Developed/Published by: Honeyslug Released: May 22nd, 2013 Completed: February 29th, 2016 Completion: Finished all the challenges with a bronze cup or higher. Trophies / Achievements: n/a
“Ball, ball, ball, Footie, footie, footie, Ball, ball, ball, Football!” —“The Footie Song” by Adam & Joe
Will I ever play it again? Probably not, to be honest.
Final Thought: Passing Time is a tremendously charming little PlayStation Mobile title that you can’t get any more because, you know, PlayStation Mobile got shut down and that. I got insanely raging on one of the challenges (actually complaining about it on Twitter to the developers, I think?) and put it down for about a year, but when I was just making sure my PlayStation Mobile purchases worked (that they had the runtime thing that would make sure that they worked forever, or something—the whole PlayStation Mobile shutdown was kind of a bugger) I started it up and beat the challenge after a couple of attempts, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Developed/Published by: Sega Released: April 1987 Completed: 17th August, 2015 Completion: Finished all the courses, including the world tour. And without any saving or anything like that. Trophies / Achievements: n/a
Super Hang-On, guys. I know what you’re thinking, because it’s what I was thinking too. “Ugh, isn’t this the earliest of the Super Scaler games? I mean it’s really boring, right? Just racing on a two lane highway for ages. Barely any more evolved than Pole Position.”
What an idiot I was and what an idiot you are. This is the wrongest wrong, and I guess it took those wizards at M2 with their 3D Super Hang-On release for 3DS in 2013 to show me my wrong wrongieness for the wrongitudinal wrong it wring wrong wubba wran
(Sorry readers. Let’s take a little intermission here to listen to Super Hang-On’s super cool chilltimes music. Ahh, that’s better.)
Super Hang-On is fantastic. I don’t know why I believed we’d all decided it wasn’t very interesting. Maybe it looks a bit boring in stills, and likely, Outrun, with its wide roads, loads of cars and set dressing, just seems like it’s better. But here’s the deal with Super Hang-On: it’s an incredibly clever and subtle example of pseudo-3D racing. The game is about two things: 1) avoiding the many, many other racers on the narrow-ass road by carefully weaving through them, even as they attempt to murder you because they hate you 2) using “turbo” (which boosts your max speed by like 50km/h) carefully when you know you won’t fly off the aforementioned narrow-ass road or right into another racer who, also aforementioned, wants to murder you.
This is but two very simple mechanics. Together, they are perfect. Playing Super Hang-On on 3DS is almost painful, because you more or less death grip your 3DS with a brutal intensity as you try and edge through the field at the maximum speed you can manage. And you have to, because the time limits are absurdly strict.
Which is one of the reasons the M2 version is so great. There are a variety of settings which—and this is maybe the one real negative I have to give—are a bit obscure (I’m still not 100% sure what they all do) but with some fiddling you can get the game to “challenging” rather than “you will never finish this, puny humans.”
It’s possible this image doesn’t capture just how great the 3DS version of Super Hang-On is.
And the other settings are all great. Playing it using the gyro is actually really fun, the screen tilting is great (if you want to use it) and the 3D is fantastic even if it still doesn’t agree with me at all (I wonder if the New 3DS1 would fix that) so I sadly had to not really use it. It’s the perfect release, although if I was super greedy I’d want them to include the track from Hang-On too?
Maybe this one does? Wheee!
Super Hang-On is not optional. It’s an amazing example of a clear, simple game design that’s absolutely thrilling to play. I played this for hours and hours and hours and I’ll go back to it, to finish the “sit down” version of the courses probably (even if they’re only mildly different? I haven’t tried them yet.) It’s great.
Will I ever play it again? Yes.
Final Thought: And I must say: Super Hang-On looks great, too. It’s maybe hard to see that when everything is flying past at 324km/h, but if you sit and watch the credits you can see how intricate the level furniture and backgrounds and colour choices are. Super Hang-On might actually be one of those perfect things, you know? A flawless pearl for people who like a specific kind of pearl (I’m not saying everyone is going to love this pearl. It’s just as good at being a pearl as a pearl can be.) [“Stop saying pearl!”—Ed.]
Developed/Published by: System 3 / Maximum Games Released: 22nd April 2014 Completed: 20th May, 2015 Completion: Finished Marathon mode. Trophies / Achievements: 42%
Yes, here’s why I played Super Putty. You see, I started playing this on a whim, and it’s such a total wreck I was like “wait, why is this a legendary lost Amiga game?” so had to go back and play Putty.
Putty, as described, isn’t good, but it is beautiful, and in an alternate universe where someone with a consistent design philosophy made it, it’s great. Putty Squad, in its “on Amiga/SNES” format, is a big departure from the original Putty—gone are the tight levels, instead these big sprawling things. It’s much more a “traditional” Amiga platformer if there is such a thing, largely forgetting Putty’s “puttyness.” It’s still nice looking—if less striking—but loses a lot from the levels no longer being tight vertical scrollers, and is generally, a bit generic.
Putty Squad’s re-release, however, has some of weirdest decisions ever. First off, we lose all of the pixel art, which is tragic, and it’s all replaced with what I can charitably describe as “mid-90s CGI.” In fact, it’s so much of that time—think of games like Constructor, which it turns out as I google it was developed by System 3—that I’m suspicious that if the art hasn’t been lying about since then (look at this cover of Amiga Power, or the SNES release cover) or that literally the same person did it now, using the same tools after not having touched a computer since 1997.
It’s sort of funny? A kind of “retro” no one is really asking for, but released as a 2014 improvement to a 1994 game that wouldn’t really cut it in 1997.
So, it’s ugly, in a funny way, and you do see way more of the level thanks to the resolution, but above all someone at System 3 decided that the platforming action was archaic and no one was going to enjoy it, so they gave Putty the ability to, at any and all times, pump himself up and float. This means that you can, literally, avoid all of the platforming and huge swathes of the levels. It’s so daft, actually, that I spent some time trying to work out if it was a bug, but it’s not.
Not to say Putty Squad isn’t still hard—just like Putty (and, it seems, more so than the original intended release of Putty Squad) every level is a mess of enemies you just have to try and survive. So it’s not really a platform game, more sort of a weird muddle where you fly about as a floating putty, landing occasionally to rescue the red putties, take unavoidable damage and then hope you can survive enough to the end of the level.
After playing Super Putty and this, I can still imagine this perfect vertically-scrolling Putty game that’s a bit puzzley but also a challenging, fun platformer, with amazing pixel art. It would be really good on Playstation Vita. This isn’t.
Will I ever play it again? No, but I enjoyed this as a piece of history and slice of weird Western-developed kusoge, so I’m going to keep my physical copy.
Final Thought: If you’re gagging to play a modern update of a western platformer, you can’t go wrong with Rayman Origins. It’s more beautiful than the original pixel art and is just generally a fun wee romp. So there.
Developed/Published by: Nintendo SPD / Nintendo Released: 18th April, 2013 Completed: 3rd February, 2015 Completion: Unlocked all the places on the island, I guess? Trophies / Achievements: n/a
I went home for Christmas this year—as I am wont to do—and before I went a read a funny tweet by my, yours and everybody’s beardy pal Brandon “tha B-dogg” Boyer, where he said “I’ve been playing Tomodachi Life for 7 months & no one has ever even expressed vague interest in dating my Mii and it’s incomprehensibly sad.”
Now, I’m sure most of you took from that “ha ha, his Mii is such a sad bastard” and went on with your life, but I went “Christ, he’s played it for seven months? I should really give this a go after all.”
It’s weird, because I was so, so, so excited for Tomodachi Life when it was announced. If you watch the early trailers, it seems so incredibly full of potential. Like it’s just going to be super, super hilarious and fun to play.
But then people I knew got it, and they were all like “no, this is quite boring, actually” and put it down after a few hours, maybe a few days. So I just didn’t bother to try it.
And now I have! Trading it off with Fantasy Life in the ol’ 3DS slot. I dutifully checked in on my wee Mii society, every day… except I realised a couple of days ago that I haven’t even looked at it in nearly a month. I didn’t even notice that I wasn’t playing it. It was so uncompelling that my brain just, more or less, erased Tomodachi Life from my memory.
So I guess I have to say I’m done with it.
“But wait!” you ask. “What is Tomodachi Life?”
Well, my confused friend, it’s a video game where you put all your wee pals on an island, with personalities that sorta correspond to the Myers-Brigg types (I think) that you sort out yourself, and wait for the magic to happen.
What this means is that you click on the apartment they live in, and they say something like “I’m hungry” so you give them a crème brûlée. Or they tell you someone they want to be friends with, or they’re asleep, or they give you something like a bath set so you can watch them bathe (uhh…) You can also decorate their apartments and dress them up, that sort of thing. But mostly, the game is “click on apartment, resolve need, click on other apartment.”
Occasionally they do stuff! like have funny dreams, or interact with other Miis in a silly way. It’s cute, but in that way where you go “heh.”
The problem with Tomodachi Life is that the interaction with the game is so stupefyingly repetitive and uninteresting. It led me into this long thought on why EA had never just straight up done a Sims game with Miis, which then reminded me they’d actually done a game called “MySims” which was Mii-like but not actually Miis. What’s up with that? I’m going to say it’s corporate hubris, because when I think of Tomodachi Life but instead it’s, you know, a basic “The Sims” with Miis, and it’s got a lot of the wackiness of this, it seems like a real winner. Like something that would actually be good. Stupid corporate hubris!
Don’t get me wrong. I’m actually glad that they went out of their way to localise this game. But it seems like there’s something cultural about this game that doesn’t translate, and it’s the (likely stereotypical) idea that Japanese people aren’t very open in public, so seeing friends and loved ones acting crazy is really, really wild. I feel like I remember someone describing the game as analogous to a Japanese variety show, and that sounds spot on. It doesn’t translate because seeing people do strange things just isn’t enough—as in The Sims series, we need context to make it really hit home, as being openly silly isn’t transgressive or shocking in the same way.
Anyway, Tomodachi Life is bad, and I don’t know why tha B-dogg has played it for seven months. It’s joining that ignoble list of games where I’m straight up deleting my saves. Sorry, wee dopplegangers of my pals.
Will I ever play it again? No, but I still hope they make (and localise) sequels.
Final Thought: tha B-dogg, in my game, successfully dated Nikki, the wee lassie who used to be the mascot for Swapnote. So he can have some success… with fictional characters, in someone else’s copy of the game.
Developed/Published by: Comcept / Level-5 Released: June 20th, 2013 Completed: 28th October, 2014 Completion: I finished all the missions, including the extra ones, unlocking all the tanks that you can unlock from said missions! Trophies / Achievements: n/a
Bugs vs. Tanks is not very good. At absolute best you can sort of think of it like an Earth Defense Force game, except there’s no buildings being destroyed, or really that many bugs on screen at one time, or, uh, any particularly interesting weapons.
But it does have all of the slightly wonky graphics and rough controls you expect from Earth Defense Force? And giant bugs, obviously the main comparison point?
Basically, you play short levels where you shoot at bugs with your tank (though weirdly, firing is automatic at default.) occasionally finding new tanks. It’s very, very… blah. If not an Earth Defense Force game, it’s definitely in the ilk of the Simple Series that spawned it, feeling like a phoned-in cheapy title, but sadly not one with any interesting ideas to back it up as such. Keiji Inafune worked on it, apparently, in (probably) yet another case of a named Japanese developer saying “it would be cool if…” and then never checking in on the team again.
Having said all this though I still played it all the way through and went back to unlock tanks. Why, you might ask? Well, because tanks are quite interesting and when you unlock them you can look at them in a gallery, and read a tiny bit of text about them. It the ideal game for someone who’s slightly interested in WWII tanks, but not so interested that they’ve read up about them already? Specific!
Will I ever play it again? I have no excuse but if someone is ever like “want to play the co-op missions” I’d totally do it.
Final Thought: Bug vs. Tanks isn’t very good and yet I’ve just admitted I’d play it more. It simply passed some time in an agreeable fashion. I have no excuse… well, maybe co-op’s really good, you know? Like Earth Defense Force, the game that this game really isn’t very like at all (apart from the giant bug thing.)
Developed/Published by: Vanillaware / Atlus Released: July 25th, 2013 Completed: 25th October, 2014 Completion: Defeated the final boss. Trophies / Achievements: 21%
I really, really, really did not enjoy Dragon’s Crown. I think it’s crap. Really, stunningly, confusingly-because-people-seemed-to-like-it-and-as-a-result-I-was-looking-forward-to-it crap. Boring, repetitive crap. Have I said it’s crap enough yet.
So… what’s the deal, anyway? I’ll show my hand here and admit I’ve never played another Vanillaware game, despite also owning Odin Sphere (picked up for a fiver many moons ago) and Muramasa for Vita (I thought I’d play this first though?). However, I really do like side-scrolling punch-me-dos. I mean, I genuinely like the Dungeons and Dragons games that obviously inspired this. And obviously, it’s nice looking, even if the art isn’t to my taste really in any way at all.
I mean, it’s probably that art, which looks nice in stills, but makes the game seem really… I don’t know, static when you’re playing it. It’s totally one of those side-scrollers where you feel like you’re fighting cardboard cutouts, you know? Where if you’re slightly to the side you miss them completely. Which isn’t amazing when you’re playing the Elf, and every arrow you fire just seems to whizz past your enemies harmlessly because you’re a pixel off (I might be exaggerating here, but it’s how it felt.)
It just doesn’t feel rewarding to hit things, or move about, or really do anything moment-to-moment. It all feels clunky, and restrictive, and then you get your 3 AI companions (because, of course, you don’t get to unlock online play until you’re over half-way through the game) and if the game felt like cardboard cutouts before, now it feels like cardboard cutouts you’ve scribbled all over, thrown glitter at and then blown up with a small explosive. The screen just becomes a mass off, well, fuck knows to be honest, spells and attacks and bodies any time there’s a skirmish, and you pretty much dodge and then start to spam your most powerful attacks in the hope you’re really hitting anything.
(If you don’t, it’s fine because you’ll definitely survive to the end of the level anyway, it’s really not that hard. At least until the bastarding final boss, where you’ve got to do it in two lives and have to grind/hope you’ve unlocked powerful enough AI to survive it. Hurrah.)
Anyway. Yeah, I know you’re probably thinking like “how different is this from the Dungeons and Dragons games, really?” so… ok! I’ll have to go back and play those new ports then, eh? Rather than just base this on my memories of playing it years ago. Maybe I’ll be eating some humble pie!
Of course, that really won’t change that Dragon’s Crown is definitely crap.
Will I ever play it again? Never ever ever ever. Not even multiplayer. I played it a bit but zzz.
Final Thought: I really struggled to find something interesting to say about this, to be honest. I totally get that you’re supposed to really get into pushing your way through the levels as a group, playing the (cute but easily missed) cooking game and then, when spent, sort through your loot, but… man, if it just doesn’t feel good, why bother? I mean I’m talking about a game here that feels less good to me than repeatedly clicking the mouse in Torchlight or something. I mean really.
Developed/Published by: Millennium Kitchen, Aquria / Level-5 Released: July 18th, 2013 Completed: 3rd October, 2014 Completion: Finished the main story and all of the “episodes” other than that one which requires you to play the mini-game over and over and over and ov Trophies / Achievements: n/a
There are a couple of things recently in my life that have caused my face to seize up into a rictus of sheer joy. The kind of frozen, gawping wonder that you’d assume, had you caught me in the middle of it, that I’d just taken some brain candy and locked myself in the memory of going down “The Big One” in Blackpool at some innocent age, a long, long time ago.
Well, I’ve never been on “The Big One” so it wouldn’t be that. One of these two things was seeing Tilda Swinton in Snowpiercer, playing the ungodly spawn of Margaret Thatcher and Jarvis Cocker. I’m not totally sure why that tickled me so much, but it did. The other was Attack of the Friday Monsters!’s intro, which you can see here.
Oh my god, right? It’s so sweet. It’s sweet like having a man with fists made out of lugduname punching all your teeth out and then grinding them into dust to save you the indignity of watching them rot out your head because it is so sweet. The incredible on-the-nose nature of the lyrics; “I am a child,” “My dad is a dry cleaner.”
So much simplicity, but also, so much depth.
And on that level, Attack of the Friday Monsters! is an interesting one. You see, as a game, if we’re going to “review” it that way, Attack of the Friday Monsters! is deficient. It’s very, very basic. The game tells you to go a place, you go there, things happen. There isn’t really any puzzle-solving to be had. There’s a collectible card game that you’d think was really important, but you actually only play it about three times in the main story mode, and the game itself is a very simple rock-paper-scissors-a-like that might have some tactics to it but (frankly) they’re so subtle as to be basically pointless.
There’s really nothing to it at all. And yet Attack of the Friday Monsters! is deeper than many games by virtue of its setting and story. Set in a small Japanese town in a not-directly-defined period of time, it follows Sohta, who has just moved there with his family (his dad’s a dry cleaner, as pointed out in the song) and is set the task of delivering some freshly cleaned clothes on Friday, the day of the week huge monsters have a fight on the outskirts of said town (so he’s got to be home before that happens.)
It sounds “wacky” and “Japanese” to have a game where giant monsters fight near a small town and everybody just accepts it, but as is (obviously) the case there’s so much more to it than that. Directed by Kaz Ayabe, known for the (never released outside of Japan) Boku no Natsuyasumi series, Attack of the Friday Monsters! is similarly a reflection on Japanese childhood and a thoughtful take on the rhythms of Japanese life and culture that surround it. It’s much, much closer to, say, a film by Hirokazu Koreeda than it is another video game, which makes Ayabe absolutely unique as a game developer. You see, Attack of the Friday Monsters! isn’t really about the “play” as such. It’s about being a wee kid in a new town, about being told what to do by your parents, about being side-tracked, about meeting new kids, about not really feeing in control of anything about your life (because you’re a wee kid), about having to be introduced the games that the kids in your new town play, about how those games seem weird and silly, about the lies your parents tell, about the lies parents hold…
It’s about the golden age of tokusatsu in the sixties, when televisions became more usual in Japanese homes as the country left recovery from World War II and began to boom; in fact it’s about being a child at that period, and not having the experience of war first hand to see Godzilla as a metaphor the horror of nuclear warfare, but as a hero to cheer on when he battles Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster. It’s about that difference, that gap right there at a moment in history where Japanese adults saw something, Japanese children saw something, and that what the children believed became true, because after all, they believed it so forcefully, so unquestionably, and the adults had been helping them believe it. Because why not make believe, after so much struggle?
Attack of the Friday Monsters! is about so much more than rock-paper-scissors. It’s definitely about more than semantic quibbles of how good a “game” it is or not. It’s trying to say something bigger, and I think it’s easy to get lost and forget that’s entirely possible when we grind things down to their mechanics.
Will I ever play it again? Hmm. I’d love to play it again, maybe on a big screen, but on 3DS probably not.
Final Thought: That Ayabe can manage so much with an experience that clocks somewhere in the region of a couple of hours makes it a legitimate tragedy that Boku no Natsuyasumi has never been released for audiences beyond Japan. It would be a serious issue if Koreeda’s work had never been seen outside of his home country, for example. That art is accessible is important, and it’s something that the games industry still struggles with.
Developed/Published by: PES Productions / Konami Released: 20th September, 2013 Completed: 9th July, 2014 Completion: Won the World Cup as Scotland (on penalties versus Uruguay in a 0-0 nailbiter.) That’s all that matters, really (though I did also play Be A Legend as Messi, lazily, for a while.) Trophies / Achievements: 38%
Football! Yes, we’ve gone football mad here at exp. Towers, what with the World Cup and everything (though that’s finished by the time you’re reading this, which means that we’re no longer football mad and are instead football sane.)
Whenever there’s a big international tournament (because the Old Firm has led met to basically distrust and fear club football) I tend to like to play a footy game, and it’s almost always Sensible Soccer (I usually go to the bother of finding the most recent update files and everything.) However I decided to actually try a “modern” football game for the first time in years and years, and it was this one!
Note I put “modern” in quotes there, because the weird thing about PES 2014: Pro Evolution Soccer is that—and this is probably not news to people who buy football games every year, or whatever—it feels like a game that could have come out on PS2. I mean… it looks like one too, sorta. shonky animations, character faces that—unless they’re a star—are generic, crap crowds, awful, repetitive commentary…
It’s sorta weird! And retro! But not in a good way, like Sensible Soccer. In a way that makes me think all the way back to this series when it was International Superstar Soccer on Nintendo 64, except faster?
In fact, after playing a few quick exhibitions I decided to scale back my ambitions from “I’m gonna download all the fan-made real team information and play this seriously!” to “let’s win the World Cup with Scotland and call it a day.”
It’s important to note, however, that if you look past all the surface stuff, PES 2014 still plays a decent game of footy. Don’t play it on Beginner (at all) otherwise you’ll spank every team like they’re Brazil (a sentence that now makes sense after this World Cup) but on Regular, it’s fun! You know, football. Passes, through balls, that sort of thing. It’s not very exciting, you’d probably call it workmanlike, but scoring a goal still feels amazingly rewarding, so there’s that.
Will I ever play it again? No. Next time (Euro 2016, probably) maybe I’ll pick up a FIFA. Those feel “new” right?
Final Thought: I didn’t really discuss why I put PES 2014 down so fast, did I? Indeed, I’m sure there are many, many people out there who want to moan about my surface take on this, after all the website crows about the game’s “trueball tech” and the “M.A.S.S. (Motion Animated Stability System.)“ Even if that was all incredibly apparent, there’d still be the UI.
This is a game where, in the flagship modes are “Be a Legend” and “Master League”, you spend a lot of time in menus. It’s also a game where literally every screen has a loading screen after it. Where information that could all be on one screen is spread across two or three. Where getting from one football match to the next—even if you don’t touch or change anything—can take two or three minutes.
It’s gash; it takes all the imagined fun of “being a footballer” or “managing a football team” and replaces it with all the fun of “watching loading screens” and “turning off the music because there are only six songs” and “stopping playing this forever.”
Developed/Published by: Lucas Pope Released: August 8, 2013 Completed: 20th April, 2014 Completion: Finished it seeing five different endings (two that I’d consider “proper” endings.) Trophies / Achievements: 10/13
I loved The Republia Times. Loved it. In fact, I think if you’re the kind of good-looking go-getter that reads this site, you should just go ahead and play it if you haven’t already.
…
Great, isn’t it? Especially the sting in the tail. Oh man, that’s what elevated it to a masterful piece of game-design-as-satire in my mind. It genuinely manages something that few games ever have, and to think it was just a wee warm-up for a game jam!
Anyway, here’s Papers, Please, set in the same “world” as The Republia Times, dealing with some of the same issues, and of course cleaning up at the IGF and GDC awards because it’s about real stuff and isn’t supposed to actually be fun.
Papers, Please… I am… ambivalent about it. Critiquing the game design alone, well, it’s sort-of… I guess I could describe it as a dynamic, timed hidden-object game. You only have so much time each day, you have to check people’s documents for errors, there isn’t quite enough space on your desk, and (intentionally) the controls are slightly awkward. So you’re trying to find the error (if there is one) and get to the next person so you can make more money. Each day there are more and more possible errors, more documents, and more mistakes you can make. And so your days pass, somewhere between a high-tension challenge and a boring grind. Somewhere in there.
I guess if you like hidden object-style games, it’s cool? The nice thing about The Republia Times is that it didn’t outstay its welcome. Papers, Please does, and hard. If you want to get to one of the proper endings, you’re going to be playing it for thirty days. After seven you’ll be like “ok, yeah, I got it.”
However, that’s not all there is to Papers, Please. There’s a story to the story mode (“duh”—everyone) and while it’s very very loosely sketched, you’ll make choices: people you might let through even if they don’t have the right papers, or to help some people and hinder others. The weird thing about Papers, Please is that these people all appear in exactly the same way every time. So while most of the people who stop in are generated, you know that the third person on day three is going to do a certain thing. Now don’t give me shit for this after my Rymdkapsel write-up but it seems strange that it has to be this way—there are a bunch of different characters who appear, and with a shorter game (fourteen days, maybe, rather than thirty) they could be randomised in, yes, a rogue-like-like style to make a different experience every time.
However, with the number of different endings you’ve achieved tracked and the saves cleverly branched by the game, it does seem that Lucas Pope has intentionally designed it so that you can replay the game from certain points with the knowledge you have from previous runs to make different things happen. It’s not how I’d have done it—or how I want it to be—but it seems fair enough (I’m interested in his reasoning, though.)
There’s a bigger problem, though. About halfway through Papers, Please I thought to myself “you know, this would be pretty cool on iPad.”
And then I realised something. Papers, Please could easily be put out on the App Store. In fact, I’m pretty sure that Apple would feature it. And this is a company that aggressively bans games based on content (Phone Story, Sweatshop HD, Endgame: Syria, Intern Saga… the list goes on) famously saying “If you want to criticise a religion, write a book.”
Why is that? Well, it’s because the satire of Papers, Please is toothless. Yes, you play a border agent, but who is being critiqued here? Generic Eastern European states in the eighties? One of the most astounding things about Papers, Please is how even when you are at your most strict, if anything the indignities you pile upon people trying to get into Arstotzka are less strict than those on anyone trying to get into America. And Arstotzka literally suffers a terrorist attack at the border every other day. Take your shoes off. Have your items x-rayed. If that’s not good enough, they can go through your bags. Don’t want to consent to a full back-scatter scan? “Enhanced pat-down.” Why are you travelling here? Business or pleasure? Where are you staying? What are you bringing in? How do you know these people? Are you trying to work?
And so on, forever. And the profiling—you only have to look at Did Rami Get Randomly Checked to see how pervasive it is.
If Papers, Please was about being an American TSA agent, it would actually be saying something just by actually representing how absurd it is the hoops they make you jump through—and to what extent your privacy is abused.
But it doesn’t, so it could easily be approved for the App Store.
Funny, that.
Will I ever play it again? Nope.
Final Thought: Maybe the saddest thing about Papers, Please is that unlike The Republia Times I can’t even see any satire in the story, anyway. Arstotzka is… bad? For some reason that isn’t super clear? You might want to escape, but maybe not? There’s one ending that comes close to making you feel that shiver of horror (I won’t spoil it, but it involves forged passports) but it doesn’t push it too far. The fact that there are “good” endings is actually pretty shocking to me.
Oh, and the game rewards you with achievements for making the “right” decision in several cases. Come on.
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.
