Sensen and Sensibility. And Shufflepucks.

Hey! I played some video games this week. How about that. Sure doesn't sound like something I'd do. Let's humor me in my new endeavors with a pair of not-quite-a-review appraisals.

Remember Me

Remember Me is a game from DONTNOD, so already the developer is scoring points with me by naming themselves a palindrome. More so than that, it's one of these parkour action games for which the template was set by Tomb Raider way back in the day, and ably mixes shimmying across ledges with a hand-to-hand combat system that focuses on a lot of situational techniques. That's the gameplay in a nutshell, anyway. What I feel is more interesting here is the setting and story:

Remember Me is set in near-future Paris after a hell of a lot of catastrophic shit has gone down in the world. The polar caps melted, the oceans rose, the entire globe went effectively bankrupt after all their major ports vanished and the world was wracked with storms and intense torrents of rainfall that it had insufficient infrastructure to deal with (given the storms currently raging in the UK, and that whole polar vortex thing you guys in the US got going on, it feels a little too close for comfort) and there was a massive war or two to monopolize dwindling resources. This is all just flavor text up to this point, and it's really only the tip of the (melted) iceberg as far as the game's information dumping is concerned. The game introduces "Sensen", or the Sensation Engine, which is essentially detective vision but for everyone and allows instantaneous transference of memories and thoughts from one person to another, sorta like how futurists imagine the internet is heading. There's robots everywhere, there's enormous dam-like structures and Mirror's Edge-esque slanty skyscrapers, a whole lot of orange for whatever reason, and there are street hackers going around robbing people's valuable memories and selling them to the highest bidder... it really feels like a world of endless possibilities and stories, cribbed together from so many familiar literary and film sources (I feel like even a semi-obscure personal favorite of mine, Strange Days, got a shout-out). If anything, it feels like the Mass Effect universe: you might recognize the pieces, but the entire package feels like something wholly new.

The game also tries its darndest to tackle some Mature Themes. Capital M, capital T. Let's list them off here: crushing regrets, trauma, the catastrophic effects of global warming, mass vagrancy and refugee migration, civil unrest, devastating continental civil war, some completely unnecessary implied rape, and an even less necessary errant boob on one of the raggedy female mutant enemy models. It's a game made in France, all right. Honestly, I rarely see game worlds this thoroughly detailed, and it really feels as if this game might've considered trying to set up the foundations for a sequel or five with how much effort they put into it. There's much hinted about the world outside the gated metropolis of Neo-Paris, and several characters like the vengeful bounty hunter Olga Sedova, or the celebrity ex-memhunter (the rebellious thieves and hackers of Remember Me, of which the protagonist Nilin is apparently the best) Kid X-Mas, who publicly airs his takedowns of his erstwhile fellow rogue elements on an overwrought MMA-style show of the sort that would probably get a lot of Affliction-endorsed merchandizing. It's rare to see a game focus so much on its world building, outside of a RPG at least, and very much appreciated in turn. Stylistically and tonally, the game almost feels like it could take place in the same world as Binary Domain or Vanquish - there's a lot of shared visual elements that I thought were interesting, especially with the android designs. Very "I, Robot".

But enough about its setting, I want to talk about its combat system a bit before moving on. Though initially something of a headache, Remember Me's combo customization system grows on you as you get used to it. Having the freedom to control what sort of combo you want - healing, tech-boosting or sheer power - is a refreshing approach to dealing with that irritating (for designers) and persistent "dominant strategy" problem: that if you give your players a dozen workable combos, they will narrow that list down to one specific series of moves that best balances input complexity, the time necessary to perform them and the damage output and then use it over and over in lieu of anything less effective. All of Remember Me's combos have fixed button placements dependent on their length, but the "pressens" (individual attacks) can be of four types: regen, for healing; cooldown, which allows you to run the cooldown timer on the game's situational "super moves" faster; power, which greatly increases the damage output if you just need to take an enemy down quickly; and chains, which simply repeats and boosts the previous pressen in the combo. The best part of this system is that it's easy to remember which buttons you need to tap to invoke the five-hit combo or the six-hit combo, so all that's really required is to remember which combo you've stocked with, for example, regen pressens for when you fall to critical health or which you've loaded with power pressens to bring down a tough mini-boss during a brief window of vulnerability. I'll freely admit that it took me a while before I drank the Kool-Aid (or the Winey Jacques, since we're in France) but now I think it's perhaps one of the best realised combat systems of any modern character action game, even compared to Rocksteady's Batman: Arkham series, with its wonderfully fluid flowing moves and dodges, to which Remember Me owes more than a debt of gratitude.

There's trouble in paradise, however. The game seems about as stable as a suspension bridge made of jell-o. At one point in the game you get ambushed by an enemy playing possum, though I can only suppose that was the intent because he was standing in a T-position when I encountered him. One time it simply wouldn't let me pick up a collectible - I hit the button prompt over and over, and nothing doing. Numerous times the game simply kept going when it should have paused due to a cutscene trigger, causing no end of confusion until I restarted from the nearest checkpoint and had the cutscene proceed as usual. These glitches, which are far from infrequent, wouldn't be so bad were it not for the fact that the checkpointing kinda sucks. It's far too arbitrary and will occasionally force you to start multi-part battles from the beginning, but not always? There's several battles with three or more stages you'll need to start from the very beginning should you be overwhelmed, but many more two stage battles that will checkpoint in the middle. It's maddening trying to figure out the logic behind where the game decides you ought to resume after a death, and, of course, no collectibles found after a checkpoint will be recorded until you've hit the subsequent checkpoint that follows. This goes ditto for the combo customization menu, which means you can spend half an hour (I mean, if you're crazy) reconfiguring what regen and cooldown pressens go where in your combos and lose all of that work as soon as you unpause the game and get KO'd by walking off a ledge or a mistake as equally dumb and inevitable. The glitches I can forgive to an extent, because there's always the chance that my particular copy's disc is in some way flawed, but this sort of amateur design and lack of intelligent QA are forever the biggest thorns in my side, more so than any amount of wooden dialogue or ugly textures (of which the game has thankfully very little of either).

However, if I had to categorize Remember Me, it's a game you could very easily fall in love with in spite of its flaws. Remember Me is 2013's Enslaved: Odyssey to the West: an impressive amount of vision, with a few unfortunate flaws that drags down its strengths but doesn't negate them entirely. Sometimes a game's so memorably unique that it rises above its problems, and I can only imagine this game will shine all the brighter when I recall back to it years later and its rougher edges have been sanded away by time and nostalgia. It's entirely fitting then, that Remember Me - a game about the importance of memory - will endure in this manner.

Shufflepuck Cantina Deluxe

Shufflepuck. A word seemingly invented to be said incorrectly in an inappropriate way at an inappropriate time. Or one of the houses of Hogwart's if you're hard of hearing. I don't delve into my old, old Atari ST and Amiga days too often on here, because I'm fairly sure the percentage of readers of mine who have had a similar enough gaming background to understand the references would drop precipitously to the single figures. Honestly, that period is largely a wilderness even to me.

To boil it down to bare essentials, my time on my Atari ST was divided between what I would now consider to be very early DOS CRPGs and simulators, and some very shaky Arcade conversions of numerous brawlers and other action games of the type which were treated with far more fidelity on home consoles. Ninja shit, mostly, but what kid growing up in the 80s wasn't obsessed with Japan's deadliest (mostly fictionalized) killers? Anyway, there were a few odd games that sat in the void between those two larger groups, and that was where Shufflepuck Café fell.

Shufflepuck Café was little more than an air hockey sim, not a far cry from the legendary antecedent of the home console boom, Pong. Instead of a top-down view of the table, however, Shufflepuck used scaling sprites to present what appeared to be a depth of field, providing a more accurate perspective of an air hockey table from the standpoint of a hypothetical person actually standing next to one. That was cool enough at the time, but the developers decided they'd riff on Star Wars a bit and introduce as a setting this watered-down dive full of dubious characters at the edge of the known universe. Characters ranged from the mundane (an entirely incongruous to the setting archetypal nerd character named "Skip") to some truly strange and unknowable Elder Being type entities, and because they occupied that spot at the far side of the table from you it often seemed for all the world as if they were a million miles away. They taunted you when you lost a point, got agitated when you won a point and were an intimidating presence that never made the game any easier to focus on, but in a compelling way I'd never seen in games of this type. If I had to point to another, more instantly recognizable example that exemplified this, it'd be Nintendo's Punch-Out!!. The personalities of your opponents - both in how they act and in how they fought you - and the way they were always front and center in the screen greatly elevated the appeal of an otherwise mechanically interesting single player boxing game.

Anyway, years passed and I kind of forgot about it. Occasionally I'd remember, and wonder if slamming a virtual puck around a table while a repeating loop of music not entirely unlike the Star Wars Cantina song (but dissimilar enough to not be litigation-prompting) played in the background was anything like as fun as I recalled. Sometimes I thought I might have imagined it. The internet, once that became a major permanent pillar in my life, confirmed the veracity of my memories yet I never felt the compulsion to actually try it again, just in case it turned out to be super lame.

Well, the fine folk at Agharta Studio clearly didn't think it was super lame, because they recreated an experience exceedingly similar to my own memories of playing against Chinese bootleg "Lank Skullrunner" and "Drewablanka" type characters in a bar filled with luminous illegal interstellar intoxicants that would probably kill a human being were they to even look at them too closely. Shufflepuck Cantina Deluxe, a title that both homages the original game and suggests that someone might owe George Lucas an apology, is a fairly new Steam release I acquired recently in a Groupees bundle (though not the one I highlighted a week back, alas. Had I known there was a better bundle coming along...). It's every bit the Atari ST game I remember, only with a whole heap of progression mechanics, acquirable special moves and a whole host of fancy 3D character models which skew even closer to the lifeforms from a certain galaxy that's far, far away from our own. Yeah, that one.

I actually quite like it. I think it'd be a harder sell without all that aforementioned nostalgia to prop it up, but even though it stretches itself way too thin with the amount of times you need to beat everyone to move on with the game, it's a lot of fun. I mean, it's air hockey. Against robots and alien strippers who aren't Twileks but sort of look like them. There's also a Japanese guy wearing Han Solo's trademark black vest who calls himself a smuggler. I've not met the owner of the establishment (very clearly the end boss), but if he turns out to be a giant gross worm alien you would need some state of the art microscopy technology to register the surprise on my face. Despite all this, I've found myself loading it up for a few games between streams and during podcasts and the like, edging ever closer to the next mini-quest requirement or new purchasable upgrade. It's not a game you'll want to play in long stretches, certainly, but it's a little addictive for short bursts.

I'd say it was one of those games I used to dub as "neostalgia" (before I realised that one cannot simply make neologisms happen without some groundswell of support) - when an updated game not only doesn't suck, but manages to live up to the impossibly high standards of one's romanticized, rose-tinted view of the original. XCOM: Enemy Unknown was a similar case, and now we have Shufflepuck Cantina Deluxe to add to that short list. Effusive praise indeed, but whether or not anyone without that requisite nostalgia base would be in the same desert sail barge as myself is another matter entirely.

The End!

So what am I playing next week? Well, everyone seems to be getting into that interesting 3DS JRPG, so who am I to buck the trend? Tales of the Abyss 3D it is. Maybe I'll throw in a few more Indies from my Shame Pile here and there for color. I did just buy a whole bunch of those Level-5 eShop games (currently on sale! Buy Crimson Shroud!), so maybe I can get my Indie fix without having to put the 3DS down? The world is full of possibilities. I mean, I can only assume, as I'll be too busy craning my neck down at the 3DS screen to notice any of them.

Oh right, I'm still doing those stupid intelligent average IQ monthly comic commission blogs. Well, I guess I'll see you all there to highlight what the first half of 2009 had to offer. It was a good year, if I recall.