Developed/Published by: Sega Studios Australia / Sega, Disney Interactive Studios Released: September 3, 2013 Completed: 20th April, 2014 Completion: Rescued Minnie! Trophies / Achievements: 61%
Yep, I played through both version of Castle of Illusion in the same weekend.
I did this because I was sure, sure that this wasn’t going to be a remake but actually one of those “inspired by…” type things. Because with Castle of Illusion’s frankly weird level design and pretty darn dated everything else, I didn’t think they’d be that straightforward with it.
Uh, so the weird thing is that they really were. It’s not like they didn’t change some stuff. Most notably, the game goes “full 3D platformer” in certain segments (which is awful, for a reason I’ll explain in a second) and certain parts of the levels are changed (though in general their structure is amazingly faithful.) Bosses have more attack waves (usually allowing them to use the full 3D stuff a bit.) And Mickey’s jump is different.
Except… it’s also weird and terrible? It’s still floaty, it’s just as hard to aim his landing, but for some other reason? I can’t put my finger on why both jumps are terrible for different reasons (and I really can’t be arsed to go back and play them off against each other) but trust me: they’re both bad. And in the remake, not only is it bad in 2D, it’s godawful in 3D. Non-stop frustration as you slightly mis-aim Mickey and drown him in milk again and again and again.
(Because he can swim in water, but not milk. I guess that makes sense? Sorta?)
This is, genuinely, a remake of Castle of Illusion with some extra bits bolted on (most notably totally extraneous narration and loads of chat from Mickey, who… did Mickey always sound like this? He sounds so off-brand. Like a “Mikey Mouse” VHS, bought from a discount store in Orlando.) If you were going to play one version, I’d be hard pushed to say which one to bother with—probably the original—though both can be finished really quickly, and it’s really not worth the effort.
Here is the thing, though: much like with the original Castle of Illusion, it’s not like you can’t see there was talent on the team. Had this been a reimagining, not a remake, and they’d manage to make the jump less weird, I’d be happy to gamble this would actually have been pretty great.
Uh, not that it matters because Sega shut down Sega Studios Australia right after this. Alas.
Will I ever play it again? I could go back and collect more diamonds and do time trials, I guess? I’m not gonna, though.
Final Thought: Interesting fact: Emiko Yamamoto, director of the original game and who also supervised this, went on to work at Disney Interactive in Japan and has served as a producer on almost the entire Kingdom Hearts series. Huh.
Developed/Published by: Sega Released: 21/11/1990 Completed: 19th April, 2014 Completion: Rescued Minnie! Trophies / Achievements: n/a
I have strong memories of Castle of Illusion as one of the games that people marvelled at in video game magazines of the time for being particularly beautiful and holding promise for what was then the “next generation,” so this weekend discovering that M2 had ported it to PS3 was too good to resist.
It’s interesting, then, that on playing Castle of Illusion—a “pre-Sonic” Mega Drive title—that the thing I find most remarkable is how much it reminds me that even by the time of the Mega Drive video games were… under-developed? It’s hard to explain I guess, but the thing I most remember of playing games in the 80s, particularly on the home computers popular in the UK, is that sense that developers either got to this point where they went “ok, good enough” or that they didn’t actually know that games could be better than that. It’s fondly remembered, perhaps, but Castle of Illusion has that half-baked feel where you can see some bits are done absolutely expertly—Mickey’s animation is lovely, the cut-scenes are sweet, and certain stages definitely have their moments—but there are other parts where you have to question why it was there that they stopped.
I mean, Mickey’s jump. It’s just the weirdest, floaty, awkward jump. One of those jumps where you feel like you’re pushing a bitmap around, not controlling a character. No “game feel” at all; something you notice in the many many bits where the ceiling is low enough that Mickey clonks his head over and over.
Or the enemies, who do that thing where they just move towards the right of the screen at a steady velocity, and respawn if you walk them off screen. No sense that they’re actual beings who are actually there. I’m definitely reminded as to how far ahead of the game Nintendo was with the Mario series compared to everyone else at this point; it’s actually crazy to consider that anyone would have played Super Mario Bros. 3 as a developer and then be happy to put this out. I’m not talking about world maps or secrets, the things that I suppose made Mario 3 feel so amazing at the time; I’m talking about making sure the jump feels good, the level design supports it, and the enemies feel worth jumping on.
The level design is weird too. The first two levels are completely linear, but then from level three onwards you can’t actually progress unless you explore (totally counter-intuitively in level three, too, as it involves you falling into water you don’t know you can swim in.) Indeed, the game’s wrapper—Mickey going in each castle’s door, one by one—is presented “in engine” which makes me think maybe these levels were supposed to be approached in any order, and to be generally non-linear, but that got snipped off at some point.
That’s total speculation, of course.
I didn’t actually have a bad time finishing this, however. There’s a pleasant enough pace, and once you’re comfortable with its quirks it’s very much your average early platformer (one that’s nice enough to get through thanks to M2’s good port and freely-available save states.) It doesn’t stand out to the point where you should particularly feel the need to play it, though.
Will I ever play it again? Nope.
Final Thought: I’m a bit sad this game isn’t as pretty or as good as I read it was in the magazines of the time. The vision of games I built in my mind from reading many, many more game magazines than playing games is something I come up against regularly now I have access to any game I want; even now I can look at the cover of Castle of Illusion and imagine something exciting, something just beyond my reach.
Developed/Published by: Grapefrukt Released: May 7th, 2013 Completed: 18th April, 2014 Completion: I researched all the monoliths. Trophies / Achievements: n/a
I had played Rymdkapsel on release, but I thought the core concept—placing tetrominoes down to create a space station, choosing if they’re corridors, barracks, weapons rooms or so on—was so cool that after touching it briefly I put it down thinking “at some point in the future, when I’ve got more time, I’ll really dig into this.”
(God knows why I chose this weekend, and right before bedtime, too.)
I must admit: I’m a little disappointed in Rymdkapsel. It’s my own fault in some ways. You see, Rymdkapsel is a small, short, single experience. Your station is centrally located between four mysterious monoliths, and you reach your corridor tentacles out to research them, all the while making sure you don’t run out of materials and are well defended by weapons rooms. It’s really really cool. But once you’ve done that—and it should only take a few hours—you’re, uh, done.
Now, before you cry foul, you can continue playing—there’s definitely an ending if you can get through 23 waves of enemies, and there’s a relaxing zen mode for stress-free building—but I’m kind of surprised because the design promises so much more than one canned experience.
Yeah, I’ll say it… I wish this was a rogue-like-like. I know, I know. Everything is a rogue-like-like now. But I don’t see why with Rymdkapsel I don’t constantly have different monoliths to find or why the enemies aren’t different each time (well, to an extent). I can definitely see playing this over and over if there were differences every time I played. It doesn’t make the basic experience of playing the game the first time any worse—actually, I totally recommend playing Rymdkapsel, it’s great—it’s just… why am I not still playing it?
Will I ever play it again? I really want to, which is the odd thing. But I can’t spend my time re-playing the same experience, I have this site to think about!
Final Thought: I mean, look, I can see some problems; you probably can’t let a single space station get too big, or it’ll make the game unwieldy. But it could stay a short, just very varied, experience, I think? There are some other things that would have to be considered, too. In this version, you can sneakily place and then delete corridors to ensure you get the right shapes you want, which you’d probably want to avoid to make the rogue-like-like harder. And in that case, well, Rymdkapsel is described as a “meditative space strategy” which is definitely a step down from the intense, “you are going to die, and soon” experience of most rogue-inspired titles. So maybe this isn’t an ideal twist.
Developed/Published by: Studio Liverpool / Sony Computer Entertainment Released: February 22nd, 2012 Completed: 15th April, 2014 Completion: Finished the single-player campaign with all elite passes, played one section of the online campaign, and played a few chunks of the Wipeout HD/Fury campaigns. Trophies / Achievements: 34%
With Kurt Cobain’s suicide on April 5th twenty years ago generally considered to line up with the birth of Britpop—as if his head exploded into a bloom of English roses—it’s fairly fitting that I found myself digging into the last outing of the Wipeout franchise while the British press felt the timing was right to masturbate itself silly with retrospectives of a romanticised past.
Wipeout was a PlayStation UK launch title on the 29th of September, 1995, so right at the height of Britpop-mania; Wonderwall was released just two weeks earlier. It’s hard not to feel pangs of horror that a series that once felt so futuristic (by way of The Designer’s Republic) is now nineteen years old, but as with Britpop, Wipeout’s place is to line up as an example of what was once British exceptionalism. When I think of this period of post-Cobain US, I layer a sickly, orange television-transmission filter over a country spinning its wheels culturally while it waited for nu metal to be invented. Twisted Metal defined the “extreme” angle of the PlayStation’s marketing in the US, still locked into the “Genesis does what Nintendon’t” mindset; ugly, nihilistic car combat with evil clown iconography. Like nu metal, the only thing that could make it seem cool is that your parents might confiscate it.
Wipeout, however, was something different. For whatever reason, Sony managed something in the nineties that it didn’t manage to quite keep up as the world got smaller—PlayStation in the UK was “cool.” Lara Croft on the cover of The Face, Wipeout demo pods at legendary club Cream. Wipeout wasn’t about chugging Mountain Dew and yelling at your mom to stay out of your room, Wipeout was about running a few laps while you waited for your mates to come round after TFI Friday finished so you could go down the pub and “have it large.”
Honestly, if you asked me to visualise a copy of Wipeout for PlayStation, it’s actually impossible to do it without seeing it lying on a pile of copies of Select magazine next to a packet of Rizlas, probably dusted with left-over cannabis resin.
(And if that doesn’t make any sense at all, well, you weren’t in the UK in the nineties.)
But, of course, I have a complicated relationship with Britpop. I said English roses for a reason; for after all, on the world stage, Britain is England, and Britpop was an English movement that, fair or foul, the rest of the UK was tugged along with. It was never really my movement, and when it came down to it, my key memories aren’t playing Wipeout and listening to Suede, it’s playing Wave Race 64 and listening to Arab Strap.
So when I return to these things, there’s a familiarity, yet a distance. An understanding of what the promise was—Britpop is gonna save us from the indignity of either America’s miserabilism or its manufactured pop / games are finally going to be cool—but too much knowledge that it was never going to come true.
And yet, I have a fondness for Britpop—and Wipeout—because it did try. It might not have been fighting my battle, but there was an inherent optimism I respect. And like the reunion of a Britpop band from twenty years ago, with Wipeout 2048 you can definitely tell what it was they were trying for originally… except it doesn’t look quite the same.
Wipeout 2048 was sadly the last game Studio Liverpool (née Psygnosis) would ship, and one does have to wonder if the changing face of what PlayStation is and was led to a game like Wipeout 2048, which lost all the swagger and self-belief of the Designers Republic and European dance as the years passed, ending up here, with generic futurism and bland EDM.
Underneath that, however, it’s still Wipeout. I remember playing Wipeout 2097 at its height and being utterly frustrated by just how difficult it was, because when you’re dealing with floating racers all the things that you expect about vehicles (how they turn, what happens when they hit walls, what braking means) are all out of the window. I never learned how to play it, and I could never find anyone to explain how you play it either. So let me inform you if you don’t know: Wipeout is a proper racing sim that just happens to have, uh, weapon-equipped floating vehicles. You’re trying to get around the tracks by maintaining a proper racing line, braking early and accelerating properly. You can use air brakes to slow on turns, but they don’t help you drift or anything (well, there’s this “side-shift” thing, but I never got much use out of it). You don’t want to hit walls, but they don’t slow you down as much as you might think (you know, like Gran Tusimo). It’s actually weird to realise years later that the Wipeout series is as serious as Gran Turismo despite its trappings. It’s a series you have to dedicate yourself to—for at least a while—and I was surprised that I dedicated myself to Wipeout 2048 enough to get the “elite pass” in every part of the campaign (definitely helped by the fact they were all single races—no tedious tournaments—although I really hate the “Zone” mode introduced with Wipeout Fusion.)
One you learn it, the game does feel good, even if the level design and campaign never really seems to live up to it (combat events are a nadir.) You can see what people liked about it. It’s just that, like Britpop, it had its time, you know? You can’t play the same songs, just older and uglier, and still expect to stand above.
Will I ever play it again? No. There are loads of levels left in the Wipeout HD/Fury campaigns but I actually found them much less inspiring than Wipeout 2048’s main campaign so I won’t bother.
Final Thought: According to BBC 6 Music, the best Britpop song was voted to be Common People by Pulp. A band who I don’t think ever deserved to be called it, there’s something insidious about marketing a movement such that a song as clear-eyed and angry as Common People was seen at the time and still is seen as a shouty sort of pub sing-a-long, ripe for jokey karaoke covers by William Shatner. I heard it recently and it made me think about Cart Life again. When I think of what Cart Life is lacking, it’s that conviction in Jarvis Cocker’s voice when he screams about exactly how it feels to be a “common person”—simultaneously derided and romanticised for what they are thought to be, never considered truly as who they are.
“You will never understand / how it feels to live your life / with no meaning or control / and with nowhere left to go / you are amazed that they exist / and they burn so bright / whilst you can only wonder why.”
Developed/Published by: Acquire, Japan Studio / Sony Computer Entertainment Released: March 18th, 2010 Completed: 29th March, 2014 Completion: Finished the main campaign without letting a single person die/go unsaved. Hurrah! Trophies / Achievements: n/a
Oh, hello! Patchwork Heroes is a game I actually wrote about already—for exp. issue infinity—and so I don’t think I should write about it again. And, yeah, I wrote about it without having finished it. Deal with it. I kind of forgot about the game for a while but returned to it last weekend and polished it off. I’m not going to discuss it any more than that—look, if you wanted to hear what I had to say, you should have bought a copy of the zine three years ago, ok—well, other than to say you should buy it, you can download it for the PS Vita and it’s lovely. Just buy it.
Will I ever play it again? A tougher question than usual. I can see myself playing it again, yeah, but I’d (as usual) rather see a sequel.
Final Thought: It’s funny how if you really like a game, failing a lot and having to replay it just isn’t a problem, eh? Towards the end of Patchwork Heroes there’s actually a few unfair twists (hell, it’s a Japanese video game, that’s the way they make things harder) but I always had this sense I could deal with it, that I could do better. So I would spend hours not really getting further but still enjoying it. And yet in so many games when I hit a high challenge it’s such an unpleasant stumbling block. Was I ever really enjoying them at all?
Developed/Published by: Richard Hofmeier Released: July 29, 2010 Completed: 27th March, 2014 Completion: I didn’t. This is the first time on this site I have a game I can officially state I gave up on. Trophies / Achievements: n/a
Before we get into the article: you can pre-order a copy of exp. 2602, my brand new zine, right now. If you haven’t picked up any issues yet, there’s a discounted bundle of all three zines! Patreon members get an even bigger discount: subscriptions start at just $1!
I wasn’t going to write about Cart Life! As I played it for a while and gave up on it, I was prepared to let it slink off into the dark. However, I was asked by a few people (not least Incredibly Strange Games’ Chris Charla) why I didn’t like Cart Life, so I kind of feel honour bound to outline why I couldn’t bring myself to even finish one of the stories in Cart Life.
Full disclosure: I played every one for at least two-three days of in-game time, and in every case multiple times.
So, Cart Life then. After this year’s IGF and GDC Awards, where Papers Please cleaned up, I decided to go back and find out what it was that made the last two award-show defining titles the titles you—at a glance—can deduce are obviously depressing, intentionally boring, and glibly worthy. I’ll talk about Papers Please in future! But I wanted to trust that these games were being chosen for what they actually are, not what they represent vis-a-vis a “trend.” (I’m not convinced.)
But what is Cart Life?
Cart Life is a weird sort of mash-up of adventure game and Lemonade Tycoon-esque simulator. There’s sort of a dash of The Sims, too. Basically, you have a hero—one of three street vendors—and they have a goal, something simple like “get enough money together for a deposit on a flat within a week.” They’ve also got to eat, sleep, and feed their addiction (smoking, or coffee, for example.)
So, what you do is you get them up in the morning, you get them over to their cart, and you spend their day doing monotonous tasks. Then you either do something vaguely social/story-related if there’s time, or go to sleep and have pointedly bad dreams. And there’s never, ever enough time in the day.
That there’s never enough time in the day is an obvious point for a game to make, but it’s a point that Cart Life is making, and it’s what kind of leads to what I consider my main criticism of it:
Without already being extremely video game literate, Cart Life is impossibly off-putting. Yet with an extreme level of game literacy, Cart Life presents a challenge that obscures anything it’s trying to say.
This is possibly a little hard to explain, but to put it roughly: Cart Life uses its video gamey aspects: world navigation, maps, menus, “mini-games” to represent the challenge the characters face. But if you’re not already very familiar with this kind of thing, the idiosyncrasies of the system and general lack of useful tutorials are insurmountable. And this isn’t something I could call useful to the meaning to the game, as it’s definitely a struggle with the “top layer” of the content.
Of course, if you can become familiar with how to play the game, as I did… it’s too easy to get drawn into a system where you are determined to absolutely murder the challenge; to “min-max” your play. Didn’t spend the day just right or make enough money? Reload the last save.
This is probably controversial! In fact, I can imagine that many (most?) players of Cart Life doggedly played a “failing” hero right to the end (where it turns out it’s the taking part that counts, anyway.) However, having played many, many first days where I made mistakes because I didn’t understand how to play, once I did I was in the mindset that I could always do better. It was after beginning Melanie’s story for the fifth time or so where I managed to run a “perfect” first day (set up the cart, get the permit and a bus pass, even walk her daughter home from school) that I was like “gah, fuck this.” (Admittedly because I’d min-maxed so hard that I went to bed at 6pm, woke up at 3am the next day and broke the game completely.)
In an earlier article I talked briefly about how when and why you stopped playing a game is also educational, just in a different way from doggedly getting to the end to suck the marrow from the bones of its design. With Cart Life, I stopped because I found the tension of “being a game” and “being meaningful” impossible to relate when presented the design of Cart Life.
There are several interviews with Richard Hofmeier where he talks about how the game is supposed to not so much be depressing, but to instil in the player that kind of pride a wage slave worker gets from doing a boring, repetitive task well. I’m going to set aside how arguably patronising that is—there’s a rougher, more polemic article I could write about how Cart Life’s success is related to a safe, private othering of the working poor by the kind of middle-classes who would write and talk about and vote for an “art” game—and say that having been a wage slave, Cart Life is weak at this. I know how it feels to cut the plastic ties on a bundle of newspapers or a cardboard box, and it doesn’t feel like switching my hands to the keyboard to type “cut the ties,” an experience which in every case I thought “urgh, how irritating.”
You don’t think “how irritating” when doing a job like that. You think “just a few more then it’s break time” or “fuck, these bindings are cutting into my hand” or you escape into your own mind entirely because it’s all you’ve really got to do.
I just don’t see the challenge of the game as accurately representing the challenge of these lives, something that I think Hofmeier admits (he’s stated in interviews that actual vendor cart owners respond least positively to his game, and I do understand his artistic urge to make dealing with newspapers involve text.)
But If you want a key example: Andrus is an immigrant. As an immigrant myself, one who was pretty sure he was speaking English, I discovered that when I moved to Canada I spoke Scots and no one understood me. Just talking to people became a difficult navigation of the right words to use. A challenge.
Andrus? He speaks awkwardly, yeah. But if I want to talk to anyone in the game, I just hit “up” and he does all the work for me.
Will I ever play it again? Hofmeier has made the game open source and I’m definitely interested to see if anyone is interested in picking the game up and murdering the bugs which plague it. I actually doubt we’ll see a complete, non-glitchy version of the game, but if we did, I’d consider taking another run at it, tempering my urge to min-max or “be a gamer.”
Final Thought: I wouldn’t let Andrus smoke. No matter how bad his cough got, how poorly treated by the cough drops from the store, I wouldn’t let him smoke. I never said the game didn’t succeed in some ways.
Developed/Published by: Project Soul / Namco Bandai Released: September 1st, 2009 Completed: 25th March, 2014 Completion: Uh… there’s no actual story mode or anything in this. Not even an Arcade mode. I just… stopped. Trophies / Achievements: n/a
Apparently Soulcalibur is how you write the name of this series? Huh. Well… you know, Soulcalibur on Dreamcast is the first time I remember being “wowed” by graphics. It’s rare, but it happens. I remember standing in G-Force Games on Union St.—never a game store I’ve been fond of, I’ll spill—and seeing the attract mode run; Kilik all swingin’ his staff about. I was genuinely impressed.
So, later I bought a Dreamcast and Soulcalibur and basically devoured every single piece of content. It was enjoyable! Anyway, a while ago Soulcalibur: Broken Destiny was put on PlayStation Plus and it works on a PlayStation Vita, so I thought I’d give it a wee go and see how I felt about it, having not played a single Soulcalibur game since the Dreamcast one.
The PlayStation Vita screen is nice, isn’t it? Because weirdly, there’s something about the PSP-level graphics on such a nice, crisp screen that I found… impressive. Like these graphics are just good enough that I’m drawn back to that “wow” feeling, without being so good I don’t notice them or feel weird about them. Just before the uncanny valley, or something.
However, I’ve since discovered: I don’t remember or never knew how to play Soulcalibur, and I don’t really care to either.
Will I ever play it again? No.
Final Thought: So, there is a bit of the game that you could expect me to want to complete, the “Gauntlet” mode which is sort of a silly story mode/tutorial. Despite being cute, even borderline amusing, it’s hundreds of incredibly short “react instantly to your opponent’s move” tutorials that are boring and teach you nothing really about the systems of the game. So I didn’t.
Developed/Published by: Zen Studios / LucasArts Released: February 19th, 2013 Completed: 25th March, 2014 Completion: It’s pinball. You can’t actually complete it, so yet again more truthfully: I just stopped playing. Trophies / Achievements: 27%
Pinball is in a wee bit of a renaissance, recently. Not the physical machines (god no) but in video game-o-form, with FarSight Studios more or less kicking the whole thing off with their excellent digital re-creations of classic pinball tables in things like Pinball Hall of Fame and now their ongoing project The Pinball Arcade, which has enough of a following that they’ve managed to run fairly pricey Kickstarters for new tables and otherwise keep up a pretty regular run of new tables.
So people who like this—admittedly fairly niche—line of game design are well served. What I think has been so important to the whole thing is a little odd, though, considering that it’s something I pretty much hate in every other kind of game. It’s achievements.
You see, I don’t actually think it was until I went to the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas that I ever really understood how to play Pinball. For pretty much my entire life up to that point, every table was an inscrutable jumble of flashing lights. You put in your 50p, and the entire aim of the game was “don’t let it go down the hole in the middle… or those holes down the side, but you can’t really do anything about that.”
Not to say I didn’t like some tables! I always loved the Data East Star Wars pinball machine (which we’ll probably never see remade, thanks to this) Twilight Zone and so on. But understand them? No. It was only by spending almost an entire day at the Pinball Hall of Fame, working my way up from the most basic tables to the most modern, that I got this gradual understanding. Tables that have one feature up to tables that have a bazillion. Started to be able to pick out what I was trying to do to make points happen. Started to learn what an incredible game design challenge a pinball machine is.
Not everyone would have this opportunity, and honestly, it still wasn’t enough. And that’s where FarSight stepped in. They added “goals” to every table, which result in achievements. Get the “Standard Goals” and you’ve basically learned the table. Get the “Wizard Goals” and you’re amazing at that table. They’re nice, granular ways to learn the table, always giving you something to aim for other than a high score, and if you’re so good that you’ve got them all, then you’re aiming for some pretty astonishing high scores and the challenge alone should be enough to keep you going. It’s really an incredible way to start to get pinball, and off the back of it I learned to really like what seemed like a confusing yet simultaneously boring table like Black Hole.
Anyway, Star Wars Pinball is a stand-alone game from Zen Studios, basically FarSight’s only competitor with Zen Pinball. They create their own tables—which are a bit more magical, more Devil’s Crush video game pinball, than strictly realistic—and they have no fucking idea how to use achievements to teach the tables or give players an interesting challenge/range of goals. There’s three per table, every one (bar one, a Yoda-based bonus on the Empire Strikes Back table) is insanely hard to do unless you are amazing; in fact the Boba Fett table’s goals are more or less “do everything on the table” and one of the Clone Wars (spit) table’s is “do this one thing flawlessly three times in a row, NO MISTAKES.”
It’s garbage.
Will I ever play it again? No.
Final Thought: What if you don’t want goals, you just want to score points on pinball tables? The tables are ok, I’d actually say they’re overcomplicated by all the video game stuff. And you are going to get SO sick of the theme. The same quotes from the movies, over and over and over again. Barf.
Developed/Published by: Intelligent Systems, Nintendo SPD Group No.2 / Nintendo Released: February 16, 2009 Completed: 10th March, 2014 Completion: Got all the way to the final level, gave up and watched the ending on YouTube. Trophies / Achievements: n/a
It happened! Yes, this is a rare occurrence—admittedly one that’s more usual with Japanese games of an RPG or strategy persuasion, of which this is all of the above—but here’s a game where I got to the end boss, clunked against it without any acceptable way to progress, said “fuck that” to reloading an earlier save and grinding or some other tiresome solution, and just watched the ending on YouTube.
And I was so proud of that time I toughed it out and beat the end boss of the original Persona, too.
It’s sort of a shame! Because there was this… well, I’ll be honest and admit it was brief, but there was this brief period where I was sort of into Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon. In fact I was thinking “heck, everyone likes Fire Emblem: Awakening so much, and this is actually ok, so I’ll probably play it some time.”
Now? I doubt that. Because nothing dredges up all the mistakes a game has made than a bad ending. So let’s discussing!
Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon is the DS remake of the very first game in the Fire Emblem series, which made it feel like a pretty good place to start (especially as it’s the introduction of Marth, the first Fire Emblem character that was seen outside of Japan, albeit in a Smash Bros. title.) Unfortunately, it’s obvious that as a Famicom game originally, the first Fire Emblem was pretty basic. All the things it seems people mention about this series, like characters talking to each other in missions, are missing here. That of course shouldn’t be a problem, because the strategy core—very similar to Advance Wars—should be what you care about, right?
Hmm. There’s a quirk! And if you’re familiar with the series, you know it already: if a character dies, they die forever. This is clearly intended to give weight to the strategy, but sadly, it doesn’t really work. You aren’t going to care about the characters, you care about how much you’ve levelled them up, and while the game does feed you new characters quite consistently—obviously to shore up your forces—you are never going to want to use them because they are never going to be better than a character that’s been with you for a while.
So what this means is that you’re going to grind up your characters to get them to the point where it’s going to be hard for them to die (to the point, likely, where the Advance Wars-style “lances beat swords, etc.” rock paper scissors aspect become totally pointless.) Which means doing what I did, which is carefully sending your favourite characters into the arenas that are found on certain levels, and repeatedly fighting until they’re over-levelled.
It’s boring! But, and here’s the but: once I’d over-levelled them just enough, the game became pleasantly strategic. It wasn’t an Advance Wars, no (I thought the graphics were ok, too, then I saw how beautiful the GBA Fire Emblem animations were recently and that took the shine off a bit) but it was fine. I can’t begin to imagine how unpleasantly hard the game would be if you were letting units die noble deaths or not abusing the arena, however.
Or maybe I can! If Marth dies it’s game over, so I hadn’t been using him on the front lines, and he was woefully under-levelled by the end. The final boss? Well… The only person who can use the ultimate boss-killing weapon is Marth. Who would die after one hit, while my other once over-levelled heroes were barely able to keep on top of the constant reinforcements. So I should actually have never stopped grinding at some point earlier, removing all the strategy/challenge from the majority of the game just so I could finish the final, ludicrously unbalanced level. Great.
Will I ever play it again? No.
Final Thought: Pretty sure I could get lots of responses here about how I could have used a particular other character to kill the boss, or do some particular combo, or whatever. Or maybe to promise me that Awakening, with the ability to turn off permadeath, is worth playing. It’s too late, folks!
Developed/Published by: Signal Studios / Microsoft Studios Released: August 17th, 2011 Completed: 1st March, 2014 Completion: Completed the campaign. Didn’t have an interest in playing any of the extra stuff (survival modes, etc.) Trophies / Achievements: 85/300
I really liked the original Toy Soldiers! I have a soft spot for tower defence probably borne from an entire day lost to Desktop Tower Defence; the way as you learnt it you’d modify your layout, starting with dense mazes then evolving into sparse, odd arrangements that maximise killing in a far more efficient manner… I found the design pretty thrilling actually.
Er, except Toy Soldiers wasn’t really like that, being one of those games where you have set places you can put towers and it’s more about knowing where and why to place things—with the added quirk of being able to control the towers and the odd vehicle. But what really worked for Toy Soldiers was just how informed the setting was: the horrors of World War I recast in (period appropriate) die-cast. You’re playing at war just as children of the time would, but being able to zoom into the machine gun and mow down literally hundreds of people—remember, it’s tower defence so you are aiming for efficiency of murder—it was readable (though I doubt intentionally) as a pointed statement on war and play.
But Toy Soldiers: Cold War doesn’t really work! I’m not even asking for it to say as much as the original, but with the original, you really felt that Signal Studios loved old tin war toys and they were very comfortable making a game around them. Here, making a game set in the 80s, the “toy” setting feels far more pasted on, which is pretty odd unless everyone at Signal Studios is actually in their 80s and therefore have only the most surface understanding of the decade. I mean, the game has pre-level briefings that treat the war as if it’s for real, and not being played on a table top? And levels and enemies look super realistic, except sometimes there’s a cassette tape in the way?
It’s odd, because the setting promises so much. It takes most of the inspiration from things like Red Dawn, and overlooks what playing with toys in the 80s was: a glorious the-rights-holders-wouldn’t-allow-it mash-up. We’re talking GI Joes fighting with Transformers, green army men with ugly flash being ran over by Hot Wheels with all the paint scraped off.
They have the lightest claim that they’re doing this—the commando you can call in is larger than the enemies (GI Joe scale to army man scale) but he’s more a Rambo joke (which is actually pretty fun, I never got tired of his barks) and the final boss is a… thing. Why aren’t the enemies army man green though? Was it just in case anyone remembered those 3DO games that they made like a hundred of even though there is no human recorded in history who actually liked them?
Ultimately Toy Soldiers: Cold War just feels generic in the way that it absolutely should not. Indeed, I even found the tower defence play a little disappointing (the placement options are limited, and a lot of the game now is getting into a vehicle to kill as much as possible of what your towers can’t get, so the balance has shifted to an action game).
You can’t always get what you want, and I suppose what I wanted was a game with, I don’t know, My Little Pony towers that barfed Play-Doh at attacking Micro Machines. You know, some imagination.
Will I ever play it again? No.
Final Thought: If you wanna play one of these (but are biased against WWI for some reason) you should play Iron Brigade. I really liked Iron Brigade.
