Steel Diver
Nintendo 3DS
2011
Nintendo EAD Group No. 5

Oh man, I have come to love the 3DS so damn much.  Steel Diver is a sidescrolling submarine racing sim boxed product made in 2011. Only on a Nintendo platform would such a game make a lick of sense. I would never had considered playing this game if it were for console or PC.  I would never had paid money for this game if it were a download. But as a 3DS game in a box, this becomes a game that I want to know more about.

Turns out there is nothing much more to know about it. “Sidescrolling submarine racing sim” is basically the beginning and end of what it is. It works and it is kind of fun. As fun a submarines get. Submarines are kind of boring. Why do I play the games that I do?

This is an odd, slightly charming game. I got everything I needed out of it in 45 minutes.  I’ll set it in a stack with Game & Watch Collection and Bit.Trip Complete and I won’t think about it again for a couple of years. One day I’ll dig through my rapidly growing stack of old DS and 3DS games and I’ll play this game for another 45 minutes and those will be a good 45 minutes.

Contact
Nintendo DS
2006
Grasshopper Manufacture

I know that I do not like JRPGs (roleplaying video games in the Japanese tradition). I pretty much hate them. I keep playing them and I keep not enjoying them because I hate the very characteristics that define the genre. It’s a special kind of hate, my JRPG hate. It is the hate one reserves for something one really wants to love.

It is with a heart full of this complicated hate that I head once more unto the breach with Contact, a JRPG that has just absolutely amazing presentation. It seems so cool! There is a guy and his cat in a spaceship with a computer and he has used his computer to detect the existence of the player. That is to say he has detected me, Isaac, the person holding the DS. He starts asking me about myself when his ship crashes on a planet and the planet has an entirely different art style than he and his ship and then he starts sending some random kid from that planet on missions, and that kid is the player character, and the guy starts coaching me, the player, on how to help the player character while hiding the fact that there is a player from the player character. It’s weird and whimsical and makes great use of the dual screens. These are the sorts of games I live for.

And none of this wonderful sense of style changes that fact that mechanically this is very much a typical roleplaying game from Japan, which means that the gameplay is horseshit. It is all one dude standing next to another dude while numbers alternately fly out of their heads. It is all grinding the same fights over and over again until one is able to progress. It is all very limited player input combined with incomprehensibly complex systems that are not explained because it is assumed that the player will have picked up the player guide (sold separately) and it does not matter that there is a cute-as-a-button stomach icon that fills up with your partially digested power ups, because at the end of the day, this marvelously crafted game, built with charm and wit and love, is absolutely tedious to play.

It’s all on me. I have no one but myself to blame for the disappointment felt and the time wasted on this game. I let the scorpion onto my back, knowing full well its nature. You can’t go to a superhero movie and complain that the people in pajamas look silly. You can’t go to an opera and gripe about all the people singing in German. I knew what this game was, I just thought maybe it would be different this time. It wasn’t.

BIT.TRIP SAGA
Nintendo 3DS
2011
Gaijin Games

This is a compilation of the six original games in the Bit.Trip series. It’s a beautiful, weird, half-arty experiment:  Six rhythm action games, each mechanically unique, with some very loose connective story tissue and an absolutely gorgeous retro aesthetic. It’s a cool, creative package.

Of course, with any compilation or anthology, at least half the contents are likely to be garbage, and in this particular suite, I think I would only ever want to play two of these games again: Beat and Flux, and Flux is essentially the mechanical sequel to Beat. As for the rest, Core and Runner are too hard to be fun, Void is a bad game, and Fate is essentially unplayable for left-handed gamers such as myself.

These games have a pseudo-Atari era style that ends up being quite fitting. While I like playing Atari games, I don’t play them for hours on end unless I have been caught up in an ongoing high score battle.  Otherwise, I usually can get everything I need out of an Atari game in about ten minutes.  A couple games of Frogger and I’m good for a couple of years.  That’s about as much as I got out of the Bit.Trip games. Checking out this compilation felt quite a bit like burning through a stack of VCS games. I think the three remaining readers of this blog know just how much I like to do that.

Game & Watch Collection
Nintendo DS
2008
Nintendo

I’ve been playing a DS port of old Game & Watch LED games. How would I even explain a Game & Watch to my five year old daughter, a child who plays Where’s My Water? on her mom’s tablet? For that matter, how many of today’s grown ups even remember LED games? It seems so primitive a notion, here in the far-flung future.

Before we had smartphones we had Game Boys and before we had Game Boys we had Game & Watches which were like big digital watches that played Donkey Kong. Oh, and before we had smartphones we had digital watches.

I picked up Game & Watch Collection as a curiosity, to explore a weird chapter of video game history. I had never played these things before, as proper Game & Watches were slightly before my time. When I was a child Tiger Electronic Games were the LED game of choice, and Tiger Electronic Games were weird garbage.

The games included in this collection are not weird garbage, which honestly surprised me. They are weird marvels, bizarre half-video games that are beautiful in a way that I can scarcely describe. In a traditional video game your character has a limited number of animations that look the same throughout the environment, but in a Game & Watch game, your character has a unique pose every step of the way, cartooned magnificently. That’s the only word for it.  These games are cartooned. It is really something special.

They don’t just look great, they also work well as games. Well, Donkey Kong‘s scoring seems broken, but apart from that, they are responsive, elegant, and clever. These games are great frantic little five-minute time wasters.

There are three games in this collection, Donkey Kong, Greenhouse, and Oil Panic. All three are charming and fun.  After playing this collection, I’m really tempted to start scouring Ebay for some originals.    There are 60 different Game & Watches out there.   But that is a dark, expensive road, that is probably best not to start down.

Super Mario 3D Land
Nintendo 3DS
2011
Nintendo EAD Tokyo

Super Mario World was my first gaming love.  The first contemporary video game system I ever owned was a Super Nintendo, and Super Mario World was that system’s pack-in game.  It is also one of the greatest video games ever made.  I played that game over and over and over again as a child.  I learned it inside and out.  I climbed to 96 stars easily a dozen times.

Some time afterward, my mom bought me a copy of the compilation Mario All Stars and I discovered that Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 3, and Super Mario World formed an amazing trilogy of video games.  Probably the best trilogy of video games ever.

Naturally, I wanted a sequel.  Instead, what I got was Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island.  A game where you played a dinosaur chasing a screaming baby.   Whatever merits Yoshi’s Island may have, it was not the successor to Super Mario World. It also does not have many merits.

Eventually video games gained a third dimension and we were given Mario 64.  A lot of people consider Mario 64 to be amongst the greatest video games of all time, if not the greatest.  My opinion is slightly different.  I think that Mario 64 is a garbage sandwich, not in any way fun to play.

Years passed and I gave up on ever getting a proper 2D sequel to Mario.  Mario had starred in  hundreds of video games following Super Mario World, but none of them were proper Mario games.  Even the second-tier Super Mario Land series had been phased out for the Wario Land games.  Nobody wanted to make another game in the greatest video game series of all time.

Finally, in 2006, that all changed.  Nintendo finally had created a new Super Mario Bros. game for the Nintendo DS, cunningly titled New Super Mario Bros.   It was to be a return to form, the Mario of bygone years returned for a new generation.   I bought a DS specifically so that I could play this game.  And play it I did, to my great regret.  It was as if someone had pooped in a hat and said “this hat is a new 2D Mario game.”

And all of this, at long last brings us to Super Mario 3D Land, a 3D platformer in 3D  (we really need a new way to distinguish between 2D games and 3D games now that we have to distinguish between actual 2D and actual 3D.).  As someone who doesn’t like 3D platformers or 3D anything, I’d be hard pressed to say why I bought this game.

I’m very glad I did buy it, because they did it.   They goddamn did it!  They made a game that captures the feel of Mario.  They made a game that has that magic frisson of discovery, a game with that sweet spot of challenge.  They made a game that takes core Mario elements and makes something new and exciting with them.  Sure, I would like more pipes and koopas in my Mario game, but the folks making this game had the guts to minimize those classic elements in order to make a better game.

Super Mario 3D Land  is exactly the game that New Super Mario Bros. isn’t.  My theory is that every person at Nintendo who complained about how fucking boring it was to make New Super Mario Bros. games got put on the Mario 3D Land team and told to make whatever game they wanted, to create their ultimate Mario game, just so long as it showcased the 3DS’s 3D capabilities.  They did a good job.

It isn’t that this game is bonkers crazy, or that it is stuffed with new mechanics.  It is just  put together amazingly well, with craft and with care.  It has momentum, whimsy, friction, and surprise.

It also manages to be accessible and hard at the same time.   Mario games are appealing to the so called “casual player” but can be frustrating because they are pretty damn hard games.  To solve this conflict, the developers borrowed a page from Zelda and gave players a second quest.    Super Mario 3D Land starts with a full length Mario game that is challenging but not crazy, and when that game is completed, a entirely separate remixed version of the game is unlocked, aimed straight at the heart of the player who has been waiting twenty years for just this game.

The 3DS is a remarkable system, and this game is the shining jewel in its crown.  If you own a 3DS, buy this game.  If you don’t own a 3DS and you love classic Mario, get yourself a 3DS.

Metroid: Zero Mission
Game Boy Advance
2004
Nintendo R&D1

Metroid: Zero Mission  is a weird one for Nintendo. It is a full remake of the original NES Metroid, graphically upgraded for the Game Boy Advance. I absolutely love Metroid games, but I never played this one because I already had (two copies of) proper Metroid and it was unclear to me why I needed a remake. The music and graphics of Metroid are crude, certainly, but they’re absolutely beautiful. Without a doubt, Metroid would be my favorite NES game if the NES did not have The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros. And Super Mario Bros. 3 on it. Nintendo makes some pretty good games.

As the only proper Metroid game I had never played, it was time to give this remake its due. I hated it as soon as I started. It looked so different than real Metroid and I am a guy that hates revisionism. I refuse to watch the Star Wars “special” editions, I turn off smoothing in game re-releases and in general, I like old things to look like they did when they were old. My idea of a perfect Metroid remake is the exact same game, with the addition of the ability to save the game. I was the definition of a hostile audience for this game.

The more I played this game, the more agitated I got. They had so flagrantly changed so many things. It wasn’t just a bump to Super Metroid quality graphics. It wasn’t just that they had also added save rooms and map rooms and, y’know, a map. The level design was totally different. It was way off. This barely felt like the first Metroid at all.

Finally, something flipped in my mind. Zero Mission was such a different game, the design team had taken so many liberties, that it stopped feeling like a sacrilegious remake and started feeling like a totally separate game. And once I could look at the game that way, I started enjoying myself. This was a real 2D Metroid game that I had never played before. I never thought I was going to get one of these.

However, as I played further I realized that being a unique Metroid game didn’t mean that it wasn’t still just a remake of that first Metroid game. In fact, wasn’t Super Metroid just an expanded remake of Metroid? It really was. And so was Metroid Fusion, and hell, so was Shadow Complex. As a gamer, I have been perpetually in a state of wanting a new 2D Metroid game, but now as I’m playing exactly that, I’m thinking that there is nowhere left for the series to go. Maybe the potential design space has been exhausted and it would be best to just replay Metroid and Super Metroid whenever the urge strikes, and leave the series in peace.

And then, once again, I defeat Mother Brain. But that does not trigger the end of the game. It turns out that there is a whole ‘nother scenario on this cartridge. Samus crashes on a planet damaging her suit. The player then has to sneak onto a ship of Zebesian space pirates with no suit, armed with nothing but a shitty stun pistol. For the next hour or so, Metroid Zero Mission becomes a 2D stealth game.

The execution in that last bit of game is not perfect, but it is something new in a Metroid game (or, y’know, it was in 2004). More importantly, it managed to feel true to Metroid without being stale more-of-the-same. So it can be done. This puts me right back in the position of wanting a new 2D Metroid game that I’m never going to get.

Aliens Infestation
Nintendo DS
Wayforward Technologies & Gearbox Software
2011

There have been many video games based on the Alien(s) film franchise. Traditionally, the good ones have been versus Predators, and not exactly true to the tone of the James Cameron film. (I like the Ridley Scott one better, but of the two films one is video gamic and the other isn’t. (There are only two Alien movies, right?)) The Predatorless Alien(s) games tend to not work.

Aliens Infestation is a 2D sidescroller, and a member of the regrettably named “Metroidvania” gameplay genre. Metroid is a video game in the story genre of trapped-in-a-derelict-science-fiction-setting-with-monsters, a genre which started with Alien(s). (Actually, now that I think about it, Metroid is closer in tone to the Scott than the Cameron. Hmm…) This is like when they make Indiana Jones video games that are Tomb Raider ripoffs. In other words, this franchise has finally gotten the gameplay genre that it has always deserved.

The style of game may be perfect, but unfortunately, the game is not. The gunplay is pretty stiff and pretty poor. The environments do not have enough variety to make exploration fun and if exploration isn’t fun in your game about exploration, you’re in trouble. In absolute terms this is a shitty Metroid ripoff in a world full of good ones.

But here’s the thing: Early in the game, before you run into any Aliens, there is a moment where you enter a room, and a cat leaps out of nowhere and runs past your character. You don’t have continues or lives in this game, you have a limited supply of fragile space marines. In many ways, this game GETS IT. It’s a bad game but a great treatment of a source material and it is probably the closest to a good Aliens game as we are ever going to get.

Kirby’s Epic Yarn
Nintendo Wii
Good-Feel & Hal Laboratory
2010

When I finally bought a Wii last year, I knew that one of the games I would have to play as soon as I could was Kirby’s Epic Yarn. This game is set in a world where everything is either made of yarn or fabric, and by all accounts, this art style was executed beautifully and brilliantly. I was pretty confident that I would love Epic Yarn‘s art style, but I had also heard that it was easy. Very easy. I was afraid that my time with Epic Yarn would be the proverbial walk in the park, boring but with nice scenery.

I was entirely mistaken. This game has proven to be frustrating, fraught with challenge at every turn. Every step forward in this game, however minor, feels like a victory. Kirby’s Epic Yarn turned out to be a very hard game indeed. That is to say, a very hard game when played in co-op mode with a four-year-old daughter.

“Can we play Kirby’s Epic Yarn please?”

“Sure.”

“I want to play as Kirby because she’s a girl.”

“If you like, sure.”

…

“How do I jump, again?”

“Press button 2.”

…

“Press button 2 and the right button at the same time.”

“I can’t do it!”

“You’re holding the controller upside down again, kiddo.”

“Oh, ok.”

“There. See, you can do it.”

“Hahahaha! I picked you up.”

“Haha. Will you now put me down please?”

“Wait up for me!”

“Ok.”

“Which button is jump, again?”

“Two.”

“I can’t do this.”

“Sure you can. You were doing it before. “You’re getting much better at this game.”

“Arg! Stupid angels.”

“Sweetie, please move to the right so that I can have some room to maneuver.”

“I don’t want to play anymore.”

“We can stop after we finish this stage.”

“Hey! Why did you pick me up?? Put me down!”

One completed stage later:

“Let’s play another stage! I hope the next one is a boss fight!”

Forget Demon’s Souls.  Never have I played a game as fraught with tension as Kirby’s Epic Yarn.  And, yes, it is every bit as pretty as I had hoped.

Picross 3D
Nintendo DS
HAL Laboratory
2010

Picross 3D is a brilliantly designed puzzle game. It executes a great idea, the 3D Picross, perfectly. What is a picross? Well, We’ve all heard the one about how to sculpt an elephant, right? You start with a block of marble and chip off everything that isn’t an elephant. Picross 3D is a collection of simple logic puzzles based around figuring out what isn’t an elephant.

A puzzle might take 5-10 minutes, but it will feel like 30 seconds. I sat down to play this game last night, and 15 minutes later I discovered that 3 and a half hours had passed. It feels so good to chip away at these puzzles and it is so easy to say “just one more.” Did you see that shitty episode of Next Gen where Wesley Crusher and Ashley Judd had to save the enterprise from an evil video game? I bet the evil game they were playing felt like Picross 3D.

I feel really good when I’m playing Picross. However, when I’m done playing, I feel really empty inside. Hours have passed and I have absolutely nothing to show for it other than spent sand from the hourglass of life. It was fun but utterly hollow.

Is a hollow game worth playing? For that matter, is there any real difference between a solving a picross puzzle, and solving a Zelda dungeon? Or solving the puzzle of how to time my jumps in Mario or solving the puzzle of which gun to shoot the enemy with in Halo?   Am I fooling myself when I say that video games are an enriching pastime?

Really, when you get right down to it, isn’t everything that I do merely passing time as I attempt to distract myself from an inevitable death that will claim my life as it claims all life?  I will eventually cease to be, and so will everyone I have ever known. There will be no memory left of anything I have ever done.  It will be as if it never happened, so how can Picross be more or less hollow than any other activity?  In the end, all that will remain is this blog, captured by the Internet Wayback Machine, viewed by no one, until one day it too goes offline.

Picross 3D is kind of a bummer.

Odama
Game Cube
Vivarium
2006

Sometimes I wonder why I’m wasting my time playing old, mostly terrible video games, but then I will I play a video game that would never have otherwise played and it makes all the Barnstormings and The Getaways worthwhile. Consider, Odama, a very strange game for the Gamecube that I only just discovered.

Odama is a real time strategy game set in Edo period Japan. You control an army by shouting commands into a microphone. Also, it is a pinball game. This may be the weirdest video game I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing and I’m saying that as an veteran Space Giraffe player. I think I’m in love.

To the credit of a very oddball concept, this game is an effective hybrid. You must play effective pinball while also effectively commanding your army, all while racing a clock. It’s tense and hectic. Tactical and random. It is every bit a strategy game and a pinball game. Neither half feels bolted on, and it is clear that a ton of loving design work was put into making the the two disparate genres meld into a unified whole. Odama creates the voice command RTS pinball genre and it drops the motherfuckin mic.

The game is brilliantly constructed, but it is a very silly thing that they have constructed. The presentation plays things largely straight, with just the right amount of goofy charm. The most important object in the game is a powerful bell, called the “Nin Ten Doh.” You have an advisor who uses the system clock to chide you if you stay away from the game for too long. The stage select screen is a painting in traditional woodblock style, with the curious addition of flippers and other strangeness. It feels like a pinball game set on the battlefield of feudal Japan should.

I bought this game expecting nothing more substantial than a bizarre curiosity, which would have been enough for me. But what I got is a minor masterpiece. Challenging, fun, and totally unique, I have never been as surprised by a game as I have been surprised by Odama. I am floored by this game.

I have always hated real-time strategy games and now I have found one that I love. In finding it, I have also pretty much eliminated the possibility of my ever finding a second one that I will like because I now demand all RTS games that I play not only include both pinball flippers and voice command but also meet the standard of quality set by Odama.

Earthworm Jim 2
Super Nintendo
Shiny Entertainment
1994

I hate dogs. Hate ‘em. Mean ones, friendly ones. Tiny ones, big ones, the whole lot are a blight upon this world.

In Earthworm Jim 2 there is a stage where Psy-Crow will throw puppies in the air, and your job is to use a trampoline to safely ferry them to Peter Puppy, will put them in a dog house. Every time you miss a puppy it makes a very satisfying splat upon the ground. That splat feels so good, I want so very much to let them all drop. Of course, if too many puppies splatter, Peter Puppy will maul you to death.

So there I stand, torn between two ancient impulses, the urge to murder puppies, and the urge to not be murdered by same. This is what game theorists call the Puppies Dilemma. Needless to say, I will never beat Earthworm Jim 2.

Earthworm Jim
Super Nintendo
Shiny Entertainment
1994

Earthworm Jim.  What a great game.    It is charming and weird in the liquid televisioney way things could be charming and weird in the 90’s.  It has gorgeous Doug TenNaple art, coming from an era where “art design” was not a phrase you heard in conjunction with video games.   Most importantly, right off the bat you get to shoot dogs which makes every video game better.   This is a true classic, an exemplar of what a 2D platformer should be.

On paper, that is.

In practice, this game is hard, not in a good Super Mario way but in a bad Ghosts ‘n Goblins way.  The platforming is clunky and the game’s whole feel is just unsatisfying from top to bottom.   I have not seen most of this game because I cannot progress through it.

People love this game and I would really like to be one of those people.  And so I have revisited it over and over throughout the years, each time hoping that something will click.  But that click never clicks and I have to face facts, this game just ain’t for me.

The Getaway
Playstation 2
Team Soho
2003

There is a weird gap in the market when it comes to crime games. GTA, Kane & Lynch, and Saint’s Row are all cartoons, although I don’t know if the guys making Kane & Lynch know it. Mafia and The Godfather are period pieces, and also not good games. True Crime and Driver cheat by making you an undercover cop.

And then in 2003 there was The Getaway. There was a great idea behind this game. Take the open world of Grand Theft Auto III, but give it the pace, tone, and momentum of a Guy Ritchie-style crime movie. That sounds like a game that I want to play.

It’s a goddamn shame that The Getaway is terrible. The driving parts are bad, mixing overfragile cars with heavy London traffic. The shooting parts are worse, with terrible cameras, terrible aiming, terrible cover mechanics, and an unbelievably slow regenerating health system.

The cutscenes are also terrible.

Last year gave us two great hardboiled crime games in the form of Sleeping Dogs and Max Payne 3. Ten years after The Getaway, as near as I can tell these are the only two good non-jokey crime games ever to be made. You would think crime and games would be a natural fit, but something seems to be missing from the equation.

F-Zero
Super Nintendo
Nintendo EAD
1991

I have heard the difference between a “technical” and “arcade” racing game is that it is technical if you have to use the brake and arcade if you don’t. F-Zero is without a doubt an arcade racer, and one of my very favorite racing games of all time. Set in a charming 90′s future, you race silly looking hovercraft on courses littered with jump pads, speed boosters, electromagnets, and more of that sort of thing. It is mode seven as fuck, and a ton of fun, really hitting my own personal sweet spot of challenge. Which means it is pretty easy.

This game doesn’t have a multiplayer, which is a major strike against a racer, but it don’t bother me none. When I have friends over to play Super Nintendo, we ain’t playing F-Zero, we’re playing Super Bomberman, as it should be.

There are some genres of games that you only need to bother with the best in the genre. For me, racing comes close to being one of those genres. I only need so many games about driving around in a circle very fast. So it a bit of a surprise that twenty-two years later, F-Zero is absolutely still worth playing.

Rocksmith
Xbox 360
Ubisoft
2011

I love the plastic instrument genre of video games and have put spent many many hours playing imaginary guitars. When Rock Band 3 came out a few years back, it came with a new “Pro mode” that allows players to play Rock Band with a genuine-article, six-string, plug-it-into-an-amp guitar controller. I have lusted after that controller ever since.

I have always wanted to learn how to play the guitar, but I have never taken the plunge. I suspect that it is some combination of a lack of fine motor skills, a deficit of musical talent, and extreme laziness that has held me back. However, pro mode seemed to transcend these hurdles. if you can turn the hard work of practicing things into a video game, well… I’m pretty good at video games.

One insurance settlement check later, I’ve purchased a pro guitar. It’s a Fender Squier, which is about as entry-level as guitars, but y’know, makes guitar noise when you press the strings. It has been modified with crazy rock band sensors, and it has a bunch of Xbox controller buttons in a fashion that I wish my refrigerator would take lessons from.

Interesting thing, it turns out that funny as it seems, Pro mode is not for amateurs. The Guitar Hero plastic guitar has five brightly colored plastic buttons on its fretboard. An actual guitar has over twenty frets for each of its six strings. As I attempt to make this leap in complexity I have gained new insight into people who cannot handle the moving parts of a modern video game controller. Even on the easiest difficulty, Pro mode requires more fluency in guitar than I am capable of.

So I set aside Rock Band 3, and turned to Rocksmith. Like, Rock Band 3, Rocksmith is a video game that you can play with a genuine guitar. However, Rocksmith differs in two key ways. First, it works with any electric guitar. And second, it is specifically designed to be a learning tool.

It works. Like traditional music games you are presented with a note highway and a selection of licensed tracks. It starts very basic and adapts to how well you are doing so that you are always being thrown slightly more than you can handle. It does a surprisingly solid job of steadily giving you that Goldilocks zone of challenge.

I’m blown away by this game. In about two months I’ve gone from total incompetence to being able to play real rock songs. That is to say, I can play some fairly simple songs at 66% accuracy while being prompted one chord or note at a time. It’s far cry from proficiency but that is still a long way from where I started.

It’s a strange piece of software, and I wonder, is Rocksmith a video game? I mean, sure it is on an Xbox disc and I’m entering input into an attempt to improve my high score, so yes it probably is a video game. But the high score isn’t the goal, merely a means to learn a real world skill. If this is a video game, is Typing Tutor? Wii Fit? How about Rosetta Stone? If there were language-learning video games, would I be able to speak Bantu?

Should we turn all drudgery into a video game? Am I complicit in putting a fleet of guitar instructors out of work? I don’t know, but I can play guitar a little and I feel pretty damn good about that.

Blackthorne
Super Nintendo
Blizzard Interactive
1994

In 1994, I read a review of a game called Blackthorne, then a current release. The review, as I remember it, compared the game favorably to another game called Flashback, only this game had more and better combat. At the time, twelve year old Isaac was of the opinion that Flashback was the single greatest video game of all time. If this game was anything like Flashback, I had to play it.

That was 18 years ago. I played Blackthorne for the very first time this week, and I can certainly see why Game Players Magazine gave Blackthorne an 8.5 out of 10. This is an attractive, solidly built game that does some interesting things. It has a really neat shooting mechanic. In 1994, this would have been a respectable, above average game.

There have been a lot of outstanding puzzle platformers in the 18 year interim, and I’ve played more than a few of them. Braid, Portal, and an entire tradition of “Metroidvania” have raised the stakes of what one can expect from the genre. And even in 1994 Blackthorne was already outshone by the likes of Flashback, Another World, and Game Boy Donkey Kong.

The mechanics of this game have not stood the test of time. Most of the “puzzles” in this game are solved through careful deployment of an assortment of different types of bombs, and the game gives you a very limited number of them, with no way to replenish your stock other than die and retry.

Once I threw a grenade at a monster to kill it, but before the grenade went off, he hit me with his whip, knocking me back to a previous screen before the kill could be registered. I had no choice but to restart the level. Another time, after killing a monster, I gained a new item that was a flying scarab robot that could be remotely detonated. There was another monster on the same screen, which I killed with the scarab. That used up my only scarab, which I needed to kill a different monster. I had no choice but to restart the level. Another time, I used a grenade to open a door. Behind the door were health potions, but no additional bombs. This meant that I didn’t have any grenades left to open the door at the other end of the section I was in. I had no choice but to quit this game in disgust.

You don’t notice good game design until you see it absent. Blackthorne‘s trial-and-error, no-margin-for-error, punishing-fail-state approach to gameplay was fine in 1994 because we hadn’t yet invented better ways. In 2013, it just seems amazing that they would make a game that doesn’t prevent you from using items you need to progress, or give you some way to regain your weapons if you used them prematurely. It feels dumb in a way that points to how games have gotten smart. And it makes me scared as hell to replay Flashback.

Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution

Nintendo DS

Firaxis

2008

If some strange set of unlikely circumstances created a scenario in which I could only play a single video game for the rest of my days, and for some reason we will not be exploring, it would be a game of my choosing, well, the game that would be chosen might feature fewer giraffes of the spatial variety than longtime readers of this feature might suspect. The game that I would pick in this highly farfetched situation is Civilization IV, but really any version of Civ would probably be fine in this strange-but-ill-defined scenario.

I love Civ very much, but it scares me. Civ is not like other games. Playing Civ is like being in a relationship with Robocop. It is kind of amazing, but probably not very healthy.

Forget World of Warcraft, if you want a game to drain all all of your free time, you want Civilization. Unlike WOW, or its MMO ilk, Civ is actually a good game. An amazing game. It is a game that grabs hold of you and makes you say “one more turn.” And then you say “no, this one more turn will be my last.” And then you say “one more turn.” And then you see the sun come up and realize you forgot to sleep. It is a game that I have on several occasions spent thirty-odd hours completing, and immediately upon completion, started a new game, muttering to myself “this time a cultural victory” or “this time let’s try spies.”

I have repeatedly had to quit Civ cold turkey for my own good. It had been over a year since I last allowed myself to play Civ when I found a used copy of the DS version of Civ Revolution for five dollars. How could I say no at that price?

Why did I think I could say yes?

Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution on the DS is a Civ game that I can take anywhere. Who the hell thought that creating such a game was safe? I can play this game in bed. I can play it in the kitchen. I can play it in the bathroom. This is a version of Civ that in theory I never have to stop playing.

It just might kill me.

Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball
Super Nintendo
Hudson Soft
1991

Video Games are expensive. This is true today and it was especially true in in 1992, the age of the Super Nintendo. They seemed impossibly expensive for a ten year old kid with a ten dollar a week allowance. Games were priced between 60 and 80 dollars, and back then we didn’t have Game Stops full of used games and if the Record Exchange carried video games, nobody at the time had bothered to tell me. My family rented a lot of video games, but I only owned one.

One day I was reading a video game magazine in the supermarket while my mom shopped, and I found an ad for really cheap video games by mail. I scanned the list and one stood out: Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball. Now, I didn’t give the slightest shit about basketball, and I had never heard of Bill Laimbeer, but there was one thing about this game that seemed amazing to me. The mind blowing thing about this video game was that it was only eight dollars. That was a number of dollars that I possessed! I mailed them my eight dollars that very night.

A long six to eight weeks followed.

One day I came home from school and the game had arrived. It was just a cartridge, no booklet, no box. I didn’t care. It was here and it was mine. Fighting siblings for television time was usually an epic struggle in my house, but my new game took priority. With nervous anticipation I put the cartridge in the system and turned it on.

The game was amazing. It depicted a a dark world where basketball was a brutal full contact sport. Clone players were bought from megacorps. The basketball court was littered with buzzsaws and explosive mines. Teams had names like The Posse, The Ruffians, and the Danger Dudes. Everybody had mohawks.

Folks, I played this game to death. Repeatedly crushing my little brother in exhibition mode, and climbing the ladder in league play until I had an entire team of Bill Laimbeers. That took some work, too. Bill Laimbeers are expensive. But what I had worked out was that as long as I had a point lead, I could grab the ball, and forego scoring in favor of wandering the court looking for the money that was randomly scattered on the court. You could earn a small fortune this way, and I felt quite clever indeed for having worked this out. This was my game.

Twenty years later, my perceptions of this game are slightly different. This game is… pretty terrible. It is strategically shallow and very easy. Gameplay only uses the pad and a single button. Every player on every team looks identical, which is to say a white guy with body armor and a mohawk. A basketball game with nothing about white guys is… odd.

Also, there is this game called Speedball, which is very similar to Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball, only better in every single aspect. It is pretty obscure in America but trust me, it is pretty good.

Despite the fact that this game is, if we’re being honest, hilariously bad, I still have a soft spot for it. The goofiness of the premise is delightful, and the gameplay, simple as it may be, works. The game moves at a good clip, and I honestly still find it a fun way to kill five minutes.

In 2007 I decided to play and microreview every video game I owned. About 250 games across fifteen platforms. I estimated this to be a two year project, give or take. I failed to factor two things into this projection: my becoming a father and my deep-seated laziness. Also I kept buying and trading games. And so this project languished.

Despite the laughable frequency of my updates, I have never abandoned this project in my heart. Late last year, I was gearing up for a massive rededication to the project, building up a backlog of reviews to post. Then I got robbed.

In a day I went from owning about 400 games, a decade of carefully curated content, to about 30 games that the thieves couldn’t bother to grab, mostly Atari and NES games. In other words, all that they left were the games I had already reviewed.

I was a bit taken aback.

Now I have a collection to rebuild. And rebuilding I am. And as I rebuild, the 2600-360 project will now tackle each game roughly as I pick them up. I have a lot of games that I want to play. And I’m going to let you know how that goes.

By Riley, Age 4

Once there was a boy tied up with a magic rope. A superhero named Lord Bravery saw him and saved him.

The boy went home.

Then Lord Bravery saw two supervillains, Cave Guy and Cobra Queen. He didn’t know that they were boyfriend and girlfriend. He beat them and threw them in a trash can!

Then Lord Bravery saw ten more villains! There were ten of them. The point is that there were ten villains.

Then ten superheroes showed up and they all beat the villains with Lord Bravery.

The point of the story is that a magic rope can have chemicals in it.

The End

I really like to watch Looney Tunes. If you like Porky Pig, you should watch Looney Tunes. I really like when Daffy drives Porky Pig nuts. I really like Porky Pig, Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny. It was very funny when Daffy was being painted crazy. Do you know who did it? Bugs Bunny! My favorite part is when they sing a song for the Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner Hour.

I have written a piece for the all-stealth-game website Sneaky Bastards, wherein I take an unpopular position.   Check it out!

Fucking Skyrim. It seems every damn person on the planet has played or is playing Skyrim (This may be slightly exaggerated.) If you like to read Game of the Year lists, Skyrim was the clear consensus GOTY. As I write this, a friend is IMing me to tell me about her love of Skyrim. This game is drowning in the combined sticky affection of both popular and critical reception.

There is a reason for all this love. Without a doubt, the game is a staggering achievement. This is the singleplayer computer equivalent of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign that has shipped 10 million units. That just doesn’t happen unless something special is happening. Skyrim gives you a giant open world absolutely stuffed with things to do, and gives you the freedom to explore that world as you see fit. Never has the illusion of the open world been so beautifully realized.

I hate Skyrim. I think it is a terrible video game.

The first twenty five hours I spent playing this game were amazing. The second twenty five were increasingly dull, frustrating and awful. Finally, I yanked the game out of my Xbox in disgust and mailed it far, far away from my physical body. Angry for the hours of my life it had stolen. Why did things go sour? This game presents an absolutely amazing world. Unfortunately the people who lovingly crafted that world did not make an amazing game to play within it.

This is a game with hundreds (thousands? Almost certainly thousands. Fuckloads.) of “quest objectives.” “Quest objective” being nerdtalk for “shit to do.” Every one of those objectives boils down to either “go somewhere and press the action button”, or “kill stuff”. Of course the act of going somewhere in order to press the action button often involves traversal through geography filled with hostile things that need killing. Most of this game is killing stuff. That’s pretty normal for a video game. The tragedy is that killing stuff in this game just isn’t fun. Well, not fun enough.

You fight a lot of dragons in this game, and the dragons that populate this world are big and scary and graceful and they feel well and truly dragonny. The first time I fought a dragon, it was amazing. The second time I fought a dragon, it was amazing. The third time I fought a dragon, it was amazing. The fourth time I fought a dragon was pretty damn similar to the first three times.

Skyrim actually has some very fun combat situations. The first dragon you kill is an exciting and unique encounter. The first dungeon you clear feels great and nails the atmosphere of a good dungeon delve. However, since this game lacks any depth at all to its combat, clearing out one dungeon is much like clearing out any other dungeon. Once I learned how to effectively sneak up on things and shoot them in the head, I had basically solved the game.

Everything about this game that doesn’t directly contribute to worldbuilding lies somewhere between mediocre and bad. The game has systems for “crafting” that make it very easy to create powerful and valuable weapons, armor, and potions. Crafting makes it so easy to earn money that the only problem with getting coin is that nobody has enough cash to buy your wares. This should break the game’s economy, but the solution seems to have been to not stock stores with anything worth buying.

Even worse, the best weapons and armor in the game are the ones that you make for yourself. This means you don’t need to loot dungeons for treasure because money is no object and you don’t need to loot it for gear because the stuff you make will be better. Skyrim is a dungeon delving game that takes away your motivation for looting. That’s some cripplingly bad design.

As for the game’s story? There is a ton of it, but it is all utterly uncompelling. Stiff and linear, most of the story beats involve listening to generic characters traveling down long expository paths of dialogue that all seem to arrive at “go kill this thing/dude.” The game’s systems of dialogue, combined with an adherence to doing everything in-engine in real time cripple the ability of the game’s writers, who are clearly trying to tell interesting stories but are unable to escape the constraints of the game.

Bad story, bad combat, and bad looting. It all leads to a hollow experience. But for all it’s ugly machinery, the world of Skyrim is a joyously beautiful one, and I tromped around it for over a full day’s worth of playing before the magic of the worldcraft started to wear off. I kept on playing it for another full day before I quit. And I quit pissed.

Fifty hours in, I had not completed a single major storyline. I had explored a fraction of what the game had to offer and I had no desire to see any of the stories through. I wasn’t invested. I wasn’t engaged. It was so unfulfilling. I felt owed an epic adventure but the game couldn’t keep me interested enough to get to the epic part.

I am aware that in this age of six-hour blockbuster games, complaining about a game that gets boring after fifty hours of play is crazysauce. But there is more to the worth of a work than it’s length. (In fact, video games are pretty much the only major medium where length is a significant qualitative factor.) Payoff is important. A game where you dick around until you get bored had better provide a complete experience in the off-dicking. I don’t feel Skyrim does.

No payoff, but still, this is a game that provided me with twenty five hours of great, compelling exploration. Can a game that does that possibly be bad? I’ve given that question a lot of thought and y’know what? Yup. Skyrim is a shitty game. It’s also an amazing game. Despite decades of review-score mentality, there is no reason a game cannot be both. Very few things are either “great” or “awful”. They contain facets. Unfortunately for Skryim, the more I played, the more the awful came to the fore.

Clearly, my opinion is in the minority. This game topped a lot of “best of” lists. Most people seemed to not have my issues with this game. I’m still trying to suss out why. Maybe I approached it in the “wrong” way. Maybe I’m less charmed by the endorphin ping of numbers ticking up than others. Maybe I’m just a grumpy old bastard. Whatever, the reason my takeaway from this game is largely negative.

Except…

There’s this moment in the game where I’m hunting a dragon. I’m letting the dragon fight with the local fauna while I slowly wear it down with a flurry of arrows from as great a distance as possible. I’m doing a pretty good job of ruining this dragon’s day, when I stumble over a resting grizzly bear, waking it up. And at this point I could care fuck-all about dragons because, this bear is going to kill me. I immediately start backpedaling furiously, dumping arrows into the bear as fast as I can. It doesn’t matter, this thing is going to close the distance and kill me with a single swipe. But before death can come, my view is filled with scary fucking scale and wing as the dragon I had been fighting lowers itself directly behind the bear. Right before the bear can kill me, the dragon spouts fire straight at both the bear and myself. The bear takes the brunt of it, shielding myself from a fatal blast. And the bear forgets about me, and goes to attack the dragon, while I get the hell out of dodge.

That encounter with the bear and the dragon is what I will take away from Skyrim. Not the tedious dungeon slogs, not trying to unload my vast potion overstock, not failing to give a shit about any of the quests. Ten years from now what I will remember is the moment the dragon saved me from the bear. And a moment like that is why video games are worth playing.

3.8 billion years ago life began with single celled organisms.  Over time, those organisms gave way to multicellular life, and from there, life just got more and more complex, until after billions of years we finally had animal life.  Over the next 600 million years animal life got more and more complex, eventually resulting in Homo Sapient, the wise man.

This is where things speed up.  Possessing the ability to use tools as well as a capacity for self-reflection, it took Man a scant 200,000 years to develop agriculture.  Farming lead to settlement.  Settlement led to civilization.  Civilization led to culture.  Over the next 10,000 years this culture evolved into to a beautiful social mechanism slowly and painfully spreading out across the entire landmass of the planet creating works of ever increasing beauty and complexity.  In the 200 years since the industrial revolution, things really began to speed up, and they began to speed even faster in the 20 years since entering the “information age”.
Now, a decade into what is laughingly called the “twenty-first century” terrestrial life has reached it’s apex.  All that replicating, that adapting, that striving has led to the single moment in time where, at long last this could exist:

That’s it.  The game’s over.  Time to put away the pieces and go home.

One day, when my daughter was around two she caught a glimpse of my penis. Her face absolutely lit up. “OH MY GOODNESS,” she breathlessly intoned. “YOU HAVE A TAIL!!”

More recently, during a trip into a public men’s room I explained urinals to her, and for a while whenever I was going to the bathroom we’d do the following routine:

*Knock knock*
“Hey Isaac! Are you going to the bathroom?”
“Yes, honey. I’m going to the bathroom.”
“Are you… STANDING UP?! Hahahahahaha!”

Gargoyles
Sega Genesis
Buena Vista Interactive
1995

This game is noteworthy for one thing, and that thing is certainly not the gameplay. The gameplay is, well, bad. However, if you are a fan of the show, this game rates a footnote in the Gargoyles lore for introducing the Eye of Odin as a Gargoylian macguffin.

Although, to be entirely clear, the actual eye of Odin already existed as a mythological macguffin.  The folks at Buena Vista Interactive didn’t say to themselves “Hey, there should be this goddy guy named Odin who can be an eyeball shy of a set.”  That idea totally already existed.  It was made up by a dude probably named Erik Erikson, or possibly Olaf McViking. I’m not sure on the specifics. The point is the guys making this game had the idea that this ocular stray could be a thing that got mentioned in their video game.

In what was a pretty silly act of cross-promotion, this macguffin not only got incorporated to Gargoyles cannon proper, but was eventually revealed to be one of the Three Supermacguffins of the Archmage. This is a franchise with a lot of macguffins.

The best part of all this macguffinry is that the Gargoyle clan had a big storage closet in which they kept all their inactive plot devices.  Mixed in with the flashlights and the vacuum cleaner, not only did they dump some of the most powerful magical artifacts in the world, they also stashed a comatose cyborg frankenstein gargoyle. I really appreciate that sort of verisimilitude.

Altered Beast
Sega Genesis
Sega
1989

This is an almost unplayably shitty beat ‘em up. That’s pretty impressive, because “beat ‘em up” is one of the very easiest game genres with which to make a passably mediocre game. Punch, kick, jump, jumpkick, throw, a bunch of enemies, colorful bosses… you’ve got yourself a beat ‘em up.

The fundamental divide in classic beat ‘em ups is between the games with an isometric “3d” playing field and those with a single plane with platforming elements. The former becomes about crowd control, keeping yourself from being flanked, while the latter is more about carefully timing your jumps.

The makers of Altered Beast boldly rejected both choices, instead making the stunning choice of not creating any platforming elements, while also giving the player only one plane to fight upon, thus taking all of the depth out of an already shallow genre. This rough game structure is rounded out with terribly stilted fighting, muddy garbage graphics, an a vague cloud of shame.

This game was a pack-in game with the Genesis. Everyone who bought a Genesis got a copy. The NES came with Super Mario Bros., the greatest video game of all time. The SNES came with Super Mario World, a masterpiece showcase of what can be done with 16 bit hardware. The Genesis came with a kick to the teeth. It is pretty shocking that anyone ever bought a Genesis under these circumstances.

When I was a kid, due to a mishear on my part, there was a period of time where I thought that this game was called “Ultra Beast.” Frankly, that sounds like a much cooler game. Sometimes I like to pretend that somewhere there IS an Ultra Beast game, one where you turn into monsters and that is totally rad to play.

Whew, finally made it to the Genesis. I’ve been waiting a long time to get here. Back in the day, there were two types of kids: Nintendo kids and Sega kids. The Sega kids alleged that the SNES was a namby pamby baby system, lacking in attitude. The Nintendo kids argued that attitude is all well and good, but at the end of the day the SNES had better games. I was a Nintendo kid.

I grew up pretty ignorant of the Genesis. I’ve played a little bit of Sonic and once I borrowed a friend’s Genesis for a month and played through Shadowrun. That’s about it. There are tons of games on this system that complete unknowns to me.  One of the main reasons I started this stupid little project was do delve into the mystery of the Genesis.  I’ve got a Genesis and a stack of games I snagged at a yard sale for cheap.  Time to fire up the Blast Processor.

Radiohead

The Association

The Bad Plus

Tiger Army

The Space Cossaks

Wolfmother

King Missile

The Jesus Lizard

The Damned

88 Fingers Louie

Joykiller

The Stranglers

Twisted Sister

Ugly Kid Joe

The Vandals

The Beastie Boys

Primus

The International Noise Conspiracy

Black Rob

Lords of Acid

Meat Puppets

The People Under the Stairs

Smash Mouth