Top 5 Critical Miss Games of 2019

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I played a lot of older games this year, games that are considered classics, to see how well they held up for someone with no nostalgia for them. Honestly, this has been my favorite part of writing Atomic Bob-Omb. I wanted to celebrate nearly a year of Critical Miss by ranking my top 5 favorite games I played for the series in 2019

#5) Spryo 2: Ripto’s Rage

I was glad to play Spyro 1 and 2 this year. They were games I always wanted to play as a kid, and I did play a lot of a demo of the first game, but never owned them. While I found the first game to be clunky and frustrating with too precise of jumps with a very stiff arch, Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage as a good time. With its wide range of characters and setting, differing mission for orbs, and more relaxed but still challenging at times platfoming, it was my preferred of the first two Spyro games. I’m amazed how much adding a small flutter to Spyro’s jump added to the feel of the platforming. It was a very relaxing game to play, but stayed fun throughout the full adventure.

#4) Majora’s Mask

Majora’s Mask may have become my favorite 3D Zelda game this year. It’s so fascinating how the developers created a game that feels similar but also completely different than other games in the franchise. They cut down on dungeons but made those dungeons trickier and more interesting to explore. They shifted focus of the story from Link’s journey to Termina and its citizens. What truly sets this game apart are the transformation masks that change Link’s moveset and basically give you 4 characters to play as throughout the game. It’s easy to see why Zelda fans hold this game in such high regard nearly 20 years after its release.

#3) Doom

The original Doom is a hell of a fun time. While the sprites and early 3D art style has aged, it has a huge amount of charm today. The game excels at fast-paced, frantic combat and exploration. The core gameplay loop is running at breakneck speeds through the level, killing the hordes of hell, searching for the exit and possible secrets for extra weapons and power ups. For me, the best part of the games is its variety. There are many guns with differing uses and lots of enemies, with different behaviors to learn and optimal ways to kill. Add that with excellent level design and you have a landmark title that still holds up today.

#2) Resident Evil (Remake)

I learned this year that I love the gameplay loop of the early Resident Evil games of being dropped in a puzzle box building and slowly unraveling your way out. It helps that the Spencer mansion is expertly crafted and the player will have the layout nearly memorized after their first playthrough. The prerendered backgrounds look beautiful and the gameplay is extremely solid. The gun play is lacking, but it’s overshadowed by the game’s other mechanics: learning when to fight enemies or run, mapping out what paths are safe to run through or where you might need to burn bodies, managing your inventory to ensure safety and progress through the next puzzle. While the game isn’t very scary, it keeps the tension high enough to keep players on edge throughout the entire playthrough. It truly amazes me how well the Resident Evil Remake has aged (with the modern controls, of course).

#1) Papers, Please

Papers, Please was the most enthralling game I played for Critical Miss this year. The main mechanic of inspecting papers is unlike any I’ve experienced and the story was very emotional while being very minimalist. The best part of the game is how it uses the player’s beliefs for moral choices. Most games have moral choices baked into the code, as in doing certain things are considered good or bad by the game and can change how events play out. Papers, Please relies on the player to decide what is right or wrong. As long as you make enough money, the game will continue whether you help everyone in need or ignore their pleas. The emotional impact of the game is so ingrained with the player trying to do what they think is the right thing, that it would never work as any other form of media. Papers, Please is my favorite game of the year for this series for being utterly unique, impact full emotional, and truly fascinating from beginning to end.

Papers, Please – Critical Miss #11

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Working for the Clampdown

Solo developed video games have always interested me. They are a good place to see what can be accomplished with unhampered vision and passion. Lately I’ve been working my way through Return of the Obra Dinn by Lucas Pope. The game is fascinating and it made me interested to check out Pope’s earlier game Papers, Please. Met with critical acclaim when it was released in 2013, it has since kept up a reputation of a unique and heartfelt game.

In Papers, Please, you play as a border inspector for the totalitarian government of the fictional country of Arstotzka. The country takes obvious inspiration from the former Soviet Union and its heavy regulation and restriction of immigration. The gameplay focuses on checking the papers of all people trying to enter the country through your border checkpoint, accepting the immigrants with proper papers and denying all those with missing and forged papers. Your character gets paid for every person processed and pay is docked for every mistake you make. The money is important because you have a family at home that depends on you. Rent is immediately taken out every night and you must also pay for food, heat, and medicine if a family member is sick. That is, if you have enough money.

Everything in Paper, Please revolves around time and space management. Your desk space is extremely limited and you will soon have too many papers to check to have them all on you desk at once without overlapping. The time in a day you have to work is also limited and is even cut short sometimes by terrorist attacks. If you don’t process enough people in a work day, you’ll go home short on cash. The game throws a load of little things that take up a tiny amount of time which adds up throughout the day. This aspect of the Papers, Please is so smart and subtle it is a great candidate for a future post.

The most interesting thing in the game is the people trying to get into Arstotzka. Many are desperate to enter the country, begging and bribing you to let them in if their papers are forged. Some get mad at you for denying them entry and some are even bitter about returning to the country. There are dozens of sad stories that will pass through the checkpoint during a playthrough. Memorable ones for me were the couple were the wife is missing papers, the woman who wants you to deny a man because he plans to sell her into sex work, and the father who request you to steal a man’s passport so he can track him down for killing his young daughter.

Even through the game’s minimal dialogue, the character’s fear and sorrow are heart wrenching and it is effective at making the player want to help them. This is not easy to do though. You have two free mistakes in accepting improper people a day, so you have a little wiggle room if you play perfectly, but if you are too careless then you pay and the end of the day screen will remind you that it is your family that suffers. The player is constantly torn between wanting to help the people coming through the checkpoint and keeping their family healthy.

The game offers multiple playstyles without ever changing the core mechanics at all. During my first playthrough,I found the easiest way to win was to keep my head down and work under the government’s boot heel. The only problem with that is I felt horrible turning away anyone in need of help. During my second playthrough, I tried to help as many people as possible since I improved at the game, but quickly ran into issues making enough money to keep my family warm and full. Many games offer different skill sets for differing playstyles or classes, but Papers, Please stays the same game mechanically. You’ll still be checking papers and all, but it feels completely different trying to slyly subvert the government or just look out for you and your own.

There is a strange sense of meta-immersion in the game. It often feels like office work while looking over the number of papers needed to be checked and that feeling is only heighten while you are sitting at your desk playing on a computer. A complaint I’ve often heard against Papers, Please is that is can end up feeling too much like a job. This is a valid complaint because checking the papers can be tedious and fear of making a mistake is stressful like work can be. I’ve also heard people say that they would not consider Papers, Please a game due to it feeling too much like work and I don’t agree with that. The game still has very video games rules and logic. Booth upgrades can help you point out discrepancies and stamp passports faster, there are no repercussions of skipping a day of meals if you eat the next day, and the fact that you can quickly restart a day if you fail a task and lose are all examples of things that could only happen in a video game. Real life work doesn’t offer a redo button nor do books or movies offer the freedom of choice in Papers, Please.

It’s a game that only works as a video game and I was enthralled from beginning to end. The concept was interesting and the characters’ desperation fit perfectly with the setting and themes. Papers, Please is fascinating as a game because it uses a new and unconventional gameplay style to tell a believable story of human pain. Mechanically it is fresh and challenge, keeper players just on the edge of failure, but offering enough support throughout the game to keep them engaged.

Of course, there are some issues with the game. The art style I really like. It is rough and bleak, fitting perfectly with the former Soviet Union setting, but it does tend to make it difficult to spot certain discrepancies. Height was always an issue for me to catch due to the measuring bars behind the characters not being clear enough. The font on the documents is extremely pixelated, making it hard to read sometimes, and fingerprints are very messy, requiring me to just check for differences whenever they came up. Most discrepancies are noticeable while just looking over documents and comparing them, but it’s the moments when they are not clear at a glance that lead to frustration.

Other issues I have with the game are very minor. Failure can come in an instant at times if you forget to do a certain task in a day. Example of this would be losing because I denied a diplomat from entering Arstotzka because their papers were incorrect. But while failure can come quick, you can also restart just as quick on the day you failed. The pointer can also feel imprecise at times. It’s more annoying than frustrating when you mean to click on a date on a passport but end up highlighting the entire passport, but because of the imprecision, I never ended up using the final booth upgrade to double click to search for discrepancies.

But all these issues are forgotten when I think of the line of sad stories that passed through my checkpoint and how it made me feel genuinely terrible not to help those struggling people out. Papers, Please is so truly engaging and unique that I implore anyone who hasn’t played to please check it out. It is a highly emotional experience and a strong, sad story that doesn’t skimp on gameplay. It is an argument for video games to be considered art. It is a video game that only works because of the unique qualities that make games different from movies or books, and that is honestly the highest praise I can give any game.

Shovel Knight & Difficulty Curves

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Shovel Knight by Yacht Club has become one of my favorite 2D platformers since its release in 2014. The game is near perfection with great music, 8-bit art style, and level design that focuses on shoveling through dirt blocks and pogo jumping off enemies and obstacles. It is funny to think about how I picked the game up on a whim when it released. I hadn’t played many NES platformers at the time so there was nothing about Shovel Knight that I was nostalgic about. It’s also funny to think about how I couldn’t beat the game the first time without an invincibility cheat enabled. Since that first playthrough, I have beaten Shovel Knight a handful of times and I’ve come to realize that Shovel Knight might have the most perfectly crafted difficulty curve of any game I’ve played.

When talking about difficulty, it is important to first acknowledge that the term is completely subjective. People all have different skill set and levels of experience with games that lend certain games or genres to be more or less difficult. To use myself as an example: puzzles games are typically difficult for me, games like Fez and Grim Fandango I had to put down when I couldn’t wrap my head around certain puzzles, RPGs and action games like Person 5 and Bayonetta 2 always seem to click and I manage to play through no problem, and games like Bloodborne, The Binding of Isaac, and Megaman titles are second nature after playing through those games or similar ones, many times. Shovel Knight was extremely challenging for me during my first playthrough, but has become much easier after multiple playthroughs and playing other, similar titles.

Basically what I’m saying is Shovel Knight’s difficulty is hard to discuss. I can’t say what makes the game difficult for everybody overall. However, there are things in the game that make certain levels in the game more difficult than others. This is what creates a difficulty curve in a game.

Difficulty in a video game can be defined as how the game applies pressure on the player and Shovel Knight does this in two main ways. The first is by making jumps trickier. This is usually done by adding spikes or bottomless pits, which work as an instant death, around platforming challenges. This is most noticeable with the spiked ceilings in the Iron Whale, the many lava pits in the Lost City and the long sections of the Flying Machine over bottomless pits. The second way the game pressures the player is by restricting their time to be still and process their surroundings. This is done a lot in the Clockwork Tower with the conveyor belts and auto scrolling sections, but this method also appears in the Explodatorium in the section with the birds drop bombs on you and with the ice physics in the Stranded Ship.

A difficult curve in a video game is a tricky thing to get right. If things get too hard too quickly, players might not be able to keep up, but if it takes too long to increase the challenge, players may get bored. Shovel Knight’s difficulty curves raises at a perfect rate by starting with a tutorial level that teaches the player all the basic mechanics while lacking most hazards besides enemies until the end. Then the game increases the pressure on player a little more with each passing level. But Yacht Club games also did something very smart with the difficulty curve, that being they didn’t have the difficulty just consistently increase throughout the entire game.

A standard difficulty curve equates to the difficulty of the game increases with every level the player completes, but Shovel Knight has what I call a wave curve for its challenge. The game is split into three main sections and once you’ve completed all the levels in one section, you move to the next. With this structure, the first level of a new section will be slightly easier than the last level of the previous section. The slight dip in challenge before raising it again does wonders to keep the player engaged because it gives them a moment of slight rest after a difficult level, let’s them feel that they are improving at the game, and makes the difficulty of the game feel more dynamic and less predictable.

Shovel Knight takes a lot of queues from the classic Megaman series. This show mostly in the level design, but also appears in its nonlinear structure when choosing level. Each new section of the game presents few levels that can be completed in any order. Most the time, nonlinear games like this have a tough time constructing a satisfying difficulty curve. Either the difficult is very erratic because there is no structure to what levels can be completed or it’s flat, with every level being on the same difficulty level. Besides sectioning off later levels until after the early levels had been beaten, the developers at Yacht Club utilized a very subtle and smart choice to silently guide the player. When each section is revealed, the clouds on the map screen wipes away from left to right. When this happens, the players eyes will be drawn to the top left of the map and they will scan across the same way the clouds move. This mean the first levels they see will be the easiest in the section: Pridemoor Keep, Explodatorium, and Clockwork Tower in their respective sections. These levels are also the shortest distance for the players to travel when entering the next section.

The last thing to discuss on the topic of Shovel Knight’s difficulty would be the bosses. Honestly, I find all the bosses to be on the same level of difficulty. Later ones add more mechanics to the fight, like Plague Knight changing up the terrain or having to dig through dirt in Mole Knight’s fight, but none of them are very challenging. The only time I died to a boss was when they introduced instant kill elements to their fights. Propeller Knight has bottomless pits, Polar Knight has spikes, and the Enchantress, the penultimate boss, will destroy the floor beneath you and creates pits to fall into. I am not a fan of any boss with an instant death mechanic, but since Shovel Knight waits until the final few bosses to use them, I don’t find it that intrusive. It is the natural time a player would be expect a meaty challenge.

Shovel Knight excels at keeping the player engaged. The incredible soundtrack fuels them through levels with constantly new mechanics and obstacles that are all still tied to the central mechanic of the little blue knight and their shovel. The player keeps playing to see what the next level will introduce, but there is another guiding force working behind the scenes to engage the player. That is the perfectly crafted difficulty curve that knows the exact rate to introduce new challenge, what levels should be completed before players can access others, and even when to let off on the player to give them a breather. All this combines to a difficulty curve that make Shovel Knight one of the most consistently challenging games of its type, but also one of the most fun and rewarding ones to play through.

The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask – Critical Miss #10

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What do you when you’re expected to make a follow up to what is considered to be one of the greatest games ever made? This is the question Nintendo had to answer after Ocarina of Time. The developers must have decided to create something that is familiar and different at the same time because they created The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. It’s impressive that Majora’s Mask was built largely on Ocarina of Time’s assets, but feels completely different, not only to Ocarina itself, but to all other Zelda games.

The main mechanic that makes Majora’s Mask click (pun intended) is the 3 day cycle and the clockwork schedules of the citizens of Termina, the game’s world. After 3 in-game days, about an hour in real time, the moon crashes into the clock tower, destroying Termina and erasing all the progress you’ve made. You can restart the cycle by playing the Song of Time and that allows you to keep important items and upgrade while losing consumables like rupees, bombs, and arrows.

This mechanic turns a lot of new players away because it adds constant tension to everything you do. A lot of players don’t like being timed and while it is frustrating to have to restart a dungeon or quest because you ran out of time, this mechanic works extremely well. First you can slow the flow of time by playing the Song of Time backwards. Second the game typically has ways to skip parts of dungeons or longer quests if you don’t finish in one cycle. Examples of this would be getting Kafei’s mask to skip talking to his mother and skipping the pirate’s fortress to get to the Great Bay Temple once you learn the tadpoles’ song.

The third reason the 3 day cycle works well is because it makes the world of Termina feel more alive. Unlike other action games, most NPCs in Majora’s Mask don’t just stand in their determined spot. Many walk around, have conversations with other folks, drink at the bar at night, or don’t open their shops until the next morning. Since this game was made for the N64, these schedules are rather limited and rigid, but even a little bit of movement from the characters goes a long way.

The story of Majora’s Mask is not focus on Link or his quest, like it was in Ocarina of Time, but on the world of Termina itself and the character’s who make it up. Termina is just more interesting than Hyrule in Ocarina. It’s more colorful and varied with a surrealist feeling to much of the imagery that helps foster a sense of unease and fascination. The character’s too are more interesting than they are in Ocarina, all live lives of contained sadness and frustration, lost and fear. I wanted to help the characters with their problems, not only for side-questing to acquire upgrades, but also to see where their story goes and what help, if any, I could provide them. This extends to the main antagonist, Skull Kid. I’ve always been interested in villains who are basically children that are granted unimaginable power and don’t know what to do with it. That’s why I find Porky from the Mother games and Tetsuo from Akira so compelling. Skull Kid being corrupted by the power of Majora’s Mask and crashing the moon into Termina fits the bill. He’s more sympathetic than Ganondorf in Ocarina because he’s just a lonely child that wanted friends.

In the beginning of the game, Skull Kid transforms Link into a Deku scrub, leading to him acquiring his first transformation mask, another new mechanic in Majora’s Mask. Link will acquire three masks in the game that transform him into a race from the Zelda series and grant him new abilities. The aforementioned Deku mask lets him shoot bubbles for an early ranged attack, skip short distances across water, and use launch flowers to shoot into the air and hoover across gaps. The Goron mask makes him hit harder and gives him a very fast rolling ability while the Zora mask grants Link the power to swim and attack underwater. These masks cut down on many dungeon specific items that where throughout the end half of Ocarina of Time because many of the uses for those are now rolled into the transformation masks. For example: the hammer needed to press heavy buttons is done with the extra weight of the Goron and the blue tunic and iron boots needed for the Water Temple are gone in favor of actual swimming as the Zora.

Majora’s Mask contains only four main dungeons, one of the lowest amounts for the series, but, much like Breath of the Wild, gaining entrance to the dungeons is a part of the puzzle. Every dungeon has a small section or side quest that has to be completed to learn a song to enter. Be it stealthily infiltrating a Deku castle or saving Zora eggs from pirates, the dungeons are only half of solving each areas infliction.

That being said, however, the dungeons in Majora’s Mask might be the strongest in any Zelda game I’ve played. Woodfall is the perfect beginning dungeon with a pitch perfect balance of puzzles, rewards, and progression. Snowhead and the Great Bay Temple are both rather vertical in nature and require the use of the Goron and Zora masks respectively. The game culminates in the Stone Tower Temple which might be one of the most interesting and fun Zelda dungeons. The two central mechanic for Stone Tower is the use of the light arrows and flipping the dungeon upside-down to walk on the ceiling. The dungeons aren’t perfect, of course, and do have their moments of frustration. Falling down Snowhead leads to a long climb back up before getting the fire arrows, backtracking through the Great Bay Temple can be tedious do to clunky swimming controls, and having to flip Stone Tower no less than 3 times get all the fairies takes forever.

There are issues with Majora’s Mask and a lot of them stemmed from playing the game in a post-Breath of the Wild world. While that game felt fluid and smooth, Majora’s Mask feels very clunky at times. Watching a short cutscene every time Link transforms or travels through time becomes grating, even if you can quickly skip them. The main action button being contextual can lead to frustrating moments where you keep rolling into a block you mean to grab or grabbing a block you mean to climb. This also the Zelda game that made me realize how boring combat is in the games. I spent the time with the sword master learning the vertical, horizontal, and jumping slashes only to spam attacks when faced against an enemy. Even the final boss, Majora’s Mask and its multiple forms, was so mindless after acquiring the Fierce Deity’s mask that I had wished I had gotten it.

Majora’s Mask has a lot of little issues, but a lot of little issues can mount up to big problems. Luckily, the game’s issues ever resulted in more than mild frustrated. The game is engaging. With its emphasis on the world and its people, limiting dungeons and items to focus on side quests and transformations, and its overall surreal and creepy tone, Majora’s Mask isn’t just an extremely interesting Legend of Zelda game, but an extremely interesting game in general.

Astral Chain & the Legions

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I got Astral Chain for my birthday from a couple of friends. It was a great gift because it was something I fully intended to get myself, but they came in and saved me $60. Every since playing Bayonetta 2, I’ve loved Platinum Games and the reviews I saw for the game were glowing so I knew it would be quality. When I picked up the game, going in as blind as I could, I found an over the top, outrageous plot, deep and fluid combat mechanics, and a perfect dodge mechanic (which I’m on the record of being a sucker for), all things that Platinum excels at. From the trailers I saw, I was iffy on the monsters all the characters were throwing around, but they become the most interesting and unique thing about the game.

The central mechanic of Astral Chain are the Legions, armored beasts used for combat and puzzle solving. They are attached to the player character by a chain and are invisible to the general public, as are the Chimeras you battle. You’ll start with just one Legion, but since your character is anime special (this is: special in a way that is never explained and is just meant to be accepted) you’ll acquire more Legions as the game goes on. Each of these Legions have special abilities. Some help in combat, like a shield or powerful range attack, and others are utilized for police work, like tracking scents and lifting heavy objects.

A lot of games with different gameplay styles like Astral Chain’s combat and police work would have them separated, with different mechanics for each playstyle, and those systems would only affect each other tangentially. Platinum Games, however, did something very smart by having the Legions work as the main mechanic for both types of gameplay. It makes the gameplay feel connected, each style feel equally important, and the whole game overall feels very consistent, even when switching between combat and puzzle solving.

The thing about Astral Chain that impresses me the most is how fleshed out and fully realized the Legions are in terms of gameplay mechanics. The developers explored every possible use a giant, invisible creature attached by chain would be in combat and investigation work. This creates a fighting system that is deep and encourages experimentation while also having side quests and police cases that feel varied and fresh.

For example, in combat you can go in by yourself and never summon your Legion at all. However, the fights will be brutal and long (not to mention less fun) so you are encouraged to summon your Legions to help fight. When summoned, the Legions can act independently and attack the nearest enemy, or you can command them to focus down a specific foe. You can perform powerful co-op attacks with your legion after performing a 3-hit combo, after performing a perfect dodge, or have your Legion save you from being knocked to the ground after being hit by a nasty attack. The chain comes into play as you can pull yourself to your Legion with a press of a button, enabling you to cover large amounts of ground quickly. You can even wrap the chain around enemies to stun them for a few free attacks or trip the enemies who perform a charge attack. Along with each of the five Legions special abilities, the combat system is vast and very fun.

The combat can feel overwhelming at times, I feel it’s slightly over-designed, but the coolest thing about Astral Chain is that a lot of the same mechanics that are used in combat are also utilized in the exploration and investigation gameplay. Using your chain to pull yourself across gaps is used both on the Ark and in the Astral Plane, many police cases involve you constraining fleeing criminals by wrapping them up with your chain, and the Legions’ special abilities are all used in some way or another. Examples of this would be riding the Beast Legion to traverse areas faster, using the Shield Legion to pass spewing fires or poison gas, or hitting switches by aiming with the Arrow Legion.

Despite all the abilities and mechanics that are used in both combat and the investigation gameplay, there are still mechanics that are only used in the latter. I’ve mentioned before that the Beast Legion can track scents and this becomes a go to ability to track down both criminals and lost civilians alike. The Sword Legion can remove red shifting, a disease that slowly turns humans into Chimera-like monsters, and the Shield Legion can break open barriers to access chests and new areas. The Legions are also invisible to the general public, so moving them to a suspicious person and using them to eavesdrop is a great, organic mechanic that stems from the rules of the Legions and the context of being a police officer.

The best moment of the game, for me, comes in one of the last few chapters. Before heading out for the final raid against the big bad, you can walk the city streets one last time. If you do so, you can take on a quest from a mother to watch her daughter while she is away. To help keep the girl entertained, your friend tells her that the player character is magical and the little girl tells them to prove it. Following your friend’s lead, you summon your Legion near a stack of boxes to blow them apart, take a neon sign and hurl down a busy street, and use the Arm Legions ability to hover off the ground. This moment is just brilliant. It uses all the small mechanics you’ve learned throughout the game in a completely new way. When I first picked up Astral Chain and started to learn each new Legion ability and mechanic tied to them, I knew I would be fighting giant and impressively design enemies. It’s a Platinum game; that’s what they do. But I would never have expected to be using those same learned skills to convince a child my character was a magical being.

That is what’s truly special about the game, the central mechanic of the Legions is varied, yet well realized enough that it can still throw new things at you even at the end of the game and have they fit perfectly. Most games either lose steam halfway through after all the mechanics have been introduced or feel disjointed as they continually introduce new gameplay styles all the way up to the end. Astral Chain stays fast ahead of the curve by exploring a strong central mechanic and how it could be used for both of its gameplay styles. It truly is like two beings working as one.

Spyro 1 & 2 (The Reignited Trilogy) – Critical Miss # 9

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I’ve always had a soft spot for 3D platformers. Mario Odyssey is one of my favorite games ever, I played the Crash Bandicoot games with the N’sane Trilogy, and I played a lot of Gex 2 as a child, even though I never made it far in the game. There was one series I games I played a bunch on PS 1 demo discs, but never got around to playing until now. That series was Spyro the Dragon

Like Crash Bandicoot, the original Spyro trilogy recently got remade for modern platforms. The Reignited Trilogy did for Spyro exactly what the N’sane Trilogy did for Crash: update the visuals and controls of the Spyro games while keeping the levels and mechanics exactly the same. I can’t honestly say whether the levels are exactly the same as the original games since I’ve never played them, but by all accounts based on reviews, they are nearly identical. These are the versions of the games I will be using to review the first two Spyro games.

Both games excel at presentation. The music is ambient but catching and was composed by Stewart Copeland, the criminally underrated drummer of The Police. The visuals got a huge overhaul from the original games and they are gorgeous. Everything is colorful, cartoony, and full of expressive detail. While the games use the same art style throughout both of them, Spyro 2 has more variety with locations which brings along with it more variety in landscapes and enemies, making it the more memorable of the two.

A great thing about the games is that they truly go the full distance in exploring what a dragon can do through mechanics. Spyro has two attacks. He can breath fire at enemies, searing them to a crisp, or he can head butt with his horns and send them flying. Head butting metallic pots and enemies in armor is the only way to deal with them, since fire is deflected by the metal, so the player is constantly switching between attack styles instead of just favoring one.

There are flying levels, which are iconic for the series, where Spyro soars through the air unabated, but in standard platforming levels he is only able to jump and glide with his tiny wings. This was a huge missed opportunity. So many platformers feature characters with double jumps despite the laws of physics, but Spyro lacks one. Even with his wings that could realistically give him another jump in the air, Spyro has a very strict jump arch. This lead to a lot of frustrating moments, especially in the first game. Many jumps require Spyro to be at the very top of his arch to land on a platform but holding charge makes him plummet like a stone. There was some Mario muscle memory I had to unlearn to play Spyro because it’s nearly impossible for me not to hold the run button the entire time while playing a platformer. The player does get a small flutter in Spyro 2 and that lets them make up a few inches at the end of a jump for more precision, but it feels clunky since it requires hitting the triangle button (on PS4) away from the jump. It helps but doesn’t make up for a full blown double jump.

At the bone, the Spyro games are 3D collectathons. Throughout the levels, there are hundreds of gems to pick up with your firefly friend, Sparx, who will fly out to grab gems near you. This is a great mechanic is a 3D platformer because it requires the player to be near the gems, but not super precise, which can be challenging in a 3D space. But the more damage Spyro takes, the shorter the distance Sparx will fly to pick up gems. Sparx also works as a visual indicator of Spyro’s health and is a great example of an integrated UI that I completely forgot to mention in my last post.

While both games use gems as the moment to moment collectables, both Spyro 1 and 2 have different main collectables that lead to different level design. Spyro 1 had crystalized dragon you need to free from their geological prisons. This is done simply by walking into them. This leads the levels in the first game to be more linear, with a path leading to the end of the level and having most the dragons along the critical path. Levels in the first Spyro game feel akin to the levels in the Crash games. They are linear halls to the goal, but unlike Crash, Spyro’s levels have secret paths that branch out and across the main path.

Spyro 2 has a mission system for the main collectables. To bet a level, you just have to get to the end where a member of the local population will get you a talisman. Once you have all the talismans, you can beat the game. But If you want 100% in Spyro 2, you need to get all the orbs and that is where the changes in the level design spring from. There are two types of orbs to collect, orbs hidden in the levels behind platforming challenges and orbs you have to complete a mission to collect. These missions can vary from collecting a number of items for a character, killing all the enemies in an area, or scoring a set number of goals in hockey within a time limit. This leads the levels to be more open, with many more paths to explore and secrets to find

While both games are very easy to complete, there’s difficulty to be found in each and the difficulty curve is another difference between the games. Each level in Spyro 1 seemed to have one jump or obstacle that was extremely frustrating. Whether is be a jump from across level that needs to be lined up perfectly and drops the player into a bottomless pit to take a life if missed or using the boost paths to run extremely long distances with messing up to make one jump to a new area, there was always something in the first games levels that seem to take much longer than they should. And they come as soon as the first levels.

Spyro 2 has its fair share of difficult missions, but the truly frustrating mission come near the end of the game when the difficulty would be expected to ramp up, and they are more fairly designed. The difficult missions in the game are built around how well the player knows the mechanics of the game and level layouts they take place in. This means to beat them, you don’t don’t have to find a perfect angle to jump, you just need to practice the challenges a few times. I enjoyed both games a good amount, but with its mission based collectathon, challenges designed around the mechanics of the game, and more variety in locations and enemies, Spyro 2 was my preferred game of the two.

Untitled Goose Game & UI

Featured / atomicbobomb / Leave a comment

When I first heard of Untitled Goose Game a few years ago I wanted to play it immediately. I didn’t know anything about the game besides the player takes control of an annoying goose and runs amok in a rural country village. It all sounded so fun and silly and unique that, in the following years, it became my most anticipated game, my most “hype” game. Well the game came out a couple weeks ago and, after playing through it immediately upon release, I can say it is exactly what I wanted.

The main loop of the game is very easy to explain. In fact, it’s so easy that I’ve already explained it. As the titular goose, the player goes around a village and irritates every human being they come across. I wouldn’t say they wreak havoc on the village, more so they wreak nuisances. They make a boy trip in a puddle, take away a man’s stool right as he’s about to sit down, and, in my personal favorite section, force one neighbor to throw the others belongings back over the fence when the goose drags them over.

It’s all very cute and quaint, but there’s a level of polish to the game that shows how well designed the game is. First: the art style is perfect. Everything is simple and low textured, with deep colors and thin outline that makes it look right out of a children’s book. Second: the sound design is great. I was thrilled every time I picked up a new item and learned it affected my honk, like a glass bottle muffling it or making a harmonica sound when holding one in my beak.Third: the characters are expressive. The humans in Untitled Goose Game, while being simple by lacking fingers and even faces, show a range of emotions from fear to anger to confusion. This is done by all of them using overthetop gestures, but that just feeds into the slapstick tone the game. This also is an example of my favorite thing about the game, it’s integrated UI.

Most user interfaces in video games tend to appear above the game, in a layer between player and game. They appear as button prompts to open doors and climbable ledges, enemies’ health or level appearing above their heads, or informational text floating above a weapon you might choose to pick up. They exist only for the player, not the character in the game, and can add slight fractures to the immersion the game is trying to build. Some games, however, choose to have the UI existing in the world of the game. Notable examples of these are the map and compass in Metro 2033 that the player has to pull out to check objective locations and in Dead Space where the player’s health is shown through a glowing bar on the back of their suit. These are what I think of as integrated UI because they integrated, explained, and exist in the world of the game.

The UI in Untitled Goose Game is integrated into the world more thematically than physically, but it works extremely well. I mentioned before that the art style of the game resembles a children’s book. Well the UI uses that style to feel a part of the world. Honks appear as lines from the goose’s mouth like in a cartoon, indicated to the player that is a noise that will alert other characters to them and other items with similar indicators act the same way. Items the goose can pick up also has the white lines appear around them when they can be grabbed. It’s a clever way to show what’s intractable in the world while being thematically and stylistically coherent with the game’s world.

Untitled Goose Game is one part stealth game, one part puzzle game, with all the fun of annoying your neighbors in Animal Crossing. The stealth and puzzle genres of games have some overlapping rules used by them. They both work with predictable character AI and set patterns for those characters so the player can anticipate their movements and so the results of actions can be consistent.

A lot of stealth sections in games will have enemies walking back and forth along one path so the safe areas are clear or they will have a way to show the enemies’ range of sight so the player can work around them. Untitled Goose Game’s world feels so much more alive than that. The villagers in the game have patterns they will go through in a section, but they do might do four or five different things, making their paths and movement ever changing, but still predictable. There is a video game shorthand for when the player has been spotted in enemy territory and that’s the sudden exclamation mark appearing over an enemy’s head.

Untitled Goose Game is not above using the same cliche, but that’s only if the player is caught doing something the people don’t care for, like stealing an item or being where they are not supposed to be. Other times, if a village spots the goose but the player is not doing something that warrants being chased after, the people will simply stand there, staring at the goose, perhaps stroking their chin a bit. This is a really well done system. While the ! or ? appearing above a character’s head when they notice something out of place feels slightly out of place in the world of the game, the pencil style font melds well with the art style and the two different ways characters react to the player clearly shows them when they are in trouble or not.

Last bit of UI in Untitled Goose Game I want to mention is how the game tells the player the characters’ intentions. As a puzzle game, the player needs to know what each villager is intending to do so they may use it to solve the check lists of objectives. The game shows this by having a thought bubble appear over a character’s head with an image of the item they intend to grab. This is one of the biggest things that endeared me to the game. It’s true that the thought bubbles exist only to the player and not the goose in game, but it feels completely in place in the world. Utilizing the strong art style of the game, the characters’ thought bubbles heighten the children’s book aesthetic. They are not integrated into the world physically, but artistically, like the honk and grab lines.

I love Untitled Goose Game. I found it endlessly charming and silly when I first booted it up, and it bloomed into a very clever and well designed game. The first time I noticed its genius was in the simple and integrated UI. But I’m now a little sad that it’s out because I need to find a new game to be my most anticipated game to be released. At the moment, honestly, it’s got to be Team Cherry’s Silksong.

Doom (1993) – Critical Miss #8

Featured / atomicbobomb / 1 Comment

I’m not a PC gamer. A gaming PC is something I would like to get at some point, but cost always prohibit it. Because of this, I had never played Doom until recently. Doom is easily one of the most influential games of all time. It may not have created the FPS genre, but it popularized it and help shape it into what we know today. But the game came out for home computers in 1993, tech has advanced so much in the 25 plus years since its release and we can now true 3D games. Can Doom really hold up that well in the current day? The simple answer: yes.

The player takes control of the “Doom Guy” and the goal of the game is to kill a bunch of demons. There is a story that’s told to the player in between episodes, but it’s so hacked-out and insignificant that I don’t remember much of it. The focus of Doom is on combat and level exploration and it does those two things to near perfection.

In Doom, the player has two things protecting them form the hordes of Hell: guns and speed. Doom Guy moves extremely fast from the get-go and this is even without holding the sprint button. While there are walls and corners to dip behind to avoid oncoming enemy projectiles, taking cover is never as efficient as strafing to the side. This avoids the attack while still being able to fire at the enemy. Learning to strafe around enemies at incredibly fast speed is crucial to surviving. Sprinting can definitely feel too fast at times, but it is a necessary skill to learn for later levels, not only to avoid tougher, faster enemies, but to make it across gaps in platformers because Doom Guy can’t jump.

A great FPS is judged on the quality of its guns and Doom does not disappoint. All the guns are impactful and satisfying to use. The sound design for all the weapons is crunchy and loud, the enemies stagger and flinch when hit, and there is a variety of guns to use, each fitting different needs in combat. The shotgun is useful for enemies that chase you down like the Pinkys. The chaingun’s bullets are weak, but it fire so quick that it tends to stun-lock enemies and is good for Cacodemons. The rocket launcher will damage the player if they are too close to the blast, teaching the player to make space before firing, and is the best way to kill the Barons of Hell without burning too much ammo. And, of course, there is the BFG, the Big Fucking Gun. This gun is pretty much a screen nuke with a trigger. It explodes in a huge radius and melts basically any enemy in the range. The weapons add variety to the combat that’s already fast and fun, but when the excellent level design is added on top the combat is when Doom becomes something truly great.

All the levels are mazes, increasing in complexity as the game goes on, with enemies, medpacks, and secrets scattered throughout them. The only real requirement to finish the level is find the literal exit sign and go through the door. Sometimes there are colored key cards to progress, but everything else is done for the sake of fun. The player might need to kill enemies because they are in the way, but most can be ran past. They really fight the enemies because it’s fun. Secrets are well hidden, satisfying to find, and filled with goodies like extra guns, ammo, and power-ups like overcharged health. That’s reason enough to seek them out, but the game can be easily beaten without finding any. That main reason to search for the secrets is because it’s fun.

There’s a special kind of logic to the level designs. Doom couldn’t do true 3D level design which means no room can be on top of another room. This makes the bare, top-down map surprisingly useful and intuitive to use. Looking for holes in the map is the only real way to search for secrets in the levels. There is hardly any unused space in Doom, so if there’s a chunk of the map with nothing in it, there’s a good chance that’s where a secret hides. The 2D-3D visuals the game is built on has obviously aged in the decades since the game was released, but it all works. The art style is extremely strong and consistent and there’s something very charming watching flat 2D sprites spinning to face the player as they move around them.

I played on what I would consider casual mode. With difficulty set on the Hurt Me Plenty, or medium difficulty, I still found it necessary to save at the start of every new level and load that save if I ever died. Death is punishing in Doom. All weapons, ammo, and health gets carried over to new levels, but if the player dies, everything is taken away. Doom Guy respawns at the level entrance with just his pistol and fists. The other weapons can usually be found again in the new levels, but surviving to get to them is not easy. Later in the game, when the difficulty really starts to ramp up, I had to start using save slots more and more.

The difficulty curve is one of few issues I have with the game. The difficult jumps up and down throughout the 4 episodes. Episode 2 gave me more trouble than any other and maps 1 and 2 in episode 4 are noticeably harder than the rest in the episode. Part of this could be me getting better at the game as I played, but there are noticeably leaps in difficulty at odd points throughout a playthrough. While most levels are great and fun to explore, some are very unintuitively designed, especially the levels that rely heavily on teleport pads. Lastly, some of the music is plain bad. One later level theme uses a very high pitched guitar synth and, during a solo, it holds a piercing high note for at least five second. It’s very ear grating. Most music is excellent, especially the theme song, which is a video game classic, but later songs just have odd choices in them that feel out of place.

After playing Doom, it’s clear to see why it’s still so highly regarded. It has its faults, like every game, but it’s finely crafted with excellent level designs, great gameplay, and is simply fun to play. And that’s what I admire most about it. It is my belief that video games should strive to be fun before all else. A game can have a strong story or offer a unique experience, but if it’s not fun to play then I lose a lot of interest to continue playing it. Doom manages to be cutting edge, innovative, and influential while never sacrificing any fun.

*Writer’s note:

I originally intended to have this review be on both Doom and Doom 2, but I couldn’t finish both in time. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting Doom to be as big and tough as it is. I will have either a small bonus review of Doom 2 by the end of the year, or an update post with my thoughts on it.

Secret of Mana – Critical Miss #7

August 24, 2019 / atomicbobomb / Leave a comment

Everyone has games that just doesn’t click with them. It doesn’t always have anything to do with their quality, but for whatever reason, a person might find themselves not enjoying a game as much as others seem to. These are hard games for me to review, personally, because it’s easy to say why you might love or hate a game, but to discuss one you only mildly enjoyed or lost interest in before finishing is trickier. Apathy can be a more nuanced emotion than either love or hate, and it is the best word I would use to describe my feelings toward the SNES classic Secret of Mana.

Secret of Mana is a lot like Square’s take on a Zelda game in many ways. First would be the story, which is a basic save the world plot where a boy must defeat evil with a magic sword he must restore to power. The story is passable, nothing new or great, but the worst part is the actual writing itself. Lines of dialogue are short, clunky, and full of exposition. This, in large part, has to due with the SNES’s limitations and the difficulty of translating the game from Japanese to English. But the translation can only do so much for the story’s poor pacing and boring characters.

Primm is the only character with an interesting, relatable goal throughout the game. She’s trying to save her love Dyluck from the evil forces manipulating him, but every time she gets close to saving him, something interferes and takes him away again. It’s not much, but the goal is more interesting than Randi’s box standard save the world from an evil empire quest. At first, I thought that something interesting would happen with Popoi in his journey to remember his past and find his home again, but that story line is cleared up just a couple hours after meeting home. His home, it turns out, is the Upper Land Forest, the very first area you travel to after the opening section. This means that Popoi’s character arc is introduced and concluded in the first fourth of the game. He is then relegated to making snarky quips for the remainder of the game.

The combat is also reminiscent of early Zelda games if they were mixed with a pseudo turn-based system. The player has an attack which will strike out with an equipped weapon. There is a gauge that counts up to 100% and goes to zero when an attack is performed. The key to combat is to wait until the gauge is full before attacking because the attack will do its highest damage, while attacking at less than 100% will do less damage. This system is very interesting because it forces the player to be patience, focus on positioning while waiting for the gauge to count up and attack at the right time.

Another great thing about combat in Secret of Mana is the ring menu system. All menus in the game appear as rings of options that the player selects by circling through the wheel by pressing left and right, or up and down to switch different menu types. In all honesty, it’s just a unique way of presenting and interacting with the menu, but it is really clever in battle. Every character has their own menu system for weapons, armor, and magic. Every time you select the menu, the battle stops and it continues when the menu is closed. This is the turn-based feel of the game. With the action pausing every time the player goes to choose an item or spell, it gives them some breathing room and a moment to survey their surroundings and assess the battle. The ring menu can feel clunky at first, but it quickly becomes natural and an asset in battle.

Because of the attack style and active battle system, Secret of Mana always felt like an action game with RPG elements in it to me. That’s probably why the randomness of the battles began to frustrate me so much. Fighting overall feels imprecise. In an action game, if the player attacks the enemy and sees their weapon make contact with them, they expect to hit the enemy. This isn’t always the case in Secret of Mana. The player’s attack can miss the enemy out of the blue and it’s all up to random chance. This never feels fair to me. If I clearly see my sword hit an enemy, they should take damage. Less frustrating randomness is the characters dodging attacks. If your dodge stat is high enough, and you roll a good number, the characters can sometimes cartwheel out of the way of an enemies attack. This isn’t terrible, but I’d have preferred a dodge roll I could control because leaving it up to chance takes control out of the player’s hands.

So the story wasn’t gripping me and the combat was enjoyable but not precise enough for my tastes. What ultimately made me lose interest in the Secret of Mana was the exploration. I love games where I can explore to see new things or find goodies around the map and Secret of Mana never scratched that itch. Everything in the world looks the same with maybe a different color pallet if you are in a snowy forest or a springtime one. I found myself getting lost all the time in the game because there was no interesting landmarks for me to remember in the world. And the dungeons don’t fare any better. They all have the same castle exterior and there were no interesting puzzles to tease out. Most the puzzle result in pressing a switch in one room to open up progress in another room. Couple that with enemies that were extremely annoying to fight in some dungeons and needing to save magic for most bosses at the end of the dungeons, I just didn’t have any remaining interest to continue the game.

Secret of Mana is a fine game, maybe even a great game, but it’s one I slowly lost interest in. The game has its fans who consider it a timeless classic and will no doubt gain more fans in future generations to play it. But for me, it was just a stiff, clunk game with a subpar story and a boring world to explore.