wall around the West End to prevent the plague from reaching into the rich homes and let the poorer neighborhoods fight for themselves instead of helping them. I hated Dawson much like I hate the real-life, mega-rich capitalists he is an analogue for. So when it was time to decide if I would turn him into a vampire or let him die, I chose the latter and convinced him to accept his death. He did so and died that night, donating medical supplies and money to the community resulting in everyone returning to a health state for a while. I took advantage of that bump to the city’s health to go on a spree of sorts, eating the NPCs on my list I didn’t like and raking in the experience. When I was finished, the West End had fallen into the critical range and I then learned that meant all NPCs I spared were killed anyways and the district was overrun by Skals and vampire hunters.

Losing all NPCs in the West End was the only real time the game had an emotional impact on me. I felt like garbage because there were characters in the district I truly liked and didn’t want to die. Like Charlotte, the love interest Lady Ashbury’s adopted daughter. I thought Charlotte’s death would have repercussions with Johnathan’s relationship to Lady Ashbury, but it was never mentioned in any future conversations. I still didn’t want her to die though. She was one of the many folks just trying to survive in the chaos of the pandemic. She wasn’t trying to profit off it or willfully ignore the suffering of others or a danger to other citizens like so many others and even Johnathan himself.

Treating patients to keep the city healthy is a great way to show Johnathan as a doctor through gameplay and allowing players to devour NPCs shows his vampiric side. However, I feel the latter is not pushed enough by the game. It would make Johnathan’s melodrama of being torn between wanting to save lives and his need to end them to survive a lot more poignant and relatable if the game really pushed players to eat folks to survive too. As stated above, the game is not difficult enough where being under leveled from abstaining to feed on NPCs is that big of a detriment. I thought it would be interesting if the game had a mechanic similar to that of Dark Souls 2 where a small chunk of your overall health is knocked off every time you die. It’s negligible at first, but after multiple deaths the player will start feeling their missing health points more and more. With this idea, the only way to get these health points back is to feed on someone, pushing players even harder to feed on the NPCs while also requiring more thought about when and who to devour.

I’m only disappointed because everyone else I’ve talked about Vampyr went with a no kill run to shoot for the good ending of the game when the mechanic of eating NPCs is such a great idea. It’s a problem not just with Vampyr, but pretty much every game with obvious good/bad endings. Players are more likely to shoot for a good ending and can miss out on mechanics and stories a game has to offer when pushed towards one goal. I knew of the multiple endings when booting up Vampyr the first time, but I didn’t care about which one I got. To me, the strength of the game and its most interesting aspect is the choice given to players about which NPCs to feed on. I wanted to interact with this mechanic, to see how it was utilized and how far it could be pushed, to see the benefits and drawbacks, and what differences it brought to my experience compared to others. When the West End fell and everyone there perished, I felt horrible, but it was thematically in tune with the game. You should expect a game named Vampyr to make you feel like a monster.

Super Mario Galaxy: Critical Miss #25

Featured / atomicbobomb / 1 Comment

Shoot for the Golden Stars

I’ve always loved Mario games. From the colorful, cheery art styles to the depth of the movement mechanics to the sheer creativity displayed in the games, Mario is the undisputed king of video games. But there are still major gaps in my experiences with his games. I never had a Gamecube growing up so I missed out on Sunshine and The Thousand-Year Door until recently. While I had a Wii as a teenager, I didn’t really play it all that much. This means I also missed out on Super Mario Galaxy, the debut 3D Mario game on the system released in 2007, still widely considered to be one of the best games in the series, until the recent rerelease of the game in the Super Mario 3D Allstars on the Switch. 

The core game of Galaxy appears to be untouched with its port to the Switch, but what has changed are the controls. Since the game was made to be the marquee 3D Mario title of the Wii, Galaxy was designed to be a showcase of the new Wiimote and its features. The pointer was used to collect Star Bits, grab blue stars to pull Mario to them, and sometimes even an air horn looking fan that blows Mario in a bubble. Motion controls were utilized too, of course. Wagging the Wiimote made Mario do a spin attack and specific levels, like the manta ray racing and ball rolling levels, have unique controls that all involve twisting the Wiimote around. The Switch port allows the player to substitute the motion controls for standard button and analogue stick controls, but offers the player two options for how to control the pointer. In handheld mode, you use the Switch’s touch screen to guide the pointer. In menus or simpler levels, this works fine, but in long Pull Star sections, you will find your hand blocking most of the screen, making it impossible to see what’s coming up ahead. In docked mode with detached Joy Cons, you can use the right controller to aim the pointer and this is how I would recommend playing the game. Since the Joy Con uses gyro motion instead of infrared sensors like the Wiimote, you will have to recenter the pointer often, but this is easily done with a quick press of the R button and is never a hassle.

I wanted to mention the differences in controls because that’s the only major difference in the version of the game I played. Besides those, Super Mario Galaxy is the same game at its planetary core. After Bowser steals Peach along with her entire castle and a short tutorial level, Mario finds himself on the Planet Observatory, newcomer Rosalina’s intergalactic vessel. As a hub world, the Planet Observatory is not my favorite. There are nice aspects to it, like how more instruments get added to the theme that plays and the more livelier it feels as you progress through the game, and I appreciate how contained and focused it feels. However, there’s not much to do there—no secrets or extra levels to find and all rewards like extra lives are in plain sight. I think I would have preferred a simple level select or world map instead because the act of climbing all the way up the Observatory for late game levels takes a little too long, and that’s time taken out of playing the wonderful levels.

The incredible amount of creativity and variety on display in Super Mario Galaxy cannot be understated. There are forty-two levels in the game and, besides a few common themes and a few outright reskins near the end, each has mechanics and challenges differing from the rest. Sometimes you will be running under little planets as the camera tries to follow you. Other times you will be in a side scrolling type section with arrows on the walls dictating which direction gravity will pull you. There are launch star pieces to collect, blue switch pads to hit, lasers to avoid, cages to blow up with Bullet Bills, Star Bits to gather to feed to hungry Lumas for power up and additional routes in levels and even additional levels themselves! The whole game feels like you are a kid adrift in Toy Time Galaxy.

Forty-two levels is a massive increase to Mario 64’s fifteen stages and Sunshine’s nine (even Odyssey’s sixteen later), but there is the same amount of Stars to collect in all three games. This is because Galaxy’s levels are much smaller and usually more linear than the other 3D games in the series. Most levels have only three Stars to get with maybe a secret Star or Prankster Comet Star (a remixed challenge of a previous Star) to grab. This leads to the designs on the levels having a more mission based, get-to-point-B objective to them instead of 64 and Sunshine’s sandbox approach to level design. You see the Star’s location and a general route in the initial flyover of the level and then it’s just completing the challenges in the way to grab it. This would get repetitive having to do the same challenges three times, but luckily Galaxy’s levels have a lot of bits and pieces that are swapped in and out for different stars like building different things from the same set of Legos. It’s a little disappointing that players can’t decide or make their own path through levels like you can in other 3D Mario games, but with most of them being composed of small planets, with each having their own unique goal to accomplish, I understand why. The levels you create from hungry Luma’s themselves are just one-off challenges with a single Star to collect.

The whole game feels sadly limiting to the player—almost to the point where it feels more like a 2D game in the series as opposed to a 3D one. Mario has all his acrobatics of Super Mario 64 and that means a long list of moves that can be performed; the long jump, the triple long, slide somersault, and backflip are all tools like your plumber overall to pull out and use at any moment. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t give you much reason to ever use them in creative ways. I didn’t see anywhere I could take a shortcut by making tricky jumps like in 64 or Sunshine or any hard to reach nooks hiding secrets and collectables like the later 3D World and Odyssey offered. I may have missed them since it was my first time playing the game and it didn’t rather bother me that much in the end. With level design this stellar, it is not actually much of a problem that they are more linear because they are still incredibly fun to go through, but it did clash with how I expect a 3D Mario game to feel and that it was a little jarring.

The more I played Galaxy, the more it struck me how much of a transitory game between the older sandbox designed games in the series like 64 and Sunshine and the more linear 3D games of 3D Land and 3D World that took inspiration from Mario’s 2D roots. Oddly enough, this thought came to me most when thinking about the power-ups in the game. There’s a good handful of power-ups on display in Galaxy—more so than any other 3D game of the series at that point. The Fire Flower makes its debut in 3D, the Ice Flower creates ice under Mario’s feet and lets him slide across water, Bee Mario can fly for a short time and climb on certain surfaces, Spring Mario hops everywhere and is terrible, and the spooky Boo Mario can become intangible to phase through walls. All these power-ups are great fun to use, so it’s disappointing that they are as situational as the power-ups in 64 and some F.L.U.D.D. upgrades in Sunshine. Most are on a timer (including the Fire Flower which has always been an upgrade until the player was hit) and are used for specific challenges that must be completed with them. There is no way to take a power-up from the level you find it in and bring it to another for creative and experimental uses like would be possible in 3D World, there didn’t seem to be any chances to even bring them to different parts of the level to find secrets like you can with the Captures in Odyssey—you have to use them only for the specific challenge right in front of you. I get having more limited challenges help curate a more focused game, but it led to a nagging sense of inorganicness in the back of my head.

These are the things that came to my head when sitting down to write this review—the more linear, but still incredibly designed, fun, and creative levels, the disappointing situational requirements of the power-ups that had so much more potential, and the lack of utilization of Mario’s acrobatic movement, his greatest feature. But none of this is a deal break at all. Super Mario Galaxy is still an incredibly fun and rewarding game and very much deserves to be played today. I won’t say that I wasn’t disappointed with it because I was, but only slightly. After years of hearing how it’s possibly the greatest game ever, after countless reviews lauding its praises, and after playing Super Mario Odyssey—easily the best Mario game to me and possibly even one of the best games Nintendo has ever made—Galaxy had no chance other than to disappoint do to my in the clouds expectations and that is not the game’s fault. That’s the poison of hype, folks: it leaves you satisfied with even the greatest of games.

Going Under & Weapon Durability

Featured / atomicbobomb / Leave a comment

There are certain divisive mechanics or design choices in video games. These are things like escort missions, fetch quests, and grinding in RPGs—things that people either seem to absolutely despise, or it doesn’t bother them at all. The release of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild rekindled the fire of discussion around one such mechanic: weapon durability. Suddenly, the internet was aflame with debates of the merits, annoyances, and possible tweaks that could be made for breakable weapons in games. This discussion quickly spread from just Breath of the Wild and engulfed other games like the Witcher and Dark Souls series. I have to imagine the developers at Aggro Crab noticed these arguments burning up the internet and decided to double-down on the weapon durability mechanic because it is at the core of their recent game Going Under.

The game is a roguelite dungeon crawler that humorously mocks into late capitalism and startup culture with its story and characters while the combat is ripped right out of Breath of the Wild. There’s a variety of weapons that fall into a handful of attack patterns with swords and clubs swinging side to side, spears stab in a line, and heavy weapons slice in wide slow arcs or smash in front of the character. There are even ranged weapons with limited ammo, but they can be used for melee after all their shots have been used up and before they break. Every weapon is designed to break in Going Under and the player will have a lot of weapons break over the course of a run. Weapons break fast enough that you learn to never rely or expect any to last, but they last long enough to not be frustrating. Some people will get annoyed with the durability system, that is inevitable, but I think the designers at Aggro Crab did a fantastic job of tying pretty much every other aspect of the game in this mechanic.

The combat in Going Under has a hectic, chaotic energy to it thanks to the weapons breaking. If a weapon breaks in the middle of a fight, you have to decide whether to rush to grab another one, quickly switch to another weapon you’re holding, or finish the fight with your fists. You’ll find yourself constantly surveying the room you’re in for enemy attacks and weapons you could grab in the future all while dodging, attacking, and running around like an Amazon warehouse employee. Every weapon can be thrown too, meaning that if a weapon is close to breaking, you can use it for a bit of ranged damage by hurling it across a room. This is useful when you spot a weapon laying on a table or shelf you want to grab as you can position yourself next to it, chuck your old, busted weapon to create a moment, and then grab the next weapon and continue the battle.

Luckily, the rooms of the dungeons are small and confined. You have plenty of room to kite around enemies and avoid incoming attacks, but you will hardly ever be out of range of grabbing something, anything, that can be used as a weapon if your final one shatters in your hand before the room is cleared. The game has a sort of Dead Raising quality to it since pretty much everything can be used as a weapon. Chairs, pencils, swords, keyboards, even throw pillows can be grabbed and used to smack enemies around. And it is necessary to use everything you can get your hands on since weapons break so often, especially while fighting tankier enemies like the bosses.

As a general rule, I prefer boss fights to be one on one encounters. I like them to be big, imposing, and test my skills at the game. I’m always a little weary when a boss spawn basic mobs in the fight because it feels like a cheap way to complicate the fight instead of focusing on giving the boss tricky mechanics and harder to read attack patterns. This is obviously not a hardset rule, just a preference, since many games manage to design boss fights with basic minions in them too very well, and Going Under is one such game. Every boss in the game will occasionally summon mobs into the fight, but this is due to necessity. Bosses have long health bars and your weapons will break before you manage to chip it down completely. Having basic enemies spawn into the fight helps bring in new weapons to use once you defeat them. Sometimes beating the round of mobs will even summon a drone delivery, dropping off a box that can contain more weapons and even healing items.

As a roguelite, a big part of the appeal of Going Under is building a run as you explore a dungeon. Each floor has a room with a choice between skills you can equip, along with additional skills you can purchase from the shop or find in boxes that drop as you clear a room. These skills are all passive effects that range from changing the speed and damage of attack, acquiring and buffing enemies to fight with you, setting fire or freezing enemies under certain conditions. No skill actually affects the durability of weapons used in battles in the dungeon, which was disappointing at first. Then I realized the run building aspect of the game comes from the moment to moment gameplay and decision making with weapons to use then acquiring skills themselves.

There is something satisfying in the roguelike/lite genre when making a run work when the game seems to be working against you—not giving you useful upgrades or skill, nothing really tying anything together to build synergies between what you are handed. This can be frustrating in games like The Binding of Isaac or Slay the Spire where the best way to victory is creating a build as you play, but Going Under is more akin to Enter the Gungeon, where the passive skills and upgrades you get are secondary to the weapons you find. It goes back to the idea that during combat you will find yourself scanning the room for future weapons you may need. You will most likely acquire a preference for certain weapon types—for me, it was one or two handed weapons that attacked in a sweeping motion—but you can never rely on having those weapons available to use. So sometimes you will have to make do with what you can grab and this is where the run building aspect of Going Under lies for me—making use of weapons you may not like or know well, trying to ensure you keep as many good weapons you do like on hand at any giving time, and just making what you can get work no matter what. It adds a level of improvisation and strategy to the chaotic battles in the dungeons of the failed startups.

When Breath of the Wild released, I remember a lot of discussion about how the game needed a system or some way you could repair damaged weapons you liked so you could choose how long to keep them and when to toss them out. While the weapon durability mechanic in the game bothered me really, I agree with this idea. As a huge open world adventure, I think this would be a great way to add an RPG character building feel to Breath of the Wild and could be used as a way to reward players’ exploration. For a while, I thought Going Under was missing an opportunity to have a similar sort of mechanic in the game, either by a shop or consumable item that could repair your weapons or skills that could affect the durability of them. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was not necessary for Going Under and would possibly undercut the entire design of the game. Everything in the game, from level design to combat, is built around the weapon durability mechanic. Taking that out takes away all of the game’s uniqueness and charm.

Portal & Portal 2: Critical Miss #24

Featured / atomicbobomb / 1 Comment

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.