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#i think until the game is like. playable. on console the best way to engage w it is to watch a playthru and then make up ur own character
withteeths · 3 years
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Maybe Steamrolling Games is Bad Actually
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Videogames are unique in that they are inextricably tied to corporatism and have been since birth (this is an oversimplification but roll with it). This means that to an extent most companies even since the ’80s have never really cared about proper preservation or easy access to their titles. Nintendo carts were originally manufactured to have their battery die in 3 years so you would have to buy a new one (this failed, but it’s why you still see a lot of dead carts floating around). I think there's a nostalgia issue within the gaming fandom regarding "oh x was great back then" but a lot of the time, games manufacturers have been historically shitty and anti-consumer and it’s just that they now have the tools to execute it much more effectively. Regarding obtrusive DRM, that’s an issue PC games have had since their zenith, where if you lost your original copy of a manual or a small plastic key you could never play a game again because the codes were individualized for each copy and support would refuse to give you a new one. Even back in the arcades, there were particularly batshit examples like the CPS board, which I shit you not was built to explode a battery pack filled with corrosive acid if it detected you were attempting to repair or modify it. There’s a lot to say about the current state of games but what I would likely illustrate is that 2/3 major consoles are racing to decide who will be obsolete first. Games consoles are reaching a point where they are trying to emulate PCs with more restrictions and DRM. We're already seeing interest in steam spike again and it’s likely that eventually, we will see almost a crash for consoles where no one can justify the price for games they can play on a PC rig. The only solution I see there would be a merger between the two consoles which feels inevitable. 
That being said as interest in the PC space increases again so does attempts at entering the bubble. We have Epic, Origin, Microsoft, Indiegala, Itchio, and Steam all vying for attention, requiring accounts, and offering exclusives to justify the use of their storefront over others. Some people think this is a good thing because it's breaking up Steam's monopoly but it literally is not, if you ever really wanna hear me rant ask me about Leftist obsession with itch being some sort of ethical steam, which it is provably not. In the end, the real sort of saviour figures that work to preserve games are random ass people on the internet. I know people who automatically assume that at the end of the day, companies care about games preservation too, and they usually have a three-pronged argument that cites a) Steam’s ability to allow the redownloading of delisted games, b) retro companies periodically rereleasing titles for modern consoles in compilations, and c) companies doing limited reruns of a game that fans request. All three of these examples are basically an incredibly effective use of diversionary tactics, but most of the time when someone cites these I just assume it’s a misunderstanding and not outright malicious intent because a lot of the time companies will attempt to actively implant these ideas to build brand loyalty.
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My main dissertation is usually that Steam is incredibly selective with what titles you can redownload, and most importantly, corporate benevolence is more-so a band-aid on a gaping wound! There’s no contingency for when Steam might migrate to a new service, go belly up, or become obsolete when a new OS is created. That means thousands, tens of thousands of dollars worth of games are just gone, permanently, along with fan mods, DLC, and content. It’s a terrifying thought that not many people bring up when discussing the problems with game storefronts that focus so much on providing a cloud and have DRM attached to every purchase. In a way, Steam preceded the trend of not allowing consumers to actually own the things they purchased, and they’ve avoided criticism by strategic use of silence and creating the illusion of a company being made by the consumers they’re attempting to serve. At the end of the day, Steam is a business, and if you ever lose access to your Steam account, or they decide to up and leave one day, you will not be able to play almost all of those games, even if you have them installed on a hard drive, because if you’re online, they connect with a server to ensure your steam account has the ability to play them. When it comes to other arguments like the limited rereleases or use of compilations to preserve arcade titles, I usually just beg people to look at community-driven options that have existed for years. The Scott Pilgrim game is a big source of contention, but I would point out that for years now, it was playable, for free, with all the DLC, on PCs. Preservationists didn’t wait for the gods of Universal and O’Malley to rerelease it for 30 bucks or save up to snatch the fucking ridiculous 200$ limited edition with shitty paper cut-outs, they straight up just did the work to make the game free and available. RCPS3 has (with a contemporary build) been able to run the game pretty flawlessly for years now, in fact, it was how I played through a majority of the game in high school on my shitty brick of a laptop. If you look further out than this one example then it gets even better, MAME and other emulation backends have been able to play obscure, unfinished, and homebrew titles with 100% accuracy, on almost any setup, for free, for decades! I found out about many of these options back in 2015 or so, certainly late to the curve, but I never really questioned as to why emulation, games preservation, and some key titles being available on PC remained some sort of arcane, unknown knowledge to most people interested in games. In the end, the answer was a highly effective propaganda campaign that combined with strategic use of DMCA takedowns has resulted in the concept of communal games-preservation and emulation becoming some sort of debate, where people will wholeheartedly side with corporations in some sort of quest for preserving things the “ethical and correct way,” which is code for preservation on the condition that it remains profitable for the IP owners.
 I think the best way to illustrate this would be with the community built around the preservation of an infamous PS4 title, PT. The story of its inevitable delisting from the storefront and the messy breakup between Kojima and Konami is well known, so I won’t regurgitate it, look it up at your own leisure. What is significant here is corporate reactions to attempts at preserving the game, which can basically be boiled down to Konami acting with borderline rabid fervour to prevent redownload, redistribution, or recreation of a seven-year-old demo, released for free download. Mentions of solutions to redownload the game have been taken down, fan-made recreations for PC, and archival servers that store a copy of the game for future preservation or emulation. Usually when this is brought up a debate occurs citing that technically speaking, Konami has a right to do this whenever they want, for whatever piece of media they believe infringes on their copyright. On one hand, yes this argument is factually correct considering the current state of copyright and ownership of media, but on the other hand, what compels someone to step into the ring for a multi-million dollar company with the primary argument being “well actually, people SHOULDN’T be able to play this specific video game until it benefits the shareholders”? In my opinion, it’s some sort of corporatized symbiosis where players believe that, if you cull the bad actors and play by the rules of the company, you may be able to eventually play the game a couple of years down the line. Sure, this has happened in the past with a few isolated cases, but it can’t be stressed enough that this is a genuinely dangerous and reductive position for people to take regarding games preservation.
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 I have two colleagues, Mariken and Fotocopiadora, who released a short interactive title called Videopulp (playable here: https://fotocopiadora.itch.io/videopulp). It’s a dramatic reimagining of a real historical event, wherein a promotional event was held in 1994 at Lelystad to destroy bootleg carts by a figure in a Mario costume. This perhaps best encapsulates something I am pleading with younger generations to understand, as an archivist, art historian, and creator: corporations are not your friends, and they never will be. With the rise of online circles of leftism, this concept is starting to gain traction but is starting to be polluted with concepts of fandom and tribalism. This has lead to arguments that while *most* corporations are bad how could you say that about Nintendo? Or Valve? Mario is so innocent and characters like Wheatley are beloved by all! I feel some people don’t realize that they can enjoy a select title or character without enlisting in a corporate faction in the battle for “best company” or “best videogame”. It leads to a parasocial kinship with a nonexistent figure that was hand-crafted to ensure consumer loyalty to a certain brand. It’s depressing, terrifying, and should stand as a disquieting example of how the grip of capitalism on works of art has permanently distorted how we think and engage with media today. So, what’s the solution? As always I can never really provide something concrete that’ll act as a cure-all, only things that people in games need to work towards. Bring up conversations about games preservation, create archives for your own work, support archivists and boost their work whenever a new discovery is created, and try to promote optimism and solidarity in your hobbyist communities. I’ve noticed a lot of futility being intertwined with the future of AAA gaming, use of online storefronts, and the inability to own pieces of media anymore, and I feel this should be pushed back against, even in a minute way. Open-source programmes still exist that allow you to hold on to what you have purchased, offline and ad-free options exist for games launchers, e-readers, and media players. The future isn’t bright, but it is not a place without hope, and as long as people continue to enter communities with passion and ingenuity, I think we have a chance at stopping the events at Lelystad, 1994 from happening again. 
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gamewise · 3 years
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Curse Review
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I make no claims that I am the greatest when it comes to the shoot-em-up (shmup from here on out) genre of gaming. Hell, I still have yet to find one I can beat on a single credit, but I’m always trying! What I find interesting about Curse is that it seems like the type of game that was designed with me in mind. It’s a more generous type of shmup. A simple, inoffensive game, nothing more to your average gamer. To the critics, it was a failure of a shmup that was destined for the bargain bin. For me however, Curse is a morbid curiosity. A shmup that seemed to be cursed upon its release, as its timing couldn’t have possibly been any worse.
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It’s December 23, 1989, Curse has just been released onto store shelves... right along side it, the very same day, was Sega’s Golden Axe. Sure, Curse caught your attention with its bizarre cover, but you knew Golden Axe was coming, you played it in the arcade, and wanted to play it at home. Curse, you had never heard of, and unless you had a PC in Japan, you would never know who these Micronet guys were. It gets worse as prior to Curse’s release, Technosoft began to forge its legacy with Thunder Force 2 and Herzog Zwei, and Toaplan had also shown up on the Mega Drive with Truxton. Curse needed to stand out, and it did... for all the wrong reasons.
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Curse is a 5 level, horizontal scrolling shmup that has all the basic elements you would expect in a shmup. Assorted weapons, optional turrets, and super bombs. When it comes to upgrading your weapons... there isn’t much to gain here. Each weapon does enough to behave differently, with one always being the most optimal choice. What Curse does offer you for turrets is you can have up to two of them, and you can change their position to either cover you from the sides, or top and bottom. Not necessarily a bad thing I would say, if it wasn’t for the fact that you rarely will ever get attacked from behind. It does act as a nice shield in case you are attacked from behind. Speaking of shield, that’s something Curse offers the player. A shield that can absorb damage and also enemy collisions. The shield is good to cover you for at least 3 shots or crashes before you die, but you’ll never be hurting for power in this game. Even if you go into this game underpowered, at lowest speed, you actually will find yourself with a fighting chance, but again, that shield will see to it this never happens. That shield, coupled with the game’s simple scoring, and ease of access is a blessing, and a curse.
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This is a shmup that is way too generous to the player. I don’t mean in the sense that it dumps power ups left and right, as any self-respecting shmup is going to give the player a something resembling a fighting chance. What I mean by it being generous is shield powerups are constantly being dropped, so as long as you don’t collide with a boss, or the environment itself, you’ll never be hurting to finish this game. In fact, after about 3 tries with Curse, I had finally managed to get to level 5 with the greatest of ease. Normally with a shmup, it’s all about memorizing enemy attack patterns, finding the best weapons to use, maximizing that weapon’s capabilities, rotating your turrets for optimal positioning, and using that super bomb when it gets out of hand. The existence of a shield becomes an excuse to miss attack patterns, as you’re most likely going to find plenty of shield drops in your quest. As if that weren’t enough, Curse was also generous in the extra lives department. In a shmup, getting an extra life is seen as rewarding, that you are doing so well in the game, but in Curse, it feels like the game is willingly giving itself up to you. It has made up its mind and surrendered. It isn’t until you get to stage 4, you feel this game is trying to challenge you by throwing as many possible projectiles it can from indestructible asteroids, to missiles and bullets. It’s the one time I felt this game was actually enjoyable, but sadly the game’s curse had already been setting in.
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Now, I’d be willing to forgive Curse’s ill-fated existence if it at least felt good to play, but here’s where everything goes wrong for Curse. Remember how I mentioned Thunder Force 2, and Truxton? Well, those games played at a smooth, silky 60 frames per second. All good shmups play at 60 frames per second. This gives the player optimal control, and response time to the given situation. Why am I bringing this up? Surely Curse is running the same frame rate, right? Nope! Because Micronet decided to make use of parallax scrolling in the background, which unfortunately hinders the overall framerate of the game, dooming it to an abysmal 30 frames per second, getting close to 20 when the action gets too hot. This, unfortunately, makes you feel sluggish, even if you have your speed at max. If Truxton and Thunder Force 2 could manage hectic action without the framerate issues, what’s Micronet’s excuse? Because this was their first console outing, they probably didn’t realize until it was too late to reverse course on their desire for parralax scrolling. In terms of boss design, there are some odd choices of a boss, such as facing off against giant birds set out to kill you. As for the environments, they really don’t have that much memorable about them save for the final stage and its final boss, which I will not spoil. The final stage will really test your patience with the frame rate, especially because it’s the only level where death sends you back to the start. Consistency, please! 
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By this point, you’re probably saying “hey, Mr. Game Wise, is there anything about this game you genuinely like?” There is something about this game I genuinely like, yes! While the game may not be the best thing in the world, I will say I think for Micronet’s first outing on the Mega Drive, this game has one hell of a soundtrack. One thing a shmup needs to get right to make the player feel engaged is the music, and boy did it get my blood pumping, especially at the end. It felt like everything I had suffered through, the frame rate, the simplicity, the ease of access, that I was finally ready to tackle those who started this war with me. It’s a shame the sound effects couldn’t match that. As again, after playing Truxton prior to this, Curse feels like it needed more punch in sound effects, because when you shoot, there’s no sound effect! Maybe it was for the best as most of the sound effects in this game have that scratchy sound you come to expect from close to the bottom of the Mega Drive bin.
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All that said, is Curse the worst game to come out of 1989? No. It’s arguably an inoffensive shmup that was victim to poor design choices, and some of the worst possible timing in the world. It was because of the poor reception in Japan that publisher INTV backed out of distributing the game in the United States. For Micronet however, this served as a learning experience, as two years later they would put out a fantastic port of the arcade classic Raiden to the Mega Drive. As for Curse, it’s at least playable, and if you need a shmup to get used to the genre, Curse will make it a little easy for you. If you’re a seasoned veteran of the genre, skip this one, it will offer you very little outside of the soundtrack.
Positives
+ The soundtrack
+ Box art
+ Late game levels actually deliver a balanced challenge
+ The Final Boss
Negatives
- Sluggish framerate
- Way too generous towards the player
- Stage 4 boss is too easy compared to others
- Significantly short for a shmup.
Overall: 5/10
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kittenfemme27 · 3 years
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Bastion: What it means to truly move on.
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“Someday, your bird is gonna fly.”
Bastion is the first game released by what is now the critically acclaimed Supergiant Games, makers of other games like Transistor, Pyre, and most recently Hades. But back in 2011 they were a nobody. 7 developers from various backgrounds within the industry came together to make games that could focus on storytelling first and foremost more than any of their previous studios would allow. Bastion was the result of that. Starting out from the idea of a top down isometric RPG, Supergiant realized that they wanted to portray a world that was fractured and broken, and wanted to show the vast and empty sky as a contrast to that destruction, but realized the camera angle wouldn’t allow this. So they came up with the idea that the ground would come up in front of the player as they walked forward, allowing the empty sky to show beneath them since the groundwork would not originally be laid until the player walked towards it. To explain this choice and why the world reacted this way, a destructive event known as “The Calamity” was created in the game's story. Thus, Bastion found its ethos.
Bastion’s a masterpiece. Plain and simple. It's been ported to nearly everything under the sun for a reason, being playable on literally 3 different console generations as well as every OS a PC can run, but coming back to play this game for the first time within the current political and geological climate that we find ourselves within as time goes on only makes it more and more apparent how much the story has to say. Even if you could somehow ignore it’s absolutely incredible music, insanely varied and addictive and yet delightfully simple gameplay, jaw dropping art direction and set pieces, Bastion’s storytelling is at its core and the story it has to tell is one that I think a lot of people didn’t fully appreciate back in 2011. From what I could find online, most people either ignored it in favor of the gameplay, or let the meaning of it glaze over them. And that's really, deeply a shame. Because Bastion is one of the best games I have ever played. And I’d like to talk about why.
Gameplay:
“Kid just rages for a while...”
I want to start first and foremost by talking about the gameplay and how you engage with the world. Combat in Bastion is simple and not exactly groundbreaking. An isometric hack ‘n’ slash with 2 weapon slots and a single ability, with a shield that has a parry mechanic and a dodge roll with fairly lenient invulnerability frames. Player movement is very, very slow which encourages you to very quickly become proficient in dodging and blocking. It’s fun, for sure, if just a little bit easy. But it’s nothing to write home about at first. As you play, though, you’ll begin to uncover Bastion's hidden depth and variety within its combat. A lot of that depth comes from the sheer number of Weapons, Upgrades, Passives, and Skills you can equip in any combination. 
You are given 11 weapons, each of which can be upgraded with collectibles found within the levels for a total of 5 times per weapon, and these upgrades form a loose “trees” of upgrades that you can switch between at will. You can make the Spear better at critical hits and critical damage and faster thrusts, or make it better at throwing with more spears per throw, for example. Every single weapon has a 2 distinctive upgrade “Trees” in this way that clearly make it better at one specific aspect of the weapon, but you are free to mix and match these upgrades as you see fit. Maybe you want the Spear to have a high critical hit rate, but also throw 2 spears per throw, you can do that. It’s also worth mentioning that there are no restrictions placed upon you on what type of weapons you want to take. You can take two melee weapons, or two ranged weapons, whatever combination you desire is up to you. The narrator even has a line for literally every combination you can have that you’ll hear upon exiting the armory. Some compare you to legends of yore from the game worlds past, others point out just how plain silly it is for the Kid to carry both a mortar launcher and a rocket launcher.
Each weapon also comes with two skills that you can use during gameplay, ranging from protective skills like one that makes you block all attacks for a few seconds, to damage based skills such as the Bow’s skill that fires a ricocheting arrow between enemies. Even then, there are other Skills that are tied to no weapons at all which brings the total of skills in the game to 30.
In addition, there’s the Tonic system in which each level up confers a slot that you can equip a drink from the bar, for a total of 10 at max level. These function as passives applied to your character that allow even further customization. Some are basic things you’d expect, such as overall more health, or more restoration or ability potions, a flat 15% damage resistance, and so on. A number of these however offer a very very strong benefit in exchange for a side effect. Werewhiskey, for example, gives you a 100% crit rate but only below 35% health. Doomshine offers a permanent 10% crit but takes away 10% of your health permanently. Or Leechade, which allows you to gain health from striking enemies, but makes your health potions only 1/3rd as effective. These can all be stacked upon each other in any order or combination. You choose and be changed at any point between missions..
All of these systems together enhance the very simple hack ‘n’ slash combat to be something with infinitely more depth than presented to you at first glance, and something that you can experiment with as much as you want, since no choice is permanent. Part of the way it encourages you to experiment are the Weapon Challenge missions that crop up each time you obtain a new weapon. They ask you to complete some sort of challenge related to that weapon with no Skills, no other weapons, and in some of them not even the ability to dodge or block. Besting these will net you 1 of 3 prizes, depending on how well you did, With the first two prizes being upgrade materials and the last being a Skill for the weapon the challenge is based on.
Beating Bastion unlocks a “Score-Attack” version of New Game+ that keeps a running overall score during the whole game and during stage specific score for each mission, with a multiplier and a timer to keep that multiplier up. This effectively turns the game into a leaderboard chasing isometric arcade game. Every enemy adds 1 to the multiplier, and resets the timer, so it's up to you to run through each mission as fast as possible and challenge yourself to see what kind of score you can get, and since it lets you replay any mission you want, you can always find ways to get a higher and higher score. One of my playthroughs of this game was on the PS Vita and even since beating it, I've found myself trying to one-up my own score while i’m just sitting around since each mission only takes about 10-20 minutes. The most challenging content in the game is a set of 4 different repeatable combat arena’s with 20 waves of some of the toughest enemies in the game. You can make this even harder by invoking each God within the games Pantheon and raising the difficulty of every enemy you encounter. Doing this raises how many points you get per kill, and in these combat arena’s I’ve regularly topped a million points in just a single stage from precise gameplay.
I think that’s what I find amazing about Bastion’s combat is that despite 3 playthroughs, I never once found myself bored or annoyed by any of it. All 3 of my playthroughs had me switching up Weapons, Upgrades, Skills, and Tonics between every mission just to experiment and see what crazy builds I could make. Every challenge was always a delight and a real test of skill, every mission a romp where I got to find a new weapon and play with it each time. Often, I would die, but that was fine! Losing in Bastion is fun. It’s part of the experience, because you can always go back and change your build to whatever you desire to try again. In a way, it’s fitting for the entire theme of the game. It’s the End of the world, and there are no more rules. Do whatever you’ve gotta do. Might as well have fun with it, while you do. 
Art & Sound:
“I suppose all that's left... is to try'n remember this moment.”
I think the other reason that I didn’t get bored on any of my 3 playthroughs of Bastion was the absolutely breathtaking art and music the game features. The soundtrack, composed by Darren Korb, clocks in only at an hour and while that does sometimes mean that there are repeats of songs, I'd be lying if I told you there was a single song on that score that I didn’t absolutely love. Or that I thought was out of place during any section of the game. Each and every song is its own radically different soundscape that, in songs like “Brynn the Breaker”, invokes a feeling of complete and utter destruction around you and a sense of leaning into that destruction. It’s fitting that the first time this song plays, you are almost assuredly going to hear the line “Kid just rages for awhile...” as you wreck each and every enemy and object around you after waking up on a floating rock in the sky.  Meanwhile, in other songs such as “Build that Wall”, it's clear that Supergiant was acutely aware of the impact their music could have on a scene. In Caelondia, the games world, “Build that Wall” is a jingoistic anthem meant to inspire the Cael by noting the danger they face from the outside world and from the Ura, a people who live to the east, and implores them to build walls to keep everyone else but keep themselves safe. But the first time you hear that song, you’ll be rolling through the dilapidated ruins of Prosper Bluff, a place overrun by birds ready to rip you apart and barely hanging together by literal boards between each floating island, and not a wall in sight. Guided only by the simultaneously soothing and haunting voice of an Ura girl singing the theme of the people who hate her. In that moment, it sounds much more sorrow and sad than any anthem for a nation ever could.
Darren Korb has stated that the point of Bastions music was meant to invoke a sense of the “American Frontier”, of exploring new and uncharted land, but it’s interwoven with melodic and slow moments of tragedy and despair, featuring lots of slow acoustic guitar and lots of slow vocals when there are any at all. I really cannot praise enough this choice of frontier-ism interwoven into the music itself, as it sells the entire theme of the game perfectly.
The art of the game is just as fantastic, too. Supergiant set out to make sure you could see the sky in a top down game, which sounds a little absurd and like a nearly impossible feat, and yet they succeeded with such aplomb it almost seems like it was easy. Below each stage is a blurred barrage of trees, nature, clouds, sky, sometimes ruins within those things, it reminds you constantly that the world has ended and nature has reclaimed it. Progressing further and further down the set of missions and further away from the Bastion and Caelondia sees you going more and more into what's left of those wilds and away from the ruins of civilization, before reaching the icy peaks in the east of the Ura. It creates this feeling of loss and tragedy at what's lost, a sense of exploration into this new and unknown world, before finally getting to it's cold center as you get closer to the truth of the Calamity.
In general, the art style of Bastion feels like a living breathing oil painting. Features on people are exaggerated with small bodies, yet large heads and eyes and hands or feet. Making them feel like something out of a children's book. Every single thing in the game is full of color and life, down to the animals and the foliage, with the only notable exceptions being the ruins of buildings that are oppressive and gray, and the final cold reaches of the Ura’s leftover ruins. Because of the oil painting aesthetic, the narration, even the surreality of the world coming up before you, Bastion feels a lot more like playing a fairy tale than anything else I've ever played, even things that have tried to emulate that same effect. Bastion reminds us that the presentation of a game, in both its art and its music, tell just as much about the story and the world of a game as the actual story itself does.
Story: (Spoiler Warning)
“Now here’s a kid who’s whole world got twisted, leaving him stranded on a rock in the sky.”
Bastion is a game about a lot of things, but at its heart, it’s a game about Tragedy. A tragedy you can’t prevent no matter what you do, because it has already happened. Setpieces in the game constantly remind you of this, like going through the Hanging Gardens, a place where people used to gather and finding nothing but ashen corpses. Rucks, Bastion’s narrator, will even tell you the names of these people. I remember playing this game in 2011 and being upset at this. I wanted to know about Maude the Tutor, I wanted to hear the life of Percy the Snitch, but I couldn’t. That was the tragedy. It didn’t register with me at the time, but that was the point. I was supposed to be upset I couldn’t know these people, that they died in a tragedy I couldn’t prevent. 
The core story of Bastion revolves around a war that took place some 50 odd years ago. Caelondia and her people, versus the Ura. In the modern day, before the calamity, the war was over. There was an Ura named Zulf who was trying to broker peace, even. But the Caelondian’s military-science division, the “Mancers” had a secret weapon. One they intended to use to get rid of the Ura for good. It would cause a genocide of the very land the Ura lived in and cause it to literally fall into nothing, ripping apart the physical earth where it stood before. Worse yet, this weapon was being created by an Ura inventor that lived within Caelondia named Venn under threat to his daughter, Zia. Venn couldn’t stand to aid the destruction of his people and sabotaged the weapon that ushers in the Calamity with vengeance in his heart, so that it would backfire and take Caelondia down with it. Imagine Venns shock, then, when the mancers asked him to pull the trigger.
Turns out an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. Just like that, the Calamity has already happened. The Ura who were discriminated against in every part of Cael society and the racism and cycle of vengeance and violence within the Caels and the Ura reached a boiling point that caused the literal end of the world.. And that’s where you wake up. In a world already torn apart and crumbling before you. On a rock in the sky.
Tragedy permeates everything about the game. In the Hanging Gardens, you find Zulf as he’s about to kill himself after watching his Cael wife crumble to ash right before his eyes. When you meet the second survivor, an Ura singer who just so happens to be Zia, Venns daughter. She’s mournfully singing the tune of Caelondia that was the anthem used to inspire the Caels to oppress her own people, and her sweet voice sounds like the dying breath of an entire nation. Bastion makes it very clear that these people's lives as they knew them are over. But then Bastion asks you a simple question: You have to keep going, so what are you going to do with that world?
Before you get to make that choice, though, you’re asked to decide the fate of a man who hurts you. Zulf at one point reads the journal of Venn that he obtains from Zia and learns everything about the Calamity. He learns about the Mancers plan to genocide his people. He learns about Venns sabotage. Zulf spent his entire life advocating for peace between the two peoples, and this is what he’s met with. Unable to stand it, he attempts to destroy the Bastion and flees after injuring Rucks. As you chase him, he lures you far from the Bastion and sends the signal to an entire army of Ura survivors to attack the Bastion, even persuading Zia to come with him to try and convince her to abandon the Bastion. In the end, though. You chase him all the way to the heart of the Ura nation and as retaliation for bringing someone so powerful who kills so many Ura, the Ura forces attack Zulf and leave him for dead. You come across his body and are given a choice to either leave him and carry on, or take him with you and abandon your weapon. You’re asked right then and there, can you forgive someone who hurt you and your chance at fixing the world and break the cycle of violence? Or will you press on, like Venn, with vengeance in heart. If you choose to save Zulf, you walk forward with zulf on your shoulder through multiple Ura archers shooting you nearly to death. It’s only once they realize that you’re trying to save Zulf do they stop trying to attack you. This moment of compassion, this breaking of the cycle, inspires the Ura to let you pass. If you choose not to save him, you must battle an entire army, which isn’t even hard for you at that point. It’s a bloodbath. You, a Cael kid from nowhere, end the last of the Ura outside of Zia who knows so little of her culture that she can’t even read the journal her father left over. You succeed where the Mancers failed. The cycle of violence remains unbroken within you and within your heart.
You’re given two options upon returning to the Bastion at the end. You can use the power of the Bastion to reset the world to where it was before the Calamity. You’ll lose all your memories, but everyone and everything that died will be okay and alive again. There’s a risk, though. Rucks has no way of knowing if this plan will work. If it will prevent the Calamity in the end. “Problem with a machine that sets things back to a bygone time,”  he says, “Is that you can’t test it.”
Your other option is Zia’s choice, though both her and Rucks support whatever decision you make, they know it’s not an easy choice. Her plan is to turn the Bastion into a floating island ship that can travel anywhere. To forge a new world and look for survivors on other floating islands and carry on in this destroyed world and find hope within that tragedy. Make something new, and beautiful, from the ashes of something dead. Maybe that’s not possible, she thinks, but it’s better than recreating a world with institutional violence, with cycles of hate and vengeance, a world where something like the Calamity could happen in the first place.
Supergiant knew what most people would pick, though. Resetting seems like the only real choice, at first. Maybe the Calamity will happen again, maybe it won’t, but you can’t just let all those people die. The whole game has been building up to fixing the Calamity. Rucks, old and clinging to the past, is sure that resetting it will work and that things will be okay again. He’s a bit like a father figure to you, too. He’s narrated every action you took, made sure you were never truly alone in this ruinous world. So of course you trust him. An overwhelming amount of people chose to reset the world the first time they play. I did, too. I knew that maybe the Calamity would happen again, but I couldn’t just let everyone die. Maybe things would be different, I thought. Maybe this time people won’t let something like a genocide happen again. Maybe Venn won’t pull the trigger. I didn’t know, but it was better than letting everyone die, right? It had to be. I had to hope that I made the right decision. So with trepidation in my heart. I chose to reset everything.
Rucks comforts you when you choose to reset that “No matter what happens next... you done good.” Credits roll. You see pictures of the lives of each character in the reset Caelondia. The lonesome Kid continues his work as a mason on the wall built to keep the Ura out, where he isolated himself after losing everyone in his life. The only person to ever sign up for 2 tours on the Wall. Rucks continues his work on the Bastion, refining it for the future, meaning that there’s still a need for a safeguard like it in the first place. Zia plays a concert on her harp with a mournful look on her face, she found comfort in music but that comfort was equally as isolating and lonely, what with her being an Ura girl in Caelondia. Zulf gets married to his fiancee, blissfully unaware of the impending genocide on his people while he fruitlessly brokers peace. Upon seeing these credits, these images of the lives of these characters, I knew I made a mistake. History is going to repeat itself. Sure they were alive, and so was everyone else, but the cycle of violence remains unbroken and eventually, even if the Calamity that befell the world the first time doesn’t happen again, another will. Rucks final words in this ending are a simple forlorn goodbye. “So long kid... Maybe I'll see you in the next one. Caelondia... We’re coming home.”
Choosing this ending left me feeling anxious at first, and then hollow and empty. I didn’t save anyone, I just clung to the past. I expected things to be different in a world where something like the Calamity could happen in the first place. I knew, then, that for there to be any hope at all I had to move on from the old world. I had to do right by Rucks, by Zia, even by Zulf. They were my friends. They deserved better, they deserved more. They deserved a world without the conflict and violence that Caelondia brings. I understood even more clearly what I had done when, upon starting a new game, Rucks final words echoed over the loading screen. As far as I could tell, the Calamity had happened again. Rucks even makes comments of feeling a sort of deja-vu while retelling the story and is much less confident resetting will work the second go around, for a reason he just can’t quite explain.
Bastion is a story about tragedy, about generational trauma left over from a war, about the cycle of violence and all that it perpetuates. It’s a story about waking up in a world that has already crumbled and fallen apart through no fault of your own and being told there is nothing you can do about that destruction. And there isn’t. Climate change is a bigger problem now in 2020 than it ever was in 2011. People are going to die, it’s just an awful fact at this point. Those in charge continue to ignore that fact and these issues while also continuing to stoke the fires and flames of the impoverished and destitute more and more every day, bleeding them dry for any pennies they might have. 
But that’s not all Bastion has to say. It’s not fair for the next generation just like it wasn’t fair for the Kid, to wake up in a world already destroyed, and yet still, people like the Kid and Zia found hope. Within Bastion, you can save Zulf and end the cycle of violence, you can choose Zia’s option and set out on a world that is better for everyone in the end, as ruined as it is. Even in the end of the world and everything you knew, there is hope. Bastion doesn’t just ask, it begs on hands and knees for the next generation to take up this dying world and make it better. Bastion, and Supergiant, believes in the next generation. that it's possible to move on from the past and make something better, to seize control and make a better world while purposefully never forgetting the cycles of violence that led us to the end of the world in the first place. Our great Calamity is already unfolding before us and there isn’t anything we can do to stop it, only delay it. Bastion tells us that it's okay, that we can make something beautiful, and new, and better from those ashes. 
In the scene for the Evacuation ending, Rucks tells us that he’s not sure how to live in a world like this, but he’s willing to learn. And excitedly offers to help teach you how to fly the Bastion through the skies. The very first image you see during the credits then, is the Kid finally collapsing of exhaustion and resting while Rucks tucks him in. The next is Zia looking forward on the deck of the Bastion, a smile on her face and hope in her heart. You get to see Rucks later teaching the Kid how to fly the Bastion, finally giving the Kid the family that he so desperately needed, and finally you see Zulf. He’s got a frown on his face, he’s still lost everything in the Calamity after all. More than anyone. But he’s chopping food for everyone else still, helping out where he can. I couldn’t help but think upon seeing his expression that he might hate me for the rest of my life, and that was alright. I’d always just be happy he was alive. Seeing the smiling faces of everyone in the Evacuation made something very clear to me. In the Old World, Zia was an outcast, Zulf was a fool, Rucks was nostalgic, and the Kid was alone. In the Calamity, they found friendship, they found happiness, they found love and family in each other, they found adventure and they found hope for the future. Zia’s final words to the Kid echoed in my head:
"Any moment I'd want to live again... happened after the Calamity. Not before."
And I was at peace. I knew I had done the right thing I had chosen to move on, accepting the world for what it was and not looking for miracle solutions to fix it or change it, but to forge on ahead with what I had and make something better. 
Bastion’s story is not directly told to you, especially after the ending. There is no epilogue that tells you exactly what happened, just a few lines of dialogue that you can make of what you will and some pictures of the lives after your choice. it’s never explicitly stated that the Calamity happens again if you choose to reset things. It’s meaning is in between the lines that Rucks has to say. It’s In the subtext. It's in the art, it's in the environment, like the tragedy of finding nothing but ashen corpses around a lone peace talker right before he’s about to jump to his death. It’s in the music, like the haunting melody of an outcast’s voice singing the song of her oppressors while never realizing how much the very city she was raised in tried to exterminate her. But more than anything it's in the feeling you get while you play. Bastion’s story plays out in your heart as much as it plays out in your mind and on the screen in-front of you. What you feel, what you make of it, that’s just as important to the meaning of the story as what you’re hearing and seeing. Obviously this can be said of all stories, but Bastion is maybe the one that’s resonated most in my heart and in my soul more so than any other story. It offers no simple answers, no painless choices, and no easy ways out. Move on, or cling to the past, those are your only two options and Bastion forces you to make a choice.
In the end, I chose a new world. A better world. A world with my friends that would never let the cycles of violence and the generational trauma that caused the Calamity to happen again. Sure, resetting technically brings everyone back to life, but it wasn’t until I chose to move on and move forward that I felt I could even say in my heart that I’d saved anyone at all. 
Conclusion: 
“I dig my hole, you build a wall.”
“Build that wall, and build it strong, Cause we’ll be there before too long.”
Bastion is, and I'm not saying this lightly, a perfect game. The gameplay loop and combat is phenomenal and addicting, the music and art and aesthetics are so top notch you could honestly create an entire art style out of them all on their own, the storytelling is amazing and has so much to say that I cannot believe something this important was just thrown out by an indie studio nobody had ever heard of while it was only 7 people strong, and how many people slept on it or completely missed the point of the tragedy of Caelondia and the Ura. 
This game will live in my heart for a very, very long time and its music and messages it conveyed will stick with me even longer. My only regret with Bastion is that I’ll never get to experience it for the first time again. But, even with the spoilers here, you can. Play it, Kid. You won’t regret it.
“We can't go back no more. But I suppose we could go... wherever we please.”
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daleisgreat · 3 years
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15 Years of Xbox 360: Flashback Special!
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I am usually timely with these, but the holidays has resulted in this 15th Anniversary of the North American launch of the Xbox 360 Flashback Special to be about a month late. The 360 was one of the first major consoles to have a near simultaneous global launch in the three major market territories. With the United States and Canada launching first on November 22, 2005, followed by Europe on December 2nd and finally Japan on December 10th with most other smaller markets over the following year. The 360 had an extraordinarily long life cycle, with it being eight years until Microsoft launched its successor, the Xbox One. I had major highs and lows with the 360 so get ready to take in my journey with the system. Like with past system specials here, I recorded podcasts based on RPG games and comic book games that released on the 360, PS3 and Wii and have embedded them at the bottom of this entry for supplementary material if you crave even more 360 games to learn about. Be forewarned, this is my lengthiest Flashback Special yet, so I have implemented bookmarks for ease of navigation you can click or press on below! With that out of the way, the last special I did here was on the PS2, and I want to begin the 360 Flashback Special the same way by expanding upon its unavoidable….. CHAPTERS Part 1 – The Hype Part 2 – The Launch Part 3 - Reinventing Dashboards with Blades & Achievements Part 4 - Revolutionizing Downloadable Games on Consoles Part 5 - An Awesome Debut Year of Games Part 6 - Upgrade to HD Part 7 - Three Red Lights Part 8 - Kinect + Avatars = Wii’s Userbase Part 9 - Backwards Compatibility & Indie Games…..not those Indie Games Part 10 - For the Love of Online Co-op Part 11 - Bringing on J-RPGs and Doubling Down on Western RPGs Part 12 - Becoming a Pinball Wizard Part 13 - Racing Away to One of the Best Eras for the Genre Part 14 - The Fad that was Plastic Instruments Part 15 - Non-Kinect Casual/Family Game Hits and the Failure that was NXE Part 16 - Wanna Wrassle? Part 17 - Sports-ball Forever! Part 18 - No Russian, No Cauldron Part 19 – Dubious Honors Part 20 - Lightning Round Quick Hits Part 21 - ”It’s an Ocean” (THE END!!!) Part 22 – You’re Still Here!? Well then…. (STINGER!!!) The Hype Microsoft garnered a lot of attention by pulling the plug on its original Xbox early because of the PS2 being an unstoppable global force, and was determined to launch its system a year before the PS3. The Dreamcast had huge success in North America for its first year by launching ahead of the PS2 a year early, so I could see where they were coming from. I covered E3 2005 for the long defunct gaming site, VGpub. I recall getting a closed door tour with a few other gaming press members for the Xbox 360 and was shuffled around to a few isolated booths that showed off the 360’s “blade” dashboard interface and went over some of the functions of the system. I recall being shown Kameo running side-by-side an unreleased build on the original Xbox to demonstrate the 360’s horsepower. 360 had a couple games playable on the show floor that year with Top Spin 2 and Need for Speed: Most Wanted. From my brief time with those two games what I took away the most was the much-improved controller being lighter, slightly more ergonomic, and the much appreciated inclusion of the shoulderbumper buttons to replace the peculiar white and black buttons from its predecessor. Of the several games I was shown and/or played from E3 2005, the one that impressed me the most was Saints Row. I walked out of that demonstration thinking it looked like the first viable open world contender to Grand Theft Auto after countless watered down GTA-clones were flooding the market. Sure enough, Saints Row did not disappoint the following year and would have three more successful sequels over the years.
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Back when cable TV mattered before the dawn of streaming, this MTV reveal event delivered on building anticipation for the 360.
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Microsoft’s E3 press conference, which happened in tandem with a much publicized MTV reveal event of the 360 filled with all kinds of celebrities made it impossible to avoid the 360 launch hype building up to its November launch. Then there was Microsoft’s truly extraordinary “Zero Hour” launch event in the Mojave desert to give people the opportunity to travel all the way there just to buy an Xbox. Then there was the Mountain Dew contest where they were giving away 360s every so minutes and you increased your chances to win by entering more codes on their website, and yes, I must have entered at least a 100 codes from weeks of gathering bottle caps from co-workers to no avail. All this blitz of marketing engagement made it impossible to not pay attention to the 360’s launch. I was a huge fan of the original Perfect Dark on N64, and thus was eagerly stoked for the prequel, Perfect Dark Zero which made it a day one buy for me. Amped 3 wound up as the second game I pre-ordered for launch day, and it was a solid snowboarding game, which got a significant boost from its irreverent narrative that pushed me through playing it. The Launch With my pair of launch games pre-ordered I went on to count down the days until the 360’s launch. I thought I had my launch system guaranteed on November 22nd, but last second shenanigans prevented me from buying it at the final hour, yet I was able to procure dibs on the first batch of second wave systems that hit retail three weeks later. Launch window systems came with a couple limited pack-ins in the form of a DVD remote control (yay?) and the downloadable XBLA puzzler game, Hexic HD. Hexic HD was a perfectly fine hexagonal based puzzler from Alexey Pajitnov, the same designer who invented Tetris, but I mostly played Perfect Dark Zero in those opening months of the 360. I only got about halfway through the campaign, but I played a ton of deathmatch with friends and/or solo against bots. Like the previous game, PDZ had a plethora of multiplayer options and maps and tided me by splendidly during the first months of the 360’s lifecycle.
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Perfect Dark Zero and Amped 3 were my first two 360 games and both held me over nicely during those initial launch window months! Over the next few weeks I played a fair amount of launch games my friends brought over and picked up/rented a couple more. Top Spin 2 I played far more than I thought I would and wound up finishing its lengthy career mode. Call of Duty 2 was a local multiplayer hit that friends repeatedly brought over. A few years later I eventually picked up Need for Speed: Most Wanted and got immersed working my way through its “blacklist” of rival racers to vanquish. Launch title Condemned: Criminal Origins I did not start playing until recent years, and I am kicking myself for not starting it sooner as it is a trip of a suspense/thriller first person game consisting of intense hand-to-hand and melee weapon combat over traditional firearms FPS weaponry. The game is still fun to this day and I have made it a ritual to play it on Halloween for the past three or four years. Reinventing Dashboards with Blades & Achievements
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Also worth highlighting here during the launch was familiarizing myself with the much-loved “blade” dashboard in the launch window. The four blades were filled with many options to separate game, videos, photos and music media. I made heavy use of custom soundtracks on the original Xbox, and loved how the 360 had support for it built into the user interface so they could be dropped into any game. Dashboard and online features on the original Xbox like friends list, voice chat, game invites and more carried over on the 360 and later evolved into so much more through system updates that introduced must-have features like Party Chat that made it so several users can voice chat together regardless of what game any of them are playing. It made catching up with family and friends on weekend game nights more manageable. The biggest hit of the UI during that launch window was Microsoft debuting achievements that were mandatory for all games. These became an instant sensation among any ardent game player when accomplishing the criteria for an achievement and hearing the endorphin-rush of a sound effect and accompanying on screen graphic that indicated you unlocked another achievement. Most of the launch window games had straightforward achievements like finishing campaign missions or getting X amount of wins in sports and racing games, but they eventually evolved and encouraged users to play games in new ways I never thought of (Crackdown was a great early example of this with its achievement design). Also the way the Blades made it easy and irresistible to compare what achievements you accomplished in a game against other people on your friends list that it only upped the friendly competition between friends to see who could unlock more achievements. It is gratifying to see Microsoft allowed each Gamertag’s linked Gamerscore to carryover from 360 to Xbox One and now Series S|X. While achievements are still around today, and I occasionally dive into going out of my way to unlock some if I am enjoying my time with a game, they do not compare to the early years of the 360 where achievement-mania was running wild. Revolutionizing Downloadable Games on Consoles
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This was also the first time a major console had an online digital store implemented at launch. The original Xbox had a scaled-down store they experimented with late in its lifecycle with about a dozen smaller classic arcade hits and smaller sized web browser-esque “flash” games of its era that could be purchased, and the 360 expanded on this bigtime. Initially, the 360 digital game marketplace known as “Xbox Live Arcade” launched with games maxing out at 50meg download limits so the game could fit on a memory card, so all of the first year or so worth of XBLA games were mostly re-releases of smaller-sized arcade classics like Smash TV, Contra and Gauntlet along with similar simple browser-based flash game of its era like Bankshot Billiards 2. Over the 360’s lifecycle though they kept increasing the game size limits to the point where disc-based games were coming out digitally and were multiple gigs in size as memory card and hard drive storage options increased. During the first few months of the 360 after launch developers were not flocking to releasing XBLA games because they were unsure if they were going to take off like digital games were slowly starting to on PC at that point. The launch dozen or so XBLA games were met with success, but developers were not anticipating it so in those early months only one or two new XBLA games hit a month. The big breakout XBLA success was a straightforward adaptation of the card game, Uno that launched in May 2006. I can attest for many sessions of simple, pick up and play rounds of Uno while catching up with friends over voice chat online. Microsoft eventually patched in support for the 360’s first webcam, the “Vision” camera, which lead to some peculiar matchups with strangers online who wanted to make sure to demonstrate all their adult substances they were consuming that evening. Later throughout 2006 and 2007 XBLA grew to releasing a game every Tuesday, and Microsoft enforced every XBLA game have a demo/trial so it was an eager experience to see what game would be hitting that Tuesday, because most of the time Microsoft did not announce the game until maybe a day before at that time.
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It took over 20 years, but it was worth it to relive the iconic X-Men arcade game with online co-op, and EA did a bang-up job bringing back NFL Blitz for two of my most played XBLA titles! There are so many success stories of XBLA games to go on about, but I want to highlight a few of my favorites. Seeing the re-release of many classic arcade, 8 and 16-bit titles with enhanced graphics and online support was a big win for XBLA in this department. I remember interviews with the XBLA executives from this time answering fans demands and going through the legal hoopla with Konami to bring back arcade favorite beat-em-ups like TMNT, X-Men and The Simpsons, and all with online play! This treatment went doubly so for fighting games. It started with Street Fighter II: Turbo receiving the XBLA treatment, and within years Capcom, SNK, Namco and other studios were porting over their greatest hits onto XBLA like the first two Marvel vs. Capcom and Soul Calibur titles, many King of Fighters re-releases. My personal favorite is the remake, Super Street Fighter II Turbo: HD Remix that saw all new gorgeous artwork and a new officially endorsed ReMix soundtrack from the fantastic ocremix.org community.
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Non-fighting game wise I was surprised by EA Sports’ revival of NFL Blitz. It is one of the few games I somehow got addicted to online, and become somewhat legitimately good at too and was able to genuinely earn the 10 straight online wins achievement against random ranked opponents! Renegade Ops is an addicting twin-stick shooter in an mini-open world unleashing destruction as pint-sized vehicles with a gruff CO barking orders from the chaotic minds from the team that also made Just Cause. Valiant Hearts I originally played on 360, and loved the passion they showed on their unique adventure/action take on a World War I game. I 1000% related to Double Fine’s take on being a wide-eyed kid caught up in the whimsical spirit of Halloween in both of its RPG-lite Costume Quest titles. Fans of past Sega consoles like the Genesis, Saturn and Dreamcast were well treated, and new fans emerged after a plethora of XBLA re-releases of titles like Guardian Heroes, Radiant Silvergun, both Sonic Adventure games, Daytona USA, Ikaruga, Virtua Fighter 2, Nights, Jet Set Radio, Sega Bass Fishing, Space Channel 5, Crazy Taxi, Rez and others saw new life in XBLA form. The Genesis saw packs of three games re-released in bundles themed around best-sellers in the Streets of Rage and Golden Axe 16-bit entries. Although I would recommend skipping the XBLA Genesis packs in favor of the 360 disc release of Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection that has 40 Genesis games and bonus unlockable Arcade and Master System titles. Sega obviously treated its back catalog well on the 360, and I put in many hours revisiting these past favorites. I bought into the hype for Shadow Complex, and it became the first “MetroidVania” I ever finished. Hydro Thunder Hurricane perfectly captured the nature of the 1999 arcade boat racer, while successfully evolving its gameplay into the HD era. Adorable puzzle-platformer Ra-Skulls brought back pleasant memories of Mr. Driller! Twisted Pixel’s Comic Jumper made smart use of implementing FMV-video into its charming superhero platform-action title. Despite its stomach-turning title, Deathspank is a lighthearted action-RPG I saw through to the end with a twist ending I did not see coming. That same developer, Hothead Games, released the first two turn-based RPG Penny Arcade games I ate up that perfectly encapsulated the popular web comic in videogame form.
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Two of my best-of-class XBLA recommendations are Trials HD and its sequel, Trials Evolution. It is an exemplary example of the adage, “easy to learn, tough to master.” Its quirky, bouncy motorbike and instant reloading spawns made it easy to succumb to endlessly retrying its inventive stages after each wipeout. It also had innovative use of implementing Friends List leaderboards with their ghost times appearing as you play, just teasing you more and more upon each crash when coming close to usurping their times! The sequel added online multiplayer that clicked and made perfect use of Trials unique gameplay. Microsoft I recall got a lot of flak for their curating policies for XBLA at the time because they would only allow one game to release each Tuesday, and there were many indie developers lashing out for being on the short end of the stick for not getting their game slotted for release on XBLA. Eventually Microsoft upped it two XBLA games a week, with usually a more anticipated game hitting on Tuesday and a lesser known title from a smaller studio hitting on Friday. Looking back on this the obvious downside is the lack of quantity of XBLA titles with only one or two releasing a week, but the curation process lead to the hit-to-miss ratio of them being significantly in favor of the hit range. Sure there were some stinkers that creeped in their like the disappointing Turtles in Time Re-Shelled remake, but the good outweighs the bad greatly in the XBLA market, especially compared today to the ridiculous amounts of low-rent DIY shovelware hitting every week on all consoles with there being seemingly no restrictions for any developer to get their game on a current console, for better or worse.
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The digital store also made game demos more easily accessible instead of the traditional demo disc, and downloading demos in the early years of the 360 was kind of a big deal, especially when they had major opening acts of action and intriguing narratives like the Prey and Just Cause demos that made a huge impression on me and triggered me to rush out and buy them. This also worked against games, with the most egregious case being EA Sport’s planned reboot of its basketball series with NBA Elite ‘11’s demo being so plagued with bugs and glitches, that EA infamously flatout cancelled the game days before its street date release and forced retailers to return their copies of the game. That last minute recall tempted overzealous retail employees to snatch up precious copies to make it one of the rarest physical releases on the 360, with copies going on eBay for many thousands of dollars. An Awesome Debut Year of Games
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I have no idea if it was happenstance, or intentionally planned, but it worked out pleasantly in the 360’s favor in its first year of next-gen exclusivity they had one or two AAA exclusive games launching per month. Noticing multiple users on my friends list playing the latest AAA game, and with the dawn of podcasts in 2005 featuring their affable hosts discussing the latest games in exhausting detail on launch week is what I feel created the horribly named sensation, “Fear of Missing Out.” I ate up gaming podcasts upon discovering them in 2005 with 1up Yours, The Hotspot, Broadcast Gamer and Team Fremont Live being early favorites of mine and influencing my gaming purchases with their genuine positivity on the latest games that made it difficult to ignore their top picks. They, along with traditional print and online gaming press made it easier to keep up with the latest must-have game of the month for the 360’s first year. A month after launch Dead or Alive 4 snuck in at the end of 2005. It was the first fighting game on the system, and with it having a Spartan character from Halo’s universe as a guest fighter, and an innovative-for-the-time pre-fight lobby system lead to me spending many hours in it online and offline. I was terrible at it, but still had countless hours of fun, even while legitimately earning the dubious zero point achievement for 25 straight online losses.
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Oblivion’s Adoring Fan I loved seeing respawn every couple of in-game days to tag along on my adventures before quickly getting slaughtered, and Test Drive Unlimited was an unprecedented always-online open world racing title that laid the foundation for Forza Horizon and The Crew! A couple months later, the first big RPG hit on 360 with Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It was a huge improvement from Morrowind, and this Western open-world RPG was publisher Bethesda’s first mainstream console hit. It took me well over a hundred hours to finish that I spread out over the course of five years (just in time for Skyrim!). I had to resort to abusing the hell out of the dupe glitch for infinite invisibility potions to get past those dastardly Oblivion Gates, but it was an immensely gratifying experience to complete and fully 1000 gamerscore Oblivion! Pro tip, make sure to avoid a near freak-out experience like I had and have a bow in your inventory on the final Thieves Guild mission where you steal an actual Elder’s Scroll!
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The string of big-release games kept rolling through 2006. Test Drive Unlimited broke new ground for the racing genre with its always connected open world! Before From Software had blockbuster success with their string of Souls games, they were known at this time for their niche mech games, and had their most success yet with the release of Chromehounds in 2006. The online-focused mech game was more accessible from their previous feature-extensive Armored Core titles. A pair of popular third-person Tom Clancy games hit in 2006 with the first Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter and Rainbow Six: Vegas titles. I rented both of these and was terrible at them online, but I do recall having fun as the decoy in Vegas to draw out enemy fire so my friends could pick off my assailants! My anticipation for Saints Row paid off, and it wound up being an awesome GTA-clone done right that year! The first Gears of War was the big 2006 holiday release from Epic Games, riding the success of several hit Unreal FPS games, but long before their current Fortnite fame. It lived up to the hype and delivered with its unapologetic brand of in-your-face gore, and smooth drop-in/drop-out online campaign play. It became one of my favorite franchises on the 360, and I would up playing through the campaign of every single game released to this day! The final big 2006 release I want to highlight is Dead Rising’s brand of campy, zombie mayhem from Capcom that became a huge new IP for Capcom and also the catalyst for many 360 owners to… Upgrade to HD Up through most of 2006 was when I used a traditional CRT (AKA “Tube TV”) as my main gaming television. HDTVs were first noticeable on the market during the PS2/Xbox/GCN era, and a fair number of games supported HD resolutions (especially on Xbox), but HD graphics were never a marquee bullet point of that gen. That all changed with Dead Rising. For the first several months I remained content with the CRT visuals of launch window 360 games, then when playing the Dead Rising demo, I could not help but notice the game’s text was rather tiny and kind of difficult to read. Upon listening to podcasts I learned I was not alone on this and it turned out the game’s text was optimized and quite readable for HD resolutions. Many more games would soon follow this trend in the following months. I noticed this even more when a friend brought over a smaller HDTV and we put them side-by-side running Rainbow Six: Vegas and I saw for myself the difference in the legibility of the in-game text. So yeah, the core graphics for all games where shinier and crisper in HD, but my primary reason for upgrading at the end of 2006 was just to read the damn text. History is repeating itself in recent years with text starting to look smaller and requiring more eye-squinting again to read in games like Wreckfest and MLB: The Show for me, when I later learned that is so because the visuals are optimized for 4KTVs (which I finally upgraded to several weeks ago).
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Did you experience the ‘Look and Sound of Perfect’ with 360’s HD-DVD player, along with its killer app of a film in Tokyo Drift? HD movies also arrived to the 360 in 2006 with the release of the ill-fated HD-DVD add-on. Sony getting the better end of the stick in exclusivity deals with studios lead to it losing the physical HD format war against BluRay, and movies stopped releasing on HD-DVD by the end of 2008. I almost impulse-bought the add-on upon seeing it on the clearance rack for $50, but thankfully I held off. By that time however HD streaming was starting to take off with TV shows and movies available to rent and purchase from 360’s online marketplace, and the 360 nabbing a year exclusive on being the first non-PC device to offer streaming Netflix. Streaming movies and TV shows exploded in popularity and before I knew it, almost anytime I logged on nearly half of my Friends list was making use of one of many streaming apps that would become available on the 360. A couple years before the 360 got to this level of success, it had a couple major hurdles to overcome, especially the right-of-passage a vast majority of early 360 owners fatefully dubbed…. Three Red Lights There have been a fair number of platforms that have been notorious over the years for noteworthy faulty hardware ratios like the first three original PlayStations and the problematic powering on trickery required to boot NES games, but those all pale in comparison to the atrocity of the launch year 360 units. Within a few months after launch more frequent whispers started to become prominent of knowing someone who had a 360 that failed on them with the telltale indicator being three flashing red lights on the system. Users would then have to call Microsoft to set them up with a shipping container to mail to Microsoft to repair and mail back. I was the first among my local friends and peers to get the three lights of doom, and I have painful memories of it because my system was lost in UPS transit for three months before I finally got it back after visiting the local UPS center’s lost and found.
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360 #2 only lasted several months before red-lighting in 2007, and the third met its expiration date in 2011. I will refrain from going into the nuts and bolts of the architecture problems, but in layman’s terms Microsoft was in such a rush to get that year head start on Sony, that a high amount of faulty chips made their way to manufacturing and resulted in the system’s high failure rate. To Microsoft’s credit, they gave all launch year 360 owners an extended three year warranty to get their system replaced free of charge, which I took advantage of twice. The third one died after the extended warranty, but by that point Microsoft had a slim version of the console on the market releasing alongside Gears of War 3 that I snatched up, and **fingers crossed** have had no issues yet with. Being the first to be hit with the three red lights amidst my immediate local circle of friends and co-workers made it interesting. Over the next year every couple of months another friend would call or text me, and/or another co-worker would catch up with me at work and relay to me their troubles of their 360 bricking and I would be their unofficial tech support on how to get ahold of Microsoft to the point where I still remember the phone number to this day (1-800-4MY-XBOX) to get set up with the replacement system. I wound up buying a hard drive transfer cable to transfer data to new hard drives when switching systems and I recall at least a handful of people borrowing it from me when they switched systems due to switching systems and/or upgrading hard drives. In a bizarre twist, I will put a curse on Hollywood Video for my first two 360s red-ringing! The first time it happened I was playing a rented copy of Chromehounds. The Hollywood Video curse struck again in 2007 when renting Shadowrun caused my 360 to crash!!! As ubiquitous as the three red rings became, Microsoft wanted to ensure a 360 makeover image with a marketing assault for the 2010 launch of… Kinect + Avatars = Wii’s Userbase Nintendo’s Wii launched Holiday 2006, and the motion-based console was an initial sales juggernaut, and it took over two years before it was commonly available on store shelves. Both Sony and Microsoft initially had meek responses to it with Sony essentially patching in motion controls in time for the PS3’s launch with the Six Axis controller that was not that well received or regarded for its precision, and the 360 had the aforementioned Vision Camera, which was essentially Microsoft’s take on an Eye Toy that only saw a handful of games support it for motion controls. Holiday 2010 saw both companies with a meaningful response with PlayStation Move on PS3, and Kinect on 360.
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Microsoft pulled the same marketing strategies as Nintendo did years earlier intentionally marketing the Kinect towards families and advertising it heavily on daytime television. Most of Microsoft’s Kinect games were more-or-less their takes on the hit Wii versions. This is when Microsoft implement cartoony characters that could be implemented across games called “Avatars.” They were especially prominent in Kinect games, and one cool side effect for them was the many digital clothing items for them that could be either bought off the Avatar Marketplace, or unlocked for free by playing through games. I am especially proud of my You Don’t Know Jack dummy, and goofy oversized head ornament I unlocked from finishing Comic Jumper. A fair amount of late gen 360 titles supported Avatars in-game, which made for some interesting sights like having your Avatar onstage in Guitar Hero 5 jamming out next to Kurt Cobain. Microsoft’s gamel paid off, and for two-to-three years, the Microsoft moved millions of units of that camera. It is safe to sumrise that the 1-2-3 punch of Kinect, Move and smartphones all combined to steal the “casual gamer” userbase that the Wii was known for and the Wii’s console sales in America plummeted from 2011 onwards. The Kinect boosted 360 console sales so much from the Holiday 2010 period until the Xbox One and PS4 launches in Holiday 2013 that in that three year timeframe Microsoft sold the most systems in America for all but a handful of months. By the Holiday 2013 launch of the Xbox One/PS4, the 360 overcame the Wii’s sizable lead to become the best-selling console of the Wii/360/PS3 generation in America.
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Only Kinect game I ever played was the river-rafting follies seen in Kinect Adventures, but surprise hit games like the Gunstringer seen above tempted me to almost get a Kinect on multiple occasions. I never bought a Kinect, but did play Kinect Adventures at a friend’s….yes, it was that damn river raft mini-game. I paid attention to the games releasing for it and supporting the peripheral, and a few looked like genuinely entertaining games and went on to have critical acclaim. Many traditional games added optional “Better with Kinect” features like zoom-in art gallery halls, or audio play-calling in sports games. Even though the ardent game player in me despised the change in direction Microsoft took with the Kinect, I cannot deny there were still several games I wanted to try on it after seeing the positive reactions for Harmonix’s trilogy of Dance Central games, Twisted Pixel’s The Gunstringer and even the limited on-rail experience that is Fable: The Journey. Backwards Compatibility & Indie Games…..not those Indie Games Hitting around the same time as Kinect was Microsoft patching in a new division of purchasable digital games initially called Community Games, but later rebranded Indie Games. Microsoft made its XNA development tools easily available for almost any level of experienced developer. This lead to a deluge of DIY games that looked like they were made as a semester long development school project flooding the Indie Games channel. Some developers embraced the campy nature of the amateur works that dominated the 360 Indie Games scene, with Silver Dollar Games especially unleashing a plethora of their…brand…of games like Try Not to Fart and the ironically titled, Why Did I Buy This?
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The 360 Indie Games scene left a lot to be desired as seen above with the quality of games from infamous companies like Silver Dollar Games There were a few gems in the rough to be discovered in the Indie Games channel, and like XBLA games, Microsoft enforced a free trial on all games so you knew what you were getting yourself in for before throwing down some hard earned Microsoft Points, which are like regular points, but fun! There are two DLC Quest games that are fun quirky $1 platformers riffing on how gratuitous in-game DLC would become. Tribute Games gained notoriety on here with their adorable Breakout homage, Wizorb. Finally, I was a huge fan of Zeboyd Games that earned their reputation for their 360 Indie Games and I played through and devoured all four of their humorous takes on throwback pixel RPGs (Breath of Death VII, Cthulu Saves the World, Penny Arcade’s Rain Slick 3 & 4) that released as Indie Games. Zeboyd earned their development stripes on the 360 Indie Games platform, and I am happy with their continued success today! For every one of these hits that broke through however, there were at least a few dozen forgettable releases overshadowing them. Indie Games was Microsoft’s answer for their curation policy to XBLA, but as you can see it only went so far.
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Zeboyd’s four 360 Indie Games are excellent retro-style RPGs well worth your time and can be found on Steam today to experience these gems! Microsoft had similar lukewarm success with their backwards compatibility efforts on the 360. There was a huge demand leading to the 360’s launch to be fully compatible with all original Xbox games. Microsoft only originally promised that the first two Halo games would be back-compat on 360, but after enough user outcry, Microsoft released several updates over the 360’s lifespan patching in support for what ended up being a little under half of the original Xbox’s library being supported on the 360, but the software-based emulation had a list of issues and bugs that accompanied each compatibility update. Aside from a fair amount of both Halo games, I played through Fable and Spider-Man 2 via 360 back-compat, and ran into intermittent bouts of slowdown with the former, and random little portions of graphic flickering with the latter. Still enjoyed my time with both, but not without these added issues. Speaking of Halo…. For the Love of Online Co-op
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The 360 featured countless games that supported online co-op which made playing the latest big AAA title all that more fun. This primarily effected first and third-person shooters with the big example for this being the Halo titles on the 360 (3, 4, Reach, ODST, Halo Anniversary Remake). I played through all five of those games in online co-op and enjoyed them all tremendously. I will give props to Halo 3 and 4 having my favorite narratives, and I loved the final level of Halo 3 being an homage to the last level of the first game where you drive a warthog through a lengthy labyrinth of enemies and terrain to navigate before a time limit expires and everything explodes, MacGrueber-style! Halo 3 brought in four player online co-op, which I experiment with friends online by trying out the “Skull” modifiers which only upped the difficulty and lead to us finishing a good chunk of the game on the highest difficulty. Halo 4 I continue to this day to reference an ill-fated moment I had when playing with my friend Derek, where I was controlling the Scorpion tank whilst marching it up a lengthy incline, and he was walking alongside me and I misinterpreted the level’s geometry where I did not see a turn and nonchalantly drove the Scorpion tank off the edge of a level and plummeted it down to its awaiting death to the erupting laughter from Derek on the headset.
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While I had a lot of fun with the Halo titles online, there were plenty of other worthy options, with the first Crackdown standing out among them. Getting lost in that open world with a friend and wreaking havoc with powered-up heroes whose jumping abilities had seemingly no limits was a blast, so was coming up with random challenges for each other like making a competition to see who could race up to the top of the mammoth Agent’s tower first. Saints Row 2 is another open world game that had online co-op, and made discovering some of the game’s secrets I had no idea about like its hidden mall worth going out of the way to show to friends. Dead Island’s online co-op stood out to me with its in-depth crafting system and emphasis on melee combat ala Condemned. The four Gears of War titles on the 360 all feature first-class online co-op. Gears of War 3 I have classic memories of bringing over to a friend’s the night it launched and we set up our TVs next to each other and played through the entire journey over two days. The survival-based Horde modes from the Gears titles created a new sensation for online co-op, and I played many hours of it online in the first three Gears. I even became invested into the “deep” lore of the Gears franchise to the point that I read a couple of the novels. Gears of War: Judgment switched developer to People Can Fly who tried to freshen up the controls and gameplay a bit. They also focused the narrative on Baird and Cole’s origins which did not go over well with the fanbase, and while it was the least popular of the four on the 360 I will still give Microsoft props for trying something different with it.
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Marvel: Ultimate Alliance’s final boss battle with Galactus was made to experienced and conquered with someone in co-op, and while the Army of Two games weren’t perfect, I would be lying if I didn’t admit to having some fun times with all the games in online co-op If it was not for online co-op I would have not broken my curse to finally finish the first Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. I started and never finished that campaign on five, yes five, separate occasions with different sets of friends each time and stopped because we either lost interest and/or ran into logistic issues setting up times for everyone to meet together. A former co-worker Sean reached out to me to play with him online and I reluctantly agreed and started it the sixth time, but sure enough we stuck with it and completed it, and it was worth all the starts and stops because it remains years later one of my all-time favorite comic book games. That Galactus boss fight is a final boss fight that I will never forget and a truly epic final encounter to close the game! The second Ultimate Alliance game also featured online co-op and I finished that game on a much timelier basis because a lot of my co-workers also picked it up and we met up regularly for a couple weeks to finish it twice because it focused on the popular Civil War Marvel event that had two separate storylines. It had a more polished presentation, but the first Ultimate Alliance I easily rank as the superior game!
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Some rapid-fire quick online co-op memories to wrap this segment up on: The first Kane & Lynch game was an interesting experience in co-op because I played it on this insanely huge HD projector. The first two Borderlands games were both huge hits with my friends and peers that won us all over with its loot-driven FPS gameplay. Credit to Derek for having patience with my crazy work hours and sticking with me for the better part of a year to pick away at and eventually finish Borderlands 2! To a lesser extent, another fun FPS co-op focused title were the Army of Two trilogy of titles. The games all had noticeable control issues, but the teamwork focused gameplay worked for us, and the franchise had a certain charisma to it with their many unlockable masks and charming fist bump animations to equip. Real time strategy games have historically been troublesome to pull off on consoles, but Ensemble Studios found the magic formula to make it work with Halo Wars, and somehow made online co-op viable with it too, and it was another game I found myself teaming up with Sean in a very enjoyable campaign that also featured some of the best CG cutscenes that remain stunning to this day. Finally, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand has likely the most ridiculous storyline of all these co-op titles where you play as 50 Cent himself to track down a prized skull across the middle east that made it a zany quest to just shake my head and go with to see where it took me next, and also for my friend Matt and I to jam out to its hip-hop flavored soundtrack to throughout. Bringing on J-RPGs and Doubling Down on Western RPGs In the console space, before this generation, role-playing games were dominant on the first two Nintendo and Sony platforms. That surprisingly changed this generation. Microsoft made pitches to Japanese developers in the early years of the 360 to release their games exclusively, or at least timed exclusively on the system. This lead to Square-Enix releasing exclusives like Infinite Undiscovery and Last Remnant on the 360, and porting its MMO, Final Fantasy XI onto the 360 in 2006 and making it cross-platform-online compatible with the PS2 and PC versions which meant it was the first game to share online user bases between consoles from different manufacturers. It took a little over a decade for this to happen again, so this was kind of a big deal. I still recall Square stunning gaming fans with their E3 announcement that Final Fantasy XIII would release day and date with the PS3 version (along with XIII’s two sequels later on), so it was surprising during this time to see Square open up its publishing portfolio on other platforms.
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As twisted as its plot may be, I still got a lot out of Eternal Sonata with its highly entertaining battles. Blue Dragon was another early J-RPG that drew a lot of attention that Microsoft was serious about RPGs this gen. Other Japanese developers also released RPGs in the early 360 years with Blue Dragon, Enchanted Arms, Resonance of Fate, Eternal Sonata and Lost Odyssey all appearing. I purchased nearly all these games, but only one I played through of these was the bizarre Eternal Sonata, which is a traditional J-RPG set in the mind of dying legendary composer Federic Chopin. Its plot is as out there as its premise, and I will never forget its equally bizarre post-credits stinger, but I loved its engaging battle system that kept me glued in all the way through. I was also taking a music history class in college at the time, so the brief Chopin historical fact interludes between acts also did a lot for me. While Japanese RPGs took off on the 360, so did…. …. “Western RPGs” from companies on this side of the global hemisphere. Bethesda and BioWare are the two most prominent developers responsible for this slate of RPGs this generation after lighting the fire on the original Xbox. I already discussed my love for Oblivion, and Bethesda capitalized on that success with another blockbuster in the form of Fallout 3. Take the medieval fantasy world of Elder Scrolls and apply a retro-50s post-apocalypse skin to it and you have the formula for another Bethesda best-seller I once again put in over 100 hours in completing the main campaign and all of its DLC expansions. After that I needed a break from Bethesda’s games and have yet to play New Vegas. I did start up the Oblivion sequel, Skyrim and briefly made some headway into that, but got sidetracked by other holiday tent pole releases at that time and it regrettably succumbed to becoming lost in my backlog. I eventually picked up the remaster on Xbox One, and one day I will restart and finish that game!
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Giant Bomb’s videos of their complete play-throughs of the Mass Effect trilogy is some of their best work that should not be missed! A series that did not get lost in my backlog was BioWare’s Mass Effect trilogy. The first game I initially got into as an awesome modern-day take on Star Trek, with an engrossing cast of crew mates on the Normandy. The first Mass Effect was a little rough around the edges, so I eventually fell off halfway through, but picked it up a couple years later and plowed right through it. The same thing happened with Mass Effect 2, but the advantage to finishing it in 2014 was that all the bonus story DLC add-ons were released and combined for a gratifying experience all together. ME2 delivered on hyping up being careful with pivotal story decisions that would have consequences in the infamous final “suicide mission” in the game. My initial run through of it saw three of my crew members not survive it through, and it gutted me so much I restarted that final mission and had to compromise with only two crew members passing away. Immediately after finishing ME2 I jumped right into ME3 and this time saw it all the way through within a couple months, luckily by this point the extended ending and all the story DLCs also just finished releasing and I was stunned with what Bioware held out of the core game and I can feel for players who initially played it and missed out on having a central character like Javic locked away behind DLC and missing out on essential storyline DLCs that dealt heavily with the origins of the Protheans and Reapers. The way I played it felt like a complete experience with all the DLC, but without it I sympathize for the critics who stated it felt unfinished upon first release.
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There is also the fantastic “Citadel” DLC I want to give props to which is its own standalone swashbuckling adventure full of lighthearted campy jokes, and concludes with throwing a the party of all parties for all your friends! For people who have not played the initial Mass Effect trilogy, at least give a couple episodes of Giant Bomb’s Mass Alex play-through videos of all three games in their entirety a shot. I am almost wrapped up with them as of this writing, and it has been wonderful experiencing that trilogy all over again this way. Like Gears, I became so absorbed into the Mass Effect lore, that I have bought and read all of the novels, and almost all of them are good, even the Andromeda-based ones! I know the first Fable has been on the receiving end of a lot of criticism over the years for not delivering on all of its promises, but that does not take away from the final product on original Xbox still being a astounding action-RPG! I treasured my time with it, and the “Lost Chapters” expansion, and late in the 360’s life in 2014 it got the remastered treatment to bring the entire trilogy (and the spin-off Kinect game, The Journey) all on 360. Fable II from what I gathered has been the highpoint of the series from everyone I have talked to. I have only played through the prologue, and failed at getting back to it while covering other games in the gaming press at the time amidst another busy holiday release season. Fable III sounds like it did not win everyone over with its major storyline hook it marketed of overthrowing a corrupt sibling at the throne, and sadly the Kinect game, The Journey was the last major single player installment of the series as of this writing. Becoming a Pinball Wizard I have played various videogame pinball titles over the years, but for whatever reason the 360/PS3 gen is when it got ahold of me and never let go. It started with Crave’s Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection. Each real life table replica had their own set of goals to accomplish in order to unlock an achievement for each table, so I kept plugging away, and little-by-little I found hooked into addicting tables like Gorgar, Medieval Madness and No Good Gophers especially being my favorite. Later on Crave released an XBLA pay-per-table platform with tables from multiple companies called The Pinball Arcade. Every several months a new batch of tables were released and I found myself immediately downloading them and studying the in-game instructions for each table to thoroughly learn all of its intricacies and the addicting nature of filtered online Friends-list leaderboards had me plugged in to top the scoreboard for each table.
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Well over 100 hours I invested into Pinball Arcade and Pinball FX on the 360. Two of my favorite tables are pictured above with No Good Gophers on the left, and Mars on the right. The same exact thing happened with Zen Studio’s XBLA title, Pinball FX. Their tables were not based on real tables, and as they gradually released more tables for download, they embraced their interactive nature and featured more computer animated toys that flew off of and around the table, and more dynamic special effects on the playfield that simply are not possible on real life tables. Despite them being not lifelike, and featuring more exaggerated pinball physics, I still embraced them when I was in the mood to switch up from the real tables in Pinball Arcade. Zen released a sequel a few years later in Pinball FX2 that had more dynamic community and hub-based features and integrated online friends leaderboards into actual gameplay with in-game pop-ups when your score was approaching a friend’s high-score which only intensified every attempt and kept me coming back more frequently. Some of my favorite tables from the first two PBFX games are the spooky mystery pin Paranormal, the Monty Python-influenced Epic Quest (with RPG stats and leveling that carries over in each attempt!) and the outer space themed Mars. Pinball FX3 on Xbox One/PS4 added even more community based features that keep me playing it weekly to this day, but that is a story for another time! Racing Away to One of the Best Eras for the Genre I believe Microsoft somehow found a way to publish one marquee AAA racing game each year for almost the entire 360 lifespan. They originally rotated between Bizarre Creation’s Project Gotham games, and Turn 10’s Forza Motorsport series each year. I never got into either of those series that much. Forza is the more serious sim, and I have tried out a couple installments over the years, but the intense sim mechanics are just not for me. If I would have put more time into PGR I feel I would have really got into that series, and I have some fleeting memories of getting into the second game for a brief moment on the original Xbox.
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While I did not get reeled into Forza Motorsport, I fell hook, line and sinker into PGR’s replacement, Forza Horizon from the developer, Playground. It lightened up the sim-based controls and offered up enough assist options to procure that comfortable blend of sim and arcade racing. I also wound up in favor of its open world hub nature to either drive around to new races and take in the country side, or hang around the game’s central music festival. The first Horizon had such a fitting licensed soundtrack of rock and electronica-based songs that I sought out the entire soundtrack and it is its own separate running playlist for me. Since I did not upgrade into the Xbox One/PS4 gen until 2016, that meant I picked up Forza Horizon 2 on the 360 instead, and thankfully it was not all that downgraded from its Xbox One version. Both games I wound up completing all the races, challenges and finding all the hidden barnyard cars. Yes, I even played through all of the Fast and Furious licensed expansion for Forza Horizon 2 where Ludacris himself as Tej provided voiceovers to set up each race. Before Forza Horizon, another game attempted the same thing a couple years earlier with Test Drive Unlimited. It featured a sorta-GPS replication of the entirety of Oahu as its open world hub and I absolutely ate it up and was white-knuckling the final race which was a one-on-one endurance race against the top ranked AI around the entire outer highway of the island. The sequel was fun too and added another island, but I think one Alex Navarro’s reaction to the opening cutscene in his Quick Look video will be my main takeaway of it. I have mentioned in previous console flashbacks how I love demo-derby racing games, and on 360 Flatout: Ultimate Carnage was king! It is a fantastic follow-up to the PS2/Xbox games, and my brother and I played it online regularly for years, I can go on about it forever, but instead I will embed below a special three-part video where my brother and I raved about why it was one of our favorites….
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Many years ago my brother and I made this three-part YouTube series on our fandom for Flatout: Ultimate Carnage The summer of 2010 saw two new arcade racing games debut that both should have been successful new IPs with sequels to this day, but since the two released within a month of each other they presumably took up each other’s player base and both Activision and THQ did not pick them up for sequels. Activision invested in Bizarre for an all new racing IP in Blur, which is essentially conflating the power-ups of Mario Kart with underground street racing, and it was indeed as awesome as that pitch sounds. I played hours of it in the main career mode and online as well. On the other end THQ invested in Black Rock Studios with their innovative racer, Split/Second, a reality show-based driving game where studio directors would triggers obstacles and destructible environments to activate and provided an all-new gripping racing experience. It too was also a riot to endure and 100% finish, but it sadly never received a sequel either.
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I loved the Burnout series the previous gen, and EA delivered with an upgraded port of Burnout Revenge that remains my favorite entry in the series to this day. I got into its open world follow-up, Burnout Paradise and developer Criterion were aces with their long-term support of free updates that kept me coming back to it. EA’s other flagship racing series, Need for Speed had a few entries I put serious time into. The 360 launch title, Most Wanted had an intriguing concept of working your way up the “Blacklist” of the most wanted street racers to compete against. When Criterion did an all new reboot of Most Wanted several years later, it combined that concept with the blazing fast gameplay from the Burnout series to my approval. Finally, I will give head-nods of recommendation to both of Sega’s Sonic kart-racers on the 360. They are the top Mario Kart-clones out there, and ooze with Sega fan service. The second game, Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed successfully innovated with evolving stages that switched up from racing in karts, then into mini-bi-planes and then onto water-based hovercraft. I completed the careers for both games and put in a fair amount of online play with both entries too. The Fad that was the Plastic Instruments My gut told me the original PS2 Guitar Hero was going to be big within minutes of trying out the original demo in the fabled Kentia Hall at E3 2005. Adored the first game, but the second game was when it went mainstream, and was thrilled with the second game’s HD 360 release in 2007. 2005-2009 was the apex of the genre for my friends and me. There were countless nights of my friends and family passing the guitar around trying to best each other’s scores, and when 360 introduced online leaderboards for each song it upped the competition level even higher. Local city clubs and bars did Guitar Hero tournament nights and my favorite memory from these was on a Guitar Hero III tourney night when it was my turn to go up on stage to pick a random song out of a hat I was the lucky soul to draw one of the hardest songs in the game in the form of Slayer’s “Raining Blood.” I suffered on stage, and barely managed to finish, yet it remains a memory I shall cherish! In fall of 2007, Harmonix splintered away from Red Octane and teamed up with MTV Games to unleash the revolutionary Rock Band that brought in drums and karaoke to the fold for four player co-op play!
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I will forever love the countless Rock Band nights I had in the first two Rock Band games that hit in 2007 & 2008, especially the nights I played with my old podcast co-hosts Chris and Scott. I downloaded well over a hundred extra DLC songs over a few years for it, and we would routinely meet up one or two nights a month for Rock Band nights for two years. Almost always, our last song to finish off a session was the final song in the first Rock Band’s career mode that was filled with many wrist-suffering solos, yes I am talking about Outlaws’ “Green Grass and High Tides”. Our Rock Band addiction culminated with the “Bladder of Steel” achievement which we procured when playing every song straight without a fail over the course of several hours! I was almost always the drummer on Rock Band nights. At first no one else wanted to do them, but eventually I got into them and kind of became somewhat decent at it on medium difficulty. One night at an Alice Cooper concert I became entranced at watching the drummer wail away all night that I convinced myself after the show to lay down a $200 pre-order for the premium ION Drum Set for Rock Band….though after a few months something about that bulky set did not gel with me and I did not prefer the way the drumsticks clanked off the pads and I never developed a rhythm for them and eventually gave them away to free up space.
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The forgotten gem Rock Band title no one talks about, LEGO Rock Band! Behold one of its awesome boss stages with the Ghostbusters theme song! The plastic instrument genre quickly became oversaturated with numerous entries a year from Activision and EA. At first it was kind of interesting to dive into some of the band focused entries of the series like how Harmonix did a wonderful tribute to The Beatles with reliving their career and its groovy “Dreamscape” stages in The Beatles: Rock Band. The Metallica nut in me feasted on forcing carpal tunnel upon myself with the painfully intricate, yet entrancing solos from almost every track in Guitar Hero: Metallica. By the time Green Day: Rock Band and Guitar Hero: Van Halen rolled around though and other offshoots that I completely skipped like Band Hero and Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits, it was clear the writing was on the wall for the genre. I did manage to sneak in some last doses of fun with a couple other off-the-beaten-path entries though before this genre faded away from its zenith.
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The head-bopping mash-ups of DJ Hero with its uniquely intuitive turntable controller and feeding my karaoke addiction with Lips were breaths of fresh air for the genre late in the 360’s life.
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Microsoft’s karaoke series on 360, Lips, supplied a fair amount of fun with its unique glow-in-the-dark microphones and four volumes of songs released before Microsoft eventually morphed it into a karaoke pay-per-song app late in the 360’s lifecycle. My buddy Matt introduced me to LEGO Rock Band, which Matt got for free with any Black Friday purchase one year at Kohl’s and we were both nearly burnt out on the genre by this point, but thought we would at least give this graphically unique version a shot. The adorably twee nature of the LEGO visuals with its complementing soundtrack were irresistible, and it instantly won us over. We stuck with it all the way through, and were fans of its music video-esque “boss” levels, with the Ghostbusters theme song stage being one we replayed far too frequently. Another refreshing take on the genre was through DJ Hero and its sequel, DJ Hero II. I loved that turntable controller, and it flawlessly placed me into the DJ world with its mash-up stylings soundtrack and fitting club visuals. Both games were unsung heroes of the genre when they released because they both came out a year or two removed from the apex of the genre’s success, but the DJ & LEGO games brought in some much needed fresh air in that scene. Non-Kinect Casual/Family Game Hits and the Failure that was NXE Now while I almost entirely avoided the Kinect, there still remained deluge of non-Kinect casual party games that were a hit with the family on holidays and friends on game nights. The two Microsoft published Scene It games that came bundled with their user-friendly big button wireless controllers were family favorites for a few years and successful adaptations of the hit movie trivia DVD-board game. A guilty pleasure of mine is legacy licensed trivia/board games/game shows on consoles, and the 360 had plenty of them with solid editions of Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, Apples to Apples, Risk and Family Feud 2012. Doritos Crash Course seemed initially like a forgettable promotional game that was free on XBLA that only offered avatars racing each other on a variety of obstacle courses, but somehow its simple gameplay was addicting and far more entertaining than it had any right to be at family and friend gatherings.
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You Don’t Know Jack was a fun revival of the hit PC irreverent trivia series that was dormant for nearly a decade before THQ brought it back on consoles in 2011. Friends and I played through every episode on the disc and its DLC packs, and I revisited it for several years because of one dumb habit where the adorably jerk-of-a-host, Cookie Masterson, would have a unique greeting to open the game if you played on a holiday. The success from this You Don’t Know Jack revival got the developers at then-Jellyvision to revitalize the brand and include a bunch of other party games in the popular yearly Jackbox games that are still going strong as of this writing. I also wanted to squeeze into this chapter of the flashback Microsoft’s polarizing decision to appeal the UI of the 360 to a more family/casual audience and changed the fan favorite “blades” UI into the detested “New Xbox Experience” (NXE) in 2008. Microsoft was trying to synergize with the equally detested UI of its latest PC operating system, Vista. Tablets were starting to become trendy at this point, and Microsoft was resilient on forcing a tablet-esque UI across all its devices and the results were a total system failure. I was among the many who made their outcry heard over how ugly the many rows of diagonally aligned boxes filled with ads were a visual nightmare on the eyes. I was use to some minor ad implementation in the Blades UI before promoting other 360 games available, but the NXE mixed in all sorts of commercials, movie trailers and other assorted promotions that hit the same wrong nerves as those eye-blasting web browser ads.
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Microsoft eventually updated and tweaked the NXE into a much more aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly UI that remains on the 360 boot-up today. With the 360 user base understandably a modicum from what it was in its prime today, it is refreshing to see Microsoft lay off as of this writing with a complete absence of ads on the UI. I will also use this space to shout out the premium theme backgrounds that I have used for many years being the pumpkin patch and winter wonder land themes that are always a delight to see when I boot up the 360. Yes, the Xbox Live 360 servers are surprisingly still online in 2020, 15 years after the 360 launch. Most 360 online multiplayer supported games support peer-to-peer multiplayer so as long as Microsoft keeps the lights on, you will still be able to play 360 games online. Microsoft only kept the original Xbox Live servers up for seven and a half years, so to see them more than double that for 360’s servers as of today is…astonishing. Worth noting is some games like Chromehounds, Final Fantasy XI and all EA-published games utilized their own private servers which the publishers have shutdown long ago, so those games are unplayable online, but a vast majority still support the option. Wanna Wrassle? For several years on the 360, one of my yearly holiday season traditions was to buy the latest WWE Smackdown vs. RAW game and complete the career/season story mode and unlock all of the hidden wrestlers and features over the course of a few months. I did this from WWE Smackdown vs. RAW 2007 through 2011. For one of the yearly installments I was so close to unlocking all the achievements to get 1000 gamerscore, but the last one I needed required a grind to complete the main single player career mode five times. I decided at the time this was a perfect opportunity to catch up on past seasons of 24 and brought a second, smaller TV next to my living room TV and absentmindedly button mashed my way through those extra career mode playthroughs, and it took almost the entirety of the second season of 24 to accomplish that feat and earn that final achievement. No regrets!
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WWE's yearly Smackdown vs. RAW games featured zombies in their storylines, while All-Stars shifted the gameplay to more arcadey fun for all! The story modes in those yearly WWE games were worth playing through because the writers in some cases got creative and did things that were not possible on TV like having the Undertaker cast mind control spells for example. They added and experimented with a plethora of new modes and options, with the WWE Universe mode being a prime example of going all out creating dream cards and custom storylines. The creation options became incredibly in-depth each year too, in the later installments the developers added a Create-a-Storyline feature that had a surprising level of customization full of custom text entries for dialogue and branching cutscenes. One infamous online community, Video Game Championship Wrestling, became famous for its machinima they created with this system that contained intricate storylines with created wrestlers in its league consisting of video game character icons, developers, comic book & anime characters, fabled movie legends and yes even sprinkling in a few wrestlers. I dabbled in creating a couple simple storylines, but it was too much for me to invest into, but thankfully users could upload and download storylines from the community which added seemingly infinite replay value.
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You have not lived until you witnessed an episode of the acclaimed wrestling videogame machinima that is Video Game Championship Wrestling. Will it be Gabe Newell or Dr. Wily who will emerge here as VGCW champion? WWE released a couple spinoff games that were not as feature-dense, and contained more accessible, arcade-like controls. They were on the right path with Legends of Wrestlemania, which highlighted the 80s success of the then-WWF, but absolutely nailed it with WWE All-Stars which featured a hybrid of past legends and current stars, and all of them were intentionally designed to look like roided-out action figures capable of larger-than-life moves like hurling opponents 30 feet into the air in addition to juggling, fighting game-like air combos. This all combined for fun multiplayer sessions with friends and family members who usually are not fans of wrestling games, but genuinely got into the gameplay to my surprise. I rampaged through everything All-Stars had to offer within a couple months after the latest Smackdown vs. RAW game, and was kind of burnt out on wrestling games after this for a while and skipped all future WWE games for several years starting when they changed the branding with WWE ‘12.
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TNA iMpact! was from the same people who made All-Stars and had super-fun Ultimate X match as seen above! FirePro Wrestling on the other hand features only controllable Avatars and none of the trademark legacy 2D gameplay the brand is usually known for. There were a few other non-WWE games I tried out before I took a 360 wrestling game sabbatical. Rumble Roses XX was the first 360 wrestling game and the second all-women wrestler game in America after its PS2 predecessor. Never put as much time into it as I meant to, so I cannot leave any lasting impressions on it other than it gave Dead or Alive a lot of competition with its variety of costumes. I did put a lot of time into TNA iMpact! however, which was the game the All-Stars developers worked on before. At the time it hit, I was into the TNA promotion, and the game was a pretty good representation of that product with a fun Ultimate X mode, and a story mode circled around a fictional costumed wrestler named Suicide who went on to become an actual wrestler in the promotion in 2008, and the character has remained there off-and-on to this day. Lucha Libre AAA Heroes del Ring introduced the high-flying luchadores from Mexico with their own exclusive game and featured some familiar past WCW/WWE/TNA stars, but had problematic controls to prevent it from having any lasting appeal. I never played the Kinect motion-based wrestling game, Hulk Hogan’s Main Event, but I have seen clips online to witness it in its near-broken state that lives up to one of my favorite reviews on Game Informer where it became one of their worst rated games ever. There are a couple of low budget Avatar Wrestling games on the Indie Games channel on 360 that are basic affairs, but there is one Avatar-based grappler that somehow got a full fledge XBLA release with the much-respected, best-in-class FirePro Wrestling branding. Those games have been a decades-long line of some of the best 2D wrestling games of all time, and somehow Microsoft was able to secure that branding for an admittedly decent and accessible Avatar wrestling game, but a game that should in no way be worthy of that elite branding. That would be like Phillips securing the Zelda and Mario licenses for their own low-rent made games on their CDi system….oh wait. Sports-ball Forever! Time to highlight some of my favorite go-to sports games on the system. Starting off with football, there I got use to buying Madden every two or three years. I only rented the 360 launch title, Madden NFL 06, which wounded up being one of the worst debut Madden titles on a console ever. This is because of EA’s overblown “Target Gameplay” video they debuted at a previous E3 where the final game, while still graphically a leap above Xbox/PS2, was far from what they teased. To make it worse, that was the same year they debuted the doomed “vision cone” gameplay feature in the earlier PS2/Xbox versions that went over so poorly that they had to disable it as a default option for the 360 version and hide it in the options. This was also the first lead Madden game to remove John Madden himself (and co-commentator Al Michaels) from commentary in favor of a nameless afterthought of a radio-style announcer. Madden NFL ‘06 is easily the all-time worst lead-platform version of Madden!
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This video encapsulates why Madden 06 was an atrocity of a debut on the platform…at least it had easy achievements.
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EA stepped it up with later entries, with Madden ‘10 remaining a favorite of mine for the brand this gen. I still recall that edition was when EA initially introduced their cash cow microtransaction-focused “Ultimate Team” feature as a free DLC a few months after its release. How foolish I seem now for at first dismissing it as an interesting curiosity I could not bother to invest a dime into ever, but only to see it blow up in DLC sales for EA and become integrated across all of EA’s sports titles and other publisher’s sports games within a few years. I only picked up one college EA effort this gen via NCAA Football ‘12 which was technically free with a six-month subscription to Sports Illustrated, but I got the most out of that game, and was huge into its “Road to Glory” mode. Road to Glory had my created player play out his final year of high school, and then go through a full college season. EA were absolute pros at this point with their college game, perfectly capturing the college game pageantry by jam-packing the it full of college anthems, cheerleaders, mascots and first-class commentary from the old College Gameday crew of Kirk Herbstreit and Brad Nessler. EA was also surprisingly generous with a community create-a-school option where users could create and upload teams and stadiums, and sure enough someone created my middle-of-nowhere Midwest FCS school and high school teams. It remains a heartbreaker (for good reason though) that EA pulled out of college sports games after the NCAA student athlete class action lawsuit, with NCAA Football ‘14 being their final installment. I do not feel that much love for EA though because of how they squashed 2K’s attempt at returning to football videogames with All-Pro Football 2K8. 2K signed on a couple hundred retired legends for their game, and players could pick a handful of legends to be the standout stars on their otherwise auto-generated teams. It was a fun, different approach, which EA quickly put the kibosh on by signing many of those legends away to appear in throwaway historical features in future Madden games. As I mentioned earlier though, EA did win back some favor with me by resurrecting the Blitz franchise with their excellent XBLA version of NFL Blitz.
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There were a few other non-NFL games on the 360 I gave an honest try to, with Midway releasing an unlicensed, M-rated version of Blitz before they went bankrupt with Blitz: The League II. It showcases M-rated behind-the-scenes drama storylines, and more brutal and violent hits that bestow it the M-rating, and if you can handle that, then it is worth checking out. Finally, Backbreaker was an ahead-of-its-time pigskin game that debuted an all new physics engine that EA would eventually incorporate into Madden games. While the tech was not quite all the way there, the thing I associate most with that game is it playing P.O.D.’s “Here Comes the Boom” on every…single…kickoff. It was a huge detraction in my review, and I was surprised to see a few weeks later an email from my editor at the time passing along a note from the developers to revisit the game after an update addressing reviewer feedback, which did address a multitude of things, but at the top of the list was reducing the amount of times P.O.D.’s jam played to only twice a game, thank god! On the basketball side of things, I remained a huge fan of the NBA 2K series. The 360 carried over the awesome 24/7 mode I adored from PS2/Xbox era, which was an in-depth career mode for a single created baller, doing a global tour of the street hoops circuit. The 2K games struck gold in NBA 2K11 when Michael Jordan graced the cover and the game added a new historical Jordan mode where he relived his most monumental games with historically accurate rosters, and vintage 90s telecast presentation and commentary. The Jordan mode was a success, and integration of NBA legends became a big selling point on the 2K games going forward with future installments having a theme around the Jordan/Magic/Bird NBA breakout success of the 80s and the iconic ’92 Olympic Dream Team.
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EA had a downward spiral with their sim hoops games, and I only tried out a couple demos of the earlier NBA Live titles this gen that did not win me over, including the attempted re-branding of the series with NBA Elite ‘11. That doomed demo was so glitch-laden that it got EA to cancel and recall the game from retailers mere days before its street date, and took them three years to launch another proper console NBA sim. I did love EA’s re-launch of NBA Jam however, along with the XBLA sequel, On Fire Edition. They hit all the right notes on re-introducing the classic arcade gameplay to a new generation. No idea why they have not done another NBA Jam since however, but at least On Fire Edition is back-compat on Xbox One and Series S|X. The PS3 consumed the bulk of my baseball playing time with their awesome MLB: The Show games of that era. However, I do have one chuckle-worthy memory of staying up late playing a lot of 2K’s arcade take on baseball, The Bigs, at a friend’s place one night. We played several games and I recall being impressed at how fast each game breezed by. I skipped all hockey sims this generation too, with the only time I digitally hit the ice this gen being EA’s killer NHL game on XBLA, 3-on-3 NHL Arcade, which delivered the hat trick of arcade fun gameplay, creative power-ups and intuitive controls.
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For alternative and single player sports games, I already raved about Top Spin 2 during the 360 launch window. I could never get into EA’s thumb-stick controls for its Fight Night games, but I did enjoy 2K’s Don King’s Prize Fighter, which came from the same team that made the Rocky games on the previous gen I preferred more. Of all the MMA games, I briefly got into THQ’s UFC 2010, but the game always became a chore when gameplay transitioned into ground submissions. I enjoyed Tony Hawk’s Project 8 when it launched, but that series also had a fall from grace with several failed experimental games once EA stepped up the competition with Skate. One of the greatest mysteries in gaming history to me will always be Skate 3’s staying power in sales seeing it on sale for so many years that eventually EA repackaged the game in an Xbox One case with a sticker on it saying it is playable on both the 360 and through back-compat on Xbox One because there were no longer any other 360 retail games on store shelves. I tried a few times to get into Skate, but like the Fight Night games, the thumb-stick focused controls never gelled with me and I could never adapt. No Russian, No Cauldron
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For several years straight, from the 360 launch in 2005 through 2012 I played every yearly installment from Activision’s flagship brand, Call of Duty. The first couple of years it was not that much though. Call of Duty 2 I only played several times in local couch multiplayer battles when friends brought over a copy. I always regretted never renting or buying it cheap to play through the single player campaign which I heard is excellent. Ditto that for the original CoD which eventually got a re-release on XBLA as Call of Duty Classic. However, I played through the entire campaigns for the next six games. CoD3 I rented from GameFly and breezed through in a weekend in split-screen co-op with my brother and did not think much of it at the time, but came to learn later that when playing in co-op it removes a few levels that proved to be too daunting to be handled in split screen. Then in 2007 Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare released and first person shooters as we knew it changed. 13 years later it still has two of the most powerful moments in a FPS campaign in the form of the nuclear blast and its immediate fallout in the failed helicopter escape, and THE sniping level of all sniping levels in the flashback mission which immerses the player so well into the sniper role at its apex moment, that few other games since have managed to achieve. It overall was an incredibly gratifying campaign, which was equaled with a revolutionary online multiplayer experience that popularized persistent online multiplayer unlocks with a seemingly endless barrage of weapon and character customization unlocks to keep players reeled in. I was never “hooked” into the multiplayer on a regular basis, but starting with CoD4 and for the next few games I would occasionally pop on and play with colleagues who did play all the time, and had a blast catching up while apologizing for not carrying my own with my less-than-ideal kill/death/ratio.
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World at War was an interesting revisit back to World War II and I enjoyed Keifer Sutherland’s voiceover talents as a superior barking orders at me throughout. It also debuted its survival variant in Zombies mode that was a hit that year and frequently played with co-workers on game nights. While that mode would become a bigger focus and more expanded with each successive CoD game, for whatever reason it never became as popular or played as much then as in World at War. 2009’s Modern Warfare 2 somehow met the high bar for the quality of campaign that the first game set, and its “No Russian” level I will never forget and I was bug-eyed throughout it as I never experienced anything like it before or since while my character attempted to keep his cover. As good as Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare titles were, Treyarch stepped it up with 2010’s Black Ops and its Vietnam War setting. It remains my favorite single player campaign from this stretch of CoD games. The meaning of the “numbers” touched on throughout the campaign had a meaningful payoff, and I loved how Treyarch sprinkled in their own unique gameplay intricacies like “diving to prone” and my love for the RC Car killstreak bonus in multiplayer. No matter how much of a weak link I was for my coworkers in online multiplayer, as long as I got just one set of three kills straight to get that fun RC Car perk, then I considered that a successful multiplayer session! Infinity Ward had a satisfying conclusion to the Modern Warfare trilogy with MW3 in 2011, but 2012’s Black Ops II was surprisingly underwhelming to me. It felt like they tried to do too much with the campaign, and sprinkled in optional bonus missions I felt obligated to do, but broke up the narrative for me. Of course, it could have been CoD burnout by this point, and I have never played another CoD game since. If I were to play the campaign of just one CoD game after this from 2013 on, what would you recommend?
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For five years I anticipated the low budget FPS efforts from Cauldron that had me reliving past historical battles and as a DC Secret Service agent seen above. Interestingly, while Treyarch and Infinity Ward took turns each year this gen delivering Activision’s big holiday FPS hit, quietly another studio, Cauldron, yearly released five budget-tiered FPS titles under the Activision Value banner. These little publicized releases always caught my eye, and I had no idea if it was the case, but Cauldron’s games felt like where Activision would send freshly recruited developers to get their feet wet before getting promoted to the CoD teams. Three of Cauldron’s five games were History Channel licensed games themed around recreating and reliving both sides of war in two installments based around the Civil War, and another in the Japanese theater of World War II. The history nut in me appreciated the History Channel-produced intro video for each level, and it was a budget-friendly alternative come down FPS game to breeze through in a weekend after the latest blockbuster CoD game. Cauldron also did a DC-terrorist themed FPS in Secret Service, and Jurassic Park-inspired FPS titled, Jurassic: The Hunted. I imagine all of these play horribly outdated now, but I still will appreciate them for what they brought to the plate. Dubious Honors
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Hulk Hogan’s Main Event and NBA Elite 11 top the dubious honors list for reasons I already ranted on above, but wanted to make sure to at least notate here. Moving on to other bad games, here are a handful that I was not a fan of: Rogue Warrior was a super-short and barebones functioning FPS published from Bethesda, but bizarrely got AAA buzz and marketing. It did have a catchy closing credits song though. Turning Point was an FPS from Codemasters with an interesting concept of a post-WWII shooter if the Nazis won the war, but poorly executed and reason why Codemasters has primarily stuck with racing games since (although they did attempt one more FPS with Bodycount which I did not play, but understand is just as atrocious). One game that went on to have a misrepresented history I reviewed at the time was Bullet Witch. It was a middle-tier single player action game published by Atari, and while it had some problems I made sure to point out in my six out of ten review, I received serious flak from a few friends for overrating the game. While I addressed the game’s issues and marked it down appropriately so, I did have a fair amount of fun with the boss battles and messing around with some of the more powerful spells. Over the years I have seen many bill this game with the label that it is among the worst on the 360 with the same kind of tone and vitriol as ET received on the 2600. Even Mr. Microsoft Larry Hyrb poked fun at the game in an online video long ago. Again it is not a great game by any means, but it is far better than what a lot of people make it out to be.
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An XBLA game that got one of their marketed themed event releases (‘Summer of Arcade’, ‘Fall Feast,’ etc.) was TMNT: Out of the Shadows. It looked to be a cannot-miss 3D brawler TMNT game, and with that level of hype how could it go wrong? Very much so in fact, and with some of the worst camera controls in gaming I could not put it down fast enough. Another painfully disappointing TMNT game was the aforementioned XBLA remake of Turtles in Time. It played well enough like the original, but the redone visuals did not capture the spirit of the affable 80s/90s cartoon like the original did, and it stripped out the SNES bonus levels and had poorly substituted voiceovers. Stay away! There were a couple of semi-decent 360/PS3 era Turtles games. Nickelodeon TMNT was a perfectly serviceable brawler that did a better job of bringing back the good memories of the arcade classics than Re-Shelled did. Ubisoft released a single player platformer/action game to coincide with the 2007 CG film, TMNT. It too was pretty straightforward, and not earth-shattering, but at least hit some TMNT fan service marks good enough to be a worthwhile entry. Danger of the Ooze is one that slipped through the cracks that I rarely hear talked about likely because it released late in the 360/PS3 lifecycle in 2014. This should be played by any Turtles fan because this is the standout Turtles game this gen from the platforming masters at Wayforward with their take on a pretty fun MetroidVania-style game the TMNT license seemed destined for all this time. Lightning Round Quick Hits
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Microsoft did not release 360’s successor, the Xbox One until 2013, so with eight years between the 360 and Xbox One, a boatload of games hit that system and I played far too many of them which is why this is going on far longer than it should have. There remains a hearty amount of AAA, mid-tier, XBLA and other noteworthy games that I want to give their due, so bear with me as I attempt to rapid fire through these… -I got wrapped in too many open world games this gen, and I want to first give props to RockStar Games for managing to finish two of their behemoths in the form of Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption. GTAIV is the only GTA I finished the storyline for, and Niko Belic will be one of my favorite protagonists. The cell phone activities were initially a chore to retain friendship ratings, but eventually I came around to bowling, cab rides, comedy clubs and rounds of pool. RDR was the ultimate Wild West open world game. Neversoft’s 360 launch title, Gun, was in my backlog still and I blitzed through that in the weeks leading up to RDR’s launch because I just knew it would blow it away. Gun was a decent effort from Neverseft, but quickly became obsolete when starting up RDR, which did not disappoint, and delivered a remarkably atmospheric experience for its time in 2010. I loved getting lost on adventures out in the wild, and that original score is masterful and could not be have been better crafted. That final several hours of gameplay based around the family ranch is an incredibly bold choice of gameplay that will always have a special place with me. Kudos to RockStar with their spooky-themed story expansion, Undead Nightmare, which is a hell of a side story to RDR that is well worth your time all these years later!
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GTA IV put a lot of attention on its mini-games that were entertaining shoulder content, and Red Dead Redemption introduced a drop-dead gorgeous wild-west open world I would crave getting lost in and exploring for adventures. -Another one of my top 10 favorites on the 360 released on the same day as RDR, and I am talking about sci-fi third person thriller that is Alan Wake. I got completely absorbed into Alan’s quest to find his wife, and Remedy had a five star presentation to keep me on my seat. Some people criticized its style of combat, but it worked for me, and I believe it will go down as the only game where its deadliest weapon in its arsenal is a flare gun! Easily the spookiest T-rated game I have played. Do not skip out on the DLC episodes that put a nice bow on the story, and the XBLA sort-of time loop sequel, American Nightmare
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-Two open world games that I shamefully have resting in my backlog to this day are GTAV and Bully. I picked up both on 360, and eventually picked up the Xbox One version of GTAV. You know what open world games I did play through though? The first two Just Cause titles. This satirical take on the James Bond-super agent was right up my alley, and Rico’s unique gadgetry like hookshots, parachutes, and wide variety of instant vehicle drops innovated in new ways to traverse its gigantic open world. The chaos and destruction those games both were capable of raised the bar with how creative one could be to lay waste to their surroundings. -I already commented above how the first Saints Row lived up to its potential from its E3 demonstration I saw a year before its release. The sequels surprisingly kept getting better and better. The first two games were essentially damn good GTA-clones, but with both games having more zany activities and side missions than in GTA. Saints Row the Third upped the outrageous quotient for its plot and side missions, and was groundbreaking for how far it pushed the boundaries with its whacked out style of storytelling.
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-It did not feel right to include it with the racing games above, but another recommended open world title from this era is Driver: San Francisco. Ubisoft and Reflections nailed making an open world driving game without races being the focal point. The spirit-car-swapping feature against all odds is cleverly explained, and actually works! -Despite its popularity I could never get into the Assassin’s Creed games which debuted in this generation. A friend borrowed me the first game and at first I was into its setting and gameplay, but that first game was notoriously rough around the edges and I believe I got hung up on a glitch that prevented me from making progress roughly halfway through, and I have inadvertently been done with the series since. I picked up a few other entries over the years and have been wanting to at least try them, especially hearing how the latest ones keep getting better and better. One day! -I finished my first Resident Evil game on the 360 with Resident Evil 5. That game also featured online co-op, but I ventured fourth and played it solo and still had an impeccable time with it. It put more of an emphasis on action to the dismay of critics, but having not played too much of prior entries that did not bother me, and there were still plenty of intense thrills had throughout.
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This is easily my favorite arcade stick ever, and the exquisite 2011 Mortal Kombat reboot made its tall asking price worth it! -This generation saw collector’s editions become out of control, with games packed with all kinds of statures, Master Chief helmets, night-vision cameras and other gadgets for well over $100. The only one of these I invested in was 2011’s Mortal Kombat. I originally was not too hyped for that game because I had my fill of the series at that point after the three good entries on PS2/Xbox, and felt the series had nothing else to offer. My brother however is a big MK-fan and told me how he ordered the $200 edition that came with premium arcade-replica fighter stick. I went to his place to drop something off one day when he wasn’t home, and he told me had the game and stick hooked up and to give it a try while I was there. Within minutes of starting the story mode and realizing how they were reimagining the original trilogy and how they switched up the gameplay for that generation, I became immediately entranced with it and could not think of any other way to play it without that stick and could not rush home fast enough to pluck down a $200 order. I made sure to get a lot of use out of that stick, and is was absolutely worth it!
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-Sniper: Ghost Warrior is an unorthodox FPS focused entirely on sniping, and for being a low-budget game at the time I had way more fun than I should have with it. Also loved how it did a 180 from games like CoD, where instead of one sniping mission to mix up the campaign gameplay, here there is one run ‘n gun mission for a break from all that sniping throughout the campaign! I am glad this game had a ton of success and City Interactive has released a few sequels that I hope to emerge from my backlog of doom. -I already elucidated on my Borderland 2 experience earlier. The first Borderlands was a surprise out of nowhere hit that I loved my first few days with it and could not get enough plowing through the campaign online with friends. Unfortunately I went on vacation a few days after it released for a week, and when I got back, sure enough, most of my friends were many levels higher than me and already vanquished the game, so I soldiered on the final third of the game on my own. It was a challenge and a half to beat the final gi-normous tentacle-laden boss, but I managed to squeak by it after gradually picking away from it behind a boulder for nearly an hour!
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-I had a unique experience with the Portal games. The first one I initially played for about 15 minutes, quickly became frustrated with the teleporting mechanics and had to step away from it. A couple years later, an old co-worker Rick was one of many by that point stating why those games were some of the best games out there. I told him my case, and he offered to come over and bestow his Portal wisdom upon me. Many thanks to Rick, who did not straight-up spoil and told me what to do to get past Portal’s many puzzle rooms, but instead kind of nudged me into gradually easing into a feel for the core mechanics of the game and it helped greatly! I would not have been able to get into it without him. He had a surprise for me when he left, and left me his copy of Portal 2 to borrow and told me not to give it back to him until I finished it. I knew he was moving in a couple months at that point, and that compelled me to put all my attention into the Portal games. I am glad I did because both games are spectacular, especially the sequel which had a noticeably bigger budget to go all out with a AAA experience and narrative that came together to be one of my favorite games of that generation. -Bulletstorm was another innovative FPS with its implementation of a whip, and combining it with melee strikes and gunplay for a refreshing take on FPSs. It kind of came and went though, and I rarely hear people talk about it anymore, except for briefly last year when it got a re-release on Xbox One/PS4, with an extra DLC to have Duke Nukem replace the original protagonist’s voiceovers for the game. I will also associate the original Bulletstorm release for having one of the worst box arts of all time. It is just a no-frills footprint. If you played Bulletstorm before, sure, it will kind of make sense since kicking is a core melee attack, but if you were a potential consumer browsing games and had no clue about Bulletstorm then I would not blame you for not giving that cover more than half a second’s worth of thought.
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-The trilogy of BioShock titles were all high ranking in my top 10 game of the year lists for their appropriate years. The first game immersed me into its aquatic utopia gone haywire, and it stood out from standard FPSs of the time with its heavy emphasis on its narrative and hunting down those audio tapes to get every nook and cranny of the story. Its “twist” was something else for its time, and remains one of my favorites to this day. The sequel had a lot of polarization because it was from a different studio, but I felt they mixed it up by playing as a Big Daddy for the whole game and I could not get enough of freezing Splicers and then doing a drill rush attack that shattered them into pieces. BioShock Infinite was an astounding way to wrap the trilogy with its mesmerizing city-in-the-sky setting, and one of my favorite storylines from this gen. Its two storyline DLC episodes that released around a year later are worth checking out if you missed out, especially the second episode that changed the gameplay into more stealth-based by playing as Elizabeth. It felt like a whole new game, and developer Irrational absolutely perfected the change-up! -Spec Ops: The Line will not light the world on fire for its stick-to-fundamentals third person action gameplay, but what appears to start off as just another rah-rah military shooter, eventually morphs into a far deeper and complex plot than what I thought it was going to be. A book eventually came out thoroughly breaking down its exposition because it stormed up that much of a discussion around it.
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-Shmup fans had several worthy entries to play on the 360. Raiden IV and Deathsmiles were landmark new entries for the genre in their time. On XBLA, there were re-releases of a pair of renowned shmups from Treasure: Ikaruga and Radiant Silvergun. A pair of original shooters also stood out among the XBLA crop with the free of charge student developed game, Aegis Wing and also the beloved Sine Mora that captured the pilot play-by-play stylings of Star Fox and successfully merging it into a shmup. There were also a fair amount of Japan-exclusive shmups for the 360, most notably from respected shooter developer, Cave. Many of them are region-free and can be played on American 360s, so please keep that in mind! -I already told some tales above about my favorite comic book games, and embedded below is a video where I and my friend Matt painstakingly dissect a ton of comic book games that hit the 360. Highlights include the shockingly good movie licensed games, X-Men Origins: Wolverine & Captain America. Not-so-good highlights include the movie licensed Watchmen, Fantastic Four and Hellraiser games. Matt also had a lot more hands on time with the acclaimed Batman: Arkham and Spider-Man games on 360, and I have always respected his expertise in the genre so please give his takes a listen below! -The Telltale adventure/choose-your-own path story-driven games originally started off on PC, but became more and more popular with their console releases. I was 100% into the first two seasons of their Walking Dead games like everyone else. Loved the first one more, but my favorite Telltale episodic game is still Back to the Future. The Wolf Among Us was a fascinating twist on a mature dystopian fairy tale world. I was not impressed by their take on Game of Thrones, but I surprisingly enjoyed all eight episodes of Minecraft. I originally got that for my nephew who was huge into Minecraft at the time to play with, but he was not all that into this genre and I found myself getting into it instead. Telltale was pumping out so many of these episodic series that I could not keep up, and still one day want to go back and play through both Batman seasons they released, and their Borderlands series too which I hear is their best work.
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Back to the Future remains my favorite Telltale episodic game, but the event-like nature of the first season of Walking Dead was an undeniable zeitgeist while it transpired. -The LEGO co-op games we know today based off nearly every license imaginable became ubiquitous this gen. Only one I put serious time into and was able to finish was LEGO Marvel Superheroes. This one is special to me because it was the first game that I got my nephew Carter really into right when he was old enough to start grasping modern controller-based games. Had to help him out in quite a few parts, but we got threw it, and now several years later his gaming skills have greatly improved, and I will gladly give him a humble brag on his conquest of finishing the tough-as-nails Cuphead.
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-I subscribed to the Official Xbox Magazine for several years, until around 2009-ish, and I was surprised that they stuck with including demo discs for another year or two after that since downloading demos quickly made the discs obsolete. OXM did attempt a few exclusive disc goodies though, and one I always came back to was their own take on an episodic game called OXM Universe that lasted for about a couple years. The disc itself awarded up to 1000 “OXM” points based on checking out all the demos and videos on the disc. Those points could be used in the space ship station game, OXM Universe, which was entirely menu-driven to build space station tech and explore a galaxy. It did lead up to a decent conclusion if you stuck with it all the way to the demo disc that came with issue 100 and upon completing all the final tasks you are rewarded with a lengthy video filled with OXM staff past and present thanking everyone. THAT IS MIGHTY COOL OF THEM TO GO TO ALL THAT WORK FOR A DEMO DISC EXTRA!!! -I think one thing we take for granted in today’s console space is the ridiculous amount of weekly sales and specials on digital games across all platforms. It was not always that way. In the early years of the 360 digital marketplace, for a couple years all that was available was one weekly game on sale and one piece of DLC on sale each week and that was it for a couple years. Luckily, Steam was catching fire with their acclaimed Fall and Winter sales with their monster savings, and that eventually rubbed off on 360 and PS3 and by the end of those system’s lifecycles both started offering a surplus of weekly deals and flash sales. -Digital game preservation is something that is brought up more and more lately, and one thing that periodically ruminates in my mind is how the 360 handles patches/updates. For the longest time, most games had limits of 4mb patches until the later years in the system’s life where they started to change into the larger file sizes we associate with them today. However, the 360 has a nasty habit of auto-purging a game’s update on the 360 after several different games get played on the 360. So if you were to revisit an older comfort food game many years down the line long after the 360 online servers got shut down, any updates for that game were likely auto-deleted and cannot be re-downloaded. This could be huge for a lot of games whose patches likely helped patch out game breaking bugs and other issues that can no longer be downloaded whenever the 360 servers go offline. Just food for thought.
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-Final random item I want to bring up is something you saw in the header image to this special. Yes, that is a leaning gallery of 360 faceplates! Remember those? They were kind of a thing for the first couple years of the 360 when Microsoft was flexing the customization options of the 360 so anyone can snap on or off a variety of 360 faceplates to make their system stand out in their own way. I never bought a single faceplate, and only procured them if they were pre-order bonuses, or part of some promotional giveaway. The only highlight of this was how I got my Madden NFL 08 faceplate, and that was when I participated in my Gamestop’s yearly Madden tournament where no more than four people showed up for the few years I participated. The year I won, was when I got the Madden NFL 08 faceplate, which sure as hell beats my Madden NFL 07 plastic beverage cup from the previous tourney! It will forever remain in my drawer with my faceplates for Full Auto, Eternal Sonata and Deathsmiles. It is not like there is some uber-popular YouTuber who has a unique fandom for that particular version of Madden who could benefit from it in any certain way. To the drawer the faceplate remains! ”It’s an Ocean” (THE END!!!) OMG, this took me a whole month to gradually pick away at. I did not come close at all to releasing this in time for the 360’s 15th anniversary of its launch. I feel that I could have made this into a mini-eBook and charged six cents for this!!! As you can tell from my many memories I have shared thus far, the 360 is a platform I hold in high regard. I waited three years to upgrade to the Xbox One and PS4 in 2016, so from late 2005 until late 2016, the 360 was one of my primary go to consoles. Which is why I had so many memories, good and bad, to get out of my system. If you want to catch up on one of about a dozen other flashback specials I have crafted like this (which are thankfully significantly shorter) over the years check out the links below. In the meantime, I will close this off with two embedded videos of episodes of my old podcast I recently un-vaulted circled around the 360. They are the final installments of our history of comic book games and RPG games series. Both episodes focus on the games that hit for those genres up until the point the episode was recorded for 360, PS3 and Wii. Many thanks once again if you have stuck with me for these near-18,000 words of garbled memories of mine, I sincerely appreciate it and I will see you all next time if I can somehow muster enough energy after this beast of an entry for yet another anniversary flashback special!
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Listen to us break down almost all the RPGs that his this gen released through 2008
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And here we dissect all the comic book games released on these platforms through April of 2011 My Other Gaming Flashbacks Dreamcast 20th Anniversary GameBoy 30th Anniversary Genesis 30th Anniversary NES 35th Anniversary PSone 25th Anniversary PS2 20th Anniversary PSP 15th Anniversary and Neo-Geo 30th Anniversary Saturn and Virtual Boy 25th Anniversaries TurboGrafX-16 30th Anniversary and 32-X 25th Anniversary
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If you made it this far and have yet to experience the THING that is Rogue Warrior’s end credits theme song, then I dare you to click it above and not have Mickey Rourke’s lyrical lashings remain forever stuck in your head!
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Enjoy this montage of the many creative demises of the worst sidekick in the history of videogames! You’re Still Here!? Well Then, Let Me Tell You Another Story About the Shephard….Not That Shepard
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It is not my tale to tell of “another story about the Shephard.” Hopefully, EA and BioWare will right that ship as they teased at the recent Game Awards a few weeks ago. I am talking about the other Shepard on Xbox 360, that being Lost: Via Domus’s Jack Shephard. Jack and most (not all) of the cast from the first season of Lost are in that game, but are not playable. Instead, a new offscreen Oceanic survivor is introduced as the playable character, Elliot. The game was an average licensed adventure-lite game affair (find out all about by click or pressing here for my original review), but at the time when it released Lost was in its fourth of six TV seasons, and I was eating up every bit of fan service that game offered. It did have a couple minor things never seen in the TV show like the Dharma magnet, and I loved its ending which got my mind reeling with it possibly tying into new fan theories from the latest episodes of the show at the time. One in particular being my favorite episode of the series, “The Constant.” Not a great game, but loved how it treated the license. That said, this hit a few years before Telltale hit big with its Walking Dead games, and I can only imagine if they were the ones to give their episodic adventure game treatment to Lost instead. Now that is another story about the Shepard I would be all-in for day one!
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fretened · 3 years
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Celeste (2018) - pushing game design to new heights (Developed by Matt Makes Games)
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Reviewed on PS4, playable on:
Steam
Itch.io
Epic Games store
Nintendo Switch
PlayStation 4
Xbox One 
Introduction
Celeste is a game about a girl called Madeline who decides to climb a mountain to overcome her depression and anxiety, as well as the other characters she meets along the way. Little does she know that Celeste mountain is more than what it seems and, in order to confront the challenges she will face along the way, Madeline will have to come face to face with a part of her that she would have much rather avoided. Celeste uses mostly linear 2D platforming across groundbreakingly designed levels, all with a gorgeous 16-bit art style  which, along with a cast of charming characters and wonderfully written dialogue, delivers a truly moving story about self-reflection and overcoming anxieties despite all the odds. Here are my thoughts and feelings on the 2018 critically acclaimed ‘best independent game’ and ‘games for impact’ Game Award winner, Celeste.
Level design
Celeste’s fundamental mechanic is Madeline’s dash ability which propels her in a straight line in a chosen direction for a set distance. The dash can only be interrupted by objects in the environment and it can only be used once in mid air -  it recharges as soon as Madeline touches the ground; this is represented intuitively on screen by Madeline’s hair turning blue when her dash is used up and turning back to orange when the dash becomes available. This core mechanic is explored in a different direction in each of Celeste’s 8 chapters. If you explore these levels you can gain access to the far more challenging B and C side versions of the levels which push the exploration further in it’s respective directions, however, you may not even feel inclined to touch these levels as Celeste’s main game alone is likely challenging enough for a lot of players.
Celeste’s side-scrolling levels are broken up into stages/sections that you have to pass to progress through the game. I felt as though each section was designed to push and improve my ability at the game and make me practice and experiment with my approach to each section’s unique challenges. 
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Each screen/section would have maybe 2-5 challenges you had to pass, one after another, and the game’s instant deaths, fast respawn times and the ability to save anytime meant that there was no repercussion for my trial and error and I could keep trying and trying until I would find faster and faster ways of progressing and, often, hidden shortcuts that I hadn’t seen the first few times round. The gameplay promotes developing a mastery of it’s mechanics. These shortcuts are often found by thinking outside the box and playing around with levels’ systems and mechanics. For players looking for a challenge, as well as cassette tapes with B and C side levels, Celeste’s 8 main chapters are full of collectible strawberries which present a whole load of extra examples of really clever game design. For example, some of these collectible strawberries have wings and will fly straight up and out of the level if you use Madeline’s dash and so you have to think outside of the box and grab the strawberry without using the dash which is usually vital for getting from A to B. It’s this kind of design that stops the game from ever feeling dry or formulaic. Celeste’s levels constantly feel fresh, well paced and engaging. 
I’d also like to note that at the start of each level in the loading screen, Madeline receives a different postcard with useful information on it. Two stood out to me: one saying that you should be proud of your death count because it shows that you’re making mistakes and you’re learning; I found this message incredibly uplifting because at times frequent deaths had made me feel a little embarrassed or made me wonder if I was getting something seriously wrong. The other was that the collectible strawberries are entirely optional and only for showing off to your friends if you really want to. I think this was a brilliant move because it gives the player a little more control over the game’s pacing. You get to decide whether you’ll spend some time trying to grab this tricky strawberry or whether you’ll push on with the game and move into the next section.
Accessibility
Celeste is rightfully celebrated for it’s range of accessibility options, from it’s tactful and unobtrusive assist mode - for players who need to fine tune the game to their specific needs in order to get the same enjoyment out of the game, to it’s picture settings that reduce flashing and particle effects for people with photosensitive epilepsy or motion sickness. For more on Celeste’s assist mode, check out Game Maker’s Tool kit’s video on ‘What Makes Celeste’s Assist Mode Special’, you can find the link to that at the end of this post.
Soundtrack
Lena Raine’s soundtrack to Celeste is an audio marvel. Whether it’s daunting, uplifting, mysterious or moving; the soundtrack made me feel tied and invested to every moment. The music was just as much a journey as every second of gameplay. The soundtrack plays to the gameplay perfectly and occasionally leads to some really incredible moments. As well as Lena Raine’s marvellous score, Celeste’s B and C sides have a range of tracks and features by other artists like lo-fi artist ‘In Love With a Ghost’.
Narrative
Celeste deals with heavy subjects like depression and anxiety without ever being tasteless or insensitive but simultaneously the game manages to deal with these subjects in an uplifting way, much in line with the game’s core message. Each level feels rich with meaning and the games narrative is tightly interwound with it’s settings, characters and mechanics in a way that feels seamless and engaging.
Celeste uses profound metaphors to deliver it’s story and discuss mental health in each chapter of the main game. One of my favourite’s was Chapter three - ‘Celestial Resort’ - which had you help skittish spectral maître d’ clean away the clutter in his abandoned hotel. As you tidy away the hotel you find him seeming less anxious than the last time because you’re helping him order the clutter in his mind so he can finally have some peace. This also happens to be what Madeline needs at this point in her story and helping the maître d’ provides her with th clarity she needs to move on. This is one of the ways the game deals with heavier subject matter without dampening the player’s experience of the game and keeping an ‘upward momentum’.
The game’s narrrative, characters, environments and soundtrack all made me feel engrossed in my ascent of Celeste mountain. The mountain has a real sense of place, mystery and history that unveils itself to you as the story unfolds. I felt fully engaged in every setting because it felt like I’d come across something that nobody had seen in a long time. Even with Celeste’s generally fast paced gameplay, it never felt like I was ‘just passing through’ a location because the drive to explore and overcome challenges kept me searching every corner and taking time to explore when I wanted to.
Everything about Celeste contributes to it’s narrative. It’s gameplay pushes you to reflect and overcome challenges. Lena Raine’s soundtrack fits every scene like a glove and fills each moment with emotion in a constantly moving way. Characters will climb out of their Dialogue boxes in some scenes as if they’re really coming to life. Even the ‘chapter complete’ screens, at the end of each level, push the story forward and tell you where Madeline is going next. Celeste is a beautiful and important story,told in an ingenious way, unlike any other game I’ve played.
Is this game for you?
I would suggest Celeste to anyone looking for a new and different gaming experience and an uplifting story. It feels consistently fresh with perpetually ingenious level design and a really wonderful story. I’ve had more fun on Celeste than any triple A game I’ve played in a long time. I’d recommend Celeste to people looking for a hopeful story in what feels like quite a hopeless time because this is a story about never losing sight against all odds, friendship and support, and self-acceptance. It’s clever, inventive, charming and moving and I just love it and I’m pretty damn sure that you will too. Celeste is a permanent fixture of my PS4 library.
Can’t afford it?
I completely understand that lots of people may not have the funds right now or in the foreseeable future to get this game and if you choose to engage in piracy or any kind of swashbuckling then I’ll reserve my judgement but personally I would always rather support the developers so I’ve put togther some links to some ‘let’s-play’ series and videos about the game so you don’t have to pirate the game if you want to get the closest thing to the experience without having to take it illegally and get into legal trouble, damage your computer/console or promote activities typically detrimental to the developers.
Watchlist & sources
Here I’ve put together a semi-curated list of videos, articles and other resources about the game as well as some ‘Let’s Play’s and speed-runs:
GMTK - Mark Brown from Game Makers Tool Kit made two videos about Celeste which were really useful resources for writing this review. It was actually these videos which introduced me to the game in the first place so it’s only fair that I recommend them to you.
Why Does Celeste Feel So Good to Play? https://youtu.be/yorTG9at90g - This video talks about the design of Madeline’s controls and what makes Celeste such a satisfying to play.
What Makes Celeste’s Assist Mode Special https://youtu.be/NInNVEHj_G4 - This video looks at how the developers have confronted a fundamental problem in game design: balancing the design intentions and accessibility as well as player preferences.
More videos - Here are some more videos about this game that I love. The first two are a lot more focussed on the level design and how the game showed you the ropes and guides you to mastery and they’re both really well produced and written and really entertaining. The last one is a short and sweet documentary about Celeste’s development from pre-game to the design and how the story started to fall together.
How Celeste Teaches You It’s Mechanics - Good Game Design (Snoman Gaming) https://youtu.be/lZoQ9a7oPvo
Celeste: Breaking Down Level Design (OK Beast) https://youtu.be/w_aWMxcHrgw
The Story of Celeste’s Development (Noclip) https://youtu.be/c3mbELVqAmo
Let’s plays and speedruns
Celeste: Fruit Brute - PART 1 (Game Grumps) https://youtu.be/iB4KG2wABPA - This series by Game Grumps is really funny but it only covers the earlier parts of the game so if you’re only looking for a bit of gameplay then this is for you!
Celeste Let’s Play [Playlist] (TenMoreMinutes) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLn5okaoIT7P5KvGs25IWmGPcM5kvowqqh - This series covers pretty much the whole game so if you’re just looking for something to watch then here it is!
Celeste Any% Speedrun in 27:31.4 (TGH) https://youtu.be/g2KqMYWviYk - A really impressive speedrun. This guy’s just trying to finish the game as fast as possible without worrying about the strawberries or the B and C sides.
Celeste All B Sides Speedrun in 26:46 (TGH) https://youtu.be/I76TcmlsRIk - This is another complete marvel by the same guy. This time he’s doing all the B side levels; the B sides really are substantially harder than the main game.
The Celeste Speedrun That Wasn’t Humanly Possible (IGN) https://youtu.be/yEKku8S5-fo - This is a short video about an AI designed to Speedrun games that did a super human run of Celeste.
Links
Celeste game accessibility guide http://gameaccessibilityguidelines.com/celeste-assist-mode/ - This is a great website if you’re interested in accessibility in games, I used it for the accessibility section of this review.
Notes
I may eventually write a piece in more detail about aspects of the game design that I really enjoyed but in the interest of keeping things spoiler free - this is all for my Review of Celeste. This is my first game review and there will be things I’ve done well and, in greater likelihood, things I’ve done not so well and I’d love to do better in future so share your thoughts with me! I’m on Instagram under @Fretened or you can contact me here on Tumblr, I’d love to hear what you think.
If you got this far, thanks for reading Xx
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docexe-mx · 5 years
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While several of my prior wish list picks didn’t happen, I’m very satisfied with both the base roster of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, as well as with the DLC characters that have been announced/released so far.
That being said, l can’t deny that the announcement of more DLC coming has prompted me to prepare another wish list. As with the prior ones, I won’t be particularly sad or angered if any of my picks don’t happen, but I definitely will be elated. (Heck, as things stand, I will probably accept anyone/anything they add to the game provided it at least has an interesting move-set).
Some base assumptions made before going into the list:
Until stated otherwise by the development team, I’m assuming that, besides the fifth character of the Fighter Pass still pending reveal, we will get at the very least a Second Season/Fighter Pass that will contain the same exact amount of content as the first Fighter Pass: Five new characters, each with their own stage, music tracks and Spirit battles.
I’m assuming that, as with prior DLC on the Fighter Pass, all the new characters will be Third Party rather than Nintendo owned. I don’t expect more Microsoft or Sony owned characters, however (yes, Banjo and Kazooie are finally in the game, but they honestly feel more like an especial exception, rather than any indication of things going forward).
I’m also assuming that characters already in the game as Spirits, Assist Trophies or Mii Costumes won’t be part of the upcoming DLC (so, sadly, no Geno, no Rayman, no Shantae and no X ;_;).
Without further ado and in no particular order:
KOS-MOS from Xenosaga. A somewhat unlikely pick, but then again, Bandai Namco is one of the few Third Party publishers already present in Smash Bros. that don’t have multiple playable characters in the game (conspicuously even, given they are helping to develop it). Given that KOS-MOS seems to be one of their characters that most often shows in crossover games, her inclusion seems plausible. Now, if I have to be honest, I particularly want her because I think the Xeno series (and by extension, Monolith Soft, the studio responsible for all its iterations and which has been a great asset for Nintendo in recent years) deserves more representation in Smash Bros. However, with Elma, Rex and Pyra/Mithra out of the competition by virtue of being Spirits, KOS-MOS is the best bet to get another Xeno character in the game (mind you, I do like her design and think her move-set could potentially be interesting).
Nightmare from Soul Calibur (with Sigfried as an alternate costume). A very unlikely pick. While Terry Bogard being announced as the next DLC character makes me think we will see at least another fighting game character as DLC, it’s way more likely that we will see a Tekken character than one from Soul Calibur, by virtue of the former being more popular than the later. However, as I have mentioned before, I don’t really play Tekken, and Soul Calibur is my favorite 3D Fighter franchise, so pardon me again for the blatant favoritism.  
Ryu Hayabusa from Ninja Gaiden. This one seems like a no-brainer by this point. Ninja Gaiden is one of the few iconic franchises originating from the NES era that hasn’t appeared in Smash Bros. yet, and Koei Tecmo has maintained a close relationship with Nintendo in recent years (even helping with the development of Fire Emblem: Three Houses). Furthermore, Hayabusa is probably their most iconic character, not only being the protagonist of Ninja Gaiden (both the original NES series, as well as the modern reboot series), but also a mainstay in the Dead or Alive franchise, and even having cameos and guest appearances in the Warriors franchise.
Crash Bandicoot. Somewhat unlikely but not impossible. His major disadvantage is that he comes from a Western franchise, and Masahiro Sakurai and Nintendo tend to prioritize Japanese franchises when it comes to deciding on newcomers for Smash. That being said, the fact that the games on the original PlayStation were very popular in Japan and that the franchise is currently having a renaissance of sorts help his chances. If I have to be honest, while I have developed a soft spot for Crash after playing the N. Sane Trilogy recently, I mostly want him in Smash Bros. for a) The inherent appeal of having him battling Mario and Sonic as the big videogame mascot characters from the 90’s, b) the sheer irony of Nintendo getting three (3!) Third Party PSX icons (Crash, Snake and Cloud) in their exclusive fighting crossover when Sony didn’t even manage to do that for theirs.
Ezio Auditore da Firenze from Assassin’s Creed. Another unlikely but not necessarily impossible pick. The major issue against him is that he comes from another Western franchise, his major advantage is that it’s Ubisoft’s most popular and best-selling franchise worldwide, and Ubisoft remains as one of Nintendo’s major Third Party supporters. Now, if this franchise do comes to Smash Bros., I think they could pick any protagonist to represent it (possibly even go the Hero route and have several protagonists as alternate costumes with the same move-set), but Ezio seems to be the most iconic of them, hence why I have chosen him as my pick (and before somebody asks or protests: Yes, he has actually made an appearance on a game for a Nintendo console: Assassin’s Creed Discovery for the Nintendo DS).
A character from Capcom. This one is admittedly cheating on my part. Capcom has so many iconic characters and franchises (several of which have historical ties with Nintendo consoles or finally arrived to them thanks to the Switch) that you could fill an entire Fighter Pass solely with them. However, it seems that Nintendo is trying to spread their collaborations among several companies, rather than privileging a single one in particular, so at most I would only expect one or two characters from Capcom as part of Ultimate’s DLC. But rather than engage in the monumental task of boiling down the selection to only one or two characters, I will simply list here all the Capcom characters that I think would be neat to see in Ultimate: Phoenix Wright from Ace Attorney, Rad Spencer from Bionic Commando, Morrigan Aensland from Darkstalkers, Frank West from Dead Rising, Dante from Devil May Cry, Mike Haggar from Final Fight, Firebrand from Gargoyle’s Quest/Demon’s Crest, Sir Arthur from Ghost n’ Goblins, Amaterasu from Okami, Leon S. Kennedy and/or Claire Redfield and/or Chris Redfield and/or Jill Valentine and/or Albert Wesker from Resident Evil (yeah, I couldn’t boil down this franchise to one specific pick, it just has too many iconic characters without a single one being more representative than the rest), Strider Hiryu from Strider, Joe from Viewtiful Joe.
Finally, a bonus pick: A character that I honestly believe is so incredibly unlikely to ever get into Smash Bros. that I’m not really considering him seriously, but I would laugh out loud if it actually happens:
The Doom Guy/Doom Marine/Doom Slayer from (duh!) Doom: It seems like this character has gotten a lot of clamor among certain circles of the Smash Bros. community in recent times. I can only assume that he started as what you could call “an ironic meme pick”: Most of the people who originally talked about him and proposed him for Smash Bros. didn’t actually want him in the game, but it was fun to bring him up given the incongruity of such an ultra-violent character appearing in an E10+ rated game …Then characters like Bayonetta and Joker were actually added to Smash Bros., and people started to consider him as a serious candidate. In his favor: The Doom series actually has historical appearances on Nintendo consoles (the SNES got a version of the original Doom running with the Super FX chip that powered Star Fox; Doom 64 was an acclaimed game that was exclusive to the N64 until very recently), the entire series is going to be playable on the Switch after Doom Eternal releases, and if you can tone down Bayonetta enough for her to appear in an E10+ rated game, you can certainly do the same with the Doom Slayer. Against him: He comes from another Western franchise, but unlike Ubisoft or Activision Blizzard (which have been long time Third Party publishers on Nintendo consoles), Bethesda only started to support Nintendo on the Switch era; most importantly however: the First Person Shooter genre is exceptionally unpopular in Japan (and Doom as well by extension), it’s pretty much a niche genre there in the same way that RPG’s used to be in the West. So, for those reasons, I’m not really expecting to see the Doom Slayer in Ultimate’s DLC, even if, strictly speaking, is not out of the realm of possibility for that to happen.
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kirain · 7 years
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Indie Game Reviews
Hello, everyone! After I posted about the games I’ve platinumed I received a few asks about the Indie games I’ve played, so I figured: “Why not review my favourites?” Below is a list of Indie games I’ve played that I consider above average. Hopefully this list will help people decide if they’re worth playing or not. Keep in mind, though, that these are my opinions. If anyone would like to discuss the games further, please feel free to message me or send me another ask specifying the game you’re interested in. I’m always happy to discuss games. XD
Whispering Willows
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Whispering Willows is like a throwback to the 90s computer games that we all loved and played when we were kids. With a spooky atmosphere and almost game board-ish feel, the story takes place on an old mansion property where a young girl named Elena Elkhorn must depend on her Native American roots to find her missing father. Switch between human and soul to solve puzzles, overcome obstacles, and attack enemies. Though a bit slow-paced, the story and gameplay are solid and definitely worth a try. 6/10
CounterSpy
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CounterSpy is a fun little platformer that's almost comedic in nature. You play as a (possibly) British spy during the Cold War, who spies on the Russian and American forces to prevent nuclear detonation on both sides. The missions are pretty straight forward, with you shooting or sneaking your way through enemy territory to discover their plans of attack. If you fail to thwart them ... it's the end of the world! While it isn't really anything too special, its in-your-face 1970s James Bond style music and gameplay are entertaining as hell, and if you set it to the hardest difficulty, it is a fun challenge. I'd recommend it as a good time-waster. 6/10
Assemblance
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Assemblance is a psychological first person thriller, where you play as a man who is forced to repeat a time paradox over and over until you figure out a way to move on. The story is subpar at best, but it's not terrible. The graphics are beautiful and very relaxing, as is the music. I've heard this game be described as a "mind fuck" too, but I'm not sure if I'd give it quite that much credit. Either way, it is a good game if you're looking for something to pass the time, and if you're looking for a light challenge. 6/10
Velocibox
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Velocibox is a pure challenge game where you control a tiny square that zooms through various obstacle courses. It doesn't sound like much, but the levels can be extremely frustrating and the trophies are so hard to attain that they've only been awarded to a ridiculously small percentage of players-- we're talking hardcore gamers with no life (like me). If you're looking for a fun challenge, this is the game for you. 6/10
The Park
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The Park is a first person, mostly cinematic horror game, where you play as a schizophrenic mother who chases her son through a theme park that she used to visit when she was a child. As you play, you begin to ask yourself if what you're seeing is real or if it's just the result of the mother's mental illness. There are a few jump scares and puzzles to solve, but all and all it's basically a horror movie, with a child so un-likable he makes you miss the boy from Babadook. The story is worth exploring, however, and the graphics and voice work are topnotch. I'd give it a chance, unless you scare easily. 6/10
Race the Sun
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Race the Sun is a meticulous challenger game where you steer a tiny plane through an endless field of obstacles. The objective of the game, aside from collecting trophies, is to simply beat your own record before you crash or run down. You collect extra points by hitting rings, which eventually allows you to upgrade your plane for future levels. While I will admit that at first the game is fairly addictive, it can get a little boring. You can't memorize the fields because they change and randomize every 24 hours, which is a neat idea, but it still does little to keep players interested. But if you're looking for a decent challenge, then I highly recommend this game. Personally, I've come to use it as a fun time-waster while I download other games. 6.5/10
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture
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Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is a story-based video game where you divulge the disappearance of an entire town. I wouldn't suggest this game to people who prefer action-packed shooters or tricky platformers, because aside from walking around and watching a beautiful cinematic story unfold, there isn't much else to do. Don't get me wrong, though; the game is still highly enjoyable. You play from a first person point of view and collect clues that give you insight to the missing townspeople. Each clue reveals a short story that helps you arrive at the conclusion, in the form of several astral projections. Aside from the creative story and stunning graphics, the voice acting is also incomparable. Definitely worth a play through if you're into cinematic game play. 6.5/10
The Unfinished Swan
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The Unfinished Swan is a first person puzzle game where you play as a young orphaned boy named Monroe. The game is relaxing and wacky, as paint your way through various levels to help Monroe finish his recently deceased mother's favourite painting. As you play, a world of imagination unfolds, and the air of innocence reminds you what it was like to be a child. Definitely worth a try if you're looking for something light-hearted. 7/10
The Fall
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The Fall is a puzzle platformer where you play as an advanced robotic spacesuit AI named Arid. The game begins with you crash-landing on a seemingly abandoned planet, with your pilot injured and unresponsive inside you. In order to save him, you search the planet for medical supplies, but soon find that the robotic inhabitants are dangerously malfunctioning. To save your pilot, you must succumb to several tests, forced on you by the head AI, and defeat an army of homicidal robots. The puzzles are fun and challenging, the story is wholly original, and the twist ending makes you think you're watching The Sixth Sense. If you're looking for an intelligent Sci-Fi Indie game, you're looking for The Fall. 7/10
White Night
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White Night is a horror survival game where you play as an unnamed man who crashes outside of a haunted estate. Injured and in need of help, he hobbles to the mansion and breaks in, desperate when no one answers the door. Once inside the house, certain events transpire and horror ensues. I won't spoil the plot, but there is a twist ending and a story worth experiencing. The game has a very noir-type feel to it on top of the horror genre, which I thought was very unique. To beat the game, you must outwit the ghosts that hunt you, solve puzzles, and discover clues that eventually prompt the ending. The game also does an excellent job at making you feel helpless and vulnerable, as your only defences are running, hiding, and depending on matches for light. I personally didn't have this problem, but I have heard people complain about their eyes hurting after a few hours of gameplay-- so as a warning, the game is almost entirely black and white. If you're not sure if you can handle that, then I'd highly suggest watching a spoiler-free video on YouTube before buying, just to see how well you adjust. Overall, it's a great game that I highly recommend. 7/10
Contrast
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Contrast is a platformer clearly meant for the PC, but it is playable on consol. If I had to describe the setting, I'd say it's almost Tim Burton-y in nature. You play as a voiceless woman named Dawn, who watches over and guards a little girl named Didi. Didi lives with her poverty-stricken mother in a tiny house in a town filled with corruption and debauchery. With no friends and nowhere to go during the day, Didi sneaks out at night to play; therefore, it is your job to make sure she stays safe. When her father starts meddling with some dangerous loan sharks, however, events transpire and you must help her save her family. Aside from some irritating controls on consol, the game is great and the story, obstacles, and puzzles are magnificent. The voice acting is also highly commendable, which was a pleasant surprise. Didi is actually voiced by a little girl, not an adult playing a child, and she did such an excellent job I thought Disney hired the cast. I definitely recommend this game, especially if you play on PC. 7.5/10
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter
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The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is another story-based game in which you play as a first person detective searching for a missing boy named Ethan Carter. Much like Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, the game is almost entirely cinematic with a gripping story and stunning graphics. While exploring various locations, you will find clues and solve intricate puzzles in order to piece together what happened to Ethan. Without spoiling the plot, I can only say that the mystery turns very dark and engaging. Definitely worth a penny or two. 7.5/10
SOMA
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SOMA has repeatedly been praised by fans for its "mind-blowing" original story and designs, but I personally took issue with some aspects of the game. I will agree first and foremost that the story is fresh beyond belief: it begins with you, Ethan, booking an appointment with a famous neurologist after viewing a flashback of a car crash. It becomes apparent that Ethan suffered a brain contusion during the accident, which could, at any given moment, kill him. The next day you visit the doctor and agree to an experiment that could help Ethan and others like him. After a long conversation, you get strapped into a machine, then wake up in an underwater, apocalyptic hell. SOMA has also been described as a "mind fuck", and you might agree, especially when it comes to certain choices you're forced to make. I personally found the game to be a bit buggy, which is apparently common, slightly slow, and somewhat boring at times. The bulk of the game consists of you exploring a huge map and evading "monsters", which can be rather irritating when they get too close. There are some horror elements to the game, but nothing spectacular. All and all, it's worth a quick run through, if not for the story alone. 7.5/10
Type:Rider
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Type:Rider is an educational platformer where you play as a colon (two dots) and work your way through several levels to learn about the origins of various forms of print. If you'd rather just play the game you can easily skip the information-- but I promise you, it's fascinating. You can learn about Script, Gothic, Times New Roman, etc. The game itself is a blast, but the history lessons work as an added bonus. 7.5/10
Oxenfree
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Oxenfree is an intriguing supernatural mystery graphic adventure where you play as a teenager trapped on a costal island. What at first seems like a harmless trip with friends, it quickly turns into a living nightmare when strange events begin to occur. The story itself is distinctive and gripping, where certain decisions you make help determine the outcome. The game has several endings and multiple puzzles that require independent success or teamwork with the other NPCs. The gameplay is smooth and soothing, the visuals are clean, and the story is outstanding. Highly recommend. 8/10
Feist
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Feist is an adorable platformer with some of the most intelligent enemies I've ever seen. If you're up for a challenge, they'll make sure you're not disappointed. Though a mostly dark game, with the main character, the enemies, and much of the levels being a black silhouette, the game is fun and endearing. You play as a cute, unidentifiable creature that fights through obstacles to save his abducted partner. The game has a very primordial feel to it, with a sort of "survival of the fittest" connotation. Without the strength or biological advantages that your enemies have, you must rely on your superior intellect. The trophies are also incredibly difficult to achieve, half of them being speed runs, with almost no players having platinumed it. Aside from a few glitches that occur every now and then, the game is definitely worth buying. 8/10
The Swapper
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The Swapper is a platformer where you must solve various puzzles by making and erasing copies of your own character. There is a story to follow, set in space, where you begin to experience weird occurrences. Each new area offers harder and harder puzzles, but nothing unmanageable. For me, the true wonders of this game are the graphics and music. The soundtrack is so beautiful and ambient that I found myself downloading the whole score halfway through the game. The map is relatively confusing when you get a bit further in, so you might find yourself lost every now and then. You do have to backtrack to some levels, so I suggest learning the layout early on. All and all, it's a fun challenge well worth your time. 8/10
Wick
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Wick isn't a game I would recommend to anyone who frightens easily. The game is riddled with jump scares and portrays a haunting story about five dead children and their psychotic killer. Despite being a survival horror, there is a story to explore through certain clues that you can collect while playing. The game has several challenges, including a DLC that answers a lingering question that looms over you throughout the original levels. In order to beat the DLC, though, great memorization of the map and clue locations is required. Wick also holds some of the hardest trophies I've ever achieved for an Indie. The game itself takes place in a very small campground at night, where you are pursued by the five dead children. Your only source of light is a candle, which burns out if you don't locate more. Each level runs longer and longer and introduces a new child every time, each with their own unique form of hunting you. If you decide to brave this game, prepare for a long night. (Game is not as slow as the gif suggest) 8/10
Octodad: Dadliest Catch
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Before I get into this game, I must be sure to tell everyone that it is likely a game for children, so I'll be judging it from a child's perspective. While I don't see it winning a ton of awards, even as an adult I'll admit it's fun as hell. You play as an octopus with a wife and two children, so already the theme is ridiculous. To make matters worse, your family doesn't know that you're an octopus, so you have to do your best to keep it a secret. Throughout the game you must perform various mundane tasks, but as an octopus the controls are intentionally wonky, which makes for some hilarious accidents. There is also a story to follow with a rather adorable ending. The game is colourful, cartoonish, original, and warm-hearted. Perfect for anyone who's looking for something soft and enjoyable. 8/10
She Wants Me Dead
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She Wants Me Dead is a noir-type platformer, possibly set in New York City, where you play as a man trying to outsmart his homicidal cat. The cat, after being neglected by her owner, forces you to work your way through various traps and obstacles. The levels naturally get more and more challenging as you progress, but the game itself is incredibly fun. Additionally, only one song is played throughout every level, but it's one of the most kickin' songs I've ever heard in a platformer-- "She Wants Me Dead" by CAZZETTE vs. AronChupa ft. The High. The beat of the music actually helps you determine when it's safe to jump, which I thought was really cool. If you're looking for a decent challenge, I'd highly recommend this game. 8/10
Layers of Fear
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Much like Wick, Layers of Fear is a first person horror game filled with jump scares and a recurring theme of helplessness. Nothing scares me, but when I had my sister play this game she got a headache and threw me the controller-- it scared her that badly. The game does a stellar job at recounting the story of a painter gone mad as you explore his house and piece together his past. Aside from the spooky atmosphere and wonderful graphics, Layers of Fear also includes one of the most hauntingly beautiful soundtracks I've ever heard. If you're looking for a good mystery/horror game, Layers of Fear would be my first recommendation. 9/10
ABZÛ
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ABZÛ is an adventure art video game where you play as a female diver who silently uncovers the ruins of an ancient civilization. The entire game takes place in the ocean, where the eco system seems to be terribly damaged and unbalanced. As you swim through each beautifully crafted level, you discover the reason for the imbalance and work to revitalize the ocean. The graphics are spectacular, the story is new, and, if desired, the game is also educational with nods to marine biology. The overall control of the character takes some getting used to, but I highly recommend this game to anyone looking for something uplifting and peaceful. 9/10
Typoman
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Typoman is an adorable little platformer where you play as an all-black typographical character made up of the letters H E R O. The game itself is particularly unique, with every enemy and almost every level being made primarily of letters. The story sports a creative battle of good versus evil in the form of words, with "good" words having positive effects and "bad" words having negative effects. As the hero, you must solve puzzles and traverse through a post-apocalyptic wasteland to defeat the evil running rampant through the streets. The graphics are gorgeous, the story is amazing, and if not for the game's unfortunate tendency to crash during the mini games and mild glitches, I would have given it a perfect ten. 9/10
Unravel
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Buy it. Just buy it. I shouldn't have to say anything else, but I will. Unravel is a beautiful Swedish platformer where you play as a little red character named Yarny. As you may have already guessed, Yarny is made of yarn, and as you control him you embark on a journey to find multiple missing ornaments for a photo album. Each ornament produces a page of pictures that "unravels” the story of Yarny's family (humans who don't know that he can move). Each level presents a menagerie of fun obstacles and atmospheres. Aside from the flawless controls and beautiful story line, Unravel impresses players with gorgeous graphics and a soundtrack that could put Mozart to shame. Highly, highly recommend. 10/10
Inside
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Inside is a puzzle-platformer adventure game that really tugs at your imagination. The story is multi-layered and brilliantly crafted without a single word of dialogue. Without knowing or understanding where the story is headed, you play as a nameless boy who traverses through many psychological puzzles, with danger lurking around every corner. Since the game's release, no one has been able to decipher what the story is truly about, but if I had to guess, I'd say it presents an Orwellian dystopia that forces mind control on the masses and foreshadows our eventual future. I believe the entire game is a controlled experiment, wrought by the facility that you're trying to escape-- but really, who's to say for sure? The controls, story, and graphics are crisp, seasoned, and endearing, and they convey a uniqueness of the highest calibre. Highly recommend. 10/10
Limbo
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Limbo is a two-dimensional puzzle-platformer designed by the same company that produced Inside. Much like Inside, you play as a nameless boy who awakens in the middle of a forest on "the edge of hell". How the boy died or if he's even truly dead is a mystery. While searching for your sister, you encounter other hostile children, mechanical traps, murderous creatures, and all around unfriendly environments. As you play, you begin to wonder if anyone is trustworthy and if there's a way out of the forest at all. The game does not hold your hand, so it is up to you to depend on your wits to succeed. Besides being pleasantly enigmatic, the gameplay is also awesome and I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys peaceful but challenging platformers. 10/10
Journey
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Journey is an interactive adventure game where you assume the role of a figure clad in robes. While able to play alone, online gameplay allows other players to connect with you, which enables you to share the adventure. The story is silently narrated through cut scenes that you unlock as you venture through the desert, eventually ending up at a snowy mountain. This game is definitely meant as a "feel good" type of platformer, with music and graphics that put some mainstream games to shame. The story consists of you, the character, realizing the fall of an ancient civilization while avoiding the giant automatons left over from the war that destroyed it. I would also argue that the journey you embark on is a quest to find your ancestors, who later guide you to paradise. While I couldn't confirm this and it might not be true, I personally believe that this game was also heavily inspired by the Hinduism. For anyone looking for a relaxing, family-friendly adventure, this is the game I would recommend. 10/10
Little Nightmares
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I'm sure that by now most of you have heard of Little Nightmares. Personally, my sister and I were looking forward to this game long before it hit the mainstream, and I'm happy to say we were not disappointed. Ironically enough, Little Nightmares ended up being one of the best Indie games I've ever played. With a Spirited Away meets Tim Burton feel, Little Nightmares gives us a puzzle-platformer horror adventure game superior to all others. No one knows the true plot of the story, which has sprung theory after theory after theory from fans, as you work your way through the mysterious Maw and avoid being eaten. I also have my own theories, but if I went into that we'd be here forever. I'll simply say this: Little Nightmares triggers your imagination and keeps you on the edge of your seat. While some people have complained about the slow load times, the only complaint I have is that it's relatively short. I could have played this game for days without getting bored. The horror element is almost kid-friendly, the graphics are stupendous, and the character designs are out of this world. I might even start collecting the comics. 10/10
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spvg · 6 years
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Games Literacy (this is hard)
I’ve been thinking about how to best introduce games to people that have never played them, or see no real appeal in them, and this has led me to dive a bit more into the notion of games literacy. 
And if you’ve ever tried to get a friend or relative that never plays games, to play something you really like, only to watch them struggle with tasks you take for granted, then you have been exposed to the lack of game literacy that concerns me.
How do we share our beloved medium with people that are not used to it? And what games are best to introduce people to? What game should you pick to introduce basic game literacy to someone who never played games?
First let’s see games literacy and what it is, as the name suggests, is the ability of an individual to interact with any given game at a novice level, Just like literacy is an individual’s ability to read and understand the words on any given book, at a surface level at least.
But games are so diverse that a player that is amazing at Sports games, like say, Fifa, might be completely lost when playing a real time strategy games like Starcraft.
This makes it very hard for us to decide what the line for games literacy is generally, but for argument’s sake let’s say that our goal is to teach someone between their 20’s and 30’s to become game literate and they’ll be so when they have the “ability to play any given game at a novice level” so our hypothetical literate to be players will all play everything but they’re not exactly high on the leader boards for anything.
We also have to understand that children tend to learn faster, not only for their all consuming brains, hungry for information, but because usually they do not have as much distractions as a full grown adult that might very well see no point in “wasting time” with a game, but games tend to be engaging so that might be a good innate way to counteract that feeling, children have another advantage though and that is usually the games are so engaging that they’ll go beyond any frustration with mechanics and will try until they learn, an adult usually will stop after a few tries when they start feeling overwhelmed with a game, even the simplest ones.
For instance I once tried to get my mom to play Little Big planet, run and jump right? like a Mario game but more handcrafted looking, No, for some reason, something I thought so obvious as pressing jump while moving forward, to, you know, jump forward, for her was extremely hard, so hard I was able to have her play SKYRIM better than little big planet! (still an extremely comedic and ludicrous Skyrim play through but she did it mostly alone) I still get surprised when I think abou this, how could some one have more trouble playing through the first little big planet level, than Skyrim?!
how could it be that a 3D world first person simulation was easier to understand than a 2D sidescroller? surely the sidescroller would have a lot less information to worry about right?
So here’s what I think happened with little big planet, it has too much information for a newcomer, the music the different textures, the quirky characters, it’s great to attract the attention of kids, it is not so great for an older person to keep track of what is going on, unless of course you are game literate, the physics based interactions with objects and characters also don’t help much.
Ok but why was my mother’s time easier with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim?
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I believe the 3D environment was easier for her to understand, since it’s the one that  resembles our actual way of moving around the most, walking from point A to B was simple for her, controlling the camera on the other side had it’s ups and downs, and I noticed that she had a hard time separating body movement form camera movement, and frequently when in panic she would move both joysticks forward causing her to look straight down and face the ground instead of her foes, but still, she managed to use swords to attack (even if she was afraid of monsters) and perform basic tasks such as speak to non playable characters, or open doors, chests and so on, even if it did took a long time, she had to look to the controller and remember over and over again what button did what, even though effectively she was more literate in open world RPGs than side scrolling platformers. And this still is hard for me to fully comprehend.
it’s not like Skyrim had a tutorial so it made no real difference the way mechanics were taught, and she did play the first tutorial level of little big planet  and had trouble all the same, So I had to keep asking myself, what other differences were there between the two games, and what game should be the perfect fit to teach someone basic game literacy.
And so I did, I sat my mom down again this time to play the first level  of Super Mario world on the Snes, and then the first level of super Mario odyssey on the nintendo switch,
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I wanted to see the difference in behavior from one to another, considering that the first is a course clear game and the second a sort of sandbox explorer,
It took her a few tries (about 6 actually) but eventually she did manage to beat both first levels all on her own, so the mechanics were indeed learned, they just need to be fine tuned, and I assume the more she’d play the better she’d get at it. So as far as Super Mario World went I’d say it was a major improvement over little big planet, and the simplicity of the game did make it easier to learn I believe (I still would have preferred to try this with an earlier Mario game though)
there was something interesting I noticed while my mother played super Mario odyssey though, as opposed to Skyrim, the other open world 3d game she played, in this one she had a harder time placing Mario around the map, the third person camera seemed to make it harder for her to position herself as opposed to the first person view of the elder scrolls games. I believe this has to do with a lack of experience with the controller, and how using the joysticks translates to movement and control this is something most of us are used to do since early, if we play games often, but to suddenly come in grab a controller and play it’s a drastically steeper climb.
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so i’m still trying to figure my head around how this learning curve should go, but clearly a good way to start is with simpler easier games, probably, I’d say, something simple along the lines of Super Mario Bros mainly the world 1-1, that first level is a landmark in game design it has a great safe space to try mechanics of the game and most of all it’s clean, Mario is clearly visible against the background, there’s plenty of room ahead for players to get used to what’s coming and it is not overwhelming with information, it seems to be a good fit to new older players, probably something along those lines, with easy mechanics and understandable tutorials is a good choice. (please if you have any idea of games that might fit this description let me know). I thought of other types of games such as narrative driven games, or puzzle games as good gateways into the video game world since they don’t require as much dexterity with controllers, maybe some easier role playing games could then bridge the gap to more action focused games, and since rpg’s tend to have so much information packed in them, they could be a good starting point to strategy games or vice versa.
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Now how can developers make their game easier to learn or at least to get a basic notion of how their game works? For that I think we should start with an Idea Zach Gage shares on his GDC talk on how to build easy to understand games, that is the three reeds rule, this is a graphic design rule that can be altered to work pretty well on a games design, it works like this:
1 what pulls you in - the core of your game
2 the key details - big unintuitive rules
3 contextual information - contextual rules
So the ideia here is to design the look of your game in a way that it is easy to read by anyone, and I’d go beyond just the look of menu and user interface and apply it to the game mechanics as well, since I’m focusing on console/pc gaming and your way of interacting or the controller is actually a very important part of how you learn/perceive a game
So in a Mario game the first reed would be Mario against the big blue sky, the question blocks and the ground you stand on, the second reed would be the question mark blocks and action enemies take towards you allowing the player to understand where interaction is possible, this isn’t exactly visible but it is well explained since you only have two buttons that work, and finally the third reed is the score the world you’re in, number of coins and the time you have left.
By making the game easy to understand for anyone, or at least easy enough to visually read, developers are able to make for an easier introduction to their game world mechanics and ideas.
But there is a long way from being able to play a game, and properly understanding any meaning one might have, this is where advanced game literacy comes into play, of course not all games have meanings or thought provoking ideas behind them, Duck Game isn’t interested in make you think about the inner workings of a sadistic duck universe where ducks fight for sport, it’s interested in being a fun crazy game for friends to play and laugh together.
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But Night in the Woods for instance is interested in sharing ideas about finding meaning in yourself, in your life, in growing as individuals and even in the real life effects that a growing economical state has upon entire ways of living, and its sustainability. But imagine you never played a game in your life, I think the experience of trying to learn simple mechanics if you never tried them before, may very well get in the way of properly engage with a game’s ideas, that is why it’s important to make the learning a smooth curve for newer players, and if we can it’s up to us people that have been playing for a long time, to help our new friends to get the best experience they can, we can be curators for the great work developers put out there, and at the same time keep them  away from the sea of terrible content that is out there.
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I know that this article is setting up more questions than answers, but I’m so intrigued by this situation that I felt like sharing and hopefully get some feedback and some deeper notions handed back to me.
Have different ideas? something that I clearly missed, suggestions? Write them to me, and we’ll be Speaking of Video Games!
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breakingarrows · 5 years
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Discourse Conversations During E3 2019
Watching press conferences and livestreams of various talking heads discuss whatever video game thing they saw that day is only part of E3. Another major part is the social media discussions that unfold faster and accumulate more conversation than any ten hour IGN livestream could. However, like any form of discourse being developed on Twitter and elsewhere, it can be easily lost if you aren’t in the moment, and nearly impossible to find due to some of the best commentary coming indirectly. This is a small attempt to capture some of that discourse that unfolded during this week of E3 2019.
Before E3 even started we already had a large social media argument about “spoilers” for the press conferences. Essentially: people went back and forth on whether or not to share/publish/promote leaks of things like, “This game surprise is going to happen!” While things like Breath of the Wild direct sequel being announced is a fun secret to watch live, a headline report spreading online beforehand isn’t something to condemn. The sort of corporate love-fest E3 already is will only continue when gamers are actively antagonistic to anything other than the publisher message being put out. As many of these discourse conversations will go, this is the same old song and dance we have seen for over a decade. If you don’t want to see anything before a corporation hits “go” on a press conference, just stay offline and don’t bitch about it at whoever it is that’s publishing details earlier than the publisher dictated commercial. People trying to frame this as hurting developers feelings should redirect that energy towards unionization and fair pay advocacy, not, “Please don’t publish details early, these people worked really hard to sell me this game.”
Perhaps the biggest thread-spawner was the reappearance of Cyberpunk 2077 from CD Projekt Red at the Microsoft press conference. Developer CDPR also owns GOG, which has previously tweeted a gamergate related gif of Postal 2, a, “did you just assume their gender?” response tweet from the Cyberpunk account, and using the #WontBeErased for GOG games. Eurogamer has a rundown of it all here. Then this week, you have Keanu Reeves making a surprise appearance in the game Cyberpunk 2077 as well as on the Microsoft stage to announce the release date. The internet goes wild, fueled by post-John Wick 3 hype and long-lasting Keanu love. Then an advertisement in-game for ChroManticore appears, bearing the image of a presumably trans-female with a large erect dick and the phrases, “Mix It Up,” and, “16 flavors you’d love to mix.” CDPR’s explanation via Polygon was: “This is all to show that [much like in our modern world], hypersexualization in advertisements is just terrible,” Redesiuk continued. “It was a conscious choice on our end to show that in this world — a world where you are a cyberpunk, a person fighting against corporations. That [advertisement] is what you’re fighting against.” Responses were generally critical of the ads message, intentional or not, as well as critical due to CDPR’s past actions. “Also, as a note, and this is all i'm gonna say: in proper context, that ad could absolutely be a meaningful statement in a cyberpunk world, and we don't know the context. But also, sadly, CDPR has burned all their trust and have given us little reason to take them in good faith.” [source] That about sums up most of the opinions coming from trans critics, CDPR has failed to properly respect them in the past, why should this be treated in good faith?
Discussions about cyberpunk weren’t limited just to the one game, as it also extended a previous conversation about the origins of cyberpunk as a genre and if the genre has any inherent themes no matter its adaptation or usage. One thread making the rounds argued that cyberpunk is inherently xenophobic, playing on fears of Eastern Asian cultures spreading and taking over the world. Other pushed back against this, citing early Japanese media that heavily influenced western cyberpunk fiction, not the other way around. The opinion I most agreed with was, “Maybe I'm being naive, but everyone keeps saying ‘Cyberpunk is good’ or ‘Cyberpunk is bad’ or ‘Cyberpunk is X’ as if cyberpunk is a cohesive, monolithic thing. It's a genre that has been around for decades which countless different creators have contributed to, and all of those creators were trying to say different things within the genre.” [source] “I am beginning to feel like strongly emphasizing genre as an acting force is kind of formalist nonsense? Like, cyberpunk or whatever isn't any *thing*--it's just a set of ideas some people have used, and other people can take or not take or use or not use.” [source]
Another big topic was the continuing saga of games as non-political and the back and forth between media and developers/publishers/PR in the lead up to a game’s release. Games have messages, but their creators, whether intentionally or due to PR, won’t engage with those ideas during pre-release coverage most of the time. Those sorts of conversations don’t happen until post-release, because the previews are generally focused on the gun-feel or summarizing slideshow pitches. There is also a disconnect between what “political” even means. “They think ‘political’ means being explicitly literalist about what every single moment means instead of being in any capacity complex or open to audience interpretation, for better or worse.” [source] Chris Avellone, longtime games writer, had a statement in a VG247 article about whether stories can be apolitical. “If you’re purposely pushing an agenda or point of view in your game – especially a real-world one that’s clearly divorced from the game world – and you’re dictating that perspective as correct vs. asking a question or examining the perspective more broadly, then it’s left the gaming realm and the ‘game’ has become a pulpit.” However, in an example like Far Cry 5, a game that doesn’t “push an agenda,” actively, still promotes a specific perspective or viewpoint as valid with its endings, as I detailed before. “But, another (very reasonable group, to which I largely subscribe) would say that ‘asking questions that emerge from perspectives in the fiction’ is *exactly* what being political is--interrogating our relationships to each other and the world.” [source] This topic also seemed to collapse in on itself when Watch Dogs Legion was announced, playing on the fears of a post-Brexit London and an authoritarian surveillance state, and coopting the “welcome to the resistance” which is mostly mocked by leftists online whenever someone from the right is kicked out of their group. Definitely not political.
This is also a very tired subject. Ubisoft for years, and other publishers as well, have avoided talking about their games messages relating to the current events during events like E3. Continually the press laments and pushes back against it on social media and sometimes in previews, but the cycle continues. “You know how I've argued ‘We need to stop debating if games are art and just do the job of treating them like art?’ It's also time to move past ‘Can games be apolitical?’ and just focus on continuing critical cultural analysis. Do the work, make it unavoidable, shift the frame. To be clear, I think we needed to spend some time on that earlier debate just to have a mass-level, stakes-setting conversation. But at this point, the best way to push back on ‘No, no, we just make games just ask questions’ is to show how those games actually offer answers.” [source] This is true, but it’s also something others (mostly non-staff people) have been saying for years now.
The annual, “E3 is weird huh?” conversation also happened, like it has for at least the past five years. In May it begins with, “Man what is E3 going to be like this year?” Then E3 happens, everyone does their shit, and at the end they go, “Boy what’s next year going to be like?” The major difference this time was Sony’s complete absence from the show. Despite not having a press conference or show floor presence with demos and presentations, games media still had plenty to talk about, including E3’s relevance. It seems to be the same old song and dance, with the ending statement being, “Well I guess we’ll wait and see what next year is like.”
Another repeated conversation was that of video game streaming platforms, with Stadia having another presentation pre-E3 and Microsoft coming out with console and internet streaming plans for later this year. No real advances were made in this conversation other than confirmation that, yeah, Stadia streaming for those with data caps on internet or smartphone use are going to be fucked if they want the best presentation, which of course they would. Not a ton of talk about the details behind how developers would be paid, though going by how streaming has been slowly killing the movie and music industries, it is not going to be good. Of course the usual access and archivist arguments continue, which I am 100% behind.
New game details sparked lots of speculation, mostly in regards to a direct sequel to Breath of the Wild, one of the few good Zelda games. Being a direct sequel to a previous entry and having a trailer with a darker tone, mean Majora’s Mask became a recurring subject in regards to what this follow up could be. The inclusion of visuals and audio cues seemingly from Twilight Princess also fueled the “darker” Zelda sequel. Some also speculated about a playable Zelda, which, don’t get your hopes up people, this is Nintendo after all.
A game closer in release and in my heart is Final Fantasy VII Remake, which looks to be a big fucking hot mess. Broken up into parts, each seemingly equivalent to a mainline Final Fantasy game in content, this first one releasing next March (we’ll see about that) will only cover the Midgar section of Final Fantasy VII. You know, that section that takes about five hours to complete in the original release. Now that’s going to be extended into probably 30+ hours, which means lots of new original content coming from Square Enix, who are great at adding great new content to the already existing universe of Final Fantasy VII! Despite that I’m still very interested in getting my hands on it and playing through it all. I really like the opening hours of Final Fantasy VII, I just have little faith that they are going to do anything interesting with the new content and not make it feel like filler. It appears Jessie will have a much more expanded role, but still no word on the crossdressing or squats minigame. Combat has been very much changed, and everything is super overproduced in terms of visual flairs, which might explain why there will be TWO blu-ray discs! TWO! Red Dead Redemption 2 is the only other game to do this!
Back to Nintendo, Animal Crossing will now allow players to choose their skin tone, something that has been asked for a very, very long time now. They also confirmed they will let you use whatever hair type you want, which some people took and ran with as equivalent to them saying trans rights, which, no? “You guys please these are fucking table scraps. This is not pro-trans this is just a bare minimum feature for thee love of god.” [source] “Not only is that animal crossing thing a bare minimum there weren't hair restrictions in new leaf anyway???” [source] This was giving me flashbacks to when Soldier 76 was shown to be gay in a tertiary comic from Overwatch and people went nuts despite it not being represented in the game at all. Also, “quick reminder that nintendo fired a support team member bc of ppl making trans flag stages in smash bros” [source] [source]
There was some good news, Ikumi Nakamura came out and presented her new game Ghostwire to rapturous reception. A female creative director, a visually interesting trailer, and an excited jump at presenting her game made her the darling presenter alongside the likes of Keanu Reeves. She was previously an artist on Bayonetta, The Evil Within and its sequel, and made her own Twitter account during E3 to celebrate with her fans. Some of the reaction is probably rooted in how Asian women are treated as adorable and infantilized when compared to others, but she’s been having a good time gathering all the fan art of herself on Twitter, so for now it’s a nice break from the usual depressing nature of AAA publisher presentations.
Lastly, this wasn’t so much a part of the discourse but just an amazing moment, Dr Disrespect was banned from Twitch and thrown out of E3 after he live streamed in a bathroom without censoring other people’s faces, violating a California privacy law. As Alex so wonderfully stated, “this is our generation’s version of Capone going down for tax evasion.”
There was probably a lot of other conversations going on and this isn’t even the full depth of what I tried to find but boy does going back on timelines and searching for threads and responses and quote tweets and subtweets take way too much time. Anyway hope this proves to be a good time capsule for E3 2019 discourse and can’t wait for next year where a majority of these topics are readdressed again and again and again. Video games!
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Best Fiends Forever Aplikacje Na Androida W Google Play
Best fiends hack for nothing. Generate as many diamonds as you need.
There are three main contenders in the video game console market, and each one has unique advantages and drawbacks. The PlayStation 4, for example, is easy to use: Sony has made a powerful console designed to appeal to as many players as possible, and its gamble has largely paid off. While Microsoft clearly wants just as many people playing Xbox One, it's tackling the market via its ecosystem, which is more open than any of the other consoles. The Xbox One supports cross-play with Windows 10, and its built-in livestreaming architecture, Mixer, is an impressive tool. Meanwhile, the Nintendo Switch is a strange treasure, packing less power than the other two systems but making up for this technical loss with an innovative hybrid design. How this will go over with Trump himself is another matter. But until someone tries to stop this game from working its satirical magic, most will likely enjoy the gameplay, which is well designed and engaging, no matter what side of the issues you're on. Another audio-visual gem, Superbrothers Sword and Sorcery is not quite a puzzler, nor is its visual style anything like the Esher-esque grandeur of MV, but its ambiance, story and emotional underlying resembles heavily the Monument Valley. An exploration and adventure, with the definite focus on the sacred geometry, S&S takes you on a journey of a lonesome monk on her journey through a mythic realm, solving the mysterious puzzles with her sorcery. No one ever said growing older would be easy; personally, I just never knew that I'd have to revisit building friendships as an adult. But, now that I have, I'm pleased to find that it's just as much fun to have a call with a girlfriend today (or chat or tweet) as it was when I was 16. And while Best Fiends hack, don't have to watch what I say so that my mom doesn't hear it, I do have to worry about my two-year-old repeating my colorful conversation to the kids at daycare. Somehow, it's all the same. Team Fortress 2 has been free to play since mid-2011 and is another Valve classic that takes a more relaxed approach to the FPS genre. Combining a number of unique classes that combine together in all sorts of ways, Team Fortress 2 has a lot of replay value.
30 more things that best fiends cheat give to your game.
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