Under the Wire

I keep telling myself that I'm going to make one more blog post to wrap up August, and I keep not doing it. Sorry folks... I'm just incredibly unmotivated right now. It's like my get up and go got up and took a plane to Siberia.

When not in the middle of a creative coma, I've been chipping away at the games on my Xbox One. I gave Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon another chance, and it turns out that it's not too bad when you actually know what you're doing. The game utterly creamed me when I first played it four years ago, but now that I've spent some time with Far Cry 4 and the similar Horizon Zero Dawn it doesn't feel quite so overwhelming. On the down side, now that I've played those two games, this one feels more limited, with a smaller selection of enemies and less stuff to do. I'd call it "Baby's First Far Cry," except there are so many reasons a baby shouldn't be playing this...

I also finished Double Dragon Neon after a few hours of dedicated play. This game got a royal reaming from some members of the gaming press, and I can understand why... for all its references to the characters and situations in the first two games, it doesn't feel much like Double Dragon. The combat is more technical, leaning on a "gleam" play mechanic that temporarily boosts your strength after successfully dodging an attack, and it borrows from a lot of other beat 'em ups. For instance, I'm pretty sure I saw those jet pack guys in Streets of Rage 2, except they're not actually guys here...

An authentic Double Dragon experience it's not, but Neon has a lot of heart. I love the retro aesthetic, Billy and Jimmy's re-imagining as bone-headed surfer dudes, and the new villain, who has absolutely nothing to do with Double Dragon but nevertheless fits as a tribute to the impossibly inept antagonists from countless 1980s cartoons. It's not game of the year or even game of the month material, but it was worth the hard drive space and the three hours it took to beat it.

One nostalgic throwback that didn't sit so well with me was Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two. It's not just because of the lead character, but that's a big part of it. Frankly, I loathe Mickey Mouse... he's a dated relic, and a poster boy for the broken copyright laws in this country. If it weren't for this big-eared, squeaky-voiced rat, books and films would fall into the public domain where they belong, rather than being held under lock and key by conniving corporations for over a century. It's a given that Mickey is the game's lead character, and that would almost be tolerable, but Disney went that extra mile and branded everything in the game with his face. Currency, collectible items, the icons that stream out of enemies after you've slathered them with brain-washing paint... EVERYTHING. I can't say I look forward to eight hours of that miserable rodent tattooed on my eyeballs.

Beyond that, Epic Mickey just isn't that great a game. Its objectives are surprisingly obtuse... I couldn't get past the first stage until I looked up a solution on the internet. The gameplay switches from 2D to 3D and back, so sometimes you'll be playing Disney-branded Little Big Planet and sometimes you'll be playing an even more disappointing Super Mario Sunshine, with paint thinner replacing Mario's water tank. Oswald the Lucky Rabbit is the most aggressively annoying video game sidekick ever, constantly getting underfoot and talking in the same grating voice Frank Welker used for the hatchling chickens on Garfield and Friends. Reviewers have complained about Epic Mickey 2's poor camera controls, but personally, I thought it was a relatively minor flaw next to all of the game's other big, big issues.

So yeah, that's two pretty good games, and one regrettable one. Considering that I didn't pay for any of them beyond what I already spent on my Game Pass and Xbox Live Gold subscriptions, I can't complain. Too much, anyway.