Monday, March 4, 2024

Beaten: Advance Wars (GBA)

Back in the 1980s, I had tried a few strategy games on the Commodore 64 from legendary developer Strategic Simulations Incorporated, who absolutely defined the genre in those years. These games were incredibly complex, often involving additional maps and charts to supplement what was shown on the screen.

Imperium Galactum was one I had tried, a game of space colonization and conquest, and damn did I suck at it. By the time I had figured out just how to get my first colony established, the computer-controlled enemies were already showing up with their armadas and wiping it out. 

A simpler game from Electronic Arts came later called Lords of Conquest (again on the Commodore 64), with lighter resource management and pared-down complexity that made it, as wine aficionados say, “approachable “. I loved it and beat it in a few weeks. 

However, it was Military Madness on the Turbografx 16, my 1991 game of the year, that really sent me. While real-time strategy games were just emerging back then, I preferred turn-based strategy as I needed time to think. Military Madness was turn-based, relatively simple to start and grasp, and grew in complexity as the player battled through map after map.

Years later I read rave reviews for both Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising and the Game Boy Advance SP, and once I understood that it was a portable game like Military Madness, I pulled the trigger and purchased both. I was not disappointed, and played the game until I got stuck on the final battle. It was so good it became my 2003 game of the year.

I was also searching for the game’s predecessor, Advance Wars, which was out of print by then. I eventually found it at a record store of all places, and preferring to play game series in order, started that campaign and got pretty far.

However, I didn’t beat it. Since then, I’ve also picked up Advance Wars Dual Strike and Advance Wars Days of Ruin on the Nintendo DS, increasing my Advance Wars backlog to four games.

Fast forward to this decade and my decision to tackle at least one “unfinished business” game each year, and my choice this year was that first Advance Wars on the Game Boy Advance. I started about a month ago, working my way through the campaign one battle at a time in between sessions of Dead Island 2 and while I awaited my new Analogue Pocket.

With Dead Island 2 in my rear view mirror, the Analogue Pocket in my hand, and some free time opened up while visiting family in San Antonio this week, I fully engaged in Advance Wars at last, hopeful that I could finally win this war. 

Wisely, I did not continue my previous attempt and started over. Advance Wars does an amazing job of training the player right from the start and slowly introducing new elements in each subsequent battle. The first few fights use land units, with air and naval units showing up later, as well as factories used to create new units.

There’s a lighthearted feel to the game even though war is hell, with a variety of characters involved. The player takes on the role of an adviser to these characters, who are each commanding officers that have individual bonus abilities that slowly build up during battle.

One CO can use this ability to repair damaged units, one can get a boost to damage, and so forth. Once all these characters are introduced, the player can choose between them at the start of each round, which can be an important strategic decision but not a game breaker if one chooses the wrong one.

As stated in my extensive introduction and backstory above, Advance Wars is a turn based game where the player takes a turn and then the computer takes a turn and so on. Tanks move forward to attack, infantry can capture cities, artillery can move or fire, and submarines can sneak around the seas stalking prey.

Capturing cities is important to fund the factories one captures to create new units. However, factories only create land units, and later in the game one must capture airports and naval bases to create those types of units. Like Military Madness, each new element introduced makes the game incrementally more complex, but never overwhelmingly so.

The story plays out as the characters show up and talk at the beginning and end of each battle, slowly revealing a shadowy threat behind all the chaos between the various factions or nations, leading up to the big, final battle.

There did seem to be a huge uptick in difficulty for the last few battles. Whereas the first three quarters of the game seemed to have maps that took me half an hour to an hour to win, the rest were much longer. 

For these tough contests, it became necessary to play a few rounds to see how the enemy deploys and start over knowing how best to respond. I should have done that for the final battle, but after a rough start I just kept going, grinding through a brutal stalemate until I could turn the tide. 


It made that victory much more satisfying even though I got a “C” grade. 

There is much more gameplay than just the campaign on that tiny cartridge, with a link cable versus mode and map designer, among other options. This game is a complete package.

Good news if anyone is interested in the first two games in the series is that they have been remastered and released on the Nintendo Switch. I’ll probably stick to the original again when I get around to my unfinished business with Advance Wars 2 at some point. 


Sunday, March 3, 2024

An Age Undreamed Of

A few weeks ago I got some good financial news at work on Friday, was feeling a little giddy and buzzed from White Russians at a local bar on a frozen Saturday morning around sunrise, and pulled the trigger and ordered a device called an Analogue Pocket. It is a modern device that plays Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance cartridges and boy was it expensive.

Weighing against the collection of aging Game Boy hardware my wife and I’ve accumulated was the perfectly playable collection of timeless software we own for those devices, so I’ve been on the fence about the Analogue Pocket for awhile. Which was fine, as it was scarce at first and it’s always good to wait for the reviews to hit.

The consensus was positive that it was a great design and the games looked amazing. Here is the cutting edge tech behind it:

Pocket is built with one Altera Cyclone V FPGA and one Cyclone 10. This implementation is to support 3rd party FPGA development accessing the Cyclone V.  

I’m so old I have no idea what that is. Field Programmable Gate Array? I’m confused because one “Cyclone” is a V and another is a 10. Either use Roman numerals or don’t.  All I understand is that it’s not an emulator running on a Raspberry Pi, its a “core” that thinks it’s a Game Boy or something.

It arrived about a week later, and I confess I tracked it all the way from California on a FedEx truck. I fired it up right out of the box and quickly realized that I did not do my research. It did not come with a micro SD memory card, which is needed to create save anywhere states, so I could not do that right away. I also need to somehow get the latest firmware update onto an SD card and bring it over, but that can wait as the unit is ok without the update to do what I wanted - play old games better.

I've began by testing it with two games: Wizards & Warriors X Fortress of Fear for the Game Boy, and Advance Wars for the Game Boy Advance. My eyes melted as the screen lit up and the title screen appeared for Wizards and Warriors X, a game I love but found to be much harder than its NES counterparts. 

One of the Analogue Pocket's features is the selection of screens one can select, reflecting the Game Boy’s history of hardware. Right out of the box, it was set to the standard, original Game Boy:


Even though it’s green it’s crisp and clean. But the Analogue GB option is even better:

Other options include Original GBP (Game Boy Pocket), Original GBP Light, and Pinball Neon Matrix, which makes everything red. Similar modes exist and show up when one inserts a Game Boy Color or Game Boy Advance cartridge.

The aforementioned Wizards & Warriors X Fortress of Fear is a very tough Game Boy game that I had never gotten that far in. That was not just a difficult gameplay thing holding me back, but also the technical limitations of the hardware that made side-scrolling blur a lot. That issue is completely gone with the Analogue Pocket.

In fact, I made it farther in my first session with the game than I ever had before. Once I had the micro SD card inserted, I was able to create a save state, allowing me to save anywhere. One simply presses the “Analogue” button and holds up on the d-pad to create it instantly without pausing, and Analogue-down to load it. So far I’ve made it to level 3.0, but hold no illusions that I’ll ever actually beat it.

I mainly got the Pocket to play the Game Boy Advance classic Advance Wars, where I was able to use the cartridge’s built-in saves in conjunction with the save state feature to ease my playthrough. I’ll do a full write-up on that once I (hopefully) beat it.

There was a time in the late 1980s and early 1990s where I wondered if I was the only one who not only cared about game preservation but also saw the value of playing old games. That concern was resolved when I discovered the classic Digital Press newsletter, and by the end of the decade, the internet.

Decades later, the nineties kids have grown up and become become collectors themselves, and hobbyists have gotten more advanced than any generation that has come before.

The rewards of this are homebrew games and controllers for retro systems, modders taking old hardware and installing better screens and buttons, and the Analogue Pocket, which I’ve been calling the Rolls Royce of Game Boy hardware. 

I never conceived in my many hours of wondering how I would continue to play these games when the hardware or screens no longer worked that such a thing as the Analogue Pocket would become available.

For video gamers, this is truly an age undreamed of.

 


Beaten: Dead Island 2 (PS5)

 When Left 4 Dead hit it the fall of 2008, I enjoyed it but asked if someone would take this multiplayer, short level gameplay and make a standard single-player campaign type of game out of it, and in 2011 Techland delivered on that quite well with Dead Island. While a little rough around the edges in terms of glitchiness and framerate, it was a full and fun experience. They quickly followed up with Dead Island Riptide and promised a Dead Island 2 in 2015.

Eight years and two Dying Lights later, we finally got that sequel, and I was very much there for it after my recent and depressing playthrough of The Last of Us Part II. Dead Island 2 is a game that lets the player have shameless fun with the zombie apocalypse, and everything that made the game great two console generations ago is present in this new game, looking, loading, and playing better than ever.

This time it takes place not on an island, but in Los Angeles, which in an innovative bit of storytelling has not just suffered a zombie outbreak and quarantine, but a devastating earthquake as well.  Because it's the 2020s and everything is worse I guess. Streets are torn up, buildings partly collapsed, and wildfires rage in the hills by the big HOLLYWOOD sign.

The same wacky but light crafting is back, allowing the player to upgrade melee and ranged weapons with elemental damage types, like making a sword do caustic damage. There are skill levels to raise and lots of extra “curveball” perks like throwing stars and pipe bombs to get. These perks slowly recharge over time so it’s important to use them strategically, but once the perk is unlocked the player essentially has it available. One does not use up crafting resources for them.

The story is good too, with only the legendary Sam B. coming back, not as a playable character but as an NPC, which was fine. At the end of the campaign though, there are some serious loose ends in the story, signaling that the door is wide open for a pretty cool sequel. Which, hopefully, we won’t have to wait until 2036 to play.

Thursday, January 25, 2024

Beaten: The Last of Us Part II (PS4)

 I have quite a few Playstation 4 games in my backlog, but The Last of Us Part II became a priority for a brand new reason: I had to play and beat it before the TV show's second season premieres. That has never happened before, as usually videogames licensed to television or movies generally deviate in plot from the games they attempt to bring to live action. Not so The Last of Us, whose epic first season followed the first game in the series almost to the letter. 

Of course, I was going to play it anyway. The studio, Naughty Dog, created a great formula years ago with their Uncharted series, and the Last of Us has simply been a new application of that gameplay and storytelling formula. This write-up will contain SPOILERS for not only both games in the series, but presumably the both seasons of the TV show.

So the formula I mentioned above works this way. The game is very focused on the story and characters, with lots of cutscenes, personal development, and small things that add texture to their tales. The gameplay is basically exploring, sneaking, and fighting against both the weird mushroom zombies and other survivors. The locations play out in a linear fashion, and the world in not an open sandbox to explore.

The two main characters from the first game return, living a relatively peaceful life but dealing with the ramifications of the first game, where Joel rescued Ellie from a medical team that he realized too late was going to kill her to get the cure out of her. One of those ramifications is a new character named Abby, who is the daughter of one of the doctors Joel killed during that rescue. Yep, it's a revenge tale. I was thinking it was weird that the player controls Abby for a moment at the beginning of the game before gameplay turns over to Ellie.

Abby gets her revenge but leaves Ellie alive and heads back to Seattle, where her brutal faction is fighting another. Ellie now wants her own revenge and sets out to find Abby. The first third of the game, then, is Ellie's battle find Abby and her cohorts in the ruins of Seattle. That section of the story takes place across three days in Seattle before Ellie finally confronts her.

I thought that this scene was leading to the big, final fight between the two. It had really felt like the game had been long enough at this point for that to happen, but then the game shifts to playing as Abby, and her own three days leading up to that confrontation. Okay, I thought, we are creating a sympathetic character out of the villain, I can go along with that.

Abby's story is pretty good, too, leading up to that confrontation, with lots of twists and backstory filled in. Finally, Abby catches up to Ellie and we get to play the boss fight as her, not Ellie. At this point, both of these revenge-driven characters have lost their own friends in their rage, but Abby stays her hand and warns Ellie to let it go and never show up in her life again.

I really thought the lesson was to let go of revenge, as both characters by now have made a journey where revenge had cost them more than their own lives to accomplish. Ellie goes back to her home where she and her girlfriend are raising a baby on an idyllic farmhouse, there is a beautiful scene where Ellie is sitting on a tractor holding that baby at sunset, and it seemed like I had finally reached the end.

But then Ellie gets a new tip on where Abby ended up in California, and still can't let it go. Thus begins a third act with Abby in California, where she gets captured by yet another savage gang of assholes, and then Ellie, hunting her down.  I was pretty tired of the game by now and it felt like the lesson I thought was the whole point seemed washed away.

Oh, I thought, Ellie is going to see how horrible the savage gang of assholes has been to Abby and will free her and together, they will take them out and finally go their separate ways. I gave out an exasperated sigh when that did not turn out to be the case, and Ellie just can't let it go, leading to yet another final boss fight between the two.

I guess the point was that Ellie was so traumatized and suffering PTSD after Joel's brutal murder that she could not let go. There was a lot of unfinished business between Ellie and Joel before he died, and only a quick flashback in her brain at the last second of a positive memory of Joel brings her back from the brink. Abby goes her own way and Ellie heads back to her now-empty farmhouse, her girlfriend and baby long since gone.

I can't say the story did not make sense, as I have my own revenge issues, but damn that was depressing, dark, and bleak. It felt like Ellie had grown into a much different character after the first game in a trajectory that veered from where I thought she was going. Overall, after a few days to think about it, my complaints about the story are pretty minor, and really it's not my story to tell, it's Naughty Dog's.

As far as the gameplay part of the game, it was exactly like I expected. Sneaking and stealth kills, melee weapons and dodge moves, guns that can be upgraded, improvised bombs, and the player working their way through gorgeously designed areas that show the full glory of vegetation growing over everything - it's all there.

Resources and ammo are scarce, but were never too scarce that I got stuck anywhere without them. The combat was balanced and fun, the jump scares well timed, and even though the story seemed to drag on, the gameplay never got old. Each encounter and area that the player fights through is usually unique enough to avoid any tedium.

The old tropes persist though. Sudden sections where one is cut off from retreat, like falling through the floor into a horde of zombies, are common. The player can meticulously clear out a large area they are in, but not retreat back to it for stupid reasons, like doors that close behind the player permanently. Enemy AI runs the gamut from clever to stupid, as always. 

At times the enemies seem to be smart, filling in patrol routes after the player takes out a few of them in an area. That also means that at some places, one can hold a corner and wait until the curious enemy wanders over the the same spot their friends got killed. You can also clear out part of a level where it seems every enemy heard the battle and joined in, only to find that one guy on the edge of the play area who heard none of it and is still wandering around in his own little space.

One glitch toward the end had enemies that were not that far away blinking in and out of existence as I was aiming at them. I am fully aware that there is a PS5 graphic upgrade available or coming that may have cleared that up, but I got the game for the PS4 so I was good to play that version.

The Last of Us Part II is another in a long line of great games from Naughty Dog, and even though the character motivations seemed to drift away from my own preconceptions, it was certainly an excellent storytelling experience, and a fun game to slog through. It is my sincerest hope that there is never a third game in this series, as the second part seemed to double the gameplay and game size and quadruple the depression. I'd be good with moving on after this chapter. 

Tuesday, January 16, 2024

2023 Year In Review

 While 2023 will go down as yet another crapfest of a year in our ongoing downward spiral toward the collapse of civilization, there was still a lot of fun to be had in the videogame world! Let's get on with my annual review of what I did in the year 2023:

Beaten in 2023:

Tenchu Z (360)

Horizon Forbidden West (PS5)

Fable II Pub Games (360)

Ace Attorney: Phoenix Wright Dual Destinies (3DS)

Arkadian Warriors (360)

Dust: An Elysian Tail (360)

Light Crusader (Genesis)

Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion (One)

Alan Wake II (Series)

King's Quest (Windows/GOG)

Quake (One)

Games of the Year:

Winner: Alan Wake II (Series)

Runner-Up: The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom (Switch)

Runner-Up: Horizon Forbidden West (PS5)

Runner-Up: Dust: An Elysian Tail (360)

The Year in Review:

I beat Tenchu Z, an old From Software title for the Xbox 360. While long and repetitive, the stealth gameplay was a blast, so I finished it. I have my eye on their modern ninja title, Sekiro Shadows Die Twice, for a future campaign.

I started out the year with a shiny new Playstation 5 and spent three months on Horizon Forbidden West. Then, instead of pacing myself, I jumped right into The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, and before I knew it it was late August. My break from Zelda is ongoing as of this writing, but I hope to return to it and finish it soon, unlike my playthrough of the Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess on the Wii, which of course remains unfinished to this day.

I picked up a few Odyssey 2 homebrew games this year like Tunnels of Terror, but also completed my collection of the rare Brazilian Parker Brothers games by acquiring Frogger, Super Cobra, and QBert. I was amazed at how well they pulled off these arcade translations for the Odyssey 2.

For "unfinished business", I finally argued my way through Ace Attorney Phoenix Wright Dual Destinies, a 3DS game I had started a few years ago and had played a little. While I missed the DLC and the other Phoenix Wright game on the 3DS, I was glad to hear that they are getting reissued for the Switch sometime soon, so that is good.

I pulled the trigger on an XBox Series X just in time for the unexpected release of Alan Wake II. I am now caught up on consoles. It was easy to set up, the interface is the same as the XBox One, and with Gamepass there are lots of games to try.

Speaking of which, there were lots of games I tried this year but not enough to write here about. I am currently playing Super Mario Wonder with the wife right now, but in 2023 I enjoyed Romancelvania on the PS5, Goat Simulator 3 and Like a Dragon Gaiden The Man Who Erased His Name on the Series X, Ark: Survival Evolved and Clustertruck on the One, Legends of War Patton on the PS Vita, and lots of XBox 360 stuff.

The XBox 360 still holds a special place in my heart, and on it I tried out Eets Chowdown, Aegis Wing, and Wing Commander Arena this year. In fact, I moved the 360 downstairs to the main setup again, so I could use the Kinect peripheral with it, and we even played Kinect Party on it again for the first time in a decade.

A lot of the 360 activity I enjoyed was because of the announcement that the XBox 360 would lose its online store in 2024, so there were some games I had to get before they disappear forever. One of the new gaming habits I picked up in 2023 was to watch for games getting delisted on this site, as the digital age means that downloaded games that one pays for can suddenly disappear for a lot of reasons. All the more reason to own physical copies of games.

The year ahead looks like total crap, but I know with my backlog of videogames in hand, I will be able to endure all of it until the power goes out for the final time. 



Beaten: Quake (One)

 While I try to beat one videogame from each decade every year, it's more of a guideline, so if I want to play more older games, I certainly can. Although I had played a 1990s Genesis game (Light Crusader) earlier in 2023, I decided to hit one more 1990s classic, the first-person shooter Quake.

Quake was Id Software's follow-up to their groundbreaking Doom games, expanding on that game's success with an eye on the emerging multiplayer shooter crowd. Quake was a very popular multiplayer game in those years, as evidenced by all the Quake players who I encountered in Ultima Online who were confused by all that roleplaying crap.

I was not interested in the multiplayer (even the XBox One remaster I played has it), but rather the single player campaign. Like Doom, Quake has the player running fast through multiple levels stuffed with monsters and secrets, rarely with more than enough ammo to make it past the next encounter. I got a taste of this old school simplicity a few years ago when I played Marathon: Durandal on the 360 and was wanting some more, hence Quake.

At first, I was not resolved to beat the game, but rather to try out a few levels as a change of pace from other games I was playing. I found myself having so much fun that, after finishing the first of four parts, I decided to keep playing to the main campaign's conclusion.

The gameplay was all that familiar refrain of running, shooting, searching, and dying, with a few variations like a low gravity level thrown in. One can save anywhere, so I developed the smart habit of not only saving frequently but of saving at the beginning of the level in case I wasted too much ammo and needed to replay the whole thing.

The music was provided by Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails, and I am grateful that this XBox One remake retained that soundtrack, as it is moody and epic.  Differing from Doom, the final level had an interesting boss fight that took me a few days/attempts to figure out, but was really satisfying. Quake has its place in history, and I am glad I finally got a chance to play it and see why.


Monday, January 15, 2024

Beaten: King's Quest (Windows/GOG)

 I was feeling so smug in the summer of 1985, having just procured a Commodore 64 computer and the requisite 1541 Disk Drive, as I was finally able to play state-of-the-art computer games. And oh, those games flowed that summer - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Adventure Construction Set, Nine Princes in Amber, and on and on.

However, I was quickly shown that I was not really state of the art, as a few games had emerged that required more computing power. One such game that looked really good but was out of reach was King's Quest for the emerging IBM PCjr and other more powerful computers.  It didn't slow me down too much, though, as the Commodore 64 was at the height of its popularity and was getting all sorts of great new games.

I try to complete at least one game from each decade every year, so this year I choose King's Quest for my 1980s game, and found it available for dirt cheap on Good Old Games. I broke out a pencil and paper, too, as these games did not hold your hand nor have built-in mapping. 

King's Quest has the player control a character by using the mouse to point and click at places on the screen to move. The player also types in commands like GET DAGGER to interact with items and things on the screen. The game world is pretty big for the time, with over 50 screens to explore.

Remembering that era fondly, and knowing what was possible in gaming at the time, allowed me to be blown away by the graphics in 2023 as I would have been in 1985. Each screen in King's Quest is gorgeous, bright, colorful, and memorable. The screens connect in all four compass directions and wrap around if one keeps going in a certain direction.

Gameplay is exploration and experimentation, and my first task was to map out the world as much as I could, and pick up any items I found. I was a few days into my playthrough when I noticed the command bar at the top of the screen, which showed me there was a jump command and a swim command that one could enter on the keyboard. That was a game changer, as the jump command especially was crucial to beating the game and the swim command kept me from drowning and allowed me to cut across lakes. Some rivers, however, cannot be crossed by swimming.

The puzzles were good, too, with some having multiple solutions. The game has a score number, based on actions and acquisitions, so the solution the player chooses might not be the best one. Using a treasure to bribe the troll to cross the bridge might work, but at the loss of the points one gained by picking up that treasure. Finding the better solution will save those points.

Once the trial and error of exploring the world was done, it was a matter of figuring out which item to use when and where to get to the ending with the most points. The actual quest the king gives sends the player looking for three treasures. One was pretty easy, the second required the only use of the jump command I found, and the last one required trying out a new text command that had not come up before.

King's Quest is a fantastic game with great gameplay and gorgeous graphics that took the old school text adventure with a graphic background and, using the mouse control as well as text commands in 1985, set the pace for the genre throughout the rest of the 80s and into the 1990s. I will definitely look at more King's Quest games down the road when I am getting that point-and-click adventure itch.


Thursday, January 4, 2024

Beaten: Alan Wake II (Series)

Long ago, in the age before the internet, videogame release dates were not really known. Thanks to magazines at the time, we knew that Atari had licensed Pac-Man for the 2600, but not when the game was coming out. Also, the lead time on magazine articles often meant that by the time the magazine had news or even a review of an upcoming game, it was showing up in stores.

As gaming got bigger, game releases became an event, such as camping out at Gamestop for a midnight opening. We watched the internet for trailers and release dates and couldn't wait to get a copy of the new game in our hands. Maybe some still do that, but for me, I just don't get hyped up for a game these days like I used to. 

So when I heard that Alan Wake II was finally in the works, I was nonplussed, thinking "Yeah, so is a sequel to Beyond Good and Evil". I paid no attention to any release dates, as those are frequently optimistic and/or inaccurate, and I did not scrape the internet for tidbits. I just heard about the game's imminent release a few weeks before it came out, watched the trailer, and decided that it looked good enough to purchase a new XBox Series X console.

The first Alan Wake came out the same day as Red Dead Redemption, so it was not a commercial success for Remedy, the company that created it. Microsoft did not want a sequel, so the few of us who were hoping for one were told it is not coming. Remedy moved on to other projects, like Quantum Break (which I hated), and then Control (which I haven't tried), which was not only a hit, but was apparently set in the same universe as Alan Wake.

This apparently was what the company needed to do to get where they could make Alan Wake II, and it was a smart strategy. Without any interference from anyone else, they were free to make the game they wanted to, and they really pulled it off.

Alan Wake II is a worthy sequel for the faithful among us who waited, and I'd certainly recommend playing the first game and its DLC ahead of this sequel. My fears that the big budget would transform the game into an Ubisoft-style endless open world (Assassin's Creed/Farcry) and that the combat would be less flashlighty and more bullety, were unfounded.

Everything that the first game had at its core, from mood to gameplay to graphics, has been improved. The world is bigger, including not just the first game's town of Bright Falls, but neighboring areas as well. The graphics on the XBox Series X are amazing, load times are fast, and the sound effects and mood music are all top notch.

This is a game that is mostly about story, though, and boy does it come packed with it. It takes the amount of time since the first game and owns it, and starts with a new character - an FBI agent - who is investigating serial murders in Bright Falls, which ties into Alan Wake's disappearance there all those years ago.

Play switches between this FBI Agent and Wake, who is trapped in some dark dimension thingy, during the game. The back and forth between the characters works really well and ties together at the end in an epic fashion. Exploring, combat, and careful item management are all a part of the gameplay and are carefully balanced.

Enemies called "taken" are back from the first game, requiring a blast from the flashlight to weaken them and sometimes reveal a weak spot, before the player sends bullets their way. It's a really cool and original combat style that is easy to learn and fun to execute. Batteries are as important as bullets in this world.

Did I mention the members of the band from the first game, the Old Gods of Asgard, are back and get plenty of time to shine as characters and as musicians. There is also the plot thread of Alan Wake's wife, who has been dealing with his disappearance. Night Springs, a Twilight Zone type of TV show, still airs on some TVs in the game, along with a set of crazy local commercials from two of the other characters the player meets.

As mentioned earlier, Remedy's previous release Control tied into the Alan Wake universe, and that tie is strengthened as members of the Federal Bureau of Control, whatever that is, show up due to the supernatural goings-on. It definitely made me want to go back and play Control at some point.

I only had one instance of the game locking up, but other than that it ran smoothly. Alan Wake II is an absolute masterpiece in every aspect. The story expands and continues, the gameplay is more fleshed-out and fun, everything cool about the first game is carried over, and the conclusion is much more satisfying than the cliffhanger at the end of the first Alan Wake game. I put over 50 hours into Alan Wake II and none of it felt tedious or unapproachable. 

To conclude, I'll just say that this is how you do a sequel.



Wednesday, December 20, 2023

Beaten: Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion (One)

 When I worked in fine dining, we used to host these elaborate seven-course "wine dinners" where a winemaker would come in with cases of their stuff to show off, each bottle paired with a dinner course designed by the chef to accentuate the offering. There was a structure to the courses, with, if I recall correctly, the fifth course being an "intermezzo". This course was not paired with a wine and was meant to be a "palate cleanser" after four other flavorful courses, and to clear the taste buds for the courses ahead. It would usually be a nice sorbet dish with a cool garnish.

After some of those heavier action games I needed a videogame intermezzo, so there I am looking at Xbox Gamepass and I see a title called Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion, which is one of the best titles I have seen since Communist Mutants From Space for the (Supercharger) Atari 2600. Sometimes a title just grabs you, so I looked at the game's description and screenshots and decided to try it out.

Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion plays in the top-down Adventure style, similar to the first Legend of Zelda, and the story features a cute vegetable character that loses his home due to, yep, tax evasion, and then goes on a quest to not only get his home back but to end the corrupt rule of Mayor Onion. NPCs are other fruits and veggies that usually need something and help move the story along.

Is there high social commentary here? Maybe, but it's lighthearted and our little anarchist turnip is so cute that it's okay if the message is not beating you over the head. It's an absolute delight ripping up every document you find, and also very funny. The combat works and the quest plays out quickly.

So let this article be sort of an intermezzo as well,  before I write up the next game I beat. Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion is a funny, quick and relatively easy adventure and I highly recommend it. There you go, palate cleansed.

Monday, December 18, 2023

Beaten: Light Crusader (Genesis)

 After playing Dust: An Elysian Tail, a 2D side-scrolling hack-and-slash that was definitely not my usual genre to play, I decided to take on another classic type of game that I never got into back in the day due to their inherent difficulty and clunkiness. That was the isometric view action-platformer, where the character on screen moves northwest, northeast, southeast, and southwest, rather than the normal north, east, south and west compass directions.

The arcade classics Qbert, Congo Bongo, and Crystal Castles all had this viewpoint and their share of difficulties in learning how to make the character go in the direction you want and jump the direction you want, with Crystal Castles actually using a trakball and having the character run at ludicrous speed, only jumping to avoid contact with the enemies. It was essentially isometric Pac-man ahead of Pac-Mania.

Of course, the trakball worked perfectly in the flawless isometric arcade game Marble Madness.

My first and brief foray into a larger game with this perspective was Fairlight for the Commodore 64, and I remember little of my attempts to play it other than awkward controls. It might be a masterpiece for all I know, I had bought it used and cheap late in my Commodore 64 years and by then had a backlog of games that I was eager to play anyway.

Another one I tried around that time was Solstice for the NES. Briefly. Based on my previous experiences in this type of game, then, I had passed by Light Crusader on my Sega Genesis Mini, until I was feeling like something different.

So I dove into Light Crusader, from the legendary Japanese studio Treasure, with some trepidation. My fear was that I would hit a wall of frustration with some crazy hard jump or enemy that would be really overpowered. I was pleasantly surprised to find little frustration and some really challenging puzzles.

The game starts in a castle that’s in a small town, and you’re quickly tasked with finding out why the townsfolk are disappearing. From there it’s delving under the town into a multi-level dungeon. The action is about what I expected, with the character slashing in an arc that the game usually recognizes as a hit when close to the enemies, but nothing in the control there felt precise. If one is going to play an older game, one must simply work with the controls that are there and learn what works and what doesn't. Light Crusader's combat works.

The game's magic system absolutely shines though. The player picks up charges for each of the four elements - Water, Fire, Earth, and Air - and then casts a spell by using one of those charges. However, combining two, three, or even all four of those elements casts a different spell. So if one just casts Fire, using one fire charge,  they get a fireball that hits one opponent. Casting Fire and Earth together creates a new spell called meteor that sends a fireball bouncing around the room causing much more damage.

I didn't engage the magic system at all in the beginning, but as I accumulated more of the charges, I started to play with it until it became an essential part of the gameplay. I did not have a paper manual with me, so exploring the magic system was as much fun as exploring the dungeons. I know, I could have gone running to the internet to uncover it, but anytime I play through an old game I really try not to let the internet be a tool I use to beat it.

The dungeons themselves are a delight, too. There seems to be a 50/50 mix of puzzle rooms and combat rooms, which was a good balance, as the puzzles were challenging but not unfair. Yes, there were hard isometric jumps and precise timing required in a lot of places, none of which generated frustration. Sometimes, coming back later to a room I had found myself stuck was all I needed to get moving forward.

There is a lot going on in each dungeon level, and they sometimes have a theme, like a Goblin Town and a  Wizard Guild. There are people to rescue (they get out on their own once you free them), a goblin fight arena, and so much more. There are plenty of save points and healing fountains, and the Sega Genesis Mini has the option to save anywhere as well, reducing frustration. 

Loot comes at a fair pace and I rarely returned to the shop in town to restock. Boss battles were pretty epic, too, and full of variety. As you can tell, I enjoyed this classic, and that joy reaffirms my direction of playing old videogames is justified. Light Crusader had as many "wow" moments for me as The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom did this year, and if that's not a great endorsement, I don't know what is.

It's isometric done right. Good job, Treasure!