Showing posts with label Video Game Thoughts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Video Game Thoughts. Show all posts

Friday, January 26, 2024

Things about Sea of Stars

When I saw the first trailer for Sea of Stars, I thought, “That looks like they were thinking about Chrono Trigger”. Having now played a few dozen hours of Sea of Stars, i can tell you that the creators were thinking about Chrono Trigger and a lot of other SNES era games as well.

Loading Page: Valare and Zale standing in a neon fantasy landscape with the moon behind them. Magic whisps glow around their weapons.

I’ve talked about this a bit in my Games of 2023 post, but when Chrono Cross came out, I was always disappointed that it didn’t expand the things I loved about Chrono Trigger. Sea of Stars plays pretty much like how I wish a 1997 sequel to Chrono Trigger would have played. The world is beautiful it’s fun to run around in, the combos and the combat make sense and you get to root for your heroes to succeed in an easy, uncomplicated way.

I really recommend Sea of Stars to anyone with SNES nostalgia, but I think anyone can love the game and it seems to me like it’s a pretty good game for a younger person, although it does touch on things like death and loss.

Here are a few things I thought about Sea of Stars. Please beware of spoilers, both for the whole of this game and for a little bit of “The Messenger” as well.


Things I Liked


I’ve mentioned that Sea of Stars is a Chrono Trigger tribute, but moving through the world actually feels like an evolution of "Illusion of Gaia". You get to move fast, drop long distances, mantle up cliffs and hookshot (sorry, “graplou”) across bottomless pits. Just moving around feels really good and traversal is always interesting.

The puzzles in the game aren’t particularly taxing, but they feel like just the right amount of challenge. You almost never have to stop moving forward, but there’s enough resistance that you always feel accomplished as you run. The challenges always felt fresh and I didn’t feel like there was much that was reused from other games. They use a lot of block pushing puzzles, but these feel the same way, interesting, not too hard, and always clever.

Screenshot: Valare, Zale and Garl keep their balance as they walk across a rope stretched over a tall waterfal.



The combat in Sea of Stars really shines. In a lot of turn based RPGs it can be easy to develop a strategy that’s good enough for most of the fights and spam that over and over, at least until you get to a boss. Things like attack type or conditions aren’t often worth factoring in, but in Sea of Stars they really shake things up and make each fight in the game interesting.

The game uses “locks”, which are stronger enemy attacks, that you can stop by hitting the enemy with the right combination of damage. You might have sharp and blunt, or lunar and poison or three sharp, three blunt a solar and an arcane. If you hit all the types of the locks, then the enemy doesn’t attack that round. At the same time, other enemies are just counting down to their turn to attack and you can’t stop them.

This makes the combat decisions important. Do I hit the lock and stop the big attack or go for the weaker enemy and get it out for future rounds, do I go for the one that’s about to hit us next. There’s also a well designed push-pull between using your regular attacks to charge up your special attacks and keeping resources in reserve so that you can hit the locks.

I was pretty much never bored in combat and this system made it so that fights with mobs in the middle of the world need as much attention as the boss fights (and are sometimes harder). Different combinations make different fights feel different, and when a boss trots out a 10 point lock you really feel like you’re about the get crushed.

Screenshot: Valare, Zale and Serai fight a witch who has a huge lock with many types of damage needed. They're in a dark and gothic looking place.

Combat also serves to reinforce the characters in the game. Garl, who is your heart and plot driver, is a “Warrior Cook” and he loves to meet people and feed them. In combat, he’ll heal you with a snack or if he has to fight he’ll whack them with his pot lid or a pressure cooker bomb.

Overall I find the characters quite likeable, one of your team is hoping that you’ll come back to her planet and save them -- which turns out to be what you need to do to to beat the big bad. Another from that other planet is basically the kool-aid man and he’s here to punch things as hard as possible.

You have two playable protagonists Valare and Zale and you can choose which one of them you run around as in the world -- although you control everyone directly in combat and they’re both present in all of the cut scenes. They’re both good and good people, but they tend to have the same emotions at the same time and while not, silent protagonists, a lot of the feeling of adventure and travelling the world is left to the rest of the playable party (especially Garl).

In your party you also have a ninja/pirate/cyborg from another planet, who is often the character who has the knowledge necessary to save the world that Valare and Zale lack. You also have the soul in an unbreakable glass body (named B’st) and The Alchemist, who has lived so long as to be basically god, and is the brother to the big bad “Fleshmancer”. The Alchemist despite having made the world -- at least I think he made the world -- has to limit himself to your level for story reasons and later on has to step out and leaves you with an identical puppet of himself.

Still they’re an interesting group and they’re surrounded by a good group of people, such as the non-ninja pirates, some of whom are ghosts, and who are in every tavern in the game playing music from around the game -- because this is an indie game you can collect and give them more. You also have a travelling historian, who is able to tell you stories when you find significant artifacts. One of the moments of the game I found touching was very late in the game where she asks you to record your histories.

Screenshot: The whole party and their friends are gathered at a banquet with several roasts and cakes spread out on the long table.

The game is also really beautiful. The backdrops are lush pixel art and feel like the perfect successor to SNES games. I don’t know that I love the style, but I appreciate the style and I really like the way the world feels and how everything works together. They also play a lot with lighting and that just serves to make the game look even better.

Screenshot: Valare and Zale stand on an old wooden ship which has been repurposed as a bar. Palm trees, lights and flags are hung all around and it seems like a core part of the town.




Things I Didn’t Like


To be totally honest there’s not much I don’t like about Sea of Stars. It took me a while to compile this list, but I found a few things that I didn’t really like.

The first is that there’s no fast travel. The world is small and you eventually get the ability to traverse it very quickly, but if you are standing in one town and you want to be in another town you have to leave town, fly across the world, land, walk into town, and go to where you needed to be. If you need to switch worlds you also have to land on your ship, travel in to the wormhole, travel out of the wormhole, and fly again.

I’m usually a happy proponent of having the travel be as authentic in world as possible -- especially if it’s interesting, but there are some treasure hunting things they want you to do in the late game and it really became a slog to get anywhere, especially if you had to travel back and for several times, and especially especially if you didn’t quite do the thing you had to do, so you don’t even get what you’d expected.

Screenshot: In a desert with techno vibes, Valare and Zale and Resh'an's puppet are looking at a huge speedball capsule.

That has a very silly additional point in that when you are on the world map, you walk *very very slowly*. I don’t know why, in the dungeons and towns you get to dash around and the movement feels awesome, but on the world map you trudge along. They’re trying to call back to the world map of Chrono Trigger, which is cute, but for some reason it’s just slow. The map is pretty though...

Screenshot: The map shows the sleeper, a dragon wrapped around the mountain and the Town of Brisk visible off to the east.



The last thing I didn’t like is that the townie non-playable characters don’t get much personality or even names. When your heroes leave town, Villager 1, Villager 2, and Villager 3 tell them how loved they are and that everyone in town -- basically identical clones of each other, of course -- will miss them.

I know the developers had a lot to do, but having a little more personality in the background characters would have helped make the world feel bigger and richer and also maybe helped make the story feel a little stronger and more connected.




Things I Noticed


I found the story of the game interesting, I didn’t love it, but it has a lot of appealing qualities. In short it’s a good fit for a game version of a Young Adult novel, which again if you look at the SNES games it reminds me of seems right. Chrono Trigger, Illusion of Gaia, Secret of Mana and even the Final Fantasies have stories that are meant more for younger people. So  I think this is a great game for a younger person to play and it’s a lot more upbeat than “Eastward” even if they have some similar vibes and influences.

Where I think there are a few more problems is that the game is also tied into its predecessor “The Messenger”, which is set in the same world (more-or-less) but thousands of years into the future. A character goes in exile so as to avoid the problems of the world, they’re not forgotten, they’re in “The Messenger”. On the other hand, Valere and Zale are forced to learn to weave (or sew?) at the beginning and that’s just never mentioned again. I’d rather figured there’d be a part of the final boss fight, or the real final boss fight where weaving turned out to be key, but it’s just a “miserable thing we had to learn in magic warrior school” that’s out of the plot a few hours in.

(Spoilers intensify)


Where I think the creators of Sea of Stars really got things right is the death of Garl. In a Chrono Trigger reminiscent scene Garl sacrifices himself to protect Valare and Zale and he dies. And he stays dead. Until the ending. Valare and Zale mourn and the world mourns, everybody loves Garl, and the game lets you sit with that sadness.



I find that unusual, there’s a lot of games where they do a “Haha, only kidding” death, and your character pops back up an hour later and who are you to have even worried about it. Here they stick with it, they make it meaning full and I appreciate that.

I also really appreciated that they gave a lot of warning in the story. There’s a cloud … mist .. which can tell the future and he warns Garl and tells him what he needs to do get more time. There are other things as well, but once Garl realises its the moment he’s able to ask The Alchemist who’s there with them for more time, from then on for as long as Garl has purpose he will remain in the world, but he’ll pass away as soon as his mission is accomplished. Garl uses that time well and intentionally and with his usual charm and grace, but then job finished, he dies and Valare and Zale take him back home and bury him under his favourite tree.

You then travel on, meet new people and sometimes talk about Garl and they say they’d like to have met him. You finish the game and Valare and Zale go off to protect the universe, but they come back home once a year to visit Garl’s grave. The ending feels satisfying, but definitely sad.

(SPOILERS INTENSIFY)


Then, as you start thinking about New Game+, the game challenges you to finish up. You don’t have to complete everything, but there are a bunch of important side quests and collectibles that you need to go find and if you finish all of the objectives you get the option to open up a hole time in and space. Valare and Zale and their unbreakable glass buddy B’st, end up right back at the moment of Garl’s death. B’st trades places with Garl, but being unbreakable just pretends to die. Garl returns with Valare and Zale and they go and dig up B’st from Garl’s grave. And now Garl joins the whole party as a Warrior Cook who really kicks ass -- seriously he’s functionally more powerful than everyone else in the game. Like when Garl died, the game gives you a moment to absorb and celebrate, and then you get to go wrap things up again.

Now when you get to the end of the game, rather than letting the big bad wander off. Garl gets in his face and you fight the true boss and get the true ending. It’s a hard fight -- although I may just be bad at it -- but very fulfilling, plus there’s just something very funny about Garl being able to just toss this guy who’s been an existential menace for the whole game.

So it might feel like an ass pull, but for me, especially the extra work they make you do and the fact that you have to finish the game once without Garl really made the story feel right to me. Now when you see the guardians return on Garl’s birthday, Garl gets to enjoy it too.



The other thing I’ve thought about a lot is the designer’s choice to use timed hits -- did I mention they called back to SNES RPGs?. They open saying that the timed hits are totally optional, but they’re not quite. I found that if I missed the block or the bonus damage, or primarily the extra hit to the lock, it was a big deal. I think they’re a good choice, but I wish they’d be acknowledged more and the optionalness been managed in a different way.



I have some concerns about choosing the difficulty generally. As I said, I found the game to be just a little easy, except for the bits that were hard. I’m 40-something now and my hands don’t work as good as they once did, disability is a changing thing and I’d like to see that acknowledged by more software. I think there are parts of the games that other people might have found harder or easier.

The developers address this, in a way I almost like. You can buy or find “relics” which allow you to turn things on and off, so you can turn on a relic that automatically allows you to do the timed hits, or you can get one that makes the enemies significantly tougher. Those are great, and they have quite a few, but they’re found in the game and I feel like those need to be in the hands of the player up front, or when the game says, there are timed hits, but they’re optional, display a list of options for how you can modify them. Finding them in shops, even if they’re cheap might make sense from the perspective of story telling or immersion, but I think we need to put all of the game play options we have in the hands of the player and trust them to make the right choices from the start.

This feels a bit low, but I’ll also point out that they wouldn’t need a relic to tell you if you got the hits right if the sprites animations read just a little bit more clearly.


Things I’d Include in a Game

 

The biggest thing I’d be influenced by in Sea of Stars is just how great the traversal is. Playing games like Hollow Knight or Super Mario Odyssey always make movement a joy, but it’s not a thing that I’d thought about in conjunction with RPGs before. Sea of Stars is just a really fun to run around and they do a good job of giving you interesting places to run through the whole game.

The other thing from Sea of Stars is just how great a great typed combat system can be. I’ve written about how much I like the way conditions work in Secret of Mana and how typed combat has always been a bit of an after thought, or something that’s included in a game because it’s expected not because it makes it more fun. The typed combat is one of the things that makes the combat in Final Fantasy X so good. Most designers have left it out of newer games or minimised it, but I absolutely love the way the Sea of Stars team pushed it to the fore and used it to make every moment of combat meaningful.







Final Things


I really appreciate Sea of Stars, it hits all of my nostalgia buttons and I think it’s a great game on its own. I also love that it feels like an entry point to games and RPGs that echos the early / mid 90s games that I entered games with. I really appreciate the time and the effort that the team has put in, they’ve made a game that fits together perfectly and I appreciate that the size is just right to appreciate how the game fits together.






Monday, January 01, 2024

2023 in Games

I've been tracking the games I play for a long time now and partly that's so that I can write a post that looks at how I played from a ten-thousand foot view. I've reached a point where that's less important to me than it was and my priorities have changed. I'm going to keep tracking in a way, but I think that's going to look a little more like what I'm doing with books now. I've written a bit more about that in an update earlier in December. but my longer term goal is to make sure that everything I'm producing is fun to make and makes me happy, so that's going to inform how I capture playing data going forward.

I also got very clobbered by COVID in November so my tracking, which has been spotty all year got even worse and I haven't written down a single game I've played since December 10.  That really helped me see what was and wasn't important to me. Earlier having very detailed information mattered to me, but now it's just not a priority for when I play or what I do. If I'd finished that software to track playing time, that might be different, but I haven't, I don't really want to and I'm looking to focus my time differently going forward.

That being said, I do know a few things about the games I played this year, so here they are.

I played 31 games this year for approximately 500 hours. That's slightly fewer games and significantly fewer hours than the last few years. My gaming PC broke a while back and between pandemic and other things fixing it was never my priority. Mostly I've been playing on the switch, but that's felt a little less fulfilling this year so I've started to broaden out again, finding the things I can play on my ancient Mac Book Pro and since my birthday on SteamDeck.

Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - Screenshot - Link is looking at his data pad which looks suspiciously like a Switch.
Fortunately the Switch and Tears of the Kingdom, which is a great game, even if you play Tears of the Kingdom on your Switch in the game!

 

Important Games

The five games I think were really important to me this year were:

  1. Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
  2. Tactics Ogre: Reborn
  3. Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age
  4. Pikmin 4
  5. Sea of Stars

I also played a lot of Mario Kart 8, Dicey Dungeons and Into the Breach, but in less intentional / important ways. 

I've merged time and favouritness this year, at least partly because I haven't tracked well and as I'm looking forward, I'm thinking a lot about what I play for the experience of the game and what I play for managing the moment.

I will say that Tears of the Kingdom is a masterpiece and I've love it to bits. It builds beautifully on everything in Breath of the Wild and is just in general a great game to play. Pikmin 4 is also really good and honestly fills in almost every need I've had in terms of a Pikmin game.

I'm also deeply in love with Sea of Stars, although because it is very much an homage to Chrono Trigger it may not be as great an experience for someone without my rose colour glasses. Still if a modern polish of 90s RPGs is something you want in your life, there's really nothing better.

Sea of Stars - Screenshot - Valerie, Zeke, and Seraï face off with some rock things in a rocky tunnel.
Sea of Stars, home to every thing I've kinda wished SNES RPGs would do, and more.

 

Finishing Games

I didn't finish any games this year. There are a bunch of games which I've started and which I think I will finish with soon, but soon is as good as it gets.

Again with my overall change in how I'm going to track things and think about game playing generally, I'm much less interested in what I've finished. I may keep track, but honestly looking at a lot of the games that have come out in the last few years few of them really even have definitive endings, where you aren't encouraged to go back and play. Even if there's not a New Game + mode, for me the space ending a game leaves in my head often leaves me going back to play a game over again right after I finish until my attention shifts to somewhere else.

Finding What Works on The Mac

Since I did open Steam again for the first time in a year or more, I thought I'd mention what out of the games I like worked well and what didn't. Overall, Steam and most video games don't work well on an 8 year old Mac (Steam has stolen focus from me 8 times writing this paragraph so far, just for example).

Smaller windowed games have been great, so I've played a good chunk of Dicey Dungeons and Into the Breach and a bit of FTL: Faster Than Light. I tried some Civilization VI and some Stardew Valley, but neither was a huge technical success. 

Invisible Inc. was probably my favourite Steam game this year (obviously not from this year). It worked well on the Mac and had the right amount of tactical thinking for me.

Getting some desktop gaming back was nice, but I want to play with a lot more intention next year.

Into The Breah - Screenshot (Mac command bar included) - The defenders of humanity, equipped with giant robots, plan out their turn trying to minimize the damage from the giant bug-like Vek.
Into The Breach, because throwing giant bugs into lakes (sometimes of acid) is a good way to relax.

 

Cataloguing Screen Shots

This is probably dumb, but I learned the correct way to get screenshots off of the Switch this year. You may recall that in past years, I very slowly passed them out via Twitter. That was a slow and laborious process, but I wanted to make sure that I had a lot of screen shots of a game in case I wanted to write about it later. As it turns out you can hook your Switch up to your computer and so long as you have a manageable number of images you can just copy them over. So I now have a fairly good archive of screenshots that I found interesting this year.

Tetris (Game Boy) - Title Screen - Tetris above a view of a towers topped with onion domes.
Because some day I might need this...


Sunday, January 01, 2023

2022 in Games

 One of the benefits of tracking what I play is that I get to make a little post at the end of the year talking about what I played and how my year was in video games. While 2022 was not a great year in a lot of ways, it did have a lot of pretty good video games in it.

Time Spent

I played 33 games for 600 hours in 2022. That's about the same amount of time as last year, but with fewer games. It was a pretty tactics / RPG heavy year, so had quite a few games that took a lot of time and then a few games trailing along at the end.

Overall my top 10 games by time played where:

  1. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 - 158 hours
  2. Dragon Quest Builders 2 - 74 hours
  3. Triangle Strategy - 64 hours
  4. Hollow Knight - 49 hours
  5. Tactics Ogre: Reborn - 43 hours
  6. Ogre Battle 64 - 35 hours
  7. Mario Kart 8: Deluxe - 28 hours
  8. Loop Hero - 27 hours
  9. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - 23 hours
  10. Eastward - 22 hours
Xenoblade 3 Screenshot: The Main Six's ship, sailing past an island with a floating castle in the background and aurora blazing across the sky.
Xenoblade was an absolute joy to look at. Good in a lot of other ways, but Monolithsoft know pretty games.


Finished Games

Last year I started tracking games I finished. The list is pretty short this year, but mostly the games I finished were the ones that took the longest to play.

  • Dragon Quest Builders 2
  • Triangle Strategy
  • Eastward
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 3
Dragon Quest Builders 2 Screenshot: A view of a house under construction in a happy looking farm.
Building myself a farmstead.


Favourite Games

I've recorded how I felt about the new games I played this year, but overall my favourites for 2022 were:

  • Eastward
  • Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
  • Ogre Battle 64
  • Super Mario Odyssey
  • Tactics Ogre: Reborn
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 3
Nothing really surprising on there. The one game that *maybe* should be included is Dragon Quest Builders 2, but I'm not sure I loved it so much as got obsessed with it.

If you haven't played Eastward I would suggest you look it up and spend some time with it. I think it's an absolute gem of a game and a wonderful example of a really well designed and built game. Especially if you loved 16-bit era games, there's a lot there for to feel nostalgic about but in a new and well thought through way.

Eastward Screenshot: Sam and John stand looking at a run down tower with a helicopter stuck to the top.
The whole game is beautiful and rundown and messy and sharp all at once.



Things about Games in 2022

My PC broke in late 2021 and I spent all year meaning to get it fixed, (or replaced) but never really got around to it. There are a whole mix of factors into why, but the outcome is that I spent all of my game time on the Switch, which worked out well with a number of big RPGs and some really strong tactics games.

I'm utterly in love with Tactics Ogre: Reborn. I'm not quite sure why that series gets to live in my head so deeply, but I love them and Reborn has been a lot of fun. Sparks of Hope is also really good and just below that "Favourite" threshold, but certainly fun to play. I've grumbled a lot about Triangle Strategy, but it is a really strong take on the Tactics Ogre / Final Fantasy Tactics model. Other than my complains about slowness, I think the other reason Tactics Ogre wins for me is that it gives you so much more flexibility in how you want to take down problems.

2022 was a good, stable year over all (as far as games go). Beyond getting a little taken away by Dragon Quest Builders, I was pretty intentional with what I played and I played a lot of good games. 

Xenoblade Screenshot: Eunie saying "I am actually trying to control myself. If I start going crazy, nudge me."
Eunie's the boss.



Tuesday, January 04, 2022

2021 in Games

I've now spend 5 years keeping track of the video games I've played and I've found it lets me play more and play more intentionally. Plus it's nice to be able to write a post like this where I can look back over what I played, what I enjoyed and how the year went.

From Battle Brothers: A moderatly equipped band of mercenaries face off with a well equiped legion of ancient undead.
Yes, it was mostly Battle Brothers

Time Spent

I played 49 games for 600 hours in 2021. That's much less time than I've spent on games for the last few years. I guess that makes sense working full time and (slowly) starting to build up my creative career. My PC also broke a little and I think that cut down on some of what I played, and it also forced me to be more intentional with what I play. I also dedicated a lot of my playing time this year to trying out games from the cellar that I hadn't played for one reason or another.

The curve on how long I played games is pretty sharp. I played 150 hours of Battle Brothers and would have played more if the PC hadn't started to fall apart. I feel like I spend a lot of time here writing about I like tactics games but I'm not good at them. Battle Brother's hasn't really changed that for me, but it has been really fun to play.

Everything else topped out at around 50 hours, so overall my top 10 games by time played where:

  1. Battle Brothers - 150 hours
  2. Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn - 59 hours
  3. Chrono Cross - 47 hours
  4. Trials of Mana (Remake) - 41 hours
  5. Mario Golf: Super Rush - 40 hours
  6. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity - 37 hours
  7. Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance - 36 hours
  8. Trials of Mana (Collection of Mana) - 32 hours
  9. Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past - 24 hours
  10. Secret of Mana (Collection of Mana) - 22 hours

After that everything flattens out into pretty small chunks.

I really wanted to *finish* a lot of games this year, and I did, but I think I really want to *experience* a lot of games for 2022 and also focus on having as much fun when I'm playing video games as possible.

A photo of my TV with the end screen for Chrono Cross, which is a very fine Fin
I love a good end screen.

Finished Games

I haven't kept track of the games I've finished before, but having spent more time in and around ProtonJon's community I thought it would be interesting to see what I've finished. As I said, I already thing my goal of 2022 isn't to finish as much as it is to play, but it's still interesting to see what I played to the end.

I'm counting finished as reaching the credits at the end of the story, although for practically all of these games there's a lot more to play at that point. More or less in the order I finished them, I played:

  • Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity
  • Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury
  • Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance
  • Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn
  • Trials of Mana (Remake)
  • Trials of Mana (Collection of Mana)
  • Celeste
  • Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
  • Super Mario Odyssey
  • Secret of Mana (Collection of Mana)
  • Chrono Cross

The only game I really completed was Bowser's Fury. It was really well designed to make it easy to pick up and play for a few minutes and get a few stars. For the others it was mostly nice to see the end of the story.

In Bowser's Fury, a number of primary coloured cats surround Mario, in a cat suit, and a green Toad.
If you want a game full of cat's Cat World certainly is. Still not sure why they write it Bowser's Fury.

Favourite Games

Every game

I think the games I liked the most were (listed alphabetically):

  • Battle Brothers
  • Hades
  • Super Mario Odyssey
  • XCOM: Chimera Squad
In Battle Brothers, three mercenaries face off against 4 (human sized) spiders in an arena.
When you do a thing right, Battle Brothers feels pretty good.

Things About Games in 2021

As I said in my Games of 2021 post, everything I played was good, but I don't think 2021 really hit the heights of 2020. I spent a lot of time trying to get really deep with a lot of the games I played and I'm not sure it was really worth while. I'm glad I played the games I did this year, but looking back on what where my favourites out of what I played, the list is weird. I only played a few minutes of Hades and Chimera Squad and not that many hours of Odyssey.

Battle Brothers is great and if I can manage the multi-headed hydra of fixing my PC (or more accurately, figuring out *how* I want to fix my PC) I'll be back to it. I think it's a great game where commitment, to characters and attempts, is really well balanced with interesting outcomes. I *like* Dwarf Fortress, but it always feels like it takes too much commitment for the "things went really sideways" fun to kick in. With Battle Brothers I've screwed something up in an interesting way after a few hours, or if things get boring, it's easy to jump out and start again.

I also like that I get a little better every time I play. I keep an eye on the Battle Brothers Reddit and sometimes I feel like I'm not getting enough from the game, or playing it right, but I'm having fun and that's really all that matters.

I'm trying to "Do" more in 2022 and I think that's going to apply to games as well. I've said it a few times, but I'd like to play more games and play more types of games. 2021 was a little bit stayed and I think I forgot to have as much fun as I can.

I recently read a tweet about how you shouldn't consider games you want to play but haven't a "pile of shame" so much as the video game equivalent of a wine cellar, where you're waiting to find the right moment and mood to open something up and I like the reframing. I think I can add that games don't go off after your start them, so there's no worry about putting stuff down and picking them up again later and you may as well have as many open games in your cellar so you can find everything you enjoy.

Tuesday, January 19, 2021

Blog: 2020 in Games

It's time to take a quick look at my yearly gaming wrap up for 2020, wrapping up what I played the most (and least) and what I enjoyed the most. 


Hades: Zagreus fights Wretched Thugs in Tartarus



Top Games by Time Played


I don't think it's too much of a surprise that my most played game of 2020 was Animal Crossing: New Horizons at 205 hours. Animal Crossing was exactly the right fit for a year where we avoided contact with other people and mostly stayed home. In a lot of my recent monthly tracking posts, I've mentioned that this particular Animal Crossing feels a little hollow compared to some of the ones that come before (I'm a relatively recent convert, but Tama Hero has a video on what changed). I'm not sure as things stand AC:NH will be that high on my 2021 list, but it was certainly a pleasant way to spend the year.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons - Carmen (a brown rabbit) is excited about the release of Super Gyroid Brothers.

Following up AC:NH, we have Europa Universalis 4 at 84 hours and Dragon Quest XI S at 83 hours. EU4 filled a lot of my time in the first half of the year. It's enjoyable and has the right amount of challenge that I'm engaged without being too frustrated. I'm not exactly good at it, but it's also not a game you really need to be good at, it's just interesting to see slightly different ahistorical version of Europe turn out.

Europa Universalis 4 - A map of the game world including the Ottomans Empire stretching from Hungary, to Egypt to India.


Dragon Quest XI was also a lot of fun. It is Dragon Quest, so if you're not interested in straight ahead JRPGs you're apt to not enjoy it too much, but it's a nice addition to the series. I found it a little bit longer than I'd really have enjoyed but the late game had the right level of challenge and fun.

Dragon Quest XI: The Hero, Hendrick, Jade and Rab pose in Hotto Village.


My two least played games of the year were Bloons and Space Hulk Tactics at roughly 6 minutes each. Bloons is (was) a free flash game so that's no great loss. Space Hulk Tactics was pretty wildly disappointing and I wish it had the Warhammer 40K name on it because I probably wouldn't have tried it.


For the record the "middlest" game I played was Risk II. This was a version of Risk (the board game) produced in the early 2000s published by Hasbro/Mircroprose. It's abandonware and my PC did not enjoy trying to play it (even with windows XP compatibility turned on). It's an ok version of classic risk, but it has a fun construction of "Same Time Risk" where you put in your orders and then the game reveals everyone's orders at once, so you can have armies clashing over boarders if two players decide to attack each other. It's unbalanced and honestly has some problems, but it's a game that has really stuck with me. It also has the mechanic that bigger armies get bigger dice so if you do it right you can role a d20 against your enemies d4 (that's not quite how it's implemented but that's the idea). Kinda odd for a thing I didn't download until after Christmas (and can't switch away from once it's started).


In total I played 799 hours of games in 2020. This is a bit up from previous years, but given the nature of 2020 I don't think that's a surprise.


For fun, I also keep track of how often games appeared in the games of the month. So in case you were curious here's how often each game appeared in the lists:




Top Games by My Rating


Chrono Trigger: A Nu in the Kingdom of Zeal says "All life begins with Nu..."


My favourite games that I played this year are (in alphabetical order):

  • Chrono Trigger
  • Hades
  • Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
  • Super Mario Odyssey
  • XCOM: Chimera Squad
I never look back at previous rankings, so this is my subjective list from late 2020. I think it's a solid list of games. Chrono Trigger is a classic and Breath of the Wild will be too. Hades is seriously one of the best games I've ever played. After feeling ambivalent about most of the XCOM reboot, Chimera Squad is a breath of fresh air and a total blast to play. Odyssey is maybe the game that's most on the bubble in this list, but it's an absolute tour de force in how to put fun movement mechanics into a game that easy to pick up an play for a minute or an hour.


XCOM: Chimera Squad: Over the shoulder view of Verge looking past Cherub at an Andromidon



Thoughts on Games in 2020


I'm pretty happy with a lot of what I played in 2020. Ending the year with Hades was a delight and it topped off a year with a lot of other things that I was pretty glad to play. I was pretty intentional with what I played (especially considering there was a pandemic on) and generally I didn't feel like I was supposed to be doing something else for a lot of my play time.

Beyond Hades, I also really enjoyed starting the year with Chrono Trigger and then Dragon Quest XI. I also really enjoyed XCOM Chimera Squad, Golf Story, Mario 35 and ending the year off replaying Illusion of Gaia. 

Illusion of Gaia: Photo (off-screen) of the opening school room of the game



I did end up feeling uncomfortable towards the end of the year. I wasn't as good as I should have been about being intentional and additionally I found myself very tired, so I was doing less and playing more. I'd like in 2021 to be a little better about getting things done outside of playing games. In particular I'd like to actually *make* some games, so that's a thing I'm going to try to focus on.

The other thing I found towards the end of the year is that it was hard to really get engrossed in a game. That's a thing that's hard to control, but I think it's worth it to try to push myself through a couple of games that I haven't stuck with so that I can see them and feel done about them.

I also want to find some quick-fun games that I can play in 5-15 minute chunks when I need a break from getting stuff done.




Saturday, October 31, 2020

Blog: Things About Paper Mario: Origami King

Paper Mario: The Origami King is a pretty interesting game. It's the most recent result of the crafted world games Nintendo has been working on and the latest Paper Mario game. As such I found it to be beautiful, but also a little over polished.


Honestly it 's a game that was fun while I was playing but thinking back on it a few months later, I'm finding it a bit bland. Still it has some interesting elements and I think it's worth talking about.

Please be aware of spoilers right up to the ending for Paper Mario: The Origami King.


Things I Liked

The visuals of the game are pretty awesome. The designers have put a lot of effort into constructing a world out of paper and crafts. The game feels very natural and also like the kind of idea they were looking for in the early Paper Mario games. 



That said, I liked the "real world" style more than the origami style. I think they did a lot of really interesting work in the origami creatures and settings later in the game, but somehow the lacked a little of the charm of the crafted style. Totally impressive, but I think not just the thing I really liked.



I liked the two new combat systems that were introduced for Origami King. I think the card-based RPG-style battle system used in Colour Splash was enough to keep the game interesting, but it wasn't a draw to the game. Both of the two systems used in Origami King are much more engaging. I like the minion fighting system, where you have to group enemies together to hit them either with an attack that's the right shape. It's not a knock out, but it's certainly enough to make you sit up an pay attention to every fight in the game.



The star for me, though, is really the system for boss fights. You have to create a path for Mario to travel to the boss, picking up power-ups and magic along the way and then hit the boss with the right kind of attack. These turned out to be interesting puzzles and sometimes really dynamic and interesting fights. I found it took me about half the game to really figure it out, but once I did I really enjoyed the puzzle and fight-control aspects the game offered.



Another thing I really loved is that the game has a quick help mechanism to get you through combat. You can choose at the start of a turn to spend some money for support from your audience of Toads. If you spend a little money you might get a point or two of damage to the enemies (pretty much useless but maybe lets you finish up a battle). If you spend more they might refill your health. If you spend at least 100 coins, they'll actually help solve a step in the puzzle. This can really help sometimes when you just can't see the solution. The game throws more than enough money at you that there's no real penalty to using the system.

The only downside to this is that the game does a terrible job of explaining how the system actually works. I spent a while frustrated with the game especially when I was really tired or stressed trying to win a boss fight before I lose and have to start over. Once I understood, it was nice to be able to choose if I felt up to tackling the puzzle myself or if I needed some help.


Things I Didn't Like

Honestly as a game with this level polish, there's not much to not like about it. The story is a little linear, but that's not too uncommon for a jrpg-style game and it doesn't have quite the same level of personality as I though Colour Splash had. 

I think the thing I disliked the most about this game is that it's as polished as it is. I recently watched Tama Hero's video on the evolution of Animal Crossing villagers, and she discussed the transition of the villagers from somewhat frustrating, but realistic characters to very smooth town decorations. 

Paper Mario has a somewhat similar trajectory as a series, with a very rough first outing on the N64 to an sprawling but esoteric adventure on the Game Cube to the smaller and more streamlined games that followed. At the end of the day this feels a bit like a pretty view and funny quip dispenser. 




Oh. One more thing. This is a Paper Mario game that doesn't end with a parade. What the fuck?





Things I Noticed


The Paper Mario games are known for the their excellent writing. They tend to have a charm and wit that gets left out of a lot of Nintendo's other games. Recently, Treehouse has really added a lot more personality to the games they translate (such as Animal Crossing: New Horizons), but the Paper Mario games have had a strong identity right from the start.




That being said, I think that Origami King didn't have the same level of attention as Colour Splash. There's a moment late in Colour Splash where you meet a troop of 50 Red Rescue Toads. They all look identical, but every single one of them has unique dialog, not just once but trees of dialog that lasts to the end of the game. Origami King lacks a little bit of that, there's just a little bit less life in the NPCs and in the world. 




I also had a bit of a hard time with the music. It's very good music, but it's completely unmemorable. Honestly every time I started playing I was surprised that it didn't have the theme from Colour Splash. 

Things I'd Put In a Game


Paper Mario games also inspire me to focus on those details that make the world really feel alive.




I like the general innovativeness of the combat system. The Paper Mario series is well situated in allowing for different kinds of combat that doesn't necessarily relate to the rest of the game. I'm not sure that's a thing that works smoothly in every game but it's still a fun thing to keep in mind for the right moment.

One this I definitely like is the low/no penalty system to make combat easier. There's been a lot of discussion about how to adjust difficulty and game play to accommodate players of different skills and players with different abilities. There are a lot of important parts to that discussion and different ways to implement it but I think making it a straight forward part of the combat is a really good way to be accommodating to all players. 




Final Things


Paper Mario: The Origami King is a fun game. It's pretty, it's charming, it sounds nice, it's worth playing. I finished it as much as I wanted in about 25 hours. There's more you can go back for to get collectables and such, but I was pretty happy just to get to the end of the story. 

Not every game has to be a ground breaking epic, sometimes it's nice just have something bright fun and quick to play and Origami King is that to a t. I really enjoyed my time with it.



Saturday, April 11, 2020

Blog: Thoughts on Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival

It’s not a great game, but Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival is a fixture in my home. I actually expect at this point that we’ve played more of that game than pretty much anybody else. To be honest, it’s not a great game, but it has some interesting points and it’s a game I’ve spent a long, looong time thinking about.

Welcome


I’d usually offer spoiler warnings at this point, but I’m not sure there really are spoilers for a party game like this. Additionally if there are spoilers, they’re for Animal Crossing in general or for Animal Crossing: New Leaf more specifically.

Things I Liked


I’m relatively new to Animal Crossing. I only picked up the series at New Leaf (the 4th game in the series, which came out in 2012). I picked it up after watching Chuggaconroy’s Animal Crossing: New Leaf Let’s Play. I bought matching 3DSs for my partner and I and two copies of Animal Crossing New Leaf. We got up extremely early on Boxing Day to watch the World Junior Hockey Championship, and started two new towns. I played New Leaf for well over a year, but eventually petered out as the new things to see in the game became fewer and fewer. My partner still plays at least a little bit each day (even with New Horizons to play as well).

The tradition keeps it going for us.


The town itself is an important part of any Animal Crossing game. Which villagers are in town, how the town is laid out, how the town is decorated are all important aspects. The town in Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival is also important. The game is played on a map of spaces spread out around a randomly generated town when you start playing. The different spaces in the game map to different events based on local fixtures so as you move around the map you get a few different experiences based on where you are. This provides a lot of familiarity as you swing by the coffee shop, or the bonfire, or the pool.

Events happen each time you land on a space. Each time you stop, a tiny vignette plays out with your character getting happier or making money, or getting sadder or losing money. The generic events are alright, but they don’t really hold the game in the long term. The events based on places around town are a nice addition, especially as your town grows, but the events that happen especially for specific characters have been the things that really charmed us. Having Blathers find fossils for the museum or Reese spend the day working with Cyrus makes the game charming and different enough each time you play it to keep it interesting. The special monthly events, like Festival, Toy Day or the August fireworks are also important and charming. We made a rule early on that we’d only play in the current month and that means that the time passing in real life is an important part of our enjoyment of the game.

The Amiibo Figures are also a nice part of Amiibo Festival. Getting to bring in villagers to live in the town (and host the games) is nice. Playing the game as the special villagers (such as Isabelle, Digby, etc…) is nice. The events provide them with a lot of character on top of whatever you bring in from other animal crossing games and the variety of costumes makes it worthwhile to keep playing.

I've had a K.K. concert running in my living room for the last three years.


Things I didn’t Like


While it has charm, Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival seriously lacks things to do (let alone interesting decisions). It's probably worth noting, that my perspective is as someone who is not a kid and does not have kids, so my expectations are different than the developers. Still I feel like there are some elements of this game which aren't as good as they could be. The basic mechanic has you rolling a D6 to move around the board. When you reach a branch in the path, you can choose which direction you want to go. On top of that you can collect cards that let you go a specific number of spaces, do something special, like roll double or pick your roll, or change a few other aspects of the game.

Roll and find your fate.


The frustrating part is that there’s enough flexibility in what they designed that you could make interesting choices once a turn, or at least once every few turns.

I see that they want to have a heavy randomness in the game. The game has a strong “Snakes and Ladders” or “Candyland” flavour, in that your success in life is at the hand of bigger elements. Similarly, randomness is a staple of Mario Party, and it makes it easier for people of different skill levels to play together. However. I think they could have kept a lot of that randomness while still allowing the player to do a little more to control their own fate. A weekly card, along with the weekly turnips, would have gone a long way towards making this work. Or maybe a no-items, final destination configuration might also help for some long-term players.

Happiness in August


One of the other things that is somewhat frustrating about the game is that there’s no trade off between the two currencies in the game. You have bells (money) and you have happy points (happy … points). Sometimes you get events which give you both, just one, take one away or take both away. I have certainly traded happiness for money in my life and money for happiness, so it’s a little disappointing sometimes that the game has no trade-off option between the two. Especially as there are lots of in game events which seem like this would be the appropriate result. I spent a little extra money on my coffee today, and I really enjoyed it, is a “you lost money” event, rather than a “you lost money, but got happy” event.

The final thing that particularly frustrates me that I’d like to include here is that the game just stops. Well that’s not strictly true, so far as we’ve played the game continues, with different events each month, but the ability to grow your amiibo cuts off after level 6. I suppose that’s fair enough, but it feels to me a bit as though they didn’t have a lot of plans for people to play the game as long as we’ve played it.

Things I Noticed


The strength of Amiibo Fest is really in its charm. We’ve tried to play it a bit slowly, adding new things to the town infrequently and we’ve limited the number of animals we’ve added to the town too (which is partly due to a lack of the animals we want on the Amiibo Cards we were able to find).

Llama love is in the air.


Still despite the fact that this is a candy land style game, with a, you take the good with the bad and everything balances out mindset, we’ve managed to play about once a week for more than two years now. While that certainly says something about us, I think it also speaks to the way the game feels.

Obviously the Animal Crossing games in general are a testament to the idea that you can have many different verbs in gaming and that non-combative ones can be just as appealing. Amiibo Festival feels like a part of that dialogue, a game which focuses on togetherness beyond the game.

Things I’d Include in a Game


I have a lot of feelings about Amiibo Fest, but I don’t know that I want to, or could, create a game that follows it’s structure or design. That being said, I think the persistent environment of a board game that grows over time is very nice, especially if it can be managed in such a way that it has a narrative arc with an ending to it. Pandemic Legacy is a great game that you can play over many sessions and you build up a world with your history of mistakes and successes. I think having a gentler game that still builds up its own history as you play it is an interesting approach.

Remember Last Year?


I also think you could expand that to have a game grow over the course of a year and then have a giant celebration leading into a new game plus, new year kind of thing. That way you could have a new town grow up to follow your old towns each year, with some elements of the old towns kept around for nostalgia or remembrance and then new elements from your new town for the new year.

I was pretty flabbergasted when I saw The Runaway Guys tackle this and realized they were playing in a totally different town, and I think this game might have benefitted from making that difference a little more palpable. Obviously not everyone is going to want to step away from the town they have, but having a natural end might make it easier to decide when and how to end.

Final Things


I don’t know if Amiibo Festival could have been better. I won’t argue that the charm is reason enough to play, and if you’re looking for anything like a Mario Party experience you’re going to be disappointed. As I said, this is very much a Candyland experience. That being said, we still enjoy it and every time I play I'm struck that with just a little different construction it could have been a secret gem that really lasts.

I mean, how much charm can this game have?

The Video Games I Played - February 2024

This is the second new monthly games post . I'm not feeling very settled in what anything means. The book posts have some basic stats...