Author Archives: thebonusworld

Blog: Later Alligator – 09/25/19

This past week, I had the absolute pleasure of playing a game about a paranoid alligator who was convinced that his family was plotting to kill him. If that sentence hasn’t scared you off, then allow me to introduce you to Later Alligator, one of the most charming games I’ve played this year.

In Later Alligator you play as an unnamed alligator in a suit who has been tasked with helping a paranoid alligator named Pat, figure out what his family is planning to do to him at an event they have planned for the night. Through talking with him and his family members, along with playing a bespoke mini-game for each of them, you start to piece together the not-so-mysterious, mystery.

You’re never deducing anything in Later Alligator, instead you’re playing these little mini-games that if you’re successful in, will get the family member in question to spill a detail about the event planned for the night. The mini-games range from playing a claw game, to protecting a sleeping baby from getting possessed by ghosts, to the bane of my existence: slide puzzles. The mini-games themselves are scattershot in terms of quality, but they’re usually charming and easy enough for it to never really be a problem.

Where this point-and-click adventure really shines however, is through its characters. Every gator you meet with is some relative of Pat’s, all with a piece of the puzzle as to what his fate for the evening will be. One of my personal favorites is Pat’s father, Two Tone Tony, who is mid-existential crisis and desperately trying to cover it up with bad jokes and a badass new grill that he doesn’t quite know how to work.

Aside from one or two mini-games, there weren’t any real times I felt challenged or like I had to solve anything. Later Alligator kind of holds your hand the whole way through, allowing you to focus more on the wonderful characters, as opposed to offering up a mechanically challenging experience. The only thing you really need to manage is time. You start at 10 in the morning and have until 8pm to do as much investigating as possible before the event itself is underway. The time crunch really kicks in when you fail a mini-game because each retry will cost you 15 in-game minutes that can really add up.

Later Alligator is the kind of game that I really enjoy, but know that it’s a hard sell to make for most people. It only took me about two hours to beat, but if you want to grab all the collectibles and play all the mini-games, it could probably be double that. But I had a very good time exploring the world, meeting its inhabitants and admiring the gorgeous art and animation. So if you’re in the mood for a lighthearted and chill adventure game that wont take up too much of your time and has a great aesthetic, look no further than Later Alligator.

Blog: Apple Arcade – 09/18/19

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Apple Arcade is only a few days away from being released to the public alongside iOS13, but for those of us in the beta branch of iOS, the service became available to play around with earlier this week. So I did what any reasonable person would do, and downloaded a smattering of games, deleted a bunch of stuff from my phone when I learned I quickly ran out of hard drive space, and played a couple of titles.

But alongside just downloading the games, I took advantage of the new feature to pair a Bluetooth controller to my phone, and tried these games out with my PS4 controller. Here’s just a bit of the bangers I tried out.

SAYONARA WILD HEARTS

I’ll begin with one of the most aesthetically pleasing games I got to try out, because I’m apparently naturally drawn to pastels and neon. Sayanora Wild Hearts is a game about… something. I think someone’s heart was broken so hard that the universe was impacted by it, and the only way to fix everything is to surf through Tron or something. But the important thing is that you control a lady who cosmically skateboards through space collecting coins and hearts while pulling off some sweet ballet kick-flips in the process.

It’s more exciting than it sounds, I swear. I only played about 3 levels to start with, but I don’t think it’s a rhythm game as much as it is a game with a rad look and killer soundtrack that you just kind of experience. I might be too early into it to understand the actual mechanics of the game, primarily if there’s a win or lose state to the game, or if you truly are just letting it all wash over you.

Whatever the case may be, I’m certainly going to try out more of Sayanora Wild Hearts when I get the chance. It’s made a great first impression, and I’m exceedingly curious about where the gameplay goes from here.

OCEANHORN 2Oceanhorn 2 follows in the footsteps of Oceanhorn in that it too is doing its best Zelda game impression. While the first game was an ode to the top-down Zelda games, this one is a 3D action game, much like Ocarina of Time or Windwaker. But despite wearing its inspiration on its sleeve, Oceanhorn 2 seems like a genuinely competent version of what it pulls from.

You’ve got your dungeons, your annoying mob enemies that shouldn’t be as much of a threat as they are, you’ve got a sword, a shield and plenty of puzzles involving you putting a thing on a pressure plate.

Oceanhorn 2 however, is the only game where I dealt with some weird input issues while using my controller. The camera would occasionally start to swirl, my character would start sprinting without me telling them to, and sometimes they’d just swing their sword at what I assume is a ghost I couldn’t see.

But despite those minor quibbles, my main issue is that I don’t think I’d want to play this on a cellphone. I kept looking over at my Switch, wishing I could play it there, or cast it to my TV or something. The game itself seems great, but not suited for cellphone gaming.

WHAT THE GOLF?

You know what’s a weird thing about me? I like golf games. Seriously, I think they can be a lot of fun and calming in the right scenario. Sometimes you want that slow paced, methodical experience, and I think a good golf game can deliver that

What the Golf? is absolutely is not that game. It’s way better. The first level has you do the standard, “hit ball into hole” thing, except they just want you to hit the flag to complete a level. Then level two comes in and suddenly you’re just hurling the golf club at the flag. This kind of keeps going until I found myself launching couches, cats and even houses at the hole. Sometimes I was one ball, sometimes I was 50.

What the Golf? is this absurdist take on golf which easily was the highlight of Apple Arcade for me thus far. I would buy this game outright if Apple Arcade didn’t already have me covered on that front.

GRINDSTONE

Grindstone is a puzzle game where you’re tasked with climbing a mountain, using tons of little critters as your stepping stones. By which I mean you’re killing a bunch of little creatures to fulfill your murder quota while collecting scraps and currency you can use to craft better items and abilities.

I went into Grindstone thinking it would be a nifty looking, “match 3” game like Bejeweled, but instead you’re chaining as many same colored enemies together, allowing you to blaze a path through them. You need to find the most effective route to clear out the most of these little guys as you can. But soon you learn that by collecting a titular grindstone, you get to change the color of the enemy you can kill in that turn.

Some enemies will attack you if you stop in their radius, or some obstacles require you to build up a chain of enemies before you can clear through them. There’s a lot going on here, and I can easily see this game getting super challenging in the later levels when you need to manage several mechanics at once. But as it is, I’m really enjoying it.

SKATE CITY

Skate City is exactly what you might think it is from the title. It’s a 2D skateboarding game that boast chill vibes, and smooth tunes while letting you effortlessly pull of various flips, spins and grinds.

Tricks are controlled using either the analog sticks or virtual analog sticks on the screen. For this game, I decided to see how viable it was without a controller. Turns out, you’re really gonna want one for this game. The touch controls aren’t awful, but having to juggle between mushing your thumb on different parts of the screen to accelerate, spin and do a trick make it a little clunky.

But if you’ve got the controller and want just a chill-ass skate session, Skate City is probably one of the best skateboarding games I’ve played on my phone, which admittedly isn’t saying much. It’s good, trust me.

So those are more or less, the first games I managed to spend any real time with. I’ve got to say though, Apple Arcade as a product is actually really winning me over. I haven’t really come across any games that have actively repelled me away. There are some genres of game on the service that I know aren’t for me, but all of the games themselves look pretty polished from my quick glance of what was available.

Although in classic App Store fashion, discoverability among this subset of iOS games is still kind of a hassle. There aren’t any genre categories to browse or even a straight alphabetical list to peruse, which kind of seems to defeat the whole point of Apple Arcade in the first place.

My limited impression of Apple Arcade is based on the handful of games I got to play, but so fa I find myself more drawn to the games that aren’t trying to provide a “console” experience. I like a certain kind of game on my phone, and playing something like Oceanhorn 2 on an iPhone screen just doesn’t seem like anything I want to do.

Apple Arcade launches on Friday, September 20th for iOS for $4.99 a month and later this year on iPad. There was a free one month trial I took advantage of that should be available when the service launches.

The Master of Disaster: Finding the Balance – 05

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Since the inception of this feature, I’ve mainly used it as an outlet to talk about the various mishaps and shenanigans that cropped up during my role-playing adventures. This time however, I’d like to talk about my struggles in finding a way to balance a good game, with an engaging story.

Admittedly, I don’t have the broadest scope of experience running campaigns or writing stories in general, but I feel I can speak to it a bit. In fact, if it wasn’t for playing Dungeons & Dragons, I probably wouldn’t do much creative writing at all. I was inspired to give it a go from listening to shows like The Adventure Zone and Friends at the Table in terms of how the pace of my games should go.

The problem is that the people on those shows all know that while they’re playing for fun, there’s also a broader entertainment implication that’s tied to what they’re doing. They know that they’re performing not just for each other, but for thousands of listeners and viewers. That isn’t to imply that they’re adjusting their play to make the show progress, but the thought of an audience involved must have an effect on some of the moment to moment decision making.

That coupled with the ability to edit down long stretches of conversations about mechanics, rules and ability descriptions, makes the final consumable product seem like a faster flowing game in general. When in all actuality, I’m probably just not hearing those parts.

It was all of this that led to me mismanaging a lot of the early sessions in our campaign. I was trying to run a game as efficiently as what I would hear in an edited episode of a podcast and that just wasn’t feasible. We all were new to playing Dungeons & Dragons and we had to Google a lot of mechanics mid-game for clarity. They usually cut that part out of the podcasts.

What I loved about shows like The Adventure Zone and Friends at the Table was how gripping the story managed to be. The excellent craftsmanship of the story, the detailed and evocative descriptions, and the general understanding of the rules all made me feel like I was letting my players down constantly in comparison. It caused me a ton of anxiety every week while I did my preparations, even though I knew I was setting an impossible standard for myself as a first timer.

I was writing dozens upon dozens of pages of dialogue, lore, descriptions and quests to throw at my players, all of which were designed to illicit some sort of weighty impact, deliver on a joke, or inspire the players to act. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. But most of it felt rigid and rarely felt like it came up naturally.

After pages of stories and quests would go unused by my players, I initially felt a tinge of disappointment, often wondering what I did or didn’t do correctly to get them on the right track. Hours of my work were getting ignored and overlooked because I had a very particular on-ramp and set of circumstances that led up to them. I wasn’t angry, but I was getting frustrated. I was essentially building quest hooks into the way I assumed my party would do things. Steps 1 – 50 were ready, but I never thought about what if they never took that first step at all. I had to change things up.

So I did some research and consulted dozens of YouTube videos for some guidance. It became clear to me that I was over preparing to enormous degree, and it was leading to me railroading my players occasionally as well as get frustrated when things didn’t go as planned. I was trying to tell a story in D&D instead of letting my players tell theirs. So I decided to revamp everything.

I more or less threw out dozens of pages of story in an effort to craft something new and versatile. I stopped writing out individual lines of dialogue and quest progressions and stopped treating conversation as if my players were picking dialogue options in a video game. Instead of creating a perfect narrative, I built little pieces of lore that would tie together should the party pursue it. There’s a “story” should they happen to stumble on it or feel lost, that I can point them toward, but I just stopped writing everything like I was writing a book.

It’s been kind of liberating to let the players dictate the story and lead the charge, which arguably is how Dungeons & Dragons is supposed to be played. I’m not amazing at running games and I’ve made my fair share of mistakes in the process, but I’m having a lot more fun and experiencing a lot less stress because of my change in prep style. It’s also a lot of fun to not know what’s coming next.

I guess what I’m ultimately saying is that I learned how to not be as precious about everything I’ve made. If my players are reading this, relax, there’s still plenty of tailored content in there for you. But I’ve basically taken the coloring book approach, where I have the outline, but they’ll be the ones coloring it in.

Blog: NBA 2K20 is a Bummer – 09/11/19

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I’ve always been a fan of the NBA 2K games since I first played NBA 2K back on the Dreamcast. The promise of a realistic simulation of the only sport I really care about was obviously alluring, and the in more recent years, the video game itself was the catalyst for me following its real life counterpart again. That’s why it’s such a shame that this latest entry in the series is so underwhelming and broken that it’s hard for me to want to play more of it until the inevitable patches hit.

I know not a lot of my readers have a big familiarity with the NBA 2K games, so I’ll do my best to summarize some of the core systems in place. Like most sports games these days, you can choose between a variety of modes from creating a player and taking them through their career, to playing as a general manager of a team, to whatever their card collecting mode that I never touch is about. Normally I stick to the franchise mode, where you pick a team or teams, and just run them through the years managing trades and contracts, along with playing the games too.

This year I decided to try out the career mode, which tasked me with creating a virtual version of myself and taking him through climbing the ranks as a college player with the hopes of getting drafted in the NBA. The story itself is all over the place, having your player decide to look Idris Elba (no, really) in the eyes and say that he isn’t going to play in the championship game, because a player I’ve never met on my team got injured and lost their scholarship. By the time I ended the pre-NBA story mode, I was a first round draft pick that got selected by the New York Knicks.

Now here’s where the game part gets in the way. NBA 2K launched in a hilariously broken state with players reporting a wide variety of glitches and bugs ranging from funny, to game breaking. Some people noticed their player names weren’t showing up on their NBA jerseys, animation glitches that allowed their opponents to just break the rules of basketball to suit their needs, and a whole lot of server issues that led to lost progress.

That last one is made all the worse when you take into account the VC, or virtual currency that runs the game. VC is money that you either earn in game or pay for with real money that allows you to upgrade your stats and buy clothes and shoes for your character. To spend any of this VC, the game pings the 2K servers and authorizes the transaction to make sure you haven’t done anything unsavory. What that meant for players though, was that loading screens, purchasing, and earning, were all reliant on the servers holding up. They did not. That meant a lot of people weren’t getting any money for their games, or losing cash because the servers messed up the transaction. It was a real bummer.

2K has since patched the game to fix some of these loading issues, but while not as egregious as it was at launch, some of these problems still persist. I’ve also encountered a new one that makes playing the game, all the more laborious. As a player, you’ll need to attend practice and complete drills to upgrade your players badges. Badges are like perks that help you do things that aren’t explicitly stat related, or boost you over what your stats dictate. A badge can enable you to see where a rebound where land when a missed shot is put up, or make driving the lane easier for you. In these drills, you gain a 1 to 3 star rating depending on how good you’ve done. But with a new glitch in the progression system, getting a 3 star rating just subtracts your score from your total progression, so the better you do, the more experience you lose. It’s made progressing normally impossible, to the point where I don’t even want to touch the mode until they fix it.

On top of all that, there’s just the abundance of things trying to get you to spend money in the game. We’ve all seen the slot machines and “gambling” hooks that 2K themselves showed off in a promotional pre-release video, but there’s just stuff everywhere in the career mode encouraging you to spend real money. Not to mention your player is so easily outmatched by everyone in the NBA that you’ll basically be demoralized into paying for VC to boost your stats.

It’s all such a shame because the actual game part of NBA 2K20 is fun. Sure it’s got some weird animation glitches that pop up once in a while, but otherwise the act of playing basketball is still fun. My main issues with NBA 2K20 are that the modes I mostly play, the franchise mode, has not been touched in any meaningful way since last year, and all the gross micro-transaction stuff that is always in the series. I’m sure I’ll end up putting in another few hundred hours into the game like I always do, but man, I wish they’d shake up the formula a little bit.

Blog: Games, Again! – 09/04/19

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Every year we wait for that time at the end of August when John Madden bestows his latest sports simulation upon us, marking the beginning of video game season. This year the harvest has been bountiful and immediate. What I’m saying is that a lot of games came out recently and I’d like to talk about what I’ve been playing.

CONTROL

Holy shit Control, holy shit. I’ve been very lukewarm on past Remedy offerings like Alan Wake and Quantum Break, but Control seems like the culmination of everything they’ve learned from producing those games. Control takes place inside of a secret federal building that specializes in messing with forces they don’t understand. Surprise, surprise, things go sideways and it’s up to you to fix it all, I think. I haven’t finished it yet, so things are bound to change.

There are so many things I love about Control already. The Federal Bureau of Control, otherwise known as The Oldest House, otherwise known as the place where the game takes place in, is a constantly shifting office building with plenty of HR posters, memos about book clubs, and training videos in it to make the whole place feel grounded despite the fact that inter-dimensional creatures are hijacking the bodies of the employees and trying to gun you down. The whole place is just so interesting to wander around in and explore.

The combat is no slouch either. You have a gun that can change forms on the fly into either a pistol, a shotgun, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen assault rifles and more referenced in some collectibles. On top of the cool gun though, you very quickly get the power to use telekinesis to hurl just about everything that isn’t nailed to the ground at your opponents.

I could go on for a long time about Control, but I’ll save that for a different article. The last thing I’ll say about it is that while I love the story, combat, tone and world building that’s going on, things like performance and load times are certainly areas that could be improved. Having to deal with minute long load times whenever you take the elevator or happen to fall in a bottomless pit (standard office building stuff) it’s made all the worse by the painfully slow loading bar.

REMNANT: FROM THE ASHES

Let’s be incredibly reductive here for a moment and say that Remnant: From the Ashes is basically an easier to understand and play Dark Souls game with an emphasis on guns and multiplayer. But make no mistake, this game is brutal if you’re playing it solo. That’s why I initially bounced off of it for a bit until a friend picked up the game as well. Now I can easily see why people are speaking so highly of Remnant: From the Ashes, because quite frankly, it’s good.

Like I mentioned before, Remnant: From the Ashes really wants you to play alongside a friend or preferably two. A lot of the bosses and other enemies use the simple tactic of running at you in an attempt to outnumber you, and it works when you’re alone. But with a friend, we were basically the SWAT team if they had to fight horrible nightmare creatures that look like sick trees.

There’s a lot going on in Remnant: From the Ashes, from level randomization to upgrading and crafting equipment, to the general strangeness of the world itself. I’m only a few hours in, but I’m looking forward to continuing my adventurers. I’ll just be sure to grab a buddy before I do.

KNIGHTS AND BIKES

Knights and Bikes is mostly an adventure game with a lot of mediocre combat and slight puzzle-solving sprinkled on top of it. You play as one of two girls on a small island that I think is in the general area of England based on the liberal usage of the letter “U” in their words. It also is about an ancient curse that only they can stop because none of the adults on the island actually believes in it.

The game is a cooperative focused affair with the option of playing solo where you’ll have to switch on the fly between the girls to harness their unique abilities. At the point I’m at in the game, so far one girl has the ability to throw a Frisbee to attack at range, and the other has a ground pound. I’ve heard there are more abilities that get unlocked as you make your way through the game.

I’m not too far in but I can safely say that it’s charming as hell. The characters are fun and interesting so far, and the presentation is delightful, even if some of the graphical elements occasionally get in the way of your basic movement.

At the point I’m at in Knights and Bikes, the two girls have arrived at the city on the island where I’m sure things will start to kick off in a major way. While I am interested to see where the game goes, I don’t know when I’ll get back to it. The previously mentioned two games have kind of consumed all of my free gaming time, and Knights and Bikes just didn’t hook me in hard enough to make me want to rush back to it.

But here’s the thing, there’s a goose that follows you around named Captain Honkers who I love more than anything. So I’ll go back to Knights and Bikes just to kick it with Cappy Honk-Honk.

I’m actually a little overwhelmed with how many games have just hit in such a short period of time, and it doesn’t show much sign of slowing down anytime soon. That being said, it’s a good time to play games, and a less good time to be broke.

Blog: You Can’t Go Home Again – 08/28/19

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It would be generous to say that I have any experience with World of Warcraft considering I’ve only played it for about a week almost a decade ago. But while the fervor around the 15 year-old game has waned in popularity from time to time, it hasn’t stopped people from losing their minds over the release of World of Warcraft Classic.

From the time when WoW Classic was announced to its recent release, I’ve gone through varying degrees of confusion about the desire people have to jump back into a game from 2004, with all of its quirks and hiccups intact. But now, days after it’s dropped, I think I get it.

Like I said, I have basically no experience with WoW Classic nor any desire to get in there and see what all the fuss is about. I just figure that considering most of my friends have fallen prey to its wiles, I should at least pay some attention to the arc of this whole experience and try to get some insight into people’s excitement.

I asked some of my friends if they were genuinely excited to play WoW Classic as a game, or if they were actually just trying to chase those feelings and memories associated with it. Most of them agreed that the latter was the primary driving force for them, which is evidenced by the fact that suddenly, people I haven’t spoken to in over a decade started popping up and coming together to plan out their game nights. It’s kind of incredible when you think about it. It’s really the only game I can think of that has the cultural cache to become the equivalent of a high school reunion.

I was in high school when World of Warcraft burst onto the scene, taking the world by storm. At the time, the only MMO I was playing was Star Wars Galaxies, and that was purely motivated by my love of the movies along with a dash of peer pressure. I enjoyed playing it with those people at that moment in time, but if it was suddenly announced that Star Wars Galaxies was getting a faithful re-release that encapsulated everything about the game at that time, I don’t think I would care that much.

I know that’s just me though, as evidenced by the mass of players bombarding the WoW Classic servers. I’m not writing this with the intention of raining on the parade of anybody who is having a great time with the game. Chase your bliss. But for me, the way I felt when I played games with other people back then, are relegated to pleasant memories now. Sure I miss the carefree days where I could play games online with my friends till 3 in the morning, but those days are gone, and that’s okay. I did that when I had the time to do it, and I don’t regret it.

If you’re playing WoW Classic, I hope you’re enjoying it. It has to be this time capsule of a game that evokes so many memories, and that’s wonderful. A similar situation is soon to crop up with me and the Halo games when they start getting released on PC sometime this year. Yeah, it’s going to be fun to dive back into those games and play them again, but I know I’m not going to stick with them the way I did when they initially released. I must have over a thousand hours in Halo 2 alone, but when it drops on PC, I know I’m never going to come close to even a tenth of that.

My point is that these games are like looking through a photo album or something. You get that burst of positivity and warmth while the memories flood back in, and then you turn the page and keep going. I’m glad that Blizzard released WoW Classic, allowing so many people to come and visit Azeroth in just the way they remember it, but it’s never going to feel the same as the first time you had to kill 100 boars in hopes of getting 10 tusks.

Blog: Actual Human Physics – 08/21/19

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On numerous occasions I’ve mentioned my particular fondness for physics-based wackiness, but looking through the history of this site I don’t think I’ve actually talked about one of my favorite examples of that. If you haven’t heard of it, allow me to put Human Fall Flat on your radar, because it’s damn good fun.

Human Fall Flat isn’t a new game. It was released a little over 3 years ago on PC, but eventually made its way to just about every platform out there. In Human Fall Flat, you play as a little blob person who must traverse through various levels filled with puzzles and platforming challenges. At face value it doesn’t sound particularly exciting, but it’s the wild physics that you’ll be battling that makes things interesting.

Puzzles usually require you figuring out how to hit a switch, breaking through a wall, piloting a vehicle or just maneuvering through tricky terrain. All of this is made more exciting as you’re trying to reign in the wily physics or preferably, exploiting them to break the level and circumvent the obstacle entirely.

It’s a goofy experience that only gets better when you get your friends in on the chaos. The game supports 2 players locally (on PC at least) and up to 8 players via online play. I’ve played through this game both single player and with another person, and I cannot fathom what kind of shit show it turns into with 8 people.

And “shit show” might actually be the most accurate descriptor of Human Fall Flat because of just how bonkers things can get. You might find yourself flying through the air, or flipping a vehicle with your bare hands or something because the physics went bonkers. But that’s what I love about the game. I can solve the puzzles and traverse the obstacles as intended in a pretty quick fashion, but it’s when you decide to go off the beaten path that Human Fall Flat really shines. It really is a case of, “if you think you can do it, you probably can.”

The problem is that there’s only a handful of official levels in the game at the moment that offer limited replay value. Creating a level filled with puzzles and branching paths can’t be easy, so this isn’t me complaining as much as it is me yearning for more stuff to fool around with. Luckily there’s Steam Workshop support which has enabled people to create their own nightmarish levels for me to bang my head against. I think I’ve downloaded about 20 levels at this point, and have only been able to conquer about half of them, which is fine because it’s more game for to play and I wont grouse about that. But here’s a tip for you custom level makers out there: put some fucking checkpoints in your levels.

The unfortunate truth is that Human Fall Flat is one of those games that when you see it, it’ll either click with you or not. While writing this, it was announced that a new level was coming to the game come August 27th, so that’s something to look forward to. I can’t properly express my love for this game without showing it off to people or letting them get their hands on it, but if you get the opportunity to try it, please do.

Blog: Everyone Needs to Calm Down – 08/14/19

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Late last year the Epic Games Launcher was released to much cynicism and side eyeing from the gaming audience, myself included. I won’t lie, I was very skeptical of the product and in some regards I still am, but I’m ultimately glad to see that there’s some real competition in the PC games marketplace for once. My issues with the Epic Games Launcher are mostly directed towards the very limited feature set which to be fair, they’re working on, but most of the anger and vitriol amidst the discourse revolves around how “aggressive” Epic appears when lining up exclusives.

A few months ago, Metro Exodus was gearing up for its PC release on Steam. It had been available for pre-order on Steam for quite a while and people were eager to play it. Weeks before it launched however, it was announced that the game would be a timed exclusive on the Epic Games Store. The Steam pre-orders would be honored and activated on release day, but people were not happy with the abrupt jump to this new platform. I’m guessing that was the start of everyone getting angry with the platform in general. Even I thought it was a questionable move, but I also had no intention to play Metro Exodus, so I moved on.

Since then, Epic has been courting developers of all sizes, encouraging them to release on their platform and enjoy a healthier cut of profits from sales. There should be no question that developers should get paid for the work they put into making these games, and if there’s a platform out there that better facilitates that, then it’s an easy decision to make.

But the internet is still a nightmare emporium where people will take any reason to raise their pitchforks and try to ruin the lives of others. That’s where Ooblets comes in. Ooblets is a game that appears to be mixing the elements of Animal Crossing and Pokemon together into one colorfully charming experience. Unfortunately, this post isn’t about how excited I am to check the game out (which I am), instead it’s about how on July 31st the studio behind the game announced that they were signing a deal with the Epic Games Store for a few reasons, income being the primary motivator. Let’s be clear, an indie studio doing what they have to in order to get paid more for there work is not something we should be grousing about. Developers need money to survive, and if the Epic Games Store is offering them a bigger cut alongside of a signing bonus, they should take that opportunity.

I bet you can guess what happened next. See, the team behind Ooblets put out a pretty hilarious and snarky blog post outlining the decision, while also making fun of how much people on the internet lose their minds when they hear about Epic grabbing another exclusive. I thought it was pretty hilarious but the internet did not. The internet found it so unfunny in fact, that they responded in some pretty shitty ways including racial slurs and death threats. You know, completely rational responses to a video game going to another store.

WARNING: If you want to see some of the garbage people have said, it’s here, but there’s some really horrific stuff in there, so click at your own risk.

So here we are in the aftermath of all of this, left with yet another tragic example of targeted hate campaigns over the stupidest and most inconsequential shit. The amount of hatred and anger over this move should seem unbelievable, but unfortunately the internet continues to remain a smoldering crater full of mutants with keyboards. I don’t have the solution to this problem, I can only encourage people to spare a thought for the people behind the product. It isn’t worth getting so wound up over a game that you verbally assault someone or threaten them. Nothing should prompt you to be that kind of person, especially not a video game.

It’s a shame that the developers and their insanely charming game have to be associated with this nonsense and I hope the developers are able to rise above the noise and push on. I’ve been interested in Ooblets for quite a while now and fully intended on playing it, regardless of what storefront it eventually wound up on.

Maybe it’s hard for people to wrap their heads around how to install a new launcher. Maybe they don’t like having two whole icons on their desktop for game related things. Those excuses are bullshit. None of it is worth threatening people. Get the fuck over yourselves.

Building a New Splinter Cell

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A YouTube channel named NoClip, recently released a documentary series about the rebooted Hitman games of the past few years. It highlighted developer IO Interactive and their separation from Square Enix, the way they designed their levels and AI patterns, as well as some other very interesting tidbits about their struggles and accomplishments. You should check it out. But it got me thinking about another stealth-action franchise that could use the same rebooting treatment that Hitman received. Of course I’m speaking of Splinter Cell.

Just like the Hitman franchise, Splinter Cell has had some really good entries in the series, and some not so great ones. Hitman eventually pivoted off of a divisive release in the form of Hitman Absolution, into the phenomenal Hitman 2016. Absolution was a fairly linear game that tried to follow in the steps of popular action games of the time, ultimately betraying the core conceit of what those games were traditionally like. Hitman 2016 threw linearity out the window and placed you into clockwork, systems driven levels that had dozens of way to approach them, with multiple objectives for you to complete, a bevy of disguises and weapons at your disposal, and plenty of over-the-top methods for you to dispatch your targets.

But it isn’t the only tried and true stealth-action franchise that made drastic changes to the formula. In a similar fashion, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain did something of a soft reboot in terms of its mechanics and play style, favoring an open world and systemic driven design as opposed to a more curated one. It wasn’t without it’s issues, but most people can agree that it was the best playing Metal Gear, despite having a middling story at best.

So I got to thinking, if Hitman and Metal Gear could reboot themselves so successfully, Splinter Cell should be able to as well. While it’s easy to say that Splinter Cell should just do the same thing those games did, it can’t. There are fundamental differences in the way those games play that just don’t translate perfectly. But if we were to cherry pick elements from either of those games to slot into a new Splinter Cell, I bet you’d come back with something pretty good.

In Hitman 2016, you’re infiltrating these massive and mostly public spaces, adopting the persona and disguise of whomever you need to be in order to gain access to some of the more guarded targets. You’re usually trying to get rid of some sleazy rich guy who’s throwing a party or staying at a hotel or something. There are more “public” spaces for you to occupy and plan around, making it feel more like a puzzle game than anything else.

In Metal Gear Solid V, you’re infiltrating various military installments spread throughout this massive open world, returning to your home base every so often to cash in your missions or progress the story. There isn’t a ton of variety in the way you actually approach these missions, but you’ve got a pretty impressive tool kit at your disposal, from a rocket powered arm that you can shoot into the faces of your enemies, to a dog that wields a knife in its mouth and will cut fools up at your behest.

Splinter Cell is different kind of game in those regards, striving to be a more grounded depiction of military efficacy than the other stealth-action franchises. That established ideology about what those games do makes it difficult to open up the floodgates and allow for more of the weird shenanigans that Metal Gear and Hitman allow for, and Sam Fisher as a protagonist isn’t exactly the “dressing up like a clown and sneaking into a birthday party” type of secret agent.

But despite all of that, here are some elements from both Metal Gear and Hitman that a new Splinter Cell should implement in a new entry.

LEVEL DESIGN

The star of the modern Hitman games is most certainly the levels that you play in. What Hitman 2016 doubled-down on were these clockwork levels that were massive sandboxes for you to explore, where NPCs had routines and goals for you to intercept and take advantage of. Almost every corner of the level provided you with some new opportunity, tool or costume for you to use to dispatch your targets. Along with that, the way the AI was scripted was such that no matter what you did or who you removed from the world, the game was able to pick it back up and make sure everything didn’t grind to a halt because you killed a particular NPC or were caught doing something.

I think that same philosophy can be applied to Splinter Cell in an extremely effective way. In Hitman, the levels all provide Agent 47 with opportunities to hide in plain sight, playing to his strengths while also providing you with a ton of variety in terms of settings and weaponry. Because Agent 47 is more focused on infiltration, the levels can be anything from an active movie studio, to the suburbs, or to a fashion show. That’s the beauty behind the core concept of Hitman.

Whereas Sam Fisher is more of a traditional spy, running military ops, sticking to the shadows and using his environment to help shield him from detection. Instead of the normal, shoot out the lights and sneak up behind a guy routine, a bigger and more complex level could afford you new opportunities to take when stalking your prey.

The problem is that Sam Fisher as a character has a pretty one-note arsenal. He’s a super effective spy who knows how to sneak around, shoot guns and climb obstacles, but he can never dress up like a hipster and pretends to be the drummer in a band so he can kill the lead singer. It’s what makes creating these more intricate levels so difficult, because nobody ever cares how Sam Fisher gets into an enemy base and kills everyone, because he’s on a mission to a dangerous place where there are rarely any civilians to worry about.

CHALLENGES

There are so many things that make Hitman levels so infinitely re-playable, but the challenges and missions have to be up there. Hitman encourages you to replay levels and approach them differently by rewarding you with experience for throwing a pair of scissors at your target’s head while dressed like a clown, or by pushing a loud speaker off the awning above them and crushing them. By completing these challenges, you’re rewarded with new outfits, starting points, and weapons you can use to flex your creativity. It’s a brilliant loop that consistently proves to be the voice in your head that says, “yeah that was cool, but how about this?”

In Splinter Cell though, you have maybe 3 or 4 ways to actually deal with your targets, and in reality you’re only going to either shoot them or strangle them. That’s kind of another big problem Splinter Cell runs into if it tries to adopt a more Hitman-like approach. How do you encourage your players to play differently, and what does that even look like? Sam Fisher doesn’t dress up in goofy outfits and he rarely hides in plain sight, so how do you make new challenges and missions within this limited tool set as well as what the audience expects from a Splinter Cell game? Without completely redefining what kind of character Sam Fisher is you get kind of locked into a box.

I personally wouldn’t mind seeing an all new Sam Fisher who gets tasked with taking down targets that aren’t purely enemy combatants, but I think people would lose their minds if he suddenly started dressing up as a waiter or something.

WEAPONRY

Some of the deadliest and most effective weapons in Hitman are often the most innocuous ones. I’ve killed more people with pasta cans, letter openers, and cheeseburgers than actual guns, because in Hitman, everything you can pick up becomes a deadly weapon. I’m willing to bet Sam Fisher is just as effective as Agent 47 when it comes to improvised weaponry, but I can’t really recall him ever exhibiting that beyond throwing a brick or a rock.

This issue seems far more surmountable than the previous ones considering that you can put plenty of flotsam and jetsam in the levels that Sam could throw at the heads of his enemies. Cinder-blocks, bottles and so on and so forth all would narratively fit in the self-serious tone of Splinter Cell. But that tone can be a little limiting in terms of what you can cram into a new Splinter Cell.

I want to see Sam Fisher try to play guitar poorly in an attempt to fool his target. Then, when he realizes that the target isn’t buying it, smashes it over their head. He might then say something like, “everyone’s a critic” and move to leave the level. But I sincerely doubt I’d ever see that.

TONE

Speaking of the self-seriousness of the franchise, we arrive at my last point. The tone of Splinter Cell, hell, the tone of all the Tom Clancy games are just so painfully self serious. That isn’t to say that striking a serious tone is a bad thing, but it is limiting if you’re trying to build out levels, opportunities and basically everything I’ve mentioned up until this point.

Even when you look at something like Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, a game that also provided players a systems driven sandbox to skulk around in, that game still had levity built into it. By Metal Gear standards it was pretty serious, but you could still do some wild stuff in that game like making your horse poop on command that would lighten the mood.

I can’t really recall anything like that happening in the Splinter Cell franchise. Sam Fisher will make the occasional quip, but he’s never drowning his targets in the toilet they’re vomiting into like you can in Hitman or confusing enemy guards with 20 inflatable dummies of himself like you do in Metal Gear.

The Tom Clancy approach to things is to make bad military humor that is funny to maybe a handful of people out there. Like, there had to be one person out there who cracked up every time a character shouted the phrase, “shitballs!” in Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands, right?

Despite my personal preference for a lighter toned game, I just think that from a design perspective it has to be easier to create fun opportunities than just the standard military fare ones. I’d rather watch the ejector seat on a jet launch a man into the sun than see a guy just shoot a guy with a sniper rifle. It’s why I appreciate the Hitman games so much. Maybe Splinter Cell just isn’t the franchise for me anymore, but if I had my way, it would be a much different game in tone.

I desperately want a new Splinter Cell game, but as time goes on I get a little more cautious about what that game looks like. Between the need to change and the desire to stay true to the existing formulas, I’d have to imagine that part of why a new Splinter Cell hasn’t been announced is because the well of ideas that exists within those confines might be running dry. I just hope that if there ever is a new Splinter Cell game, whatever it turns out to be, it manages to keep me playing for as long as the Hitman reboots have.

Blog: A Hike I Like – 08/07/19

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Last week, a delightful little game was released on Steam called A Short Hike. It’s about your character, an anthropomorphic bird lady, who decided to get away from it all and head out to the mountains with her aunt. Your goal is simple: make your way to the top of the tallest mountain so you can get cellphone reception. At first blush it seems pretty absurd, but very quickly you find that you’re expecting an extremely important phone call from a family member.

So you head off through the woods to find a way up to the peak of the mountain. Naturally, it wouldn’t be as simple as just going there. You lack the physical capabilities to properly scale said mountain when you start out. Soon after that realization, you encounter a mechanic that quite simply put, is a stamina meter. You need to collect these golden feathers that expand your capacity for physical activity. Whether it be climbing, running or flying, the feathers are the key to your success.

In total, you’ll need about 7 or 8 feathers to make the journey up. The way you get more of them is through completing side quests through the quirky side characters that pop up along the way, buying them, or just straight up finding them in the wild. It’s all pretty straightforward in terms of gameplay mechanics.

The characters are written well enough, with some genuinely chuckle-worthy moments sprinkled throughout their dialogue, but there isn’t any real characterization going on here. By the time I got to the climax of the game, I didn’t find myself too attached to the main character and her quest to really feel the weight of it.

While the story is a little bit of a bummer, A Short Hike has a style to it that I personally really enjoyed, but I could imagine some people would hate. Everything is overly pixelated, almost to the point of being completely overtaken by a mosaic effect. It’s like someone took a GameBoy Advance game and blew it up to a modern resolution. While that may sound odd, when it’s paired with the wonderful art direction and color palette the game boasts, it comes together pretty well.

A Short Hike isn’t just a clever name though. It’s a very short game, taking me only about an hour to beat. I did a few side quests and explored a bunch before I decided to make my way to the peak of the mountain to see where the story went. Once I got the scene up there and made my way back to the starting area, I accidentally triggered an event that resulted in the game ending and credits rolling. The game didn’t make it terribly clear that this was going to happen, but it is what it is.

I enjoyed A Short Hike for what it was, even if there wasn’t much there. It’s a calming and pleasant game that’s decent way to kill an hour or two. It’s out on Steam now for $7.99.