Author Archives: thebonusworld

Gut Check: Ghost of Tsushima

I went into Ghost of Tsushima knowing very little about what the game was outside of it being an open world action-adventure game set during a Mongol invasion of Japan during the 1270’s. A cool premise to be sure, but a cool premise alone wasn’t able to change the fact that I wasn’t having much fun with the game itself.

I really wanted to like Ghost of Tsushima. From its initial pitch to the various trailers and snippets of news that led up to its release, I was under the impression that this would be something I could sink a lot of time into. By all accounts, there was a lot of the game to experience, but the general consensus was that very little of it was worth the time investment. But I wanted to experience it for myself because I was very much in the mood for a big and bombastic action game. Instead I got Ghost of Tsushima, a sigh in video game form.

You might look at screenshots or trailers for the game and think, “wow, that’s a beautiful game,” and you wouldn’t be wrong. Riding through a field of flowers and over the rolling hills of cherry blossom trees is objectively beautiful in Ghost of Tsushima. The art direction is fantastic and deserves to be applauded without a doubt. But once you start moving around and interacting with the world, that’s when you see the cracks start to show.

Standing in stark contrast to the beauty of the world were the rough and jagged animations in Ghost of Tsushima. Nothing seems to flow together in a natural way, ultimately making navigating the world look and feel clunkier than you’d like. Multiple times I found myself getting caught up on walls, being slid across the ground by roving NPCs, and unnaturally snapping into static animations while trying to climb or duck under obstacles.

But janky animation isn’t the end of the world. The real issues crop up in the playing of the game itself, particularly when using the camera. Now there are bad cameras that fail to adjust to a player’s position, or a broken one that just doesn’t follow the action when you need it to, but I’ve never had a camera in an open world game vehemently disregard my inputs in the brazen way that the one in Ghost of Tsushima does. The camera often tries to force a cinematic angle that isn’t particularly helpful when you’re barreling down the road on your horse and just want to see what’s ahead of you. While annoying, it isn’t the end of the world.

However, the camera exhibits borderline game-breaking behavior during combat encounters, when you’re desperately trying to create space between you and the ever charging hordes of enemies. The camera will often rotate into awkward angles if you happen to back into an object, making the concept of keeping your enemies on screen more of a chore than it needs to be. This could all be alleviated to some extend with a competent lock-on mechanic, but Ghost of Tsushima lacks a functional targeting system.

You are regularly surrounded by groups of enemies, something that other games might use as an opportunity to let you hit a button or click a stick so you can individually lock-on to an opponent. Ghost of Tsushima opts for something slightly different and objectively worse. You have a sort of soft lock-on where you gently nudge the camera to focus on an enemy, and that will “lock-on” to them. Except it doesn’t work and you’ll just end up swinging wildly at nothing until some dick with a spear stabs you through your sternum. I hate this camera with a passion, and it’s one of the main reasons I don’t like Ghost of Tsushima.

I can’t really talk about too much of what to expect from the later hours of Ghost of Tsushima considering I’ve only played maybe two hours of it, but I feel like I’ve already hit my limit with it. A lot of people have said the the opening hour or so is by far the weakest portion of the game, but that fact is usually followed up with the revelation that very little of the game’s content is interesting or unique. While I don’t have first hand experience to speak on it definitively, based on what I’ve played thus far, neither the gameplay, missions, nor story have been particularly engaging or worth returning to.

Early in the game almost every action you take is interrupted by a cut-scene that goes on way too long, or a flashback training sequence that also overstays its welcome. The story seems fine so far, but it has had no emotional weight or impact on me at all, which ultimately seems to be the overarching theme with Ghost of Tsushima. It doesn’t really excel at anything, and more often than not it just feels deflating and disappointing.

That being said, it’s a lot of fun to get into sword fights with people in Ghost of Tsushima. The combat is deliberate in a way that can feel incredibly rewarding when executed correctly, and utterly deflating when you mistime something. It would be a lot better if it had a traditional lock-on mechanic, but as it stands it’s rewarding when you aren’t overcome with frustration from the incompetent camera. There’s also a “standoff” mechanic which, while not revolutionary, is certainly interesting. It’s basically the “anti-stealth” mechanic, where you march right up to a group of bad guys and challenge them to a duel. What happens next is you basically have to time a button release to one-hit kill your opponent, but I still thought it was pretty cool the few times I did it.

I can’t really speak to the stealth aspects of the game though, because you’re severely limited in the early hours of the game with what you can actually do. It seemed okay I suppose, but it wasn’t anything worth gushing over. Coincidentally that’s exactly how I feel about the everything in Ghost of Tsushima.

But that’s Ghost of Tsushima in a nutshell. It’s an okay game that has some pretty rough edges. It’s one of those games that I couldn’t recommend anyone rush out and buy at full price, but on a big enough discount I might. Maybe Ghost of Tsushima just makes a really miserable first impression and needs more time to really be appreciated. But I just don’t think I have that kind of patience in me for a game that just feels sloppy.

Blog: A Waiting Week – 07/15/20

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You might have noticed that things have been a little light around here in the past week in terms of new content, but I assure you that it’s mostly due to unfortunate timing and there’s a slight bit of apathy on my part if I’m being perfectly honest.

This week sees a few of my most anticipated releases of the year which is very exciting for me, but as of this being posted only one of them has come out. The three games in question are Ooblets, a mix between farming styled life simulation games and Pokemon which releases today, Paper Mario: The Origami King and Ghost of Tsushima which are both dropping on Friday.

All three of these games are pretty big blips on my radar and the wait for them has felt fairly excruciating since I’ve run out of things to do in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Unfortunately I won’t be able to give my thoughts about any of these games until next week at the earliest, but I assure you that they’re coming.

The other problem that I’ve run into is just general apathy for everything, including my own hobbies. I’m sure everyone has felt the crushing anxiety of the world weighing down on them lately, and I’m no different. It’s been really hard to muster any enthusiasm for anything in the past few months, and finding joy in playing and writing about video games has gotten harder and harder.

I’m hoping that these games spark something in me that can ignite my fire once more because I truly love what I do. It’s just a hard time in general, and I’ve felt like my hobbies aren’t bringing me the satisfaction that they once did. It mirrors my relationship with Netflix, where I have nearly infinite choices of things to watch but I’d rather just watch the entirety of The Office again.

I don’t know how everyone else is dealing with this situation, but I know that I’m having a harder and harder time as days go on. I honestly miss working and being able to decompress with my hobbies when I come home. But now that I’ve got endless access to the things that i like doing, I find myself doing nothing at all more often than not.

Blog: Price Adjustment – 07/08/20

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Recently the folks over at Take-Two Interactive came out and announced that the upcoming NBA 2k21 will cost $70 on next generation machines like the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, while current generation editions will remain at $60. The two reactions I’ve encountered most have been people grousing at this price adjustment, and those who think a price hike has been long overdo. For the most part I find myself agreeing with the latter sentiment in general, but sincerely believe that NBA 2k21 should not be the game to usher in this new price tag without making massive changes to the formula that the 2K series has recently followed.

There are a ton of reasons why I don’t think NBA 2k21 can justify this new price tag, but chief among them has to be their pretty disgusting monetization practices they’ve exhibited in the past few years. I wrote all about their gross business practices alongside the overall state of the game itself a while ago, and I just cannot conceive of a world where NBA 2k21 ditches any of those micro-transactions because they got ten extra dollars upfront.

Maybe you’re like me however, and don’t engage with any of the modes that hit you up for money, surely the higher price tag is something you can live with? I suppose you could justify that approach, but as someone who exclusively plays the franchise modes in these games I can 100% tell you that you aren’t getting anything new. The franchise modes in the past few iterations have been pretty identical, offering little to nothing in terms of new features or even UI design.

The hopeful, starry-eyed version of myself that exists somewhere inside of me thinks, “well at least developers will be getting more money for their work,” which they %110 deserve, but I don’t believe they’ll see a single cent of this revenue. With the ballooning cost of game development it makes sense that games would increase in price, but not one particle of my being believes that this money will make its way to the people who are crunching for hours to make James Harden’s beard look fluffier.

Games have remained at the $60 price point for the past two generations now and definitely need to increase in price. But when you read stories about how Take-Two Interactive made a third of their revenue in three months thanks to micro-transactions, but then turns around and says that the increased price is to account for the rising costs of features like “3D audio” and 8K textures, it’s a little hard to swallow that pill.

The economics of the video game industry are complicated and I don’t claim to understand them fully, but unless this extra money is being fed directly into the development budgets or even better, into the pockets of employees, then I can’t help but feel like this is Take-Two deciding that from now on, their games will bring in at least ten more dollars per sale and not actually raising prices as a response to high development costs.

Gaming is an expensive hobby, and it’s only getting less accessible when you account for the projected high cost of the upcoming consoles and online service fees. Especially now, when a lot of people are out of work and might not have extra cash to throw around, announcing your price adjustment is an absolutely tone-deaf and utterly wild thing to do. Another wild thing to do is to not honor Vince Carter, the only NBA player to play across 4 decades, and put him on one of the 4 different versions of the game.

Review: SpongeBob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated

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Towards the end of my time with SpongeBob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated, my opinion of it had soured so drastically from how I felt when I began it. Being a 3D platformer from 2003, it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that you’re hopping from level to level, completing challenges and solving puzzles in order to obtain some sort of shiny object, which in this case are golden spatulas. Collecting enough golden spatulas grants you access to more levels, where you’ll do more challenges and so on and so forth. It’s a 3D platformer through and through.

Seeing as the original game released a few years into the show being around, I was able to catch most of the references and jokes and not feel like an outsider to the source material. It was actually kind of nice to revisit this world I hadn’t thought about in nearly twenty years, only to see it realized in this 3D space that I could run around in and explore. I’ve never played the original release so I don’t know how the it looked when it came out, but SpongeBob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated looks really crisp and colorful. It’s fully voiced as well which makes the whole thing feel like a really long, yet enjoyable episode of the show.

For how well this remaster has done in terms of presentation, I feel like some attention could’ve been paid to the actual gameplay itself. SpongeBob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated is a decent platformer at best, and a frustrating test of patience at worse. The game is marred by a disastrous camera that will play along with you the most part, but will damn you at the worst possible times.

There is a point later in the game where you learn how to wall jump between two walls. After the first few times of just leaping at the wall and then rhythmically hitting the jump button until you crest the obstacle you’re climbing up, a new version of this challenge appears. This time, instead of going up, the walls you’re jumping between move forward and backward, offering you a way to get to a distant platform. This “simple” task turned into ten minutes of me leaping to my death because the camera felt the need to lock into what can only be described as a “cinematic” angle the moment I took my first jump. That’s what the camera does in SpongeBob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated, it’s fine most of the time until it decides you’ve been in too much control.

The camera’s ability to screw you over doesn’t just stop with platforming either, because I can’t begin to count how many times I’ve tried to attack something only to find that it’s just out of my reach. This of course leads to me getting counterattacked, stun locked, thrown off of a level, or all three at once. And if you do happen to fall off of a level, know that everything resets because of that. Were you halfway through a particularly tedious puzzle? Great news, now you’re back at square one. Got through all of those enemy encounters? Then you can totally do it again. While you retain all collectables along with the puzzles you’ve already solved, falling off of a level or dying often feels like the game is adding insult to injury by making your climb back to where you were even much more tedious.

While SpongeBob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated has its share of highs and lows, I found that playing as any character other than SpongeBob isn’t very fun. There are certain points in levels that allow you to swap between either Sandy or Patrick depending on what the level calls for. Patrick can lift heavy things and throw them, while Sandy can glide through the air and swing from certain objects. Playing as either of them isn’t fun, especially when the game calls for precise platforming from Sandy. Her specific challenges usually rely on using a combination of gliding and swinging, both of which are hilariously unresponsive.

There’s a level later on where Sandy is put to the test and must cross a massive chasm of nothingness in order to get to a floating plot of land. There are swing points scattered about which require you getting close enough to them for an indicator to pop up letting you know that you’re locked on and able to initiate a swing. But that window is incredibly small when you’re worrying about plummeting to your death while trying to fumble with the unresponsive controls.

If there was a word to describe SpongeBob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated as a product, I guess ‘inconsistent’ would be it. It has all the charm and joy that I remember from the show itself but isn’t particularly fun to play. That being said, I still finished it because it scratched that 3D platformer itch I had, but I have no intentions of going and sweeping up the collectibles I missed or anything. I bought and played through the game because I have fond memories of those early seasons of SpongeBob, and that was enough to push me through. But if you have no connection to the source material, then this is just a decent platformer at best.

Review: BarnFinders

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BarnFinders is a game that I am deeply conflicted about. It’s the exact sort of mindless, meditative gaming experience that I love so much, most of which involves you finding, repairing and selling various flotsam and jetsam at your own junk shop. It also is a game that is tremendously unfunny and at incredibly problematic in the way it represents various ethnicities and cultures.

Clearly aping the likes of reality television shows like Storage Wars and American Pickers, BarnFinders puts you in charge of your very own, rundown junk shop somewhere in the southeast portion of a fictionalized America. Your establishment is pretty miserable at first, boasting nothing more than a dingy storefront and a beat-up truck. Eventually you can upgrade just about everything, but it still retains that unkempt feel.

Just like real life, your computer in BarnFinders is the heart of the operation allowing you to accept various jobs and travel to different locales. Jobs boil down to a borderline incomprehensible email asking you to retrieve a specific item from a location and mail it back to the sender. After accepting the job, you need to front the cash to drive your truck to any new location you wish to go to, but that’s only necessary when you first go to a destination.

You arrive at the location which can range wildly from barns, houses, bunkers and more, and are reminded of what item you’re there for, as well as a progress bar that ticks down as you collect other items you can resell currently in the dwelling. It’s just enough information to let you know there’s something you missed without explicitly telling you what it was, ultimately making it a fun little puzzle that can get pretty tedious after enough meandering through the level.

Chairs, hard hats, traffic cones, laptops and other notable items are usually prime for resale, while the deluge of cardboard boxes and hay bales that litter the area can be broken down into repairing components that you can use to fix certain broken big ticket items like televisions and microwaves. Aside from fixing things, you’ll also find items that can’t be sold, but can be combined with other items to make more rare and expensive products to sell like motorcycles and what definitely is an Atari 2600. Finally there’s just dirty items that need to be hosed off before they can sold which can be anything, but the first one you’ll come across is a blow-up sex doll.

Once you load all of that stuff into your truck, you head back home and prepare your merchandise to put on sale the next day. This includes the aforementioned cleaning, fixing and building of components that you’ll find throughout levels. But you won’t be able to just do those things because you need to buy the various stations that allow you to perform those actions. You also need to buy tools like an ax, a shovel and some lock picks, as well as a price gun that allows you to upgrade the interior of your store.

The store has a few spots for wall shelves, display cases and free standing displays, all of which hold different sized items. A washing machine needs a free standing display, while a guitar is hung on the wall. Where you put things doesn’t matter, because this whole section of the game is incredibly underwhelming but extremely necessary to progressing. You also can change the flooring and wall coverings, but despite how much they cost they’re all varying degrees of filthy.

Once you have your shelves packed with the garbage you rescued from various dumps, you get to open up shop and meet the very small cast of characters in BarnFinders. This is where things go from uninteresting, to aggressively bad. The characters in this game are all different stereotypes, including the co-owner of your store, your uncle. Being set in the southeast, BarnFinders leans into a lot of the stereotypes about the people from those areas, portraying your uncle as an uneducated, scraggly-haired redneck. Also in this cast of characters is an Asian woman named Lady Dragon and an African-American man dressed in Rastafarian garb, constantly smoking a blunt.

It’s all part of that aggressively unfunny “sense of humor” I mentioned up top. In addition to that, the characters all speak in noises and grunts while text bubbles appear near them, some of which are problematic as well. You’ll hear and see a lot of these things during the tremendously mundane retail portion of the game, where customers appear in your shop in front of objects they want to buy. You being the employee of the month, go up to them and can either elect to sell at the default price or haggle with them. Haggling in this case means to play a bad timing based mini-game that sometimes just doesn’t work.

Speaking of bad mini-games and terrible “humor,” the parts of BarnFinders where you have to bid on properties is hilariously thin as well. Some barns or houses will require you to own them before you can actually pick through them, which means you’ll have to enter an auction for it. The only people who ever show up to these auctions are the same characters as I mentioned earlier, but this time their text bubbles will shout various insults at you whenever you outbid them. These too are written in an insanely problematic way that I won’t go into, but you can imagine what they are like.

Outside of having terrible writing being hurled at you, in an auction you’re allowed to raise the price by a modest amount or a large amount, both of which change depending on the item itself. I’m fairly certain that none of this matters however, and the auction ends once you’ve hit a certain price threshold. It feels like the game decided that a certain house was worth ten-thousand dollars, started the bidding at five thousand, and would keep the auction going till you made it past the ten grand price tag. This is evidenced by the fact that no matter how long you wait to put in a bid, the auction timer won’t start to count down nor even reveal itself until you’ve made it to a certain point. It’s this smokescreen that very quickly dissipated and revealed nothing more than another time wasting mini-game in its place.

What I do like about some of the properties you acquire however, is how expansive they can be. Some levels are multi-layered and require some light puzzle-solving and platforming to find mission critical items. There’s also the fact that some of these levels are spookier than others, but BarnFinders is courteous enough to ask you upon starting said level if you’d like to be scared or not. I wish that kind of courtesy extended to other aspects of the game, but this was a pleasant surprise that accounted for my low threshold for fear, or as others might call it, “cowardice.”

There’s also this gigantic alien sub-plot that I can’t even get into because of how absurd it was, but just know that aliens play a large part in BarnFinders. It’s bizarre and ends up becoming a weird focal point of the game, but I don’t think it’s any worse for including these story beats.

It’s hard to feel good about playing BarnFinders when there’s just some really unnecessary bullshit that are just hurtful and tone deaf. Even from a purely gameplay focused standpoint BarnFinders makes it seem like there’s a lot to do and consider, but there really isn’t much new to do as you play for a few hours. Outside of level design and maybe one level specific item, there’s really nothing mechanically engaging to do after the first 3 hours of play and that’s probably for the best.

Blog: Games of July 2020 – 07/01/20

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As cautious as I am about celebrating a new month in this disastrous year that is 2020, I feel like it’s worth mentioning that there are some games due out in July that I’m excited for and might possibly stave off the encroaching sadness inside me. Granted, there’s always the possibility that a spectacular game could release out of nowhere, but as far as the planned releases for this month, this is what I’ve got my eye on.

TRACKMANIA (07/01/20)

I don’t actually know if I like Trackmania as a game, or if I just enjoy the videos and gifs that come out of each release. Whatever the case might be, a new Trackmania is out today. For those who don’t know, Trackmania is a series of racing games that are less about battling for prime position, and more about just getting the best time on a track. It’s a game about time trials and nailing the perfect run of a course that involves crazy jumps and loops. I don’t think anyone really cares about the content that’s included in the game, rather the excitement seems to center around the community servers where creativity runs wild. Below is a video from an older entry in the series, Trackmania Caynon, and it’s the thing I saw a few years ago that got me into the games in the first place. Not every track is like this one, but I think it’s just so dang cool.

GHOST OF TSUSHIMA (07/17/20)

I’ve inadvertently kept some sort of media blackout with the upcoming PlayStation 4 exclusive Ghost of Tsushima, a stealth-action game set during the first Mongol invasion of Japan in the 1270s. Aside from just looking incredible, it’s been a while since I’ve gotten to play a good stealth-action game, and this one looks incredibly promising. I also can’t remember the last time I played a game that took place in a similar setting, so I’m excited to see how the story and setting manage to come together. Honestly, everything about Ghost of Tsushima looks great, but only time will tell if looks end up being deceiving.

PAPER MARIO: THE ORIGAMI KING (07/17/20)

Paper Mario as a series has kind of felt a lot like Star Wars in that while most of the entries aren’t spectacular, the earliest entries were so good that I’ll be excited every time a new one comes out. That’s where Paper Mario: The Origami King sits with me right now. I’m tentatively excited for this new game, but am still a little weary based off of the last few. Paper Mario lives and dies by the strength of its characters, stories, and combat mechanics, and is one of the few turn-based RPGs that I’ve ever enjoyed. Paper Mario: The Origami King looks like it’s hitting all the right notes in trailers, but time will tell if this is truly a return to form or another lifeless release. Hopefully this one can recapture the whimsy and fun that the originals did, but I’m still going to proceed with caution.

ROGUE LEGACY 2 (07/17/20)

Speaking of games that are exceptions to my genre tastes, Rogue Legacy is one of the few rouge-like games that I’ve actually enjoyed. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I perceived the original as a simpler game than the rogue-likes that have released since 2013, but I remember it fondly. Surprisingly, there’s a sequel coming out later this month that, like every other game on this list, I’m cautiously looking forward to. I doubt it will be able to grab me like the first one was able to, just because my tastes in games have shifted so much in the past 7 years but I hope to be proven wrong.

The offerings this month might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I think that this is a pretty good July for game releases. If Paper Mario and Ghost of Tsushima alone stick the landing, then I’ll be a happy camper. Besides, I need a good reason to boot up my PlayStation and Switch again.

Gut Check: Among Trees

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There is no denying that Among Trees is cut from the same cloth as the countless other survival games that have existed over the years, but leaving it at that would not only be dismissive and reductive, but fairly inaccurate as well. While Among Trees is one of “those” kinds of games, it sands down some of the rough edges of other titles of its ilk that usually lead me to avoid the genre entirely. But there’s something about this particular early access survival game that has me so fascinated and eager to continue playing it.

The first and most striking thing about Among Trees that you’ll notice is just how gorgeous it is. It has this painterly, low-poly graphical style that really adds to this feeling of being in a mysterious place. Everything is drenched in this blue haze that makes seeing into the distance more of a chore than you’d like, but its presence makes everything feel more ethereal and ripe for exploration.

Unfortunately, in my time with Among Trees, I found exploration to be a little laborious at times, from the sparse amount of interactive elements in the world to the dreadfully slow walking speed of your character, it can feel like a real chore at times. While just seeing the world around you is incredibly pleasant, when you first start Among Trees, you have very little in the way of interaction and abilities.

Maybe I came into Among Trees with some preconceived notions about what a survival game should allow me to do from the start, but I posit that having to construct a bespoke crafting room on your house before you can make an axe is wild. I wouldn’t be complaining if crafting the room was easier, but the requirements for it were 12 wood planks, some moss from tree stumps, and some driftwood (I think), all of which were preposterously hard to find, especially when you have no tools.

You can’t punch trees until wood comes out, instead you have to find each thing on the ground as you explore. It took me about 3 in-game days before I finally was able to craft an axe, and that was only because I got very lucky and found this large plot of land with a bunch of boxes, rope, nails and wood planks. If it wasn’t for that boon, I’d probably still be out there eating every mushroom I could find and praying none of them were poisonous.

Poison, in my experience, has been the second most dangerous thing in Among Trees, only falling short of the first spot to the big angry bear that chased me around. In Among Trees, most of the time you’re alone with only the trees and the bees to keep you company. But there are plenty of animals skittering about like rabbits, deer and birds. Also there are bears roaming about. You know they’re a big deal too because it’s the only time I’ve seen Among Trees give me a stealth indicator. From what a helpful loading screen has told me, bears tend to hang around areas where good loot is, so that’s something.

But if you can manage to outrun the bear and make it back to your prefab cottage in the woods with all those materials, you might just be able to expand your home and get yourself a kitchen or something. Base management in Among Trees is odd, but not in an inherently bad way. You start in front of a dilapidated cottage in need of repairs. Getting close to it will reveal its material requirements for becoming a lovely little home in the woods that people will pay crazy amounts of money to Airbnb at.

Once you’ve collected the materials the house is reborn anew, granting you a bed to sleep on and a book to save your progress in. There doesn’t seem to be any customizing how the house is constructed or how it physically looks, trading that for prefabricated rooms that you can unlock as you go that make the home bigger. You can decorate it by crafting little trinkets and such, but as early as I was in the game, I couldn’t imagine wasting the resources on something as frivolous as decorations… not yet at least.

Among Trees is a fascinating survival game that lured me in with its gorgeous visual style, but kept me there because of its mellow and relaxing core loop. There are plenty of weird quirks in the game like not being able to craft multiple things at once as well as the pitiful walk speed, but outside of those gripes, Among Trees is a truly serene and calming experience. It’s currently available in early access exclusively on the Epic Games Store, but if you’re looking for something low key, you could do a lot worse than Among Trees.

Gut Check: Hardspace: Shipbreaker

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Hardspace: Shipbreaker is a game that might have been made with me and my proclivities in mind. In Hardspace: Shipbreaker, you play as an unnamed “cutter” for a company that dismantles and salvages derelict space crafts for various clients, while making sure to pick through everything in an effort to get a little extra bonus cash. It’s currently in early access which is reassuring considering its various and completely understandable technical issues, that hopefully will be fixed as time goes on.

Booting up Hardspace: Shipbreaker, I was immediately greeted with the telltale signs of a game that didn’t play well with my dual monitor setup, constantly dropping the image in favor of a black screen. This happens sometimes and simply requires me to change some resolution settings and toggle between windowed full-screen and regular full-screen. I only mention this because Hardspace: Shipbreaker has a surprisingly long and potentially interesting introduction sequence in it, but it was lost on me because I could only see it in quick flashes. Which is why you should all sign my petition to make sure that games let you edit your settings instead of throwing you straight into various cut-scenes and gameplay.

Once that was all sorted out however, I made the smartest decision of my life and played through the entire tutorial. Do yourself a favor if you end up picking up Hardspace: Shipbreaker and play the tutorial. It doesn’t explain everything to you, but it gets you on your feet faster than just winging it ever could.

In the tutorial you’re walked through the basics of movement, which even after completing it, I found myself gently floating into space more times than I’d like to admit. In Hardspace: Shipbreaker you need to account for all dimensions of movement including vertically, horizontally, and going forward and backward. You have jet thrusters on your space suit that allow you to roll, accelerate and decelerate, which can help counteract the momentum you’ve built up while you hurdle into the sun.

Once you “master” your movement abilities, it’s time to do some destruction. You get access to a few tools during the course of the tutorial including a grappling laser, two kinds of laser cutters, and tethers. The grappling laser allows you to shoot a beam of energy at something and whip it around if it’s light enough. The two laser cutters allow you to either focus a laser on a fixed point or cut long horizontal or vertical lines into a surface, like if you wanted to make a new window in a ship. The tethers are basically the same thing as the grappling laser, except they’re capable of moving heavier objects and you have a limited amount of them.

Using all of these tools, you have to deconstruct a few ships, take their various components and deposit them into one of three locations. I’m not entirely sure what the delineation between the three areas are, but one of them is burning with fire which I understand to be where sheets of metal and miscellaneous materials go to be refined. The second one is this glowing blue area that accepts other, usually bigger pieces of the ship to be refined, and the third is a barge that sits below you that’s where you deposit the mission critical stuff like the ship’s reactor.

While inside of the tutorial or freeplay mode, you’ve got unlimited time and resources at your disposal, but once you start your career in earnest you have to worry about oxygen, thruster fuel, tether amounts and the condition of your tools. You also have a time limit to complete each job, which means completing the task list. If you’re using a controller like I was, you will not be able to open the task list without using the keyboard. The controller support is mostly there, but that seems like a pretty important function to not have working.

Within the career mode, you have to make sure you’re being mindful of your tools and resources, all of which can be repaired and refilled back at your floating hub platform that’s right by the ship you’re scrapping. You need to make sure you complete the objectives of the job first, whether they be removing the reactor, or collecting a certain amount of a particular metal or material. Secondly you’ll want to scrap and salvage anything you can after the objective is completed, because you’ll earn both money and an upgrade currency that can be used to unlock more features and abilities for your tools.

You can work on a particular ship for more than one shift however, allowing you to truly complete a job if you’re so inclined. Just make sure it’s worth the time investment, because your character is in massive debt to the company they work for, and need to make payments regularly to stay afloat. Hardspace: Shipbreaker captures that capitalistic dystopian nightmare that we’re heading for so well, genuinely making me worry if I’ve worked enough to pay off the company I work for.

Lastly, Hardspace: Shipbreaker is an early access game, which means it’s pretty rough around the edges at the moment. Cut up too many particles or accidentally trigger an explosion in the ship and the frame rate vanishes before your eyes. I don’t begrudge the game for that considering there’s a lot of physics occurring at once and slowdown is to be expected. I also experienced a crash in the brief time I spent with Hardspace: Shipbreaker, but I’m going to chalk that up to it being in early access.

Hardspace: Shipbreaker can feel overwhelming at first, what with the amount of mechanics you need to learn before you can actually feel comfortable doing anything on your own, but once you get the hang of it I found it to be a genuinely enjoyable time. I think the tutorial needs to do a better job at explaining how to properly, safely and efficiently dissect a spaceship instead of leaving it to trial and error, but that’s just my personal preference. Hardspace: Shipbreaker is a truly good time and I recommend checking it out if the idea of being a space scrapper is as enticing to you as it is to me.

Blog: E3 Would’ve Already Been Over By Now – 06/24/20

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It’s weird to think about it isn’t it? Had this year not been just a catastrophic mess from top to bottom, we would have already experienced what was gearing up to be the potentially weirdest E3 in history. Instead the world broke and we’ve been experiencing a steady stream of announcements that have sprung from various events that are too vast in number to keep track of anymore. I guess in a weird way I miss E3, but I’m also pretty ambivalent about its return.

There’s something to be said about the spectacle and brevity that comes with what once was the focal point of the video games industry. It was a singular event that all of the gaming populace could look to for the biggest and most exciting announcements of the year. Considering we’re in a console release year, the E3 we could have had would have certainly been colossal. As hokey as it sounds, people aren’t wrong when they call E3 video game Christmas. During the course of one day we’d be inundated with massive reveals that would range from genuinely exciting to downright confusing, and I guess I miss that aspect most about the conference. It was a pain in the ass to cover those conferences, but it was extremely rewarding too.

I’m not entirely confident that we’ll have an E3 next year either. Without question the ESA, the folks behind E3, are going to do something to try to reclaim their ever-dwindling throne, but I don’t think we’ll ever see E3 be as big or impactful as it once was. Going to E3 as a game maker or publisher is a tremendously expensive proposition that doesn’t even guarantee any real success in the future. Many people I’ve talked to just assume that the press conferences that come before the actual event of E3, are the entirety of the conference itself. Meanwhile there are people, myself included, who only really pay attention to the press conferences and pick up what else they can from articles and videos later, which probably sucks to hear if you weren’t featured at a press conference that year.

Right now we’re literally in the thick of a deluge of digital events and announcements, but I’ve never gotten the feeling that one is being immediately drowned out by another. With the entire summer serving as the “E3 window” instead of the week or so it normally occupies, these announcements don’t get buried mere hours after they get on stage. I’ve had time to process my feelings about how the PS5 looks, or how excited I am for Paper Mario: The Origami King without feeling like I’m forgetting something. This allows announcements to breathe and exist for a while before immediately being steamrolled by something else.

I still miss E3 despite it being woefully unnecessary nor beneficial to anyone that isn’t a massive game company like Microsoft or Sony. I miss the bombast that came with knowing that this would be the place where the “big guns” would come out. But what E3 traded on for so long was its reputation and stalwart position in the industry, something that its squandered by continually proving how poorly run it actually was. I don’t know that we necessarily need something to fill E3’s shoes considering E3 was going through an identity and relevancy crisis, trying to poise itself as both a press, business and consumer event all in one. I think conferences like Gamescom, PAX and TGS all fill that E3 void well enough that we don’t need E3 to rise from the ashes like some miserable marketing phoenix.

I think this summer has been a test run for what will be the new standard in the industry. Companies will continue to elect to not waste money at superfluous conferences when they can just make an hour long video of trailers and press play on a random Tuesday in June. They control their own message this way, and don’t have to worry about the next press conference that goes live in two hours to completely overshadow them. I like E3, but I think I’m okay if we never see it put on again.

A Look Back at The Steam Game Festival

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As we watch the corpse of E3 gently float down the stream with golden coins placed over its eyes for The Riverman to grant it safe passage, we find ourselves in the midst of constant press events that look to fill vacuum E3 left in its wake. One of these events came in the form of the now concluded Steam Game Festival, where developers could directly market their upcoming games via Steam and allow us to download demos of upcoming games. I played a couple of these demos and wanted to provide a little bit of insight into each of the games I got my hands on.

I want to preface with the fact that most of, if not all of the demos I tried, were of games that were not done and clearly needed more work. I am not judging these demos as full products, nor would I want to imply that was the case. These games are in development and are subject to change, so consider this article as a time capsule that describes what these demos were like.

GRIEFHELM

Griefhelm is a side-scrolling action game that sees you, a knight, sword fighting their way through waves of increasingly deadlier enemies. While it sounds fun on paper, the execution leaves a lot to be desired. The controls feel floaty and unresponsive at times, often resulting in the mistiming of blocks and strikes. Griefhelm uses a similar combat system to Nidhogg in terms of having to correctly angle your sword stance between low, medium and high, in an attempt to parry and hit your opponents. While technically that system works in Griefhelm, it doesn’t feel anywhere as responsive or satisfying as Nidhogg.

There’s also another layer to the game that lives in-between skirmishes, where you select which mission you want to go on. Each mission offers a different kind of objective, although they all boil down to just killing dudes and not dying with the promise of some sort of reward that you can use in other levels being bestowed upon you, as well as new pieces of armor for your knight.

While I don’t think Griefhelm is there just yet, I think with some refinement to the controls and mission variety that it could be a really fun game.

UNTO THE END

Remember everything I said about Griefhelm? Then get ready for Unto the End, a game that is cut from the same cloth as Griefhelm, but does just about everything better. Well, except for showing me anything outside of the combat mechanics of the game, because the demo is literally just the combat tutorial and nothing else as far as I could tell.

Unto the End is a much more visually appealing version of Griefhelm, that’s easier to control and more satisfying to play. It uses a similar combat system that seems to be a little more fine-tuned and responsive than Greifhelm. Outside of those examples however, there isn’t really much else to glean from this demo. I look forward to seeing more of Unto the End despite knowing next to nothing about it though.

WINDJAMMERS 2

Windjammers 2 is a game that I forgot existed at all despite it being the sequel to one of my favorite Neo-Geo games, Windjammers. If you have no idea what Windjammers or its sequel actually is, you could call it a mix between pong, air hockey, and that aggressively 80’s attitude that we all love so much.

Windjammers 2 boasts a new hand drawn art style that I’m actually really into, along with a couple of new offensive and defensive capabilities that allow people who know what they’re doing to completely devastate others. Completely unrelated, the demo only allows for online play at the moment, and I definitely didn’t get obliterated by every opponent I faced.

I will always champion Windjammers as a game everyone should try at least once in their lives, although I don’t know that I am foaming at the mouth in anticipation of a sequel. I’ll see how I feel about it when the full game is released, but for now I’m okay with the first installment that currently lives on my Switch.

RUSTLER

Long before the days of Shark Cards and orbital strikes, the Grand Theft Auto series started as a top-down action game where driving a car in a straight line was borderline impossible. The early GTA games also showed off some of that trademark humor that Rockstar is infamous for, but nowhere near as loudly as they do it now.

With that history lesson out of the way, Rustlers is the fantasy version of those old GTA games, emulating everything from the top-down camera angle to the inability to ride a horse in a straight line along with some really hit and miss attempts at humor.

The combat is sluggish and unresponsive, often times defaulting to you just mashing the attack button in the hopes you land a hit on an enemy that’s also flailing wildly, but somehow better at it than you are. Riding a horse is a laborious process that will almost always end in you crashing into something and falling of said horse, which ultimately became the way I dismounted my horse every single time.

The only somewhat redeeming factor is the sense of humor Rustlers has. There were some moments where I might have softly chuckled to myself, like when I saw a cow on a roof that had the word, “horse” spray painted across its body, or when the medieval cops were after me and had one of those rotating red and blue police lights on their helmets. There were also a lot of not so great jokes that I endured, most of which involved being drunk, excessively cursing or soiling yourself.

I don’t think I like Rustlers at all, but maybe you’ll enjoy it. If that’s the case, more power to you.

THE BLOODLINE

A while ago I wrote about the newest Mount & Blade game, specifically mentioning how I thought it was way too much for me to contend with. I know that it’s a very beloved series, but it just wasn’t for me. I only bring that up because I share a lot of the same feelings with the Mount & Blade series as I do The Bloodline.

The Bloodline does itself a massive disservice by starting you out in a mostly abandoned castle with barely anyone around. You create your low-poly character and head out on an adventure that is mechanically similar to something like Mount & Blade. Just like those games, you’ll split your time between first or third person combat, traveling and exploring the over-world, and recruiting allies to join you in what I’ve heard are fairly massive battles.

One of the first things I encountered on my travels was a massive tower that was devoid of any enemies, but had a big bell hanging at the top of it. The game and I agreed that I was to make it to the top of the tower and ring that bell. Luckily The Bloodline gives you a grappling hook that works about 70% of the time which is all I needed to make it to the tippy-top. That and I don’t think there’s any fall damage, so that helped too. I got to the apex, rang the bell, and got 1500XP for my trouble, and was teleported back to the world map. Then I traveled to a town, looked around for people to recruit, and the game crashed.

I haven’t loaded it up again since, but the demo is so rough and janky that I think I’ll wait for a more polished release to continue on my The Bloodline adventure.

NIGATE TALE

Do you like rogue-like games? Do you also like unnecessarily horny representations of anime characters? Well friend, you might just love Nigate Tale, a game that apparently is both of those things and I had no idea. Not like there’s anything wrong with liking these things, it was just a lot to absorb all at once.

See, I don’t enjoy rogue-likes at all. It all just feels a little too grindy for my tastes, but I get the appeal of them, and for what it’s worth Nigate Tale seems like a pretty competent one of those kinds of games. The controls are responsive, the enemies provide a real challenge, and the game has a pretty good look to it as well. From the perspective of someone who doesn’t know what makes a good rogue-like, this seems like it’s all right.

I don’t want to give the impression that I’m trying to “yuck anybodies yum” or anything, I just was not prepared for the 3 scantily clad anime ladies I would encounter within the first 5 minutes of playing. All of that confusion immediately faded away when I met a large hamster-like creature who gave me some special powers, cause their presence alone was easily the high point of Nigate Tale.

I played a little bit of Nigate Tale, and I genuinely have no idea if it’s good or not. It felt good to play, but I was constantly at a loss because the in-game translation isn’t fully there yet which made it genuinely hard to understand what powers I was picking up or even what the story was. I hope this thing gets properly localized and people can get their hands on it, cause it seems all right for what it is.

SKELLBOY

Skellboy is the kind of game that I can get behind. It’s this action game where you play as a skeleton that acquires new body parts and weapons from their fallen foes, and wears it on themselves. A new head might give you more health or the ability to spit projectiles, while new feet could make you run faster. It seems ripe for a puzzle solving game where you’re swapping parts of yourself out to progress through certain obstacles, but you don’t have an inventory so you just pick up and discard things as you go.

The game also boasts this almost Paper Mario-esque art style, except instead of everything being made of paper they’re just chunky pixels. But the way the perspective shifts as you move through a level gave me some really strong Paper Mario vibes that I very much appreciated.

The only criticisms I really have with Skellboy is that the combat not only feels slow, but there isn’t much impact to anything you’re doing. I found myself losing a lot of health because I just didn’t realize I was getting hit, and the same thing can be said about attacking. Outside of that however, I really dug what I played.

There it is, my not-so-comprehensive coverage of The Steam Game Festival. Overall, I like how Steam has run this event and gave people access to a lot of neat upcoming games that I would have otherwise not known about. Considering E3 would be over by now, it’s been nice to get a constant trickle of announcements and events like this one, and I wouldn’t be surprised if other publishers tried similar things. Everyone has their own launcher these days, so it wouldn’t be outrageous to see someone like Ubisoft announcing a game one day and simultaneously allow people to try a demo or beta of said game on their own platform. We’ll see what happens over the course of this summer I suppose.