Beaten: Dying Light 2 Stay Human (PS4)

 Is it human to take five and a half months to beat a modern videogame campaign, even when one skips thousands of side missions and objectives? Picking it up when one has increasingly rare playtime, getting stuck on a challenging part of the game and not coming back to it for two weeks? Is it human to say "Wow, this game is great, but when the hell does it end?"

I found out this year with Dying Light 2: Stay Human, the latest and greatest entry in the Dead Island/Dying Light series, which I've enjoyed very much over the years. I was ready for a release-day AAA title, and knew this game would be good, but I was surprised at how good it really is.

This is a polished, smooth, and complete game package with a great story and reasonable level of challenge. I really wish I had more time to go back and hit all the unfinished business I left behind in that world, but other people release games I want to play, too, so it's not happening. I'm glad all that content is there, because it helps create a huge amount of gameplay for those who want it.

Combat and Parkour are the main focus of the gameplay, with the concurrent levelling of those traits happening based on what missions or challenges the player completes. Upgrading and modifying weapons is there, too, but I just got by with what I found and was fine doing little of that. Armor is upgradable too, and like their previous titles, lots and lots of looting fuels all this.

The "Stay Human" part of the title is one of the game's challenges. The player is already infected but only starts turning at night, when out of ultraviolet light. This makes the early part of the game very challenging in terms of nocturnal activity. There is a timer on how long one can remain out of UV light, and while there are items that can prolong that time, it really comes off as a huge inconvenience in the early game, but hey, that's the game. The timer expands, too, as one finds certain items and applies them.

Combat is almost all melee, with archery added later, and it handles like a dream. Blocking enemy hits is essential and makes the combat fun. Enemy AI is pretty smart, but one must often use the environment to their advantage, climbing away from trouble when necessary. The player has a stamina bar to watch during combat, preventing button mashing battles and adding to the challenge.

The stamina bar is also depleted during parkour moves like climbing and swinging from one's grappling hook, but it expands as the player levels, once again making the early game harder than the later part of the game. Oddly enough, to this acrophobic old gamer, the parkour was much scarier than the zombies and human enemies one faces. There are a few places where the player must climb a dilapidated skyscraper, making series after series of jumps and watching the stamina bar dwindle. Add in grappling hook use, where one has to hook onto something at the corner of the building, swing out blindly around the corner, jump off, and quickly grapple to another hook and then to a platform, and  my nerves were shot. 

It's not even a VR game, but it looks so good that those challenges were the most nerve-wracking part of the game. There were very few frustrations in this game and very few bugs that I found. Both sections of the enormous map were well designed, the rooftops and other parts of the city clearly created and tested for cool parkour moves.

Just playing the main missions left me more than capable of beating the final boss through multiple phases and the ending was satisfactory. After the six hour credit sequence, one can continue in the open world if so desired.

And I so desire, but time is not on my side. It's not you, Dying Light 2 Stay Human, you did everything right. It's me and the nature of middle age that keeps me from your rooftops going forward. Maybe I'll swing by again in retirement.

Odyssey 2 Arcade Adaptation Scorecard

 The race was on once Atari landed its official license to put Space Invaders on its 2600 VCS and the industry realized that the pipeline from arcades to home consoles was a profitable one. It was clear that bringing home the superior arcade experiences was what players wanted. Those who could not front the marketing prowess, however, were free to publish their own adaptations of these hits for their systems, and every console and computer at the time had some version of Space Invaders before too long.

Magnavox's Odyssey 2 was no exception, and many of its early games were at least inspired by some sort of early arcade game equivalent (Football, Cosmic Conflict). At first, Odyssey made no big deal of it, but later put the tag "Challenger Series" on its arcade-inspired releases. Let's look at the progression of Odyssey 2's arcade knock-offs and see how they did as compared to the official licensed adaptations by Atari.

Alien Invaders - Plus! (Space Invaders)

While this game is not that good for several reasons (the scoring only going to 10 and ending the game), it captures the Space Invaders theme well enough. The weird twist is that the 3 barriers that the player hides behind between shots at the armada at the top of the screen are not degradable shields like Space Invaders, but rather storage for extra lives. 

When the player's gun is hit it is destroyed, but the player emerges as the usual little Odyssey 2 guy and must run to one of those shields. Once under it, pressing the button removes the shield and puts the little guy back in a gun. Essentially this gives the player four lives per round.

The game is a campaign, meaning that once the player wins 10 rounds (or the Invaders do) the game is over. This is the first videogame campaign that I ever beat. It took only a few play sessions to learn how to do that every time I played, and to this day I can still do it. This adaptation was not a part of the Challenger Series, which started later with Monkeyshines! (which itself, oddly enough, was not an arcade adaptation).

Score: Much worse than Atari Space Invaders or literally any other Space Invaders clone.

UFO! (Asteroids)

The designers at Odyssey must have heard that kind of criticism for Alien Invaders-Plus when making UFO! , which became critically acclaimed as one of the best games for the system and remains so to this day. They added 4 digit scoring (it's hard to get to 100 much less 10,000 so that was fine) as well as a very cool 6 letter name input via the keyboard for those who got the high score, which became a standard on most Challenger Series games after that.

This is Asteroids on steroids (see what I did there?). The player gets one life to live (setting another Challenger Series standard), and the game can be brutally hard. Just like Asteroids, the player controls a ship and shoots at space rocks and occasional UFOs that show up. The player's ship has a rechargeable shield that can stop an asteroid or enemy fire, but goes down for a few seconds after a hit. 

To make the most of one joystick with one button, the designers created an amazing control scheme where the gun is one dot of the shield and is rotated using the joystick in a clockwise motion, while still flying around and dodging everything. It seems insane at first but soon becomes a delicate ballet of shooting, rotating, and dodging.

Score: Far superior to Atari's blinky-ass home version of Asteroids.

K.C. Munchkin! (Pac-Man)

So good it got banned by a judge because K.C.'s gobbling animation was too close to Pac-Man's. Odyssey 2 was the first to bring the insanely popular Pac-Man home to players with K.C. Munchkin, and they really did a great job on it in a lot of ways.

First of all, there are only 12 dots to catch in the maze, but they move around on their own. Four of those dots glow in multiple colors and those are the ones K.C. eats to turn the ghosts vulnerable enough to kill. The mazes are smaller than Pac-Man but there are a lot of them pre-programmed into the cartridge, some with walls that are invisible when moving. 

Continuing with what UFO! did, there is the same high-score name entry at the bottom of the screen and the player only gets one life. The real value of this feature in these games shows when one is playing with friends and trading off the controller, taking turns and competing for the high score.

As far as I know, K.C. Munchkin also contained a home console first by allowing the player to design and program their own mazes. That's right, there were games with level editors as early as 1982! The whole package is quite a value with that taken into account. And it moved a lot of Odyssey 2 units before the court injunction removing it from the market forever.

Collectors need not worry, though, as the game had been out for months before the injunction and many copies were sold. 

Score: Far superior to the absolutely crappy, rushed, and critically derided home version of Pac-Man for the Atari.

Freedom Fighters! (Defender)

Defender is an arcade masterpiece, with a gorgeous side-scrolling landscape and a lot of buttons. I immediately wondered how any home version of it could even be done given those constraints. The designers at Odyssey 2 ditched the scrolling landscape and put the ship in space, and consigned the joystick to movement and firing. 

Oddly enough, the other controller can be used to activate hyperspace, but as with Defender, it's a crap shoot as to whether it has any strategic value at all, as the player might hyperspace right to their own death.

In the end, it's as hard as UFO! without the unique design charms of that game, and bears no great resemblance to Defender other than a sleek side-scrolling ship and dudes that need rescued.

Score: Atari's home Defender was better and more akin to the arcade.

Pick Axe Pete! (Donkey Kong)

One would probably look at the Odyssey 2 Challenger Series and assume Monkeyshines! was a clone of Donkey Kong, but it came earlier with a different design. The similarities end with monkeys climbing platforms.

Pick Axe Pete! was their answer, and what a great answer it was. By the time it released in the summer of 1982, Odyssey had lost their court case with K.C. Munchkin being too close to Pac-Man, so it seems like the designers decided to capture the gameplay of arcade games they were imitating but not the look, and then to add their own twists.

Pick Axe Pete! has the now much more flexible little Odyssey 2 guy running around a series of platforms, jumping and ducking like a pro around a bunch of bouncy rocks that pop out of the three doorways shown. The character and controls are extremely precise and with the game’s difficulty it is appreciated.

When two rocks collide, they can create a pickaxe or a key for the player to pick up. The pickaxe allows the player to break the bouncy rocks, and the key allows the player to go through one of the doors to the next level.

There is a great transitional animation between levels, and each new level removes one segment of the level's platform. Strategy plays a big part of the player’s decisions to stay on the current level or grab some points and move on.

Maybe it was Space Panic they were imitating, but either way they really knocked it out of the park with Pick Axe Pete!

Score: Far superior to Coleco’s adaptation of Donkey Kong for the Atari, but obviously not close to the great version they did for their own Colecovision.

K.C.’s Krazy Chase! (Ms. Pac-Man)

Post-lawsuit, Odyssey needed a new maze chase game for their library as Pac-Man Fever still gripped much of the nation. Arcades were filling with Ms. Pac-Man machines while at home Atari VCS owners were stuck with the crappy port of Pac-Man mentioned earlier.

As with Pick Axe Pete! it was clearly the designers intention to imitate only the gameplay and then improve on it while adding unique twists to the theme. K.C.'s animations are different enough to not get sued again as his movement through the maze is rolling and not gobbling, at least until he makes contact with the enemy or a tree.

No dots in this one, so K.C. gobbles segments of the Dratapillar, which as one can guess is a caterpillar-like beast. His head section is deadly, so K.C. must roll up behind him or from the side to get those segments. Eating one turns the three Drats chasing K.C. around vulnerable for a few seconds, and he can gobble them too in that time. Lastly, random trees pop up in the maze, and they can slow down the Dratapillar as he takes a few seconds to eat them, or slow K.C. down as he seeks to escape the Drats.

It also was released ahead of the Voice module but certainly uses it well. 

Score: Far superior to Atari VCS Pac-Man at Christmas 1982, but Atari owners got a good version of Ms. Pac-Man a few months later in 1983.

Attack of the Timelord! (Demon Attack)

Since Alien-Invaders Plus! was such a dud, the Odyssey 2 hadn't gotten a good invasion-style shooter, while over at Atari, every company was producing them. Imagic gave us Demon Attack, Activision had Megamania, Games by Apollo brought Space Chase, and so forth. In the arcades, games like Galaxian and Gorf pushed the theme by adding enemy flight patterns, different waves, and other bells and whistles.

Odyssey took that void and filled it with Attack of the Timelord!, adding their own awesome design decisions to make a game that could stand tall next to the greats of the time. Waves of saucers like the ones in U.F.O.! drop up to four different weapons on the player, each requiring its own tactic to avoid. It's fast and frenetic and a blast to play.  

As a Challenger Series game, the usual one-life and high score entry options are on the screen. It could also be easily deduced that Attack of the Timelord! was developed as the killer app to accompany the release of the Voice module at Christmas of 1982. Between waves, the disembodied head of Spyrus the Deathless appears to offer vocal taunts to the player, reminiscent of Space Fury in the Arcade.

If I had to say Attack of the Timelord was based on any other game, I’d say it was Demon Attack for the Atari 2600 rather than an arcade game. That being said, the Timelord showing up between waves to taunt the player is straight out of the arcade game Space Fury.

Score: Can stand up there with Demon Attack and Megamania a one of the best Invaders-style shooters on any system at the time.

Smithereens! (Artillery Simulator on Apple II?)

It turns out there were artillery games on early computers in the pre-Apple II 1970s, but the one I remember playing was the Apple II game Artillery Simulator. Two players take turns lobbing artillery shots at each other's position until one wins.

Someone at Odyssey saw how fun those were and put a medieval twist on it by making the artillery into catapults and the player uses it to defend a small castle. Enemy shots can hit the castle, the player, or his catapult,  requiring a few moments to roll out a new one.

With the additional sounds provided by the Voice, this little gem is a fine and polished take on the classic artillery duel type of games. I did not pick up Smithereens! back in the day, but rather when I began collecting the Odyssey 2 games I did not own. I was pleasantly surprised by how fun it was.

Score: As good or better than any other game of this type at this time.

P.T. Barnum's Acrobats! (Circus)

Circus was an early arcade game similar to Breakout, except the paddle is replaced by two clowns on a seesaw and the blocks are balloons. Like many popular titles, it was copied across various systems (Circus Atari on the Atari 2600, Clowns on the Commodore VIC 20 and 64, etc.), and Odyssey decided to put one in their library.

At that point in the early videogame industry, licensing was starting to take off, so to make their entry into the Circus copycat wave unique, they must've signed a deal with P.T. Barnum's company (the man himself died 90 years earlier). I assume they calculated that the name recognition would be a plus, but who knows?

Even without a paddle controller, it plays fine, but it was a late release for the system and I wasn't interested at the time. It was the last Challenger Series game I picked up as I finished my collection.

Score: Good enough if this type of game is your thing.

Turtles (Turtles)

Odyssey actually did score the semi-exclusive license to one arcade game - Turtles, which arrived as a part of a wave of Pac-man clones and made very little impact on the crowded market. Nonetheless, as Atari, Coleco, and others scooped up exclusivity to almost every arcade game, Odyssey managed to score this one toward the end of its life. A win is a win.

The player is the mama turtle, running around a tight maze, trying to find your baby turtles and bring them home. The home appears once you pick up a baby, and of course you're being chased around the maze by beetles. It gets challenging quickly bit not unfair or frustrating.

In spite of the limitations of the Odyssey 2, Turtles! was another fun maze chase game for the Odyssey 2. It also uses the Voice module really well and it should be noted, was never translated to the Atari. One wonders how many Atari 2600 owners lamented not getting an Odyssey 2 instead once Turtles! came out!

Score: Close enough, and the only other home versions were on the Emerson Arcadia 2001 and Entex Adventurevision, so good luck with that.

Killer Bees (Robotron 2084)

Robotron 2084 was an arcade masterpiece of mayhem, light, and sound that was also very difficult. It's twin-stick controls had the player running around a room of robots, trying to save a few humans and avoid any contact with the robots or their shots. It was brutally hard and only the most dedicated players made any headway with it. But man, it looked and sounded fantastic.

For its last great release ahead of the console's death, it really brought home the fact that, with ingenious programming, the Odyssey 2 could shine as well as its competitors. Killer Bees! has a unique title screen, uses the Voice to simulate bees buzzing and add to the system's native sound effects, and even features Easter eggs!

Players control a swarm of bees attempting to sting small robots to death, because that is a thing, and it plays like a dream. Three swarms of enemy bees attempt to find and sting the player to death. It's really cool that the player's swarm is a bunch of small dots, and coming into contact with an enemy swarm for just a second can peel a few bees off. Any longer than that, and the enemy kills you. I have finished levels with just one bee out of the swarm left.

Each enemy robot killed charges a RoSHa ray (named after Robert S. Harris, the game's designer, who also put his name in the game via Easter egg), and the ray is your only offensive weapon to use on the enemy swarms. So the player stings a robot to death, gets the charge, and tries to line up the ray to zap as many swarms as possible.

In my opinion, Killer Bees is still the best game in the whole Odyssey 2 library and the final proof positive that the Odyssey team was awesome at copying the general gameplay of an arcade game and improving on it within the system's restrictions.

Score: Better than Robotron 2084, there, I said it. 

The Odyssey 2 was certainly not the place to bring home the arcade (unless you were that one person who really dug Turtles), but it's clones and knockoffs of the popular arcade games of the time mostly held their own. Often offering unique twists to the gameplay of those arcade classics as well as Voice enhancement and on-screen high scoring where players could enter their names, Odyssey designers can be proud (for the most part) of their effort to make the most of their limited hardware.