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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.

Top 5 Dodges in Video Games

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I picked up Astral Chain the other week and I have really been enjoying it. I didn’t have many expectations for the game besides that it was made by Platinum Games and I tend to like the games they develop. I had a hope in the back of  my head, however, that it would have a good dodge button. I am a sucker for a dodge button in video games. While I’ve been playing through Astral Chain, I’ve been thinking of other games with great dodge mechanics.

#5 – The Mario and Luigi Series

The Mario and Luigi series is an assortment of RPGs that I’ve dabbled in a few time, mainly Partners in Time when I was younger and Dream Team a few years ago. I was always interested in the timed action mechanic in the games. By hitting the attack button at the right time while attacking an enemy, you can do extra damage. This also works in reverse. If you press the button corresponding with either Mario or Luigi when an enemy attacks them, you can dodge all damage. This is a great mechanic in a turn-based RPG because it keeps the player focused and engaged during battles instead of mindlessly mashing the confirm button. While the Mario and Luigi series wasn’t the first RPG to use this style on timed action button presses in battles, I think it’s the best example of it.

#4 – Hollow Knight

There are many upgrades for the player to find in Hollow Knight, with one of the first ones being the Mothwing Cloak. This gives the Knight a short air dash that can be used to gain access to new areas, move more quickly through the world, and even dodge incoming enemy attacks. It is tricky to use as a dodge because it doesn’t grant the Knight any invincibility frames though. That is until the player finds the Shadecloak. This upgrade means that the Knight is invincible when using the dash, though on a short cooldown after use. So if the player doesn’t have the timing needed to dash out of an attack, they can still escape unharmed. The best part, however, is that the Shadecloak give the Knight the ability to dash through enemies themselves without taking damage. It helps the player avoid damage and gives them a brief moment of safety when reaching the other side of the enemy. It even makes some bosses, like the titular Hollow Knight, much easier than without the Shadecloak.

#3 – Enter the Gungeon

As strange as it sounds, I’ve always liked dodging towards and through enemy attacks instead of away from them in video games. What feels counterintuitive at first starts to feel very satisfying when the player understands that going through an attack is safer than dodging away from an attack. Created by Dodge Roll, Enter the Gungeon, perhaps unsurprisingly, has a great dodge roll. Gungeon is built on dodge rolling through enemy bullets. There are many different types of enemies in the game with many different attack types. Many bosses in the game will force the player to dodge through waves of bullets to survive. The Dragun is a great example. Its second phase fills the screen with bullets but there are holes where the player can stand safely. As the bullets move across the screen, the player will have to roll from hole to hole to stay alive. But, honestly, the best part of the dodge roll in Enter the Gungeon is sliding across tables with it. That is just plain fun.

#2 – Dark Souls

Dark Souls’ dodge roll is a lot like other games because it grants invincibility frames to protect from enemies. There is ending lag with Dark Souls’ dodge, which is the time it takes your character to get back up from the roll. What Dark Souls does that is interesting is how equipment weight affects the character’s roll invincibility and lag. There are three types of rolls being fast, medium, and slow (or “fat”). Fast grants you the most invincibility frames and the least amount of ending lag, but the character’s equipment weight has to be 25% or less, meaning they will most likely be wearing light armor which provides the least amount of defense. Slow rolling is what happens when you have 50% of equipment weight or higher. It has almost no invincibility frames and has the most ending lag. Dark Souls’ equipment weight and dodge rolling mechanics are so deep and subtle, I never knew that there are actually 3 different speeds of each of the different types of rolls.

#1 – Bayonetta 2

Bayonetta 2 is exactly what I look for in an action game. The combat is fast and fun, enemies are varied and awesome in design, the levels know when to be linear to guide the player but also when to open up to let them explore, and the story is absolute nonsense that’s self-aware and silly. I had a blast playing through the game for the first time and often go back to just play random levels because I enjoy the game so much. And a huge part of that enjoyment is due to Witch Time. This is my favorite dodge mechanic is games. Bayonetta can dodge any attack coming in with a simple button press, but if the player dodges at just the right time, just as an attack lands, they go into Witch Time. This is a state where time slows down for a few seconds around Bayonetta and she is able to punish on the nearly motionless enemies. Entering Witch Time never stops feeling good. The timing to dodge is narrow enough to take attention from the player to do, but wide enough where it never feels frustrating or unfair. The combat in Bayonetta 2 is tough, but never feels impossible and I think a large amount of that has to due with Witch Time. It is so good that it is not only my favorite dodge mechanic in video games, it is one of the most satisfying things to do in all of gaming.

Limbo – Critical Miss #6

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Independently developed games have been around nearly as long as video games have existed, but they really came into their own through the mid 2000’s to the early 2010’s. Games like Cave Story, Braid, and Super Meat Boy all helped establish indie games as a source of excellent titles. Even Minecraft, one of the most successful and popular games ever made, was an indie game developed by the tiny studio Mojang. Indie games have been a fascination of mine ever since my reintroduction to video games around 2014. In fact, Cave Story + was one of the first games I bought on my 3DS. One indie game I always heard a massive amount of praise for was Limbo, but I only recently sat down to play through it.

Limbo was the poster child of early 2010’s indie games. Developed by Playdead with a team of around 8 people, it emphasized a striking art style and atmospheric storytelling while cutting gameplay down to its core. I came out in 2010 to instant critical acclaim and was the indie darling of that year. Being a platformer, it was a very familiar style of game, but one that was done so differently and artistically that people took notice.

Limbo is focused to a laser point. It gets rid of everything unnecessary to the game, leaving only two actions for the player to do besides moving the character: jump and interact, which means either pushing/pulling an item or hitting a button. Everything single thing and mechanic in the game revolves around these two actions. The anti-gravity affects how and where the boy will jump, a bear trap might need to be pulled into the path of a murderous spider leg or a box pushed to climb pass a high ledge, the section were the level rotates around the boy moving the layout of the platforms constantly, making the timing for jumps constantly changing. 

This strong focus is Limbo’s greatest strength because it extends out of the gameplay and into the presentation. The art style is the first thing any new player will notice about the game. Limbo’s visuals use only light, shadows, and the shades of grey found between. This style shows the character and the world around them as silhouettes from distant light and helps builds the bleak atmosphere of the game. The world the boy must travel through is utterly indifferent except when it wants him dead. It forms an oppressive loneliness around the player that sticks with them well after the game is over. Personally, the loneliness of the atmosphere is what affected me most about Limbo and what I continued swirling around in my head when thinking about the game because the Limbo seems to actively work to make the player dislike it.

The puzzle solving loop of the game relies heavily on trial and error. Nearly all the puzzles and platforming challenges in the game are close to impossible to solve on the first try, either due to very strict platforming timing or some of the pieces of a puzzle being obtuse without the player dying first. Trial and error gameplay has always been a touchy subject for games as it often seems unfair to the player, who couldn’t predict an obstacle until it’s killed them. Limbo can be frustrating with its trail and error design, especially when the player is expected to interact with a new mechanic they have no idea how it will act, but it doesn’t hurt the overall experience too much. Death, for one, is always interesting since the boy’s body will rag-doll and react to the game’s physics engine and respawning is extremely quick, meaning the player doesn’t have to wait to play the game after an unfair death. Secondarily, the trial and error design feels intentionally hostile to the player themselves and this helps with the atmosphere of dread and oppression. Ultimately I believe gameplay should come absolute first for any game, but I begrudgingly respect Limbo for sacrificing smooth gameplay to heighten atmosphere.

The first half of Limbo is the stronger one. The moment the player is sunk into the game’s world and take in the bleak landscape around them is one of the most off putting in gaming, the blurry outlines of shapes in the background looking like they’re about to jump out at the player at any second. The game feels like a horror game at first, with a giant spider trying to hunt the boy throughout much of the first half and a strange group of people trying to impede your progress forward. 

By the second half of the game, though, much of the horror for the forest is gone and replaced with more physics-based puzzles of the industrial area. The player will have to explore run-down buildings with electric signs, buzzsaws, and machine gun turrets that never truly feel like they belong to the world in which the player explores. More frustrating, though, is that the puzzles become much more strict. It’s only natural for puzzles in a puzzle game to get more challenging as the game progresses, but they would be expected to add difficulty by making the puzzles trickier or require more thought and exploration of the surrounding area. In Limbo’s case, the difficulty is increased by narrowing the margin for error. Timing to move boxes or complete a task will rely on frames of timing and platforming challenges often come down to pixels between success and missing a swinging rope needed to pass. I was nestled in for a slow, puzzle solving game and was not prepared for platforming challenges later in the game.

Even with these issues in the game, however, Limbo is still good, but I have trouble deciding whether I think it’s great or not. My opinion of the game wavers between loving the game and thinking it is fine. Moments like the spider chase and the section where the player rotates the area around them are great, but the frustration felt with some of the later, stricter puzzles means I not itching to replay Limbo anytime soon. The thing I know for sure, though, is that I respect the hell out of Limbo for it’s tight focus on core elements and it’s willingness to emphasize atmosphere over everything else. These are choices not often seen in games by AAA studios and is the reason I can easily recommend Limbo, and independent gaming in general.

Resident Evil (Remake) – Critical Miss #5

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The Resident Evil remake for the Gamecube is an interesting case in video games. It’s one of the few game remakes that is widely considered to be just as good, if not better, than the original. The original game came out for the Playstation in 1996 and was a landmark title for the survival horror genre. The remake came out in 2002 and fined tuned the original game to near perfection while adding minor difference to surprise players of the original title. 

The Spencer mansion in which the majority of the game takes place is a giant puzzle box you solve from the inside out. The main gameplay loop of Resident Evil is exploring the mansion to find items or keys that open up new areas to explore. With this design, the mansion slowly blooms open. The game is very good at indirectly leading the player by limiting where they can go. In the opening, you only have a few rooms to explore before you find the sword key and then you have another limited amount of rooms to search until you find the next key or item for a puzzle that’ll unlock new areas. This heightens the sense that you are investigating the mansion and uncovering its terrible secrets as you play.

While some rooms in the mansion tend to blur together, like the multiple bathrooms or balconies, most are very distinct with different designs or set pieces. This is a smart way for the game to help the player remember where they might need to go in the late game when the entire mansion is open and sprawling. Another thing that helps lead the players in the late game is the map itself which always shows what rooms that all the items have been found in. If a room on the map is green, everything has been found. However, if a room is red that means something is still to be found and it’s worth a second look. This leads the player while backtracking throughout the game, which is something you’ll do a lot.

Two complaints I hear about the Resident Evil remake, after they made the original’s tank controls optional, are backtracking and the inventory management. With inventory management, I understand the complaints. Each character has limited item slots, six for Chris and eight for Jill, and that is the max number of items you can carry at a time. So If you find a room with an important item you need to progress but your inventory is full, you need to go back to a safe room with an item box to drop some stuff off before returning to the room to collect the item you need. While this can be very annoying, I personally liked the limited inventory. I’ve always had a soft spot for inventory management mechanics in game and I starting seeing it in Resident Evil as a puzzle in itself.

The backtracking never really bothered me either. The game is designed around by having the mansion interconnected with paths opening up that make traversing it rather easy. The games leaves it up to the player to learn these paths, which can be frustrating in the early game when the mansion isn’t completely etched into the player’s mind, but after a while they will be as familiar with the Spencer mansion as they are with their own home. The backtracking will ensure of this.

There are other areas of the game to explore besides the Spencer mansion. Throughout the game you will search through the courtyard and a guest house on the grounds, run through an aqueduct system with sharks and abandoned mines where the terrifying and tragic Lisa Trevor lives, and discover a secret Umbrella lab deep below the mansion. While none of these areas are bad, they never reach the heights of the mansion. They are much more linear in design and some, like the forested area or mines, tend to feel samey since they lack interesting set piece in rooms. 

Exploring and solving puzzles would be enough for other games, but Resident Evil is a survival horror game, which means there has to be something that threatens the player and forces them to be on edge throughout the game. Resident Evil does this by having the mansion and its surrounding areas be infested by zombies. The zombies themselves are not too scary, but it’s the mechanics around them that keep them threatening. 

There is limited ammo, healing items, and ink ribbons used for saving the game in Resident Evil. This leads to an internal struggle within the player every time they encounter a zombie: is it better to try and run past them, risking losing some health or leaving them in the same spot to have to be dealt with again, or is it better to use some ammo and kill them? There is never a right answer to this question.  Zombies that are killed will come back later in the game as more powerful Crimson Heads if their bodies are not burned, which is another thing to consider since the kerosene used to burn the bodies is limited. This keeps every encounter with an enemy interesting and tensions are kept high by introducing stronger enemies throughout the game, first with the Crimson Heads and then with the lizard-like Hunters.

But while each encounter with a zombie is interesting and it is consisting stressful to go up against a Hunter in the late game, that’s not the same as the game being scary. Tension was high in the early game when I tried to kill every zombie I came across, but after a while I learned to get around them by baiting their lunge animations. I killed any zombies in areas I knew I would be travelling through a lot, burning their bodies immediately after. By the end of the game, I had a surplus of ammo and heals so I started shooting everything I came across in the end game. 

I tend to see games in terms of mechanics which leads to horror games falling short for me. I often start to see games as their moving, mechanical parts instead of their wholes so the feeling of fear doesn’t stick with me that long. Resident Evil suffered from this. I wasn’t looking at it as a spooky survival horror game after a while but as a series of combat, inventory, and puzzle mechanics. But honestly, I loved my time with the game. The mechanics sewn into Resident Evil and the truly excellent level design still makes it a must play to this day.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice & Revisiting Levels

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The world of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is noticeably smaller than those seen in previous Fromsoftware’s Souls games. Dark Souls was a tower of levels stacked on top of each with paths and elevators and secret connecting them all. Dark Souls 2 started in Majula and branched out from there, with branches coming off those branches and so on. Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3 are a combination of the previous games and are like webs with areas spreading out and folding on top of each other while being interconnected throughout. But while Sekiro’s world is not as large or as interconnected as those other games, it does something genius with its central point, Ashina Castle.

The first part of Sekiro is very linear. You have to make your way from the Dilapidated Temple through Ashina Outskirts and the valley until you reach Ashina Castle. Ashina Castle sits in the middle of the game’s world and works as the trunk of the tree that the rest of the game spreads out. From the castle, you can go to the Sunken Valley from the shrine, Senpou Temple from the dungeons, Ashina Depths from the bottomless pit, or stay and explore the interior of the castle. During my first playthrough, I completely missed the window to enter the castle. So I actually went and explored all the other areas until I hit dead ends before going back and fighting the boss in the castle to progress the story. The young lord tasks you with retrieving a few items from the other areas. But once the items are collected and you try to warp back to Ashina Castle, you’ll discover something surprising: you can’t.

This is because Ashine Castle is under attack. When you go back to Ashina (I used the Abandon Dungeon idol and climbed over the gate), you’ll find it under siege with bamboo ladders reaching to the rooftops and new enemies slaughtering the Ashina soldiers. You find yourself in the middle of a war. The soldiers of the opposing factions will attack other enemies and yourself upon sight. This helps give the ascension up Ashina Castle have a different feel than before. The battles with enemies are more chaotic and dangerous while sleath has a new option of luring different enemies into each other and slipping away in the confusion.

Sekiro does these moments of revisiting previous areas so well. A lot of games don’t change anything in levels you need to revisit, leading you to fight early game enemies with late game equipment, skills, and stats. This can help the player feel the growth the character has undergone throughout the game’s journey, but it also often leads to these sections to feel uninteresting or boring. Like in their other Souls games, Fromsoft never wants the player to feel overpowered in Sekiro.

I loved playing through Sekiro because I was still learning things about the game and the combat mechanics up until and during the final boss. It’s amazing having a game that feels like there is still so much more to master even after you’ve beat it, especially one where a large chunk of the game is revisiting the same areas multiple times. Sekrio keeps its difficulty cranked high when revisiting Ashina Castle by introducing new, tougher enemies or by having enemies that were mini bosses now being basic mobs. The interior ninjas and Ashina generals were early game mini bosses while the Red Guard are some of the toughest enemies in the game with tricky attack patterns and guns that shoot fireworks.

The game stays challenging when revisiting Ashina Castle, but it also manages to feel fresh when exploring. There are new routes through around the castle. First time revisiting it, there are bamboo ladders all over the castle, making for new grapple points and new ways to ascend. During the second revisit, you start from the top of the castle and have to fight your way down. It’s a small thing, but it goes miles to prevent revisits feeling samey. The castle itself will also look different, be it from the ladders scaling the rooftops or from everything being engulfed in flames when you have to make your way down during the games final section.

During the final third of the game, you also have the option of revisiting both Hirata Estate and Ashina Outskirts in new ways and both these areas are also burning, almost seemingly to the ground. Fire works as a wonderful theme in the last moments of the game representing the war and destruction the world is set in. Hirata Estate you revisit through Owl’s memory of that night instead of your own and it’s pretty much the same with tougher enemies and much harder mini boss encounters. Revisiting Ashina Outskirts, however, is what solidified my appreciation for the reuse of previous areas in Sekiro.

When you go back through Ashina Outskirts, you do it in reverse. You start from the castle and make you way over a bridge where you see Ashina’s defenses being slaughter by the Red Guards. After this point, is all Red Guards and fire. I went through Ashina Outskirts so many times on my way to the castle in the beginning of the game that I had a set route through it so I could stealth kill all the enemies in the way. Upon revisiting Ashina Outskirts, I didn’t have that route so I have to think quick about stealth, had to pay closer attention to my surroundings, and I had to fight hard or find an escape route when I fell into a nasty fight. Everything looks different when you go through the outskirts again in the same way that a road might look different if your driving through it in the opposite direction you usually do. At the end of the trek through Ashina Outskirts, after seeing all the fire and destruction suffered to the area, you find yourself up against the cause of all of the damage: the Demon of Hatred

This ferocious, tragic, pain in the ass boss is a strange creature in the world of Sekiro, belonging more in the worlds of Dark Souls and Bloodborne both in design and boss battle. It is huge and beastlike, with one arm composed entirely of flame. His fight relies more on attacking his vitality instead of his posture which runs counter intuitively to the rest of the boss fight in the game. But it is a good fight after you learn its patterns and it all takes place in the battle field before Ashina Castle gates. The world of Sekiro comes full circle as one of the final bosses in the game has the exact same arena as one of the very first bosses.

Shadow of the Colossus – Critical Miss #3

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Shadow of the Colossus came out for the PS2 in 2005 and gained critical acclaim for being a completely unique game. It told its story like a myth with deep implications and a moral complexity seldom seen in video games of the era. It featured such large creatures as enemies that gave the game an unparalleled sense of scale. It was very impressive on the PS2 and, 15 years later, continues to impress through its remake on the PS4.

When the game starts, the player finds themselves controlling a boy named Wander. He is entering a forbidden land with a dead woman to cut a deal with an ancient god, Dormin. Dormin tells Wander that the woman’s life will be restored if he can defeat sixteen colossi scattered across the land. So Wander sets off without a second thought.

Wander rides his horse, Agro, across the barren, desolate forbidden land that obviously hasn’t been inhabited of hundreds of years. Agro’s controls take some getting use to and the camera struggles against the player. After climbing some cliffs, you’ll find your first target. The creature you come across is huge, towering over Wander, and is covered in hair and dirt and stone structures. It looks organic and constructed at the same time. The colossus is awe inspiring and intimidating, but isn’t too hard to defeat. Climbing up to the colossus’s head to its next weak point is thrilling. Climbing drains your stamina and watching Wander being flung around when the colossus tries to shake him off is extremely tense. When you reach the weak point on its head, you plunge your sword into it over and over again until it finally falls. Wander gets transported back to the temple to get his next target, but not before strange, black tendrils pour out of the fallen colossus into him.

This is how the entire game goes from the first colossus onward. You explore the world until you find the next colossus , find its weak point and take it down, and then go back to the temple to start over again. This structure works surprisingly well for the game and keeps the momentum going because you carry the excitement from defeating a colossus over to the next one. It is smart of Shadow of the Colossus to focus on the excitement of the gameplay because it seems Team Ico was more interestd in making a visually stunning over a fun game.

Shadow of the Colossus has a lot of frustrating things about it. One major thing being the controls. Wander’s movement controls are stiff and clunky and I never really got completely used to them. He stumbles on small rocks or ridges in the ground that other games would have you smoothly pass over. While it might seem more realistic, it makes the game feel clumsy and heavier than it should. Wander’s run speed is way too slow which incentivizes riding Agro, but Agro is also difficult to control. It gets easier when you learn that Agro will continuously run forward and try to avoid upcoming obstacles by changing directions. Agro’s controls are especially frustrating when approaching a gap or narrow path. Agro will often try to run to the side of narrow path or comes to a complete stop in front of a gap because it recognizes these area as obstacles. It makes the player feel that they are not in complete control.

Taking control away from the player is always a bad idea for video games. A game where you don’t feel completely in control of your character or your camera is a game that feels unfair. I mentioned before that the camera struggles against the player and that’s because the camera favors a cinematic view. It focuses on Wander running across a field and it might sweep around to the side for a nice profile shot. You can move the camera wherever you want it, but it will always moves back to the original position. This is why I said Team Ico seemed more interested in making a visually stunning game over a fun game. It seems they wanted some dramatic scenes when exploring, rather than letting the player look at the world freely themselves.

But when it comes down to it, the game is fun. Travelling to the colossi can be tedious, and even boring sometimes, but the world around you is beautiful and mysterious. Climbing puzzles are always satisfying because places you can grab are subtle enough that you have to look for them, but never hidden enough to take too long. The real stars of the game, however, are the colossi themselves. They are the real reason that the game still deserves to be played today.

Every colossus is simply thrilling to fight. From first seeing them and being shocked by their size to finally landing the final stab in their weak point, it is just exciting. Most the of the sixteen colossi are totally unique in design and the few that seem similar, or complete copies of each other, still have unique ways of taking them down. They all work as enemies, puzzles, and levels at the same time which is something still rarely seen in games. For the most part, they are all so alien, yet awesome looking, that I found myself with a new favorite colossus every time I found one.

You feel completely insignificant while climbing on the colossi because they are so huge. Wander almost disappears against some of the larger ones when the portion you’re climbing takes up the entire screen. Watching Wander hanging on for dear life and flopping around like a rag when a colossus tries to shake him off helps heighten the sense of scale. It is also one of the most tense things I’ve experienced in gaming, especially as you watch your stamina meter quick depleting, hoping that the colossus stops before it is completely gone and you’re flung off it.

I typically don’t do well with games that have bad controls. If a game is frustrating just to move in, I will drop it quick. Shadow of the Colossus could have been one of those games with its clunky movement and stiff camera that fights you whenever you want to move it. But with each colossus I found, I was invigorated and would forget about the frustrations getting there. I had to see the next one, and the one after that, all the way until the end of the game. These colossi, these sixteen massive beings of stone and flesh are still so utterly unique in the world of games that they alone make Shadow of the Colossus worth playing.

Crash Bandicoot: N’Sane Trilogy – Critical Miss #1

/ atomicbobomb / 1 Comment

My experience with the Crash Bandicoot games in the 90’s were all through Playstation demo discs. I specifically remember the Crash 3 demo with one of the tiger riding levels on the Great Wall of China. I recall playing it over and over again. It was fun but I also had a hard time finishing the level. When the N. Sane remastering of the original trilogy was announced, I immediately wanted to play it and finally experience these classic beloved games.

While playing the games, I realized the original Crash games are in a strange place in this day and age. The more linear 3D level design and stiffer movement controls have dated compared to other more explorative, free moving 3D platformers popularized by Mario 64. There haven’t been many platformers with hallway style levels like Crash since the 90’s. The first one that comes to my mind would be Super Mario 3D Land on the 3DS. This unique style of levels is the main reason I think the Crash Bandicoot games are still worth playing today.

There are other strengths of the Crash trilogy that still make them enjoyable to play. With the N. Sane Trilogy being Remastered in HD, the games look better than ever. The characters are cartoony and expressive and everything is so lush and colorful that the games pop off the screen. There is also a variety of level types from 3D paths to 2D side scroller and the infamous chase levels and multiple vehicle sections. Sometimes, particularly in Crash 3, the variety of level styles make the games feel inconsistent.

Along with this slight inconsistency, there are two other major areas of frustration in the games. The first is the movement, which feels heavy and sluggish. This help to some extent when making precise jumps, but the heaviness of the jumps and some finickiness with the slide can make what should be simple jumps difficult. The second frustration are the hitboxes. They seem to extend further off the character model than you’d expect, leading to a lot of infuriating deaths where Crash turns into a ghost or smoking pair of sneakers slightly before he touches anything.

These issues should be deal breakers. Especially in a platformer where movement and control are paramount. But while these issues are frustrating, they are surmountable. More importantly though, the Crash trilogy is still worth playing just based on the uniqueness of the games. As mentioned before, there are not many games with the same type of 3D levels as Crash. The games are more linear than 3D Mario games and require more precision than 3D Sonic games. It’s an interesting case study of a style of 3D games from a time with more limited hardware, a style of level that didn’t gain as much favor as more explorative 3D platformers.

If you are interested in the Crash Bandicoot trilogy, the N. Sane collection is great. It looks great, plays well, and is easy to get your hands on. My rankings of the games would be:

  1. Crash 1 as the worst because the level design is sloppier and is by far the most frustrating of the games
  2. Crash 3: Wrapped in the middle because the over reliance of multiple vehicle level styles makes the game feel the most inconsistent
  3. Crash 2: The Wrath of Cortex as the best because it has the best difficulty curve that gets challenging but never too frustrating.