Month: September 2022

Magicka is a game where you are a wizard and can combine different elements together into a spell. Cast fire by itself, and you spray a little gout of flame that will set enemies on fire. Cast lightning by itself and you shoot a bit of lightning that chains between enemies. Combine them, and you will cast lightning that sets enemies on fire. Casting arcane by itself creates a beam of deadly energy. Casting shield by itself creates a shield in front of you that absorbs all attacks from that specific direction while its health lasts. Casting arcane and shield together and you create a set of land mines that explode into deadly energy when someone moves across them (including you, so watch your step). And if you combine shield with life, you create healing mines that heal anyone who steps on them, which, it turns out, is one of the most time-efficient methods of healing in the game.

Some special “magicks” are castable from specific element combinations in exactly the right order, for example, arcane-lightning-arcane casts teleport, but arcane-arcane-lightning is just a laser beam with some lightning damage attached. Some element combinations aren’t a special magick, but are useful enough to be worth memorizing, like the aforementioned healing mines, the earth/shield stoneskin armor, or the highest single target DPR attack in the game, steam-steam-arcane-lightning-lightning, or as I like to call it, the death ray. Some elements don’t combine into a magick, but have synergistic status effects if you use one after the other rather than together. For example, make an enemy wet with a water blast, then freeze them solid with a cold blast, and now using an earth attack to launch a boulder at them will do massive damage.

The story is a satirical fantasy story about wizards sent on a quest to save the world from an evil rogue wizard who’s made a pact with a demon for supreme arcane knowledge and get revenge on the order for imprisoning him however many years ago. Your main mentor figure/quest ATM is Vlad, who is not a vampire. The king introduces one level by hoping he can find someone easily manipulated to throw at an army of orcs so he doesn’t have to lead his soldiers into the fight. At one point on an airship level, an NPC announces that they must depart to their home immediately and leaps off the side of the ship.

The game is quite difficult, partly because it’s intended for multiplayer play and I can never find more than one person to play with, and partly because the difficulty helps push people to explore the spell system and find out combos like the healing mines and death ray, rather than relying on the chaining power of the default lightning blast to kill everything (something which mostly works for the first two levels).

Except, unfortunately, it is extremely unstable. It crashes all the time, in different places for different people. Sometimes you have to try again another day and hope the crash has cleared up with time, which somehow actually works, at least some of the time. Sometimes you just have to try and beat the crash to the next checkpoint, killing the enemies before whatever memory leak is killing you can catch up and then loading the game from the next checkpoint, where hopefully the problem is fixed. Sometimes you have to start over from the beginning and hope that whatever weird combination of memory values caused the crash in your last playthrough doesn’t get locked into this one.

I got through about two-thirds of the game, and now I’m crashing consistently on a loading screen, which means it’s either restart or Regrets. I have chosen Regrets. Playing it from the beginning, I would constantly be anxious that the run might be ended by another unavoidable crash, and the game just wouldn’t be fun with that hanging over my head. Much like the Force Unleashed, this is a good game that I wish I could finish, but technical difficulties have gotten in the way. Worse, the technical difficulties arise not because my computer is too weak or even too powerful, but seem to afflict everyone, so there isn’t even a hope that I might be able to come back later with a stronger computer.

Little Big Workshop has managed a fairly rare feat: Getting onto my Regrets list despite my coming very close to completing it. This game was fun just often enough to make me want to keep playing, but it was also very stressful a lot of the time, because it never quite had enough tools to really make the little factory I was running efficient enough. I couldn’t partition my workforce and say “right, you lot hang out in this section of the factory and you lot hang out in that section of the factory and I will have you working on separate projects all the time,” so as my factory grew and I had more and more workers running more and more machinery, my output didn’t go up nearly linearly because I had workers who would decide to cross the entire length of the factory to reach a workstation that had opened up on the other side, working on an entirely different project from the one they had been working on.

The game is full of trap options, things that look like they will increase your productivity but actually aren’t efficient enough to balance out their increased costs. The clearest example is that you unlock specialists way before you unlock the advanced machinery that only specialists can operate. Specialists require a higher salary, but because of a bug, they don’t actually work any faster than your standard generalist workers. Even if they were 20% faster or whatever, it would hardly matter, because once you’ve got midgame machinery up and running, by far the greatest bottleneck on your productivity will be the time spent moving things around your factory. You can, of course, minimize this by designing your factory such that things involved in the same process are nearby one another, and that’s the part of the game that actually works, but it means that any upgrade to your workers that doesn’t improve movement speed had better have no ongoing costs, because no increase in worker salary could possibly be worth it. Going 20% faster at something that only makes up 10% of your construction time is only a 2% increase overall.

I still feel the game tugging at the edges of my mind to go back and try to find a way to push myself up to the level of profitability required to finish the Champion Milestone and call this a win. There are strategies I haven’t tried, but the problem is that it takes an hour or more of gameplay to build up the kind of funds needed for a major factory expansion, even with the clock set to as fast as possible, so every time I try anything I am spend an hour in boring production of routine products to build up wealth to then spend another hour watching my newly expanded factory operate and trying to figure out if the general trend is an improvement or if its increased costs are too much. I like the gameplay loop, it just takes way too long to implement a new strategy and get feedback on whether that strategy is working.

I tried looking up guides online to see if I can just copy someone else’s factory layout exactly and put this one on the “Completed” pile, but the only things I’ve been able to find are one suggestion to exploit a bug and another that’s basically just to engage in another ten hours of glacial expansion and micromanagement, making the same products with the same machinery, but just assigning them to different sectors of an ever-growing factory. I can’t even zone out and zen-grind it while listening to podcasts and audiobooks (did you know that they’re finally getting the entire Discworld series on audiobook? I can’t believe it took this long, but this year it’s finally been happening!), because I have to keep figuring out exactly which contracts to assign to which parts of the factory – if I accidentally assign a second contract for making cupboards (or whatever) to Workshop Alpha, then they’ll get bogged down with two projects at once while Workshop Beta sits around twiddling their thumbs, so I have to keep doublechecking which parts of the factory are active and which need new work, and the amount of micromanagement required steadily goes up as I buy more plots of land and build a larger factory, but the actual resource management stays the same. All I have to do to march to victory is keep doing more of what I’m already doing, but I just don’t want to do that for another ten hours to tick the final box on the final milestone when it’s all the worst combination of too much busywork to zone out but too little new content to be interesting or fun.

While I’m certain there are winning strategies to Little Big Workshop and that I could figure them out with another 10 hours of time investment, the fact is I’m not having fun anymore and I don’t want to spend another 10 hours not having fun just to call this one a win.

The developers say that Out Of Space is completely playable solo, but this is misleading. Technically it’s totally true – I have beaten the largest map solo, so clearly this is doable. However, it’s much, much harder than the multiplayer. Playing Out Of Space solo means you jump right into a special challenge mode, resulting in a difficulty wall that’s hard to get past. This makes sense with the game’s basic theme of being about the difficulties of moving into and maintaining a home with other people. The multiplayer is the game’s default mode, about arguing over who’s going to do the dishes and trying to work out a division of responsibilities that prevents you from being overrun by alien goo monsters, while the solo mode is a special challenge where you have to take care of everything yourself.

But if, like me, you have no friends (or, more likely, you have no friends who’ve bought this obscure indie game), you may wish to play Out Of Space solo from start to finish. And if you’ve tried it, you’ve probably made decent progress on the smallest six-room map, but the alien goo gets more aggressive over time, so you’ve found the tide turned against you and eventually you get overwhelmed. Worse, while the alien aggression ticks up on a timer, it also ticks up if you clear a certain number of rooms, whichever occurs first, so you can’t beat the game by speedrunning the rooms before the goo gets too aggressive to handle. You have to contain it just like you were in multiplayer, but with the resources of just one person. How is this possible?

Step 1) Shrink your front line. Once we realize we’re on the clock, we solo players tend to react by moving blindly forward as quickly as possible, trying to beat the aliens before they get too powerful. This is both impossible, since alien aggression will increase in response to the number of rooms you’ve already cleared even if you’re way ahead of the timer, and also tends to lead to salients that are impossible to defend. If you always clear whichever room is closest to the water faucet you start with, you will end up expanding in every direction and hit that critical endgame of hyper-aggressive aliens with active rooms at three different farflung ends of your space house, and you’ll have absolutely no hope of holding them all even on the small maps. Instead, when you’re expanding, take a moment to check how many doors the room you’ll be expanding into has. Doors adjacent to dirty rooms get dirty themselves, and that dirt spawns alien eggs, which spawn aliens, which spawn dirt into your clean rooms. You’re probably familiar with the general process, but note that the key chokehold here is doors: Aliens can’t open doors, which means doors are impervious as long as you can keep them clean, which means your total vulnerability is a product of the number of doors and the furthest distance between any two of them. You want to both decrease the number of doors you need to monitor and make sure that all doors are as close together as possible.

A critical part of shrinking your front line is buying and placing rugs underneath those vents that spew goo periodically. Rugs are (close enough to) impervious to getting dirty, so having a rug under a vent will prevent that vent from starting up a goo alien flanking attack which might otherwise spell your doom. No room with a vent is secure until you’ve put a rug down under the vent. You’ll still want to clean the vent off while clearing the room to buy you enough time to get the rug down, and you’ll want to make sure the floor is totally clean before putting the rug down, because dirt underneath the rug stays there and will eventually spread out from underneath it and create more alien eggs, but if you put a rug down on a clear floor below a clean vent, that vent will be unable to dirty the floor again even after it starts spewing goo again. Be warned that objects in the room can still get dirty by the goo-spew, and while this won’t reopen the front line (alien eggs can only grow on doors and walls, never on objects), it will render those objects non-functional. Despite the game’s name, you are pretty much never out of space to put down new objects even on a small map (although individual rooms can get very cramped), so it’s usually best to just leave a vent room empty.

If a battery socket is directly under the vent, this will in some ways be helpful, as the battery getting knocked out by the goo will let you know that the vent needs cleaning. The battery is not destroyed by vent goo the way it is by aliens, so you can just grab a bucket, toss the water from the bucket across the battery socket and vent (you can get both with one bucket if you angle it right), and plug the battery back in. So long as you have a rug underneath, no further effort will be required.

Continue reading “How To Play Out Of Space Solo” →

5-star or 10-point rating systems for video games are, I think, rightly despised as a review metric, redeemed only accidentally by the existence of Metacritic. While an obsession with Metacritic review scores is unhealthy, Rotten Tomatoes-style averaging of both critic and audience opinion is useful data. The practice of review point scales predates Metacritic by a lot, though, reaching back to the days of magazines and the early internet when this kind of mass data collection to observe general trends wasn’t on anyone’s radar.

Ever since May-ish of this year, I’ve reorganized my games list in such a way as to encourage myself to play more new games to completion, rather than picking at them for an hour or two before falling back on replaying something comfortable, which happens a lot because I’m usually picking a video game to play when I’m tired and picking a new game from a backlog of nearly 200 seems daunting. I started using the blog again as a place to dump my thoughts on these video games, because it turns out once I’m playing new games I actually have new things to say about video games for the first time in a while. Imagine that. And as I’ve spent a few months playing lots of new games, I find myself gravitating towards a few familiar phrases. It’s kind of like a rating system, except without the claim that all games are to be judged on a linear scale of badness to goodness. Indeed, one of the most common ratings I give is “recommended to anyone who thinks the premise sounds cool.”

This ad-hoc, organic rating system is probably not cutting to the core of the human experience of interactive media or anything, but I’m confident it is better than the standard numerical system. Numerical rating systems might’ve made sense as a first try at giving a bottom line on the quality of a video game, but I don’t think it’s hard to improve on that first try.

Play This Video Game. I stress again that these categories aren’t a linear spectrum from best to worst, because we are starting with the category that is “games which are really good” and will be ending with a category that is kind of like “games which are really bad,” and it’s mainly in the middle categories where one category is clearly not better than another. This category, though, is for video games that I recommend to absolutely all gamers, even if I know nothing about them except that they like video games. If the basic concept of a Metroidvania where you play an adorable bug exploring a fallen kingdom full of secrets and lost treasure doesn’t immediately repulse and enrage you, you should play Hollow Knight. Bastion is another game I would put in this category, and Transistor is borderline between this category and “Interesting Enough To Justify Its Playtime.” I haven’t played Hades yet, but given Supergiant Games’ track record, I expect it would also end up here. Games in this category look good, sound good, play good, and don’t overstay their welcome – they’re paragons of their respective genre so good that even people who are usually ambivalent about that genre will probably enjoy the experience.

Janky/Flawed, But It Delivers. If the first category is exemplified by Hollow Knight and XCOM, this one is exemplified by STALKER (for janky) and Assassin’s Creed II, IV, and Syndicate (for flawed). As you can tell from the exemplars, this is really two very similar but still clearly distinct categories. Assassin’s Creed games are safe and same-y but very good representations of their chosen historical eras. If you want historical tourism, Assassin’s Creed delivers, often for eras where there is no competition. Janky games like STALKER and Necromunda: Hired Gun have rough edges resulting from small or medium size teams trying to bring big ambitions to life, but they successfully deliver their core experience of being an illegal scavenger looking for psychic artifacts in the Chernobyl Zone of Exclusion and being a cyborg bounty hunter in the underhive of Warhammer 40k’s Necromunda, respectively. I recommend these games to people who like the idea of the premise, because for those people, the jank/flaws don’t matter as long as it delivers.

Interesting Enough To Justify Its Playtime. The best exemplar of this category is definitely Papers, Please, but the significantly less good Mind Scanners, Not For Broadcast, and Fortune 499 also qualify, so remember that these categories aren’t intended to be a linear scale from best to worst. This category is defined by two things: Being interesting, and being short enough that the interesting thing doesn’t wear out its welcome. That doesn’t necessarily mean these games are short, because maybe the interesting thing is so engaging that it holds my attention for twenty hours, but I can’t think of any games that actually pulled that off from the top of my head. Papers, Please only lasts for about three to five hours, but I went back for second and third playthroughs, so it was much more interesting than it needed to be to justify its playtime. Not For Broadcast and Mind Scanners were starting to test my patience a bit by the time they got to the end, and it was mostly because I could tell I was approaching the end that I carried them through to completion, so it’s a good thing they weren’t any longer than they were and they probably would’ve benefited from being slightly shorter.

Continue reading “Things I Say A Lot When Reviewing Games” →

Thief Simulator is kind of a weird game – it’s got the overall style of the “having a job simulator” games that’ve become more popular recently, with a first person perspective that emphasizes a high degree of granularity in actions. For example, in order to drive somewhere you have to use the interact key to open your car door, get in your car, and turn on the ignition, and only then is your control scheme switched from on-foot to in-car, and your perspective remains in first person inside the car rather than zooming out to a third-person vehicle perspective.

Except, of course, the job it’s simulating is being a thief, so it’s actually a stealth game about avoiding cameras and guard patrols and stuff. It’s more grounded than most stealth games, as a major part of the early game is in observing the routines of tenants of various houses you’d like to rob so you can find a window of time where the house is deserted or, failing that, at least when everyone is asleep, then break in and steal everything with no risk of someone walking in on you to interrupt (so long as you don’t trip any automated security features like cameras or window alarms). It’s only in the second half that the game throws you at buildings which are continuously patrolled by security guards, a staple feature of your average high-adventure sort of stealth game.

And the introduction of those guards also marks the point where the game starts to get kind of boring. In earlier parts of the game, there were always multiple options for how to burgle a building, which made it feel organic, like you were penetrating defenses set up with a limited amount of resources. This camera scans between two different entrances because they couldn’t afford to have two different cameras permanently camping on each of them, that window has no shutters that prevent you from unlocking and entering because it’s on the second floor and the owners didn’t think second story window security was important, the car gate isn’t visible from the house which means you can open it up from the inside to create a getaway route and no one will notice unless they happen to be walking up the driveway at that exact instant because this is a house, not a fortress, and people like privacy.

This starts to fall off in the second neighborhood’s larger, higher-end buildings, but those at least feel like they’re run by people with enough resources to invest in as much security as they want, balanced out by the fact that their houses are enormous and by now you’ve got hacking tools that help you disable a lot of the automated security from at least a small distance. There’s exactly one way out of house 202, the car gate in the front, but the building is big enough that there are at least a lot of options for how you’re going to navigate between the mansion’s three security guards while you’re inside.

In the third neighborhood, though, it starts to feel like the defenses are impenetrable except for one very specifc route that was left open to you by the developers of the game. The whole game is about being a thief exploiting gaps in defenses, and of course the maximum difficulty is going to be buildings with exactly one gap in their defenses to exploit, but the increased difficulty comes at the expense of the feeling of simulation. Some of the third neighborhood buildings are more like the last few buildings of the second neighborhood: Lots of guards covering a large floorplan. Not all of them, though.

There’s also an element of home decoration that’s a lot of fun, where towards the end of the game you can buy a house and then arrange furniture and stolen items inside of it, replacing the grimy industrial safehouse you’d been using for the first half of the game with an empty house that you can fill up and turn into something that looks just as lived-in as the houses you burgled in the first two neighborhoods (which look pretty good, and the third neighborhood isn’t a decline in the quality of building layout or doodads, either, it’s just an industrial neighborhood full of warehouses and server farms and stuff). You don’t have to pay any attention to it if you don’t want to, and it’s annoying that the only items you can outright buy to decorate your house with are furniutre pieces that you can’t steal – any stealable objects must be stolen and then placed in your house rather than sold.

I imagine this is to try and tie the home decoration side-activity more firmly into the main theft gameplay, so that a nice-looking home will necessarily be full of nice-looking TVs and kitchen appliances and stuff that was stolen from specific houses, rather than stealing a bunch of cheap but portable junk like toasters and broken iPhones over and over again until you can buy your own TV, but I would’ve appreciated being able to go on a spending spree and make my house look cool in one two-hour block of home decoration rather than having to make a shopping list of appliances I need to steal and doublechecking against the wiki to make sure the items I’m looking for actually exist.

Thief Simulator does have some janky rough edges. The game is often quite finnicky about exactly where you’re hovering your cursor to interact with an object, which can lead to annoying situations like absonding from a house with a bag full of stolen loot while the police are on their way, and then accidentally ramming your hand into the window a couple of times becuase you’re struggling to get the door handle in the exact center of the screen. The physics of carryable objects like TVs or printers (they make you more visible and also bystanders who would otherwise ignore you will call the police if they see you hauling a printer out to your creepy windowless van) is acceptably functional, but barely, with lots of little annoyances like having to get a running start up a staircase to ram your way through some kind of catch at the bottom stair, and if you drop or throw an object at the wrong angle, it can get launched into the stratosphere.

The lack of fall damage on objects is also weird and annoying. I’m willing to accept no fall damage for the thief as an acceptable break from reality because the game has no health system, the maximum drop in the game is three stories, and depending on how you land and what you’re falling on, a three story drop is potentially manageable (the thief is depicted as quite nimble by the end of the game). No fall damage on objects means that throwing a television out of a second story window to climb out after is not just possible, but frequently a good idea – it means you don’t have to sneak through any first floor defenses while slowed down by a large object. For a game whose whole selling point is that you’re playing as a mostly-realistic thief whose abilities are limited to things that a real world human thief could probably accomplish, it’s kind of annoying that tossing valuable electronics out of second or third story windows is not only effective, but that later buildings are built around this (I’m 80% sure that the intended way to get a server or an office shredder out of building 303 is to toss it out of a second story window).

Despite the jank, I think Thief Simulator is pretty good at doing what it sets out to do. If the premise of being a more-or-less realistic human thief burgling houses in a regular old town somewhere in regular old America or Canada sounds cool, Thief Simulator delivers. If that premise isn’t reaching out to grip you, though, it’s not the kind of Hollow Knight-grade masterpiece where I’d recommend it to basically any gamer.

Crash Bandicoot is 1) infamously difficult, although as with all infamously difficult games, its difficulty is exaggerated, and 2) it doesn’t suit the action cartoon aesthetic very well. Since it is an action cartoon, you want there to be some challenge, but when people are photoshopping Dark Souls UI onto your game, you’ve probably gone too far. Naughty Dog themselves realized this, and have said they didn’t understand difficulty curves very well in the first game. By the third game, the main levels are relatively straightforward and it’s in secret levels and optional collectibles that the Crash-brand challenge is found. Funny enough, one of those Dark Souls comparisons photoshopped the Firelink Shrine title onto the first level of Crash 3 anyway. Crash 1 is a gauntlet, especially in the second half of its final island, but Crash 3’s not that hard.

Anyway, the difficulty of Crash Bandicoot is an accident and it’s pretty easy to fix it with two edits, one of which is very easy. Number one, have an infinite lives toggle. When you toggle infinite lives back off, you are reset to 4, so no cheating by using infinite lives to get past one tricky level and then holding onto your reserve of 30+ extra lives afterwards, and also it’s impossible to get gems (the optional collectible). Even if you fulfill the prerequisites, the gem won’t appear if you have infinite lives toggled on. In Crash, losing a life sends you back to the nearest checkpoint, but losing your last life sends you back to the start of the level. On the harder levels, having to redo the tricky beginning to reach the trickier middle/end can be annoying. Infinite lives solves this problem.

Second, make Aku Aku bounce you out of pits you fall into. Aku Aku is a friendly tiki mask who gives you one (two in golden form) extra hit points, making it possible to facetank enemies and hazards, but he doesn’t help with pits. You can find Aku Aku occasionally in a breakable crate, but he also spawns for you automatically if you die enough times in a row without reaching the next checkpoint as an anti-frustration feature. The inability to save you from pits is a pretty annoying gap in this feature. The N. Sane Trilogy is a platform-for-platform remake, but it was rebuilt from scratch, without using any of the original code or assets, so this was the perfect time to add in something that might’ve been difficult to code into the original games if, for example, Aku Aku was added to the game long after the falling mechanics were, and the falling mechanics were coded in such a way that they’d have to be rebuilt from scratch to let Aku Aku bounce Crash out of them, in the same direction he was originally headed so that you can use Aku Aku to facetank pits just like enemies or hazards (like fire, barrels of toxic waste, spiked logs, etc.).

These changes wouldn’t have affected the game for people who don’t need them. Infinite lives is something you have to choose to toggle on and you can’t get gems or other optional collectibles while it’s active, so if you want 100% completion you will at some point have to turn it off. Plus, infinite lives isn’t infinite health. You get to try again from the nearest checkpoint an unlimited number of times, but you still have to overcome the obstacle to succeed. And bouncing Aku Aku only helps you if you have Aku Aku, who doesn’t show up very often from crates so players who aren’t dying often enough to get him automatically won’t see him very often, and who cannot be stockpiled (your third Aku Aku mask gives you temporary invincibility and then goes back down to two) so the relative generosity of the early levels won’t let you facetank entire levels later in the game. It might have some implications for time trials and you’d want to do some playtesting to figure out if that makes the time trials more interesting or less before you shipped it, but at a glance it doesn’t seem like it would make a huge difference if the optimal strategy for certain levels is to pick up Aku Aku from a crate and then fling yourself into a specific pit so you can save a second or two waiting for the platform.

Spyro Reignited is a graphical upgrade to the first three Spyro games, the ones made by Insomniac. I appreciate the Rule of Three love and making the cutoff for the remake be the games made by the original developer and no more is a pretty sensible decision, but having played through all three games, the series was already entering into steep decline by the third installment.

The first two games were about a dragon in a fantasy world fighting fantasy villains. The second game already had a bit of dilution of this concept with some levels towards the end that were pretty blatantly sci-fi, which is also a problem that crops up in MediEvil: Towards the end, there’s a level about the evil wizard using a strange kind of magic called “technology,” a concept which isn’t foreshadowed before that level or revisited afterwards. I think Spyro in particular might’ve been aping Crash Bandicoot, which was in turn aping Sonic the Hedgehog, by having an otherwise low-tech character and setting face high-tech enemies near the end. But that’s because Sonic and Crash have a sci-fi villain attacking a lower-tech, more mystical/nature-y setting as their premise. Sonic’s enemies are robots from the word go, and Crash breaks out of Dr. Cortex’s mad genetics lab in the opening cutscene. It’s not like Lethal Lava Land, which is named for Mario but which refers to a general terrain type that can plausibly show up in basically any genre. Spyro is cartoon medieval fantasy where anything vaguely old-timey can work so long as it doesn’t overwhelm the medieval aesthetic, so you can have trains and even biplanes in moderation, but entire levels dedicated to space sheep and laser cows means that the game no longer has a consistent aesthetic.

The problem gets worse with the third game. The space sheep from the end of the second game return, but are now foes who pop up periodically in the game as the nemesis to a specific side character Hunter. Spyro 3 has a lot of side characters like Hunter, who have different movesets to Spyro in various ways. Sheila the Kangaroo lacks Spyro’s horn-charge (and technically his fire breath, but her kangaroo kick works almost exactly the same) but can jump much higher, Sgt. Byrd the penguin can fly around and shoot missiles (yes, penguins are well known for being flightless and no, Sgt. Byrd doesn’t have, like, a jetpack or something, he clearly flaps his wings to fly while the engines on his rocket harness activate only when firing a rocket), Bentley the yeti is big and slow and honestly is pretty much just Spyro but worse but you can’t bring Spyro to his levels so you have to put up with it, and Agent 9 is a space monkey with a laser gun. You can tell that Insomniac really wants to be making Ratchet and Clank games at this point.

And these characters’ own slightly different movesets then get used as the vehicle for minigames that homage other games entirely. Sheila gets a 2D sidescroller level that I guess is supposed to reference Crash Bandicoot (the level is called “Crash Kangaroo”), a 3D game, but I guess it does have some 2D levels peppered in. Agent 9 is a third person shooter in his original level, but then his other levels are a first person shooter, a rail shooter, and one that keeps repositioning the camera to a top-down perspective every time you enter a new room of the level, but lets you reposition the camera to over-the-shoulder if you want. There’s also a Tomb Raider reference at one point, but she’s not playable.

Spyro 2 expanded Spyro’s moveset with powerups that gave temporary flight (instead of gliding) and long-range fireballs (instead of short-range gouts), and then combined them towards the end with challenges where you had to fly around breathing fire at things. Then in the last phase of the last boss, the arena falls away completely and you get an unlimited superflight/superfire powerup, so the final battle is between Spyro in full dragon mode having an aerial battle with an evil wizard riding a pterodactyl. I don’t know how intentional it was, but I loved how this really felt like Spyro the Dragon has fully arrived just in time for the final battle with an enemy who considered himself unstoppable once he found a world without dragons.

And I guess Spyro 3 didn’t know where to go from there, because its only new gameplay were all these side characters, half of whom feel like they’re visitors from another video game. Spyro is a cartoon setting without any, like, deep lore or continuity or whatever, but what it did have in the first two games (well, most of the second game, at least) was a vibe, and in Spyro 3, that vibe falls apart, at the same time as it runs out of ideas for its core gameplay and falls back on a bunch of minigames and side characters to try and pick up the slack. A mediocre finale to a trilogy that’s 2/3s fantastic.

It’s September 6th (with some edits from September 7th) as I write this, the first Tuesday of the month, which means the Humble Choice has just dropped. What’s in the box?

Crusader Kings III is an easy get. I probably won’t actually play until it’s got a good few more expansions under its belt, but this gets me the base game for, like, $5, and I won’t say no to that.

Just Cause 4 is another easy get. I love the Just Cause games, they’re the sandbox games that most seem to get what a sandbox is about: You are in a cool place doing cool things while wearing cool outfits. Just Cause 3 and 4 have kind of stumbled on that last one, with Rico gravitating more towards looking like a pretty ordinary 40-year old dude except for the part where he’s hookshotting up to a helicopter gunship while firing a grenade launcher at tanks, and it’s not as good as representing cool places as Assassin’s Creed or Far Cry, but it absolutely nails the “doing cool things” part, and unlike Assassin’s Creed games, it knows exactly what it is and gets you to the good stuff in a hurry.

The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk is a lighthearted adventure RPG of some sort. Sounds like fun, I’ll give it a whirl. It’s yet another video game adaptation of a semi-obscure fantasy story, which the Dwarves was, too, and I wonder if maybe a bunch of mid-size studios are digging through the obscure books (or, in this case, radio dramas) that they love hoping to be the next Witcher. Sounds like a long shot, but as long as the resulting games are made with genuine love for the source material, it usually works out alright (for me, at least – Longes strongly disliked the Dwarves). If I can pitch my own favorite B-tier fantasy novel series to the developers who aren’t reading this anyway: The Dark Profit Trilogy is ripe for a video game spin-off story. The main plot would be a mediocre choice for a game, but the setting in general is perfect for video game adaptation and has plenty of room for side stories.

Forgive Me Father is in the genre that we are for some reason calling Boomer Shooters even though Boomers fucking hated DOOM. I have to assume it’s part of our general policy of erasing Gen X from history. To any future historians who end up reading this, I wanna make sure you guys are aware that the generation in question didn’t get referred to as “Generation X” retrospectively because their true name has been forbidden, they were always called Generation X. Anyway, so far as I’m concerned the shooter genre began with Half-Life and the promise of being a Lovecraftian entry in a genre specifically known for its lack of subtlety sounds only more eye-rolling, so I’m giving this one a pass.

Crown Trick is a rogue-like RPG with some kind of combo-focused turn-based combat system. I have way too many games in my backlog already to be weighing myself down with roguelikes unless they have a really compelling hook, and this one doesn’t, especially.

Descenders is a “fast-paced extreme downhill biking game,” which I’m sure sounds exciting to someone. There’s a certain visceral thrill from watching the gameplay .gifs, but I know this is a game I’d toy with for forty minutes before getting bored and walking away from forever, and there’s plenty of other games that will hold my attention much longer.

Industria is a first-person, story-driven, atmospheric shooter about someone getting lost in a parallel dimension on the day the Berlin Wall falls. It’s not really clear why the fall of the Berlin Wall is relevant to the story, and the gameplay .gifs suggest it’s a lonely, industrial atmosphere, not the thronging crowds present at the fall of the wall. On the one hand, this feels like it picked a famous event from the 80s to hook its story onto despite minimal relevance, and the whole thing scans as just a little bit pretentious. On the other hand, it says it’s about four hours long and How Long To Beat suggests they’re rounding up, which means I can play it start to finish on a workday, I’m going back and forth on this one, but its promise of short length has won me over. I can get it out of my backlog quickly, so even if it turns out to be mediocre, I probably won’t have to grapple with whether it’s bad enough to be a Regret. I really like atmospheric first-person shooters, and I don’t want a reluctance to add to my backlog to keep me from playing games I might really love.

EDIT: I don’t want to make a full post about Industria, since I ended up playing only about a third of it, so I’m backing up here to say that it’s about being sucked into another dimension and so far as I can tell from the first hour and a half the fall of the Berlin Wall indeed has nothing to do with it, and that instead the plot about an insane rogue AI from our dimension trying to kill everyone in that one.

But more importantly, there are certain sections where it causes my processor to chug to the point where it loads about 1-2 frames per second, these sections are not lacking in enemies, and even on normal mode (as opposed to hardcore) this game is punishing enough that you can’t run up to enemies and spam “attack” and still win, which means the game is pretty much unplayable. Its atmosphere is pretty well done (even when the graphics are turned all the way down to try and alleviate the processor lag – it didn’t work), but the game’s first big “reveal” is that your colleague Walter Rebel is secretly the same guy as this other dimension’s last leader Walter Rosenhal, which comes as a surprise to your character but should’ve been bleedingly obvious to the person who tells you, since that guy knows that Walter and protagonist Nora are the only two people to have come from another dimension and that Nora is wandering the streets shouting the name “Walter.” It makes sense Nora is taken offguard that the last leader of this dimension wasn’t even native to it, but her friendly voice with a radio connection should’ve been able to piece this together immediately.

Anyway, Normal Mode is far too punishing with resource scarcity, especially regarding health, considering that they went to the trouble to make a Hardcore Mode. I shouldn’t be dying and reloading four or five times to get through a section of your story-driven, atmospheric shooter when specifically playing on the mode designed for non-hardcore play. Admittedly, the point where I quit and uninstalled came because the game’s difficulty was combining poorly with its technical issues, but I was getting pretty annoyed with the difficulty even in sections of the game that ran smoothly.

/edit

Shapez is an abstract automation puzzle game. A key part of the enjoyment for automation games for me is building cool stuff, so making it abstract is a killing blow to my interest.

That’s technically four new games, although CK3 doesn’t go into my backlog for realsies until I’ve built up a DLC library large enough that I feel I can get a complete-feeling playthrough out of it, and Industria is only going in because it’s promising to get itself back out quickly (EDIT: Which it did, though not well). Between that and a Humble Bundle of games I picked up but didn’t write about, I’ve pretty much totally wiped out progress against the backlog made in August.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, every game in the backlog is a game I would someday like to play. If my backlog is still growing despite my efforts to more consciously chip away at it, then that means there’s games in there (mostly the longer ones) that I will never see. On the other hand, my backlog is growing because the Humble Choice continues to deliver me games that I do, in fact, want to play. If I end my Humble Choice subscription, that just means I either miss games that I want to play or else go back for them later and buy them at a higher price.

Back on the first hand, maybe I should be more choosey about games like Industria, that give me mixed feelings. I added Parkitect from that Humble Bundle to my backlog, but really, how many theme park tycoon games do I want to play in my life? It might be just one. This has prompted me to take another look at my incomplete list and remove both the Escapists games from it, because I played half of the first game and didn’t like it, and on reflection they made it onto my backlog list during the original roundup through a combination of me really wishing a fun prison escape game existed and the fact that I was pushing through like 500 games to find out which ones I wanted to play, so I wasn’t giving a whole lot of consideration to each one. That review of the backlog only caught those two games, though.