Today we have another Top Ten Tuesday. The topic is suppose to be Beach or Beachy Reads. That isn’t really my kind of prompt. I rarely go to the beach to read and I don’t really read a genre where beaches, vacation or holiday are topics in them. So instead I’m going for a stack of shame post. I recently posted about this as a reel on instagram so why not also share it on here. For easy watching…

Game #37: Tony Hawk’s Underground, Neversoft, 2003

Playing Tony Hawk's Underground as the female avatar is the strangest experience. First of all, it's dead obvious that they were imagining a male character when they wrote the dialogue. Everyone is calls you "dude" and "man" constantly.

At one point, you and your friend, later villain get arrested. This scene starts with a police officer's boot on your avatar's neck. Then the cop tells you you won't make your skateboarding competition unless your avatar is willing to "do them a couple favors, hehe.” This is an outright horrifying image when your avatar is a WOC. 

Later, you're put on a mission to retrieve women for a party. You drive up to strangers on a motorized cart full of potted plants. After you impress the women, they say something vaguely flirty and join you, a stranger, on the cart. Keep in mind the cart is a two-seater, so women nos. 2, 3, and 4 are foced to ride with the plants. 

Don’t make the combo too big though. You’ll look like you’re compensating. 

This party was thrown in your honor for a successful magazine shoot. But it's now your job to go "get some women", because the party honoring you, a woman, is "a total dudefest,” says an NPC you’ve never met and never meet again. This is clearly the result of the female avatar being an afterthought, but taken at face-value, it is incredibly creepy. Not that riding around in a cart full of strange women and plants is any less creepy if you’re playing as a man. Actually it’s almost worse because now it’s creepy in a more intentional way, I guess?         

This all is just my reaction as a privileged white cis dude. I don’t even want to think about what this was like for any women playing the game. I think when we talk about representation in games, we forget how bad it used to be, and how many of those problems simply got toned down rather than fixed. Re-experiencing Tony Hawk’s Underground has made it all the more obvious how games pushed women away. This game takes masculinity beyond masculinity, to a place where there are only men, and girl-objects. And if you’re a woman you better count your lucky stars you’re on the skateboard because it’s the only thing keeping you a man. 

Ah, I remember you mentioning something like that in your Ted Talk

I considered the possibility that the female avatar is intended to be off-the-charts butch. Call it my last stand in the fight against being overwhelmingly embarrassed and ashamed. But it doesn’t hold water. The female avatar’s voice is bubbly, with a little fry. Her voice is perfectly honed to sound cool and relatable, but not so masculine as to threaten the other characters’ masculinity.

Without having heard this voice, I had used create-a-skate to make a badass biker-punk looking character with a red Mohawk. Now, there’s no reason that someone who looks like my character couldn’t talk like a 12 year old Miranda Cosgrove. But unless you go far, far out of your way to make the character look like the girl from Lazytown, the sound you expect to hear is a brassy 20-something alto with a pack-a-day rasp. This is not the time for lofty hypotheticals about dissonance between a character’s voice an appearance. This is a case where the game gives you a grown woman to play as and then makes her talk like a toddler who takes elocution lessons.

Or perhaps the avatar is meant to be a lesbian, the straw man in my head says.  If that’s the case, so is every other woman in this universe. It’s the only way to explain the coos of, “Wanna put lotion on my back?” during the “Impress 3 Bikini Girls” mission. Again, one could disingenuously twist this scenario to try and argue some kind of statement about sexual liberation. But the obvious truth is that the question is directed at the player. “Your combos are sooooooooo big,” comes the voice again. 

Game #36: Superhot, Superhot Team, 2016

Super Hot is an absolutely amazing game that does not deliver the experience I think it promises. 

It's whole gimmick is that time only moves when you move. Except that that's a lie. Time just moves incredibly slowly when you're standing still. But even at incredibly slow speeds, bullets move fast enough that you have to worry about them. 

I can see how truly stopping time would create a lot of design difficulties that would be difficult to reconcile. If time truly stops, it would probably result in lock-step puzzles where things have to play out in an exact way. Making time progress at a snail's pace means they can introduce a challenge while allowing the puzzles to be flexible. It also means you have to think on your feet and that execution and aim matter almost as much as in a more traditional shooter. 

Thing is, I sometimes feel like an apprentice of an obsolete trade. I play a lot of point & click graphic adventure games, I'm accustom to that pacing, I am at peace with lock-step puzzles, and I was really excited going into Super Hot to see a reconciliation of shooters, a genre I've learned to appreciate through much hair-pulling, and point and click adventures, games I've loved since I was a child.  

Gaming Diary: When the Stack of Shame Becomes Shameful

I really did enjoy my job when I reviewed video games, but it was rough on my stack of shame. Either the deadlines I had didn’t allow me enough time to finish a game I wanted to, or I had to stop a game in order to review this new one. I am going through my stack bit by bit now that I am out of the reviewing biz, starting with the games I have strategy guides for. I wrapped up Mass Effect…

Game #35: Yooka-Laylee, Playtonic, 2017

I keep reading these reviews by people who have nostalgic feelings for Banjo-Kazooie who hate, hate, goddamn hate Yooka-Laylee. Jim Sterling says he was inches from refusing to give it a rating. People are calling it an abomination, a cash grab, a shining example of where the past should be left in the past. 

I’ll tell you what Yooka-Laylee is. Yooka-Laylee is exactly what Playtonic promised it would be; a clone of Banjo-Kazooie. "How did Yooka-Laylee turn out so bad then,” you ask? Simple. Because Banjo-Kazooie is a bad game.

At this point I have a small confession to make. Sometimes, if I knock a game off the stack that I really didn’t like, I’ll choose not to write about it. I’m not trying to be a game basher. That movie that we love to make fun of? People worked their hands to the bone to make it, and they weren’t idiots. There are so many reasons why a game or a movie or any piece of entertainment might turn out the way it does. So I try, as much as possible, to avoid the pitfalls of thoughtlessly bashing things. So if I don’t have anything nice to say, I chose not to say anything. 

So I played Banjo Kazooie. 

And I didn’t write about it. 

So now Yooka-Laylee is out, and nobody, I mean nobody is tearing into this thing with sharper claws than the Banjo nostalgia crowd. And when I hear them describe what they don’t like about it, what I see is a comprehensive list of everything I hate about the beloved original. 

I won’t say what those things are, but if you’re curious, go find Jim Sterling’s review, copy/paste it into your favorite text editor, and replace all instances of “Yooka-Laylee” with “Banjo-Kazooie”, and that’s it. 

UPDATE:

Yooka Laylee has become the only game that I play muted. You know how a meh day seems a million times worse when you have a headache? Yooka-Laylee also seems a million times worse when you have a headache. And the soundscape of Yooka Laylee gives you a headache. 

Having replaced the various gurgles with various podcasts, I was able to dive a little deeper. 

What I like:

You are never forced to watch your character do interesting things that you never get to do. 

The controls feel darn good

There is a lot of good platforming, which is hard to achieve.

Traversing the level even without an objective can be satisfying

It has renewed interest in the genre

What I don’t like:

Custscenes cannot be skipped, most cutscenes are not fun to watch, most cutscenes are very very long

There are some gameplay moments that are more frustrating than can be justified by a return to an old genre. 

I can only play it muted

The level design does this weird thing. In post-golden age 3D platformers, there’s a clear delineation between what surfaces you’re meant to be able to have footing on, and what you can’t. In Sly Cooper, the collision geometry of the level is a lot simpler than the visual geometry of the level. A rocky cliff side might seem like you could get some purchase on it if you jumped on it just right, but the actual collider around it is smooth as glass, and you’ll never be able to jump up that cliff side. In Yooka Laylee, there are areas where the visual geometry and colliding geometry are the same, so you can jimmy your way up mountains. I end up getting to places that I’m not sure I’m allowed to be, but it’s more confusing than satisfying. It makes the terrain feel inconsistent and doesn’t add anything. The game doesn’t particularly care if you find your way outside a level.

I respect when designers choose to discard outmoded conventions. And the infamous “bowl” form that so many open world platform games adopt could be considered one of those conventions. But in a game that is a slave to so many other conventions, I don’t buy it.

Game #26: Legend of Kay, Neon Studios, 2005

Legend of Kay is part of a peculiar group of games from the waning years of “Character Action Games” (now known as 3D platformers). In some ways these games, including Kay, are some of the best in the genre. The industry had learned how to make controls feel good. Even more esoteric things, like combo moves, had been standardized to a degree. The camera, once nausea inducing, now seamlessly balanced between the gentle hand of the game and the user’s input. 

For all that is expert about Legend of Kay, it flies a bit too high. The cutscenes and conversations over-rely on generic, canned animations. I believe that all the voice talent in Legend of Kay were fine actors, but, searching the game’s credits, there was not a dedicated voice over director. As such the voice performances as a whole leave something to be desired. 

Why am I picking these nits? Because cutscenes demand a certain quality to justify their presence in a game. Unless they are very good, they drag the experience down. I think I’d have enjoyed Kay more if the conversations had been presented only as text. I don’t say that to be cruel, I honestly believe that the atmosphere would have been easier to establish. 

Game #27: Quadrilateral Cowboy, Blendo Games, 2016

Quadrilateral Cowboy vs. Jazzpunk is an amazing case study in game audio

Largely because, given access only to the visual elements of both games, you could easily be forgiven for confusing the two.

Both have an aesthetic that blends minimalist geometry and a honey-mustard color-sheme with 80s cyberpunk, both feature a main character who is sent on various "jobs" which involve traveling to an ambiguously virtual dimension to perform espionage, and both treat pre-digital and recently digital technology as a plaything in their world-building.

If, however, you were given only the audio of each game, you would never confuse the two.

On the blog for Necrophone games, they outline the absolutely bonkers lengths they went to to achieve the sound. Many of the noisemakers used for Jazzpunk's soundscape actually built from scratch, soldering and all, by the game's creators. Bringing that level of depth to a game's sound would be admirable for a sound designer, let alone someone who is also devoted full time to simply making the game.

The soundscape of Jazzpunk is like nothing else I've heard before or since, except perhaps in a Martin Denny record. It's a jangly, agitated mix of synths and old jazz records, a kind of James-Bond-cyber-mambo. The implementation is straightforward for the most part, though outright bizarre at times, with attention-grabbing samples coming it at inappropriate times, but because the rest of the game is so damn weird you forgive it somehow.

For everything that is bizarre about Jazzpunk, it relies on more traditional adventure puzzle mechanics, as well as callbacks (there's a quake clone hidden in a wedding cake). The puzzles are hilariously gratifying to solve, but Jazzpunk does not have many new skills to teach the player.

Quadrilateral Cowboy is, in some ways, more sophisticated than Jazzpunk, and I'm not just talking about their approach to humor. Cowboy's gameplay has something quite new to offer players, and something which feels like somewhat of a holy grail in game design; it makes it feel cool to write code. For a while it seemed like there were so many attempts to make games about coding that reviewers were declaring the effort itself to be futile. But Cowboy has done it.

When you look at the credits in Quadrilateral Cowboy, under audio, it simply says "Soundsnap.com" As such very little in Cowboy's soundscape really feels like it belongs to the game. Many of the sounds are appropriate enough. But they do not have that intangible sense of having somehow come from the game itself.

The implementation of sounds is just as puzzling as in Jazzpunk, but unfortunately it is to negative effect. Point-located sounds are at maximum volume when standing near them, and nearly silent when a few steps away. When the player character throws something, they often emit a cough, not the expected effort sound.

The music is completely diagetic, which can be a powerful decision. It is all licensed, and is used to build the settings and tell you things about the characters. All in all a strong point in the soundscape.

I adore both games, but y'all can guess which has been my enduring favorite.

Game #28: Snuggle Truck, Owlchemy Labs, 2012

This game has been in my library for five years, and I sorely regret not playing it immediately after buying it. Snuggle Truck smacks of the Indie Revolution. These kinds of games, centered around a straightforward-but-wiley physics-based mechanic, will always have a special place in my heart. I found myself wondering if this game would be able to stand out if it were released today. Perhaps it would, given Owlchemy’s outreach. 

But how Snuggle Truck would do in today’s market has nothing to do with it’s validity as a work of art, nor does it have anything to do with how deserving it is of commercial success. 

I think about the discussion going on in the indie game community, about the “indiepocalypse” and the “indie bubble.” I think it’s easy to forget that there was never a time when making a game was risk free. It was never a case of, “make game, get paid, onto day three of my indie adventure.” It has always been hell. Maybe the marketing wasn’t hell for a short while. Everything else has always been hell. 

Game #29: Day of the Tentacle Remastered, Double Fine, 2016

I don’t like admitting that I always kind of thought Broken Age invented the whole switching between characters thing. I’ve been touting myself as a fan of point and click adventure games for a while now, and it’s just embarrassing to think I had gotten the whole picture after having played only a tiny selection from what the golden age of this genre has to offer. Man there are a lot of these things. They are a huge time sink though, often designed to take 40 hours to play. I’m not gonna lie, as much as a I adore these games I have myself a good ol’ fashioned think before I choose to start in on one. 

Day of the Tentacle is great, by the way. 

Game #30: Judge Dredd: Dredd vs Death, Rebellion, 2003

According to steam, I have played this for 13 minutes. I couldn’t tell you a thing about it because I have no memory of doing so.

Game #31: Elite Dangerous, Frontier Developments, 2014

Oh the deep, dark, horrible shame. My boyfriend bought this game for me at considerable expense in the hopes of giving us another thing to do together. As we booted up the game, he explained to me how we would do one simple thing to boost my cash reserves, and that we’d then be able to do some fun stuff together. He would give me some items, I would sell them. Easy. Would you care to guess how long this took? Trade and sell. How long? How long do you think? 

Three hours. It wasn’t because of our internet connection, it wasn’t because we were very far apart, it wasn’t because we had to do multiple runs, that is how long it takes to do all of the preparatory work in the 20 odd menus and locales you need to visit, then rendez-vous in space, then use a slightly smaller set of menus to open a thing, arm something else, send out another thing, there’s something called a limpet, (I’m assuming it’s named after a British cookie) and then I got the thing and then I could fly back to the station blah blah blah blah. 

I cried. I cried, people. I felt so much like a dumb failure, like a complete waste of my boyfriend’s generosity, that it honestly upsets me to write about it. He did his best to comfort me and assured me he wasn’t mad (yeah, he saw the cry happen) but we have never played it again. I still technically own it but I have hidden it from my steam library because the mere sight of it is disturbing to me, even now. 

Game #32: Mass Effect 2, Bioware, 2010

I have started using Mass Effect 2 to bone up on my German. It’s got full German language support. I only get about a 3rd of what they’re saying. It makes me chuckle how the made-up sci-fi words get pronounced with an American accent. 

Game #33: TRI: Of Friendship and Madness, Rat King, 2014

Exposition of any kind is a tough sell, especially in the fantasy genre. Unless you have Ian McKellen in your roster, almost any fantasy writing is going to sound silly when read aloud. Put another way, dramatic voice over in a game is one of those things that cannot be anything less than great.  I’m tempted to compare this to Journey. Both do a good job of building a fantastical world with magical architecture and a story that existed long before you arrived, but Journey does it better. They probably could have gotten a budget for voice over, but they chose not to use it, and I think it was the right decision. Even with the best voice cast and writers in the world, human voices would have made the world more familiar, to it’s detriment. 

And here’s the thing: in all likelihood, the team behind Journey wrote down just as much detail about the backstory of their game as Tri presents aloud, and a million times more. It may seem that choosing to tell your game’s story without voice over would save effort in terms of storytelling, but nothing could be further from the truth. To expose a world to a player without dialogue, you have to know how your world affects the walls, clothes, materials, gestures, decor, artifacts, absolutely everything the player encounters, because that is the sum total of what you have at your disposal to tell your story.  I’m told that there’s a real mind bender of a game waiting for you if you stick with it, so I may revisit. 

Game #34: Robot Roller-Derby Disco Dodgeball, Erik Asmussen, 2015

Game #25: Goat Simulator, Coffee Stain, 2014

So, Goat Simulator. Part of why Goat Sim stayed on the stack for so long is because I had been led to believe that to play goat sim was to run around in someone’s half-assed Unity scene, chuckle for five minutes, and then be done forever. I know that the reaction I'm supposed to have to this game is, "it was just funny maymays, they gamed social media so they could release a game while bypassing this whole 'effort' thing." 

It turns out that Goat Simulator is feature rich, it is cohesive, it has a vision. The barks of “Cash Grab!” may be valid for the hundreds of imitators that came in Goat Sim's wake, but certainly not of Goat Sim itself. I'm about to use a word to describe Goat Simulator which has perhaps never been used to describe Goat Simulator: polish. Goat Simulator is polished. 

Goat Sim has a lot of "juice", little bits of text and graphics that reward you for your accomplishments. Goat Sim seems to be listening for an impossibly huge variety of actions, much like the tricks in a Tony Hawk game. You can mix and match movement mechanics by adding “mutations” to your goat. The levels are full of things to discover which have been lovingly arranged to let you use your moveset. For a game of this scope, there is a considerable amount of music as well.  The reason I really love Goat Simulator, really really love it, is because it starts right at that point we’ve all found ourselves while playing Tony Hawk, or Skate, or Grand Theft Auto, right at the point where you’ve made the game act as silly as it’s willing to act. You’ve probed all the edges, bashed yourself against all the walls, nudged all the NPCs. And for this effort you have eeked out one or two cracks in the geometry, found a couple places where they player character will jitter around, if you’re especially determined you might even send a ragdoll flying into the sky, but it’ll be a while before it happens again. The game has dug in it’s heels, it has drawn the line. I will be this silly for you, no further.  Goat Simulator’s silliness is limited only by what the team put in, As such, even an inexperienced player can break this game in seconds. You’ll probably rack up a ton of points doing so. And that’s why it works. If an NPC in Tony Hawk died because he tried to climb over a concrete barrier, flickered vertically a few hundred times, and ragdolled, it would be a problem. That NPC was probably supposed to tell you to go search walls and gutters and stair railings for his twelve lost cheese slices. In Goat Sim it doesn’t matter. No gods, only goats. 

You might, at this point, be wondering if the game is just complete anarchy, but that’s not the case. It is just as achievement driven as the other games I’ve mentioned, those achievements simply don’t depend on the maintenance of this ridiculous pretense that you’re in a world where common sense laws remotely apply.

I dare say that after playing Goat Sim, the Tony Hawk games seem a bit insulting to one’s intelligence. Really, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2? You’re going to hold a straight face while you explain how I have to grind my skateboard across a crucible full of molten metal? Do me a favor. Goat Sim at least respects me enough to admit it’s all a joke.  The music and sound add to the hilarity. A drunken electronic pop mixed with Unity’s doppler algorithm desperately trying to figure out what to do as you bungie across the map many hundreds of times each second because you licked a truck.   I think what I love most about Goat Simulator is simply that it has such blatant disregard for convention in spite of coming from an established genre, and yet it’s still a game design success story. People will pooh-pooh it as a quirk of viral marketing, though I don’t know how those people would expect a game like goat simulator to market itself. Not to mention, this criticism starts from the condescending premise that consumers don’t know what they want when they see it. 

It’s true that focus groups usually produce nonsense and the layperson is generally not a good source of ideas for a game. But when you put a trailer in front of people, and they all say, “yes, I want that!” and then those same people get the product that trailer was advertising and say “yes, I want this!” you can’t really say they’ve been deceived.