Toward the Verge: Strider

Strider!

Strider is a word used here for ... Like literally ninja. You're a "strider" from a "strider" school which teaches you to strider people to death. It's weird. They also call you "Strider" like it's a name but you are also a strider from that strider school, and they previously sent other striders to bestride the stride-able but they failed in their striding leaving all possible stridering to you.

Or something? In Ninja Gaiden do they just call the main character 'ninja?'

I had actually played Strider on the Genesis slash Mega Drive back when I was a young'un, but I don't have any strong memories of it. Reading wikipedia on the history of the release, it sounds like it was considered very highly as games go and not a metroidvania at all. Strider, here, is a Metroidvania and thereby covered vaguely under the toward the verge sub-banner of games I've played.

I'm going to be honest in that as a genre goes or has gone for me this year, this has not been what I would call a pleasant set of games. Generally speaking what you end up with are a lot of games with dull hallways, mediocre enemy placement, boring gameplay. No sense of exploration, of 'opening up' the game world or progression.

Strider is both the best and worst of the games I played in this regard. I didn't write many reviews, since there are more than a few games I feel like I might go back to in the doldrums between the two great sales, when I'm not trying to grind out many a card. Strider is a mix of a lot of elements that really make me wonder how much better it would have been if it wasn't crippled by being lashed to metroidvania elements.

It is also apparently inspired by Shadow Complex, so man, did that ever make me not want to pick up Shadow Complex.

The coolest thing about this game is that the Strider's scarf changes color when you change plasma options. You won't notice this early on, since you don't get a plasma change for quite a while, but you can actually change it on the fly and it slowly flows out. A lot of the visuals pick up on this sort of subtle element while the rest of the game hesitantly sits down before drooling on itself.

The final carddown: Commander Cool 2

It's not really the final anything, except I've finally got lots of cards sold for sale day. Finally! Cards down!

Commander Cool 2 is likely from one of my many groupees bundles purchases. While I talked about this with some trepidation back in march or so, Greenlight stepping up its game has led to an influx of indie games on my list, and with it a wide variety of titles to get my card on. Or I don't know, maybe it came from some other bundle, but whatever. It doesn't matter. I have this game for cards, and cards I shall seek.

I've been pretty happy with the greenlight into indies experience on Steam. Certainly most of the games aren't good, but it is an interesting way to experience gaming. It's nice to pick up a title, play for ten minutes and just throw it away if I don't care for it.

I'm not exactly certain what the story behind Commander Cool 2 is and I largely don't care. The game stars a dude who is a sarcastic epitome of "Commander Cool, too" and he is doing platforming levels in the stone age. The game is more of a "speed run" platformer in line with something like Volchaos, or maybe Dustforce, which is sort of sad to admit since Dustforce is noted as a good game and Volchaos was bad enough I'm not even sure I bothered to write up a review. Anyway, levels are short and platforming is quick. The game's load times are good, but it does have some weird shifts in design.

Steam sale holiday 2015: This is why we can't have nice things

It's time for another steam sale! It's time for who cares!

There are three things of worth to mention re: this steam sale. This is all text, and it's not even very funny, so feel free to not read this discussion of "the moar thangs change~"

The Death of Steam Sales

No, they're not going away, but I'm going to be honest in that no flash deals and no dailies all but instantly killed the sale for me and everyone I know in terms of enthusiasm. I just immediately bought Axiom Verge, a couple friends immediately bought this or that, and we all collectively moved on. I originally made a Steam account during a Steam sale quite a many years back, and in a lot of ways it shaped my perceptions of Steam as well as how I interact with friends regarding Steam. The big sales used to be an influx of discussion within my peers, with each of chattering about what we hope goes on sale, wondering if a game is worth it and mocking poor sales that over-estimate a game's remaining value.

There's no rush to f5 at 10 PST and there's no real excitement. No one really cares. It lacks the proverbial punch that previous sale models did, and it all seems to come down to one thing. Or two things. Well, a couple things.

Snore me out the door: Super Cyborg

The game is hard is not an excuse for lazy design.

Super Cyborg is a pixeled "homage" and by homage I mean clone of NES Contra games. The visuals are really good, with lots of variety and truly horrifying imagery. The monster design is garish and absurd, looking biological, alien and monstrous all at once and sometimes in ways you don't even recognize until you look at them longer. Then the music is really good, and the game feels good in motion. The menu screen looks great as the music fires up. You're pumped. This is going to be great!

What could go wrong? Everything. Everything could go wrong. A speed run of the game is about twenty minutes long, it has that little real content. Obviously learning the game should take a lot longer than that, but the game doesn't try to make you "learn" in a way where you "get better".

Super Cyborg is built around two core axioms for difficulty: Pattern memorization and situational unfairness. The first one is what I meant by never getting better. You don't get better at Super Cyborg, you just learn the patterns and whereabouts of all of the things that kill you. Which is everything. This leads partially to the second axiom: The game puts you in spots where enemies can jump on you or otherwise attack you and you have to struggle to fight back. I mean incredibly stupid stuff like you're going up a slope, and your gun doesn't shoot up the slope, so you can't hit enemies casually walking down toward you. They just amble toward you, not a care in the world. Unless you have the spread gun ... Which we'll get to discussing in a moment. NES era design just feels like surrealism in this day and age. Instead of feeling like a bad ass, you're flailing around, until you memorize the spots you need to be, though sometimes there are no spots and you're just not supposed to be in X spot with Y gun so whoops u ded.

Oh, and most of the weapons are garbage, and you lose your weapon when you die, so if you die just start over and get the good gun again. Since without Spread, you can't hit most enemies. So you end up spending additional time hitting the re-start button, because the developer I guess never played his game and didn't realize the lives/continues nonsense doesn't matter. You have to have that gun, or the game is just insanely hard. The hardest points, by the way, the become moments where other power ups appear on screen and you have to desperately dodge getting the inferior weapon. Does this sound like good game design in action?

There's not really much to say about Super Cyborg. It's a very short, pointlessly hard game I got half way through. Needing to constantly restart and redo sections to learn patterns just made me feel like I was studying for an algebra test. There is a lot that could be done to bring the genre forward and refine it, but this game does nothing new with the gameplay. The game looks cool, but it is ultimately just 80s tier design.

If you look at the screenshots and think that looks radical, and you're up for pattern memorization based trial and error gameplay, there you go! You're the tiny niche target audience! It's a well made game for what it is, but what it is, doesn't interest me in the least.

Glorkian Warrior: Trials of Glork

I'm just going to call this game Glork.

There isn't much to really say about Glork, since it is ultimately a very simple game. You play as Glork, a three eyed "warrior" whose only skills are running around and carrying his super backpack. The super backpack is, however, a character in and of itself that talks. The super backpack fires without input from you, meaning unlike most shmups the game doesn't force you to hold down a button, which is sort of nice.

The game is a shmup in the sense very early games like space invaders were shmups, so I guess we can sort of call it that? When it comes to gameplay, the game isn't complicated. You run around while super backpack fires into very silly looking aliens that on the most part seem barely interested in your presence. You have about three screens to run across, and enemies can basically end up wherever in that space. Most of the game is firmly detached from interacting with you - enemies shoot missiles and fireballs, or spit flame, but very little of it seems directed at you - while you bob and weave trying to avoid attacks. You have a health bar with up to six hits, though most attacks take off 2, so you drop dead pretty damn quickly whenever things do manage to hit you. Healing is pretty rare, so cherish those 3 to 6 hits.

There are a range of enemies but they mostly just float around and make silly noises, and then there's a range of power ups. The game kinda suffers for the power up system, as the basic weapon takes several hits to kill just about everything but the power ups can be pretty bonkers at just sweeping the screen. Some of the power ups, but not all of them, are extended by eating "power crackers" that drop from enemies. So you run around collecting crackers, or more so, when you have a power up. I guess some of the power ups are more like power ups FOR power ups, and they also just happen to improve the basic gun albeit vaguely. Lastly, there are "boss" enemies, which are sort of grim for how grindingly slow they go down if you don't have a power up, but collapse like a house of waffles if you do. Fully powered up you completely destroy screens full of enemies in seconds, so the game's pacing can feel ... Weird I guess. The game has an unlock system but I'm not sure it really does much of anything. I mean you do unlock things, but mostly it barely changes the game.

Glork's main appeal is the silly writing and art style, coupled with goofy cutscenes that happen between games and other oddball bits. The music is also goofy and charming, and the whole presentation is more than the sum of its parts. It does a lot to make the game fun and pleasant even though it is actually kinda grueling and difficult in sections, and is basically just a primitive score attack game.

Anyway, outside of the cute art and the jokes, the game is a little lackluster. As I said, the moment where a boss spawns - which makes getting power ups obnoxiously hard - without a power up is just a big sigh as you grind away on it for quite a while, and you can end up with a lot of moments where there are two enemies on screen bobbing around without killing either of them for what feels like an eternity. I had a good two hours of fun out of the game, but exactly how I'm not quite sure. After a while it gets pretty dull, but for a game I honestly am not certain how I got or why I decided to play it, I certainly wasn't worse off for the experience.

It is also about robots: Steamworld Dig

Steamworld Dig is presented in the reviews that pop up when you look over the game news as a Metroidvania, which I don't think it is. In turn, I'm not exactly sure what Steamworld Dig actually is, beyond feeling like the partial combination of various other elements from other games.

First things first, the game's visuals are fantastic, the usual steampunk aesthetic getting its groove on with a mix of other styles. All the characters look good, and the game is just plain easy on the eyes. It feels a lot like playing Terraria, but it is more hand-drawn and in most ways better looking. It doesn't do quite as well in terms of how it uses its lighting, which is a bit disappointing since digging games really benefit from deep shadows and contrast. The lighting effects in Steamworld Dig are rather limited, and don't have the spooky impact they do in Terraria, which was sort of weird.

Second, it is mostly a platformer with digging options - it does have some Metroidvania elements to it, but it doesn't quite feel like one. At its very core, the combat is pretty light stuff, and most of the game is just exploring the mysteries as you dig down in a huge mine and then just keep going with little in the way of backtracking. You do get upgrades along the way, but they generally feel less like something you absolutely need and more like quality of life improvements. There's a good vibe to it, though, just as a certain element starts to drone on in your brain the game throws you an upgrade to make that get less annoying.

In this the gameplay is very satisfying and very soothing. It isn't a difficult game, more or less a casual title, centered on digging. You dig things up, sell them, buy and find upgrades. The game's story is actually very reminiscent of Primordia, which is weirdly ironic given I settled into playing both so close together. It's not exactly as dark as Primordia, but it has many of the same angles that do tend to feel a little grim.

The main elements of the gameplay are digging and then the interaction between digging and your various supplies. You have limited bag space, limited hitting power, limited health, light and water. All of these being depleted makes it pretty difficult to get around, and in the case of health, ultimately kills you. You can upgrade all of this stuff with money or "power orbs" which increases them in a pretty linear fashion over the course of the game. The Metroidvania, I guess, comes from the aforementioned upgrades which grant you running or double jump or the various sort of things you usually gets.

Steamworld Dig is pretty by the book, mixing elements from various other titles, but the clean visual style and simple gameplay make it a relaxing if a little monotonous title. I don't really recommend it in the pure sense of a fantastic, engrossing core title to spend your time on, but I do recommend it if you want something to sit in front of the screen with controller in hand for twenty minutes every once in a while.

Not everything needs to be the next big heart stopper. Sometimes it is alright to just be good, right?

The shadow of potential: Contrast

Contrast is humorously unique to me, for a couple of silly reasons. For one, the visual style and core concepts are just subjectively very appealing. For two, I swore off buying non-bundled games last year and Contrast didn't go on a deep enough sale until day 1 of that very same year. So I didn't buy it then, and actually, I can't remember how I bought it this year, and for three that sense of "not especially memorable" manages to permeate everything about the experience of the game.

Contrast apparently didn't do well on a financial and possibly critical level, and it isn't that hard to see why. Superbunnyhop reviewed it back in the day, but he also had an interview with one of the developers, who sounded rather ... Negative about the game's short-term sales. It might have done better in the long term, that proverbial spiky tail of the fictional dinosaur, but I kinda doubt it.

I'm kinda down on this game, if you haven't noticed.