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: 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.

Holiday Card: Pirate Pop Plus

There are various points in the nostalgia triggering spectrum that is gaming where gaming was, in a word, pretty ugly. Truly retro pixel art, that is, atari style is pretty hideous. Early 3D is pretty grim - I don't mean the sprite based faux-3d of Duke Nukem or Doom, but the shortly after those titles. But one of the true stand-outs for ugliness is the original gameboy.

I played many hours on the original Gameboy, so the four "color" LCD stylings of Pirate Pop Plus look fine to me. The faceplate, seen in the screenshots, adds to the effect and reminds me of playing Gameboy Color emulators (or whichever, the one Metroid Fusion was on) which is pretty pleasant. But I would totally understand if you took one look at these screenshots, turned three hundred sixty degrees and bubble-walked right out of the room.

Anyway, PPP is a rehash of a decade(s) old arcade game, Pang or Buster Bros or honestly who knows which? I can remember playing this game years back in the arcade, but I could never remember the name. Essentially, in this case, a pirate appears on screen and produces a bubble. When you hit the bubble with your harpoon, it pops in two or three smaller bubbles. Repeated down one size and once you've obliterated the bubble or take too long he's back again with another bubble. And repeat til you lose. PPP distinguishes itself with a world-flipping mechanic, in which the pirate appears at random and picks up, down, left or right to be the new down. Often he'll pick the direction you're already facing, but then you can shoot him in the ass.

PPP also has a currency system, in which gold coins drop and can be traded into a vendor for new characters, new music and then a lot of silly stuff that doesn't do overly much but is sort of fun. The cosmetic side is cute, but requires a lot of grinding that likely goes beyond how much fun you'll get out of the game. I had a good two hours with it, and I'd probably play it more, but I have so many games to work my way through you know how it is.

The gameplay on the most part is quite enjoyable. When the gravity gets flipped, you have a weird bonus round where you can 'land' on bubbles to pop them very quickly. If this happens at the right time, you can rack up quite a few bonus points, but it's also the most dangerous point. When you first touch the ground, you bounce, and you can't fire while you're in the air. The end result is a period of extreme vulnerability, which isn't much fun and is basically the main point I die at. The other thing is your spear can ONLY ever pop one bubble, which frankly isn't well thought out on the developer's part. You can end up in the later levels with piles of bubbles all clumped together and chain spearing just won't get through them all. Not sure why it doesn't linger for a split-second to pop multiple.

You can also run into an issue where you fire a spear as the pirate appears, and drive it into his rump while expecting to hit something else. End result is much the same.

In conclusion, I'd say PPP is good if the graphical style tickles your fancy. It's a fun little game with a little grind on the side to make it a bit more interesting. I do wish it had more power ups, or perhaps more interesting power ups as most of them are pretty dull. Definitely a lot better than, oh, quite a few titles I fired up while grinding cards only to find them utterly unplayable.

Top Seven Zones I'd like to see remixed in Sonic Mania

I just can't stop talking about Sonic these days. I recently watched a video that presented the youtuber's personal picks for the top seven they'd like to see. It's a good video, feel free to watch it before I go over my picks.

And now, I use the break function, because reasons

Summer of Sonic: Wrap-Up

Tables of Contents for the Summer of Sonic;

Sonic the Hedgehog

Sonic 2

Sonic 3 & Knuckles

Sonic CD

Sonic 4 E1

Sonic Heroes

Sonic Adventure 2

Sonic ATS

Sonic Lost World

Sonic 4 E2

Sonic Generations

Unleashed + Dolphin Colors

After the break are a couple closing statements and thoughts on the series, good and bad, as well as my favorite Sonic game and so forth. And yes that table of images looks even worse on my end. I have no idea why blogger hates me so. Sorry. It also won't let me set them up in chronological order.

Odallus: the Dark Call

Nostalgia or "homage" driven game design is an interesting and oft-times frustrating way of building games for the end user. I've often thought about what defines the niche, and from there, whether or not I'm complaining about something most of the niche enjoys or if it's just something they piled into the game because they could.

Odallus: the Dark Call wears its retro styling in big bright pixels on its sleeve. The game resembles a visually superior Castlevania 2. Yes, that Castlevania. The one you're not supposed to mention. Look at that sentence and look at the paragraph above, and you can start to wonder what I was worried about when I picked this up in a bundle a couple weeks back.

But there's a lot of mechanics in Castlevania 2 that could be good or bad, right? Just as there's lots of mechanics in Sonic, or Shadow of the Beast, or the whole potential variety of retro gaming to draw from, including a lot of games I honestly can't remember even though I've probably played most of them.

And draw from it does, in fact. Odallus feels like a mish-mash of themes and homages jumbled together, all drawn in with an almost Berserk like overtone and pixel graphics with a sweet "television" filter that makes it look super retro in a way pixels along rarely convey fully.

The result? Well, let's see...

Summer of Sonic (7): Sonic Generations

If you're going to launch a title that hopes to cash in on legacy and nostalgia, Sega has essentially built a road map to do it, and how not to do it. But we've yelled about Sonic 4 Episode 1 enough, at least until Sonic 4 Episode 2 comes up and it is coming up fast. No, bae, it's Generations time.

And it's about time. Also, it's about time.

Sonic Generations has a lot of unique elements for me, first and foremost I don't think I played a non-early era Sonic game for the entire period between the release of S3&K and Generations. I watched someone play Sonic Adventure and thought that isn't for me and wrote the entire franchise off. Took it outside and buried it in the sidelot. I might have played Rush, but that's not a main console release.

Except I played Sonic 4, Episode 1, back then. And I thought - I'm not kidding here - that I'd downloaded some sort of knock off game.

I had no experience with Sonic in 3D up until I fired up Sonic Generations, and I glumly fired it up, resigning myself to being forced to play Sonic in 3D, which I'd heard so many horror stories about. I mean, I've seen the Sonic R video Jontron did. I'd read about Sonic 2006, a game so bad it still stands the test of time as bad. Sonic in 3D was a place I didn't want to go, but the promise of Sonic in 2D made to the old timey standard instead of whatever nightmare alternate reality had...

Look, I promise, no more Sonic 4. That's back here, and after this review, we have a bonus review here and the next review will be here. The next review is more Sonic 4.

Summer of Sonic (6): Sonic 4 Episode 1

To go back to a point I started to make in the previous review and then stopped, let's talk about how I'm dividing up the eras of Sonic games. I'm of the general belief that paradigms shift in a gradual way that does not become obvious when looking for extreme granularity. Sonic, in my mind has three eras, but trying to define the when and where of those eras is tricky. To put in very evident signposts, very clearly: Sonic 1 is early era, Sonic Adventure is middle era, Sonic Unleashed is modern era.

Actually defining where the early era ends is the most difficult: Simply put, the pixel based Genesis/Mega Drive, Game Gear, SMS games are all very evidently early era. But Sonic gradually went into weird places, and while the Dreamcast is the middle era, the exact points around it I don't know.

The modern era, as I said elsewhere, lies with Sonic Unleashed. Everything I've read has stated that Unleashed is where they nailed down the 3d and got it working in a way used in Colours and Generations, and that's where I imagine it is going to stay. At least for the games Sonic Team's repulsive inability to stick to a working model doesn't rear its head.

It's very true, however, having played Sonic Adventure 2 (and hating it, yes) that Sonic's 3D begins all the way back there in some capacity. You can feel the outlines of the new ideas taking shape, but it's not there yet, and that's why I'm defining it like that. The middle era is when Sonic didn't "get" 3D, but it's still Sonic, I guess. Sonic Heroes was better about this, but it's still not quite Generations.

Meanwhile, Sonic actually has quite a few 2D games. Rush, Advance, so on and so forth. Many of these were developed by DIMPS, and while I don't personally like the DIMPS games, they went to them for the atavistic throwback that is Sonic 4 Episode 1, a modern era game desperately trying to be an early era game.

The results are... Interesting...

Sonic 4 Episode 1 is the sixth of nine games in the Summer of Sonic! The previous main entry is here, while the next bonus entry is here while the next main entry is here. Those two won't be up open initial posting, but that's just how this works.

Summer of Sonic (4): Sonic 3 and Knuckles

Welcome back to the Summer of Sonic, which has now reached what many will join me in calling the apex of the series, and likely the most pointless review of anything I will ever write in my life. Were I to review a loaf of bread, it would likely carry more meaning, since at least I could say something more than one of the few examples of fanboy squealing in my life.

Just kidding. There's a lot of interesting stuff to talk about, just not in the concept of a review.

Sonic 3 (and Knuckles!) is the name given to combining Sonic the Hedgehog 3 with Sonic and Knuckles. In their original incarnations, Sonic and Knuckles was capable of accepting another game on top of it. They referred to this as 'lock on' technology, which they then ... Never used again to my knowledge, typical Sega. You could play Knuckles in Sonic 2, and practice the special stages with other games even. Other games locked on would do this for whatever reason, it would pick a random special stage and you could get some practice with the mechanics.

Sonic 3 inversely featured the ability to save your game, which doesn't sound impressive now, but was completely unusual for a Sonic game at the time. S&K itself can't save, but it's very short, in fact Sonic 3 is pretty short as well. Combined together, though, as a kid the save thing was really helpful.

I'm going to address the game as a unified title and not individually; they're both completely playable, but the game was split in development and re-combined later, so I think this is the game "as intended" and we'll just go with that. (Although yes, as intended is up for debate, since development cut Sonic 3 in half, so who knows what they'd really have done?)

This is review four of nine in the Summer of Sonic; the preview review is here and the next one will be here whenever I get it up.

Summer of Sonic (3): Sonic CD

For a long time in my childhood and even into my adulthood, I completely did not realize Sonic CD was really a thing. I imagine I had at some point seen or heard about it, but my affection for the Genesis was never so great as to spend that kind of money on a wasted peripheral. So I just put it into the back of my mind and never considered it. Sonic to me, like many franchises, was swallowed up in the 3D era and forgotten about. Which is to say I pretty uniformly hated each and every transitional game of 2D into 3D. Yes, even that one, or that other one you're excited about. Yes, Sonic CD is 2D and gorgeous 2D at that, but by the time I had the funds to pursue a Sega CD, I certainly wasn't interested in doing so.

I believe the game was ported to be PC a long time ago, but I never saw that either. I hadn't realized I could be playing the game until it was ported to Steam, and even then, I think I pirated it and played it briefly before forgetting about it.

Sonic CD has, to my understanding, an interesting history. It is a marquee title for a system that sold very few copies. It is basically like headlining the titanic. It is also the product of splitting the Sonic team in half and producing two Sonic games at once, with rapidly divergent design perspectives. I feel that itching in the back of my teeth when I read about it, that sensation that the whole story isn't being properly presented to me, so I'll let readers do their own digging. It's certainly an interesting way to continue a franchise.

Sonic CD on Steam is, to my understanding, the Taxman / Christian Whitehead port in all its glory, and it does run well. There's a story about that guy in the first half of this Superbunny Hop video here, which deals with Sonic Mania, the announcement of which feels oddly coincidental. I didn't know, but realizing I picked up the anniversary bundle and this is the 25th anniversary announcement, it actually isn't much of a coincidence.

This is Sonic game #3 (done in chronological order) of Summer of Sonic. The previous game is here, and the next game will be here, once I actually get that written up.

Summer of Sonic (2): Sonic the Hedgehog 2

So the Summer of Sonic, brought to you by spending $10 at humble bundle on the Sonic anniversary special, continues spinning on. You can check out  the previous entry here and the next entry, when it goes up, here.

Sonic 2 is more interesting to talk about than Sonic 1, for several reasons. It is a big step forward from the original game, on essentially every single level. That isn't especially interesting, but I guess we'll get into that. What is sort of interesting is that Sonic 2 was produced at the same time as Sonic CD, which leads you to see some interesting changes in design and ideas, but also it feels like something is missing from Sonic 1. Did it go to Sonic CD? I'm not really sure, but Sonic CD (which I've only played a little of, for now) certainly feels and looks more like the original than 2 does.

The other interesting thing is the fact Sonic the Hedgehog 2 introduces the first of what will eventually become an avalanche of side-characters of all shapes and sizes. What is interesting in this is it begins a certain weird facet of Sonic and how Sonic is evaluated.

Everything Sonic does wrong - other than the blatantly obvious, like shipping an unfinished beta as a product - is generally along a spectrum. People complain there are too many characters, and that's true, but Tails, Amy and Knuckles were all well received at the time. It's all in the transition, a moment of 'knowing when you see it' (usually when Shadow shows up) but each individual doesn't seem so bad back in the day.

Even Shadow is pretty damn hilarious at the moment, mind you...

Like, right at the beginning, with nearly the best game in the series, you can already see it starting to fall apart. Corporate mismanagement aside, it's already there, waiting in the weeds.

Summer of Sonic (1): Sonic the Hedgehog

I had been thinking about picking up Sonic: Lost World whenever I next saw it on sale when humble bundle dropped the Sonic 25th anniversary bundle. I was going to buy it, when I realized it had tiered keys, which I rather hate. Then the latest Steam sale began and... Ugh... So I just cashed the $10 tier.

This steam sale was terrible! None of my friends really bought much of anything. Oh, it was also the highest grossing steam sale. Hurray for average consumers! You've gone mainstream, Valve, extract money from da dopes. Whatever. I bought a bundle.

And then decided I should review a chunk of Sonic games, to go with said anniversary. I'm technically a Sega and Sonic kid; my parents bought me a revision 1 Genesis and it is probably the console I've played the most in my life. I'm not going to review every Sonic game (good lord) or even every Sonic game in the bundle, rather spend the next eight weeks going through a selection of them depending on how much I enjoy myself.

Sonic the Hedgehog, the first, has a copyright of 1991 on the title screen. I can actually remember getting this game as a rental even, right after it came out. I remember because I was so upset I couldn't get Sonic to move when I first tried to play it. Turns out the controller was half-plugged in and the d-pad wouldn't work. That moment always stood out to me as memorable, mostly because he would jump up and down but he could not go fast. Since I didn't own it, I never actually beat Sonic the first as a kid, doing it much later in maybe 2010 or so.

Over the verge; Axiom Verge

Axiom Verge is the product of a single dude, which has long since lost real meaning to me. Thomas Happ be his name, and he made a game about ... Whatever this game is actually about is somewhat hard to describe. I'm going to try to describe the game without spoiling the game, which is actually much more difficult than you'd think, because certain explicit and implicit elements of the gameworld are tampered with as a matter of due course for the story to unveil and then unfold.

At its core, before anything else is layered on, Axiom Verge is a Metroid leaning Metroidvania. There are a lot of reviews and a lot of commentary built from that central point, and a lot of it goes from there to become very hostile and negative. Oh how dare a single gentlemen lovingly craft a passion project in his side hours that builds from his experiences in retro-gaming of the Nintendo-kind! How dare he infringe on that holy space!

Thing is, as I said back in the Super cyborg review, I honestly don't care anymore. We're not in the early generations of gaming here, and the fact that someone who was raised on video games made a video game that feels like video games is like complaining that a major book series feels like a book within its genre. Yeah, it is a Metroidvania that feels like a Metroidvania.

Get over it. The genre is actually pretty narrow, if you actually want it to feel like Metroid, and not something like Strider where the Metroidvania elements feel like a contagion that infected an action game's genome and dragged the entire production down.

To me the real question is whether or not Axiom Verge, in and of itself, by itself, feels like a quality and polished product that I enjoyed playing, and/or, think others should play.

There Was a Cave Man

 

There is a video series done by Egoraptor in which he talks about the transition from original property to sequel, and what it means in game design, and so on. Although I've read egoraptor is a bit of a loon, I agree with almost everything he says, and the one episode talks about the tutorial level for Megaman X, and how it is amazingly well done. How it explains the body of the game's mechanics in a fluid, easy to adapt to manner.

One of the things that stands out when you play 'hard indie' games is the design process seems to really fail to grasp previously demonstrated good game design. Megaman X came out like, twenty two years ago, but you still rarely see good tutorial levels even to this day. Game design constantly struggles to articulate to the player how the game works, and the most mind-blowing thing is the predilection toward killing the player.

I mean, I get it. You heard you want to make the game hard, so the game is hard by killing the player. Checkbox, little animated check going in it. Grats. The problem is, man oh man, getting killed in the tutorial while you're trying to figure out the damn controls is just so obnoxious. If you're dying, shockingly, you're not really learning. You're re-loading.

There Was a Cave Man has such a tutorial level. The controls and scheme aren't bad - actually, I really like them - but getting down the rhythm of the dash and double jump takes more than the 0.13 seconds the game gives you before it starts trying to murder you. I really don't get the appeal of this sort of thing.

I mean as I write this, Fallout 4 just came out, and 1.2 million people on steam were playing it last night. Does Fallout 4 give you, I don't know, more than ten seconds to get a handle on things? Sure, Fallout 4 has no doubt a host of problems and I doubt I'm buying it til, I don't know, 2018 or something. But there's something for a product being immensely more complicated and yet far more willing to be approachable. Game difficulty was built around artificially extending the longevity of a product, not necessarily enjoyment in and of itself.

Pac-Man Championship Edition DX+

Year of our lord 2015, played Pac-Man for the first time.

At least: As far as I can remember. Pac-Man is one of the 'forgotten' gaming icons, unless your name is Adam Sandler, something that didn't really hold on through the years, though more so than like ... Bubsy the cat. I honestly don't know that I played the original Pac-Man or any revision in the past, so this is a review of this game without really knowing what tier of update it is. I'm just going to shorten the title to Pac-Man, I'm not referencing any other game or version of this game. That's it, here we go, ghosts on the chomp

Gaming revivalism is an interesting concept to me, since you end up with a lot of weird phrases and ideas mixing with what ultimately amounts to marketing via the hook of nostalgia in your soft unprotected rump. Franchises at this point sort of co-exist in a market space dominated by franchises, and names don't really have a meaning beyond being "okay" for mainstream play. Pac-Man probably doesn't have the star power of say, a Ubisoft or Nintendo mass-produced product, and as such, isn't exactly a revival so much as just a game based on Pac-Man.

Like I said, I don't really remember playing Pac-Man (older versions) at any point in my life, so I don't really know or remember what the "core mechanics" are or how faithful this game actually is. It feels like a Pac-Man game but I don't necessarily think it feels like the original, or the maybe more popular Ms Pac-Man which I think I've heard was the definitive edition?

As you can tell, I don't know very much about Pac-Man and wasn't especially hyped about Pac-Man.

Kicking it Old School: Double Dragon Neon

80s nostalgia is pretty funky at times, with some games endlessly referenced as glorious masterpieces and others often forgotten. Castlevania for example comes up a lot, and I'd be the first to admit I've brought it up, but hilariously I think it might actually be well known not because Castlevania itself is a classic (which it is, but) however because the second game was so bad and the series kept going for quite a few years until I think recently fizzling out. Perceptions of what is "enduring" often seems to rotate around how the series continued into not longer being marketable.

I'd really like an Altered Beast indie game, on that note. Can someone get on that? Simple platforming, measured methodical pace, turn into a dragon? You'd think with the rise of furry games on Steam this would have a built in market. Maybe one of the modes could be, I don't know, a unicorn? Bam. Dollars.

Regardless, Double Dragon is remembered but I think it might be remembered due to being referenced or being in movies or other general things. (You got fifty thousand on Double Dragon??)  It's strange, it's like nostalgia only sort of works nowadays if people keep bringing it back up. Feels like I live in a generation where people are real eager to go 'so do you remember...' Double Dragon: Neon, however, is basically the 80s revival you want for every franchise you ever loved even if you never thought about Double Dragon. Like Altered Beast. And Sonic the Hedgehog.

I went there.

Neon is beautifully referential and direly tongue in cheek but quite concerned with being a fun game, which adds far more to the actual validity of the game for me than all the nostalgia in the world. It does use the fact it is homaging to punch a woman in the gut in the opening, but I guess if there's a way to justify brawling through legions of dudes, it's the fact they punched your girlfriend in the gut?

I honestly could have done without that, reference or not.

Neo Retro Future Imperfect: Shovel Knight

I was introduced to Shovel Knight way way back when Two Best Friends (who are now like, Super Best Friends or something since it has turned from a pair into a posse) played through it in a demo ages ago. The game looked pretty neat, but I never realized it was actually some sort of "major indie" release, akin to say Starbound (which mind you is still in early access 14 months later or something ridiculous) and Transistor. The hype train slowly built I guess while I wasn't paying attention.

There was a bit of a dust up about the game during the Winter sale due to it not going on sale, then going on sale. I actually thought their reason for not going on sale was reasonable - Shovel Knight is not exactly a time oriented release, and they claimed they wanted to finish the DLC they promised in their kickstarter or something to that effect before running up the sale train. I actually admire that attitude, as the current progression of kickstarter into early access into steam cards and sale train with release somewhere over yonder (hello Starbound) disturbs me. But I'm gonna do a write up of my thoughts on the current steam cycle sometime this month.

It was good to see some work ethic for once, you know? But the game did go on sale, and a friend of mine ended up buying it for me, basically in return for me buying him Trails In the Sky. Which I bought entirely because 'Dude I got you TITS' was worth the price alone. There was some further complaining about how it went on sale and I don't know, my eyes just roll around randomly in my head.

Shovel Knight is, as implied by the title above, a sort of Neo Retro about a shoveling. It is a retro styled platformer, but like Terraria, it does things far beyond what you could do in the 8-bit world. Shovel Knight, however, is far more dug into its position as a retro game. Many if not most of its ideas are built or brought forward from 20-30 year old games. This is something of a mixed blessed, and I wonder how much of the game would be improved or more creative for having this shackling torn off.

But then, the game is as it is, and that is just what we have now. There is DLC coming, but I feel like I won't necessarily remember to play through DLC whenever it happens... (promised for Q2!

)

Ya know you want to do more than stare: 2014 in review

As with previous years, this review splits games into four categories. I'm going to proactively not read my earlier YiRs and just assume I remember roughly a year later the system I was using. Maybe I'm not. If I recall correctly, it works like this. This is an entirely subjective, made up of nonsense system, based completely on my experiences. I tend to dislike things that are overhyped because I'm trying to figure out what is so great about it, and like things where people tell me they're bad because I'm always awaiting the game to take a big dump on my face.

Category A: Games that I think everyone should pick up and try if they have any faint interest in them. Games I came out of feeling like I'd really enjoyed myself. Something to branch out and try, and definitely something to pick up if you like the genre they are included in.

Category B: Games that I think, if you're interested in the genre, are definite good times. Not necessarily something to pick up if you're not into it, though, but maybe if you like the look. A bit riskier as propositions go. Most games I finish fall into this category.

Category C: Games that are decent enough if you like this or that sort of game, but not really the sort of game you should go out of you way to try. Games I quit near the end or games I was reluctant to finish tend to fall in here.

Category D: Games I regret play, regret buying or regret existing. I would advise against picking up category D games unless you find your tastes run in stark opposition to my own, which is mind you entirely possible.

To switch it up this here, I'm going to start with the games I don't recommend, and then move up the games I really liked. Whoa. Daring.

Eternal RPG dilemmas: Final Fantasy Seven

So last year - or at least a year ago, it might have been two now -  I bought the full endless amount of games D&D pack, which had Baldur's Gate 1-2 and then some other stuff, including Planescape Torment which I've never finished. I managed to finish BG1, but BG2 just drags on forever and I ended up getting tired of it in the Underdark. I don't really have a lot of nostalgia for it, so maybe I never really liked it all that much, although I did really enjoy BG1 in sort of a weird mix of 'dear lord did game design ever have its head up its ass back then' and 'this plot is rather cool and punchy!'

a world of radiation poisoning metaphors

I don't really have a ton of nostalgia for FF7, either, but they feel like fair games to contrast off each other. I feel like I'll go back to BG2 eventually, since I never played the expansions but I had finished the original core game, but maybe not. Nothing about BG2 really blows me away, the game is good and nice looking but it doesn't rock my socks or something. FF7 though, that one I've finished but far enough back I don't remember much other than the story being pretty damn weird. I mean I fired the game up and realized it was almost 20 years old and felt kinda strange. Except that while BG2 looks like a modern indie title (which is to say, it looks fine if not good) FF7 just has some of the weirdest decisions. You are basically playing with 13 polygon characters on artifact riddled JPG backgrounds and ... Yeah it just looks weird. The FMVs fire up and you're just thinking good lord, how did this not look awful back then too!?!

But then I remember why I don't really have nostalgia - I hated that area of console gaming, where everything went '3D' and wasn't really ready for it. But whatever, let's see if we can beat some fun out of this ancient, bizarre RPG.