2019 was a weird year for me where I felt like I played nothing while I played what seems like far more games than usual. It felt like year spent ‘catching up’, where the scope of what I played didn’t become clear until I started putting it all down on paper. Either way here is my barely proof read yearly ramblings.

Death Stranding

A 2019 game in 2019? I have my friend, April, to thank for this who lent me her PS4 for almost a year at this point to play through several games. She bought Death Stranding not to play herself, but so I could play it in front of her and talk about it. I did that and kept on playing, well after the story had resolved itself.

I have an unabashed love for Hideo Kojima. He is a man who simultaneously gets too much and too little credit for what he does. Kojima is brilliant, but his weird, flawed brilliance is not something exclusive to him. Many in the games industry could be just as amazing and weird if fate had given them a chance. He is as much a product of luck and opportunity as he is a result of his own skill and drive. Indie games have shown us that there potentially many many more “Hideo Kojimas” out there, but we might never see one come to the same level of prominence. The current AAA system is simply just not conducive to it. We are lucky to have even one person like Hideo Kojima.

Some people mistakenly say “Kojima should just make movies”. While I can understand how people come say this, if one really thinks about it, the opposite should become true. Kojima should NEVER make movies. The weakest parts of most Kojima games are the parts that are the most rooted in cinema. He may be able to invoke powers of cinema on a superficial level, but his limitations become obvious whenever does more than that.

Kojima communicates best through game design. The gameplay of his best games not only is fun and rewarding, but feeds perfectly into the mood and the theme of what he’s doing. This is where Death Stranding is at it’s best. Kojima can write a whole cutscene where your magical president moms dies of cancer crying on you in the oval office with minimal emotional impact. But carrying the awkward, ungainly corpse of your mother to an incinerator over lonely terrain? That communicates things cinema can’t — ESPECIALLY not Kojima’s cinemas. The whole theme of interconnectedness and how it works with both the core gameplay and the asynchronous multiplayer just feels perfect. Everything operates on a thematic level and on a gameplay one.

I’m not going to write a whole review on Death Stranding in an end of year summery. I could go on about the weird hype cycle somehow managing to delivery on it’s maddening promises. I could talk about how fucky Mads Mikkelsen is. I could talk about HOW COMPLETELY AND DISTRESSINGLY BACKLOADED THE STORY IS AND OH GOD WHY ARE THESE CUTSCENES TOO LONG but I’m going to talk about mountains.

In most games, it doesn’t feel like much of an accomplishment to scale a mountain. At best, it feels hard yet intended and at worst it feels like you’re making a mockery out of the game’s slope systems. Only two games I’ve played really made me feel like I had a relationship with the mountains. One would be Getting Over it with Bennett Foddy and the other would be Death Stranding. Getting Over it was a very intimate relationship with one extremely hard climbing route, but Death Stranding was a game where I could wander into a mountain range, feel like I was totally lost in a hostile environment that didn’t want me there and wasn’t designed for me despite the fact I was supposed to be there and it was designed for me. Death Stranding doesn’t pull any big tricks or mechanics to make this happen. There are many small gameplay systems that contribute to the experience, but I feel the important big choice was simply being okay with making the player miserable.

Death Stranding is a AAA game that was okay with me feeling ways that most AAA games try and polish over. For that, I loved it.

Bloodborne

The original reason I was lent that ps4! A big discussion before Bloodborne came out was always “Dark Souls or Demon’s Souls”? Obviously Dark Souls was the more ambitious and successful of the two, but many of us had a soft spot for the tone of Demon’s Souls. Demon’s Souls had an oppressive feeling Dark Souls rarely did that was intoxicating. While I always had to prefer Dark Souls over Demon’s Souls due to my love of maps and world design, the miserable world of Boletaria always haunted me.

Then Bloodborne happened. While by the time of it’s release, it was no longer secretly Demon’s Souls 2, it carried that spirit, complete with an incredible level of polish. It exceeds the mood of Demon’s Souls while also representing the peak of Souls combat. Is it’s world design less ambitious than Dark Souls? Yes. Is a lot of Bloodborne kinda samey? Yes. Are the samey parts still EXTREMELY GOOD? Yes!

Bloodborne saw Souls games the way I saw souls games. Bloodthirsty greed and aggressive offense. Sure, in Dark Souls I’d always have a shield equipped — a useful tool for dealing with suddenly extremely dicey situations. But it was almost always the grass crest shield and it was mostly just fueling my offense. So when Bloodborne took away the shield and was like “This game doesn’t need that”, I believed them and was rewarded for it. Maybe following this logic, Sekiro will hit hard with me too. Maybe we’ll see this year…

As for now, Bloodborne is easily the souls game I love to actually play the most.

Dark Souls 3

Dark Souls 3 is a strange game for me. No part of it lights my soul ablaze. None of its world fills me with deep curiosity and wonder. I have no lingering questions. Not because those questions don’t exist, but because the game fails at making me care about their answers. It, more than any other Souls game besides maybe DS2 feels like a game that is just ‘content stitched together’.

But boy is it good content! Dark Souls 3 probably has the best average standard of quality throughout all its areas and bosses out of all the souls game. I feel like it might have this position by quite a large lead. The game is huge and every part of it is good to great (… besides Ashes of Ariandel which sucks outside of one bossfight).

Despite not being entranced by the world, maybe that’s fine? Because there is one feeling Dark Souls 3 does convey. This world is dead. The answer to whatever questions are meaningless because this world is meaningless and may soon be dust. A minor touch that resonated with me was the hollowed enemies. In most souls game they are chaotic and violent and eager to fight. They can think of nothing else. In Dark Souls 3, many have decayed to the point where they must be roused awake by a bell to regain that spark to fight. You fight a Demon Fire Sage who has burnt out, his body reduced to brittle ash. As he fights, he falls apart. Even powerful demons have ran out of time. At the end of the Ringed City you see the fate of the world. Sand. Then you fight some corny ass last boss who looks like he fell into the wrong game, but that vision of the future is still powerful.

Dark Souls 3 never managed the sublime cohesion of the games that come before it in the series, yet still I walk away from it feeling it’s extremely good.

Celeste

Don’t ask me to make more I Wanna be the Guy games. Between something like Celeste and the trolly creations of people in Mario Maker 2, I simply have nothing to offer. I first played Celeste on the Pico-8 and loved it then. A simple, challenging and cute little game. It’s incredible to see how much further it could be fleshed out.

As I write this, I’m not yet ‘done’ with Celeste. I got some B-Sides, C-Sides and the back half of Chapter 9 to go. But I have beat the ‘main’ game and for a lot of people, that alone is enough. It’s hard to even describe what’s nice about Celeste. It manages to make this type of challenging platforming game feel fresh. It manages to characterize its characters so well in so little time. It manages to build its mood and earn emotionally uplifting moments with grace. It doesn’t do a lot while doing a whole lot at the same time.

It’s so hard to write about a great game that succeeds simply by doing everything simply and extremely well. Celeste just oozes craft and I’m glad I managed to fit it into the end of 2019.

Grand Theft Auto Revisited (1 through San Andres)

So one day I’m randoming through my roms and I hit the GBA version of GTA2. It’s kinda nauseating and hard to play. I quit out and think that’ll be the end of it but then I get curious… how were the PC versions of these games?

Well, apparently you can download them for free so I played them! The original GTA 1 and 2 are such weird games. Clearly the developers were hitting on something but they didn’t quite ‘get it’ yet. They’re half way between what GTA 1 will become and some weird (and overly long) score attack game. They don’t really work. They require tons of precision in a game that seems to already require a ton of luck. But what else would you expect from a UK developed game made in this period? They didn’t know fun was legal yet.

Not the best games to play as a gamer, but interesting to check out as designers. You could see the DNA of games to come, including even Hotline Miami (where the phone gimmick is 100% based off of GTA1 and 2).

So now I was curious… how well did GTA3 hold up?

GTA3 was extremely interesting. A fantastically designed map that felt extremely complicated despite it’s super small size. Driving felt nice and good, missions were starting to click but god, sometimes it forgot that it’s okay to have fun. As a general rule in GTA3, any timer or time limit is anywhere for 10-20 seconds stricter than they have any right to be. The game demands a lot from the player in situations with massive civilian car RNG. But when it works, it’s fun! It’s also incredible how sociopathic the game is. I don’t mean in how violent you are — it’s a god damned GTA game — but in how the story is so neutral to all your betrayals. The game doesn’t even wink when a woman who’s brother you killed tortures the wrong man for it. It’s just presented completely dryly and… oddly that feels appropriate?

Also as a minor point, flying the ‘unflyable’ Dodo is shockingly close to flying a plane with poor lift. I found it pretty easy once I learned to get stabilized! Definitely a lot of fun clearing missions in ways you’re not supposed to.

And from there it was Vice City and everything started to click. The map became colorful and memorable. The radio became ridiculously good. Missions… mostly weren’t completely horrible. Hell, sometimes they were really good! Characters were now characters and Tony, while a sociopath, was a very human sociopath. Lance betraying you actually manages to hurt a little! Just a massive step up.

But also the plane sucked and flew all arcadey which made exactly one person sad and that person was me. But at least the Sparrow was awesome.

Now San Andreas I had never played and was really excited to finally play it. It both exceeded my expectations while also in a lot of ways, disappointing me. From a gameplay perspective it was largely all good. Gunfights finally felt right, variety of vehicles was super fun. The map was almost comedically huge while still diverse and interesting. The plot and characters were many MANY times better… but yet I feel like they left a lot on the table. CJ was the most relatable protagonist to date by a LOT. The Grove Street gang members felt so close and personal. The whole start of the game feels like a story out of some indie comic book that’d get adapted to an HBO show. Exaggerated and comedic, but gritty. Actions had weight. For a short bit, killing people actually felt a little heavy!

… But then the game kinda goes off the rails and you’re plowing up bodies in a farm combine, brutally murdering people to steal a rap rhymes book for someone who totally doesn’t deserve it and just… being a GTA protagonist again. The game knew they shouldn’t do Kill Frenzies anymore (which weren’t even that fun in practice anyways) and they knew they were making something more serious, but it feels like sometime early on, the serious people got voted out of power and irreverent “comedy” returned. It felt like they were on the edge of being something special in the plot department, only to end up… decent, despite all odds. It feels funny to be disappointed by the plot of a GTA game but those early grove street missions set a tone the game never found ever again. That said, running over people in a Combine is a pretty good time.

OH ALSO THE PLANES ARE AWESOME like whoever made the plane physics cared about how planes handled and made every plane behave in a way that somewhat mirrored its real world counterparts. As a plane nerd I was very impressed.

Over all take away from the series? Surprisingly still a lot of fun but Rockstar really needed someone to hit them with a ruler every time they set the timer for a mission too low. Oh and also every racing mission ever totally sucks. But hey, still a lot to love.

Devil May Cry (finally)

I had never actually ever played much of any Devil May Cry game. I’ve played and loved games influenced by them but DMC fell within the ps2 generation which is a generation I largely missed. I tried playing DMC3 at some point on PC but the first time through it bounced off me at some point. The timing wasn’t right yet. I even owned 4 through a bundle or something.

I’m not going to go over these like I did for GTA as the evolution was a lot smoother. DMC1 showed its Resident Evil roots even harder than expected, DMC3 was rough in a lot of ways that mostly had to do with the era it came out in, but was gloriously slick where it was important and DMC4 was just a killer fucking game. It’s Devil May Cry, what is there even to say? It’s as good as I hoped!

Maybe for next year I’ll get to talk about DMC5. If not… hey, the fact that everyone hates DMC2 seems like a great reason to play it!

Jurassic Park: Trespasser

I unironically love this game. Like it is totally busted to shit and borderline unplayable but the sheer ambition was ridiculous. It really felt like I was exploring this long forgotten island. The physics are horrible. Interacting with physical keypads and buttons in the world is horrible. Having to rotate your gun manually to see down the sights is horrible. The way background entities get rendered as billboards only to pop back into 30 when you get close is horrible. The dinosaur animation and AI? Horrible horrible horrible and I LOVE it. The sense of place is great. The environmental story telling is surprisingly strong. Sometimes the dumb physics stuff actually works and sometimes a puzzle is actually interesting! And atop all that, when the game fails brutally, it fails hilariously. This is definitely a must play game for people interested in weird quirky games and gaming history.

LIGHTNING ROUND

Minoria

Basically Momodora but 3d! Extremely good! Looks slick as hell. Bombservice basically just makes these sorta ‘capsule metroidvanias’ and I love them. I told Rdein to make the second sword do something cool and then the game was cooler. Now only if he listened to me when I told him to make the nuns kiss. Please enjoy my fanfiction, coming soon to AO3

Dicey Dungeon

By the time I got to play the full version this year it stopped being fun. The game works great as an engine to enjoy broken nonsense the mechanics don’t make the game stand up well to intense difficulty. One of those games where you fail and are just like “what could I have even done differently?”

Still could recommend it, just know the game gets tedious after a certain point.

DS1 Again + Randomizer

Replayed Dark Souls 1! Gosh this game was jankier than I remember. Mostly the hitboxes. The hitboxes are TERRIBLE and nothing has any range. Stuff was sometimes hard for weird reasons I didn’t remember. Would get mad at Ornstein all the time because his collision box was bigger than his hurt box. That said, still the GOAT, still probably “Game of the Decade”, but I do appreciate all the nice changes made to its sequels. Also the “HD Remaster” looks like ass and I only played it because the PTD edition had horrible audio desync bugs for me.

Randomizer was fun though! The completely wacked out enemy placements turns things into a weird puzzle. Even stuff like leveling up becomes a chance for clever and fun “cheese”. Gotta try fog gate randomizer next!

Jalopy

I ALMOST REALLY LOVE THIS GAME. The game about driving forever and fixing your car as it breaks down and smuggling cigarettes past customs and weird Uncles. Very tactile but never quite creates the relationship with your car I hoped for. From all I read the developer was frustrated as well with their inability to really make this great concept totally come together. Still can lead to some great moments though.

Final Fantasy 4

I replayed Final Fantasy 4 for reasons that are completely beyond me. Some thoughts: Oh god I hate random battles. Oh god the japanese version makes so much more sense, not only on a re translation front but also mechanically and oh god what a good soundtrack. Still not a fan of jRPGs anymore but it was… shockingly short?

… And as usual, most of them aren’t from 2018.

Anyways, Brave Earth still isn’t out but instead of me being depressed about that, lets talk about games I played this year in no particular order!

Hollow Knight

I played this so early in the year I almost forgot about it. I remember looking at a map of this game and going “Eh. This doesn’t seem like the type of Metroidvania I like”. When I finally played it, my friend hour or so of playing “confirmed” this to me but I kept going. “This game is too much the original Metroid it’s too easy to get lost and lose all direction”.

… But that was the idea. And as getting lost led me to new and exciting places and as the game continued to feel really nonlinear the quality of the world design became more and more apparent. Things I thought were flaws were intentional and intentional things I thought weren’t to my taste I ended up falling in love with. It’s one of the few games that people compare to Dark Souls where I’m like… yes. Yes this is exactly it. A beautiful and lonely world with great NPCs and fun gameplay that might occasionally cross the line into ‘actually unfair’ but in ways that are forgivable. Absolutely loved this game and I wish it was fresher in my memory.

Iconoclasts

I was waiting for this game for years and years and years and years. Where I expected a fun puzzly metroidvania I really instead got more of a Cave Story-esque journey with punchy gameplay. The world is connected only enough to make it feel like one big cohesive space. Earlier screenshots of the game contained a mini map in the HUD that was removed because, well… the game just isn’t actually about that. Areas are “stages” that are just in or slightly off the path you want to go. It’s a big map not because you’re supposed to explore it but because it makes the world feel realer. And within this world is an amazing story with amazing characters, looking cutesy and light while being a depressing, cynical story about peoples inabilities to change, to heartbreaking consequences. All told by someone who can execute art, writing and doing his own music perfectly.

Sometimes you want your soul touching indie games to play like a Treasure game in between cutscenes and this game fits that bill.

Wonderboy in Monster World

As a side note to Iconoclasts, I played this as Konjak listed it as one of his influences of the game. Wonderboy is a strange game. I don’t think there is a single excellent thing the Wonderboy games do. Yet somehow they are oddly compelling. They feel like an action RPG demake back when the action RPG genre was in full swing. Simple grind and update mechanics, formulaic progression through cute, tropey environments, adorable art style… and yet it works. It’s like some kind of comfort food. You can feel it’s world structure in Iconoclasts too. Wonderboy gives you little reason to backtrack but the fact you walk everywhere makes the world feel whole.

EVO: The Theory of Evolution

If I were to pick a game of this year I would want to scream to the heavens about the most, it would be this. While not the best game — it is a very very flawed, old game — it was the most shocking and enjoyable find for me. This lovingly fan-translated PC-98 game is the turn based RPG prequel to the SNES’s EVO: Search for Eden. You can scroll down one post and read my whole review of this game but most importantly I was just SHOCKED at the sheer amount of quirkiness and charm this strange, surreal game had. It has that intangible ‘special’ factor that makes it important despite it’s flaws. So yeah go read that post and then download the game god dammit.

EVO: Search for Eden

Another side note game, I replayed The Search for Eden after The Theory of Evolution. What was once an amazingly quirky game felt simple and watered down compared to its PC-98 parent. The gameplay manages to feel slower than the turn based RPG it was based on and while more visually appealing, The Theory of Evolutions quadrant evolution system was more interesting and had more diverse choices. The only bad thing about The Theory of Evolution is it made me like Search for Eden a lot less. The Theory of Evolution has all of its strengths and more tolerable flaws.

Deltarune

I almost forgot about this because it hit so fast. As just a demo its hard to read into things too much, What is flaw, and what is intentional? The core chunk of the demo plays its story beats as an uncanny valley clone of Undertale in a way that we all know has to be intentional. It’s weirdly uncomfortable, offputting and curious. While the bits we’ve gotten to play have their great moments already (who doesn’t love Susie) the demo, by necessity is nothing but promises, building up to something that seems challenging to deliver upon. Looking back in the future I feel like this first release will either be completely vindicated or seen as warning sign for all the problems we’ll see in the finished game. Considering Toby said he built Undertale purposefully to make this game, I’m leaning toward the former.

Dark Arms: Beast Buster 1999

This year I found some good NGPC games! Dark Arms: Beast Buster 1999 is probably one of my favorite game names I’ve ever seen. The game itself is interesting. A zelda-with-guns pokemon crossover thing where you capture enemy souls, eggs and seeds and combine them to make new guns to level up and evolve. The game is sadly a little scant and repetitive and doesn’t have the longevity the designers wished it did, but it’s still an exceptionally charming game that is still fun to play.

It feels like the type of game where in a better world there would be a Dark Arms 2 which would be a classic and there would be forum posts asking “Hey is Dark Arms 1 worth playing?” “Its worth checking out but feels really dated and shallow by comparison” and then Dark Arms 3 would come out and everyone would hate it because it changed a bunch of stuff and removed a bunch of features from Dark Arms 2 and — well… yeah that sadly didn’t happen. The publisher never went inn this direction ever again and mostly made fighting games afterward. This would be a good game for some indie dev to shamelessly lift from to make something new and more refined.

Faselei!

The second good NGPC game I played this year is a weird Turn Based Strategy/Mech Customization game that is anime as hell. It also hits that “Final Fantasy Tactics” tone. It’s much goofier and does less of a a good job of it, but it gets some of that Gundamy ‘War is Hell’ stuff going on and executes it well in a few areas. This is another game that seems like it was a sequel away from being really great. The weapon variety does a lot but also leaves a lot on the table (there is no splash weapons). The combat, which involves selecting up to 8 moves in advance and predicting movements doesn’t have the enemy AI to make it as rewarding as it could be. But the game scales up well, limiting access to the “command chips” and amount of actions you can make until you are ready to zip around the map and blast things to hell. I still haven’t finished it but it is more a testament to the game. I’m still grinding end game content because the basic grind in this game is actually fun. Sadly it lacks the diversity to truly shine but it’s SO CLOSE.

Kerbal Space Program

Kerbal Space Program was both a joy and a frustration. I now look at the janky car wreck that is modded minecraft and go “wow, this shit is rock solid”. Like Minecraft, KSP suffers from the problem that well… there actually isn’t a whole lot -to do-. You can do cool stuff just to do them, but like with modded minecraft, having an incentive to build is fun! But oh my god the physics of this game make things so rough. Any mod that does anything interesting is a disaster. Vehicles on loading the game abhor the ground. Space stations decide ‘yes now it is time to shake apart (modded or unmodded)’ and the whole thing is just frustrating for the wrong reasons. I wanna be frustrated by my landers tipping over on the moon because I designed them bad and I suck at landing, not because the physics engine decides it wants to do whatever it wants.

I put a lot of time into KSP this year and enjoyed a lot of it, but eventually I realized I was spending more time trying to ‘fix’ quirks of the game then actually play it. Losing should be fun but it just isn’t in this. Though that said I did enjoy building and flying planes in it quite a bit!

IL2 Strumovik: Great Battles series

So after KSP I did a short stint in SimplePlanes which made me go ‘lemme get my IR headtracker gear set up again’. When Simple Planes didn’t support it I was like ‘hm, maybe I should install IL2: 1946’ and a few days later I kept just eye-ing IL2: Battle of Stalingrad, the first game in the newer IL2 Great Battles series. Now I got a new joystick and throttle and rudder pedals (after building a set out of an old joystick and wood which worked pretty well) and I’m flying around with no hud and learning real flight principles. This is hardly my first deep dive into hardcore flight sims (I did own 1946 and had a headtracker already)

While simulations aren’t very gamey, air combat has a lot of gamifying factors. The nature of ‘energy advantage’ and balancing things like radiator drag vs coolant concerns and other mechanisms are very gamey. A lot of fighting game-esque management of information happens in air combat. When I made my post about “Cleaning up your mental stack” someone came in like “Hey do you know about the OODA Loop??” which is fighter pilot terminology for what is basically the same thing. Flying a plane in combat has almost the same APM process as playing Starcraft, deciding between macro and micro decisions and always having infinite ways to optimize is you have the spare knowledge and attention. While not being inherently gamey, it appeals to the gamey side of my brain.

I won’t go into too much other detail. it’s a WW2 airplane sim focused on the eastern front and which is noted for unflinching realism and attention to detail. It doesn’t really have a lot of competitors. But whats important is that flying is hard and as such is -rewarding-.

LIGHTNING ROUND

Factorio: Jumped to this a bit once I got off the Minecraft train. Factorio gets the process side of Minecraft even better than modded minecraft by like a lot and it’s a lot of fun. My only problem with it compared to Modded Minecraft is it’s really narrow. Like Modded Minecraft gives you the space for BIG COOL PROJECTS but factorio really doesn’t. Part of the “problem” (for me, it’s not a design flaw) is that when you grow in Factorio the design is… very integrated. Everything is already connected. Modded minecraft often develops as a bunch of separate systems and ends with more and more interconnectivity and automation. Modded Minecraft your adding functionality and in factorio your adding efficiency. High end late game in some play styles seems to get more into ‘interconnected microservices’ territory but I’ve yet to pull that off.

Dicey Dungeons: What a fun little game! A spiked shield where even dice do damage and odd dice shield me? Big swords benefiting for big dice and daggers benefiting from lots of little dice? A cute little dice based roguelike that gets a lot of gamefeel out of spending dice. One of the games that softened me on my dislike of turnbased games lately.

Super Metroid x LTTP Randomizer: What a perfect combination of madness, finding flippers in Super Metroid and the morphball on Death Mountain. A very confusing, brain bendy randomizer that fits right into my core skills.

Dahna: Megami Tanjō: This game owns hard. Like it’s not the best game in the world — it’s a little janky at times — but it’s also just awesome. Your some cool blonde warrior woman whose helped by mythical monsters to fight a sorceress. The game starts with you just riding on a giant ogre and stomping on shit before you just run around wheeling around this giant big ol’ sword like a badass, blood everywhere. It has such an awesome early 80s anime vibe. One of the things I like about it that I respect a lot in games is the game is constantly different. Things happen because the designers wanted to do them. Things are reused in ways that make sense in story. Bosses you injured earlier on reappear with those injuries still in place. It’s not just platformer beat’em up formula, which makes it feel oddly special.

Final Fantasy IV: Pushing my newfound tolerance for turn based games again, I went back to a classic. I don’t know why, I just had a growing urge to. Also it’s relatively short. It was interesting to play this and think about how much of the world interaction stuff and cutscenes and all that were cutting edge at the time. It’s the JRPG stuff we all took for granted at the time. I also played the japanese version (translated, obviously) so I got to experience slightly more complicated mechanics which made the game feel a lot less primitive than the US “Easy Type” would have led me to believe.

Robotrek: This was a mixed bag! Robotrek was a game I loved as a kid. Building robots is fun! Sadly the game is super shallow despite its attempts not to be. But… it’s also a strange, quirky game with a surreal sense of humor. It was tedious until I found the tricks to cheesing it. Parts of it that seemed good in my memory were worse and parts I didn’t care about as a kid held up better. It’s a weird, gaming game (I mean.. it’s a Quintet game so no surprise) that probably could have been great with a little bit more thought and time on the mechanics side of things.

Fortunately the fine folks at https://46okumen.com/ made a beautiful translation.  Localized as E.V.O: The Theory of Evolution, the game is an expert translation that contains all the joy and weirdness of the SNES game. In fact, it’s… even more Search for Eden than Search for Eden. This is a strange game, taking the alternative history and weird tangents of Search for Eden to another level. it seems improbable to say, but I feel like we got the much more… normal game of the two.

This was a weird year in gaming for me. I played all of one game released in 2017. The bulk of the year was covered by weird hacks and modded minecraft, as well as the usual slurry of bad games. I don’t want to frame this as ‘best of list’ because while I like… most of these games, it’s honestly more ‘games I remember playing that I have some thoughts about. Anyways

Stardew Valley

What a lovely game. Due to a lot of Zachtronics stuff and modded Minecraft I got a little bit of a taste for a slower experiences again. The farming was alright, but the characters were super lovely. The game had very simple but effective writing that had me change my choice for Farmer Naomi’s wife multiple times. Even the characters on the bottom of my list were great. The only issue I had was… and honestly I didn’t notice it much because I wasn’t going for that content… that the guys were lame. Shane had a great arc that got me to befriend him, but the rest? eh. Also that super simple fishing game was so fun.

Biggest issue with the game was the lack of an end game. I feel like randomized goals in the style of the carepackages would have been lovely. But on well, you can’t play every game forever.

Momodora: Reverie Under The Moonlight

I played this on my flight to Japan since I was going to meat Rdein and the game was on my list for awhile. The level design of it had this lovely Demon’s Souls meets Knytt Story feel to it. The map they made for the game was lovely and the world felt tangible and sensible. It had a very Japanese-esque style without being generic anime. It had lovely but simple combat. Just one of those games that’s just… simply solid and good? Just a game with a lot of soul.

Getting Over it with Bennett Foddy

Foddy is a cool guy I’ve gotten to hang with a few times. Just… smart and funny and of course he makes real assholish games. But I found Getting Over It to be the least frustrating. It, more so than QWOP or GIRP became zen like to me. I just let go of any stress immediately. Progress didn’t mean anything until the job was done. I didn’t get mad or frustrated once. It was all zen. And Foddy talking philosophically about the nature of art and hard games was wonderful and a lot of it really resonated with me. A pleasant experience for a masochist.

Also this is the only game I played this year that game out in 2017. Yikes!

Metroid Rogue Dawn

What a flawed but lovely game. This is a game I wish I could get a physical copy of (it’s just a little too expensive). This romhack has a lot of rough edges but truly creates an alien planet. It also looks unlike any NES game. It’s gorgeous and just feels…. uncannily out of place, graphics from another time… Because, well, they are. I played this at the beginning of the year so a lot of details are lost on me but it was rad!

Super Metroid Rotated 90 Degrees

It’s what it says on the tin. Some parts of the game are tweaked to make it reasonable but for the most part it’s for crazy bomb jumping and walljumping nuts like me. It’s great to have something familiar yet different, where you can use your knowledge to help you, but it doesn’t ever quite help enough. Which also plays into…

A Link to the Past Randomizer

I played a Super Metroid Randomizer and some DS Vania randomizers bu the ATTP randomizer takes the cake. These are addictive.  In Super Metroid, finding a stash of items meant either, depending on difficulty settings, finding a stack of nothing or find a ton of great stuff, ATTP has enough diversity in its chest drops to make every chest feel like the pull of a slot machine. Every little trick gets you a little bit further and nets you a few more pull of the slots.

I even did entrance randomizer once because I hate myself. It was… something to be making diagrams in photoshop to figure out what goes where.

Sylvan Tale

A weird Game Gear Secret of Mana/Zelda clone thing? Certainly the only Game Gear game I have ever beat. Never released in America and oddly charming and good. If this was a GBC game released by Nintendo, it’d be one of those games people say is overrated. It hasn’t aged excellently but in its time it was surely wonderful. The game has a neat, curious world with a strange cosmology that, while nothing shocking, is just… nicely thoughtful. It has simple but memorable plot moments. It just plays -nicely-. Not excellently, but definitely nicely. Also you change forms and shit and its kinda annoying but it’s one of those weird gems that Sega fanboys would likely clutch close to their heart if it got a US release. But sadly, despite being a SEGA game, it did not.

I replayed Circle of the Moon and Harmony of Despair thinking Circle was the “okay one” and Boy was I wrong!

I didn’t remember either of these games being great. In fact, I remembered Harmony of Despair being downright awful and ugly and Circle of the Moon being… odd but playable…

Oh my god Circle of the Moon sucks. I know there was some article claiming it was secretly The Best Portable Castlevania, but it is just… awful. Bland in looks, bland in level design, tedious to transverse. The DSS system is garbage, saved only by the fact that you can use a glitch to use any card combination. Finding them in the wild? Fuck that. You move weird. You jump weird. You’re like a slug who can somehow jump 100 feet in the air. There are no items to pick up besides Health and MP ups so there is no real discovery — just tedious cleanup work to maximize your stats. The only things that don’t suck about this game: The monster choices are odd and there are a lot of them. A lot of classic enemies are replaced by oddbalsl like… archer wolves? Sure, okay, that’s better than just another skeleton. And some of the bosses are okay? Sometimes? Maybe? Even if Dracula sucks horridly.

Harmony of Despair by contrast was much better than I remember. And by much better it was “Okay”. I won’t be itching to replay it any time soon and it was a number of steps below Aria of Sorrow but it was.. fine? A little bloated and with a few advancement triggers that defy reasonable design but… it’s fine and… looked much better than I remember? Likely because GBA emulators are better about colors/backlight compensation so the game looked much less overblown than I remember. Hell at its best, it looks better than Aria, though Aria is just more consistent. Also it has a weirdass soundtrack. At first I hated it, but over time it oddly grew on me. The sample choices are weird but I guess kinda match the “Dissonance”? But the important is the soundtrack leverages these grainy, awful sounds in awesome ways. It reminds me of the horrible Demon’s Souls trumpets. They’re so bad. But so good. God I love them. Anyways here have my favorite HoD track.

Devil’s Crash

There is something captivating about this stupid pinball game. Naxat has a skill for making games just… feel nice. And they never got to stretch that muscle much but this pinball game from the guys who made Rekka is awesome. It just feels cool, has a lot of energy, lots of little subboards to find. It’s impossible to really explain. Just try it. I don’t know if, as a kid, I’d be down with paying full price for a single board pinball game but hey it somehow works.

Also known as Dragon’s Fury in the US, where it is on the Genesis rather than the PC Engine. Both versions are good. I feel like I slightly prefer the PCE version, but the Genesis version looks and arguably sounds better (which goes against my usual Anti-FM Synth bias). Also the main song is awesome.

Golden Axe Warrior

I can’t believe there is a Golden Axe game that is a flat up clone of Zelda 1. Like almost nothing tried to clone Zelda 1. It’s like a weird look into an alternative history. It’s not particularly -good- but it’s educational. Never beat it because my save corrupted but w/e.

This Fucking Thing

My uncle got me this weird crappy handheld thing for Christmas loaded with old NES games that is various minor tweaks of Super Mario Bros, Adventure Island and Contra, a few other random old shitty games and a TON of AWFUL chinese games made in the 2000s. They’re awful and awesome. I just load it up sometimes and pick a random game and groan at how bad it is… but a good groan. An oddly… exciting groan.

Modded Minecraft

I played a ton of modded minecraft this year. Too much, really. But the engineering you can do in modded minecraft is just wonderful. It’s weird because no other modded game I can think of regularly assembles mods under ‘mod packs’ (without it being a huge community drama thing). So you get these weird custom play experiences made up of multiple peoples work. The integration a lot of time doesn’t make sense but all things considered it works really well. Modded minecraft, with all its pipes and machines isn’t even the same game. It feels like a sandbox Zachtronics game or something.

https://www.youtube.com/user/kayinnasaki/videos I’ve been uploading base tours and stuff so if you wanna get an idea of what I like doing, that’d work. But yeah, it’s oddly infection. Sometimes I worry it’s slowed down BEP but then when I cut myself off I just refresh reddit for 4 hours, which honestly is a huge downgrade. JUST GOTTA WORK ON MOTIVATION, SEE YA ALL NEXT YEAR.

Year end wrap-up time, so lemme make a post like everyone else where I talk about my favorite games I played this year. As with every time I do this, I am ignoring multiplayer games and also ignoring release dates. I’m not a ‘zeitgeist’ gamer and I don’t put much importance on staying fresh with what just came out. I’m sure there are a lot of great games that came out this year that I will eventually play but I like bouncing around so for me, most of my favorite games in the years are games I discovered or just gotten around to. I also tend to play multiple entries in a series in a row, so to keep the list from being all King’s Field and Shadow Tower games I am going to block certain games up as one pick. Also no order outside that this a “Top 10”.

Devil Daggers

A game with just an absurd content to fun ratio to me. After 50 hours forcing myself to play Gungeon, playing Devil Daggers again was like reaching the surface after suffocating under water. The rush, the speed, THE AESTHETIC. Devil Daggers does not waste my time and hits all my buttons for iteration and improvement. The only problem with it is it is hard to play while doing other stuff. Back during spelunky I would pause the game constantly to do other things but Devil Daggers, like playing TGM tetris, is hard to go back to midway. The game needs your undivided attention. It also does get repetitious so its best as a ‘game between’ games but every time I load up Devil Daggers its like “Why don’t I play this more?”

Front Mission: Gunhazard

A lovely SNES gem that I would have adored as a child. Not as mechanically clever or with as good levels as Metal Warriors, Gunhazard still has an amazing feel to it, despite its repetitious nature and overstaying its welcome a bit. It feels a bit like a better EVO: Search for Eden. Even though I’d say Gunhazard is a good game while EVO isn’t (even if I still love it), it does have some of that samey grindiness. But the world and aesthetic and story and growth is awesome. Also its set piece moments are delightful. Really adored finding this game. Its high points were high even if its low points were low… but never so low as to push me away.

Infinifactory (As well as Shenzhen IO and TIS-100)

Usually I tell people I don’t like puzzle games that much. Especially hard puzzle games. A cute puzzle platformer can be fun and not overstay its welcome but stuff like the Witness where I’m trying to reverse solve an obtuse puzzle? I really could care less. But Zachtronics doesn’t make those kinds of puzzle games. His games remind me of The Incredible Machine, or bridge builders or, in a sense, Carnage Hearts. Puzzles where there is no ‘trick’ and no ‘the solution’. Puzzles which are about creativity and expression. I actually adore those kinds of Puzzle Games and in fact, that’s part of what I like about making games. So when I played Shenzhen IO I went back to play a bunch of Zachtronics offerings (no Spacechem yet, but I’ll get to it). Shenzhen and TIS-100 like like series of those rewarding “Ah-ha!” moments of fixing my games but without the same stress or stakes. Infinifactory appealed deeply to my love of spacial interactions. I wish I could do this in something like minecraft and have the things I make actually matter. I loved going back in all these games to just do better and beat my friends.

Infinifactory also had the most developed story and progression through the games I played. Its surprisingly interesting and fleshed out and the themes the games areas have match perfectly with whats going on in the story. Perfectly put together and wonderful to play.

Klonoa 2 (and also Klonoa)

What a wonderful pair of games! Klonoa 1 was delightful if a bit ages but Klonoa 2 was just… better in every possible level? The way the mechanics ramp up up, the way the level design was perfect, the art style, just… everything. There isn’t even much to even say. Klonoa isn’t one of those games that does something novelly or has something that makes it stand out. Klonoa and Klonoa 2 are just amazingly solid platformers and perhaps the only “Mascot Platformers” besides Mario that don’t suck. Why must I live in the Dark Timeline where people think Sonic games were ever good, but few people have played Klonoa?

Inside

Inside is on a lot of peoples lists! This is just a wonderful, solid, well put together game that shows a ton of craft while also being a much better execution of the gameplay found in Limbo. Inside builds up its world, it builds up its mechanics, it ramps up its puzzles in ALL the right ways. Appreciation of Inside is like the appreciation of pure craft in a game. It’s not the most interesting, its not the most that filled me with the most wonder or made me feel the most accomplished or anything, but it’s just GREAT.  Also as a fan of atmospheric story telling, especially in a platformer, this game shines. Also has one of the best surprises I ever had in a game — so maybe thats its best trait. Still, wonderful title.

Ori and The Blind Forest: Definitive Edition

A wonderful openworld platformer. I’d call it, more like Guacamelee, more of a ‘platforming Zelda’ than a Metroidvania, but I liked it a whole WHOLE lot more. Delightfully fast moving with awesome mobility options, great art and music and great setpieces. Amazing quality for what is technically an Indie game. My friend Matt tried to get me to play this FOREVER and it took forever but eventually it happened. Only complaint is I think in some of the setpiece moments were a little too Trial and Error-y for how the game felt like it should be? In fact, the game in general felt like it was a bit harder than necessary. Which was fine for me, only a few segments irked me, but I feel like my sister might get stuck on a number of parts even if she’d like every other part of this game.

Doom

I never thought there would be a time when there was a lack of good, dumb FPSs but here we are and here is Doom. Doom was exactly everything it needed to be, fun and actiony with ridiculous weapons and hordes of enemies. The aesthetic managed to be dark or hellish without being grimdark or lightless. One sad bit for me, though not THAT sad is the game has more of a… Serious Sam model than a classic Doom model.  In most cases, enemy positioning doesn’t matter because they’re all so mobile, so much fewer areas have interesting usage of enemy placement or just ‘hallway enemies’, which is apparently for a number of technical reasons. But that’s fine, because they still managed to make a great game and the times they did work out smaller encounters or interesting enemy placements, it felt great.

One minor complaint, even though it’s not terrible in this game… I’m sick of weapon upgrades and trees and stuff? Doom gives you enough stuff to max everything out but still, I hate making blind choices for skills and weapons when I’d rather just be given cool toys to play with when the designer thinks I should have them. Again, wasn’t a huge distraction since Doom was generous about it, but it just also felt completely unnecessary.

Shadow of the Colossus (And Ico)

Finally got around to playing these on the PS3 and both were just wonderful. They had their rough  points but I was engrossed in both. Ico in particular had some puzzles and timing things which were like… man… who let this happen? Who thought the water wheel was okay? Probably rushes with development or something. Ueda’s game just make you feel so.. intimate with everything in the world that despite all the rough edges, they’re delightful.

Shadow of the Colossus was my favorite of the two. The port had some rough edges — mostly making the overworld look like ass and ‘european’ shaky difficulty — but even when the game frustrated me or felt a little like a chore, I was still hungry to always go back to it. If a colossus wasn’t fun, perhaps the next one would be (and usually was). The weight of your actions in the game, both gamefeel wise and thematically just made it all have an impression on me. The fact you had to hit the button twice to stab something just screamed ARE YOU SURE? Even when the controls frustrated me I felt like they were how they were for a reason. Agro felt like my buddy, not a vehicle, and that feeling was more important than my ability to drive him around like a racecar.

I look forward to finishing BEP, getting a PS4 and catching up on a lot of modern games. One of those is definitely The Last Guardian.

Shadow Tower Abyss (and all of From’s older King’s Field-esque games)

I can’t believe I liked all these games as much as I did. You can read those earlier in my blog. But the game that surprised me the most was Shadow Tower. Shadow Tower had some weird magic to it and while it had its problems (desperately needed an Auto Map) it captivated me. Shadow Tower Abyss just went totally wild though. Running around with an AK-47 while wearing a roman legionary helmet and samurai armor withe a boardsword on your pack was just wild. The aesthetic of the game is strange and alien. The gamefeel for first person melee was INCREDIBLE. King’s Field 4 finally made FPS melee tolerable, Abyss made it WONDERFUL. The only problem with Abyss for me is it ends very weakly. The game felt a bit unfinished at the end. Also the translation is terrible… though on the other hand, maybe the terrible translation adds to the alien feel of the game?

Anyways these games surprised me in so many ways and Abyss surprised me the most.

 Nuclear Throne

If I had to say something was my Game of the Year, well… it has to be Nuclear Throne. Just by sheer playtime it has to be.  Nuclear Throne is a game that knows what its about. It’s a game that knows what an interesting character mechanic is and how interesting mechanics can chain together. It understands how to make content that new players will approach cautiously and experienced players can play through like a bat out of hell. After my Gungeon rants, it kills me that it was inspired by Nuclear Throne because Nuclear Throne GETS player engagement and it gets scaling difficulty and it gets game feel and it gets respecting the players time. It gets that there is more to enemy design than rings of bullet hell projectiles. It gets that the layout of an arena can lead to real strategic choices.

Nuclear Throne is like an F1 Racer where you can play so fast and so hard and so aggressively that you can blow yourself to bits if you don’t know how to control yourself. The only bad thing about Nuclear Throne is I DESPERATELY WANT TO GIVE YOU MORE MONEY FOR AN EXPANSION PACK WHY — WHY WON’T YOU DO THIS TO ME I LOVE THIS GAME SO MUCH

Games I Played in 2016 that I have like… a thought about?

Downwell: I wish this game had more to it because it was great until I beat hard with every style and then it was boring. :(

Super Mario Galaxy: This game was way less good than people lead me to believe though I guess it was alright.

Enter the Gungeon: I now know its not the worst games that make me the maddest but the games that brush so close with greatness

Battle Garegga: I don’t know why I’m still trying to learn this game

Battle Arena Toshinden on the Gameboy: This game is stupidly fun for no reason and has a great ringout mechanic

Pokemon Go: I haven’t played this in a month and I feel like a weight was lifted off my shoulders. Actually maybe what makes me the maddest is successful games with REAAAAALLY talentless game designers?

Mario Run: Like… this was pretty good? More levels pls?

Besiege: I hooked my joystick and a mod to it and then I made an airplane with proper control surfaces and tried to beat every stage with it despite the awkwardness in trying to do so and mostly just ended up crashing over and over again. 10/10

Owlia: An actual NES game to play on my actual NES! Was a real sweet, cute game with just a few dumb puzzles that made me mad.

Pico-8: This is my new ‘happy wheels’ and I really should make something on it.

Big Sky Troopers: This game is also like EVO in that its complete horse shit only I still liked it in fact it’s more EVO than EVO because its EVEN MORE HORSEHIT but something was charming about it and I finished it because I’m dumb?

Glittermitten Grove: I like fairies okay