The Game of the Year thing you've clearly all been waiting to see!
Hi?
For the last few years I've had the distinction and privilege of working alongside a few other Giant Bomb community members on the Deep Listens podcast series. You can hear my takes, hot or otherwise, on Final Fantasy games and/or media properties going back two years, and on the "RPGs @thatpinguino refuses to play" Off the Deep End episodes alongside
(Yes, you can also read my work on namcompendium dot com, which is not dead)
The aforementioned zombiepie said to my face (well, into my earphones) that he wished I wrote more on this site. So, what the hell? In the spirit of the season, let's do a little recap of my 2021. It's been a strange year of false starts, adapting to home ownership in a house built in the FDR administration with a squirrel infestation, and adjusting to a new work schedule split between long commute days and audio work for A Website. It has been defined, as well, by changing time priorities. Hosting a podcast focused largely on role playing games means a lot of time is spoken for by long, obtuse and dubious (hey there Braden) games in that genre.
All this adds up to me having only "finished" (whatever the hell that means) 34 games in the last calendar year, with several others lying partially finished or abandoned along the way. That's low compared to the last several years for me personally, but when I look at what makes it into this little blog entry that makes sense.
Without further ado, some preliminary categories. People like those!
Best Comfort Food Revisit: Katamari Damacy Reroll
Katamari Damacy is my favorite game of all time. I was a more casual fan of the video game medium as a whole before GameSpot pointed me to this title. I can't remember classmates or teachers from my sophomore year of high school, but I have a hazy memory of buying my copy of Katamari Damacy from the Pearl Ridge Mall on O'ahu near launch. Between multiple moves since that point in time I've lost a lot of items to time, yet I've managed to keep that original copy of Katamari (along with another title which manages to make this post). On my first trip to Japan, a priority "weeb used game shopping excursion" pickup was a Japanese copy. I love Katamari.
That said, I waited until it was on Game Pass until I spent some time with the shiny new HD remaster. Priced appropriately it's a fine deal, I mean for shit's sake it's Katamari Damacy. If you're like me and have played the original dozens of times, plus the sequels which at a certain point were just gently upcycling older environments, it might seem a little too familiar. But if you've somehow managed to miss the series since its debut nearly twenty years ago, Reroll is the most accessible the game has ever been and remains a joyous technicolor explosion. We are lucky to live in a time where we can play Katamari Damacy in any form, much less one presented in a nice shiny 1080p presentation.
Honorable Mentions: Halo 3 and Rock Band 4
I spent some time revisiting Halo 3's campaign and multiplayer this year, in light of the original's online features announced termination. That's a mighty fun campaign to this day, with remarkable contrasts in mood and tone. I did not scrape together all of the multiplayer achievements I could, but I would rather have one unobtainable achievement on my sheet than zero.
As for Rock Band 4, I continued my absolutely torrid affair with the game through most of the year. There's a world where Rock Band 4 is my Game of Every Year Since It Came Out Including The Years I Didn't Play It. Alas, between returning to work and committing more time to podcast business, this autumn I bid farewell to my noble Rivals crew after five straight Bloodstone seasons. We were generally in the top 50-100 crews on the Xbox platform, and I managed to get my guitar and bass scores both in the mid-920s. I haven't touched it in months and honestly feel bummed out that there's just not enough time to play competitively anymore, but eventually I'll bust out my fake plastic instruments again and probably have a blast.
Biggest Disappointment: Murder by Numbers
Imagine having the mind behind Hatoful Boyfriend, which is either a hilarious goof about a girl who is gonna Literally Fuck Them Birds or a witty send up of tired genre tropes depending on how much you care (it's the latter by the way). Now imagine you have that writing talent put together the most pot boiler ass mystery imaginable, with zero replay value and only the most mobile phone hidden object game dross to connect a batch of about a hundred picross puzzles.
The art is all fairly cheap looking, which is not something I thought I'd have much of an opinion on but here I am saying that a visual novel with sprite flips is of insufficient quality. The variety of tunes is lacking for the game's length to boot, which would make for an okay podcast experience... except I wasn't on a bus, because this cursed year had me working from home. Most of the underwhelming elements on display here may have not sunk this one outright. But the lack of any interesting plot elements at all, particularly when you factor in the pedigree, cements this here. Murder by Numbers, how dare you.
(EDIT: It has been brought to attention that the involvement of Hato Moa, they of Hatoful Boyfriend fame, was in fact limited to character design. So, fair play. Leaving the original text because In This House we acknowledge when we fuck up.)
Honorable Mentions: Final Fantasy IX and Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards
FFIX just escapes the top spot here. I'm on record saying a wide range of shit about The Ninth Final Fantasy this last year, and for those who don't know I am in a position to dethrone the game from the top of a Deep Listens ranking list. So here I shall set the record straight. Cards on table I like this game the least of the PSX series. That doesn't mean it is bad, or even that I don't like it. I just found the front half notably stronger than the back, and I think Amarant is one of the worst characters in the series. He's got competition though!
(FFIX is another one of my Hawai'i pickups which has survived in my collection for nearly 20 years)
Kirby 64 is not some meltdown disaster, but it did put on stark display just how awful the Nintendo 64 was as a platform. Imagine taking a franchise as bright and cheerful as Kirby, one with platforming that had a little pep to it, and just drowning it vasoline. The game is slower, softer, and missing some of the more delirious touches of something like Super Star or even Dream Land 3. I'm one of those pricks that think Kirby is the actual third pillar of Nintendo over Metroid, so I had it in my heart to like this one. At least those interstitial cut scenes are really sharp. Like, Gamecube quality video clips.
Games I Will Finish in 2022 For Real: Final Fantasy VI
I've been saying for years that the sixth Final Fantasy is my favorite FF game, and that's largely due to circumstances. A high school girlfriend introduced it to me, and it got me into both Japanese role playing games and PC emulation at the same time. So many fond memories of the first half of this game, but that does belie that I have never finished it. Until now! I will see the end this year, sooner rather than later, that I may debate its merits in good faith with friends.
I'll even drop a free take right here: Setzer is probably right on par with Amarant for suckage. I'm talking proper anime shitboy, Irvine and Hope territory. Imagine Irvine, Amarant, Hope, and Setzer in a party. Can you do that in Theatrhythm? Jesus.
Honorable Mentions: Final Fantasy XIII-2 and Xenosaga Episode I
Yeah I got hung up on the final boss of FFXIII-2. It just turns into a ridiculous plate spinning thing in the end, one that can probably be overcome by better timing or some good old "go grind a bit and put this one to bed". I'll find the time.
As for Xenosaga Ep. I, I'm a little farther back but I want to finish this because Braden has threatened me with the guaranteed good time that is Xenosaga The Second and I want to be able to import a nice full clear save into that game. I'm on the record as liking Xenosaga's brand of absolute gonzo shit, but honestly this and FFXIII-2 were directly competing with Rock Band brain and as mentioned this is no longer an issue. If one of these is a priority, let's go with Xenosaga.
Games I Regret Missing: Hitman 3
I've poured just a disgusting amount of time into Hitman 2016 and Hitman 2. I even put a little time into the HD remake of Hitman 2 (the original one) on my Sony PlayStation 3 this year before accepting that I won't be able to move backwards with this series. Sight unseen, a bunch of new modern Hitman maps is something I desperately need. As it happens, my procrastination has saved me a couple dollarydoos as all three games are now up on Game Pass. Huzzah! My spouse is not much of a fan of these, so I'll probably be getting to this when she's either away or otherwise occupied.
(Update: I have since started this game and am understanding why people have generally said Dubai is the most underwhelming level in Hitman 3).
Honorable Mentions: Halo: Infinte and Forza Horizon 5
To the former, I'm waiting for that sweet sweet coop so I can play with my friends. To the latter, I know damn well I'll be grinding out vaguely satisfying AI races and posting online times in this one soon enough and the experience will amount to "Forza Horizon 3 but with topography". A fine pick up and play experience with low stakes.
#REM < --- /// insert a nice horizontal bar here /// --- >
Rather than set myself up for more work in doing a series of posts or some such, I'm going to treat you dear readers to two very different lists. We'll start with the one that's maybe a little more on brand for me historically. And Braden. And my podcast.
Bottom Games
10. Jak 2
Have a heart for the PlayStation 3. Sony decided to bilk its disaster people user base last year by threatening to execute this legacy platform's digital storefront, only to later announce a stay of execution for both it and the Vita. I have been spending more time with both my PS3 and its chintzy controllers with decade old depleted batteries. Microsoft really does have the controller thing on lock with the swappable AAs, by the way.
Anyway myself and Mr. Water got taken to the cleaners for all the Drakengard 3 DLC and whatnot last year, but I had purchased the Jak trilogy a while before. They, along with their PS2 platformer ilk, weren't actually things I played in their day. Turns out Jak & Daxter 1 holds up pretty damn well! Nice exploratory platformer thing, in the Mario vein but with the Naughty Dog technofetishist touches. Then, they decided what this tropical open world jumparound needed was a bunch of GTA3 trappings. A new urban setting, vehicle levels, and an absolutely embarassing shovel full of 'tude. It sucks!
But at least the mission structure remained well enough to get things across the finish line. Or it would have, had the missions not devolved into nearly impossible disaster missions with one hit kills, paper mache hoverbikes, and a few rotten camera angles. I stopped maybe twenty percent of the way in, rolled onto Jak 3 and had a much better time. That one still has the GTA cruft, and even a bit more left field shit with the dune buggies, but the missions were also manageable.
9. Fable
I honestly don't even have much to say about Fable. I installed this on a lark (thanks Game Pass) wondering if the series would be a good fit for me. It is not. It's not entirely absent of that goddamn English charm and whatnot, but it also had the feeling of the absolute world Manichaean western RPG ethical shit ever. "Would you like to rescue these orphans or eat them?" Wow! Roleplay! That, nice case of 720p potato visuals, and not-like-at-all gamefeel got this one punted off this Xbox hard drive in very short order. Seems wild this one gets held up as a "great original Xbox experience" to me. Maybe just a statement about the OG more than anything else.
8. Dragon Age: Origins
And speaking of black and white ethical systems, here's BioWare! Hot off the heels of the wildly racist cult classic Jade Empire (plus some goddamn space game) they decided to dip their toes back into the eurofantasy milieu which spawned so many Baldur's Gates. But, to borrow somebody else's turn of phrase, what if it was hot fantasy that fucked? Enter a parade of absolute dipshits, just the dirt worst parade of lousy garbo fantasy characters, cast into a fantastically dark fantasy of darkness. A land of depraved leaders, ubiquitous violence, and the emerging threat of a scourge. Oddly familiar amirite amirite
Anyway my spouse was the one driving this but I was made to take over quite often. I got to man the assy inventory and menus and do a little bit of the (console version for reference) combat. It's all such a sludge. Just unpleasant from stem to stern for me, and not helped at all by having a good layer of 720p smeary visuals. That the plot resolves with a magical pregnancy hook is kind of a perfect joke to me. I will say that Microsoft cobbling together a way to play this game at a locked 60 frames per second in a web browser is a legitimately laudable accomplishment, even if this is categorically not for me. The combat was mushy and unresponsive enough that whatever lag the cloud added was not enough to make things any worse.
May as well put this note here: Dragon Age has its fans. All of these games probably do. That's fine! It takes less server space for me to say a lot of this warrants qualifying language rather than typing "In my opinion, etc" over and over again.
7. Infamous
To round out this little trio of PS360 titles is Infamous, a game which sort of rolls up all of the problems with all three of the previous games. We get action platformer weighed down by an absolute sea of edgelord trash, plus a "will you build an orphanage or burn one" ethical system. One that, as far as I know, gives you red or blue energy powers respectively. Wow! Player choice!
I bought Infamous from a small market in my neighborhood in the Puget Sound. It's one of two little shops we have in the area. There's a sign outside which reads
DELI * GROCERIES * VIDEO GAMES
Maybe they did sell "new" games at some point, in the 90s. Now there's a little glass display case which contains a small selection of the Korean releases of severeal entries in the MLB The Show franchise for the PlayStation 3, plus a copy of Infamous which I bought. A lot of the Korean releases have full English support, I've learned. I was happy to buy one of the last non-sports franchise games available for sale in my neighborhood. I was also happy to trade it to Pink Gorilla for enough to buy a few sticks of gum.
Second Son seems, uhh, okay. Maybe don't go backwards.
6. Twelve Minutes
There's been so much goddamn discourse about Twelve Minutes this year that I would just as soon not write much here. Gerstmann said something to the effect of there are two groups vis a vis this game: those who played it, and those who finished it. I think there's enough ethical and mechanical baggage there to keep people from even seeing the real "stuff" that had The Twelve Minutes up on the pillory for a good month or so. As soon as I learned about The Stuff I knew I had to show this thing to borat voice my wife, as a sort of freak show. It's not great for that, what given the repetitive nature of the time loop gameplay. Nice to hear Willem get some work though.
I can see somebody who just cannot get enough adventure games having something approximating a good time with Twelve Minutes. I'm not necessarily a fan of the genre. Everything else was just gravy. Bad, lumpy gravy.
5. Fallout 4
You know what, shame on me for this entry. I got it into my fool head that, in spite of a few attempts in the past and all of the other large games on my plate, this last year would be the one where I appreciated Fallout 4. I even spent actual money on all of the (heavily discounted) DLC in anticipation of taking a good hard chop at the game. And like the last two or three times I've taken a run at FO4 I did have a pleasant time ripping apart my dilapitated home town and laying out a nice little prepper community for incoming wasteland survivors.
Then, you need to go find those survivors. And to do that you need to play this floaty feeling, suboptimally running shoggoth of a game. I'll admit knowing where the plot will ultimately wind up does not help matters, but then again I am imagining having to play twenty or thirty hours of this to wind up at the ending they wrote and good lord. I wasn't as jazzed about New Vegas as others I know in the moment, but goddamn do I appreciate it more in light of this last shot I shall make at this little ass disaster.
It does seem extra crazy that, even after buying the developer, this game still runs like absolute shit on an Xbox One X. Curious about the Series X|S situation. Not curious enough to start again though!
4. The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age
We enter the fruits of a years work of podcasting labors now. Sorting this stack proved a challenge, and even then another title managed to slot itself in between the triad. This order does ultimately seem fitting.
The Third Age is one of the most disappointing games I have ever played. It does have a noble stab at meeting its brief of "Final Fantasy X clone", but as it happens FFX is a damn masterpiece made with a large budget by one of the great innovators of the genre. The Third Age was put together under duress by the people who made CyberTiger. Their Dollar General Fellowship is made to slog through famous locations from the films (more accurately the video game based upon the films), with a never ending barrage of identical mobs and meager stat increases. I will admit that it's not the worst looking or running game I've seen on an original Xbox, and having each equipment item appear on the character models is a nice touch. But then you spend five hours wandering through Moria and everything is ground to death, into a suffocating loam.
What's worse, this game constantly stops to tell you about the more interesting things happening in other parts of the LOTR world. Often a few hundred yards from you! They got literal by god Sir Ian in the booth to narrate over clips from the Rings films, taunting you with the much cooler shit the A-list Fellowship is doing while you play mop up detail in their wake. It's agonizing. There are hours of film clips in this game! What the fuck? The Gamecube version required a second disc just for the volume of cruft here.
What a maddening experience. Have I mentioned how tedious and slow the actual combat is? Or the wild "Evil Mode" option where you can play a gauntlet of fights from the perspective of the orc side? I now have mentioned these things. Just go watch the YouTube video of the endgame shit where (spoilers ahoy) you have a JRPG fight against the goddamn Eye of Sauron for some reason. I shall never see it in person.
3. BattleTanx: Global Assault
Remember a few minutes ago when I slagged off the N64 in regards to its sole Kirby game? BattleTanx: Global Assault is made of pure crystalline N64-shit-oleum. This game is allegedly an improvement over the first BattleTanx, a game where a plague wipes out 99% of all women in the world which immediately leads to men hording the survivors like cattle and fighting over them in tanks. The plot here reads a little less like something a dismal survivalist in Sandpoint, Idaho cranks one off to in between his Constitution readings; we get a little more comic book-y, Max Max-adjacent vibe here. You even fight a Queen for most of the game! Wow! Girl Boss Power!
The game is just muck. Mucky muck. You drive little shit box tanks in mud worlds and everything just looks dreadful. All of the nice soft, muted, low sample music and sounds create the sort of sonic landscape you'd probably find if you were buried alive twenty foot under a Poison reunion show. The gameplay feels cheap. Nothing has any real weight, which is not to say that the larger tanks are not slow. They in fact are. And the little fast ones? Nice and skittery and brittle. Skrittle. It's hard to really convey how awful this one is to play, but video footage online does get some of it across. A somewhat prominent N64-oriented YouTube personality has a soft spot for this and its prequel. I will say, this does remind me of being about ten years old and thinking the N64 was even a little bit good. This game is basically a ten year old boy's fever dream. Well, wake up kid, because play time is over! You aren't allowed to like bad games anymore! How dare you enjoy something that is not thought provoking and grown up like, uhh, The Last Guardian. You little loser.
For real though, this is bad. BattleTanx the first is probably worse though!
2. Tecmo Secret of the Stars
Back to Off the Deep End territory, and boy what territory we have here. This one was recommended to us by a dear fan. What fans we have.
Dragon Quest launched just a fucking billion clones in Japan, most of which never saw these shores outside of the most determined of fan translators. Inexplicably, this one managed to get translated. Not well, mind you. In fact I'd say this might be the worst official translation I have ever seen. That covers some breadth!
The post card version of events, such as I may speculate upon them, is one day Tecmo management walked into an office full of the folks who made Tecmo Bowl and told them they would be making a Dragon Quest clone within the year while they also worked on other sports projects. The resulting game is unsurprisingly dreadful. There are two separate parties which must be leveled independently, cannot share equipment, and can even block each other physically on the map while using one or the other. Staggeringly low experience yields lead to an absolute ocean of grindy dross, and all of this is held together by a poor story localized poorly.
The first boss encounter in this game happens thus: you, a little toeheaded dork, walk into a nondescript house in The Game's First Village Which Has A Name I Did Not Commit To Memory. There is a cat inside, which in these games generally have a little "Meow" line for fun. This cat, in effect, says "HELLO I AM THE CAT THAT IS IN THIS HOUSE" in text box one, followed by "ACTUALLY I AM A BOSS THAT YOU FIGHT, OH NO" in the second box. This leads to a fight, which at this stage you are doing solo. Did I mention the first hour or so of this game is played with a party of one, while meanwhile enemy mobs can have multiple enemies?
SotS aka Aqutallion is an immensely bad experience, and it would take heaven and earth to find a game that is actually worse than it. Unfortunately for me, I am a friend and associate of one zombiepie.
1. Revengers of Vengeance
Here we are, the worst thing I played in 2021. Competiton was stiff, but Revengers of Vengeance is something pretty special.
Secret of the Stars is pretty straightforward in its inequity: it aspires to be Dragon Quest but fails. Revengers is another ball game. If SotS is a DQ clone, RoV would have you believe it is one of the many Street Fighter clones. BUT it's also a Sega CD game, part of a broad movement of CD-ROM role playing games that crib from Falcom's work on the PC Engine. You can take part in the badly made fighting game, but you can also take part in an interactive CD based role play multimedia extravaganza! An extravagance of cack!
Imagine playing some unholy hybrid of Street Fighters I and II, but in order to have a character with meaningful good stats you must grind. You must grind, in a fighting game. You must play a bad fighting game, with a bad character, enough to become good. This is connected by a desperate attempt at something like the city exploration of Ys, and some charming "Japanamation" energy cutscenes to convey the main plot beats. These are by far the best part of this experience. They are not good, but they are at least charming in the way all of these CD-ROM experiences could be. Think the intro to Ys Book I & II on the Turbo CD, but about twelve pips below that presentationally.
As an added bonus, the final boss encounter is hidden behind interacting with a fortune teller. You could wander this game for an eternity without finding a final boss, instead stuck in a hellish limbo of a sub-Eternal Champions fighter with nothing else to its name.
This has to be the worst game on this list. Secret of the Stars is by several measures a worse time, but the inexplicable mixup of half baked elements and the breathless Mega CD energy with which they are dispensed put it over the top. Secret of the Stars, at its core, works. You play bad JRPG combat, the numbers go up, eventually the math bends in your favor and you win. A bad fighting game that is actually made worse by adding RPG mechanics, now that's the sort of ass disaster that doesn't just walk into your life. You have to dig for those, and that's why you (yes, you!) should check out the Deep Listens podcast!
Oh, it was also made by one person (probably). Also there are some shooter levels, which are mediocre at best. What a freak show.
#REM < --- /// this would be another fun place for an HTML horizontal line /// --- >
Alright, what better way to follow up that odd assortment of games with an even stranger one. Snide listical voice employed, here are the Top 10 Games of My 2021!
Top Games
10. Popeye
No, not that one. The old one. No, not that old one, the *really* old one. The launch Famicom one.
Popeye is a three screen game with a simple gameplay loop: collect falling items while not dying. You can see everything there is to see in Popeye in about ten minutes. All it can really do for depth is quicken the pace of things, belying its roots as a quarter pilfering arcade game. So just what the hell is it doing here?
First of all, I think it holds up well enough aesthetically for a launch title on a nearly forty year old platform. The sprites are big for their vintage and hardware and animate well, and the title theme is suitably strident for something that apes a vintage cartoon. The dissonance on the airhorn sounding at the end is a nice touch.
More importantly, in fact the real reason Popeye makes this list, is that Bluto is an surprisingly sophisticated antagonist. Far more so than Donkey Kong, which launched day and date with Popeye on the Famicom and whose offense amounts to "throw shit". Bluto pursues you doggedly, akin to the ghosts in Pac-Man, but has the ability to fuck with your shit even when not on the same floor of a given level as you. He can do this dive at a steep angle down a floor, and punch at your grundle from beneath. You've really got to work to keep yourself safely spaced from Bluto at all times, giving him an uncanny feeling AI routine for a game of its era. I honestly had a blast flipping this one a few times and seeing just how long I could ultimately last against the bastard (not that long).
Give Popeye a shot, it's good! Maybe not the Game Boy or Switch titles by the same name though.
9. Simple 1500 Series Volume 56: THE Sniper
If I were a less shattered and broken person, THE Sniper would have a frankly deserved place on The Other List. Alas, I am sick. I have a true sickness. I think Simple 1500 Series Volume 56: THE Sniper kicks aaasssssssssssssssss
Why? Mostly because it has styyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyle
This game was on my radar before ThorHighHeels gave it some exposure in the recent past, and it too was a game I had bought prior to last year's rescinded kill order on PlayStation Store Classic. But I chewed through it in two sittings last year and goddamn, what a thing. It's a series of seven sniping missions, buttressed by fanfuckingtastic anime jazz intro and outro clips which are themselves stitched together with in-engine cutscenes about some sort of crime shit all conveyed entirely in nihongo. I, borrowing a Jeremy Parish turn of phrase, know "about" Japanese, but do not speak it. I cannot speak to the content of the story or the inner worlds of its handful of characters. I can speak to the incredible low polygon budget PS1 energy of the thing, however, and that is also glorious.
The shooting part of the game is, uhh, serviceable? I appreciate how firing your rifle is mapped to R1, i.e. you gotta pull the trigger on your virtual gun to shoot the man in the head. The missions do steadily escalate from firing on stationary targets to moving targets, culminating in a baffling final mission which required me looking up a solution on YouTube. Turns out you gotta shoot out the struts on a billboard such that it lands on a car! Not intuitive at all! Perhaps conveyed in Japanese with absolute clarity, but sadly this is lost on me.
Still, for the low price of That One Website That Has All The Old Games Now, or Pick A Fake Japanese Address And Use PlayAsia To Buy PSN Credit in Japan, this is a pretty good time. That episode intro sequence is great, great stuff. Yoko Kanno eat your heart out.
8. Metroid Fusion
So, this Metroid thing, yeah? Turns out they are alright games! Crazy stuff here. Look at this lameass Nintendo fanboy with two Nintendo games on his list. What a little dipshit fanboy.
It took me a very long time to actually appreciate Super Metroid, but I finally got through the game a couple years ago and had a good enough time. I've also beaten Prime and Zero Mission previously, and this year I also got through Samus Returns on the 3DS as a way to keep myself from impulsively buying Dread while it was at its most zeitgeisty. But this was also also the year that I embraced using a DS Lite for all of my GBA with headphones needs, and in that spirit I played through Metroid Fusion during work commutes while those were happening.
If the game had been simply more Super Metroid it would have probably been fine. But two things got it onto this list. One, I think the overall bottled and cordoned off structure of Fusion lent itself very well to a portable experience. All of the game's portion sizes are substantial enough to feel rewarding, while generally bite sized enough to make meaningful progress on a bus ride. Lo and behold, Nintendo made a polished game that considered its use cases and the circumstances in which it would likely be played.
Second, the horror factor. Fusion gets a lot of mileage out of a slowly walking robot suit, and when you are actively pursued or in open combat with SA-X the game becomes surprisingly frantic for something meant to be played on a screen the size of a business card. Genuine dread (aha!) in places, something that I don't tend to seek out in handheld gaming.
That all said, the Nightmare boss can go to hell. Yeah flush my l33t gamercredz down the toilet, I was stuck on that prick for a day or two. Tell me how much I suck at games below!
7. Links 2004/Rallisport Challenge 2 (tied)
Ah yes, the "hacked original Xbox" special. I am a simple person at heart. When I come home from a hard day of, uhh, making sure reddit is still up, sometimes I just want to relax with something familiar. Sometimes I want to hit a pretend ball into a pretend hole in a pretend place. Sometimes I want to throw a Lancia Delta S4 around a few blind corners. There are certainly contemporary avenues for both, but let me tell you just how much joy I got out of acquiring a large IDE drive and doing the devil's work on a $25 eBay special Xbox.
Cards on the table, these are probably my second and third most played games of the last two years after Rock Band 4. I can't even say Links 2004 is all that good; it's easy as hell, and the career doesn't integrate its DLC courses at all. Yet I played a lot of this specific brand of pretend golf, and it was this game that finally got me on board with analog stick swing mechanics over Mario Golf-style three click. I should probably check out some Tiger Woods entries from this era... via That Website Where All Of The Xbox Games Are Now, and WinSCP.
Rallisport Challenge 2, as far as I know, is the Xbox title which pushed the most polygons per frame of any game on the console. It shows. The game looks very good even held against contemporary rally games. Props to the little known developer behind these titles, a company called DICE in Sweden. Hopefully they have all moved on to big things since the mid-aughts. Beyond being a looker, the racing action also holds up quite well. Fish around the right community and you can even get a little online racing in with this title thanks to XLink Kai. Absolutely worth your time, and cheap as chips. Or, you know, go to That Place Where The Games Are Now. And buy a loose copy of Spinter Cell, an Xbox-to-USB adaptor, get a decent FTP client installed on your computer, and start living the dream of 2002.
6. Jumping Flash
Just to kick the lowly N64 in its ribs once more, let us go ahead and say that a prototypical first person 3D platformer from 1995 made largely out afine texture warping is one of the best games I played last year. Or, more accurately, the one I enjoyed the sixth most.
But that's just it, the amount of swimmy PS1 graphics on display is fairly limited when you consider the scale of the levels. There is certainly a lot of texture pop-in, and I wasn't crazy for the boss fights in this game. But when you're just hopping around in the exploratory platform worlds full of future vaporwave album cover vistas, or blasting skung robots in the skung dungeons from a passable DOOM conversion, Jumping Flash is an alright time. People often cite Metroid Prime's subtle "she look down when she jump" mechanic as being some sort of revolutionary concept; buddy, Exact has had you covered there for half a decade. In fact, their Motorola 68000 dress rehearsal for this game called Geograph Seal may have featured this as well.
Jumping Flash reflect a sort of devil may care optimism that existed on the early PlayStation. A new console with no set identity yet, a blue ocean setting where you could throw shit like Crime Crackers, TAMA, Jumping Flash, etc. at the wall and all had a chance to stick. This spirit lived (and died, apparently) with the Japan Studio initiative-thing, and from my seat here I now think of the platform as "the one with really expensive forty hour open world games put together with astounding motion capture that will net a lot of 85-ish scores and people will look forward to seeing as HBO programs", and less the place for "yo have you seen this Vib Ribbon thing???" Boohoo things change, people got successful. Glad Asobi Studio is there still making things with some of that spirit. Astro Bot seems like a good time?
5. Picross S Genesis & Master System Edition
You know what's good? Picross. You know what else is good? The Sega Mega Drive. You know what else is good, as well? The plucky Mark III aka Master System, that thing with the Snail game. Goddamn there better be a Snail Picross in this game.
Look, it's just fucking Picross. Have you played one of these before? Then you've functionally played this one. I do like the Mega Picross puzzles for pushing the boat out on being a little challenging, whereas the Color Picross are even more simple half the time than the base selection. But sometimes I do a puzzle and a Dynamite Headdy picture appears. That's neat! I wish the music selection was deeper than the precisely four (gently remixed) tracks included, but it's also a damn Picross game. Just go put on your $100 vinyl pressing of the Panzer Dragoon Saga soundtrack arrangement and count some tiles. It's been an extremely pleasant time.
4. Psychonauts 2
I am grateful for many things in my life. I am happily married to somebody with whom I can share in this hobby and others, I was able to purchase a home just as the opportunity for me to do so was fizzling out, and I've been able to keep a job that has given me flexibility to avoid dying from the ongoing plague. On top of these wonderful things, I also have a supporting and challening group of friends. It is thanks to one of these folks,
Psychonauts 2 is a game targetted, I would hazard to say, at a younger audience. In that spirit I think the fairly general things it has to say about broad mental health topics, and even the concept of consent, play well. It's also at times a very funny game. A lot of "laughing on the inside" twee stuff, but a few genuine laugh out loud moments to boot. The Grulovia theme park section is great stuff.
I do agree with popular criticisms about the maps being useless and/or bad, and the power mapping errs a little too far toward flexibility for my taste. Some of them are of such limited application, it feels double plus un-fun to have to reassign commmands to triggers throughout the game. Still, fun to jump around levels and learn about a bunch of hippies with regret.
Just, be ready for a lot of dental stuff up front. Not a sensitive thing for me, but I know you are out there.
3. Grandia II
Speaking of friends, I can already hear one now crying with an adult diaper full of pee pee poo poo.
BUT JEFF YOU PUT XENOSAGA EPISODE I: DER WILLE ZUR MACHT ABOVE GRANDIA II ON OUR LIST HOW CAN YOU PUT THIS SO HIGH AND YET NOT EVEN MENTION XENOSAGA HERE FIGHT ME YOU COWARD SACRAMENTO IS A REAL CITY YOU SHOULD CARE ABOUT SHODAI IS A BAD OZEKI, etc.
Well my dear friend
Grandia II is great! It's the third best thing I played last year!
2. WarioWare Gold
That notwithstanding, WarioWare Gold is a really special package. Is it a rehash of nearly twenty years of well worn tropes and games, sometimes literally the same damn micro games from the Bush administration? Hell yes, my guy, and those still whip ass! And that's not all!
WarioWare and Rhythm Heaven represent Nintendo in its most toy company-ass mode, and WarioWare is to date the most recent Nintendo game loaded with so much pointless shit. Unlockable first paragraphs of the Wikipedia articles on every Nintendo piece of hardware to date rattle out of an in-game capsule machine, alongside such useful tools as an Ashley vocaloid, a Dr. Crygor themed alarm clock, and a series of codes which may be dialed on an unlockable telephone to hear/read brief sketches that will be a real hoot and a holler to the nine year olds in the crowd.
Oh, there's also a bunch of little games! 300 of them in fact, largely collected from past entries but with a few new ones larded in. There are unlockable modes wherein they mix the button, gyroscope, touch, and blow controls with zero warning as to which you will need for a given game. These modes are my Dark Souls. I goddamn dare you to get a score in the 20s on these. Go ahead, gamer person.
Shit, there's even an unlockable challenge mode here that recreates Gamer. You know, that mode from Game & Wario. You know, the game that singlehandedly post facto justified the Wii U's creation beyond Nintendo Land. Gamer puts you in a classic childhood scenario, one which many of the people sick enough to spend time on this website share: I want to keep playing my game, but the cops my parents think I should be sleeping. Fuck 'em, let's play more Dawn of Souls! Don't get caught though! Bottom screen (Wii U screen originally) is WarioWare, top screen (television) is your bedroom. If you see that door start to crack open, hide that game and flop! Get caught and it's back to the salt mines, punk! What a great tension! What a fun idea! It's one of the best Nintendo creations of the entire last decade! AND NOW YOU DON'T NEED A PIECE OF SHIT WII U TO PLAY IT.
WarioWare Gold was not the last Nintendo first party physical release for the 3DS (that was that Kirby's Epic Yarn remake iirc, which looked fine) but it feels like it was. A fine sendoff the the DS line, probably the last WarioWare game we'll get, and a capstone to Nintendo's rocky post-Iwata years.
1. Shenmue II
Early on in my playthrough of Shenmue II I told zombiepie that the game was not landing as hard with me as Shenmue The First. What bothered me, I recall, was really more the shift in scale.
A friend of mine compared the original Shenmue to Red Beard, a Kurosawa film which is infamous for a few reasons. It was the last time he would work with Toshiro Mifune, their relationship desolving during the tortured production of the film. It was a monumentally expensive production for the time, involving live filming of a burning village. It was also a flop of such proportions that Kurosawa more or less went into a period of exile for years, doing joint production work in the Soviet Union and the like. Shenmue is of a kindred spirit; monumentally expensive, bloated, far out of line with the other work of the visionary behind it (Yu Suzuki, the Space Harrier guy), and not widely embraced in its day.
So naturally, being the pompous fucking prick that I am, I goddamn loved Shenmue. Is it a flawed work? Absolutely! My god, the flaws. But it's a game where so much care was put into its creation that I can only stand in awe of what it tried. Recreating the precise weather cycles of a Japanese city over a historical five month window in the mid-1980s, wherein the player can open damn near every single drawer and cabinet in every single apartment of entire neighborhoods and find something in nearly of them, is wild. It's The Lord's Prayer on a grain of rice, only with each letter a badly bleeding Sega got to spend about $25,000 dollars.
It is this microscopic detail that Shenmue II lacks, for the most part. But as I stuck with the game, I started to appreciate the tradeoff of the micro-detail for the macro. Yes this is a game that amounts to a series of, on paper, tedious item chain fetch quest bullshit with quick time events galore and some of the most "get Nanako from catering to read these lines, quickly now" voice acting you will ever hear. I do not care. I think it retains so many of the strength of Shenmue - a contemplative game whose deliberate pace serves to both highlight the inner workings of its settings while also underscoring the brutal and abrupt nature of its violence - while blowing out the scale so far. Cramming so much of Hong Kong onto the Dreamcast must have been a monumental feat, and Sega releasing this on the Xbox for North American dorks seems to me as a sweet sort of balm. "Yes, we will be multiplatform now, but we will continue to do weird shit," they said.
There's so much to love. Joy showing up on her motorcycle with terrible, TERRIBLE, Japanese butt rock in the background. Random NPCs telling you that you're going to be "good buddies" based on your mutual love of capsule machines. The several in-game days you are forced to spend just, carrying stacks of books around to learn some damn discipline (no joke this is the point where I deadass fell in love with Shenmue II). Ren basically staring straight at the camera several times to say "This Ryo kid is the biggest dork in the entire universe, and I will die for him without hesitation." The inexplicably placed Hang On machine. The long and largely uneventual ascent to Guilin in southwest China, which contains so much of the contemplative Buddhist energy one otherwise must squint to see in this game. Even the final sequence, which is made out of crystaline earnestness and honestly falls a little flat even with that proviso, is still something I would not change.
At this point it is pretty clear that Shenmue III was at least a mild disappointment. At least. But by golly I enjoyed the first two so much, significant warts and all, that I'll be damned if I don't give it a go eventually. Until then, here's hoping Ryo and his merry gang of misfit friends serve Lan Di his entire ass somewhere, someday. In the meantime, Yu, please release Planet Harriers on Steam or really anywhere. I will give you this $50 bill. Please do this.