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: 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: BioWare / Electronic Arts Released: March 6th, 2012 Completed: 7th May, 2015 Completion: Completed it with one of the good (but not best?) endings. Or something. Trophies / Achievements: 640/1550
So there’s me, right at the end of Mass Effect 3, and I’m like “hmm.”
I’m like “hmm” because I realise that even though I thought I had installed the special BioWare-makes-the-fans-happy-really-sorry-how-abrupt-the-ending-was-please-stop patch, I, uh, hadn’t. And I really, really couldn’t be arsed waiting for it to install and then playing through what might turn out to be a significant chunk of the game again to see the “proper” ending.
So I didn’t and watched my ending “again” on YouTube with all the stuff they added.
Now. I’m not really a fan of… uh, fans. In general, I’m one of those sorts that thinks that authors should put out their work exactly as they want it to be, and be done with it. The author dies to the audience, the audience, to the author, never existed.
However, if the ending of Mass Effect 3 was as BioWare intended, they’re fucking idiots. No, lazy idiots. The extended cut is a botch job—stitches things together just enough that you’re like “yeah, fine, whatever” but it’s actually quite embarrassing to think they thought the original pass.
(Whether that’s more embarrassing than fans peeing their pants in such an astonishing baby-tantrum that they went to the Federal Trade Commission in the US, I’m not sure.)
Speaking of authors—BioWare is interesting, isn’t it? If you were to ask me who the main creative force of a lot of games were, I could name a person quite easily. Fable III—another example of a game with a garbagey ending and promises it couldn’t keep—you can place your anger at Peter Molyneux’ door. But with Mass Effect 3, or any BioWare game, I’d struggle to name any person who worked on it. Wikipedia says this bloke Casey Hudson was the director, so I’d assume the buck stopped with him. Never heard of him.
(To move on from authors to auteurs, if you’re wondering, I don’t feel the auteur theory fits for every work. But even in a huge video game, I think it’s important that one person or a small group of people shepherd the work into a consistent whole. Otherwise you end up with drivel. And we often end up with drivel.)
In this case, I wonder if the buck stops with Electronic Arts. EA are generally parodied as evil (I think they’re still topping the worst companies list, aren’t they?) despite the fact that everything has consolidated so much when you get down to things they’re just another massive corporation (so, evil, but no more or less evil than any of the rest of that shower.)
Here, however, the corporate bells and whistles on Mass Effect 3 are egregious. Mass Effect 2 might have had some DLC characters and that kind of shite—pay another $20 or miss out on three chapters from the latest Game of Thrones book, imagine it—but Mass Effect 3 makes the decision that, you know, if you really want to get the best endings by raising your “galactic readiness” you should spend a lot of time playing multiplayer. And you should play the tie-in iOS game. Oh, and the tie-in app!
If you don’t do this—or, if like me, you don’t actually realise you’re supposed to do this and can’t really do this, because it’s several years later—you’re fucked (I think you can get the best ending if you 100% the game with the extend cut patch, but I’m not totally sure. I certainly wasn’t sure what I had left over to do to get it.)
So what you have here is a story, a narrative, a creative work, whatever you call it, absolutely and totally at the whim of a corporate treatment that says something as vapid as “we need people engaging with the brand in a holistic manner across multimedia.” Or something. Mass Effect 3 becomes “content” to be exploited.
It’s a disaster, and to be honest, the majority of Mass Effect feels like a franchise spinning it’s wheels. No matter how you get there, you get to an ending that I characterise as “the Deus Ex.” If you’ve ever played a Deus Ex game you probably know what I mean (they all do this): you’ve just made a million decisions through the game, and right at the end they give you two or three options, usually represented with big buttons or something, none of which are exactly “good” or “bad” and none of which have anything to do your choices previous. In fact, the ending of Mass Effect 3 is almost exactly the same as the original Deus Ex if you think about it.
Even more so than Deus Ex where it’s a let-down, here you’re like “what? This has nothing to do with the rest of the game at all???” It’s baws.
(If you want to complain that actually, the endings you can get do relate to your decisions because of the way you collect “war assets,” there are still basically up to three endings. Everything else is so mild as to be meaningless.)
Anyway, my point isn’t that the ending is bad and therefore I’m annoyed. My point is that I don’t think Mass Effect 3 could have been good in the culture it was developed in. Who cares about quality when you’ve got content to exploit?
Will I ever play it again? Ha ha no. And it has made me doubt I’d play Mass Effect 4 when it inevitably comes along.
Final Thought: You might have noticed that despite being frustrated by its problematic aspects I didn’t dislike Mass Effect 2, while I consider this one a disaster. Well, Mass Effect 3 has improvements—it looks better, combat is evolved—but it’s just not compelling. It gets off on the wrong foot immediately, I think. The stakes are so comically high—the game begins with Earth being invaded—that flying back and forth and doing missions and stuff just doesn’t seem to make any sense. I was constantly like “wouldn’t everyone on Earth be dead already?”
Yes. I didn’t find a space opera “believable.” But the whole things ultimately makes about as much sense as Fable III and if that isn’t a sick-ass burn I don’t know what is.
Developed/Published by: Matrix Software / Taito Released: July 28th, 2011 Completed: 2nd May, 2015 Completion: Finished all the tracks in normal, gave up partway through hard. I’d seen all the content though. Trophies / Achievements: 34/62
Since early man carved the first iPhone out of limestone on the African savannah, tapping his finger on the screen in time to music has been something he has wanted to do. He started with things like Tap Tap Revenge, but by the time he’d evolved into hipsterlopithecus, he demanded that the things he tapped on have some kind of relation to things from culture he could at least pretend to vaguely remember, and so the Space Invaders-themed Groove Coaster was born!
That sounds like I’m being hard on Groove Coaster, but it’s a rhythm action game which starts with a very simple concept—your avatar (probably Space Invadersy) follows a track, points on the track appear, tap the screen when your avatar passes them. It slowly evolves so that sometimes you have to hold, some times you have to swipe, etc., but the main thing is you tap the screen in time when prompted. It’s about as simple—as digital—as rhythm action gets, which in itself is kind of interesting.
You see, I don’t think Groove Coaster is any good at all when it tries to be challenging, and it made me realise something about a lot of rhythm action games, certainly the most well remembered ones like the Guitar Hero franchise—that they’re not really about the skill of performance in the way video games generally are. They’re more like playing music than is obvious I suppose: as a musician it’s a rare talent indeed to be able to just pick up some sheet music you’ve never seen before and play it with a band that already knows the music. In a video game, generally you want to be able to react and recover; you want to be able to perform, or believe you can succeed, from the moment you know the rules. Music is—usually—about repetition more than innate skill, and so are rhythm games; you might fail that track several times because of a noodly bit in the middle, but once you get it, get that muscle memory down, you’re golden.
I think that’s a fairly obvious realisation, but I think this is one of those “personal realisations” where you feel out what it is you like about, and find interesting in, the medium you’re talking about. Here, with Groove Coaster, I was finding it this lovely, pleasant, spacey game to play shortly before I went to bed—tap in time to the music, while the visuals flashed in front of my sleepy eyes—but as soon as it became about the challenge, I stopped liking it.
And Groove Coaster has a bunch of quirks, anyway. Because the track your avatar keeps following often moves and changes direction, the amount you can see in the future is severely limited (and at times, the “beats” you’re supposed to hit dance on screen at the last minute, anyway.) The tapping you perform might at one point correspond to the melody, at another, the drums, and it switches between them with no warning or visual representation. And there are invisible “ad-libs” that I could never quite work out.
Basically, Groove Coaster sort of makes you believe it’s a casual tapper, but it’s actually just as serious about repetition and perfection as any Rock Band title was. It doesn’t mean it’s bad—though I’d argue that its quirks are flaws—but just that it’s not something I found interesting past the point where I’d heard all the songs a few times; the challenge wasn’t rewarding. That’s in stark contrast to the fantasy of a Rock Band game, where as you play on harder and harder levels, you feel more and more like you’re “really” playing the song. Here, you’re just… tapping on the screen, so it doesn’t have the leeway to forget what you’re doing is just trying and failing at challenge that requires repetition and learning more than skill.
Will I ever play it again? No, and I’m not particularly interested in the free-to-play version Groove Coaster Zero, but if I ever saw it’s wonderfully named arcade edition, Groove Coaster 2: Heavenly Festival I’d give it a shot in multiplayer mode which sounds like a lark.
Final Thought: Don’t get me wrong, I’m a sucker for Space Invaders style, too. They really are perfectly designed little buggers and I use a fancy Taito Station tote with Space Invaders on it all the time. And I’d totally buy this rug in a heartbeat.
Developed/Published by: Playground Games / Microsoft Studios Released: March 27th, 2015 Completed: 29th April, 2015 Completion: Finished all the races! Trophies / Achievements: 1000/1000
The Fast & The Furious franchise is a legitimate juggernaut, with the last film breaking a billion dollars worldwide quite easily and countless (countless!) articles about its unique appeal, from waffly thoughts on its diverse casts to hipster snark over how silly the films are despite that.
I love The Fast & The Furious franchise. I love it. I love it so much that I’ve marathoned the films twice—once for six, and then again for seven—and the second time we did it we actually went to all this effort to edit the films slightly so we could fit them into a day and include things like Justin Lin’s A Better Tomorrow and straight-to-DVD short films.
I love it so much that I paid $25 to watch Furious 7 in a juddering theme park chair (D-Box) on a Saturday night and cried buckets at the touching eulogy to Paul Walker at the end. While in a juddering theme park chair.
The most amazing thing is that until that first marathon I wouldn’t have rated the series at all, having only seen the first one as a student one night when people wanted to go to the cinema but there was nothing on. And now I have such a deep adoration for a series that, I’ll happily admit, is wildly patchy in tone, content and quality.
It’s one of those things that’s rather hard to sell to people, because the series has wiggled and morphed; lazy street-race parody, 80s action throwback, superhero movie, crime drama, heist flick… and yet as it has progressed, it’s,managed to cobble together an epic through-line of continuity, revealing a deep sincerity through a belief and love for its characters that shines through.
To me, The Fast & The Furious series is what makes cinema great—no, it’s what cinema is. None of that shite about “turning your brain off.” They’re movies that say “we’re going to take you on a ride, are you coming with us?”
I think it says a lot about the viewer how they react to that.
Forza Horizon 2 Presents Fast & Furious is, and this surprises me, a wee game that is made by people who clearly also really love The Fast & The Furious. There’s not really that much to it—a few hours of driving around repurposed chunk of Forza Horizon 2’s open world—but anyone who would title the final achievement here “How Long Was That Runway?” gets it.
It’s the first realistic driving sim I’ve played in an age—since digging into Gran Turismo 3 all those years ago, a slog to be honest—and I was massively impressed with just how easy you could make it to play while still making it feel “realistic.” You can more or less get it to feel like Ridge Racer if you want, but there’s a nice middle-ground there with just enough resistance that I could feel the simulation without getting annoyed at the controller interface.
However! I was playing a The Fast & The Furious game! This is, yes, a nice racing sim, and they did do what they could to make Fast and Furious events—racing a helicopter, etc.—but with the franchise having morphed from being “mostly about cars and family” to being “mostly about everything, up to and including gun fights, kung fu, big explosions, but still cars (a bit) and definitely family” it all feels a bit pedestrian. Ludacris might be doing the voice (and his best to make it seem fast and furious) but, you know, you’re still just driving a car about town without any stakes at all.
Isn’t that weird? The series has moved on so much that the focus on car racing just feels limited, and there’s not much the Forza chaps can do about it. It’s perfectly pleasant, and at the cost of free it was a great demo for the larger game (not so much at the $10 which it costs now, though). But it is just a demo and, honestly, The Fast and The Furious franchise deserves more. Just pick up Forza Horizon 2 now it costs money.
Will I ever play it again? No, but if I’m ever a millionaire I’ll spend money on one of those insane driving set-ups with a wheel and clutch and proper stick-shift and everything and drive very slowly around Forza Horizon 8 or whatever.
Final Thought: My next trip to D-Box will probably be for Mad Max: Fury Road. Cannae wait, man.
Developed/Published by: SUZAK / Genterprise Released: October 14th, 2009 Completed: 23rd April, 2015 Completion: Finished all 60 levels at the cost of many, many continues. Trophies / Achievements: n/a
I’m obsessed with weird cheapy games—well, Japanese ones, anyway. I’ve made a habit of collecting any Simple Series games I can find (like most folk in-the-know, I adore the EDF series) and I’ve always been interested in the G.G. Series, a series of really cheapy ($2) games thrown out on the DSi eShop.
(Confusingly for collectors, there’s also the GO Series put out by Gamebridge, which includes a bunch of re-badged G.G. Series games in Europe, but in North America just seems to be a grab-bag of other weird cheap stuff.)
Anyway, Ninja Karakuri Den is the first of the series released in North America (though the fifth in Japan) and I’m going to surprise you (possibly?) by saying I loved it. For $2, anyway. It’s a simple little game that’s anything but the Ninja JaJaMaru-kun clone you might imagine—your ninja constantly jumps, every platform he jumps from crumbles, and the idea is to modify your jump height and dash and slash to destroy all the cogs on screen while avoiding/killing enemies to progress.
It’s great! It really is! The controls are initially a little complex until you work out you want to be dashing and slashing more or less exclusively, but most importantly they feel great. Combined with the cute graphics and just-enough-content for $2, I ain’t complaining.
If I was to complain, I’d probably moan that there isn’t a better way to continue than just hitting retry to brute-force your way to the end, and that the bosses are a repetitive low-point of the game. And, honestly, now I’ve done all 60 levels I don’t really see a point in fighting for a high score or anything.
Basically, Ninja Karakuri Den is one idea done well for just long enough. Could it be longer, have more enemies and maybe platform types? Sure. Did I enjoy it because it was such a pleasant surprise as I was expecting nothing good at all? Very likely!
Will I ever play it again? No, but I’ll be happy to drop the $12 for the other six games in the series released in North America and that’s a big, big recommendation.
Final Thought: I don’t really have any other thoughts so actually I’d like to open the floor—have you played any of the G.G. Series? Any particular stand-outs? Oh, hang on, I don’t allow comments on the site. Let me know on Bluesky?
Developed/Published by: Nintendo EAD Tokyo / Nintendo Released: November 13th, 2011 Completed: 21st April, 2015 Completion: Finished the first eight worlds, the eight special worlds, beat Bowser Twice. Three stars on my file. Trophies / Achievements: n/a
Huh! So I liked Super Mario Bros. Deluxeso much that I just wanted to keep playing it, but as that doesn’t get me through my backlog I decided to go back to Super Mario 3D Land—which I’d been playing on-and-off since I got my 3DS—and finish it off, which surprisingly I did quite quickly because I only needed a few more star coins to unlock the last two levels of the Special worlds to finish it off (along with beating Bowser again.)
So, I’ve been effusive with praise for the original Super Mario Bros. but to be honest, since he went into the third dimension with Super Mario 64, I haven’t been the biggest booster of the Mario series. I liked Mario 64 well enough—eventually sitting down and beating it late into the N64’s life. I actually thought Super Mario Sunshine was lovely and will hold that it’s underrated for no clear reason (well, those collect blue coin missions were shite, but that kind of thing is a standard of the series now so…) But Super Mario Galaxy didn’t grab me. I finished it, but in a kind of listless fashion, and I wasn’t that interested in the sequel so I never bothered with it.
(Though I did like Super Mario Galaxy’s story. Totally non-diegetic, but it was nice.)
I picked up Super Mario 3D Land free with the 3DS I think—one of those Club Nintendo deals—and I’ll be honest, I worked my way through the first world with the same kind of sluggish, listless feel I had for Super Mario Galaxy. Now, I feel like I should have been finding it interesting, but… here’s the thing: difficulty is a tough thing to balance.
3D Super Mario games have one problem they’ll never accurately fix (that of being unable to perfectly see where you’re going to land in the third dimension) and that’s always an annoying “difficulty” of them. To some extent they’ve worked to mitigate that—making Super Mario Galaxy about jumping on spheres so you’ve got more view/forgiving gravity; making 3D Land on the 3DS, where you can use actual depth (if you get on with the 3D, which I don’t.)
However, I think the issue is more that the games are, that difficulty aside, really, really easy for ages. Super Mario 3D Land is, in some respect, a back-to-basics 3D Mario, akin to a large, prettier, collection of the secret stages of Super Mario Sunshine, which as everyone knows, were the best bits. That the levels are short is great, that they don’t get challenging until you’ve finished the entire first eight worlds, less so.
Thing is, I’m complaining from the position of a seasoned Mario… playing guy. If you’re just a normal human, this is probably not a problem at all! And your skills grow with the game. It’s not totally without challenge, anyway.
So I’m in the weird position where I was bored—genuinely bored—of this game for hours. But, then it got quite good, apart from the really challenging levels where suddenly you jump and fall off a platform because you couldn’t tell where Mario was going to land. But still, in the end, I liked it. I’d have played it longer, if there were more levels (of the difficult variety.)
Basically what I’m saying is these games need a “look I’m already really good at Mario, ok” setting.
Will I ever play it again? I doubt it, but having grown to like it, I’d happily play that Wii U sequel. I wouldn’t have said that half way through the game though.
Final Thought: It’s annoying that you can only unlock Luigi halfway through the game, and he’s got his weird jump that means, now you’re already muscle-memoried Mario’s way of being, you don’t want to use him. That’s rubbish. Luigi is obviously better, I want to play him through the whole game next time. Maybe if you select the “I’m already really good at Mario” setting at the start you play as Luigi in all the remixed-to-be-harder levels! I’d be satisfied with that.
