image from Numista |
Hey Joe Lieberman, here's something for the ferryman when you board the boat waiting on the shore of the river Styx. I hear he loves video games... I'm sure the two of you will have plenty to talk about on your way to Tartarus.
image from Numista |
Hey Joe Lieberman, here's something for the ferryman when you board the boat waiting on the shore of the river Styx. I hear he loves video games... I'm sure the two of you will have plenty to talk about on your way to Tartarus.
Buy up all the third party developers, then kill your video game brand! Oh, the stupidity! |
When you've been in the hobby for as long as I have, you start noticing industry behaviors with predictable outcomes. For instance, when a major game console takes a major price dive, chances are high that the company who made it is already planning to give it the old heave-ho. By way of example, there's the hundred dollar Dreamcast in 2001, the hundred dollar GameCube in 2004, and this, right now.
I bought the budget model of this system, which was already experiencing its own steep price drops. Given the currently dim fortunes of the Xbox brand (and grumbling from third parties who are openly wishing they'd just axe the damn thing and get it over with already), I'm glad I chose to pinch pennies. Who wants to pay five hundred dollars for a game system that's destined to surf on the lip of a two figure price tag a year later?
I'm less glad that I paid $120 for a memory card, when they'll probably tumble to a fraction of that price at Best Buy in three months. Don't think I don't remember what happened with the Playstation Vita's stupidly expensive proprietary storage!
By the way, I remember Chris Kohler, one of the major figures of the second wave of video game fanzines, sharing an anecdote about Trip Hawkins in a feature he wrote for Wired years later. (Yeah, some people actually get paid for doing this "video game journalism" shit. It's increasingly infrequent, and comes with the risk of literally being lynched by GamerGaters, but it happens.)
"I told him that a friend (editor's note: me) bought a 3DO a few years after it launched for $25, and his face just dropped. It was the same face I would have made if I had bought the latest Final Fantasy game and found a copy of Army Men in the box."
The Switch emulator Yuzu was recently taken offline, after a legal battle with Nintendo that Yuzu's creators Tropic Haze realized they couldn't possibly win. I'm ambivalent about the news. Generally, I'm reluctant to emulate games for a system that's still actively supported... with digital game prices as low as they are, and with hardware demands as high as they are for emulating recent game systems, it's kind of pointless.
However, the Switch isn't going to be supported by Nintendo forever. Then what? What happens to those games when the system gets orphaned? What happens when the servers holding the games are shut down and you can no longer download them? What happens when the systems themselves begin to deteriorate and can no longer play games without extensive repair work... work that Nintendo itself won't do, and the average user cannot do?
Nintendo's solution for customers is to just wait for Nintendo to release the games again on a more modern system. And wait we do, for years or even decades, until those coveted titles are released at Nintendo's leisure, for its own hardware, on its own terms. If you're lucky, maybe you'll be able to buy the game you wanted twenty years after its debut. If you're less fortunate, maybe Nintendo will let you borrow the game from its online service, as long as you keep paying the subscription fee. If you're not lucky at all, you won't get it at all... as fans of the Mother/Earthbound series will attest.
The lion's share of Donkey Kong ports back in the day sucked big Donkey DONG. The Intellivision port is an especially tragic example. (image from My Brain on Games) |
Everybody's been a victim of Nintendo's fickle and arrogant nature at some point. Personally, I had to wait thirty-six years for Nintendo to put its seal of approval on a worthwhile home version of the arcade game Donkey Kong. Yes, there were home versions including one for the NES, but thanks to the limitations of consumer technology in the early 1980s, none of these were arcade perfect... and very few came anywhere near that standard. Even the Donkey Kong port for Nintendo's own game system came up lacking. (That sure is a funny way to celebrate the game that built your brand, by pissing out a conversion with a quarter of the content removed.)
Eventually, after spin-offs on the Game Boy and shiny CGI platformers on the Super NES and god knows how many regurgitations of NES Donkey Kong on other systems, Nintendo finally got around to giving us the actual arcade version of Donkey Kong, with no compromises and no annoying strings attached.* This took them thirty-six years. I was a child when Donkey Kong debuted in arcades. I was a bitter forty-something by the time I could legally enjoy that experience at home. I went from freckles to liver spots in the time it took Nintendo to give us a Donkey Kong that actually was Donkey Kong.
For the sake of game preservation, some people just won't wait for Nintendo to part the clouds and shine its digital blessings down upon the world. Recently, there was a Virtual Boy emulator released for the Nintendo 3DS, the only system with a realistic chance of replicating the Virtual Boy's unique 3D display. For the record, Red Viper recreates the experience quite well... but the record must also state that for the nine years it was actively supported, the 3DS was never given an official Virtual Boy emulator.
Nintendo had a golden opportunity to preserve that moment in gaming history for future generations. Because it wasn't an especially flattering moment for them, they simply ignored it... and we're supposed to do the same for the sake of respecting copyright law? If Nintendo won't give its customers fair and reasonable access to its past work, someone else must.
* There's a port of the arcade Donkey Kong in Donkey Kong 64, but the steps for unlocking it reads like the twelve labors of Hercules. Just... just give me the damn thing. What the hell, Rare?
** It was twenty! Twenty years since Ninja 5-0 was released! That comedian on YouTube was right; time sucks.
Someone just released a Virtual Boy emulator for the Nintendo 3DS, the system where it makes the most sense. I just tested it out earlier today, and let me tell you, it's GOOD. Okay, the touch-based file menu really stinks, but the games run at full speed and adapt themselves extremely well to the system's 3D hardware. Why Nintendo didn't officially give us Virtual Boy games on this hardware is a complete mystery. Talk about a missed opportunity.
"Oh no, Xbox Series!" |
Poor, poor Microsoft. All the money in the world and you still couldn't buy a clue. Anything Phil Spencer says in next week's press conference will only serve to confirm gamers' suspicions that the Xbox brand has been dead in the water for years, since Don Mattrick's fateful decision in 2013 to turn the Xbox One into a consumer-hostile Pandora's Box of DRM and surveillance nightmares.
No game system could recover from that, and although the Xbox Series is certainly a better console than what had come before it, it was doomed by its manufacturer's past mistakes and hubris, just as Sega's Dreamcast was in 2001, and Nintendo's Wii U was in 2017. Yet again, I'm stuck with an abandoned game system, an underdog of the console wars that was run over by its competitors, then scraped off the road and deposited into a shallow grave by its owner.
You'd think I would learn by now. At least I'll have the foresight to scoop up all the heavily discounted Xbox Series accessories I couldn't afford when the system was still actively supported. And I could always segue into PC gaming, where your fate as a gamer is not so heavily dependent on brand loyalty. If I buy the wrong video card, I lose a little performance... no big deal. If I buy the wrong game system, I lose key exclusives, and depending on how badly the machine sells, may not play much of anything for a couple of years. (And let me tell you, the Saturn and Dreamcast were some dry, dry years.)
I'll live. I'll just have to adapt, and right now, PC gaming seems like the right path to take. (Besides, all the home game systems are barely disguised computers anyway.)
Imagine dragons. With Swedish accents. (from Fandom. Skyrim's fandom, I guess.) |
I know video games don't come with instruction manuals anymore (hell, if the rumors are true, video games won't have physical anything in another year...), but I've been playing Skyrim on the Switch, and that game is too damn meaty to not have one. I feel like it should have come with an operator's guide thick enough to be in Knight Rider's glove compartment. Mechanically, this game is as encumbered as your character will be after picking up everything you see on your Nordic-tracked adventures. "Troll fat? Sure, you never know when you'll need it. Wouldn't want to be left empty-handed at a sudden troll barbecue."
I'm enjoying it, though. I'm enjoying it a lot more for the ten dollars I paid at a pawn shop than I would have if I paid the full retail price of sixty bucks. For Skyrim. Yes, it's a good game with nearly infinite playability, and it suffers very little from the problems that often plague demanding titles on the Switch (see also Mortal Kombat 1 and that Batman Arkham collection), but dude, it's thirteen years old. Damn, Bethesda, stop milking it. And don't make me pay no sixteen dollars- the sale price!- for the Anniversary Edition that steps up the graphics. It's a Switch. Half the caves are too dark to see anything. I'm not slipping you sixteen skins for high-definition cave darkness.
Man, I don't even know what to do with this dusty old blog anymore. I don't think I updated at all on November, and nearly ignored the blog this month as well. However, it felt right to post something before the end of the year, so here it is. Don't expect anything too organized... I'm just going to prattle on about a handful of games I've been playing lately.
First on the menu is Yooka-Laylee. I grabbed a copy of this for the Switch when the price dropped to three dollars, and it certainly is... a game I've been playing. From the mismatched power couple who serve as the heroes to the inanimate objects with buggy eyes to the referential jokes with all the subtlety of a lead pipe to the back of the skull, Yooka-Laylee's intentions are clear. It wants to bring back the vibe of the European platformers popular on the Nintendo 64 in the late 1990s, but it concentrates way too much on window dressing while leaving the core of the gameplay unrefined.
And there are minecart races, because you DEFINITELY wanted to relive those little nightmares. (image from New Game Network) | |
You'll get your three dollars' worth out of Yooka-Laylee just from bumbling through the stages and collecting hidden whatzits, but this is the Switch. There's no end of top-tier platformers on this system, and playing this clumsy 1990s throwback feels like slumming when you've got Kirby and the Forgotten Land and a million Mario games at your fingertips.
Speaking of Kirby and the Forgotten Land, I picked that up in a recent sale, and was quite pleased with it. There was a lot of early hype about this being an open world game, but calling it "open world" is as much of a stretch as Kirby trying to get his mouth around a rusty Volkswagen. The stages are typically wide hallways, granting the pink puffball some lateral movement but little room to explore the environment. You'll find the occasional fork in the road or a path hidden behind some debris, but beyond that Forgotten Land is only slightly less linear than a traditional Kirby game. (Not that I'm complaining after playing Yooka-Laylee.)
The enemies d'jour in Forgotten Land are Woofos, corgis at their most adorably deadly. (image from Nintendo EVERYTHING!!!) |
Beyond the faintly open world gameplay and the most optimistic post-apocalyptic setting you've ever seen in a video game, it's business as usual for the Kirby series. Forgotten Land offers a perfect balance between light, breezy fun and a wealth of content... there are tons of goodies to collect and an abundance of distinct stages to visit, but there's never so much on your plate that you feel overwhelmed, and everything's clear enough that you're rarely left feeling confused and frustrated (looking at you, Yooka-Laylee).
Finally, there's Street Fighter 6. Capcom bunted with the last Street Fighter game, but this feels like a swing for the fences, with a story mode that feels like a game in and of itself, rather than a bunch of versus matches sandwiched between exposition (sorry, Mortal Kombat 11). Plenty of reviewers have compared the World Tour to Sega's Yakuza series, and it's hard not to notice the similarities when you're hoofing it through Metro City, finishing silly fetch quests and scrounging money and items from any thug stupid enough to cross paths with you.
The big difference is that while Yakuza's combat mechanics were only pretty good, Street Fighter 6's fights play like a standard game of Street Fighter, which makes them damn near perfect. As you advance, you'll meet Street Fighter legends and learn both their stances and signature moves, eventually turning your character into a patchwork quilt of martial arts mastery. It's frustratingly limited when the game starts and you're stuck with the move set of the aggressively generic Luke, but the range of your abilities expands as you visit new countries and meet the fighters who live there. Pretty soon you'll have a terrifying Frankenstein's monster of a fighter, sewn together from the body parts of past Street Fighter champions.
And oh yeah, the actual versus fights are spiffy too, although they practically feel like bonus content next to the meaty story mode. Street Fighter 6 dumps the V modes of Street Fighter 5 into the trash where they belong, and replaces them with the vastly superior drive gauge. The drive gauge works a bit like stamina in a Dark Souls game... it's a bar that depletes when you use special techniques like boosting the power of a special move, but refills when you leave it alone. Use it too much and you could drain it completely, leaving you vulnerable and potentially helpless. It's up to you to use the drive gauge effectively but S-P-A-R-I-N-G-L-Y, so you're shattering turtles with the block-breaking Drive Impacts and doling out bonus damage, but not exhausting yourself and getting caught with your pants down. It's a compelling play mechanic and one of the most monumental we've seen in a Street Fighter game since the supers in Super Street Fighter II Turbo. Don't be surprised if the Drive Gauge sticks with the Street Fighter series for a few sequels.
A playing card reject with an unhealthy addiction to steroids. Just what I always wanted in a Street Fighter game! (image from Capcom) |
It has become apparent that I'm entirely too high to finish the rest of this review, so I'll just conclude by saying that Street Fighter 6 is the very best Street Fighter has been in years. Years! Kudos, Capcom. Way to catch up to Mortal Kombat after nearly a decade of eating its dust.
* Okay, so I mixed him up with the other guy from Street Fighter 5, another lame-tastic lamie from the land of lame fighting game characters. Shit, you might as well bring back Angus from Kasumi Ninja, complete with great balls of fire that erupt from his lifted kilt.