The Ifrit is playing with fire…
Final Fantasy XII on the PS2 brought a fantasy world to life, a world that you could lose yourself in almost endlessly. From the moment that Final Fantasy theme starts playing on the title screen, you’d know you were in for something epic and amazing. If it weren’t for the fact that I need to attend to things in real life, I could otherwise be completely lost in Ivalice going on Hunts and fighting some Archadian Imperials.
The move to first person is a bold step in the continuation of the series, amplifying the combat without exceeding the extent to which it was emphasized in the 2D games (by which I mean, not very much at all), and while Metroid Prime is much more linear than Super Metroid and other 2D titles, the progression is entwined with the immersion of exploring a detail oriented world. As such, Metroid Prime offers a whole new perspective on how Metroid games can be played, literally.
I still can’t believe this was a game shown at E3. There are many other places where something like this belongs. A couple that I can think of include the Walmart bargain bin, maybe E3 2009 when zombie games were somewhat relevant (and also when the graphics could be taken more seriously), or in Steam’s Early Access titles.
I originally had a whole post written out for this from my old blog, but it’s terrible. I’ve copied over my other posts from my old blog to here, and a couple of them still carry some of the issues I’ve had in my original Zero Mission post, but at least those posts had some form to them. The Zero Mission post was just a complete mess, so it’s only fitting that this post on Zero Mission, a game that completely revises the original game, is a complete revision of my original post on it as well.
With Metroid Fusion and Metroid Prime’s success, the way was clear for new Metroid games to be released. As Retro Studios worked on making my favorite Metroid Prime game ever, Sakamoto and Nintendo took on a pretty big task: Remaking the original Metroid game. The original Metroid is, without any doubt, a pretty amazing title for its time and unlike anything that came before it. It is pretty much the foundation of the games to follow, with its core concept of being a crossover of Mario’s platforming with Zelda’s exploration, and depending on utility based items to progress through a pretty open ended environment. However, by today’s standards, the controls are limited and stiff, a lot of the enemies are too difficult or impossible to avoid, some of the platforming challenges are ridiculous (like the vertical room after defeating Kraid), and it is very easy to find yourself lost in the game’s labyrinth of rooms that look nearly identical to each other.
With the game’s twentieth anniversary a couple years away, and with all the advancements made through the previous Metroid titles, it seemed like this was a great time to go back and breathe new life into what was a pretty antiquated title, and boy did Nintendo do just that. Metroid: Zero Mission pretty much improves the original in nearly every way, as it acts as a complete revision of the original title. The game puts a pretty big spin on the original game, though, acting as a retelling of the original’s story as an origin story for Samus Aran. As such, some people are turned off by the change in the game’s aesthetic, as Zero Mission is far more upbeat and action packed than the original, but I don’t really see how the changes undermine the game as a Metroid title. Continue reading “Metroid: Zero Mission”
Full disclosure: Yes, I am biased here because two new Metroid games were announced, and Metroid is my most favorite franchise. Sue me.
This was a ridiculously exciting day. I don’t even know how to begin writing this post. This whole E3 up until now has really only been “meh.” Sure, there were a couple really cool announcements here and there, but no conference left me with that “one after another” feel of excitement. Then Nintendo’s conference came up, and each game they showed in the Switch Direct seemed pretty fun. Then they announced Metroid Prime 4, and it all went uphill from there. New Yoshi game, new Kirby game, more Fire Emblem Warriors if you’re into that, a new Pokemon announced… And that was just the Nintendo Spotlight on the Switch games coming out. I almost left during the Treehouse stream to grab lunch, only to lose my marbles over another Metroid announcement for the 3DS! How could anybody else top this?
I have to preface this post with the following: I watched Nintendo’s conference today. I do not think I have been this excited over a Nintendo conference in a long time. It was so amazing to me that it has basically dwarfed every other conference by comparison, even Ubisoft’s with their crazy reveal of a second Beyond Good and Evil game. All day, I just wanted to live and breathe the hype over not just one, but two reveals for new Metroid games. I did not want to bother with Day 3 because pretty much all the excitement from it is gone. Of course, I am biased as hell because Metroid is my favorite franchise, but one surely must understand where I am coming from here. That being said, I will not skip this boring Day at E3, Ubisoft conference aside. I probably won’t go on for as long as my previous posts, but I’ll try my best to cover the stuff I found pretty major.
For Day 3, to my complete shock, Ubisoft stole the day from Sony for me. During Sony’s conference, I just kept waiting and waiting for the big guns to drop, and I will say that the Shadow of the Colossus remake was indeed pretty exciting, but after that, I was not too amazed by anything. Meanwhile, over at Ubisoft, I more or less found half the games at least appear to be fun, actually. I told my friends and the people I speak to on Discord that I wished I was joking when I said I thought Ubisoft had a better conference, especially considering that I had just recently purchased a PS4. From the Ubisoft conference, I was able to name at least five games that I thought actually seemed fun off the top of my head. In every other conference up to the Sony one, I was struggling to remember as many.
Continue reading “E3 Day 3: Ubisoft Drops an Insane Announcement While Sony Loses Steam”
Is it bad to say that I was more hyped by the EA conference than the Microsoft one? I guess, if you’ve been waiting on “Project Scorpio” to be revealed, you might be finally happy despite the $500 price-tag. Maybe if you are a fan of the Crackdown series, you are probably hyped by this miraculous new entry to the series. For me, though, I don’t know. Surely, there were a couple of great announcements, like the sequel to Ori and the Blind Forest, even though I’ve never played the first game and absolutely should. EA actually delivered with the Anthem gameplay, which looks pretty cool but also a lot like Destiny, which puts me on edge a bit. The new Assassin’s Creed also looks hilarious, but hey, it actually catches my attention as Black Flag did. And speaking of pirates, Sea of Thieves is looking decent, though that game has been in development for so long, who knows if this game will actually come out. So I guess the Microsoft conference wasn’t all bad, or even bad at all, it just wasn’t all that exciting I guess.
And as for Bethesda, I wasn’t really expecting anything, but this conference was still not a good look. Wolfenstein 2 and The Evil Within 2 look okay, but between having pretty much nothing else to show at their conference and announcing another paid mods system, I don’t think people are too happy with them at the moment.
My EA post was so lengthy and centered around EA that it seemed odd to tack on this trailer at the end of it. In fact, I had no idea this trailer even came out until I was in the midst of writing the EA post today.
Unfortunately, there is still not a whole lot to be gleaned from these trailers, in typical Square Enix fashion. It’s nice to see that the Hercules world is finally being fleshed out beyond the arena and the underworld. Judging by everything I can tell on the screen, it looks like this game will play a lot like Birth By Sleep. The Shot-Lock system and Birth By Sleep’s limit breaks, at the very least, appear in this trailer, though I’m not sure if any of this is actually new information. It also seems like world-specific characters, like Hercules in this trailer, will be in your party in addition to having Donald and Goofy, rather than replacing one of them, so that’s neat.
I have little idea of what’s going on in the trailer in terms of story, though, and that isn’t just because I haven’t played a Kingdom Hearts game in a criminally long time. I have no idea what this “black box” thing is that Maleficent is talking about. I have a slight idea of what that encounter with Xemnas was about, but it seems pretty self-explanatory from that scene. I just find it funny that, at the end of this trailer, there’s a “release date” for their next trailer. Is this really what it’s come to for Kingdom Hearts 3? Hopefully we’ll see more when that date comes along. I have a feeling that, for now, this is all we’re going to see of this game at this time, unless Square Enix decides to replay this trailer at E3.
Well isn’t that a surprise. Am I high on something or am I dreaming? Now granted, there were still some moments about this press conference that made me sigh and wish they’d just press on. Who are the Men in Blazers? Not to mention the whole, “Hey it’s a new IP from BioWare but you’re gonna have to see more at Microsoft!” reeked of somewhat obvious corporate compromises with Microsoft to keep Anthem (I actually forgot what the game was even called for a moment) an Xbox exclusive. Still, despite that it’s EA, the quintessential caricature of the big bad corporation in the gaming industry, and despite that I got a little more sportsball than I would’ve liked, this press conference wasn’t actually all that bad at all. Am I going crazy here?
So before the conference began, I just had three major questions in mind:
As I mentioned in my previous post, I hadn’t followed any real sort of gaming news in months, hence why I didn’t really have many substantial questions to ask EA (hypothetically) before the conference started. I also hoped, for some reason, that they would at least go easy on the sports stuff, but every year I feel the same way and only now have I realized that I am making some pretty ridiculous expectations out of EA with regards to this. EA is like the sports game publisher, I am fairly certain every major title in the sports genre out there is published by EA. Still, it would have been nice to have seen more of other stuff like Anthem and their EA Originals title, Fe, which was announced last year.
Continue reading “E3 Day 1: EA’s Least Cringeworthy Press Conference in Years”
If I am being completely honest, I have only the faintest idea what to expect at E3 this year. I haven’t really followed any gaming news for a few months now. The only two companies I’ve kept my eye on lately are Square Enix and Nintendo, and even then, it is only for a few specific titles (Metroid and Final Fantasy). That being said, I’d like to take a moment to discuss what I believe may be at E3, regardless of what little I know about the most current announcements to date.
Every year, the rumors run all over the place just before E3. Because I have kept myself pretty limited to Metroid and Final Fantasy, though, I have not seen much of anything apart from the leak of Dissidia NT, which Square Enix shortly announced officially anyway. The Metroid rumor-mill has been almost barren except for this notion that there are going to be two games somehow announced at E3. More specifically, the idea is that one new game will be a Prime game from Retro Studios, and the other will be a new 2D game. The problem is, I have no idea who said anything about a 2D game though. To be fair, I haven’t really bothered looking for that info, but as a close follower of different facets in the Metroid community, I have yet to see any rumor as detailed or even outlandish as some of the stuff I’ve seen in the past E3 events. As for the rumor of a Prime game from Retro, this is just the same stuff that’s been circulating for at least a couple years now, as that’s how long I think it’s been since it was first announced that Retro Studios is working on a new game. Maybe, after Federation Force’s release last year, people have given up teasing the Metroid community and lost all hope for us, and that is why there haven’t been many rumors out lately.
I pretty much doubt the possibility of any Metroid news at E3. Maybe the franchise will be mentioned in a one-off interview, given some vague statements like, “Talk to us in a year,” and quickly forgotten afterward. As far as Nintendo is concerned, I am guessing the following will be discussed:
Super Mario Odyssey: I guarantee this one. It’s Mario, on the Switch. Looks about as good as any other Mario game released on a Nintendo console. I am actually interested in seeing more of this one in particular, though, since it’s the first 3D Mario game to play like Super Mario 64 since Super Mario Sunshine, according to Nintendo. I would say since Super Mario Galaxy 2, but I haven’t actually played the Super Mario Galaxy games. Whatever the case, I am thoroughly in love with Super Mario Sunshine and how it plays, so even though I do not plan on owning a Switch any time soon, I cannot wait to see more of Super Mario Odyssey.
The Mario and Rabbids Crossover: We have all seen the leak, and while I guess anything is possible (by which I mean, maybe Nintendo won’t mention it at E3), I doubt E3 is just going to pass by without any mention of this game. It looks as cringeworthy as you could imagine. People are saying this game is supposed to be some sort of turn based RPG, I guess maybe citing rumors. I honestly have no idea what to make of this game.
Pokemon: I know there was just a Direct done about this, and I know it was underwhelming to say the least. I am unsure of the possibility of another mid gen title being announced for the Switch after Ultra Moon and Ultra Sun were just announced. My best guess for this is that Treehouse is just gonna show up playing souped up versions of the same exact game they were playing at last year’s E3 in the five minutes that actually wasn’t about Zelda.
Splatoon 2: It’s Splatoon, on the Switch. It’s coming out in 2017. Water is also wet, by the way.
Fire Emblem Warriors: I guess the latest trend at Nintendo now is to make a Dynasty Warriors title for each of their major franchises. This game will probably feature the entire cast of Awakening, Fates, along with Marth, and maybe Lyn or Roy. Only a matter of time before Super Mario Warriors comes up next, I suppose.
Fire Emblem 16: The Fire Emblem Direct in January announced that a new Fire Emblem for the Switch is in the works. Maybe we’ll actually see that at E3 this year?
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: Again? Yes, again. As if we didn’t have enough of this game last year, which was almost completely dedicated to talking about this one game, I think it is very likely we will get some talks on DLC for this game. I can only hope the Treehouse isn’t playing this game again, but I wouldn’t hold it past Nintendo to bring back this game that people are already playing.
Assorted Myriad of 3rd Party Titles: Every conference has to have its filler, right? At least Bloodstained looks like it’ll be on there, although I’m pretty sure that’s a multiplatform game. Nonetheless, if Igarashi comes out on Nintendo’s stage and even talks about Metroid in any matter, I will go crazy.
I think there may be a bit more discussed at Nintendo’s share of E3 than listed here. The more I list stuff, though, the more it starts to dawn on me how unlikely it will be to get a new Metroid game announced. It’s depressing, but not exactly something new to this year’s E3.
While I don’t see a press conference for Square Enix specifically in the schedule, I think they will come up during Sony’s press conference. As much as I would love to see an announced date for Kingdom Hearts 3 and some actual concrete information on what exactly is going on with the Final Fantasy 7 Remake, or even some kind of announcement of a game to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the series, I have a feeling we’re just going to see more of Dissidia NT and Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age. While I don’t have any problem with more Final Fantasy XII, because that game is the most amazing game they have ever made, it just kinda sucks that this is pretty much exactly what one could expect out of Square Enix at E3, as they pretty much do this every year. Oh well, maybe at Tokyo Game Show 2017.
So apart from Nintendo and Square Enix, I really have no idea what to expect from anyone else at E3. Sony and Microsoft may talk about their “mid gen consoles,” but apart from that, I have no clue. Granted, Microsoft may cancel another set of games lined up at this year’s E3, so I would just take anything they announce there with a grain of salt. Yes, even Halo 6. Actually, I have heard that Microsoft isn’t going to announce “Halo 6,” but instead some other Halo game or something will be there. I am guessing it will be either Halo Wars 3, or the Halo TV show that’ll probably flop. You tell me.
Anyway, I will not be busy during the E3 press conferences. I do have something going on during Ubisoft’s press conference, but that is okay because their new logo looks like a top-down view of the poop emoji. I’ll just have to catch their conference after the fact. Otherwise, I plan to be on top of my game here during E3, as it is always a good way to get the ball rolling on new posts. Stay tuned.
Note: Formatting and images to be implemented Soon™.
Okay, so here’s a New Year’s resolution from me: Play more games that have been released in the current year. The majority of the games I played this year pretty much consisted of Smash Bros, Left 4 Dead 2, World of Warcraft, and Overwatch, with some Fire Emblem Fates on the side. As such, I only have a tiny little Top Three list to come up with. Meanwhile, people have already burned through Final Fantasy XV, have played through the new Doom, have played a whole bunch of indie games that came out this year, they have their top ten lists all planned out throughout the year, and here I am just fumbling for three picks. It’s also hard to stay engaged with current discussions on games when I don’t know more than half the games people are talking about.
Another New Year’s resolution from me is to actually write consistently again. Right now, I am about to finish Deus Ex; after that’s finished, I will start playing Metroid Prime to continue the Metroid Retrospective. As I mentioned months ago, I intend on focusing solely on the Metroid games for the coming weeks so that I can finish those posts as soon as possible. After that is finished, I might review Final Fantasy XV, but that is a huge beast of a game to play through and discuss every fine point. If I had more time, I would be more certain, but no promises for now.
Now, without further ado, here are my top three games of 2016. Hopefully next year I’ll have a top ten:
The Steam page offers it all: politics, action, futurism, booze, and, of course, waifus. While some may not believe it, I didn’t buy this game for the “waifus” even though I thought it really was a dating simulator. Hilariously, the game itself delivers nothing in the sense of a dating simulator, in favor of something far greater. The main gameplay mechanic, making the drinks for Jill’s customers, is almost borderline repetitive, and bears little challenge to really get through the game. The game’s story almost tethers on the brink of nothing happening. Most importantly, a bunch of hardcore nerds seeking new waifus to court were left in the dust.
How could this game receive a very shiny bronze medal for Best Game of 2016 despite all of the above? Well, for one thing, this game wins Greatest Bamboozlement of 2016, for not only completely pulling the rug right under the waifu scheme, but taking that and transforming it into a series of meaningful interactions with actual characters who are not just defined by one trait. At face value, it seems like the game has all the quintessential waifu tropes laid out for that kind of audience, but when you actually play the game, you realize this is way out of that audience’s field. The big-breasted hacker lady who talks about men a lot isn’t actually all that promiscuous and actually has her relationship views tied into a family dilemma. The furry-appeal character is actually self-conscious about her missing eye and her cat ears, which have a reason based on lore that sheds light on the state of the world around the characters. The character that’s literally a lolicon sex robot is overly literal, then suddenly has a moment of existential crisis when contemplating sharing a consciousness with other robots in her model line (Forgive me, Valhalla fans, if some of the details are a bit off, but I believe them to be close). The characters are almost never exactly what you expect every time you interact with them, unlike certain characters who drone over and over about pickles or money.
Another prop to this game would be its restraint from providing explanations the moment something arises. You won’t find out about how a character suddenly had a change of outlook on life until several days after you’ve last seen them. Jill’s co-worker Gill (can I take a moment to mention the simple fact that there are two characters with almost the exact same name and design? I love how cheeky this game is) never gives a reason as to why people say he has a “John face,” and you only get a hint of it later on through someone else. Some things go completely unexplained and that’s OK. I’m still not even sure how the cat-eared girl, Stella, lost her eye in the first place (though I might’ve missed an obvious statement about it).
The more I go on about the game’s story, the riskier it gets for me to refrain from spoilers, which should not be in a top picks list. So I’ll leave the game’s story at the point that the characters are, for the most part, awesome and have several qualities, dreams, regrets, fears… you know, things that make them people. Not just money, certainly not pickles. Not to mention that the world surrounding these characters is pretty well fleshed out through optional reading stuff between shifts.
I did say the gameplay feels repetitive, but it’s in a way that feels relaxing. Kind of hard to explain why, I guess it may be since the actual mechanic you actively control (mixing drinks) is simple and doesn’t take a long time to complete each time. Plus the game mixes things up (get it?) by throwing in a mini-game every once in a while, and these mini-games — from what I can remember — interact with how the characters are developed in the story. For example, there is a truth or dare mini-game where you get to learn more about other characters depending on who you pick. It’s as simple as that, and still very few games pull off characterization like this.
I don’t know what more to say about Valhalla without going into full-review mode, which I definitely don’t feel like doing. As I couldn’t stress enough already, Valhalla is a game that loves its characters, and if you have more patience with games than getting anxious to start playing during a deathmatch respawn, you’ll love them too. The art and the soundtrack are pretty sweet, too, and the game offers different endings depending on how you serve drinks to Jill’s clients (along with acute dialogue changes). Plus the game even says before you start it, “Grab some snacks, relax, and enjoy!” before you start playing, how polite!
After saying just about everything I could’ve imagined to say in my AM2R review, I think there’s very little else for me to go without retreading all that stuff. I love this game so much, though, that I’ll do it anyway. AM2R is everything I could’ve wanted in a Metroid game, to the best of its ability (given the source material). As a remake of Metroid II, it does nearly everything flawlessly, missing pretty much no notes from the original and expanding on the tiniest details in a way that takes the once black and white, sixteen-bit world of SR388 and makes it a living environment. As a Metroid game, it strikes a balance between various means of progression, fun and challenging boss fights, and alien (sometimes outright hostile) atmosphere.
At a casual level, this game is the tits. Want to just roam around SR388 basking in the atmosphere? The detailed environments of each zone offer a variety of unique locales just for you! At a challenger’s level, this game is the tits. Each zone has more than one way of approaching them. Not all bosses have multiple strategies, but several offer more than one method of taking them down. You can deal with the extreme bullet-hell that is The Tester in order to get a potentially better speedrun in the world records, or you can just go for a power bomb, drop a couple on the boss, and it’s dead.
Then not to mention that the Queen’s lair is simply amazing. The zone just oozes with intense alien atmosphere that is so badass your eyes just melt into the pleasure receptors of your brain while your ears quiver to one fantastic remix of an atmospheric track after another, coming to an end of extreme fanboner ecstasy when you drop a power bomb inside the Queen and blow her up into gory pieces. I keep a save just to play that section a hundred times per day. It’s that good.
As if AM2R wasn’t incredible enough already as it is, adding further to that is the fact that this is a fan game. Meanwhile, off in the deranged realm of Nintendoland that’s turned into a nightmare more twisted than the most Lovecraftian eldritch horror-world one could think of, Nintendo has churned out a game that captures absolutely nothing of what makes the series what it is. In a universe of “What should’ve actually happened,” AM2R would be the game that Nintendo made for the 3DS. In a world of, “A world that’s just like our own but Nintendo is actually with the times,” Nintendo would’ve taken AM2R, claimed every right to it, put it on the eShop, and maybe compensated Doc even somewhat. In this world, though, the reality is that the game was so good, Nintendo decided to shut it down in an attempt to save the sales of Federation Force. Can you take a wild guess as to how that turned out?
While I’m on the topic of Metroidvania games, allow me to give the honorable mention before announcing the gold medalist for Best Game of 2016. The Honorable Mention goes to Momodora IV: Reverie Under the Moonlight, mostly because I didn’t play enough games from 2016 for it to show up in a top ten or even a top five list. Momodora IV, apparently unlike any other game in its series, is kind of like what would happen if Dark Souls and Metroid had a baby that had a cute Kirby-esque design makeover. Like Kirby, the 2D sidescrolling and fighting mechanics are simple but still a whole ton of fun. Like Metroid, the atmosphere is haunting and the environments are beautifully detailed (I love the design and soundtrack for Whiteleaf Memorial Park so much). Like Dark Souls, the boss encounters, while not as punishing as they are in Dark Souls, require precision in the timing of your movements and attacks.
But that’s a lot of comparing this game to other games and not enough about talking about the game as it stands itself, which may be part of why it didn’t quite make it to Top Three. Regardless of that, I can’t think of another game I’ve played where I played as a cute anime nun who could turn into a shiny golden kitty and fight with maple and tea leaves. In Momodora IV, I went against a big-breasted, giant witch of death and disease, along with fighting intense boss battles against poor church ladies who were just desperately lost without hope over how far their home kingdom had fallen to the undead. While the story is about as present as in most other Metroid games (i.e. so much in the background it hardly exists), there is still a lot to be gleaned from the environments and how you interact with the few characters that actually talk to you. Despite that I actually forgot the name and had to look it up, I will never forget the beautiful, haunting environments of Karst and how I felt several times while exploring it the sense of hopelessness the city had fallen to. That right there is a “Like Momodora” statement.
And now, without even further ado, the Best Game of 2016 Gold Medalist is…
That’s right! How could anyone not see this coming? This game is probably the Best Of on everyone’s list, and while I’d normally find that to be silly, Overwatch truly deserves it in my opinion. In a world where the FPS genre became dominated by the same old gray, cynical, mindless repeats year after year of another Call of Duty, another Battlefield, another Hoo-rah Military X Shooter, along with the occasional Halo game trying so desperately to live up to Bungie’s precedent, and not to mention that epic failure of a reboot for Star Wars: Battlefront, 2016 comes swooping in to try to say, “No! The FPS genre is not dead!” While I admit the only FPS I really played from this year was Overwatch (unless you actually want to count Federation Force), it certainly seems that with games like Overwatch, the new Doom, and maybe Devil Daggers (not sure if it released in 2016 but it seems like it), FPS can still have room for fun games.
Until Overwatch, the only FPS I continued to play year after year was Left 4 Dead 2. While this is mostly in thanks to how easy it is to mod Left 4 Dead 2 as well as the game being centered on co-op play, even just the base game of Left 4 Dead 2 is loads of fun that can still bring me to tears laughing while playing with friends to this day. No Call of Duty has captured this same joy time and time again, or any other FPS for that matter. While I have to admit that I don’t even come close to having those moments where I died laughing on Overwatch as much as in Left 4 Dead 2 (like literally died in the game because I couldn’t pay attention to what was happening), Overwatch is still a game that I pick up in the afternoon then find myself wondering how it’s 3 AM all of a sudden. The only other game I can even think of where I am constantly saying, “Just one more match,” these days is Smash Bros.
I did not expect Overwatch to even interest me that much. I wasn’t even interested at all until Blizzard had the beta for the game, where I got to play D. Va when she was first implemented. I played a couple rounds, thought, “Huh, this is actually kind of fun,” but didn’t have too much more interest than that. I don’t know what changed between then and the actual open beta just before the game’s release, but when I came back for the actual open beta, I was blown away. I hadn’t played an FPS so refreshing since BioShock Infinite, which even then was still just more of an adventure game. Multiplayer FPS didn’t interest me for many years since Halo Reach.
Enough about me though. Overwatch is colorful, energetic, offers a variety of playstyles with unique heroes to go with them, not to mention the free DLC it offers, it is incredibly casual-friendly, the game rewards you for many things without actually spoiling the player, it has some place in a competitive scene (hero techs and skills along with maps designed pretty well for various strategy, but certain technicalities still hold the game back a bit like not being able to check other teammates, server lag, etc.), and not to mention the core mechanics of how the characters play (pushing buttons that have cooldowns) in itself all help this game completely stand out from any other FPS I’ve played.
And it’s funny because it all seems so very simple– like on one hand, of course Blizzard would be the ones to come up with this game, and on the other hand, why has nobody thought of this during the great era of an FPS-dominated market during the PS3 and 360, where almost every FPS felt like an exact clone of the last one? Blizzard has added a hero system with ability cooldowns and ultimate ability charging to an otherwise unchanged system of FPS mechanics, alongside the fantastic comic-style art that I recognize them for in other games, and just like that they’ve made an FPS that has advanced the genre. Just look at Battleborn, Paladins, and that Chinese bootleg version of this game if you can’t accept it. Like, seriously, there is a Chinese bootleg of a game in 2016 because of Overwatch.
Normally I find placing too much stock in “advancing the medium” to be a really dumb and honestly terrible approach to creating or critiquing anything. People shouldn’t be making things with the intent of advancing a medium in mind, so it’s likewise silly, in my opinion, to say a game does not deserve a “Best Of” because it didn’t advance how video games are made. However, when a game like Overwatch comes along and really goes out there, I have to give credit where credit is due. I was pretty torn between Overwatch and AM2R, but I have to give it to Overwatch in the long run. Here’s to looking forward to playing Overwatch for many years still down the line as I do with Smash Bros. and Left 4 Dead 2.
It’s funny because when I look over what I’ve written here, all of these top picks seem to all have, at least in some form, a simple approach. For Valhalla, reward meaningful characterization with a game that fits the situation (Truth or Dare). With AM2R, it’s literally just make a damn 2D Metroid game. With Momodora…. Well, it seems a little more complicated than that, but the mechanics themselves are pretty simple and fun, like a Kirby game. With Overwatch, add a hero and ability system to an FPS. None of this nonsense about the US Marines but jumping in space through spaceships (Infinity Warfare), or “exploring” an art direction and gameplay direction that has nothing to do with its series’ core identity (Federation Force), or having a tremendous sprawling epic of melodrama and an overwhelming amount of over-editing to tell a story (Final Fantasy XV, though I actually kind of like it so far still).
As with anything one makes, sometimes you just have to see right through the bullshit you are needlessly throwing around in order to focus down on something that is simple for the consumer to engage with and understand, and that’s how these games ultimately made my Best Of’s for 2016. Here’s hoping to another year of fantastic games!
I’ve dropped the ball again. This has grown into a concern of mine over the past couple weeks. For one thing, I’m not writing as much as I should be, but on another hand, I’ve hardly even felt like playing games lately. My personal life (or current lack of one, to be honest) has finally caught up with me after just a few months of kicking back after work and just playing whatever games I want. I still talk to friends and moderate a chatroom for the Metroid community, but it’s not enough for me. So I started feeling down a lot and not really picking up a lot of games in general.
While this probably won’t help my personal life’s issues at all, I think I have figured out one way to solve this issue of not feeling like playing any games even though I am sitting at my computer. One of my biggest, most immediate goals post-graduation was to finish a series of retrospective posts on the Metroid series, including reviews for AM2R and Federation Force. Well, I got up to Fusion in the retrospectives, and I got my AM2R post done, and then I pretty much left it half finished. Legion was released and put a halt into pretty much every other interest.
I tried to play other games to keep things mixed up here. But ultimately, I think that I will not be satisfied until I finish what I set out to fulfill, which was to dedicate my current skills to writing articles about each Metroid game in the series. It was supposed to be my way of celebrating the series’s 30th anniversary. While I wouldn’t say I played other games all of sudden simply to force myself to write about something different, something definitely felt lacking while I was playing these other games, and every time I was playing I had this retrospective on the back of my mind, knowing that I wanted to get it done before all else.
Things around here are going to get pretty limited for hopefully just the next month or two, as I have decided to solely focus on writing about the Metroid games before all else. It’s my favorite franchise, and I feel I need to do its anniversary justice where Nintendo has clearly failed. Metroid needs this attention more than ever, especially now that the topic has been rekindled by Nintendo pulling AM2R from the 2016 Video Game Awards nominees. I’ve wasted too much time on Reddit arguing with hardcore fanboy morons who will go so far as to try and debunk the obvious fact that Federation Force lives in AM2R’s shadow, when I should’ve really been discussing the series here and detailing the exact things that has made it a wonderful franchise before the current slump it’s in. Even Other M has things to love that Federation Force completely lacks, and that’s truly pathetic. There is no greater time to truly stop and look at what actually makes a Metroid game than right now, when that understanding of the series is needed more than ever.
Metroid Prime will be the next game I look at, as it was released on the same date as Fusion and therefore places it next on the list for me to write about. I hope to get through the game this weekend, especially seeing as how it is going to be a nice, long one for me. Until then, I’ll see you next mission, Readers.
Note: Featured image source unknown
I have to be honest, I pretty much forgot about Halloween until the middle of the month, when it was too late for me to do much of anything for it. Hurricane Matthew, while it turned out to be more of a minor nuisance that day than anything, shook my attention away from my day-to-day plans and habits for about a week. Afterward, I simply forgot about Halloween until it was about a week away. I wanted to do a series throughout the month of posts on different horror games or games with any relevance to horror, and while I still plan on doing that now, those posts are going to come up throughout November. Outside of this, I didn’t even get myself a big ol’ jack-o-lantern of candy as I always do each year. Oh well, I’ll just have to do that at some point before Thanksgiving. It’s never too soon or too late to celebrate Halloween in my book.
Also, full disclosure: All of these seasonal posts are going to be casual. I don’t expect to be writing full blown reviews of games in the sense of what I did for AM2R. These are simply some impressions and accounts of my time spent playing these games.
So while I was digging through games and trying to figure out what to play, I wanted to select games that would be short in length since I want to be sure these posts don’t come too late. After all, while I certainly will celebrate Halloween at any point in the year, it’s still going to look really weird having Halloween posts on this blog in March. I could just set the date to October, but then the posts get buried beneath everything else I’ve written up until that point. So as much as I wanted to write about (and not to mention actually finish) Alien: Isolation, I’m setting it aside for another year while I write about a few other games instead.
It’s kind of funny that my first game up on the list, then, is really not a horror game at all, despite that I’m ironically tagging this post as such. Luigi’s Mansion was the first game that came to mind when I wondered what relevant game I could finish in one night. It has ghosts, it has some creepy moments, the Game Grumps played it one year for Halloween, so why not? The fact that I hadn’t actually played this game through the end any other time at all since I was ten was another motivating factor here. I’ve made attempts, but for some reason I always dropped the game after I’d get a little bit past the third or fourth Boo.
Sky Pirate's Den 