Bottom Line Game Reviews

I've actually never heard of it. And no, I don't do requests, mainly because I have a backlog that makes me leave my desk more often than I play anything in it.

Update: for all the zero people that care about my opinions, I would like to make it clear that I did not know about the existence of the sequel and spin-offs before writing this. If I appear to be seeing nuance where you think it doesn’t exist, that may be part of the problem.

Dev: Weappy Pub: THQ Nordic Released: August 2016 Did I finish it: Not even close. 9 hours logged

I think I should state up front that, because I simply have much less patience than I used to for the type of replaying that This is the Police requires, this review is going to be more about ideas than the game itself. It’s an excellent, beautiful game, a top-notch VN blended with a light management simulator. The music, dialogue, and visuals are all amazingly well-crafted and powerfully convey the underlying themes. I’d recommend it to anyone. Mechanically, it’s just not really for me, and that’s a me problem.

I’m glad I’ve played it, because it made me think a little harder about some of my values, and how they’ve changed over the past few years. A game that can do that is Priceless, and that’s exactly what the actual bottom line of the post is going to say; if politics makes you ill, this is a great time to stop reading and buy the game. Though I hope it’ll make you think, too. Getting that practice is important. If politics makes you sick, it’s because you know something’s wrong, and you can’t fix it if you never think about it.

This is the Police is very politically interesting, particularly because the message it sends (at least to me) is probably not the one the developers intended. I believe this because I recently met one of them. She is very much not the sort of person who would say “all cops are bastards.” Some of her friends are cops, and while I haven’t talked politics with her extensively, her social circle has the character of the red state underclass.

And yet, as far as I’ve been able to get through it, This is the Police screams “all cops are bastards” at the top of its lungs. The system you work in is so hopelessly corrupt that the only morally correct decision a cop can make is to resign. That’s actually what your character has already done by the time you start playing, and so the entire game is just you being even more of a bastard on purpose for your last six months because your goal is to retire with $500k. There is no way in This is the Police to do the right thing, or even really to temper your criminality with good deeds. Literally no good deed goes unpunished. If you don’t do Crime A, failing to do Crime B instead either ends your game or makes your situation hopeless. The only morally correct decision in the game is the quit button.

That, ultimately, is another reason why I don’t think ACAB is what This is the Police meant to say. When a game makes moral statements such that uninstalling it is the only way to be a real hero, it’s essentially guaranteed to go over the entire audience’s head. Spec Ops: The Line only managed to get people to understand that by being explicit about it, and the result was that everybody hated the game and thought the devs were being insufferably pretentious.

Far more often, when the only morally correct option in a game is the quit button, it’s a sign that the dev wants to frame this Catch-22 as an excuse for the protagonist’s behavior. They have no choice but to be awful; their lives and livelihoods are threatened, society can’t function without their job, and so good people must sometimes do bad things. What would I have them do instead?

Press the quit button. A better society is not made by people seeking a happy ending for themselves. Jack Boyd is explicitly motivated by greed, and that is ultimately just a slight exaggeration of every normal person’s desire to keep their head down and get through life. You’re a bad person if you play along.

At the same time that I say that, I have no choice but to acknowledge the fact that a police department evaporating would result in innocent people being harmed. If somehow there weren’t lawless chaos in the aftermath of such a change, the people who currently run things would doubtlessly create it so that we would all be convinced to settle back under their yoke. Pallets of bricks don’t wind up near BLM protests because of mischievous fairies. There seems to be no way for people to live without the constant threat of violence. This is where the conservative position on these issues comes from, for most people. It’s not evil, it’s a different framing of the same facts. It’s the same mechanic as when people argue about, for instance, harm reduction programs. “But you’re creating the problem” is something it’s completely fair for both sides to say about the other.

Ultimately, This is The Police reminds me that we all create this problem together. We can only stop it together. People who “support the police” aren’t stupid, violent racists. They’re afraid of what will happen to them if we change this stupid, violent, racist system. That fear is entirely reasonable, because bad things always happen mostly to the people who aren’t billionaires, no matter who they voted for.

Dev: Klabater/Juggler Pub: Klabater Released: September 2021 Did I finish it: No 32 minutes logged

I’m a sucker for unusual mechanics, themes, and combinations thereof. This means I play, and even enjoy, lots of really wonky crap. This tendency led me to buy The Amazing American Circus despite not even really liking the theme. For Reasons better not discussed here, I’ve really come to find glorification of the sepia-toned, wax-mustachioed part of history a serious turn-off, in general. I gave it a pass since the idea of running a circus seemed like an interesting and fresh idea for a game, so long as it wasn’t a tycoon-style game, which this one isn’t.

I think I would’ve enjoyed it much more if it was, and that’s really not my genre.

To begin with, the mechanics are painfully derivative. TAAC is an awkward and unpolished marriage of Slay the Spire’s card battles with Darkest Dungeon’s stable management. Those are two great things that I can still believe would probably work great together, but they didn’t here. That by itself wouldn’t make me angry enough to go type about it.

The problem is that the theme actually heavily detracts from the experience in ways that have nothing to do with my bias against it. These mechanics very obviously describe combat and survival. The circus metaphor is therefore a conceptual bowdlerization, of the lazy and hackish kind that is usually the hallmark of edutainment or Christian games. It’s so bad that the game sort of acknowledges it; one of the more common animations for playing an attack is launching a bottle rocket at the spectators. The devs are practically admitting that you’re hitting monsters but not calling it that.

Another unfortunate thing about this game is the animation. Slay the Spire and Darkest Dungeon, as well as a huge mountain of other great games that would’ve been on Flash portals back in the day, have pretty minimalist animation. When you launch an attack, your character kinda moves forward and wobbles and some sparkly decals appear over your target. It’s low-fi, but we forgive it because thinky, turn-based games aren’t here to be grand spectacles. TAAC almost does this, but there’s actually too much animation for it to work. Characters do just enough different stuff when you play a card that you really notice that their activities are nothing like what is shown on the card. It feels unfinished rather than minimalist.

What really made me give up on the game was the dialogue, though. I regretted my purchase within the first few seconds of the opening cutscene. Every line of dialogue is so flat, and it’s delivered by even flatter voice actors. The style is evocative of “old men ramble for two hours and emotionlessly recite contemporary letters” History Channel specials, with the lightest dusting of PG cussing to keep your mind alive and remind you that it’s set in the Wild West. I have never been more sincere about choosing all the negative responses. I wanted all of these people to shut up, and for the protagonist to go back to his bullshit life back East, which is clearly also what he wanted to do.

Looking further down the store page to collect details for this review, I noticed that this game is part of a “historical bundle,” which means I’m probably right on the money about this being somebody’s attempt at edutainment. It’s also a perfect example of why that’s a dirty word, despite some educational games being classics; if the game actually teaches you anything about this period of history, it doesn’t happen in the first half hour. They just take a normal game concept, force an “educational” theme on to it, and call it a day. This is either gross incompetence or a scam, and that’s usually what “edutainment” means.

Dev: PopCap Pub: PopCap Released: September 2008 Did I finish it: No Nearly 3 hours logged

Cleaning out your backlog really turns up weird shit sometimes. I must’ve got this as part of a PopCap bundle. Who knows when. It's obviously intended for the non-gamer market, a sort of activity book for the elderly and/or their grandchildren. It's got a whimsical fantasy theme.

Each level is split into two phases: first you look at a vignette and find missing objects. Spokes on a wheel, the other half of a pair of scissors, things like that. No big deal. The same vignettes are reused with different exclusions each time, so it’s also a test of memory, provided you haven’t gone to sleep between one instance and the next.

The trouble starts in the second phase of each level: you are presented with a series of blank pages. You click to reveal part of an object you're trying to guess. Because many objects might be called many things, it’s extremely forgiving about how specific you need to be. “Glasses” works for eyeglasses, sunglasses, and 3D glasses. “Chair” works for several kinds of chair. It’s also very lenient about typos; I threw a hail mary on a challenge that stumped me and it accepted “nail clippers” for a pair of flippers. There are also bonus pages where the whole page is visible, but starts off heavily distorted somehow. Scrambled, blurred, twisted, or otherwise mangled.

This is what makes the game subtly terrifying. It throws in some modern objects that don't fit the theme at all, something the only other character you meet notices and is also confused by. Trying to identify objects with such limited vision is basically practice for being very old and/or disabled. I realized this was a horror game when I misidentified a razor as a toothbrush.

There are just so many unpleasant implications, even beyond the game saying “hey, remember how you’re gonna get old and suffer all manner of impairments for years before you finally die?”

I can easily imagine something similar to this being used as teaching material for the infirm. As a result, I can also imagine it being used as a test. I can imagine the Kafkaesque nightmare where well-meaning people condemn me to a quiet, supervised room for the rest of my life because I thought a razor was a toothbrush. I can also imagine the other possibility where death finally finds me because I've sliced open the artery in my tongue trying to shave my teeth.

Antichamber

Dev: Alexander Bruce

Pub: Demruth

Released: Jan. 31, 2013

Did I finish it: Yes

20 hours logged

Colortone

Dev: Kirill Belman

Pub: Kirill Belman

Released: Oct. 29, 2015

Did I finish it: Yes? But I’ve just noticed that Steam didn’t give me the latest version for some reason, even though it’s from back in January. Dunno why. I think it only matters for achievements.

2 hours logged

Visual Style

Antichamber: When it came out, this was a fresh and interesting use of minimalism. It’s a good way to make a puzzle game: color is used to draw the eye to important objects, and certain shapes are used to signal when you need to do something odd to progress. Not everything is completely necessary, as there are secrets peppered throughout, including some of the most awesome dev rooms I’ve ever seen. Some of the puzzle elements have whimsical or unnerving designs that work with the fake-deep level mottos to draw you into the space emotionally.

Colortone: Generally speaking, copypasted from Antichamber. There’s much less variety in the puzzle elements, though. This isn’t all that bad, because it’s significantly shorter, but it bears mention.

Sound Design

Antichamber: Soft synth music and natural sounds form an ambiance that feels quiet despite never being silent.This makes unusual sounds very powerful. There’s a... thing involved with the ending, and it makes a noise that scared the hell out of me the first time I played. This thing pops up from time to time, always somewhere you can’t properly investigate it, fueling your curiosity about the environment.

Colortone: Music and footsteps. The music isn’t terrible, some very generic relaxation stuff. It contains very short loops though, and gets annoying pretty quickly. Ultimately a pretty poorly chosen soundtrack.

Puzzles

Antichamber: A masterwork of physical puzzling that deserves to be every bit as influential as Portal. New mechanics are introduced at an engaging pace, are used together in interesting ways, and are never forgotten. There are a few opportunities to play with the tools you’re given outside the puzzles you need to finish to progress, allowing you to learn new ways of using them that can make your work on the main line more efficient. Due to the map cleverly looping back on itself, frequently dumping you into hub rooms or teleporting you directly to new puzzles, many spaces you’ve visited before become recontextualized by new abilities you acquire. Finally, the game features many spaces and puzzle elements that behave in a completely non-physical way, adding to the atmosphere of mystery and presenting novel challenges of logic, unbound by the usual constraints of an object-based puzzle. Overall, despite the lack of a fantasy setting, Antichamber feels like a simulation of learning to do magic.

Colortone: ...Needs work. The puzzles are interesting enough on a logical level, but their physical design makes them tedious to execute, an issue that gets worse later in the game. The platforming is awkward enough that this game probably should’ve been in third-person, though I can’t imagine a character design that would’ve felt appropriate. It’s also a little buggy: nothing really game-breaking, but objects do sometimes behave in unexpected ways, occasionally necessitating a restart. The mechanics fit together well enough, but then again there really isn’t room for anything to have been forgotten. There are only 14 discrete areas to work through, with the last few containing two or three puzzles rather than one. Each one ends with a long chute dropping you into the next one, which is a decent enough way to say “yes! You did it!” Unfortunately, it also prevents the interconnectivity that brought Antichamber so much depth.

Ending

Antichamber: Wow. I think I actually said that the first time I saw it. It’s odd, because in any other game, an ending like Antichamber’s might be about as satisfying as “thanks for playing!” After the quiet minimalism and cerebral play of the rest of the game though, the release of tension in the last few moments is a really great finale.

Colortone: “Yes! You did it!” And then there’s nothing at the end of the chute. Did they mean to make more? Are/were they planning to update it at some point? I hope so. Being unfinished would explain alot about this game.

Bottom Line: I am tempted to label Antichamber Priceless. It feels like it is a museum as much as it deserves to be in one. It should definitely be studied in schools of game design. However, as a product it’s still short, and has no real plot. It doesn’t exactly strike any deep passions in the human soul. Even considering my own quirky taste, it’s a bit difficult to picture paying more than $20 for it. Definitely worth every penny, though.

Unmechanical

Dev: Talawa Games

Pub: Teotl Studios

Released: Aug 8, 2012

Did I finish it: Yes

5 hours logged

LIMBO

Dev: Playdead

Pub: Playdead

Released: Aug 2, 2011

Did I finish it: Yes, but I didn’t bother with the secrets

3 hours logged

I’m playing with the format a bit this time because I want to compare and contrast these two. Kind of a Goofus and Gallant of physics-based puzzle games.

The Protagonist

Unmechanical: An adorable robot helicopter that is shaped like an apple. It has many applecopter friends.

LIMBO: Some kid. Nobody likes him. Seriously.

The Intro

Unmechanical: You’re flying across a beautiful open plain with your fellow applecopters. Suddenly, you are snatched underground by a menacing robo-claw! Oh, no!

Also there’s DLC where the intro is some dumb thing about a pink applecopter being kidnapped by the same automated facility and you going to help “her.”

LIMBO: You wake up. Where are you? What are you doing, other than going right?  A cold open like this can work, but it’s got to be supported by well-paced revelations.

The Setting and Visual Style

Unmechanical: Everything is so pretty! Look at all these cool machines! Wow, that hole sure is dark, I don’t wanna go in there! What’s in that other place, though? Let me get up there! I definitely feel invited to explore every room and play with the objects in them, even when I’m not working on a puzzle.

LIMBO: Sure is greyscale in here. I get that this game was pretty early in the “silhouette platformer” fad, but that shit was garbage from day one, and almost always an indicator of pretension. The world is well-drawn, at least, but everything looks so awful. It’s supposed to be depressing, but I think artists who do misery porn forget that boredom is a major part of depression. I don’t want to be here, and I don’t want to go there.

The Stages and Puzzles

Unmechanical: While there are some set pieces that feel a little forced, like the Simon Says you run into early on, as the purpose and function of the facility gradually becomes clearer to you, the puzzles begin to seem like believable parts of it. Every so often, a new mechanic will be introduced to you, and the puzzles thereafter will tend to use all these tools together in some fashion. 

There’s a few places where your path can branch, which further encourages exploration and isn’t particularly common in 2D puzzlers. These branches are well-designed loops that send you back to the hub, so you won’t get lost trying to find the next puzzle.

You are never put in danger; the one time any actual harm is done to you is in the DLC, and it’s only to impose a limitation for the next set of puzzles. You’re repaired shortly thereafter. This is important because a puzzle game, especially one based on object physics, should generally feel fairly relaxing. This encourages toying with things and abates frustration.

The difficulty curve is superb. Some of the early puzzles feel almost a little patronizing, but as you are shown the building blocks of the world you’re in, a comfortable ramp of challenge is built up. I only had to get help with one puzzle, and that was because I didn’t realize I needed to reset something from a previous puzzle that was altering the conditions for the one I was on. The DLC is unfortunately different in this respect: I had to look up most of the puzzles, as puzzle elements were frequently visually hidden. I didn’t care for this difference in approach at all.

LIMBO: This kid should seriously consider staying dead as a viable option. Why would you WANT to live in this place? Everything you have to deal with here serves as a reminder that the worst thing about brutal survival is that it’s tedious. The game is full of die-to-figure-it-out puzzles; if anyone’s ever described it as “hard but fair,” they deserve to be punched square in the balls. An unwelcome degree of precision in platforming and timing is required for several of the puzzles; I can do this crap and harder, but I’d prefer if it were kept to games that focus on it.

Stages are not strictly linear: this I assume because there are apparently some secret objects you can collect that I wasn’t aware of until I had to look up a walkthrough to do one of the more obtuse puzzles, and accidentally got a text one instead of a video. The trouble is, since everything kills you, sometimes excruciatingly slowly, curiosity is heavily disincentivized. I’m not going down that hole. It’s obviously death.

The Music

Unmechanical: There is some. It’s soothing and thematically appropriate.

LIMBO: There is none. (?!?!?) I mean... there might have been some. If there was, it was that sort of droning cave-noise junk that horror games always have somewhere in them, and so I never became aware of it. The soundscape is mostly (or entirely?) constrained to ambient noises, which are just as boring as everything looks. At one point a bunch of saw blades and other mechanical bullshit that was trying to kill me did synch up and sound like a Nine Inch Nails track. I guess that was kind of neat.

The End

Unmechanical: Throughout the base game, you’ll periodically encounter a larger copterbot with a wrench and flashlight taped to his head. At first you’re just curious about him, because he keeps hiding from you. I’ve seen him referred to as the janitor, as you see him sweeping at one point. In a few instances, he is directly (though rather trivially) obstructive to your progress.

Eventually, you find the machine that makes the strange floating balls of light that power the rest of the facility. It turns out that, until you were taken, that’s where all the applecopters it’s sucking up go. This place is eating your friends. And the janitor is trying to prevent you from stopping it. These aren’t broken units being recycled, either: their chassis are all untouched, and you can hear them squealing as they bump around inside the pneumatic tubes. 

He saves you from a falling girder shortly after that, sacrificing his own life in the process. And I don’t care. He’s a Nazi collaborator. Giving himself what he deserved doesn’t redeem him.

So, I told you all that so I could explain why the ending bugs me, as it’s the one place this game really screws up. You are given a “choice.” That is in scare quotes because you aren’t really aware of the ramifications of what you’re doing at the time. On the one hand, you can use the collaborator’s blown-out chassis to fool the facility’s sensors into letting you escape to freedom. Alternately, you can become the new janitor. Why? Why would you do that? If I could continue on to use my new powers to dismantle this horrible deathtrap, I’d gladly do so, but it just fades to black, so I can only assume you’re going to be the same guy for the next poor bastard who doesn’t get sucked straight to the processor.

The end of the DLC campaign suffers from a similar error. Although you know what you’re called upon to do this time, the “choice” is still stupid. You can leave your crushed “girlfriend” on a switch to run away by yourself, or you can stuff yourself into a pair of exposed wires to power a machine that will bring her back to life, after which she carries your limp corpse out. The problem is, of course you do the latter, because it’s already been established that the kind of damage you’ve taken is recoverable. Hell, it’s more surprising that she can be brought back; she looked as screwed up as the janitor was.

So, yes, the writing could be better. Overall, I feel like this is a risk any dev runs when they go for the “storytelling without words” bit, which is pretty popular in this genre.

LIMBO: Who the fuck cares? Nothing is ever revealed about this “setting” except that it’s a terrible place, where everyone and everything is trying to kill you, and usually succeeds. I never had any inkling of an objective other than “go right” until about three-fourths of the way through the game, when I was pointlessly teased about some sad girl with a hime cut playing with rocks or some shit who I was apparently trying to reach. I had to find out from the store page that this is supposed to be your sister, and you did all this because you were “unsure of her fate.” Despite being given no reason in the game itself to have doubts about it, or indeed any hint that you had a sister to care about in the first place. Since the game is called LIMBO, is she supposed to be dead? Are you? I have no idea, and I have been given no reason to care.

[Originally posted to my main 4/12/2016]

Dev: SUPERHOT Team Pub: SUPERHOT Team Released: Feb 2016 Did I finish it: Got all the secrets in the levels, but haven’t touched the endless yet. More importantly, beat the high score in Treedude. 0 hours logged, because I was naughty and needed to try the game while broke

“The most innovative shooter I’ve played in years!”

My ass.

It is an interesting idea, used in a novel fashion. It’s not completely devoid of creativity, I’ll give it that. It is rather unique, somewhat fun, and generally good. It’s also heavily overrated, largely because the game actively encourages you to go out and overrate it. So, that’s the most innovative marketing I’ve seen in years, I guess. Ridiculous that it worked, especially for a game that’s so painfully overpriced. Time control has been done before; to this degree and farther in Braid, and in shooter/action games in several, though the use and purpose of it has generally been quite different.

That core idea is something I would like to see used elsewhere. And it’s popular enough that it’s very likely going to spawn imitators, and at least make a little divot in the direction of the genre. For that, I’m glad SUPERHOT exists. The full potential of SUPERHOT isn’t as a game; I’d say what it could ultimately do, if picked up by somebody else and polished for the purpose, is reduce the barrier of entry to making cool action-oriented machinima. I could see a system where you play a game and are then free to not only recut what you’ve done, but tweak animations, swap assets, and perform other editing in a very accessible way, turning your Let’s Play into a feature film. SUPERHOT Team seems to be aware of this possibility as well, given the editing and publication functionality. It’s something I predicted years ago would exist some day, so that’s neat.

You’ve probably been waiting for the “but;” brace for dropping shoes.

Firstly, actually playing the game is kind of a strange experience. For the vast majority of my first run of the story missions, it was actually just… incredibly boring. I have no idea how so many people broke through that crust to get to the part of the game that’s actually good. Once you start dealing with the constraints of the various challenges, it’s a much better puzzle.

Secondly, the graphical style is hot garbage. I shouldn’t have to say that; anyone can see it. It was clearly their intention to make it look bad, and they even say as much in some of the dialogue. It’s worth talking about though, because I feel that it’s a sort of inappropriate use of minimalism this stark. The whole point of their game is topicality: VR is finally actually a thing, so let’s Ask Questions. I’m guessing they adopted the retro aesthetic of their out-of-simulation content to harken back to the times when everybody first thought VR was going to be a thing really soon. They went back too far, though, and we got a terminal for a university mainframe where there should’ve been a C-64. When things looked this ugly, nobody wanted to strap a display to anyone’s face. This weird, anachronistic presentation was pretty jarring to me. Seeing periods get mixed together has a strong tendency to make me feel like a particular attempt at retro is an affectation by somebody who didn’t really love it.

They don’t, by the way. SUPERHOT Team is, as far as I can tell, terrified and/or contemptuous of games and the people who play them. They also seem to have similar feelings about technology in general, as well as transhumanism/the Singularity. This game is blatant and vicious propaganda against our subculture, and I’m surprised I haven’t heard anyone else saying so.

I voiced similar concerns in my analysis of Undertale, but that came with three tons of hemming and hawing, because there was so much about that game that shows Toby Fox does love this medium and its history. Between that and the sheer moral complexity of the characters, I felt like he was actually just asking hard questions. I frequently feel like I should go back and change that review to reflect that realization, but I can never figure out exactly how.

SUPERHOT isn’t asking questions. It’s Just Asking Questions.™ The conclusion they draw is obvious, and they are trying to either make you think like they do, or (as with their entreaty to do guerilla marketing for them) turn you into puppets that unintentionally parody some of the behavior they are so contemptuous of. Everything about their presentation: calling you a dog and barring your progress if you don’t sit, forcing you to “type” words that they wrote, (the most pretentious and wanky bullshit I’ve ever experienced, incidentally) the mod of the “hacker” chat room basically being a cult leader and mouthpiece for the shadowy entity behind it all; the whole thing seeks to remind you that agency is something you are only given in strictly limited quantity by your masters because it is known that you will use it in the intended fashion.

Imagine this next bit in flashing red 40-point Impact if you like:

THIS IS WHAT SUPERHOT TEAM ACTUALLY BELIEVES

Hardcore gamers are somewhere between junkies and cultists, seemingly obsessed with bringing vulnerable young children into their fold. Their elitism, superficiality, and obsessive nature makes them dangerous tools of whoever might choose to pick them up at some point. Not dangerous people, though. They can’t ever be complete people. They’d have to go outside for that, amirite?

The pointlessly violent games that appeal to hardcore gamers are potent brainwashing tools that drain players of empathy, investment in their surroundings, and concern for their well-being. Virtual Reality builds upon this foundation to make games into a kind of horrifying mind-controlling super-meth that, even if it never literally hypnotizes you as it supposedly does in this game, will fundamentally alter your person to the point that you aren’t one.

This technology comes at a pivotal time in human history, when some believe us to be on the brink of superintelligence. Transhumanists are dangerous fools for thinking of this as a good thing; they already talk all kinds of frightening stuff about how their identities and their shells are two different things.

These three incredibly scary social no-no zones might someday form a perfect storm in which a rogue splinter of some shady corp/gov research network becomes a ravenous machine-created oversoul, literally eating people by taking over their minds with our cutting edge, enthusiast-targeted media and directing these thralls to “free” others by murdering them.

But worse than all of that, they think that you having agency in an interactive medium is fundamentally fake. Rather than being a feature that was popularized specifically because gamers frequently choose to play a different game than the one the designers made, hidden secrets in difficult to reach places are just proof that you are predictable in your childish desire to complete collections. You are part of this world, and therefore controlled by it. You were never free, and now your masters have decided to end the pretense. According to SUPERHOT Team, any choice you make that was accounted for by The System wasn’t really a choice.

And you know what? Fine. Whatever. I don’t even care that much. The worst thing about the propaganda is that it causes much of the writing and presentation to be extremely paint-by-numbers. I knew every beat that was coming as I played this game. They have a rabbit hole with no-slip stair mats and OSHA-compliant railings.

Mainly, I just think it’s really goddamn weird that I am the only person I know of with this opinion of the thing. Given how hyper-political games media is getting these days, how did everyone just… miss this?

Bottom Line: $5. It’s still a fairly fun game. They can be stupid assholes. Trying to change game culture at this point is like standing at the bottom of a waterfall and trying to piss it back up. Knock yourselves out, hipsters.

[Originally posted to my main 1/20/2016]

Dev: Interdimensional Games Pub: Interdimensional Games Released: January 2014 Did I finish it: Not yet. I can only stand it in small doses, as much as I want to see where this writing is going. 7 hours logged

I got this game while it was free. I’d barely heard of it before that, despite the fact that critics apparently love it. Between that and the videos on the store page, my hype detector went off something fierce. When people are talking this much about story and character interaction in an indie game, nine times in ten it’s because it has nothing else to offer and the critics really wish they were reviewing books instead. Nevertheless, my curiosity was piqued, and the price was right.

My initial reticence turns out to have been mostly correct. This game is a hot mess. Load times are execrable, to the point they wouldn’t be acceptable on a console. Loading screens also have an unnerving tendency to freeze long enough that they’re indistinguishable from fatal hangs. The devs seem to have no idea how to effectively communicate situational info to the player; it’s easy to get stuck on things, it’s not easy to figure out what objects you can interact with or how you’re supposed to, and the first time I was in a hostile situation, I triggered combat because I hadn’t been informed that I wasn’t supposed to walk two feet to the right. Incredibly, the worst thing about this game, a first-person shooter, is the combat. I have seen very little of it, but it boasts enemies with Goldeneye-era “particularly angry tree stump” AI that take ludicrous amounts of damage and start healing it the moment you’re not looking. Because of how accurate and stupid they are, a gunfight basically consists of you and your target squaring off and using each other as clearing buckets, and hoping you did a better job at it. Any attempts to hide behind shit will get you stuck on something and your dumb ass shot.

The thing is, it’s very clear that CONSORTIUM doesn’t care to be judged by these standards. The intro before you even get to the main menu tells you this game is metafiction. Once you start a file, you get a confusing cold open that, in addition to being the first taste of the horror elements you’ll be experiencing, hints at something really strange going on if you make the connection to something innocuous a little later. The room you first wake up in has access to an extensive backstory codex that makes it clear the setting is riddled with alt-history. Characters recognize your presence and regularly include you in conversations that you walk in on. There’s a little pulldown on your HUD that, when opened, shows you a (mostly superfluous) chart detailing exactly how much everyone you have met likes or dislikes you. This game wants you to be concerned with the competency of its writing and atmosphere, and seems to cutely remind you of this at every opportunity. So, how are those things?

I’m not at all sure. At first glance, the setting seemed like a hamfisted statist wet dream. Sure, it contains the standard overtures about how shady and scary the big megacorp that runs everything is, but said conglomerate is depicted as going to great lengths to avoid harming the people it nominally oppresses, and it expects us to believe that we’d have cold fusion and magical nanotech by 2040 if only we’d just stand out of Google’s way. It’s like if the world of Demolition Man were run by a genuinely nice computer instead of a greedy asshole. But as I had more details about the setting’s alt-history revealed to me, it seemed like there might be a reason for that. It could also explain some really bizarre character interactions I’ve witnessed. For example: your commanding officer scolds her mortal enemy, a hardened mercenary who clearly has the upper hand on her, like he’s a naughty child with his hand in the cookie jar. And he just… puts up with it. Walks right on to the ship and wants to have a chat with you. Surreal. And maybe the setting explains it somehow. Maybe people just think of war a different way at this point.

Similarly, when I first started encountering that alt-history, I thought it was pretty hackish. You don’t just change stuff like how Alexander the Great died, and then still wind up with America fighting the Nazis in WWII. That’s not how history works. But there might be a reason for that, too. Seeing this world is already an explicitly metafictional construct; there’s something in-universe that may have constructed this timeline to be similar to ours despite carrying the differences they wanted. Or maybe that’s bullshit and the writing is lame. I can’t tell yet, because I haven’t finished it, and honestly have no idea what’s going on. But it has been interesting enough to make me want to find out, despite being extremely frustrated with the gameplay experience. That says something.

Whether that interest can forgive the game’s failures is something I’m not sure about. This dev team has potential, but they weren’t up to this task. CONSORTIUM isn’t really ahead of its time, but it was definitely too ambitious a project for Interdimensional.

Bottom Line: $0. I’d honestly say it’d be worth something as a novel or podcast or something, but as a piece of software, it’s a trainwreck. These people want to write. They should’ve done that. The writing probably would’ve been better that way, too, more focused.

Addendum: I originally gave this game $2. That was after failing to kill the traitor once. “Oh, well, it’s the first time I’ve seen real combat in this game. I’ll get better.”

Several attempts later, after talking to my friend about it who thought I should give it $0, I downgraded it to $1. Because the combat is just bad, period. It is theoretically possible to kill this fucker, but I don’t know why you’d want to bother. It is very boring, and very difficult. But I figured I’d keep trying different ways of chipping at it so I could see more of the story.

[Originally posted to my main 1/3/2016]

Dev: Arcen Pub: Arcen Released: July 2010 Did I finish it: Good god, no. If you actually like this, the campaign probably isn’t why anyway. 5 hours logged I noticed a while ago that I hadn’t actually bothered reviewing anything I didn’t like. I decided I should fix that, so this also marks the first time I’ve played something specifically so I could review it. I’ve played it before, but it was quite a long time ago; I couldn’t even really remember why I didn’t like it. For what it’s worth, my reviews up to this point have been positive (I guess Bass Blocks was kind of mixed?) simply because I usually can’t think of much to say about games I don’t like unless they make me really angry. If something is just boring, I forget it. Usually.

Tidalis is so boring I remember it.

I like casual games. I’ve got all kinds of time-killing garbage on my phone, and even when I’m home, if I’m not feeling up to a serious challenge or story, I’ll click some cookies or push some gems or whatever around while I’m watching random crap on youtube. I’m especially partial to match-3s; the core gameplay is satisfying and relaxing, and there’s so many things you can change without breaking it that every match-3 title offers interesting variety, served at an engaging pace.

Tidalis is almost a match-3. There are things on a grid, and you need to get rid of them by matching at least three. However, the way you do it and the way chain reactions happen are both completely different, resulting in a totally novel play experience as compared to standard match-3s. Unfortunately, novelty and quality aren’t always related. I’ve heard people say good things about this game, describing it as a thinking man’s match game, and gushing about the amount of variety in it. To be fair, there is an honestly impressive number of different modes of play; the actual effect is that it feels like the developers knew their game was a dangerously experimental break with formula, so they just threw whatever at the wall to let the players decide what would stick. Match-3 games work well as time killers because they rely on visual pattern recognition. In Tidalis, there are no patterns that can be useful in the same way. Instead, you sort of have to draw your own, and the material often simply isn’t on the board unless you’re playing one of the puzzle levels.

Even if it is, the kind of problem you need to solve to cause chain reactions in Tidalis is more appropriate to pencil and paper. If your brain didn’t have highly efficient pattern recognition firmware, a regular match-3 would be incredibly tedious. You’d need to painstakingly check each pair to see if a swap would cause anything to happen, and slowly develop consciously constructed versions of the scanning algorithms said firmware contains in order to shorten the process. That’s sort of how Tidalis works. The task set before you isn’t particularly complicated, but it’s just complicated enough that it can’t be offloaded from your main processing. On the other hand, it is neither complicated nor rewarding enough to be interesting to do as a task you’re primarily engaged in. In action oriented modes, you’ll generally have just as much or more success thrashing around randomly than you will twiddling things on the board to set up some fatass combo, so whether you win or lose a particular game feels like it’s down to luck even more than most match-3s. I sometimes honestly enjoy completing paperwork, so this should give you an idea of the level of pointlessness I’m talking about.

Of course, I would probably find it much easier with a few hours practice, but that’s where the other problem with Tidalis comes in. I don’t care. Because I can just fuck around and eventually win, I don’t care about staring at all these blocks long enough to divine the proper course of action. These blocks do not matter to me. The pretty colors and the bubbly music and the cast of mascots cannot make me care about them. In fact, the general atmosphere of Tidalis is what really makes it intolerable, not its gameplay. It is oppressively cheerful. If that pair of words doesn’t make much sense to you, imagine being inside a Wal-Mart commercial. Somebody hands you a piece of paper with a weird sudoku variant on it. They won’t let you leave until you’re finished. That is how it feels to play Tidalis.

[Originally posted to my main 12/11/2015]

Dev: Arrowhead Pub: PlayStation Mobile Released: December 2015 Did I finish it: Not really applicable. I’m currently level 19 of 25, if I remember correctly. 25 hours logged

Helldivers is a co-op focused twin-stick shooter with a wide array of customizable equipment for characters to bring. It also has a broad range of difficulties, and each one is calibrated fairly comfortably. It’s a console port, but a very good one, with customizable controls for both gamepad and keyboard, and graphics that are up to modern standards without being particularly resource-intensive. It does have some troublesome crash bugs; what Arrowhead game doesn’t? It’s easy enough to rejoin a game though, and they aren’t too frequent, so this is only frustrating when it’s incredibly poorly timed.

There is one vexing design flaw which can impede a new player’s progress through the game: homeworld assaults. In Helldivers, your squad fights against one of three alien races, and your victories contribute to a community metagame in which humanity tries to take galactic sectors from said space monsters. This works fairly well until the end of any given race’s territory. The amount of points the community needs to rack up to secure an enemy homeworld is massive, and clearly intended for the game’s much larger console playerbase. During these assaults, you can’t take any normal missions for that race, meaning that if you don’t have the equipment you get from that zone, you’re not going to get it until the assault times out a few realtime days later, which it most likely will. Worse, if it actually succeeds, that race is eliminated from the war until the other two are also dead, resetting the board. This wouldn’t be so bad if it could be done in a timely fashion, but as it stands, it’s just not happening, period. I’m confident Arrowhead will fix this at some point, but for now, it’s a huge pain in the ass.

Another issue is that the game is blatantly pay-to-win. Some will disagree about this. The DLC stuff is almost entirely composed of incomparable items that serve different specialist functions, and there is quite powerful kit in the base game and the one piece of DLC that is free with the PC release. The thing is, “sidegrades” are largely a fake idea. In basically all cases, even if the numbers are very well balanced against each other, having an option is significantly better than not having it. If you got the deluxe edition, play a round on a snow planet without your all-terrain boots. You’ll come to understand pretty quickly how silly it is to defend pay-to-win by saying it’s all sidegrades. The only way to alleviate this nuisance in the base game is with jetpacks or vehicles, the first of which generally displaces much more important pieces of equipment, and the second of which tends to explode very rapidly on higher difficulties.

Here’s the thing: I don’t care that it’s pay-to-win. Firstly, it’s co-op. The worst you can do by not having the flash gear is slow your team’s progress somewhat. Secondly, skill is still a much higher factor. There is something in the base kit for every situation, and using those tools intelligently will complete missions. Thirdly, it’s still really fun. I’m horrible at this game, and even worse because I prefer to use a controller, and as such frequently fudge inputs at critical moments. More than once, I’ve been the reason we lost. Despite this, I’m enjoying the experience, and have never felt that lacking the fancy shit was holding me back. That stuff just makes certain situations easier to handle. It will only turn a failure into a success if you were playing sloppy to begin with.

[Originally posted to my main 11/11/2015]

This follows on from my spoiler-free appraisal of the game as an entertainment product here.

Important note: I haven’t heard much about any statements from the developer. So, everything I’ve said here about authorial intent is just conjecture. Furthermore, I’ve returned to this review several times since I’ve written it wanting to amend it. My opinions about the work have been refined somewhat, and this is a hotter take than is probably fair. But I can never quite figure out what I actually want to change whenever I open it, so it stays. pls no bully

Analyzing Undertale’s writing and themes is difficult. For starters, it should be noted that what I’ve personally seen consists of the nicest “neutral” ending, and the secret ending after that. Having read more on the wiki, I now know that gives me a remarkably deficient understanding of the events. Both with and without the knowledge from outside my direct experience of the game, this makes it tricky to guess at authorial intent. If Toby’s trying to send a message about what kind of person you should be, and therefore what ending you should see, it’s diluted by the fact that you have to do the bad thing to really understand the good thing. If he just wanted to make a game with enough moral complexity to provoke thought regardless of your play experience, the effort is kind of blunted by the biased reward structure and the way information is fed to you; to me, in each fight, there was always one very clear right thing to do, and those decisions only ever appeared mistaken in retrospect.

All this highlights another confounding factor: the game takes on drastically different meaning and value depending on how you play it. This might actually be the entire point of the game; there’s certainly a great deal of overt examination of how things tend to work in games, and why we take those conventions for granted. It’s a common thing for JRPGs to be self-aware, but it’s usually for the purpose of little gags, or to paper over the holes in the world-building. Undertale puts that stuff front and center, and takes it quite seriously, despite that it’s still often hilarious.

I knew when I was first cooking the ideas for this review that much of the experience is variable. Because of characters’ relationships with each other, it’d be impossible to keep all the meaningful variation in the epilogue blurb, as often happens with this sort of game. It’s a really great example of how many branches a storyline can have without asking you to do anything different in terms of gameplay. People who don’t care about what the characters are saying will believe this game to be tediously linear.

That touches on another way the experience can differ. Even people who like getting into stories, who always Talk to Everyone, and who care enough about games to write fanfiction for NaNoWriMo may wind up finding this game kind of flat, at least as compared to how much I cared about it.

[Beyond this point, spoilers.]

[Originally posted to my main 11/10/2015]

Dev: Toby Fox Pub: Toby Fox Released: September 2015 Did I finish it: That depends what you consider finished. I went back and got the letter, which is sufficient explanation if you know. 15 hours logged, plus a couple more for the demo, which I played more thoroughly

Truly thought provoking works can be difficult to talk about. Once a thought is provoked, you sort of have to beat it into submission before you can get back to whatever got it so upset. You can start from one piece of art and spin off in a myriad of ways, from simple aesthetic judgement to complex philosophical examination which may deal with concepts that the artist never even had an inkling of. Frequently, this gets critique branded pretentious, and works branded “fake deep,” and that assessment is hardly always wrong. On the other hand, it’s also why critics talk about “death of the author.” Emotions, by their nature, are not always fully understood by those having them. Since art is generally an attempt to use symbols to convey emotion with greater bandwidth or resolution than the artist can accomplish by just talking about it, it’s natural that many works will carry meaning that the artist didn’t put there on purpose.

Undertale is astonishingly beautiful in many ways. Just the demo made me laugh heartily and cry sincerely, and though having played it months ago made finally getting to the full game blunted in comparison to that first impression, it is still excellent. I have complex thoughts about it, however. There’s clearly a message, but I can’t quite figure out what it is. That might be because it is extremely nuanced; while it sometimes has a polemic flavor, it is willing to double back on itself in ways rarely seen in this medium. Or maybe I know exactly what it is, and discarded it because I disagreed with either it or its presentation, and am just digging through a game I like for something that isn’t there. Or yet again, maybe I just didn’t receive the correct message because the communication was broken by writing that isn’t all I think it’s cracked up to be. The problem might even be that I haven’t really finished the game. There’s some things I can’t bring myself to do, and whether that’s because I’m emotionally invested in the characters and the story I told through my way of playing the game, or if I’d just find completionist content-mining in this case a little more tedious than I’d enjoy is something I also couldn’t really tell you, honestly.

Talking about everything I’d like to, particularly the philosophical examination, would require completely spoiling the whole thing, and by god do you need to be surprised by this game in order to really get it. So, aside from what’s already here, I’ll write this review in two parts, one tagged for spoilers. First, an aesthetic critique, and then some examination of… how I feel about the writing, I guess would be the best way to put it?

In case you hadn’t already got the point, this game, simply as a game, is superlative. To begin with, it’s retro done more right than I’ve seen anyone else do it. In terms of both graphics and gameplay, when this game chooses to be normal, it’s the best of what we remember from the 8-bit era. When it chooses to throw curveballs, it’s a wake-up call to modern game designers that they left behind a few opportunities when they were busy cranking up the detail. As often seems to be the case with good indie games though, the real star of the show is the soundtrack. The guy who made the rest of the game made that, too, and it’s breathtaking. There are atmospheric tracks that turn “that looks odd” into “this is terrifying,” and fight music that turns “do I have to do this?” into “please, don’t make me do this.”

Bottom Line: Priceless. Don’t let this be the only thing Toby Fox makes.

[Originally posted to my main 10/23/2015]

Dev: Stone Blade Pub: Stone Blade Released: “Not yet.” It’s essentially in perpetual Early Access. Did I finish it: It’s an online deckbuilder. Not really a “finisher.” 140 hours logged

That number should tell you something. If you like card games, this is an incredibly good thing to waste your time with. It’s f2p, and their monetization model is very fair; if you want to play completely for free, there will be significant grinding, but the prices are such that if you don’t have time for that, it’s probably because you can afford to pay.

Mechanically, it’s very solid. If you played Spectromancer back in the day, you’ll recognize the general flow of combat. Furthermore, although the deckbuilding and resource models are so completely different as to be incomparable, you should be able to spot how the purpose in both cases was to solve issues with traditional card games through methods that are, if not necessarily impossible on the tabletop, definitely more comfortable on their native silicon. Given that they’re both by Richard “The Guy Before Mark Rosewater” Garfield, this is no surprise.

The learning curve could definitely be better; the combat mechanic is deceptively simple, to the point that new players may write it off as boring, but they’ll still lose, due to a rather frustrating ratio of “cards played” to “cards that were actually useful to me.” Giving it a second shake, however, makes the reason for that frustration clear very quickly if you have any experience with deckbuilding in other games.

This is, of course, keeping in mind that if you aren’t dumping in some cash, you will be playing mainly against the AI for quite some time. In random constructed matches against humans, you will be utterly destroyed. This doesn’t mean it’s of no value to new players, though. The AI is stupid, but good enough to challenge complete newbies, and using it to test your own decks against each other gives you a feel for their weaknesses. It’s also not a blatantly cheating shitpile, like a certain other digital deckbuilder based on a famous paper card game I will name later.

To additionally support new players, you get some free cards every day you log in, you can earn more by grinding the bot, and the draft tournament queue that allows you to keep the cards you draft (!) only costs about a week’s worth of the fake money. That drafting is especially useful; once you’ve pottered around with the bots enough to know what kind of mechanics you’d like to base your first real deck on, you’ll be able to kickstart the collection to build it with, whether you win or lose.

Overall, it’s a very deep and well-balanced game, with great art and theming that feels significantly less stupid than most CCGs. As a piece of software, it’s fairly robust, with good connectivity, very infrequent lagging, and crashes rare enough that I’ve never had one happen when it was important. Its business model isn’t a paradise, but it doesn’t insult you or waste more of your time than you’d want it to, either.

I also haven’t touched it even once since Magic Duels Origins came out, even though that is a bastard piece of software with bastard monetization and no competitive infrastructure whatsoever. Sorry. When you want Coke, you want fucking Coke, not Pepsi. I’ve got the same problem with Hex: Shards of Fate, which I kickstarted. And that’s practically Coke Zero.

So, even though I recommend SolForge wholeheartedly, especially if you’ve personally already gotten tired of Magic Origins’ bullshit, that’s a data point.

[Originally posted to my main blog 10/16/2015]

Dev: Milkstone Pub: Milkstone Released: October 2014 Did I finish it: Just a couple days ago. Only one character so far. 21 Hours logged

This is a Hexen/Heretic-inspired roguelite FPS. It’s very enjoyable; bite-sized chunks of arcade shooter are just right for me, and roguelite mechanics could probably make waiting at the DMV better. (Anybody planning a sequel to Papers, Please?)

With that said, everything good about this game is fairly standard. So, even though I like it and recommend it, this critique will focus on what could’ve been better.

It’s procedurally generated and indie, and it doesn’t use the retro crutch that many games of that description do, so the graphical fidelity isn’t special. I’m fairly certain the Unity engine can look better than this, even though it rarely does. I remember thinking to myself some time ago that it seemed odd that more devs don’t go for a later period of retro, since making decent graphics from ten years ago isn’t that much more expensive these days than some pixel art. This game is kind of the answer to that; if somebody does do it, it’ll just look cheap. I guess even though some of the gameplay is considered classic, ‘95-’05 era graphics are much like ‘95-’05 cars. Nobody’s ever going to cherish those things the way they do much older stuff. In strict technical terms, Ziggurat’s graphics are a bit better than that, but the style is very much from that time, so it all feels pretty generic.

Speaking of generic, the lore in this game is rather disappointing. You get random little scraps of it every now and then, and it seems interesting at first simply because you don’t have much of it. I built a cooler world in my head reading the first few of these things than what was actually in them. That they exist at all is nice, but the quality of writing here is ultimately about the same as CCG flavor text. As little snippets of flavor go, I much prefer the secret rooms with the dev’s commentary on their other titles. I’d never heard of even one of these before, because Milkstone has apparently mainly been on XBLA up to this point. It’s interesting to get a little peek into that weird alternate reality, and to see a developer criticize their own work in such a manner. I was always kind of disappointed when I got a secret room that just has monster art instead of the retrospectives.

While the combat, the weapons you use in it, and the various passives you can layer on all feel good, things start to feel a little shallow and stale after you’ve been through it enough times to understand what you actually want. In some respects, this isn’t a completely fair criticism; the fact is that it feels this way because that’s the natural effect of current roguelite genre standards. TotalBiscuit has called out the genre for tending to have boring combat, and while it can, I don’t think that’s really the trouble. The issue is that even if one of these games did have a fairly deep system, the presentation of same is hampered by the fact that you are only able to access little random slices of it at a given time. Even with the measure of control afforded by selecting from a few random perks each level, you’re always adapting rather than planning, which is both the point of the system and the problem with it.

The fact that in this game the perks are presented as literal cards points toward a solution. Hand of Fate’s deckbuilding has shown that you can give players more control over what risks and rewards they’ll be facing without just handing them the keys. This really is the next step in roguelites, and needs to become a trend. I feel that Ziggurat would benefit even more than most from this idea, as the tendency of multi-level perks to show up again once you’ve taken the first proves the value of specialization.

However, there’s another way to handle it that I think would dovetail nicely with Ziggurat’s lore. One of the benefits of roguelite mechanics is that it allows players to slowly build up familiarity with a game’s many different systems. Whereas you might need to shove their nose in a codex every five minutes if you front-load everything, roguelites by their nature encourage much faster and more natural learning through experimentation and iteration. If you’re pretty sure most runs are going to flush in any case, any resources you happen to find can be freely thrown against the wall.

So, what if after you’ve learned it, it stops being a roguelite? Give the player a chance to actually build a character, in a fashion more similar to traditional CRPG mechanics, then see if they can survive much harder challenges than exist in the normal game mode. To go back to the card metaphor, it’d be the difference between playing draft and constructed. You’ve learned how to make something basically function with whatever random junk floats by; now it’s time for you to defend your thesis on your own personal character class. Given that in Ziggurat you’re trying to earn your doctorate in Being a Goddamn Wizard, that’s pretty thematic.

Anyway, uh… Play Ziggurat. It’s good.

[Originally posted to my main blog 10/16/2015]

(Note: this is a rejiggering of a review I posted to Steam right after the 15 Minutes of Game about this game. I am including it here because it gave me the idea for the BLGR series.)

Dev: Paul Cooney Pub: Paul Cooney Released: September 2015 Did I finish it: God no, the difficulty is seriously unfair about halfway through. 3 Hours logged

If you came here from 15 Minutes of Game, you probably think this is some weird mindscrew puzzle game masquerading as a twin-stick shooter. It’s not. It’s just a twin-stick shooter, and TB, god bless him, has no patience. You’re a dot, you shoot other dots, and they drop dots that you collect. When you level up, you are teleported to a room where you get to pick an upgrade by sticking an idol on one of five pedestals. That’s the most complicated thing about it; if you move around and fire a little bit after placing a statue in each spot, you’ll get an idea of what the upgrades do. There are save points every now and then, they’re the satellite dish looking things.

It took me like… two minutes to work all that out. Experiencing this game firsthand makes it much easier to understand than watching it, since it is extremely visually noisy. I was starting to figure that stuff out just watching TB’s video; his confusion led me to believe there must be more going on, which is why I tried it at all. It turns out it’s an incredibly simple game though, and requires only the very smallest desire to experiment. If they made a tutorial for this game, people would likely joke about how unnecessary it is. You’d take one look at the thing telling you to shoot the thing so you can get the thing and say “oh yeah, haha, I’ve played this game like five hundred times.”

Comparing it to other twin-sticks, it’s fun, but not special. Pretty colors, simple gameplay. The one thing I’m disappointed about is the music. It’s a huge letdown, especially considering “interactive music” was one of the features offered by the description. There aren’t any good chiptunes here, it’s just very weak bleepbloops all the way down. Bass Blocks was a terrible name for this game, because there isn’t any.

[Originally posted to my main blog 10/14/2015]

Dev: Monolith Pub: Buena Vista Released: August 2003 Did I finish it: Yes, some years ago. Replayed recently, but haven’t finished yet. 12 Hours logged, but first copy wasn’t on Steam

Yes, it’s old. Doesn’t matter, you can still get it on Steam, and I have it installed. That’s the list I’m starting this series with, just for lack of better ideas.

My feelings about this game are kind of mixed. Before this one, if somebody had told me there was going to be a sequel to a movie I liked, but it was going to be a videogame, I’d have vomited blood. Movie/game tie-ins that respect neither medium are pretty common, and back then it was normal to believe it impossible to do better. To go as far as making an actual sequel would seem preposterous. By using a franchise where it seemed natural to try, they made a good game and paved the way for other people to try it with other properties. It’s fair to call it a classic on this basis. On top of that, it certainly had excellent graphics for the time, as evidenced by the fact that back then, I had to upgrade specifically to play it. That presentation has aged very well, aided by the style inherent to the series and an excellent fan-made upgrade, which is a necessity if you want to play today.*

Despite that, I’m not sure how vociferously I’d recommend somebody who doesn’t have it to buy it now. If you’re a fan of the series, definitely do it. I love Tron: Legacy, but this is what the original’s creator intended the sequel to be, and it has more soul if you ask me. Even if you’re not attached to Tron that much, the setting is beautifully interesting and the story they tell in it is good, if you can stomach all the corn the dialogue and its somewhat flat delivery will force you to eat.

The trouble (which some might see as a bonus) is that its gameplay is representative of the period. Regardless of how pretty the graphics were, gameplay in FPS got stuck for a while after Half-Life. Everyone knew Find the Key maze shooters were dead, and were trying to jam in-engine story presentation in at the same time as they were struggling with what to do next in terms of game and level design. Between that and the characteristically dumb AI of the time, the result was an odd mash of jumpy arcade action, (which I’ve always had a smaller appetite for than most) frustratingly Xen-ish platforming, and not-criminally-bad stealth opportunities. Tron is just such a transitional work, so if you’re not nostalgic for Goldeneye, you won’t enjoy it the same way. I think it’s worth playing even by modern standards, mind, it’s just that how much you’d be willing to pay might be affected by that.

Bottom Line: $30 for me, $15 if you’re not a fan or supernerd.