Developed/Published by: Al Iapicca, Bob Johnston / Energy Games Released: 1981 Completed: 05/12/2021 Completion: I played it. We’ll go as far as that. Trophies / Achievements: n/a
It’s the holiday season, and I was struck recently that I never make a point of playing any Christmassy games during the period. I mean I don’t even get Christmas Nights out! Shocking really. Considering I’m going through my backlog chronologically, I thought I’d see what the earliest Christmas games were, and I’m surprised to find that this, a little-known Apple II game that, like, came in a ziploc bag in 1981 is the first Christmas game ever–unless you particularly want to count a type-in memory game from Softside Magazine that just happened to use Christmas words. Well, unless Mobygames is wrong, which I guess it could be.
Update (05/12/2025): It seems a copy of this showed up on eBay this year, a rare opportunity to see the game as it looked, ziploc and all.
Anyway, this is a very strange little shooter where you control an absolutely massive Santa flying behind a huge blue Rudolph (I assume all the other reindeer are to his right depth-wise in a row). You move right to left (odd) must shoot… Pac-men? And… stars? While trying to drop presents into the chimneys below that you can (surprisingly) control the direction of a bit. All of which you do at about one frame a second, if that.
It’s, obviously, not very good, and it doesn’t particularly make you feel Christmassy outside of a beepy version of Jingle Bells right at the start (it’s silent the rest of the time.) It seems like the programmers (Al Iapicca and/or Bob Johnston of Marin Data Systems, according to the title screen) couldn’t work out how to make Santa only move up and down when you held the direction, so as soon as you hit A or Z he just… goes in that direction until you push the opposite one1. It’s also clear–unless the game has the slowest ramp-up of difficulty ever–that they couldn’t manage to get more than one enemy on screen at a time with all the chimneys moving too, so there’s points where you’re just like… should I go off and make a cup of tea and come back?
Not that having more enemies on screen would be a good idea–Santa is so bloody massive and slow [“oi!”–Santa] that it’s hard to really do anything. It’s not exactly, hard–if you’re dedicated you can slowly line up your shots and avoid the birds that you can’t kill, all while dropping presents–but it’s really, really hard to want to.
That all said… I have this weird suspicion that this was inspired by Defender (which came out in early 1981) of all things. Sure, you can’t turn around, but there’s a Defendery-ness to the stars, Rudolph shoots a similar laser and dropping presents feels inspired by the rescues in Defender, so maybe they thought “you know what would make Defender better? A MASSIVE SANTA.”
It doesn’t, but you know what? It was 1981. They weren’t to know where games would go. Here’s to the dreamers.
Festive vibes ranking: You’re constantly staring at a huge Santa. HIGH
Will I ever play it again? I barely played it the first time.
Final Thought: Thinking about this in the context of 1981, the Apple II had had an extremely impressive year, with seminal RPGs Ultima and Wizardry coming out, and system defining titles including Swashbuckler and Castle Wolfenstein also being released. With inflation considered, it’s wild to imagine how anyone afforded the “affordable” Apple II (the price translates to about five grand now!) but let’s assume you lived in one of those mansions from a John Hughes movies in the 80s and you excitedly ran downstairs on Christmas morning–you could just about accept that your granny bought you Santa’s Sleigh Ride by asking a clerk in a “mom-and-pop” computer store (if this managed any form of actual distribution at all) but you’d be hoping your parents picked up one or two of the other titles I’ve mentioned so you weren’t bored ten minutes later and have to *shudder* go and play outside.
This is apparently an issue with input on the Apple II, though it’s hardly ideal. ↩︎
Developed/Published by: Dani Bunten Berry / EA Released: 11/1983 Completed: 24/06/2021 Completion: Beat Tournament mode against 3 AI with a colony score of 110,000+ Trophies / Achievements: n/a
MULE is an interesting one. I was trying to think what the cinema equivalent is, as a sort of easy metaphor: a classic that was lauded (if never particularly imitated) by a generation of filmmakers that goes almost completely unwatched these days. It’s not one of the obvious ones (you know, Super Mario Bros. as Birth of a Nation, or something); it’s too sophisticated to be something super early (Space Invaders as Journey to the Moon) and so I just can’t place it. The Red Shoes, perhaps?
The thing is though–and I suppose it’s the reason I’m trying to draw the metaphor–is that if you want to watch The Red Shoes and see what the likes of Scorcese have raved about, you can do so easily–it’s streamable on about nine different services, free with subscription or even ad-supported; you can buy it on a Criterion blu-ray and get a boat load of special features to give you context. Nothing is holding you back.
Here’s how you can play MULE: you can pay $8 to Good Old Games to play the trash PC port that is totally unrepresentative (it’s maybe also available on Origin, but I haven’t looked.)
Ok, so you don’t want to do that (and it’s not Good Old Games’ fault: they near-exclusively sell PC games). So here’s how you play MULE “as intended”: You have to download an Atari 800 emulator or understand how to make something like Retroarch make that happen. Then you have to find a ROM (watch out! You might download a pirate one that crashes if you catch the wumpus!). Then you have to find the BIOS files that will let the emulator run the Atari 800. Oh and don’t forget that the Atari 800 emulator requires a bit of fiddling to make that work. And because you want to see the game as intended, you’ve either now got to make this run on that CRT you’ve got lying around for this sort of thing or run it through a shader, preferably with a nice border so it looks like you’re running it on an old TV.
Oh, and for context, you’re going to want to look up the (beautiful) box and manual online.
The alternative, is, of course, to buy an Atari 800, monitor, a copy of the game (good luck finding it for less than $200) and four joysticks.
This is, clearly, absurd. Now don’t get me wrong; there are lost films and inaccessible films. But MULE is out there, and in the history of games it’s at least as important as The Red Shoes is to cinema. But you have to be extremely dedicated to play it–and worse, if you don’t need to be (for example, you pass an Atari 800 in a “VIDEOGAMES!!!” exhibition at a museum) it will be completely impossible to grasp.
So anyway, that sucks, because if you’re a student of games and their history you should play MULE, and not just because it’s honestly still pretty fun. Because it’s passed into this position that people only talk of it from the second or third hand–often to pay tribute to the pioneering Dani Bunten Berry–and I actually feel a bit sad about that. We pay tribute to those who came before us by playing their work, not just talking about it.
[“OK, now start the criticising”–Ed.]
How dare you… ahhh you got me. I think MULE is super cool but here’s the thing that happens after you put in all that work: you go “mannnn this is olddddd” because MULE is old, and “80s personal computer” harsh. It’s at its heart almost a board game, but it’s slathered in early “we haven’t quite worked all this out” design decisions that sorta made sense at the time but also extremely don’t now.
It’s played like this: you and up to three other players (though it’s always played with four) are settling a planet; each round you have to select a plot of land (from plains, mountains or river) and then select a mule, equip it to either mine ore, collect energy or farm food, which it can do on any plot (well, you can’t mine on river tiles) but gain the most benefit from doing so on the equivalent tile. After everyone has done so, a random event happens (a solar storm makes more energy production, for example) each commodity is consumed by your community and the surplus is traded: either to or from other players or to or from the town store. And then the next round happens (oh, and sometimes you can buy plots of land at auction, not just take them when given.)
It’s actually pretty graspable, but the quirk is the law of supply and demand. With particular lands (and land placement) you can create massive surpluses of certain goods, and you can also choose to ignore some goods even though your community needs them. “I’ll make so much money selling this ore” you think, “that I’ll be able to buy as much food as I need.”
Trading happens in a format that must have inspired the negotiations in Theme Park (“Ah yes, I know exactly the mini-game”–every reader, who is as decrepit as me) where you walk your characters down or up the screen to meet at a value, with the quirk that if the store doesn’t have any of a good to sell you the sellers can walk back infinitely (well, within the set time limit) to bleed you dry. (And the computers will do this…) BUT–if they do this, they’re in danger of the colony getting a bad score at the end of the game! So it’s all about the balance of winning (individually) without losing (as a collective). Man sounds like those clowns in congress should play some MULE, am I right???
So far so good, right? The problem is it’s the early 80s, so all of this is done with a one-button stick where you have to control your character and make them walk into the mule pen and then walk out with the mule and then walk into the outfitter and then walk to your plot and then the timer runs out because you didn’t make enough food, or because moving your character is janky as hell. And selecting your plot of land? Oh that’s a reaction test as a cursor moves along the screen (faster on the higher difficulties) meaning the PC is gonna screw you out of half your lands (and mis-timing is going to screw you out of the other half.) And because there’s not that much space on the screen, actually fully understanding supply and demand in context… isn’t going to totally happen. You need to remember how much of a good you need to buy to not be in shortage. How the shop price affects things and changes is… obscure.
Which is not even to raise the nadir of MULE: random “punishment” events. Yep, this was designed well before balancing was really a thing, and they had the best intentions at heart, but “lift up the low boats” wasn’t a thing– “smash the high ones with a tsunami” was. It’s a bummer because it doesn’t really work. It’s super clever to make the winning players play first (so it’s easier for the worse off to strategise) but some players can get into such a commanding position that losing some money here or there isn’t that bad. And instead, things tend to happen like you scrimping and saving, finally getting your engine up and running, lots of ore coming in… and a pirate ship shows up, takes all your ore on a turn when the players ahead of you all switched to energy and food, and now you’re stuck with nothing to sell and no way to afford the energy or food you need to keep your plots going. It is the dogshit worst.
That said, while MULE has the capability to cause (and must have caused) Monopoly-esque meltdowns, the game is still dang fun if you can get into the mindset. The AI is hilariously vindictive–I love that it will screw you on land auctions if you try and force the price up to screw them (it’s all about timing when to walk backwards…) and that they’ll be extremely selective as to when to buy from you, even if it hurts them (I’d swear it knows it doesn’t need food towards the end of the game…) and if you save-scum away only the bullshit punishments or mis-clicks (be generous; it’s 2021) the core here is so dang solid–and it only really makes sense as a video game, because I’ll be fucked if I’m calculating the new cost of mules based on the previous trading period using a table in a board game manual or something.
Is it a classic I’ll return to again and again? No, not really. Is it something that any student of video games should play once, twice, three times at least? Of course, and if there’s anything you take from this it’s criminal that they probably won’t.
Will I ever play it again? I am desperate to play this on tournament mode with three other experienced (but not too experienced) players IRL. No joke desperate. I think there some of my issues (the misclicks; the punishments) stop becoming as massive an issue when you’re playing with more than two people…
Final Thought: Shout out to TreyM for their classic CRT overlays! This kind of thing really doesn’t feel right without them–and they’ll continue to help me experience things “in context” as much as I can when I get to the likes of Rescue on Fractalus…
Developed/Published by: Team Cherry Released: 24/02/2017 Completed: 09/12/2020 Completion: Finished the main story with a percentage north of 100%. Trophies / Achievements: 48%
Kinda funny, but not that funny to be writing at this today [”months earlier”-Ed.] after listening to the Greatest Games Ever Insert Credit Show where Tim Rogers enthused that this was the best Metroidvania ever and Brandon Sheffield hated it very, very much.
Might as well cut to the chase and say I like it far, far less than Tim Rogers but don’t hate it quite as much as Brandon Sheffield (but then, I played it more than an hour, and if I’d stopped at an hour I might have.) However, this is me falling headlong into “no, it’s the children who are wrong” territory because I’m going to say that is pretty much everything I hate in Metroidvania design (level design in general, even) and I’m truly, truly baffled by why this is so lauded. I mean, this is a game that opens with a short tutorial segment (fine, good) but then throws you into a level with multiple long pathways, no map unless you pick the right path quickly, and extremely samey graphics across the area meaning you just stumble around second guessing every move. I mean the whole “you don’t get a map in a section until you find the guy who has the map”… people like that? And don’t get me started on how the game doesn’t let you see yourself on the map unless you waste one of your equip slots. That’s honestly unpleasant.
I mean the level design is bad enough on the macro level, but each area is also chock-a-block with blind drops, punishment drops, and enemies that take forever to kill because you have to engage with a punitive weapon levelling system that, frankly, you’ll won’t be able to engage with unless you literally look up where to get the materials.
This kind of complaint, however, is the exact type of thing that breeds what has to be one of my most hated “extremely online gamer” takes, which to respond to a complaint something is just tediously hard or obtuse by telling folk to “Git gud”. Here’s my response: the game should get good.
Anyway, what I did with Hollow Knight was ignore everyone who says you shouldn’t look anything up because I ain’t got time for that and just start to actually roll through it using a map to find the traversal skills etc. While I never ever actually liked the level design basically ever, the game only really starts to become anything worth your time once you’ve unlocked dashing and even then it wasn’t until I unlocked the ability to dash through enemies and damage them that I gelled with it at all (especially because you can’t cancel the dash or backdash, meaning until the point dashing was safer I didn’t like it).
Even at that, a bit like with Celeste, I didn’t ever really care for how the main character controlled, nor how battles felt or having to go and get your “shade” any time you died so you could get your money back (guess what! It was never hard to do that, my stomach only ever sank at the waste of time.)
The problem is of course is that metroidvania design is so… more-ish? I played this wayyyy longer than I needed to because it’s actually fairly trivial to beat this if you “git gud” and just do the exact main quest, but instead I unlocked all the abilities, fully upgraded my sword, got all the equips… I mean, I basically dredged this because even if I wasn’t really having fun in the moment I was always so close to doing the next thing and so I did.
Anyway I beat it and the spell was broken.
Will I ever play it again? No, and no fucking way will I play a sequel or anything like that.
Final Thought: Hollow Knight is… not good. There’s no excuse for lengthy, tedious mapping and no excuse for punishing, tedious level design. Or the terrible introduction to the game or pacing/planning of the unlocks (I mean come on, the first unlock being a spell instead of dash, which is so core to the experience; lol). That said, you’ll probably stockholm syndrome yourself into thinking it’s the bee’s knees because there’s just so much content. Plus, to be honest, there’s some charming animation and even if I didn’t like the setting or any of the world design (so bland! So samey!!!) I actually thought the soundtrack was nice. In conclusion: the children are wrong!!!
Developed/Published by: Intelligent Systems / Nintendo Released: March 13th, 2015 Completed: 25th April, 2017 Completion: Finished all the levels, collecting all but eight of the gears. Trophies / Achievements: n/a
Here’s another Nintendo failure, then! You know, I do like to complain that Nintendo only seem to pump out games in just a few franchises (Mario, Zelda, recently Fire Emblem) but here’s what happens whenever they put anything else out: it tanks. So no wonder they’re getting the idea that people just want the same thing over and over until they run it into the ground. And honestly, sometimes it’s fair that the things they release fail, because they’re insanely misguided (Metroid: Federation Force) but then it’s also sad because Nintendo then learns the wrong lesson from them (“people hate Metroid”).
I mean, the lesson they might have learned here—Intelligent System’s attempt at a Valkyria Chronicles-esque third-person strategy title—is probably “don’t let Intelligent Systems do anything except Fire Emblem” because bloody hell I can’t keep up with the number of Fire Emblems that have come out. (Remember Advance Wars? It’s been almost ten years, guys.)
And, frankly: it’s a shame. Because I liked Code Name: STEAM. I know, that’s insane. I hate everything. And let me state as caveat that I immediately installed the patch that allows you to speed up the enemy turns. But Code Name: STEAM is a completely serviceable strategy title that—outside of a few frustrations—I found completely pleasant.
Now, I can agree: it’s a bit weird looking. It doesn’t manage to nail the comic book look it wants, and the enemies are somewhat… dull. However, it’s got a weirdly interesting and diverse cast drawn from literature. It gets some points, for example, for gender-swapping Zorro (was this secretly why it failed? Neckbeard boycott?) but loses some for having Dorothy bare her midriff (why?) but maybe it gains those back by including Queen Califa. I’m not a perfect arbiter of points, ok?
It does have some other flaws. Many (most?) people complain about the lack of a true tactical view, but that didn’t bother me because it’s obviously not what they’re trying to do. With free movement before you commit (hindered by enemy overwatch attacks), it’s a game about careful scouting and much more about the feel of being in a small attack squad. I do think the game is much too stingy with its steam-based action points, meaning you travel through levels very slowly, and the game doesn’t have any good sense of a progression of power—all of the unlocks are similar in power levels, just different, when it could have done with more steam being offered as you unlock new boilers (for some reason, most boilers don’t refill fully each turn, and the ones that refill slowly that you unlock I found unusable. Rather a big misstep, I feel.)
I’d say the main mistakes they’ve made are in working against the slow, methodical play style that the limited action points engender. To mix things up they add a lot of “pressure”—first with baddies that spawn in (behind you, usually) which is a mild irritant, and then just the worst: “spotter” baddies in levels featuring mortar attacks. They spawn and you have to get out of their line of sight or take a severe hit. Of course, so you can’t stall, you can’t kill them (just move them, hopefully out of sight, but it’s generally awkward to do) and this is insanely frustrating with the limited amount of action points on offer. There are certain levels where you will be harried to the point scouting is impossible, and you get situations where you stumble forward, get shot by a baddie with knock-back, and then land directly in the path of the spotter you thought you were escaping, and die by mortar. Oh, and there’s a couple of difficulty-spike levels outside of that: one with mounted guns that don’t have a clear range (frustrating) and another with a bunch of exploding enemies dropping in that I found… ragey.
Honestly, at least one of these levels had me considering stopping playing, and that’s really awful, because the game is so close to being an all-round nice time like Valkyria Chronicles. The final boss is a pain in the arse too, admittedly—but at least it’s nothing like the final boss of Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, my last dalliance with an Intelligent Systems game.
However, the levels in which it works—it really works. In general the map design is clever, with a good mix of complex indoor and outdoor spaces, and while generally it’s a bad idea to split up your team of four, the level where you’re forced to do was a particularly fun one, I thought. There are far more fun levels than frustrating ones, it’s just the annoying ones are going to stick in your craw (I mean, they’re ultimately why I didn’t collect all the gears you can find in levels, and I wanted to.)
I’m gonna say that it’s weird to me that Code Name: STEAM didn’t get a fairer shake when it was released. It was slated by almost all reviewers with them almost all concentrating on the (pre-patch) lengthy wait between turns, and I guess that one mistake wrecked any chance of it managing critical acclaim at least.
Well: It’s got the only critical acclaim it truly needs: that I liked it. I mean, I didn’t love it or anything but I had a nice time. That should be more than enough!
Will I ever play it again? I won’t, but the sequel they tease at the end I would have played, except it shall never exist.
Final Thought: I recommend this, actually. I’m gonna… recommend it. Really! Because when I picked it up it was $5, and pretty much any store is gonna have it for pennies. You can do so much worse.
Developed/Published by: Good-Feel / Nintendo Released: October 17th, 2010 Completed: 28th November, 2014 Completion: Finished all the levels. Didn’t 100% collect everything or anything, but close (cannae be arsed to boot it up to find out exactly how close.) Trophies / Achievements: n/a
Do you like Starbucks? I really don’t. In fact, I go absolutely out of my way to not use Starbucks. I hate it when I’m at, say, an airport, and the only way I can get a hot tea is from a Starbucks. I mean, look at that, I’ve written “hot tea” there because I’ve gotten so used to being beaten down by Americanisations from places like Starbucks that I don’t just say tea. Thing is, it’s not like Starbucks is that bad. It’s bland, and competent. It’s really, when you get down to it, not offensive.
You might want to guess here where I’m going with this, but Kirby’s Epic Yarn isn’t Starbucks. No. What Kirby’s Epic Yarn is like is… well, imagine a person who loves Starbucks, right? They love it. And so they decides to start their own coffee place, very much based on Starbucks. Their coffee shop attempts to have Starbucks-style coffee, Starbucks-style music, Starbucks-style decor. But, by virtue of being made from the sweat of an individual, it doesn’t come out quite that way. The coffee is a little more interesting. The music is some interesting jazz. And the decor has a really cute, handmade feel. This person hasn’t got anything wrong, they’ve just made something much more personal, more “real” despite basing their design on something bland, corporate and forgettable.
It’s the kind of place that you’d go—hell, I’d go—and I wouldn’t hate it, you know? I’d appreciate the cute touches that they put in. The cushions, or the art. I’d find myself having a perfectly pleasant time there. None of that edge of irritation that Starbucks engenders—where it’s so bland, you feel annoyed that it’s been calculated to not annoy you.
But I’d, without really thinking about it, not bother to go back.
That’s Kirby’s Epic Yarn. It’s cute, full of lovely touches. Genuinely sweet, really. But the core… well it’s just another forgettable 2D platformer, isn’t it? If you’re going to put all this effort into making something lovely, please don’t base it on a Starbucks.
Will I ever play it again? Nope. And this goes on the sad pile of “Nintendo games I won’t keep” which is rare indeed.
Final Thought: I honestly thought Jeff and Casey Time had taken music from this game. I was pretty sure they’d lifted one of the tracks… maybe Lava Landing? (which is amazing, give it a listen!) but it turns out that it’s an original piece of music, The Infinite Tea Time. Also amazing but really nothing like Lava Landing. This is therefore proof I, and you, should watch Jeff and Casey Time again because it was really good and it’s clearly been too long.
Developed/Published by: Kairosoft Released: Jan 5th, 2012 Completed: 17th November, 2014 Completion: One full career with a high score of 101,601. Beat every league and every cup except the Prin team match. They’ve got max stats! It’s nigh impossible! Trophies / Achievements: n/a
We’ve talked about football several times here, but here’s a thing! I have no idea what a football manager does. I’ve never managed to get into any of those Football Manager-type games (nae luck, Kevin Toms!) because I just don’t care about club football, but I got back into Pocket League Story recently after—more or less—realising it had been sitting on my phone for the past year (or two?) when I stopped midway through a career in it. I’d just watched Scotland beat Ireland so it seemed like a good idea.
Anyway, then I watched Scotland get pumped 3-1 by England, seeing Gordon Strachan just sort of occasionally get up during the match, yell and point, getting increasingly grumpy looking in the stupid chairs that the sponsors make them sit in (they’re a car manufacturer, so they make them sit in race car seats… I assume. If that’s what they usually sit in, that’s absurd.) I thought… how does he affect the game while he’s there? When he puts a new guy on, does he whisper in his ear “do this, tell the guys to start doing this tactic”? Something like that?
I mean, when you’re running a national team… does he get up every day and go into the office? After the match, does he sit down with tapes of it, pinpoint the mistakes, make edited highlights, talk to the team individually or as a group, talk them through what went wrong, find out why from their viewpoint, and work on what they do next?
I really have absolutely no idea. I mean, I assume something like that happens, there’s four months till the next match, and even though all the players have their club teams to go to, I’d like to believe they do post-mortem matches with the players and plan extensively for the next one. But who knows? They might just all go home after, meet for a few days training directly before the next match, and be done with it.
Anyway. playing Pocket League Story is a bit like watching Gordon Strachan, you can’t really do anything while the matches are happening, other than possibly tap a player to make them go on fire (uh, not that Strachan has that ability… I think???) which makes them more likely to avoid being tackled/score. You don’t have much of a say in anything, you just sort of watch money flow in, build wee cute buildings, try and get sponsors, and buy new players when you have cash (which has a really weird mechanic in that you give them the money, then try and convince them to join. If they don’t, you lose the money. I pumped millions of dollars into trying to hire a monkey. A monkey.)
It’s hypnotic anyway, because watching numbers go up is brilliant, as we all know. Having an unstoppable team of powered-up football men doing footballing seems brilliant, even if you didn’t do really do anything. Which made me realise something: a watched game is a played game. After that England match I played the match over and over again in my head, thinking what should have happened at certain points. If only he’d done this, or if they’d made a change in tactics there. I played the game over and over in my head. Made me think that in some respects people who watch sports are—really—playing the game, more or less as much as I played this. In conclusion: sports are cool, don’t cuss people for enjoying watching sports. Unless it’s cricket, cricket is fucking crap.
Will I ever play it again? No way! I really really shouldn’t play any more Kairosoft games, they’re all pretty timewastey. However, I’m sure at some point in my life I will, regretfully, install Grand Prix Story. Maybe that counts as “playing it again?” I mean it’s basically the same thing.
Final Thought: My favourite thing about Pocket League Story is that I had David Beckam(’s facsimile) play for my team for ages, and I replaced him with the monkey. The monkey was better.
Developed/Published by: Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo / Konami Released: May 6th, 2003 Completed: 15th November, 2014 Completion: 99.8% map completion. I have no idea which tiny secret area I missed. Gah. However, I saw all three endings anyway. Trophies / Achievements: n/a
Look, if you tied me to a chair and demanded I tell you which Metroidvania is the best Metroidvania, well, first I’d say “Jesus, you didn’t have to tie me to a chair. I’ll just tell you, ok?” and then I’d say it’s…
It’s Metroid: Zero Mission. There’s no debate here. If you’re planning on tying me to that chair again to attempt to change my opinion to something stupid, like Super Metroid, well, you’re going to have to… actually to be honest I’d probably just agree with you long enough to get out of the room/basement/storage locker/wherever it is you tend to do your tying of people to chairs to find out and then change their opinions.
Anyway. Metroid: Zero Mission is great, and it’s on the GBA, which had a lot of good Metroidvanias (remember when there was a turf war where some people wanted to call them Castleroids? Ah, simpler days.) Case point: Aria of Sorrow! It’s a good one! I probably liked Harmony of Dissonance more, even if the music in that sounds like a piano being dropped down a fight of stairs onto a mariachi band. Oh, and the the graphics are kind of bonkers; meanwhile Aria of Sorrow looks amazing—very consistent in a way that Castlevania games sometimes struggle with.
I dunno, though. Look, it’s your basic IGA-led Castlevania, you know? Really big, sprawling castle that makes no spacial sense. There’s a setting-related excuse thought—the castle is some sort of dimension of its own, as a result it’s just mad—but in this one I was really struck by how, I dunno, randomly designed Castlevanias can be. There’s definitely a thread to the design—players are going to go here first, before they can go there, because they need that—but you often get a sense that the rooms are just “well, this one is a corridor, and this one is a 4×4 cube” and the challenge is designed this way “put respawning skeletons in that one, and a bunch of axe armours in that one.”
I mean, there’s a good reason people wax lyrical about Dracula X (or the other, more linear Castlevanias) they’re very carefully designed into a moment-to-moment experience. Here, there might not be a clear “encounter” or design to a room; it’s just a space with some stuff in it. In retrospect it’s that which makes the castle design feels weird in Castlevanias; the rooms don’t have to make sense (a kitchen doesn’t have to be a working kitchen) but they have to make sense as a designed play-space. Mario levels make no sense at all, but they’re so carefully designed as experiences that we accept that Bowser’s castle is constructed of wobbly blocks that dip themselves in lava, cannons that constantly fire, etc. in a way we don’t with a Castlevania. Or at least, I don’t.
I mean, really, the one section that stands out in every Castlevania is probably the Clock Tower, simply because they’re always so clearly modelled on the Clock Towers from Dracula X—entirely about the experience of dodging harpies and Medusa heads while climbing cogs. Sure, it’s frustrating, but it’s designed.
To be honest, Aria of Sorrow is a really strong example of something that’s become endemic in games right now—weak or non-existent level design being utterly papered over with collectibles and RPG systems. I mean, Aria of Sorrow feels good to play (I will never get sick of the ol’ “dodge back out of enemy attack, move forward and attack” dance) and everything you do gets you more exploration percentage, more levels and new weapons and things. There’s always something new to kill or new to kill something with, and it works; the game might be sloppy and empty as a designed experience, but the “feel” is superb. And, you know? Here that’s enough. I ain’t gonna complain.
Will I ever play it again? Yeah. I can see myself playing this again, it’s nice and short. I’ll have to finish all the DS Castlevanias first though… no, really!
Final Thought: I know you’ve probably spent the majority of this article preparing the ropes and your special torture chair simply because I don’t like Super Metroid very much, but please don’t let this distract you from Aria of Sorrow’s perfectly pleasant time. Maybe let it distract you from the game’s story though, which is total bobbins and the one thing I found annoying.
Developed/Published by: Nintendo EAD Group No. 5, Vitei / Nintendo Released: March 27th, 2011 Completed: 2nd November, 2014 Completion: I finished all the missions. Didn’t bother my arse with the time trials or anything like that. Trophies / Achievements: n/a
I’ve taken a while to write this one because I felt that if I sat down and wrote my little… well, whatever it is these are, reviews, or journal entries or summat, right away, I’d just be going fucking mental here. Because this is one of those stupid games where it’s a total breeze right until the end, where the final boss is just totally stupidly hard for no particularly good reason, and you just end up wanting to snap your god damn 3DS in half, hold it tightly in one hand, fly to Japan and then shove it right up the arse of the director of the game (in this case, Takaya Imamura.) Now, I don’t know where Takaya Imamura lives exactly and he apparently produced F-Zero GX, so that would, probably, be a bit of an overreaction. However, I’ve noticed that Nintendo really, really love stupid difficulty spikes in their second/third tier releases (Super Princess Peach, for some reason, really sticks out in my mind… it was years ago I played it and I still want to fly to Japan and shove a broken DS up at least one arse) so I suppose I should be used to this by now.
Anyway. Steel Diver was a weird launch game for the 3DS that no one liked, in fact, no one liked it so much that I bought it for three dollars. Three dollars sealed. Seemed like a bargain, I thought. After all, on the back of the box it looks like a cute little sub sim thing! I think I bought Pilotwings Resort for about a fiver at the same time and that was delightful, just delightful, so how bad could Steel Diver be? (Let’s forget about the boss, for a minute.)
It’s bad. It’s bad because it, in classic “we have this input form, we have to use it” style that you’d have thought Nintendo would have been over by the time of the 3DS, you control it totally through the touch screen. Which turns a submarine sim into a game that’s entirely about choosing to either move the slider that’s “depth” or the one that’s “speed.”
Sometimes you have to fire torpedoes! But mostly you’re trying to make sure you don’t bump into things by going “erk, going to fast, have to slow down” or “crap, the sea floor is going up, have to raise depth.”
It’s stupefying. Brilliantly, the game is designed so you never actually have to fight enemy subs (just go past them, there’s no reason to fight them, no score or points or anything) which I guess is “realistic” but sure does make them seem pointless. And when you do have to get into a fight, using the stylus to push some sliders slowly and fire torpedoes… it’s like using the 3DS stylus to get good bits of jam out of a mouldy jam jar. A tedious and lamentable thing to find yourself doing.
Honestly. Steel Diver isn’t a game super worthy of rage. Because you shouldn’t be getting to the point where you’re fighting the last boss. Just about as far as you should go is opening it to get the Club Nintendo code and then closing the box again forever.
Will I ever play it again? ha ha ha ha [begins to choke on own mirth]
Final Thought: Y’all ever play that Radar Mission? Steel Diver is someone at Nintendo going “hey remember we released a sub game for the Game Boy when it came out? That was a good idea, lets do it again.” Steel Diver even comes with a weird, off-brand Battleships-a-like that you can play with another 3DS owner, but you don’t want to do that because it’s the equivalent of asking a friend if they want to sit in a ditch and eat bogies with you.
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.
