All-New Saturday Summaries 2017-04-01

Hey folks. I realize what day this All-New Saturday Summaries happens to land on, but I'm not going to rattle off a bunch of high-concept nonsense articles I didn't write this week in a humorous (because that ain't me) attempt at deception. I mean, that might prove to be more entertaining than the reality, and may leave me and you all wondering why I didn't write them instead. I will say that I've only been awake for a few hours and have already fallen for one April Fool's: RedLetterMedia just "reviewed" a "movie" named Horse Ninja based on the comics by Kevin Laird and Peter Eastman (not to be confused with Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird). I'm on my guard from here on out.

This week I've been wondering about the longevity of bad games. It used to be that if a game was bad, it may still have been one of the only things going that week, so you'd end up playing it away and justified it to yourself as "wanting to survey the damage". Sometimes a game was so uniquely bad or broken that it was cause enough to check it out. However, we're now living in an age where a single year can put out six or seven enormous must-play games before its first quarter is even through, and I'm ratiocinating on whether that rubbernecking curiosity for lesser games is even worth accommodating. Hearing about the various issues with the new Mass Effect: Andromeda has been a bummer, and my lasting affection for the series means I'll probably check it out regardless (though perhaps a long time from now), but the impetus to do so and to see where it went and how badly it was botched is far less urgent than wanting to catch up with 2017's otherwise sterling content so far. It's almost a relief that Mass Effect won't be one of the games from this year I feel I have to get around to before the year's end, or failing that early 2018, because my backlog plate is full enough.

And this brings me back to something I've discussed before, about how video game criticism is moving away from trashing bad games simply as a time-intensive necessity, and how that's inadvertently been shaping up the new wave in this whole industry of people gabbing about video games online. We've moved from an "accentuate the negative" approach by teams of critics that are paid to play and review every game on a scale of quality for the sake of an audience that trusts their professional opinion, to an "accentuate the positive" approach where personalities talk effusively about specific new games they discovered that week. You might argue that there's some sketchy pro-developer over pro-consumer ulterior motives involved in the latter approach, where an online panel discussion show might hypothetically involve staff talking about some apparently flawless big-name recent release while festooned in gear with that game's brand written all over it, but while those cases exist I think we just live in a time where there's so many games coming out that we can only pay attention to the ones that draw us in or have been receiving so much positive word of mouth that they can't be ignored. Bad and mediocre games, unless they're high profile trainwrecks, are forgotten in the sands of apathy as small-scale video game review sites are forced to focus on the select worthy few they have the resources to cover. In most cases, Giant Bomb only talks comprehensively about particular games during podcasts, towards the end of the year's GOTY deliberations and, more and more rarely, written reviews. Quick Looks, conversely, don't tell the whole story, though usually enough of one for purchasing decision purposes.

I'm someone who intends to catch up with every major game that catches my eye, and that's easier when I'm not employed to stay on the cutting edge of new releases and have to let so many games pass me by, but at the same time I'm beginning to realize that I won't be able to play everything even I'm sticking to the genres and settings and franchises I prefer. Trying to beat every significant CRPG/JRPG has become a fight I lose ground to every year, as a whole cadre of developers continue to produce these enormous open-world epics and my darn obsessive habits have me playing them for hours into the triple figures in order to 100% them all. Yakuza and Tales in particular are franchises where, once I've completed one of them and have waited a reasonable amount before attempting the next, two more of them have been released in the meantime. I also discover more franchises every year as I continue to catch up with the reviews and recommendations of others, and it's spreading my game time quite thinly. Not the worst problem in the world to have, granted, but when I consider a duff entry in a series I'm otherwise attached to there is a distinct feeling that being fully up to date on where Mass Effect is at now is perhaps far less important than catching up with a dozen other series I like almost or equally as much.

Anyway, talking of letting things get away from me, here's this week's blogging content in a nutshell:

• This was one of my favorite The Top Shelf blogs in a while, so it's kind of a bummer that no-one has yet to respond to it. If I had to introduce someone to the series right now I'd probably go with this week's entry as a fine illustration of the type of games the feature generally covers and how effectively I "judge" them for advancement. I've been tweaking my approach for a while now, and have settled on this current two paragraph system where I introduce the game and my opinion on it with the first, before moving onto why I've chosen to eliminate/consider/approve them for the shelf for the second. Anyway, this was a fun one to write because of the snark, because the ten highlighted games had a lot of curious backstory, and because I was afforded another opportunity to articulate what I love most about Level-5's Dark Chronicle.
• The Indie Game of the Week was Read Only Memories. Or, to be more exact, 2064: Read Only Memories, the recent rerelease that added voice acting as well as a bunch of minor tweaks. I spent much of the review marvelling at its close ties to a specific era of Japanese adventure games of the 1990s, one that more or less passed us by here in the West, and how I thought its presentation and music was top-notch. The voice acting didn't add a whole lot to the game in my view, however. Check out that review, and the game too if you're an adventure game fan and it's somehow escaped your notice until now.

Ginger: Beyond the Crystal

I saw Drakhar Studios's Ginger: Beyond the Crystal being sold for next to nothing on Amazon and it sounded like the new wave of Indie 3D platformers had arrived earlier than expected. I'm to receive my Kickstarter backer digital copy of Yooka-Laylee any day soon, if PlayTonic can get on with it instead of recreating atrocities, but my hype for 3D platforming collectathons clearly got the better of me here.

Ginger's not exactly terrible, but I would call it very unpolished. It didn't quite break on me (it did crash, but that's nothing new for PS4) but it did seem graphically rough in spots, its loading times were abysmal, and its selection of challenges and platforming levels were often fairly basic and a bit easier than expected. The bosses, conversely, could get annoyingly difficult: the eponymous player character never improves their health beyond their original four "leaves", and there's no healing item drops from enemies, which makes some of the longer fights unexpectedly tense. I will say in Ginger's defense, and this is largely the reason I was able to stick with it to its conclusion, that its controls were fine. The player is given a double jump right off the bat, though the game gates its collectibles in another way I'll discuss in just a moment, and that gives you a significant amount of air control. The game features some "harsher" platforming challenges that whisks you away to an endless sky of floating and spinning platforms - definite shades of the secret platforming challenges of Super Mario Sunshine here - and with the exception of the final one, which forced you to be constantly pogo-jumping for some reason, they were all very reasonable because the controls worked as they should. I don't ask much from my platformers - I don't even mind if they're not completely jammed with tchotchkes to collect, though that is and will always be my preference - but concise and responsive controls are a plus. Ginger - for all its faults - at least has that vital foundation in place.

Ginger's not just a set of platforming worlds though. It works similarly to a later Jak & Daxter game, where you'll frequently move to a new hub and find portals to specific self-contained levels off in the corners. While in the hub, you can spend the common collectibles you find - blue crystals - to rescue villagers from a big central crystal in the center of each town. After that, you have to rebuild the village using a secondary group of collectibles that can be found in the environment or given away as side-quest rewards. These are basic construction materials, including wood, stone, sacks full of an unidentified yellow powder (I'd guess sand, but who even knows) and blocks of steel. This particular aspect was a little more undercooked than I was hoping - if you read my mini-review of Dark Chronicle in the linked The Top Shelf above, you could probably understand why I was excited for a platformer with a town-rebuilding mini-game - but it does still add an extra layer of gameplay to pursue. Once the town's happiness rating is maxed after all the rescuing and rebuilding you get a trophy, but I didn't really see any in-game rewards. I guess the developers smartly made the trophies themselves the draw for a lot of its side-questing. Hey, use 'em if you got 'em.

Speaking of which, every time you complete a level a random smattering of villagers have quests for you to attempt. They always fall into three categories: a checkpoint race; grabbing a handful of objects that are marked on your radar/map; and defeating a few enemies that suddenly spawn somewhere in the hub. This was probably the most disappointing aspect, given how little these challenges deviated. In addition, you get one of the aforementioned special platforming challenges after each level also.

The game has a total of fifteen levels, but they aren't the sprawling playgrounds of Banjo-Kazooie and Super Mario 64 with their multiple objectives and various secrets to find. Rather, they're semi-linear courses with a single objective. Each one has a basic enough premise, but there was at least a bit more variation with the challenges they presented. One has you exploring a spooky mansion with Resident Evil door animations, while another involved collecting coins from scoring well on fairground games, while yet another has you solving clock puzzles while running around a garden maze. The game's clearly oriented towards a younger audience, so none of these levels are particularly challenging to platform or puzzle out, but I appreciated the diversity. The game also has Ginger dressing up in various costumes, each of which has their own distinct ability. These often come into play in the same level that you find them - the earliest costume, a bard, gives you the ability to summon magical platforms at specific areas by playing an Ocarina of Time style music memory game - but they're also often attached to special collectibles, which cannot be acquired without the right costume. Annoyingly, you often won't get the costume you need for a particular collectible until much later in the game, and when you come back you have to complete the stage again in full for the procured items to count.

Ginger's perhaps not a game I'd recommend, even if you're specifically in the market for a deliberate throwback 3D platformer. There are still enough of them getting released even today with a higher level of polish and overall competency: the evergreen LEGO games, for example, or the recent Ratchet & Clank reboot. Even so, Ginger's developers clearly didn't approach their game with a cynical "me too" state of mind; there's a clear affection here for a genre that has seen better days, and it's not like they were completely bereft of new ideas for it either. It was a first project from what I imagine isn't a gigantic team so while I might not rate this game too highly, I can respect the hustle and will look forward to more proficient homages from the studio in the future.