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God of War (PS2) – Critical Miss #36

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Photo by Greyhem. Found at godofwar.fandom.com

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

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

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

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

Photo by Greyhem. Found at godofwar.fandom.com

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

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

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

Photo by GabrielPacia. Found at godofwar.fandom.com

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

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

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

Photo by BlackPill. Found at godofwar.fandom.com

MediEvil – Critical Miss #32

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Spooky, Scary Skeleton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ape Escape – Critical Miss #28

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Image by KFHEWUI. Found at gamefaqs.gamespot.com

Just Monkeyin’ Around!

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

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

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

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

Image by TerrorOfTalos. Found at apeescape.fandom.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dying Light & 1st Person Platforming

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I’ve never been much into zombies. While they are not something I purposefully avoid, I don’t find myself drawn by media revolving around them. Before playing Dying Light, the last game I played involving zombies was Death Road to Canada. There is an interesting similarity with how both games handle the zombies hordes; that is, as something that should be avoided wherever possible. In Death Road to Canada, a 2D indie roguelike, there’s not much to do but try and kite around the zombie, keeping as much distance between them and you as possible. Dying Light, a full 3D, 1st person open world game, uses a parkour mechanic to let the player jump, climb, and run high above the zombies’ reach. And it is some of the best use of platforming I’ve seen in a 1st person game.

Platforming in 1st person games is nothing new, of course. Doom had “platforming” elements in 1993 by asking players to run across gaps in the floor. Half-Life had the infamous Xen levels, where the player was expected to platform across an alien planet. Mirror’s Edge was a 1st person game built around freerunning and parkour in 2009. Even more modern games like Doom (2016) and Titanfall 2 use double jumps, ledge grabs, and wallrunning to add a sense of platforming to set them apart from other FPSs. But none of these games have the openness and freedom to explore as Dying Light offers.

Set in the fictional city of Harran, the game is split into two large maps: the Slums and Old Town. The Slums are made up of buildings and shacks closely confined together. There is a giant highway overpass above and cutting through the map. Old Town, on the other hand, feels more like a Mediterranean city, filled with narrow streets, taller brick buildings, towers, and chimneys jutting out of slated roofs. Both maps are tightly packed, sometimes even cluttered, and they would have been frustrating to navigate in another 1st person game limited to the ground, but the close proximity of the buildings in Dying Light makes it easy for the player to jump and climb, saying off the zombie infested ground.

The design of the maps focuses on the freerunning. There are routes specifically designed not to break the player’s flow with street lights placed the perfect distance apart to jump to, boards curving around building corners, and ramps to jump from lead you open windows or piles of garbage to staying fall into. This can guide the player along easy paths, but the almost chaotic nature of the maps’ designs also allow free exploration. Every building has a way to climb, be it window grates, awnings, or extruding brick work. Not only does this let the player explore and find their own route through Harran, but if you do mess up and plummet into a group of zombies, it’s just a matter of a quick look around to find a way above them again. The platforming is free-flowing and open for experimentation, which is rare in most AAA games with platforming elements. It’s not as laid out and linear as in the Titanfall 2 nor is it as obvious as in games like Horizon: Zero Dawn or Doom (2016) which use colors to indicate what ledges can and cannot be used to climb.

With AAA games being a hodgepodge of differing gameplay elements and genres, it’s usually hard to describe any big budget game with a single genre. Dying Light itself is an open-world, 1st person action/adventure game. But it is as much of a platformer as any of those other descriptions. The climbing and jumping is integral to the game as one of the main loops, not an extra feature for the back of the box. Going back to Doom (2016) again, while jumping and verticality is important in a fight, most real platforming challenges reward the players with collectibles and secrets. Stripping out the platforming would make the game feel much more linear, but the main gameplay loop of fast paced demon killing would be kept completely intact. Dying Light would be a completely different game without the parkour system and would, at best, be just another zombie game, but with really limb melee combat. 

With parkour being a main focus of the game, its platforming controls have to be very tight, something many 1st person games struggle with, and luckily they are in Dying Light. The jump button is mapped to the shoulder button and it takes some getting used to, but once you learn to continue holding the jump button to grab ledges you’re aiming for, the controls click. There is the perfect amount of stickiness to grabbing ledges. The frames to grab climbable objects are strict enough to feel satisfying, but still lenient enough not to be frustrating. It strikes the perfect balance between being loose enough to be forgiving but tricky enough to be interesting. The game also understands the limits of the 1st person perspective. There is hardly any jumping on small platforms, an annoyance of the early FPS, and when there is, crossing them is a matter of keeping up speed and fluid running more so than jumping from platform to platform. 

Dying Light has a great understanding of what it can and cannot do with its platforming and how to make it fun, which makes it a real shame in the later half of the game when you enter Old Town. Out of the two maps, I prefer Old Town to run across. It’s taller buildings and ziplines make it more entertaining to parkour across. But the missions in this part of the game rely less on finding ways across the map and more on linear indoor or sewer levels. There are still platforming to be done in these areas, but they feel much less open, with there only being one, “correct” way for you to climb. It’s still fun to find that way around these levels, but missing the freedom of movement of the open maps makes these moments feel very restrictive.

I originally had an idea for this post that I would compare the platforming in Titanfall 2 and Doom (2016) to see which one was handled better in the 1st person perspective. But then a friend recommended Dying Light, saying it had the best platforming in a 1st person game they’ve played. After playing it myself, I would have to agree. It emphasizes the platforming more so than the other games and that forced it to be as good as possible, with tight controls and freedom of movement. There is a stigma around 1st person platforming and a belief that it just can’t work, which is sad because it could limit future games from offering new, differing experiences. Dying Light shows how fun platforming can be in a 1st person game if it is paid the right amount of attention during design. I hope we see more games like it in the future. More than just Dying Light 2, that is.

Metal Gear Solid – Critical Miss #13

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Sneaky-Beaky Like

The stealth genre is not one I follow too closely. I’ll pick a stealth game when it looks interesting, I enjoyed Dishonored enough and I thought the stealth mechanics in Sekiro were implemented really well, but I always have a hard time with the inherent slower pace of most stealth games. This explains why I’ve never played a Metal Gear Solid game before. But I recently picked up a PS2 and Metal Gear Solid was the first game I picked up for the system, I wanted to see what it was that has kept people so enthralled with it since 1998, why people love its creator, Hideo Kojima, so much, and if this was the stealth game that would finally help me love the genre.

Booting it up, the game’s visuals aged better than I expected. Sure, everything is noticeably pixelated on a HD television, but the art style and environmental design is really great. Everything is blue and metallic, heightening the sense that it’s a real military base in Alaska. You can see Snake’s breath when he is outside in the cold and the character models themselves are some of the cleanest and best looking I’ve seen on the system. It’s oddly charming watching the characters just nod their heads up and down instead of moving their mouths in cutscenes. 

I wasn’t a big fan off watching minutes long codec conversations, though. A lot of the discussions Snake has with his team members via the codec are just there to dump exposition, and having to watch it all with just two character portraits that hardly animate isn’t very engaging. However, the voice acting is extremely strong. It was one of the most impressive aspects of the game for me. PS1 games weren’t known for great voice acting (just see Resident Evil or Mega Man 8 for that), so to see Metal Gear Solid take it seriously was great. They had to have the best voice acting possible, though, because Hideo Kojima didn’t just want to make a video game, he wanted to tell a story. 

The story of Metal Gear Solid is basically a political/military thriller, but widened to explore themes of a soldier’s place in the world, trust in one’s government, nuclear weapons, and love. Honestly, the whole thing is very silly and over the top with larger than life characters and constant plot twists. It was the main thing that kept me playing in the second half of the game, but I wouldn’t say the writing itself is good. Character dialogue is almost always verbose, repetitive, and bloated. Characters explain unimportant details, like how the key cards open doors you just walk by, and they are always telling Snake how great he is and that he’s such a legendary soldier. I know, by this point, Snake has starred in two games already, but I would rather have his prowess as a soldier be expressed in gameplay, rather than characters saying it constantly.

I was similarly mixed on the gameplay. The controls have that classic PS1 stiffness, pressing against walls while trying to turn a corner is a constant issue I ran into, but once you get used to them, the stealth gameplay is enjoyable. The player is given many tools to sneak around guards: crawling under tables, looking around corners by pressing against a wall, knocking on walls to draw guards to the sound. The best tool they have to use is the Soliton Radar. This is a mini map in the top right of your screen that will show enemy locations and their sight lines. Using the radar well is key to infiltrating the base successfully. There are certain areas where the radar will be jammed and you will start to notice that a lot in the last half of the game. There are hardly any places on disc 2 that use the Soliton Radar. Not only is it disappointing to build up this skill to have it then taken away for most the end of the game, but it also leads to a lot of instances of being shot by something you couldn’t see off screen. 

There are also a couple bad moments of backtracking in the later half of the game, the worst being changing the shape of the PAL card. . You have to climb to the top of Metal Gear Rex to enter the control room, then you have to climb back down to go to the frozen warehouse, then climb back up to control room, then back down and take two long elevator rides to furnace before finally climbing back up Rex. This section is too long for its own good. It is just so boring and tedious. With most the rooms you travel through being devoid of enemies, there’s not much to keep the player engaged. It feels like padding at its most basic definition.

For me, the worst aspect of Metal Gear Solid are the bosses. The stiff controls make Ocelot and Gray Fox’s fight way too clunky, and the slow first person aiming makes the fights with Sniper Wolf and Rex terribly sluggish. Every boss has such a small window of opportunity to hit them that the fights involve a lot of waiting around. They never felt like they were testing my patience as a player, though, they just felt tedious. The worst fight for me was the Hind D which combines not only the slow aiming controls and small windows to do damage, but also has long periods where the helicopter dips below the building, meaning you just have to wait for it to come back to shoot it. The fight with Psycho Mantis is memorable because of all the meta nonsense happening, but my favorite boss in the game was Vulcan Raven in the warehouse. This is mostly because it’s the only boss fight that utilizes the Soliton Radar in a meaningful way as you watch his movements on the screen and place mines or C4 in front of his path.

Metal Gear Solid has the Resident Evil problem to me. While Resident Evil starts off as a scary survival horror game, it slowly becomes more action oriented as the game progresses until you are fighting giant bio weapons with rocket launchers. Metal Gear Solid follows the same pattern but with stealth gameplay instead of survival horror. The beginning is strong as you are just sneaking past guards from room to room, but towards the middle of the game the stealth gameplay gives way to action set pieces and boss fight after boss fight. I started to notice this after the first Sniper Wolf fight as I was lead down a string of frustrating action moments I didn’t feel the game prepared me for. After the fight with Sniper Wolf, you have the torture sequence where you mash the O button to survive. This leads to the communication tower section where you either run from the guards or shoot them down, stealth is not an option. Then the Hind D fight which I already discussed. The only room that requires any stealth skills past this point is the furnace and I found myself missing the sneaking around of the early game.

I can see why the game blew people away in the 90’s. With its great presentation, incredible voice acting, and emphasis on a real story, it stood out on the PS1. It really is the best cinematic experience you can have on that console. I only wish that the gameplay had stayed consistent throughout the entire game. I haven’t given up on the series, however. I still really want to play Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater because I’ve heard it’s really incredible. But first I have to get through Metal Gear Solid 2 and its bonkers story.

Monster Hunter World & Player Knowledge

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I’ve come to learn a secret about myself: I tend to enjoy difficult, sometimes even obtuse games. If a game strikes me right, I tend not to have a problem with taking the time to learn it, its mechanics, UI, etc. Learning a game that doesn’t hand out its secrets easily breeds a special kind of familiarity and satisfaction with the player. Dark Souls and The Binding of Issac are two of my favorite games because of their difficult to grasp or even hidden mechanics. Dark Souls is especially polarizing due to its refusal to explain things to its players. But while Dark Souls might be the prince of obtuse game design, Monster Hunter has always been the king.

I had a friend who laughed at me when I said that Monster Hunter World is much more user friendly than previous games, but it’s true. With a more intuitive quest system, hunter notes displaying monsters’ weaknesses and drops, and upgrade trees clearly laid out at the blacksmith, the game is much easier to parse than the 3DS games I’ve played or even the newest game on the Switch. That’s not to say the game has been dumbed down. Simplified, yes, but the game is so deep that there is plenty it still relies on the player to figure out on their own.

Even before a hunt, the player will have to prepare. This includes choosing equipment if you don’t have a preferred set, but also grabbing the correct items like antidotes if you’re hunting a monster that poisons or nulberries in they inflict blight. The player should also stop at the canteen to eat, which grants stat increases. A seasoned hunter will know the best stat to buff for a hunt like getting more defense while fighting a Diablos, who is a heavy physical hitter. You’ll have the best chance of success by preparing before a hunt and that can be difficult for new players who are unfamiliar with useful items or the monster to choose the best gear. Even learning where things are in the hub takes time. The hardest thing for me when starting up Iceborne for the first time was learning where everything is laid out in Seliana as opposed to Astera.

Another thing you can do before a hunt is practice your weapon. Monster Hunter World has a training area where you can try out any of the 14 different weapons and even provides combos to perform on the side of the screen. This is a good thing because while some weapons are easier than others, they all have unique combos and qualities that the game isn’t great about explaining to you. I personally main the Charge Blade because I like its speed and defense in sword and shield mode, its power in axe mode, and just the overall variety the weapon brings. However, this weapon is so complicated, with its charging phials to make axe mode stronger and  finicky controls, that I had to look up a few Youtube videos early in my playthrough to get the most of it. Yes, there are actual 20+ minute long videos on Youtube and essays on forums dedicated on how best to use a weapon. A player can get by without knowing all the little nuances of their preferred weapon, but that’s just another mechanic you need to put the time in to learn before heading out on a hunt.

Once on a hunt, the player’s knowledge of the game is truly tested. They will need to track down the monster with help from the scoutflies and fight the monster to submission. After a while, players learn the areas monsters tend to appear. For example: Rathalos will start in the leafy canopy of the Ancient Forest and Diablos can typically be found in the caves of Wildspire Waste. Players will also learn where useful materials spawn in areas the longer they play. I always like to stay well stocked on Armorskin potions, so every time I find an adamant berry, I make a mental note of its location.

An oversimplified way to describe Monster Hunter World would be to say it’s a boss rush game. The core gameplay loop is fighting giant monsters, be them dragons, dinosaurs, or whatever the hell Pukei-Pukei is. Like Dark Souls, Cuphead, or any other game where bosses are a major component of gameplay, the monsters take a lot of learning to master in fights. There are attack patterns to commit to memory, blights monsters can inflict, tells when they are enraged, exhausted, or close to death. The first time you hunt a monster is the most dangerous. You won’t know any of its attacks or inflictions it might cause. But each time a player hunts a monster, they learn a little more, get a little better, until fighting opposing beasts like Nergigante are second nature. Nothing feels as good as breaking an attack swing to dodge a monster’s attack and watch it miss by millimeters.

There has always been a big focus on breaking the monsters’ parts in the series. Things like wings can be damaged, horns can be broken, and tails cut off. This damage doesn’t just feel satisfying to do, but also affects the rest of the battle. The monster’s abilities and attacks will change depending on what have been damaged on their bodies. A monster with damaged wings will have a harder time flying and spend more time on the ground. Breaking Diablos’s horns is a good way to lessen the damage it can do with charge attacks. Learning what parts of monsters can be broken and how that affects them is important to success in a hunt. Barioth is a mix between a saber-toothed tiger and a dragon. It’s also a real bastard. It took me two or three attempts to finally slay this beast, but I learned to focus on specific parts of its body with each attempt. At last, during my successful hunt, I attacked him in a learned pattern. First, cut off the tail because it neuters many of its attack’s range. Second, take off the spikes off its wings to make sure it stumbles while using certain attacks. Finish it by focusing on attacking its head where it is the weakest.

Monsters in the game will start to seem easier, but it’s not in the same way it feels in a standard RPG where your character can take on tougher foes because they leveled up a few times and their stats increased. You get better at Monster Hunter World as a player. You get better at hunting monsters after studying their attacks, you learn how to prep better or collect the materials you need, you’ve mastered your weapon and know how to get the most out of it. It’s an interesting bit of ludonarrative connection that your hunter character in game gains more and more recognition as the story progresses and as you the player become better at playing the game. It makes the praise the characters layer on you feel less like it’s scripted and more like you fought hard through the trials and earned it.

Resident Evil 2 (2019) & Mr. X

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It’s now on record that the Resident Evil 2 remake was one of my favorite games of 2019. Lately, I’ve become enamored with the classic Resident Evil formula and the Resident Evil 2 was a perfect update to it, adding more RE 4 shooting mechanics to the level design of the PS1 style games. But there’s one mechanic in the game that fascinates me more than any other and that’s the character that fans affectionately refer to as “Mr. X” and which I will be referring to as such because it’s shorter to type than the tyrant. 

Mr. X appears in the station at some point during a playthrough and stalks the player in select sections of the game. If he gets line of sight on the player, he will chase after you until you outrun him, which isn’t easy to do since he walks about as fast as the characters run. If he doesn’t know where the player is, he will search throughout the station for them. You can hear his heavy boot steps thumping on the floors and the crash when he throws open doors. Even though you can hear him stomping around, it’s never completely clear when he is, and it’s very startling to open a door only to find him on the other side, ready to deck Leon or Claire in the face. Knowing where you are safe from him is invaluable knowledge. You can take a quick side path around him when he’s spotted down a hall or dip into the S.T.A.R.S. office or a safe room, where he can’t follow you, when being chased down.

He pushes the player to rush. No longer can you slowly inch down a possible dangerous hallway and you have less time to decide whether to shoot a zombie down or wait for the right moment to juke pass them. If he’s not coming up on you at the moment, he could be always be entering the room at any second. The worst areas are the halls with Lickers in them, who are aggroed by the sound of the character running. If Mr. X is running you down through one of those, yous can choose between going slow and being pummelled by Mr X or running and being clawed by a Licker.

Puzzles and inventory management must also be done quickly. Sure, you are safe in the pause menu to arrange your items all you want, but if Mr. X was standing right in front of you with fist raised when you paused, he’ll still be waiting and ready when you unpause. Luckily, he doesn’t show up in a lot of the inventory management puzzles, like the chess piece puzzle, but during the puzzles where he is bearing down on you, he will make you feel every second lost as you stand in place, pausing and unpausing.

Hearing Mr. X thundering through the rooms helps accomplish two things. The first is letting the player know where he is in the station. While it is difficult to pin down where exactly Mr. X is at any point, the sounds he makes gives the player a relative idea of his location. This helps them know when they are in relative safety. If you hear him across the station, you’ll probably safe to go slow for a while, but if the footsteps are nearby, it’s best to be on guard. Being able to always hear Mr X. also works as a constant reminder that he is out there, he is hunting for you. This keeps the tension high while playing in areas of the police station where the players know they’re safe.

This constant tension builds until Mr. X suddenly appears. Whether he bursts through a door you were heading to or you spot him at the other end of a hallway, it is a very distressing occurrence. He usually appears standing between the player and where they were trying to go when they run into him, forcing them to figure out on the fly another path through the station to their destination.

It can’t be understated what an imposing presence Mr. X has in the game, as he hulks toward you, eyes angry and shoulders squared. But I think what makes him the scariest is that he in not a fully known entity. After multiple playthroughs of the Resident Evil 2 remake, I still don’t know what determines Mr. X’s behavior. I never figured out for sure if he actually has to look and find the player when he is off screen, or if he’s always making a beeline to their location. I believe it is the former because there was a time I was standing above the ladder in the library and I watched Mr. X enter through the main hall, stopped and looked around, and exit out through a side door. This moment, character standing in a room with this monster and me holding my breath in real life, stands out to me because it was totally unscripted to my knowledge and actually scared me as I waited to see what Mr. X would do. 

There was another moment, while playing through Claire’s A scenario on hardcore mode, that stands out to me. After progressing to the point where Mr. X is introduced, I did not see him at all until leaving the station for the orphanage. I didn’t even hear him that entire time. I started to wonder if the range you can hear Mr. X in hardcore mode is reduced or if my game was bugged somehow. Was I just getting lucky not to see him? I was filled with uncertainty during that entire section of the playthrough because I wasn’t sure if the game was taking advantage of my incomplete knowledge. This playthrough became more stressful than any other because, as it turns out, not hearing Mr. X and not knowing where he’s located is scarier. 

While Mr. X stalking the player throughout the police station is designed to create fear in the player, it also helps reinforce the knowledge of the game they’ve learned and give the players a sense of growth. When he pops into a hall unexpectedly, Mr. X works as a roadblock. The player then must figure out a way around him, a side path to get them where they were heading, clear as possible of additional threats. After hours of playing the game and exploring the halls of the station, they can easily do this in a single moment. When players first enter the police station, it is confined and narrowed by locked doors and puzzles. The player will slowly open up the station as they progress through the game into a complex web of halls and rooms. The developers were smart to introduce Mr. X into a playthrough when the station is mostly open. By that time, the players will be well familiar with its layout and all the quickest, safest paths throughout. If Mr. X appeared earlier in the game, before the players had a chance to get a mental layout of the station, it would feel unfair.

The real strength of putting Mr. X in the game is that he gives the players moments of satisfaction as they backpedal away from him and use their knowledge gained throughout a playthrough to map out a new route through the police station. The true genius is his dual purpose design that creates a constant sense of fear but also a sense of knowledge in the player and how easy his design accomplishes both these purposes. 

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.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night – Critical Miss #4

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Castlevania: Symphony of the Night came out in 1997 and it was a huge departure for the Castlevania series. It was less linear like its predecessors and more explorative, with a huge open map more like a Metroid game. This lead to the series lending the second half of the genre name: Metroidvania. I was excited to play the game for the first time when a rerelease was announced for the PS4. I’ve always been interested in Metroidvania games. I have gotten through half of Super Metroid and enjoyed it before i got distracted with other games. After I completed Hollow Knight though, I was itching to get back into the genre and I thought I’d take a look at one of the major games that helped shape the genre outside and past the Metroid games.

Right off the bat, the presentation of Symphony of the Night is great. The music ranges from hype-inducing in the opening hallway to creepy ambience in the flooded caves and the sprite art for the enemies are all detailed and gorgeous. Even the few examples of using 3D models, like for the save point coffins and the clocktower that rotates as you ascend the stairs to face Dracula, mesh well with the 2D art and add a whole lot of charm to the game. Alucard himself is the only aspect of the presentation I don’t care for. While his sprite is fluid and well animated, the sprite also seems blurry when he’s constantly in motion and having after effects trailing behind him. It is neat to see the wings of Alucard’s bat form change color depending on what cloak he’s wearing, but his sprite came across messy and less detailed than the world around him.

Castlevania Requiem: Symphony Of The Night & Rondo Of Blood_20190519124932

The two best things about the game to me are the enemies and the map. Enemy variety in a game is huge to me and Symphony of the Night does not disappoint. There are so many different types of enemies from wolves and skeletons to invisible fencers and floating books the spit out a mass of conjoined skulls. Enemies all have unique sprites, with only a few pallet swaps, and there are many different attacks the player must learn to avoid. Like the enemy list, Dracula’s castle is similarly huge and varied. There are many interesting locations just filled with secrets to find and relics to collect, some of which will open up means of unlocking even more secrets to explore. I got so absorbed into exploring the castle, wanting  to find everything I could, that I ended up revealing 100% of the map before fighting Richter without much trouble. But after fighting Richter, another castle appears upside-down from a portal in the night and the last half of the game is accessible. Unfortunately, this is where the game lost me.

The combat in Symphony of the Night never really enthralled me. There’s not much to it besides attacking and jumping to dodge enemy attacks while using an occasional subweapon. The combat is very basic and when paired with the knockback Alucard suffers when hit it becomes more frustrating than fun. Alucard will go flying halfway across the screen every time he takes damage and it’s obnoxious. Multiple times I found myself entering a room, getting hit by an enemy standing just inside the entry, and having the knockback send me back out the door I just came through. This was just annoying.

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Starting in the reverse castle, the enemy placement seems more haphazard and less considered. Some halls in the second half of the game are so full enemies that do so much damage and send you flying around with knockback that it is highly incentivized to travel through the rooms in Alucard’s mist form, which is horribly slow. Traversing the reverse castle altogether is tedious. Most the platforms to scale are just slightly beyond your jump height, even with the high jump and double jump, that you need to use the bat transformation to just proceed. The bat form, like the mist form, is just too slow so exploring the reverse castle isn’t exciting. It’s dull.

A lot of the issues with the reverse castle could be made easier with Symphony of the Night’s leveling system and RPG elements, a first for the Castlevania series, but they don’t add much to the game overall. In fact, they’re almost unnoticeable. Throughout the game, you will gain experience points and levels from killing enemies, giving you increased stats and health points. You can also find health upgrades and new weapons or armor hidden throughout the castle. Going through the game, leveling up at a steady pace and equipping the best weapons and armor I found, I didn’t notice a change in my character. All enemies in the first castle died in one or two hit and did less than ten damage to me. When I got to the reverse castle, however, enemies took longer to kill and would do upwards of thirty damage per hit. That, along with the room obstacles like sliding spikes on the floor doing nearly eighty damage, the options once you hit the difficulty spike in the reverse castle is to either die a lot or move through the entirety of the second half of the game in mist form.  

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After a while in the reverse castle, my interest in Symphony of the Night just stopped. The pacing suffers too much from having to move in the bat or mist forms and the combat isn’t nuanced enough to keep me engaged. I was having fun through the first castle but I wasn’t enthralled by the game at any point. So when I hit the difficulty spike in the reverse castle, I didn’t have the motivation to continue.