Sunday Summaries 01/05/2016: InFamous Second Son & Shantae and the Pirate's Curse

Chrontendo 49's big highlight. It's about time!

May is a quiet month for many, but never for me. That's because it's the month I set aside for my most ambitious annual project: The May Madness/Mastery daily series of blogs, focusing on clearing some room in my Steam backlog for whatever the Summer and Autumn sales have to provide. I've created the "staging area" over here [coming soon!], which presently includes the rules and the feature's background and will in time also include the full table of contents for the games covered this year. I'm always a little anxious about each new May feature, because it not only means a whole lot of writing but a whole lot of bouncing between games. It's an endurance event in perhaps the loosest, almost insulting sense of the term, but it's nonetheless a handful. Still, I've been fairly lackadaisical in my games writing this year - no reviews yet! Though I've been considering one for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt given how much time I spent playing it - so I could use this kick in the pants. Join me in playing through a bunch of random Steam games, won't you? I might even cover something you've heard about.

As for everything else, May tends to be that quiet before the E3 storm in June. We'll see a few significant releases this month, but it won't be anything like a dizzying barrage of new games; we're all about ready to enter the Summer slump midway through May, even if it's still cold as hell around these parts. I think Alex Navarro said it be(a)st on the Beastcast this week when he talked about how publishers really need to get out of the habit of clumping releases together in a few overcrowded months and instead spread them out across the year when they can find more receptive audiences and can breathe a little. Guess it won't be this year though.

One last thing before we start today's Summaries: I created this little guide to chronogaming a few days ago to celebrate the recent release of Chrontendo 49. If you have a few hours spare and have run out of Quick Looks, Bombcasts and GameCenter CX episodes, I'd highly recommend any of the video series I highlighted in that article.

New Games!

It probably could've used a more distinctive name, honestly. Like "Battleborn: Dark Retribution of Dawn".

Everything appears to be getting out of the way of Gearbox's Battleborn; their new online FPS/MOBA thing with a huge cast of dubious heroes. Though why they feel they should step aside is anyone's guess: early press for that game seems to suggest that it has but a few weeks to garner an audience before the fundamentally similar Overwatch shows up and buries it. That's the issue with these online-focused games: it doesn't take long for another to come along and drink your milkshake. Of course, it happens just as frequently that a game will try to muscle in on the territory of something as popular as Team Fortress 2, Call of Duty, World of Warcraft or DOTA 2 and crash and burn horribly, failing to draw a similar audience share and facing the unfortunate reality of turning off their servers far earlier than expected in order to stay solvent.

I get that this sort of online experience is where the non-mobile money is these days, especially in terms of microtransactions and advertising and the Holy Grail that is a sponsored eSports event or ten, but you don't so much date these games by having them go up against whatever big online game is popular at the time, but practically ensure that nothing will remain for posterity: once those servers are shut down and the game taken off digital distribution services, it might as well cease to exist for all the effort those designers, programmers and artists put into creating an appealing universe.

Anyway, I just had to get that off my chest because... well, because there's nothing else really coming out this week. King of Fighters 2000 rerelease on Steam? That weird Pocket Card Jockey CCG horseracing game for 3DS? Something on the Wii U called "Touch Selections", which sounds like the sort of shovelware that is keeping the spirit of the Wii alive and well? Hopefully something unexpected and exciting emerges from Steam's always ludicrously hectic release schedule, but then I'm going to have my hands full with Steam overload this month already.

Wiki!

June's a moderately busy period in the Super Nintendo's sixth year, though hardly one of the peak months. Of its thirty-one releases, I've managed to knock out the pages of twenty-two of them: more than two-thirds of the total amount. Climbing that ladder. Incredibly, only two of those twenty-two required new pages: the utterly unremarkable Go game Shinzui Taikyoku Igo: Go Sennin and the JRPG sequel Elfaria II.

No Rob Schneider in sight, thank Grud.

Let's rattle off a few of the month's bigger names (and, perhaps, a few that deserve to be bigger): The SNES Judge Dredd game is perhaps one of the better movie licensed games for the console, not to mention one of the better things to come out of the woeful 1995 Sly Stallone adaptation; Jungle Strike continues where Desert Strike left off, creating a world of non-linear objectives for you to complete in a neat proto-open-world helicopter action game; Justice League Task Force is a lesser comic book fighter, though one that's notable due to its developer Blizzard Entertainment; Packy and Marlon continues Raya Systems' series of regrettable educational platformers, once again returning to the diabetes well (don't drink from that) a few years after 1992's Captain Novolin; Super R.B.I. Baseball is a pale shadow of its NES originator; Yakouchuu sees Athena try to bite Chunsoft's steez with their own take on a spooky "sound novel" adventure game; Mr. Do! is everyone's favorite Dig Dug clown clone, coming to the SNES a mere 13 years after the original Arcade release; Prehistorik Man is one of the better European platformers, though we're not lacking for caveman platformers on 16-bit systems; Princess Minerva is a softcore porn RPG with the softcore porn aspect taken out for its Super Famicom port; and Der Langrisser sees the Sega Genesis's second-most beloved strategy RPG series make its Nintendo debut. Phew!

InFamous Second Son!

You know what? I was a little hard on InFamous Second Son last time. Yeah, the binary morality doesn't really work, even in a goofy comic book universe where everything tends to be black and white; to assume that it was going for such an elementary maturity would be reductive and unfair, and I think it still has some important lessons for a younger audience about fitting in and expressing yourself. Which is part of the other, hopefully not condescending, retraction: the game is clearly skewing for a younger audience, the sort of anti-establishment teens that could feasibly look up to Delsin and his treatment of fellow young person troublemakers Fetch the Junkie and Eugene the Gamer (yeesh) as relatable and cool. Or maybe not. Teenagers are a complicated crowd, and only get more so as each new generation is better educated and has more resources of entertainment to draw from. I often wonder how many of them are likely to get or even care for the sort of 1980s/1990s call-backs older-kid-friendly media frequently dabbles in. For as much as I loved Gravity Falls, so much of its nostalgia-based "kids on Summer vacation" reference humor could really only land for the 30-something crowd. Hard to reconcile that with what actually growing up in the 80s, when every cartoon show was the craziest, most high-concept excuse to sell toys, and... this is getting waaaay off track, isn't it?

Neon was definitely my favorite "element". I'll have to consider picking up that Fetch DLC prequel at some point.

Back to InFamous, then. I stated last time, or perhaps after completing Assassin's Creed Syndicate or The Witcher 3 even, that while I'm not going to swear off the open-world action game any time soon I would appreciate it if more of them had less filler and a more succinct runtime. I've no doubt people were disappointed at the time about how short InFamous Second Son was for a full-priced PS4 exclusive, especially given its many meatier peers, but it suited what I was looking for perfectly. If a game only has a handful of ideas for side-content, it shouldn't wear them out by repeating them ad nauseum (an issue I have with many open-world games, including AC: Syndicate and any Saints Row after the second). InFamous Second Son has to fart out a whole lot of comic book origin story cliches - three times even - in its short duration, but it's perhaps for the best that they don't linger too long on any one step of that journey.

What is this one supposed to represent? The oppressive pigeoarchy?

As much as I think Delsin's Banksy-lite stencil graffiti is kinda lame (apologies to any real-life artists they sourced for that stuff), it was at least varied and gave you a semi-decent excuse to use the DS4's Sixaxis equivalent. I also liked hunting for the secret security cameras using their own feeds to track them back to their hiding places, or finding the undercover agent in a crowd of random civilians as a fun little variation on those multiplayer Indie games like Hidden in Plain Sight, or even tracking those audio logs by proximity signals which made for some interesting spatial awareness puzzles. The game was far too easy on Normal, in retrospect: it helps that Delsin has a "Karmic Streak" attack that is essentially an instant win button whenever you have the means to use it. Still, that means I can play on a harder difficulty if I ever decide to go back in and try my hand as an evil Delsin.

Between the Conduit power effects and the new console generation, InFamous can look pretty striking.

I guess the most damning issue with InFamous Second Son is that this genre is so well-represented in the AAA market that even though I had fun with it, it's not something I'd be quick to recommend to people. Its one big plus for me personally - that it's way shorter than others in the open-world genre - would not be a selling point over the likes of The Witcher 3 (which isn't quite the same style of parkour-heavy action game, but still counts), Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor or Sleeping Dogs (or, I'll begrudgingly admit as someone who dropped the series some years ago, GTA V). It's something I run into a lot with Indie puzzle-platformers too: a game might deliver a positive experience, but when there's at least five games that are very similar and were released around the same time that you could put ahead of it, you wonder why anyone bothered.

Shantae and the Pirate's Curse!

The last time I saw WayForward's half-genie heroine and her pneumatic pals, it was during last year's May Mastery with Shantae: Risky's Revenge. I was provided the opportunity to play another one of these gloriously animated pixel SpaceWhippers again courtesy of the Humble Bundle's "Friends of Nintendo" bundle, yet I was immediately struck by how similar Shantae and the Pirate's Curse is to its predecessor. It's not so much that a game pulled a Super Metroid and set its world in a place both familiar and new, but that it felt like more than half the assets were reused wholesale. I suppose in that sense it's closer to a GBA/DS IGAvania like Dawn of Sorrow or Harmony of Dissonance. Shantae was "demoted" to a human being at the end of the previous game, having lost her half-genie powers as the result of a scheme set by frequent pirate antagonist Risky Boots, and so in this game she essentially acquires the skills of her long-term rival as they work together to prevent the resurrection of Risky's boss: the far worse demonic Pirate King, whose designer perhaps owes LucasArts's Captain LeChuck an apology.

I'm sure Ammo Baron only exists so the artists can indulge their Metal Slug habits.

The various pirate relics that Shantae finds take the place of the usual SpaceWhipper traversal enhancements, which in the previous game were animal transformations caused by genie magic. A large pirate hat allows Shantae to glide across long gaps, a cutlass lets her destroy blocks under her feet to reach new subterranean areas, a pair of boots lets her essentially "shinespark" across areas, and so on. Each new dungeon also carries with it a map to a new location, and there's usually some extra task to do before the player finds the dungeon on that subsequent island and continue the chain. That aspect is actually a little more Ocarina of Time-like: there's one instance where Shantae is captured and can't use her items and must rely on stealth instead, and another where she has to carry close friend (and flesh-eating zombie) Rottytops through a speedrun obstacle course of enemies and traps. These sequences, though they don't always work, at least serve to break up the persistent "find dungeon, find new item, use new item to defeat dungeon, find map to new dungeon" pattern that the game utilizes for the majority of its runtime.

Yeah, sure, all right.

I should probably also mention the fan-service, if only because it becomes so flagrant as to cross over to amusing. While Shantae and the other major female characters tend to wear very little at the best of times, the following contrivances for even more near-nudity also occur: Shantae is kidnapped while taking a bath and has a portrait resplendent with "tactical bubbles", you help two co-eds fill up a hot spring (actually the warm and "bath-salty" emesis of a giant dragon) so they can splash around in bikinis, Shantae frequently switches costume mid-cutscene for comedic effect and in the aforementioned prisoner sequence the game finds a way to get all four of its major female characters in a "Slave Leia" costume, in one of the most ridiculous fan-service contrivances I've ever seen. Yet there's something about all that ridiculousness that exonerates it and turns it into harmless cheesecake fun; there's no malice involved, no underlying sinister gender politics, and it's a running goof that fans have come to expect with the series, like how Shantae butt-wiggles for no real reason whenever she's crouching. Maybe Shantae was an anime all along?

If you got tired of every subsequent IGAvania game feeling like Symphony of the Night with different wrapping paper, then maybe Pirate's Curse isn't the ideal game to play soon after Risky's Revenge. There's a lot of fundamental similarities between the two games that I can't wholly absolve. Yet purely on its own merits Shantae and the Pirate's Curse is a fantastic Indie SpaceWhipper: in addition to the quality puzzles and combat the game's presentation is top-notch with some excellent pixel art, anime-style portraits and Jake "virt" Kaufman's always superlative chiptune compositions. It's kinda nuts that Kaufman was able to compose a soundtrack this good so soon after Shovel Knight's equally great music, but then - as is the case with a lot of Pirate's Curse assets - quite a few of them were remixes of what was already in Risky's Revenge. Hey, there's never a bad time to recycle.