Doom

Here's a Doom tidbit I didn't put in the Doom 3 review: I disliked Doom 2 because it didn't have the little map screen the original game did. It's total window dressing, but for some reason to my young mind it put in this extra layer of immersion. I used to imagine the Space Marine hiking his way to these remote locations along the surface of the Martian moons, hoping each time they wouldn't be overrun with Demonic nonsense and then solemnly rip/tearing through them. (Actually that might have been in there, but I don't remember and it amuses me to this day)

Here's another tidbit: AMD named a processor the threadripper. Huge threads. Huge threads to rip and tear.

Also, worth noting, the original Doom never goes to Mars. Episode 1 is set on Phobos, which is a tiny as tiny gets moon orbiting Mars. Episode 2 involves teleporting to Deimos, which now orbits Hell itself, and then you just climb down to Hell in episode 3. Seriously, I swear the plot was you just threw a rope down and casually climbed down to Hell like it wasn't any sort of thing.

Anyway, so in this, Doom 4 which we'll just call Doom from now on actually lifts a lot of its genome from Doom 3. There's a lot of weird overlap that doesn't feel so much intentional as parallel evolution, although Doom 4 skips act 1 of Doom 3 and just kinda rushes forward from there, as well as having a completely weird story that has equal parts schlock and Jacob Hargreave going on in it.

It's also the first shooter in a long, long time to truly abandon the "realism" elements that drag down shooters and instead says F-it, you're the DOOMSLAYER.

Superhot

SUPERHOT, SUPERHOT, SUPETHOP, etc.

The thing that made Portal so successful, you'd think, was it's wonderful excellence in terms of memetic suggestion.You can say a lot of things about Super Hot, but there's a temptation to say what the game instructs you to say instead of actually reviewing what the game actually is. You'd be surprised, once you're "in on the joke".

Me, I don't know, I don't think I really felt much for the joke.

Regardless: Superhot's description almost always starts with a lie. The line is, I believe, a shooter that moves when you move. This isn't precisely true, though it isn't precisely untrue either. Instead, Superhot is a very simple shooter with a single enemy type and a weird meta story I won't get into that moves faster as you move faster, but is always moving just a little.

The end result could actually be described as a FPS-puzzle game, though that 'just a little' thing and certain other components degrade that puzzle element as well. So you end up with a shooter that is puzzling, both in gameplay and description.

Superhot, etc

A real lack of recent games: Enter the Gungeon

There's this super weird thing about using this blog as a writing exercise in that sometimes I just, uh, forget to finish up a review and never hit that publish button. Or I go back to a game after the review is done and feel like it should be re-written but can't find the energy.

I finished ETG several months ago. Finished with, that is to say, since it is a roguelite.

I have mixed feelings when it comes to roguelite design. Some of my favorite games in recent memory were roguelites, but most of them I find rapidly tedious and get sick of very quickly. They're plagued by forcing you to repeat the first level endlessly and even worse have this sickening unwillingness to program in any amount of conveyance. They're built around the idea that fun is something you need to work for and knowledge is something you acquire through repeated, repetitive play throughs. It's pretty easy for the latter two to turn into pure tedium.

The moment I saw Enter the Gungeon, hereby shortened to Gungeon, I was certain it was a game I wanted to play. For a while I waited on the game to show up in the humble monthly bundle, as I have a sub rolling ever still and humble puts up most Devolver Digital titles sooner than later. But it went cheap on the humble store and they'd given me credit for a referral so I decided the time was now!

I'm pretty certain I'll end up with an extra key sooner than later, it's probably in this month's bundle, knowing my luck.

Regardless, Gungeon is presented as a roguelite dungeon crawler fused with a shmup and a twinstick shooter with cool boss battles; the results lean a fair bit more toward the former than the latter, though this game certainly co-habits the design space you'd put Nuclear Throne and probably several other games I haven't played in. It has a few more buttons that Nuclear Throne and leans harder on the roguelite looting side than gaining XP or gaining loot, with various results.

It also loves puns and loves guns.

March to War Month: XCom 2

The original X-Com, which I'll call X-Com OG to try to be easier to read, is permanently lodged in my brain. I've played hundreds if not thousands of hours of it, and through at least one successful campaign of its sequel, the highly derivative Terror from the Deep, or Lobster men from the Ocean rise from the depths to touch your no-no zone.

I couldn't get into the XCom reboot, as it felt too close to X-Com OG while not offering much, if anything, to really get over my subjective distaste for the game. It reminded me too much of the usual dumbing down of strategic games, but it sold really well and lots of people liked it, so I'm not saying I think it's bad. Just, you know, it didn't quite line up with it. It's still very cool that they made a triple A big budget strategy game, even if I'd somewhat pull away from calling this a strategy game.

As for X-Com 2, the reality is, I have a 12 month humble bundle sub rolling and I was getting this game whether I liked it or not. Having clearly put the money in, well, I wasn't going to be deterred on giving it a try and wasn't going to be deterred by the first hour being bad since damn it, they already had my money.

March to war month: The Last Federation

Some games are easy to introduce and discuss, and others are difficult. But Arcen, makers of Last Federation, is generally a well-spring of being difficult to discuss in and of themselves, and then their games take it to the next level. Admittedly the last Arcen game I reviewed was Starward Rogue, which was a very different game.

The Last Federation is a very, very strange game to talk about. It bends a lot of what you'd expect from the genre around trying to set up this one, rather perfect little scenario that the game takes place in. But I guess I should explain the genre before I go anywhere else. TLF is a space simulation game, likely to be compared to the lineage of Master of Orion. However, if MoO and its variety of descendant games are described as "4x" games (or x4, I can never remember) then TFL is more like an 2.5x game. Most of the elements are there, but not all of them.

For one thing, the basic story is you're the last Hydral, the first race to gain space travel in a planetary system with almost ten different races. And your race was wiped out, as they were cruel dictators of the system until that wiping out. It isn't well explained why a space-faring race would be wiped out as such, but hey, it worked for Dragonball Z!

As the Last Hydral, you don't really have an empire per se and you don't really have anything approaching imperial resources. Oddly enough, though, the elements you'd expect to be dropped from a 4x given those restraints aren't the ones TFL is missing.

A slice of Indie: Morphblade

I really liked Gunpoint. My understanding, from reading the news around Gunpoint, was the next game by its developer was Heat Signature, which is this amazing sounding game about ... Actually go google it, but basically it's about being a little tiny space pod that slowly captures larger and larger ships, then battles with those ships, can lose those ships and so forth. I haven't read too much about it since it's like reading about Axiom Verge 2 or Double Dragon Neon 2: They will probably happen, but it is very far away from now in time and I don't want to think about being in my forties.

Regardless, apparently the developer of Gunpoint put out another game, on the third. I learned this when I was browsing through news of the Humble Bundle Monthly, which means not only did the game come out without me knowing but also entered a position of me owning it without knowing I was owning it beforehand. Which is pretty nice.

A break in the role for action - Wolfenstein The New Order

Shooters are such a weird thing to me, nowadays.

First off, not that many people played Doom or Quake. Not among the gamers you see talking about "old school" shooter design. I've come to the conclusion "old school" is basically the most meaningless pair of words you can see applied to a shooter, and that people say they played old school in the same way people claim nintendo and apple are innovators.

Wolfenstein The New Order is old school, according to the usual chorus of voices on the internet that always say that. But that doesn't actually mean anything, and if you're like me and expecting a Doom/Quake early era design... Welp, forget it, that's not this game. That's not this game at all.

Second, texture pop in is so strange. I only ever see it in shooters, for obvious reasons, but it's just so wonky to me. It feels like something you shouldn't ever see, but you clearly do, and what's up with that?

Also was I the only one who seriously thought this game would pick up after the earlier Wolfenstein and just involve a time travel plot? I guess that's sort of a spoiler, but it doesn't involve any time travel, which totally disappointed me. I guess that's sort of the theme of this game and my interactions with it.

Wolfenstein TNO is a first person shooter about violently attacking fascist ideology with firearms, and then a lot of strangeness around that. If you played the last Wolfenstein shooter, though, you'll be confused to find this is more of a "weird science" than "occultism" centric shooter, which I believe goes more toward the game's roots but I could be remembering wrong.

It's also kind of generic among id games for that. Actually it kinda reminds me of Fallout mixed with Quake 2. It sort of does that more than anything, though.

Eight long weeks of rolling: Divinity Original Sin

the review is actually negative, nice one steam

In gaming, there's a layer to reading reviews not quite as present in other entertainment mediums.

Gaming is very, very subjective. You might argue it combines all the subjective elements of other forms of entertainment and rolls them together, creating a truly finicky state. From there, you read reviews and wonder is that person's subjective view going to work with my subjective view? And it's hard to tell.

So, often enough, I hit on games that get rave reviews but I'm baffled at how high its marks are. Sometimes it goes the other way, sometimes bad games click. I do think there are some objective elements to gaming: Visual fidelity and quality, clarity of explanation and coherence in UI, so on and so forth. But most, if not all of it, is sort of up to the end user.

Divinity Original Sin is the byproduct of the kickstarter era of a couple years back. I think you could argue there's a pretty clean sweep of isometric-ish rpg-is titles born of KS; a "sequel" to Planescape Torment, a sequel to Wasteland, a "spiritual successor" to Baldur's Gate-ish and then whatever D:OS was supposed to be spawned from. I suppose on a level it is worth noting the game was marketed on its own graces, without claiming it's going to relive torment or BG2 or the lost direction Fallout took.

That being said, I can't really say I understand how or why this game is so positively reviewed. There's not so much hype to it, not really, as I don't know anyone who played it other than a friend I fear I unfortunately talked into it.

Sorry about that.

Eight long weeks of rolling: The Witcher 3

The Witcher series is one of the oddest progressions in the history of RPGs. It's also, maybe, one of the best attempts and best successeses at creating a real RPG that actually has you play a role in a story as opposed to a video game where a story plays in the background while you grind for goat butts.

The thing that stands out here is that the first Witcher game is weird and janky, and I rather liked it, but it was clearly limited by its engine. The Witcher 2 is much closer to realizing what they wanted to do, with an interesting and multi-threaded story that can go many different ways. The Witcher 3 realizes what Witcher 1 and 2 wanted to do - It's one of the few games I've ever played where the feeling of budget or design rarely if ever hits that sense of them wanting to do something

The Witcher 3 might ultimately be compared to Skyrim, albeit with mods so ladies can get their bits out, and then it would utterly crush Skyrim. That's not to say Skyrim is a bad game in any means, but Skyrim feels so bland and lifeless compared to the sharp wit of TW3. Though, to be fair, I have my complaints about the writing style as well, but Skyrim never makes you stop and pause to think about how much you're going to mess with people's lives. TW3 will trick you into it.

Witchers are tricky.

Eight long weeks of Rolling: Final Fantasy VI

I'd been eyeing picking up the PC port of FFVI with an emotional range running far closer to trepidation than excitement. I've always been worried that various games won't live up to my memories - FFIV, for example, is just kind of dull and dodgy - but Square put VI up for what felt like a low discount during BF sales.

I say "felt" because $4.80 USD doesn't really seem like a great deal for a >20 year old SNES game, port or no port, but as it turns out Square's webstore messed up and accidentally reversed the discount. So it was actually supposed to be less four eighty, not on sale for four eighty, and man I am not playing anything north of five dollars for this game. But I happened to have bought during the price error, so I guess that's good? Oh well, thanks store error, you save me the monies again.

Or technically don't, since it's not like I would have bought it if it wasn't at least this cheap.

2016 - Year of Sonic - Year in review

Usual caveats and ranking and caveats to ranking apply. All of this is subjective, these are my reviews, if you think as I do you'll agree. But you don't, so here's how the system generally breaks down;

A - A game I would recommend to people who don't like a genre, something good enough for people generally against it to try. These are the games I think you should definitely look into. This isn't a ranking like "10/10" or "four and a half stars, delivered pizza to my house, performed sexual favors and then changed the oil on my car", this is evaluating games subjectively, from my perspective, who I'd recommend them to. Which is the point of reviewing, to me, anyway.

And these are the games where I'd say "More than the usual". Mind you, I don't mean you should move hard outside you genre just to force yourself to try them. If you hate shooters, it's unlikely an A-rank game is going to redefine how you look at them. Look for them on sale and the like. These are games in X genre that appeal to people who don't usually like X genre.

B - Being games are excellent examples of their genre, but don't stand outside their genre. You have to be interested, at least a little, in playing this sort of game. They have to be your jam.  That's not to say a B rank game is necessarily more or less fun than an A rank game, as frankly, I had the most fun with a B rank game this year. This is more that it tends to be a little more bogged down in genre conventions and you need to be keen on how it works.

C - Games that you need to want to play the genre to want to play. Essentially, if B rank games are games where if you like ARPGs you'll like them, C rank games are ones where you need to be in the mood for the genre to like them. If you're not feeling it, well, you probably won't feel it.

D - Games I feel personally won't appeal to most people even within those that like the genre. That's not to say D rank games are all unplayable, or even that they're all garbage. Just that I'm not sure even if you were in the mood you'd be up for these.

E - Games I never finish reviewing, so they don't go on this list. There's about 10-20 games a year that fall into this category.

Also, this is a listing of games I reviewed this year, very few of which are ever actually from a given year. This is a guide to going through Steam sales and picking out stuff you might have missed at a low price, not a guide to the latest and greatest. I'm not even suggesting you buy these games this year.

I generally tend to lean toward lowering the ranking of games that are more difficult. As I said, this is about recommending games, and "difficult" is something of a subgenre. I've never met a "tuned to be difficult game" I would actually say I would recommend to anyone to pick up and try. There's lots of good ones, but the harder you tune a game, the less people who can play it and enjoy it.

The Gap: There's a four month gap in my reviews this year, which often happens around March, but went kinda wild this time. Basically, I played Serious Sam 3 - which I hated - Arkelash Legacy - which was disappointing - and spent like fifty hours dicking around with Skyrim but never actually finished it. Also Phantasy Star 2, which I think I eventually reviewed but who cares.