Beaten: James Bond 007 (Game Boy)

That Analogue Pocket I brought earlier this year is so good, it keeps begging for more use. While I've been tapping my existing library of games so far to enjoy on it, I've also done some research into any Game Boy "hidden gems" that I might have missed. People post those sorts of lists all the time these days.

One game I saw appear while looking for Game Boy role-playing games was James Bond 007, another licensed Bond game, but not based on any movie past or present. It's a top-down action-adventure similar to The Legend of Zelda Link's Awakening, featuring travel to multiple global locations, cool gadgets, and cameos by some previous Bond villains like Oddjob and Jaws. Early in the game, as in the movies, James returns to headquarters and gets to interact with Moneypenny, M, and Q.

Items are assigned to the A and B slots, which was pretty standard, and weapons run the range from bare hands to rocket launchers. Gadgets include the classic watch-with-laser, a primitive mapping tool, a grappling hook, shields, and so forth. 

Combat involves using whatever item one has equipped with whatever button it is assigned. There is also a basic but important block ability that can be equipped and used, body armors, and even shields. It’s pretty basic but gets complex when pixel perfect timing is required in a certain boss fight.

Speaking of those, there are a few boss fights scattered around and they’re all unique and fun. Health packs are plentiful enough that being mostly thorough in exploring the game will give the player an ample supply, although it was really really close for me at the end of the game. Searching for hidden items is just a matter of pressing A or B when near it, then it loads itself into the player's inventory. There are no visual cues about what is to be searched, though, leading to just walking along every wall and object in an area pressing A and B to see if something pops out.

I was worried as the first few areas were relatively small, but when the player gets to Marrakesh the map gets really big and meaty, with maze-like city streets and tunnels to navigate. Opening parts of the map may require items and side missions to get there as well. The story unfolds as one explores and plays, and it's standard James Bond stuff. That's a good thing, though, as NPCs are lively and helpful with tips and items. There is humor and innuendo, as one would expect in a James Bond experience. Sound effects are good, and hearing the James Bond theme throughout the game was a treat.

There is also a casino that has Blackjack, Baccarat, and some other basic card game to gamble on. Upon completing the game, these open up to free play. There is one part of the game where James must get to a certain amount of winnings, but the ability to save anywhere (both built into the game by design as well as the option to use the Analogue Pocket to save) allows the player to simply bet everything and if they lose, reload and try again.

It's almost mind-blowing that Goldeneye 007 came out for the Nintendo 64 in August of 1997 and then this Game Boy title followed in February of 1998. One was a state-of-the-art shooter that was a commercial and critical success and has been lauded ever since. The other came out for a nearly decade-old monochrome portable system at the end of its life cycle. These were developed by different companies and had no connection to each other that I could discern. Nonetheless, James Bond 007 on the Game Boy shines as a fun adventure, and those who made this game should be just as proud as the team behind Goldeneye 007.

Spoiler alert: James gets the girl at the end.

 

Beaten: Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel without a Pulse (One)

 There was a brief few years in 2004-2006 where I actually had an original Xbox and played a few games for it but I was mostly playing PC MMORPGs then, along with a few handhelds. I had already missed the PS2 console era pretty much, except for a seldom-played Nintendo Gamecube, so the surprise XBox gift opened up that console generation’s library a little. 

One of the titles that caught my eye was Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel without a Pulse, a third person action game where the player plays as the zombie, rather than the other way around as seen in most games that involve the undead. The hook is that your victims become your horde and the player can sort of herd them ahead into attacking police and other living entities. 

 I got pretty far in my old play through, but quit in frustration when the game had a Simon-like dance off minigame that I couldn’t get past. 

I will say, in addition, my play style was less, uh, completionist(?) than it became a few years later with the XBox 360/PS3 era. That era got me up to speed on modern campaigns and what it took to actually commit to beating a game.

In 2021, the game was re-released with improved controls and a few other bells and whistles like achievements, so I recently decided to revisit it. Like my recent play through of Alpha Protocol,  I was hungry enough for the concept that I could overlook the issues.

This was a re-release and not a remaster; a distinction I have learned in recent years, meaning the look and the feel are the same, but a few quality of life improvements were added. Fortunately, one of the improvements was to skip the dance minigame entirely, meaning the studio that remastered it was well aware of how much that part of the game sucked.

In fact, that studio also acknowledged that the tutorial level was awful, as the achievement awarded for beating it was called “That Didn’t Age Well” and was described as “Complete the painfully slow, forced tutorial “. 

None of it aged well, so a discerning gamer will surely turn away from the old graphics and janky gameplay. There are different things to do in the game and a few fun boss fights, so it really doesn’t get monotonous. 

Stubbs also has a fun revenge story and the game’s undead humor shines. I’m glad I returned to Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel without a Pulse, and I’m glad I got to skip the dance minigame and see more of it than my previous attempt to beat it. It’s unique and fun enough, and these days that’s enough for me.

Beaten: Alpha Protocol (PS3)

 I really really need to write these reviews immediately after finishing a game, and not months later.

Alpha Protocol was released in 2010 at the height of the XBox 360/PS3 era (which I call generation nine but the world says is eight) and there was a lot of anticipation for it. It is a full on espionage role-playing game, so a lot of us were thinking "Mass Effect meets James Bond", what could go wrong?

The reviews hit and it appeared that a lot went wrong. There were bugs and glitches of course, but for the most part the consensus was that the action - shooting, hiding in cover, and so forth - was very bad, even if the storytelling and character conversation options were great. So Alpha Protocol came and went, lost to the ages as many much more better games came after. 

There has been, however, an internet wave of nostalgia towards this game that had so much promise, but for me the question was - it is playable enough? Keeping with my recent PS3 love, I choose that version and dove in. 

After enjoying all the conversation options in my recent playthrough of Rise of the Argonauts, I was prepared for it in Alpha Protocol and was not disappointed. It really is deep and complex with options to be a nice romantic bond type or a total douchenozzle. I choose the cold professional but helpful agent. I just did my job and took some weird satisfaction in shooting down all the characters that were clearly hitting on me. "Uh, thanks for the intel, and no I am not interested in a romantic subplot with you" seemed to happen a lot.

The plot is pretty standard - agent gets burned and goes underground to uncover the plot. I loved that the villains are basically flimsy corporate caricatures and the company is basically Halliburton, and that there were little parts of the game where the TV is on talking about world events. There are a lot of small touches here and there that add depth. 

So the reviews were right - the story, characters, and conversation choices represent a part of the game that was clearly designed very well, and for multiple playthroughs. The action though, is so poor that most players wouldn't bother. The player plays in third person, and the aiming is sketchy at best, and the stealth is broken. Crouched behind cover, since Gears of War, usually means the player crouched behind an object is sort of stuck to it, and hidden. In this game, you just crouch near it an obstruction and hope for the best. If a single pixel is sticking out, a guard a hundred feet away will see you.

I had fun in my playthrough, and with a few cool boss fights to break the monotony, even the substandard action was bearable. The concept of an espionage RPG is still out there, but this attempt in 2010 called Alpha Protocol was a step in the right direction. Hopefully, someone will take that concept and run with it someday.

Beaten: Wanted Weapons of Fate (PS3)

Videogame adaptations of movies have earned a pretty bad rap, even though some of the earliest known such games were pretty good (see Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back on the Atari VCS).  Goldeneye 007 in the late 1990s was certainly a high standard, and the first time that I can recall a videogame making me immediately want to see the movie. It should be noted that the movie is adapted from a comic book.

I remember when the movie Wanted came out in 2008 and adding it to a list I had of "get around to seeing it eventually" movies. It had the star power of Angelina Jolie, James McAvoy, and Morgan Freeman, but the wife and I never got around to checking it out, even when it appeared on streaming services we had. I had also heard about the tie-in videogame but it was of course also forgotten about.

That is, until my recent hunt for XBox 360 and PS3 hidden gems, as I am coalescing around the idea that that specific console generation was the highpoint of the entire hobby. I picked up the PS3 version for this as my 360 has been getting plenty of attention this year. Reviews had warned me that it was fun but short, and my expectations were prepared.

Wanted: Weapons of Fate is a third person shooter that takes place five minutes after the movie ended. Having not seen the movie yet was not a hinderance as the game caught me up pretty fast on what was going on. The story revolves around a secretive assassin's guild and the main character's quest to understand both his abilities and history. 

The big hook of these assassins is that they can slow things down and curve bullets, and the game delivers on that cool mechanic. It's really fun once the player gets it going and the controls work well. Other than that, it's third person combat with a story that is a great continuation of the movie - which I watched a few days after beating the game. The movie is also really good.

After finishing, part of me wanted Wanted Weapons of Fate to be a little longer, but that's a minor quibble. Over the last few years I've come to value shorter game experiences, so maybe it was the perfect size. If you're a gamer that can appreciate that too, then this game is recommended.

Beaten: Rise of the Argonauts (360)

 Another XBox 360 game that has turned up in my hunt for games on the system I missed is Rise of the Argonauts, an action adventure depicting a story that, while not necessarily based in existing Greek mythology, was nonetheless an interesting and unique take on all of it.

The player is Jason, and he’s after the golden fleece as usual, assembling his crew of Argonauts on his ship the Argos. From there the story diverges as Jason’s crew features a lot of familiar names like Hercules, Achilles, and so forth, with the goal of getting the golden fleece per legend. In this telling though, Jason is really on a quest to resurrect his fiancé, by getting the golden fleece and using it on her corpse. He unravels a conspiracy of evil behind it all and sometimes does some hacking and slashing to get it done. 

The game unfolds in a linear fashion, with Jason and his crew of Argonauts expanding at each port. At one point the player has a choice of which part of the quest to take on next but after those sections of the game are completed, it’s linear again. 

While it appears this game is just another hack-and-slash, there really is not the same proportion of action to conversation as in other games. Conversations with people one meets and members of the crew are absolutely essential to getting through the game. In a unique twist, conversational choices align with various Greek gods, where Ares might prefer the confrontational approach, Apollo might prefer a more compassionate choice.

Greek mythology is ingrained not only in these conversations and their choices, but in an absolutely unique quest and challenge menu that consists of constellations that, with the completion of a quest or a challenge, add stars to show it. Upgrades to abilites take place in another menu where the various gods grant powers based on the player's actions and conversation choices. In addition to combat and conversation, stopping and praying to those attention-starved gods here and there also adds up. 

The combat is nothing noteworthy but there are a few decent boss fights along the way. No, this game is more about conversation and getting steeped in the mythology as a unique story unfolds, and that part of the game shines. I'd definitely classify this game as an XBox 360 hidden gem and recommend it to any player nostalgic for those simpler times.

Beaten: Ultima Runes of Virtue (Game Boy)

 Talk about a pleasant surprise. At some point in the past I picked up a loose cartridge of Ultima Runes of Virtue for the Game Boy, knowing that it would not be a full Ultima-style RPG, and tried it out. It seemed at first to be more of a dungeon puzzle game than even an action adventure and I didn’t fiddle with it much.

Then I plugged it into my new Analog Pocket and really dug in. Having beaten it after a few weeks of portable fun, I can gladly say that this game stands shoulder to shoulder with Final Fantasy Legend, The Legend of Zelda Link’s Awakening, and Final Fantasy Adventure as must-play Game Boy RPGs and action RPGs. 

So yeah, puzzles. It is a masterpiece of a dungeon puzzle game, with lots of monster combat thrown in. By that I mean, stepping on a floor plate might remove a wall and unleash a horde of spiders. That’s just one example though and fails to describe the gloriously crazy variety of such puzzles and traps.

Once again, playing this on an Analogue Pocket allowed me to save anywhere, eliminating the frustration of multiple repetitive dungeon runs. No, only my own lack of thoroughness and attention to detail resulted in multiple repetitive dungeon runs. None of these puzzles are insanely hard, and if I remember correctly, most can be solved within the same dungeon, with the items you should have, through trial and error and observation.

The game takes place in a standard, classic Ultima top down world. The player starts on a single continent with a few castles, shops, and dungeons, and opens up other sections of the world as the game progresses. Boats act as ferries to get to and from these landmasses, with the final continent only reachable through a dungeon at first, but a ferry opens up once the player has made it through so the dungeon trip does not have to be repeated.

With such complex and clever puzzles in the dungeons, the designers had to come up with a way to get players unstuck if they did the wrong thing. It is possible to get stuck in a lot of situations, so there is an item in the player's backpack to instantly teleport them out of the dungeon and back to Lord British's throne room for a quick healing and reset. It's an ugly solution that forces a complete dungeon restart, but with the Analog Pocket and its save states, I did not need to utilize it often.

There is not much in the way of NPC conversation and interaction, but the player does level up attributes and equipment to a basic degree. And it bears repeating that the player must explore every tile of every dungeon to avoid missing important items. While the goal of each of the eight dungeons is to recover a rune, there are also important items hidden that will be required for the player to advance.

In this sense, the game requires some level of backtracking if the player is not paying attention (like me), and some level of grinding to save up money for some of the more expensive purchases available in shops. Fortunately, it was easy to find places to quickly grind gold, and even some of the more useful items.

It's always a good feeling when a game gives you more than you were expecting. I was expecting a half-assed dungeon crawler that was just cashing in on the Ultima name. Instead, this is exactly what one would hope for in a portable adventure and it was a joy to explore and solve over a few weeks. I guess I had better start looking for the sequels to Ultima Runes of Virtue for more pleasant surprises.

Beaten: Two Worlds (360)

 The summer of 2024 has been bittersweet for fans of the Xbox 360 as Microsoft has pulled the plug on the online store for the console, ending a long era of support for the legendary system. It had to happen but it’s still a bitter pill to swallow.

The sweet part is a wave of nostalgia across the internet as many gamers post videos and social media posts recollecting the glory days of the console. I’ve never stopped playing on my old XBox 360, which has survived the red ring of death, a lightning strike/power surge which took out its ethernet connector, and a hard drive upgrade. As of this writing, the disc drive door is scting fussy.

In addition to a wave of last-minute downloaded games arriving on my 360, my physical disc collection is once again growing thanks to a local mom and pop video game store near my office. One game that has languished in my 360 backlog for too long is Two Worlds, a full action RPG released in 2007 by Polish studio Reality Pump.

Oddly enough, I had played and finished Two Worlds 2 on the Playstation 3 back in 2011 but at the time dismissed the idea of going back and playing the first game as the reviews were pretty mediocre. It was a good, solid RPG too, if not quirky and a little “off” in a delightful way indicative of a non traditional game studio.

That right there is the rub of my love of games from this era. For every Grand Theft Auto IV or Elder Scrolls Oblivion, there were dozens of full-effort, packed with loads of content and story games released by studios trying their best, and sometimes failing.

Two Words was surprisingly stable, with only a few crashes during my play through. It’s really a sprawling open world RPG with good combat, lots of NPCs with quests, factions, and everything one could want. The graphics are what one would expect from the early XBox 360 days, but I found them good enough.

The voice actor who voices the player’s character was thankfully in this one too, as his snarky comments here and there were a source of amusement. 

As usual, I did not dig too deeply into the complexities of character development. Nor did I scour the map for every scrap of content; but rather I completed enough side quests to level up my character enough that, when the path opened up to the endgame, I was ready.

Two Worlds is a different enough, functional enough, and fun enough game to recommend to those with a taste for a unique studio’s take on the action RPG. Even though this game was lost in the crowd of XBox 360 releases back then, it can certainly stand out as a hidden gem in one’s 360 library to this day.

Beaten: Farcry 6 (Series)

I'm currently sort of stuck on a few games and while taking a break from them, I decided to try Farcry 6 since it was there on XBox Game Pass for free. After several recent open world games bogging me down for months, I was thinking I would avoid them for awhile in favor of more focused, linear games.

What I wanted for the break was a game that I could play and make regular progress, feel some sense of accomplishment, and mostly have fun. So I took on Farcry 6 with the caveat that I would not necessarily care about beating it and just enjoy each little piece of it. If I got bored and abandoned it, that would be fine.

I hadn't read any reviews and only knew that that one actor who is showing up in almost every science fiction show was playing the bad guy. I know Farcry, and Ubisoft, its publisher, so I had expectations. I was surprised as I started playing that the game, while presenting a huge map, seemed smaller than recent Farcry and Assassin's Creed games I've played. It seemed even smaller when I found a helicopter and did some aerial reconnaissance, but also smaller in terms of side missions and optional collection quests.

Dare I say, Farcry 6 was optimized in some way to make a more approachable experience for those of us who don't want to dedicate 3-6 months of our playtime? Or was my own perception of it all altered by my attitude in approaching the game, by only going after bite-size pieces of content without the goal of beating the game present in my head.

I started, of course, with the tutorial island, and told myself if I wanted to keep going after that, I could. Once completed, there are three factions across the map to recruit for the overall revolution. I had enough fun in the tutorial to head to the first faction I choose.

There was nothing different here. The player is a part of a revolution against an evil dictator, who being backed by an evil foriegn corporate dude, is enslaving his own population to grow some weird cancer-fighting tobacco or something. The main story missions explain this situation really well, and the side missions are no longer cookie-cutter repeats but rather more focused "stories" usually relating to one of the NPCs encountered.

I've always loved the capture-bases-to-liberate-the-country model since Just Cause, and Farcry 6 delivers that. And since I had fun with that, and the characters, side missions, vehicles, I found myself picking at little pieces of the cake until six weeks later I had beaten the game and liberated the country.

I had fun and did not feel overwhelmed and stressed or rushed to get to the ending. Oh there are some complaints that come to mind, but nothing stands out as game-breaking. It is 2024, so if I am carrying a rocket launcher and you're suddenly throwing me into a cutscene and it shows me holding a pistol, congratulations Ubisoft, you're several steps back from where games I've recently played from 2008 were.

So was Farcry 6 an optimized improvement on their open world design, or am I optimized to not get overwhelmed at giant open world games? I guess I'll find out the next time I take one on.

Beaten: Little Kitty, Big City (Series)

 In recent years, I've been loving games that let one play as a regular animal and mess up human stuff, like Goat Simulator, Untitled Goose Game, and of course Stray. I think of that as my role in this world anyway (to mess up human stuff), so these games really appeal to my itchiness for anarchy.

Since Little Kitty, Big City was on XBox's Gamepass, and I needed something light to play while stuck in other games, I dove in and started checking it out and found myself enjoying it more that I had suspected. 

In terms of gaming habits, this year I’ve shifted from an absolute determination to finish each game one at a time, and instead, when I get stuck, move on to another game for a break. I'm currently stuck in Gears 5(One) and A Boy and His Blob Trouble on Bloblonia (NES), so after perusing the contents of Xbox Game Pass, I found Little Kitty, Big City and dove into it's cute, fun adventure.

The cat you play is living the good indoor cat life up in a highrise home, when sudden circumstances bring the kitty down to street level, with a quest to just get back up there again. The viewpoint is third person, with a fairly large few blocks of city making up the map. The graphics are colorful and simple, and the city looks great. 

Kitty's quest takes him around a few blocks with some things the kitty can jump up to, which is easy as a prompt appears onscreen when a jump is viable. At first I thought that this prompt made it too easy, and then I remembered that such jumps are instinctually easy for cats, so this was accurate.

There's lots of exploring to do, and little surprises along the way including encounters with other cats who help the kitty, and dogs that can be bribed with a bone to allow access to areas.

I don't have much else to say about Little Kitty, Big City except that it was a light, short, and fun game that was a nice break from the usual fare I play. It's not sophisticated like Stray, nor does it have as many things to do as Goat Simulator 3, but for the cost (free with Gamepass), it was just the break I needed.

Beaten: Operation C (Game Boy)

 Oops I did it again.

Playing Operation C, the Game Boy entry into the Contra series on my shiny new Analogue Pocket, I was just hoping to see how far I could get. 

I’ve never beaten a Contra game before, but have fond memories of trying, especially those Contra 3: The Alien Wars co-op sessions I had in 1992 or 1993 with my friend Dave Frye.

The difference, as one can tell from recent articles I’ve written, is that the Analogue Pocket can create a save state anywhere when playing an old Game Boy, Game Boy Color, or Game Boy Advance cartridge. If the cartridge has its own save battery option, that still works too.

These games are still difficult, don’t get me wrong. The save state option merely eliminates the repetition of having to play through everything over and over again when attempting to get through a difficult part.

A game like Operation C has no built in cartridge save of the player’s progress, so when first all the players’ lives are gone, and then a limited number of continues are used up, it’s back to the beginning of the game, not just back to the beginning of the level or the boss fight.

Operation C is a great, five stage sampler of Contra, containing every bit of that game’s run-and-gun shooting action. The player starts with a rapid-firing machine gun that has unlimited ammunition, starts running and jumping to the right as waves of various enemies attack.

There’s no time limit, fortunately, but few places where one can stand still without endless respawning enemies running up from behind. Occasionally a power up will fly by with a big letter on it indicating what it does. “S” for upgrading the gun to a spread of bullets rather than a straight line, “F” for fire, and a few others.

“H” is for homing bullets that home in on enemies, curving their trajectory, and other than the save state was my key to victory in this game. I had the spreading fire first, then picked up the homing bullets, and then took care to not pick up another power up at any point after that.

In addition to scrolling and jumping right and sometimes up, some stages are viewed top-down and scroll up. This certainly adds to the variety, as does several mini-boss type of encounters scattered here and there. The boss fights are likewise challenging, but patterns exist in their attacks for players to discern.

I had a perfect playthrough going on at the final boss fight, meaning I went into it with five extra lives. I failed to beat it with my first life and his homing bullets. Since the game at least puts the player back in the midst of the fight for their second and subsequent lives, I was able to burn through those extra lives to victory.

I can now cross “beat a Contra game” off of my videogame bucket list.

Beaten: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan (Game Boy)

 Platformers have never been my strong suit, even when they reigned supreme during the 16-bit era.  While I tried and played many, there were few I finished. This was especially true on the Game Boy, where the hardware limitations could cause a blurring effect when the screen scrolls in some games.

Thus, my Game Boy collection has quite a few unfinished platformers, and I’ve been giving some of them another shot since getting the Analogue Pocket, as the clear screen, the save state option, and the end of any blurring issues with these types of games makes them shine in a new light.

Enter Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan, a five-stage game featuring the famous reptilian heroes scrolling right to defeat an army of ninjas and other foes from the cartoon and comic. After failing to beat the very difficult NES TMNT game I must’ve been hoping the Game Boy game would be easier. 

I have no idea how far I got back then, but sliding the cartridge into the Analog Pocket, I dove in without much hope of getting anywhere new, but I was having fun so I pressed on. Soon, I was beating the first stage without using the save state feature, which gave me enough confidence to start a new playthrough and use the save state, just to see how far I could get.

Now, save states have not been a guarantee of success for me by any means - I still got stuck at very difficult parts of Castlevania on the NES mini and Splatterhouse on the Turbografx 16 mini - but they do remove the frustration of completely starting over upon death.

Thus, with TMNT: Fall of the Foot Clan, I locked into a pattern of slowly moving right until the next enemies spawned and attacked, killing them without taking damage, waiting until things settled down, and saving. 

With no time limit this made most of the game pretty easy, but there were boss fights at the end of every level to contend with as well. These were not particularly hard either, and saving right before them made it easier. Some I beat on the first try.

There were three small bonus mini-games I found during my travels which added variety to the experience, and those were mostly fun. I kept waiting for a spike in difficulty that never came.

Played as intended, this would be a fairly tough game, simply because there is no natural save option on the cartridge and each attempt would mean starting over. Oddly enough, the player can pick any level to play right at the start, but to get the ending one must play and beat them sequentially, I suspect.

I had fun beating this turtle sized platformer after owning it for 34 years. However, there is no way I’m trying that NES TMNT game again, thanks to the now legendary water level’ difficulty. 

A lot of these old platformers are difficult simply due to the need to start over every time. I’m too old now to hit those walls, but with the advent of save states, I can save a good playthrough in progress and take on new challenges as I encounter them.

Beaten: Mazes of Fate (GBA)

When thinking about what I wanted to write about Mazes of Fate, a Game Boy Advance dungeon crawler I'd recently beaten, I realized that the story of my acquisition and enjoyment of this game is the convergence of three of my gaming interests: portable adventure games, cleaning up at clearance sales when a device for playing them is done in the market, and unique game designs and developers.

Mazes of Fate is a portable adventure game, which early on for me was something I very much wanted to have. For the 1980s, all I had for that was the handheld Dungeons and Dragons released by Mattel. When the Game Boy showed up at the end of the decade, it was not long before full turn based RPGs followed, starting with Final Fantasy Legend. Since then the RPG has been a part of every major handheld console, and along with it the joy of having an adventure game that you can pick up and play anywhere, and of course save your progress. 

Shifting gears, there was a day in 1985 when, while in college, my friends and I stopped at a nearby Quality Farm & Fleet store for some other reason but saw a bin of Vectrex consoles and games all on a clearance sale. I sure did not have the money back then to clean up, but made a note that, when a game system goes down, to try to pick up as much in clearance sales when I can.

I got to put that into practice when the Game Boy Advance was supplanted by the DS in the mid-2000s. Without much effort, I was able to pick up a lot of GBA games here and there (I even found an original Game Boy game still on a store shelf amid that search) and build a nice little library. While I was pretty much done with that by 2009, I nonetheless picked up Mazes of Fate after finding it cheap at a Half Price Books store in San Antonio, Texas.

I tested the game, of course, and played a few minutes, but put it down until my recent acquisition of an Analogue Pocket portable. This device, with its clear screen, great controls, and save state option, has brought forth a renaissance in my Game Boy/Color/Advance playing, even more so than the Game Boy Player for the Gamecube did back in the day. I now exist in a state of always having some old game I dismissed or didn't play much in the Analogue Pocket for portable fun at home, and sometimes at work on my lunch break.

While there were lots of RPGs for the Game Boy Advance, this one is unique for a lot of reasons. It was developed by Sabarasa, and Artgentinian studio, and published by Graffiti Entertainment in the US. According to Wikipedia, development took two and a half years and the game was released on December 12, 2006. Yes, this was well after the heydey of the Game Boy Advance and well into the DS's reign as the handheld to have.

Gameplay is typical fantasy RPG stuff, where the player chooses a template character or creates one of their own, and is later joined by up to two other NPC characters. When in town or the overworld, the view is forward-top-down style and the tiny player walks around before entering a building or a town. In the overworld, there are no random encounters and little to explore. Points of interest sometimes only open up after an encounter with an NPC somewhere where the NPC tells the player about it.

In dungeons or other areas, the view turns to first person with the top part of the screen the view ahead and the bottom part the three party members' health bars and such. Battles take place in real time, with players attacking, casting spells, or using an item. Enemies approach and attack at their own speed as well. What is odd that the player can get a few range attacks on a foe, back away, and continue to hit and run. My best archer and mage, however, did not seem to ever do enough damage at a distance to make that a great strategy, so I would soften them up a bit before engaging in melee attacks with my fighter. Perhaps a different character build and other skills would have made a difference.

There is a lot of skill customization for the characters as they level up, but I did not explore that too deeply. Lockpicking is definitely a must for at least one of the characters in the party, as chests often require a high number in this skill to get open, and the breakable lockpicks are expensive at first. There were weird skills, like "Celerity" that I probably did not grasp. For those looking for character skill depth, it is here but not necessary to comprehend fully to get through the game.

Death of one or two of the three party members during combat is not permanent, meaning that if one can heal the any of the others back to life, they can continue to fight. If all three fall in battle, though, the player will have to start back at the last save point. Saving is anywhere, so death and backtracking are only an issue if the player lets them be.

The artwork for the enemies is unique, with a sort of slightly exaggerated cartoony style. Enemy attacks during battle are often just a few frames that sometimes create a slow blur. In fact, combat suffers from substantial lag at times, but never to a point where it causes issues as long as the player is aware.

There are cool story elements along the way, a few side quests, a decent level of loot and special weapons and armor, and lots of hidden walls in the dungeons to explore. I know I did not find everything nor do every side quest, but I did have a good time playing Mazes of Fate. Experiencing the different design, storytelling, and graphics provided by a rare game developer from the southern hemisphere was unique and refreshing enough to get past some of the minor lag issues of the game. 

The convergence of my lifelong quest for portable RPGs, my desire to build game libraries for defunct systems, and to see what different game studios can come up with was truly a treat. Mazes of Fate is a unique Game Boy Advance RPG that's worth a try.

Beaten: Romancelvania (PS5)

 I love the Castlevania series enough to have played a lot of them (and given up on beating all of them except Simon's Quest) over the years. I've never been interested in dating simulation games at all.  However, I love attempts by game designers to make something new or mash up different videogame genres, so Romancelvania struck me as something unique and potentially fun.

The studio behind this one is The Deep End Games, whose previous title was Perception back in 2017. In one of the great untold videogame stories I have from the 2010s when I was not blogging, a very generous friend who knew of my love of videogames actually gifted me a Kickstarter access to the project. I participated in the game's development via email, where I helped nail down some story aspects. The game was alright, but seeing my name in the credits was something special.

 The generous friend kept getting emails from The Deep End Games after its release which led her to also Kickstart their next game, and thus did I receive Romancelvania for free. I did not participate in the development on this one, though.  I tried it briefly after its release, but only recently picked it up again and played it to completion.

The premise is simple: One hundred years ago Dracula was defeated and his castle left in ruins, and his girlfriend dumped him on top of that. The Grim Reaper, tired of the downturn in damned souls coming to him via Drac, strips Drac of most of his powers and forces him to participate in a modern reality dating TV show, where he must select a new mate so he gets over the ex and starts killing again.

The gameplay is classic 2D side scrolling, jumping, combat, and exploration. Drac controls pretty well in combat and jumping, maybe not as tight as Castlevania but functionally fine. The combat is well handled, with a menu wheel to assign weapons and items to the controller keys. I kept the whip on the square button and the spear on the circle button most of the time. Certain enemies are vulnerable to certain weapons, so it's important to upgrade them all when you can.

So the gameplay is good, but the enemies are gloriously silly and cool. One starts out in Drac's Castle with some standard skeletons and bats and such, but once Drac's out in the world they get a little weird, in a good way. The bosses are unique as well, and require a little strategy to figure out how best to damage them. I found the difficulty of the game overall to be relatively easy, with the caveat that I explored most areas thoroughly as I went along, and backtracked to most of them twice after getting upgrades to access previously unreachable areas.

Drac gains experience and personally levels up, but also unlocks upgrades for his weapons in a unique way - by raising his relationship level with the various contestants. I've got to say that the cast of potential mates was thoroughly developed and written for maximum hilarity. They're all interesting, funny, and sometimes poignant. For players looking for replayability, I'd wager that every ending for each cast member offers something different.

Drac has conversations with them, goes on side quests for them, gifts them endlessly as exploration reveals gift items as loot here and there. There are romantic scenes he encounters in the world that allow him to invite a cast member on a date. He usually ends up helping the relationship but can cause a faux pas as well. Maybe next time, dude, don't take the mermaid queen to the seafood restaurant where she might know someone on the menu.

The world is well-developed, too. Starting from Dracula's Castle (rebuilt as a part of the show's production) to the nearby woods, the map expands as the story progresses, even opening up another map in what seemed like a later part of the game. There are save points only in this game, and most save points are also fast travel spots. Oddly enough, this is the only way to view the world map. It all works though, and is not that hard to adapt to. Only once did I get glitched into the environment and had to load my last save and recover some distance. The game is fun so it was no big deal.

I guess my experience with Romancelvania was one of exceeded expectations in both gameplay and story. The combat was good, the characters fun, the story had some depth, and it lasted longer than I had expected. I thought Romancelvania was going to be a little lowbrow, but it was classy and cool.

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.