Auditioning

 As a gamer maintaining a vast backlog, I normally have the next game I want to play in mind as I approach the end of one game. Sometimes, however, I'm not sure what to jump to next. So what I will do is audition my next game by trying a few titles from my backlog and seeing if they grab me. 

I've been doing this in the few months after beating Paper Mario, even completing some of the shorter games I've auditioned. Let's look at what I've been playing and checking out.

Farcry Classic (360)

This 2013 remake for Xbox Live Arcade of the 2004 PC game shows its age well. And yes, I said I was burnt out on Farcrys after 5, but this is not the modern open world Farcry. Instead, this is a refreshingly linear game with some large open environments, cool 80s action movie vibe cutscenes, and standard gunplay.

What really stood out in this game was the enemy AI. One would think that 2004 AI would be worse than most modern games, but something weird is going on with these enemies. Sometimes, as is usual with AI, they are just idiots standing there confused by their programming, which in 2021 is still common. Other times, though, they worked together, took and held positions and waited on my next move, and generally surprised the shit out of me with their behavior. It was refreshing.

Status: Beaten

Feeding Frenzy (360)

This Pop Cap casual game is the kind I normally dismiss, but I tried it and had fun with the scramble-around-the-screen-eating-what-you-can gameplay, which is vaguely reminiscent of the Imagic classic Dragonfire. Start eating small fish, grow, eat bigger fish, repeat. Fast and colorful, but the frenetic action never gets out of hand.

It's a casual game after all, so the difficulty is light but the fun is heavy.

Status: Beaten

Marlow Briggs and the Masque of Death (360)

Another genre I normally avoid is the hack and slash. Every one I've tried has been fun at first but later revealed to be frustrating, with difficult combo moves and so much stuff happening on the screen it becomes hard to even see the character, much less what they are hitting.

However, this hidden gem from late in the XBox 360 life cycle is one polished piece of software. The action gets intense but remains manageable. The character and story may seem standard at first, but not long after starting the game, one encounters a self-aware level of humor that was a delight. The companion mask-god thing that follows the player around cracks jokes about the player dying so much that it takes the sting off of dying so much.

There's lots of platforming here, too, but none of it yet has been unfair. The camera follows the player though each area and is one of the best I've seen in gaming. It always seems to be where it needs to be, with very few instances of it being in the wrong place and causing the player to die due to an unforeseen pitfall.

Status: 3/4 completed, stuck on a boss fight

Heavy Weapon (360)

Another Pop Cap casual game from way back in the day, Heavy Weapon is a bullethell shooter where the player controls a tank scrolling right at the bottom of the screen, shooting at aircraft above. Again, this is not my normal genre, for the exact same reasons listed above regarding hack and slash games.

Nonetheless. Heavy Weapon has brought me in with its colorful graphics, simple yet challenging gameplay, and varied enemies. I did not expect to play this very far before quitting forever in frustation, but playing a little every few days over the last week brought me to the end, and a victory over the final boss.

Status: Beaten

Akumajo Dracula X Chi no Rondo (PC Engine Super CD ROM2 via Turbografx 16 Mini)

This Castlevania classic was a Japan-only exclusive for the PC Engine CD ROM attachment, and tragically was never ported over to the U.S. I remember reading about it in early 1990s gaming magazines and being blown away by screenshots of the graphics, which were a step up from the NES series of Castlevania games, but not as good as the later-released Super Castlevania IV for the SNES.

It's got all the classic Castlevania gameplay and weaponry and is totally playable for a non-Japanese speaking player like me. With the TG16 Mini's save states, I plan to keep chipping away at if for the foreseeable future.

Status: At the start of the 4th Stage, no hope of going much further

Splatterhouse (Turbografx 16 via Turbografx 16 Mini)

I had this creepy cult classic in my Turbografx 16 collection before the great purge, and as much as I enjoyed it, it was a tough one to pick up and play over and over. A side-scrolling brawler with limited weapons and a haunted house full of gory enemies, Splatterhouse has great graphics and sound effects accompanying it's onslaught of enemies.

Again, with the save state feature of the TG16 Mini, I have been chipping away at in anew, making it further than (I think) I ever got back in the day. On some levels, I am literally saving again after making it past each small encounter without taking damage. The only healing comes automatically at the start of a new level, so I must make it to each boss fight with full health.

Status: Stage V so far, farther than I made it 30 years ago

Outer Wilds (Xbox One)

I saw this title on XBox Game Pass Ultimate Platinum Gold Express, or whatever it's called, and had to try it out. It's a first person game of exploration and flying that takes place in a tightly packed solar system. You fly from planet to planet unlocking some sort of mystery.

Everything here is right from the graphics to the characters to the controls, but I did not take much time to learn them and had difficulty getting around, resulting in death by crash and/or asphyxiation. Some of the planets have cave systems, and flying inside one I found a weird wormhole thing that transported me back out to space, where I did not have enough fuel to make it back to any planets, which was repeatedly frustrating.

I'm sure it would be a good game, and I hope to return to it and try to familiarize myself with the controls better. It's got a lot of charm.

Status: I crash a lot

The Outer Worlds (Xbox One)

Fresh off their take on Fallout with Fallout New Vegas, and their awesome South Park: The Stick of Truth, Obsidian Entertainment created their own version of a Bethesda RPG with The Outer Worlds. It plays exactly like an Elder Scrolls or Fallout  game, with combat, levelling, inventory management, companions, and conversation all polished, colorful, and a good balance between fun and tedious.

The player is an unfrozen colonist in a far away solar system, cut off from Earth and struggling to survive. The story unfolds well and there are lots of side missions and even more loot to be had. The companions are great, and at the difficulty I played, unable to be permanently killed. The best one is SAM, a repurposed cleaning robot that shoots acid, whose robotic commentary about cleaning is hilarious.

Since Bethesda seems to be going the Rockstar way of ending solo player experiences in favor of big bucks multiplayer games, it's great that Obsidian took the torch and ran with it so well. The Outer Worlds is a tight adventure without an overabundance of side distractions, rather just enough content that the finale comes long before the burnout.

Status: Beaten (this game won the audition and became my full campaign)

Let’s Be Honest, Sony. Play Has Some Limits

 (UPDATE: Later, Sony reversed its decision to close down the PS3 and PS Vita stores, but the PSP store will be closing as scheduled. A temporary relief for PS3 and PS Vita owners.)

In a heartless but probably sensible business decision, Sony announced today that they are shutting down the online stores for PSP, PS3, and Vita systems this summer. 

I just received the long email detailing what this means for various aspects of the service, but the bottom line is that after the shutdown, many games will become no longer available (legally) anywhere.

At the bottom of the email there was Sony’s new catchphrase “PLAY HAS NO LIMITS”. 

The irony was too much, hence the above defacing. If that logo hadn’t been there, I’d have left it alone.

No Guilt Here

 As a middle aged gamer, the need to work out each day amid the cracking bones and sore muscles becomes clear. If I want to retire well into my 100s with my backlog of video games, the time is now to get into and maintain some semblance of physical health.

So I have relocated the Wii U to the downstairs setup and tested it this weekend. It had been awhile:

As we all know by now, the Wii Fit workouts and stats are, shall I say, for smaller people than most of us. The proof:  it said that my 202 pound /55 year old frame is obese, that I need to lose 50 pounds, and my Wii Fit age is 68.

Still, it's good to know that it's working as intended with the same old snarky comments and totally unrealistic body image standards. Let's see how long I stick with it this time.

Beaten: Paper Mario (N64 via Wii Virtual Console via Wii U Transfer)

 I've tried to tackle a few Mario platformers over the last few years, trying to get into one enough to finish it, but eventually yielding to the harsh frustration that platformers in general present. I could get good enough to push through, I suppose, but time is too precious to throw myself at that level of repetitive failure just to get a few more levels into them.

Instead, I took on Paper Mario, the late-to-the-party Nintendo 64 classic that launched the Paper Mario franchise in 2001. In 2001, I was deep into Ultima Online and the N64 at this point was starting to gather dust. I jumped aboard the series later with the Gamecube sequel Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door and later the Wii entry, Super Paper Mario.

Everything that was great about those sequels started here, in a fun and polished package that presents enough of a challenge to not be annoying, enough surprises to keep players moving forward, and enough humor to make the journey enjoyable.

The pacing is great and at no point did I have to grind to level, although I did grind items for a time to increase my wealth. Levelling means raising hit points, mana, and badge slots. Badges are important attack and defense boosters and configuring them is a constant concern, as their various uses can be situational.

I may never take on a classic heavy duty JRPG, but the simplicity and overall lightness of the Paper Mario games, including this first one, makes for a rewarding experience whenever I want to scratch that itch.

Now, I had originally purchased Paper Mario on the Wii Virtual Console, along with a few other games, and had abandoned them all when I packed the old Wii up a decade ago. For the rest of the 2010s I stuck mostly to the Sony and Microsoft consoles and paid little mind to what Nintendo was doing, which was releasing their own new consoles, the Wii U followed by the Switch.

Since the old days, I have gone with one philosophy as to whether or not to buy a console, and that is simply "Is there a game exclusive to it that I want to play?" For the Wii U, that answer was no, so for the first time ever, I skipped a Nintendo console, but later in the 2010s, I did purchase its successor, the Switch. 

My last gaming friend in the world, Jimbo, is a Nintendo loyalist though, and he was quite disdained by Nintendo abandoning the Wii U when the Switch came out. He encouraged me repeatedly to pick one up, and when I kept putting it off even when the used Wii U consoles were cheap, he took the initiative and gave us one as a present in a deal he got from a co-worker who was ready to abandon it.

And while there was still nothing of note I wanted to play on it, it was backward compatible with the Wii, and offered a way to bring one's Wii data over, including those 5 games I had purchased on the Virtual Console. I dithered for over a year an a half on that, knowing it would be tedious work to perform the transfer.

Finally in December, I dug the Wii out and hooked it up to the internet to begin the process. While the Nintendo online store thing was a ghost town, the app the do the transfer was still there and ready to download. Keep in mind, in late 2020, the Wii U has been totally left behind by Nintendo in favor of the Switch, so I was actually amazed that the mechanism to transfer stuff was still in place. One wonders how much longer players have to do that.

All of the work and frustration melted away when I was presented, during the transfer, with this:

Little robot guys actually moving the files, to load them on a spaceship/SD card for their journey to the Wii U. Once the card is loaded and inserted into the Wii U, the robots unload them with similar animation.

Somebody took a lot of time at Nintendo to make all this. No doubt that it was a selling point for some Wii users when the Wii U was released in 2012. In spite of the Wii U's failure in the marketplace, I'm glad they have left the infrastructure in place in 2020 so us late adapters can still make the move. Playing the few Wii Virtual Console games was my main selling point, but having the Wii U installed in my upstairs setup allows me, when I feel the need, to revisit the our Wii game library or try a Wii U hidden gem at some point.

As always, the more the merrier when maintaining a vast videogame backlog.

2020 Game of the Year Award

 I know, I know....I still have not caught up on all the games of the years for the 2010s. I hope to revisit those years at some point by creating a page to immortalize all my games of the years, which this year will reach a milestone of continuous games of the years for forty friggin' years. Surely, my own game of the year award is the only continuous running such award in the entire industry, which sort of makes it the most prestigious in my mind.

My game of the year is simply awarded to the best game I played that year. In some cases, the game that has won was released years earlier but just that year had come to my attention. I'll leave it up to the gaming media to show us the real breakthrough games each year, with the shiniest graphics and most brilliant gameplay innovations, as I am not the one who can play the latest and greatest titles that are released each year, for the most part.

This year I finally picked up my wife's Nintendo Switch to see what games, other than Mario Kart, were worth playing. I found a few very original titles, as well as my only release day purchase of the year, Deadly Premonition 2. Other than that, I jumped around the decades of gaming and caught up with a few great titles from the past.

Here are this year's winner, and runners-up:

Game of the Year: Golf Story (Switch)

I've never picked a sports game to be a game of the year, unless one counts racing games of course, but Golf Story, an amazing hybrid of sports and RPG, was a masterpiece that easily wins it. Golf video games, with their own unique game mechanics,  have always been fun for me, but not a fun that hooks me for extended play sessions, until now.

It's a top-down role playing game, where the battles are not just golf matches, but small challenges along the way. Instead of upgrading armor and weapons, one upgrades golf clubs and related equipment and skills. The usual game mechanism for golf videogames is present in the form of a shot bar that the player uses with an eye on the wind to make a shot. 

They definitely got the golf right, as matches are perfectly balanced and quite challenging at times. Themes and courses vary as the story progresses, too. They also got the story right, as the player works their way up through the ranks in hopes of making it into the final championship tournament. Golf Story is fun, innovative, and perfectly balanced to provide an engaging and enjoyable gaming experience for the ages.

Runner-Up: Untitled Goose Game (Switch)

After enjoying Goat Simulator a few years ago, I felt the rampaging animals screwing with people genre was going to be a thing, but it took a few years to get Untitled Goose Game, an action-puzzle game where, duh, the player takes on the role of an annoying ass goose and terrorizes an unsuspecting small community with honking and stealing and other goose antics.

Doing exactly what I would do were I reincarnated as a goose, goose travels around and steals items, scares people, and gets shooed away. The goals are presented in a small checklist for each area, and finishing each section opens up the next one.  The one drawback is that the game is just too short, but for what one gets, it's worth it. The graphic style and sound are perfectly crisp and bright but not cartoonish. 

Why is it that every modern triple A game experience wears out its welcome with endless side quests and dots on a map that overwhelm any player hoping to get back to their lives at some point, but a gem like this is over in a few hours? I don't want another Assassin's Creed 200 hour campaign, I just want a sequel to Untitled Goose Game that lets the goose loose on Las Vegas or something. 

Beaten in 2020

 As the world and all of civilization continued their downward plunge toward their inevitable collapse, I had a great year playing videogames in between heartbreaking news reports and my own truckload of personal tragedy. Videogames are an escape and few years have been as escape-worthy as 2020.

In addition, the epiphany I had in March to pull away a little from shiny new releases and finally get around to playing classics that had passed me by in the last four decades really paid off, as a slew of mini retro consoles and resources like the Internet Archive and Myabandonware came to my full attention and appreciation.

Time is ticking, and this middle aged gamer could use up his last life any day in the next 40 years, so it was definitely time to approach the hobby this way. Case in point, here are all the games I beat in 2020: 

Full Games:

Assassin's Creed Origins (XBox One)

Untitled Goose Game (Switch)

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (Switch)

Golf Story (Switch)

Beyond Oasis (Genesis)

Gears of War: Judgment (XBox 360)

A Boy and His Blob: The Rescue of Princess Blobette (Game Boy)

Ys Book 1: Ancient Ys Vanished (Turbografx 16 CD via Turbografx 16 Mini)

Ys Book 2: Ancient Ys Vanished The Final Chapter (Turbografx 16 CD via Turbografx 16 Mini)

Job Simulator (PSVR)

Assassin's Creed Odyssey (Xbox One)

Marathon: Durandal (Xbox 360)

Tass Times in Tonetown (Apple IIGS via Windows 10 via Internet Archive)

DLC

Dying Light: The Following (PS4)

As 2021 begins I am reminded that, even though I first played Pong in 1975 or so, it was 40 years ago this year that it all clicked and I was hooked for life on this silly ass passtime. In the fall of 1981, when our local bowling alley added Galaxian, Asteroids, and Space War, that's when it really began for me. 

So, here's to a better year for the world, and meanwhile, there will always be great games to escape into when it is not.

Beaten: Tass Times in Tonetown (Apple IIGS via Windows 10 / Internet Archive)

 I first heard of TassTimes in Tonetown when I received my first issue of Questbusters, an absolutely essential 1980s newsletter with reviews and walkthroughs of adventure games. That's how we rolled before the internet. I did not pick up the game for my Commodore 64 until the early 1990s, during my sweeps of bargain bins, and while I played a few sessions, I did not get very far.

Nonetheless, it has been on my radar ever since, and a Google search revealed that the game was free to play on the Internet Archive, a vast, free repository of all things, ever. The sheer amount of software that is there not to just play directly but to download is staggering. Having its existence revealed to me was a watershed moment in my thinking in that, to play games across all platforms throughout the history of gaming, I no longer needed to necessarily acquire ancient hardware to do so.

This time, I played Tass Times in Tonetown using the Apple IIGS version, which featured one of the earliest mouse-based interfaces in my memory. As a standard text adventure with graphics, players can as usual just type commands like GO WEST or USE KEY, but the screen to the right of the area display contains a few common commands that one can use a mouse to click on and select. The icons for those are garishly large but forgivable as that was an emerging interface style at the time.

This being a classic text adventure, it required an extensive map to be made as the game was explored, and I went to town. The very act of exploring a map like this is enough to reveal all the aspects of the map and items in play, which brought me to approximately 80% completion by my own reckoning. From there, it was a matter of learning more about how the items I found work toward a solution.

Immediately upon entering the world of Tonetown, the player is at risk of death by not being "tass" enough. After doing what is needed to avoid that death, I thought there would be more aspects of the game that would task me with proving my tass-ness, but they never emerged. Part of the problem with playing old games is that sometimes, the modern expectations of gameplay creep in and one anticipates gameplay elements that had not been really developed yet.

Nonetheless, the world is fun to explore and the characters and situations are quirky and unique. The puzzles are not that hard, and as I mentioned, simply exploring the map will put most of the pieces in place. A lot of trial and error is required, but luckily for an older game, the player can save anywhere and there are plenty of save slots to encourage exploration.

In the 1980s, as the text only adventure evolved into first the same thing with a picture, then to more user friendly interfaces later in the decade, the themes of these games became more eclectic and varied, cumulating in such masterpieces as Lucasgames' Maniac Mansion. Tass Times in Tonetown is a fun little trip into just how wacky and offbeat these games could get. I'm glad I took the time in 2020 to finally swing back and finish the game, as well as map it out as I explored.

As for my map, I hope to take the time at some point to add it to this blog as a part of a map section, that will contain not just the new maps I make as I go, but scans of classic ones I drew back in the day. So, watch out for that. And be sure to visit and contribute if you can to the glorious effort that is the Internet Archive.

Nine Things That I Am Delighted Came Back in the 2010s

Back in the late 2000s when I was doing this blog, I would occasionally pepper my videogame blog articles with other entries related to geeky things that I also enjoyed. Continuing that, here are nine things that amazingly returned in the 2010s and my thoughts on them.

Midnight Oil

My favorite band  in the world broke up in 2002 after a decades-long career, and only reformed a few times after that to do special gigs here and there. Peter Garrett, the lead singer, went on the serve in the Australian government, and the other members kept busy with other projects. There was, for a very long time, no talk nor hope of a reunion, much less a reunion tour.

Cut to early 2016 when Peter Garrett cranked out a solo album, his time in the government done and seemingly really enthusiastic to get back into music.

Fans who hoped that this was a precursor to an Oils reunion were ecstatic the following year when not just a reunion was announced, but a massive worldwide tour, to my amazement. The first dates announced, however, put the nearest show to me as either Toronto or Chicago, so I was resigned to not getting to see them due to the sheer distance needed to travel. Late in the tour, however, new dates were added that included The House of Blues up in Cleveland, and thanks to my generous significant other, we got tickets to see the Oils in a small venue. Many of their shows on the Great Circle Tour were in large venues, but this club was smaller and we had great balcony seats with this view:

The nightmarish insanity of the times we live in were not passed by the band, calling out the corruption of the then current administration and Trump in particular. Peter Garrett also told the audience that they had stopped to visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame where they found their band mentioned on a tiny plaque in one display. Not bitterness about their lack of recognition, but rather a shining light on the relevance of inclusion in the Hall, I think.

Of course the next hope was a new LP of new material from the band, but that did not come until late 2020 and in the form of a shorter album with multiple collaborations with other artists called The Makarrata Project":

Sadly, shortly after the album's release, bassist Bones Hillman passed away. Before his tragic passing, he apparently told the band to replace him and that the show must go on, because the cause is too important. Tour dates for a hopefully post-COVID 2021 in Australia were announced later.

Mystery Science Theater 3000

Rifftrax continues to carry the torch from the 2000s, moving past synched-up mp3s playing alongside your DVD to multiple releases of fully riffed movies. We caught a few of these in the 2010s that were done in a live theater somewhere and simulcast to theaters all over the country. They did Manos again, and a Kickstarter to do Starship Troopers! It was a reminder of seeing the premiere of Mystery Science Theater: The Movie live in a theater full of Misties back in the 1990s.

But a huge flood of Netflix cash swept through the vast backlog of properties left untouched by other studios, and MST3K was continued for its 11th and 12th seasons with a new cast of humans, but the same bots. The formula held and the cast was great, even bringing back some level of invention exchange.

While fickle-ass Netflix gave up after two seasons, the show will go on. Best of all, there are free (but not commercial free) channels on Pluto TV that run reruns of classic MST3K and Rifftrax episodes all day long. How cool is that? The audience for all of this is big enough to ensure lots of riffs for the foreseeable future.

The Tick

Third time's a charm? After a classic 1990s cartoon, a "Seinfeld with Superheroes" short live-action in the 2000s, the great streaming wave of cash swept through Amazon Prime in the late 2010s. With it, a contest was created for viewers to select their favorite pilot from d a bunch of entries. The winner was a pilot for a new live-action Tick series, made with modern special effects and for modern viewing sensibilities.

What I mean by that is that this is a much darker version of the Tick, still hilariously funny at times, but with characters rooted in some deep psychological shit. The reward for winning the pilot contest was a full season order, and they delivered, creating a fantastic story arc, lots of great secondary characters, and one of the best super-villains to hit any screen, the Terror played by Jackie Earl Haley.

A second season expanded on the various side characters and developed more lore of their crazy version of a world with superheroes. Amazon, having taken fickle lessons from Netflix, axed the show after that. It's too bad, too, as it was really one of the best superhero shows ever made for television, with a ton of potential had it been allowed to continue.

Maybe they will try again in a decade.

Hassle Castle

For much of my childhood, I dreamed of being a cartoonist, and had been drawing my own comics on a regular basis since I could remember. No shame in saying that they were not that great, because I was a kid just doing it for fun. Copiers and personal computers with printers were not that prevalent a thing in the late 1970s, and although my dad was a press room foreman at a real print shop, there was no technical way to make and sell multiple copies of my comics anyway.

One day in 1977 in the next town over, my parents and I stopped in a newsstand and I saw an actual self-published black and white comic book among all the regular national comic books and magazines:

I did say it was a black-and-white comic, but I colored in some of the cover with marker in my youthful lack of concern for future appreciation. The author was, as I suspected, a local adult person with not just the creative genius to come up with this horror-pun-minute classic, but with the means to publish and sell it. I picked up 3 more issues in 1978 but never followed up on it until decades later, with a Google search for the author.

It turns out David Lady went on to distinguish himself as a world famous sci-fi/horror movie mask collector and expert and maintains a Facebook group for fans of his work. He did not abandon Hassle Castle, though, and published 2 large volumes in the 2010s. One was available from a personal website which I think he took down in favor of his Facebook group, and another is still for sale on eBay.

I cannot recommend them enough. Great characters, silly stories, subtle commentary, and the best horror puns I've ever read.

Zima

Nostalgia washes through modern culture so prevalently now, but it's a double edged sword. I sometimes fear a future where everything is nostalgia reboots and remakes and nothing original blows us away. The 1990s are at their peak of nostalgia as the children and teens of that time have taken their place as adults with spending cash.

Zima, the refreshing malt beverage that swept through 1990s culture starting in 1994, was retired in the early 2000s. The brand was owned by Coors, however, who revived it for the summers of 2017 and 2018, seeking to cash in on sweet nostalgia taste. 

My own nostalgia comes from drinking Zima at the finest restaurant I ever worked at, with the coolest crew. We kicked ass as a top-10 fine dining restaurant during that time, and Zima was our colorless, odorless drink of choice during those long days. It drank easy and quick, went down smooth, and looked like 7Up if you poured it into the Styrofoam cup that sat on your station while you slaved on the grill all day. I was (and remain) not a great drinker, so Zima was safe for that working buzz/keep your shit together ratio required by the job.

During those two aforementioned modern summers, I drank Zima again, and was openly mocked by friends and family for it. A few we shared it with enjoyed it, and some recommended dropping Jolly Rancher candy in the bottle. In reality, I did not miss Zima when it was gone again (and I keep a 6-pack stashed in the garage). There was a weird aftertaste to this modern Zima which is not present in my preferred replacement, Smirnoff Ice Triple Black.

Arrested Development

This 2000s comedy classic returned with a new season on Netflix which was good, but confusing at first because of a warped chronology within the episodes of the season. Noting that awkwardness, the new season was reworked to be more chronologically straightforward. I have seen that season but not the other new season they added, but have come to realize that Arrested Development is a tough show to drop in and drop out of.

Not that it's a soap opera level of continuity to follow, it just flows better in a consistent binge-watching schedule rather than an episode here and and episode there. Nonetheless, the show and cast were still outrageously funny and the pace of the show whiplash-fast. I'm glad we got to see more of the Bluths and their wacky world.

TV Star Trek

Movie Star Trek in the 2010s consisted of Kelvin-timeline cast adventures that were mostly satisfying. Late in the decade, Star Trek was back where it really belongs, on television. The big media conglomerate that owns it is CBS Viacom, and when they wanted to start up their own subscription-based streaming service, they smartly tapped into the Star Trek well and got a bunch of Trekkers to subscribe to it for just one show.

Star Trek Discovery takes place on a ship from just a few years before The Original Series. This ship is a science vessel containing a very experimental new type of engine that immediately makes no sense seeing as it would change everything in some of the previous Star Trek shows where no such engine is ever talked about or known to exist. it would have really helped out the USS Voyager, for example.

Luckily, this discrepancy is fully explained by the end of the second season. While the show started out in a weird direction with weird Klingons, the characters and situations have really gelled, and some familiar faces from The Original Series have shown up to help set up their own spinoff. In fact, Discovery was joined by Picard in 2020, a series centered around an elderly old friend whose name is in the title. That show, too , became really enjoyable, and helps justify the CBS All Access subscription a lot more.

Beavis and Butt-Head

In 2011 Beavis and Butt-head returned to MTV for a season. While more of these two was welcome, it did not last long and Mike Judge moved on to other projects. Their 1990s antics translated well to the 2010s, and they even riffed on modern videos and reality shows as well in the new season.

Rumor is that in 2020, he is looking to bring back the duo for another season, possibly on Comedy Central. 

Jay and Silent Bob

Kevin Smith's View Askew connected movie universe ended with Clerks 2, sadly, but understandable as the director moved on to other projects. After a near-death heart attack and subsequent recovery, he went to the well one more time to make Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, where the characters rehash their trip to Hollywood from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back to stop a reboot of the movie they tried to stop before.

As with Clerks 2, though, this was not simply a rehash of old jokes and characters; no, this one had a lot to say about fatherhood, maturity, and of course Hollywood rebooting everything. Smith weaves all of that so well, even with the smallest moments featuring old characters whose own journeys brought them back to the world of Jay and Silent Bob. It was a heartwarming celebration of the silly joys of playing in that world and recognizing together that we've all gotten old, but that's ok.

Beaten: Marathon: Durandal (XBox 360 via XBox One) and the Glory of XBox Backwards Compatability

Before the Halo series and whatever they did after that, game studio Bungie cut their development teeth on a first person shooter series called Marathon, released primarily on Apple Macintosh computers in the middle 1990s. While I was enjoying the joys of this new genre on the Atari Jaguar and then the Sony PlayStation, PC and Mac elites got the best of the best, and Marathon 2: Durandal was one of the best.

For some reason, perhaps riding high on all that Halo 3 cash, Bungie re-released Marathon 2: Durandal on the XBox 360 as simply Marathon: Durandal in 2008. Fast forward to 2020 where I am equipped with a new sense of direction in terms of playing old games I missed over the years as well as a gift card for the online store, enabling a very cheap purchase of this forgotten masterpiece.

It’s a science fiction first person shooter a la Doom, but with aliens. If that sounds standard, it is, but it’s all those Bungie idiosyncrasies that make it shine. Weapons are standard- pistol, shotgun, and up the chain - but ammo can be scarce at times forcing one to get proficient at each one’s use. In one level, I was down to fists for a time. Enemies are generic aliens too, but with AI weirdness that the player can discover quite by accident, such as by observing the horde of aliens that had just spawned begin fighting among themsleves because one stepped into the line of fire of the other.

Level design is outstanding, and of course unorthodox. In one level I was vexed for a time because I couldn't find a save point, only to realize that it was partially submerged in a pool of acid. One has to take damage to use it, but it's right next to a health station, so no foul. My gaming instincts ruled out the idea that the save point could be in the acid pool, until I was cornered and forced to dive in and check.

One will spend a lot of time in vats of acid, falling into pools of lava, and diving into water levels, all the time managing oxygen levels as well as health bars. This is a standard nineties shooter, so there will be switches to find, but no Doom-style secret doors that I remember. But there are secrets of a sort. In addition to managing the above, save points can at times be few and far between, and at other times casually close.  It is worth backtracking to a distant save point after a tough fight, as enemies can spawn right on top of the player, and one cannot push through them in tight spaces. Death can occur suddenly.

The backstory unfolds on monitors one finds scattered throughout the levels, bringing the player up to speed with the events of the first game and narrating the context of the action as one plays. It unfolds gloriously and I would not recommend skipping any of them because the story is so well crafted. I honestly found the storyline more engaging than the one that accompanies Halo.

Marathon: Durandal was extremely fun and engaging, full of surprises, and is a great way for any middle aged gamer to enjoy classic shooter gameplay with some refreshing twists. An additonal point of satisfaction for me is that classic games I missed are becoming available in ways that does not require the setup of every classic system to play them.

Right now, thanks to Microsoft's XBox backwards compatibility initiative, my XBox One has games from three generations on its hard drive waiting for me to play. I am fairly certain with the XBox Series X release, they have continued that program onto a fourth consecutive generation of their console. While not yet as comprehensive as I would like, it is a welcome change which allows me to jump all over their vast software library and find something old or new to play.

Which fits perfect with my newfound wanderlust through decades of gaming. So, good job, Microsoft.

Beaten: Assassin's Creed Odyssey (XBox One) and the Weird Ubisoft Open World Malaise

 Back in the day, when one finished a great game, there was often this accompanying sadness that it was over. All the content that the game had was enjoyed, every side quest checked off, and one could walk away from the game knowing that the world left behind was completed and wrapped up in a nice bow. But sometimes, one wanted more.

I've played three nearly perfect Ubisoft open world games over the last year - Assassin's Creed Origins, Farcry 5, and now Assassin's Creed Odyssey, and each one started out as fun, but by the middle or so I was burnt out on the endlessness of the game world and was ready to move on. At that point, I would ignore everything but the story quests and race toward the end.

Am I complaining about too much content? No. Am I saying that the excessive content was bad? No, but some of it is very cookie-cutter and repetitive. I'm saying that, it's not Ubisoft's fault, but it seems my own gaming priorities and my desire to eventually experience other games is incompatable with a three month commitment to a videogame version of ancient Greece that probably has more content that actual ancient Greece.

Rushing through to the end worked well in AC Origins, as by the time I was burnt out, I was levelled up enough to finish. Farcry 5 was a slog, though, as there were unavoidable triggered boss fights that were not that much fun. The first time one occurred, I was somehow drugged and kidnapped while alone and flying a helicopter, forced into one of a series of overwrought cutscenes and weird time limited escape scenes, wrapped up with an unwelcome boss fight. As soon as the first one occurred I was done with any and all of the game’s story or characters and blasted my way to the end.

I was done with AC Odyssey, however, before I was levelled up enough to finish. So I spent days and play sessions scraping for content that I could enjoy enough to get there. There were some stupid player-made side missions that helped with that, but at the end I'm asking myself why I even cared enough about finishing at all.

Well that ones's on me too. My own gaming ethic requires me to finish a game if I can, and it bugs me forever when I don't before moving on. I hope to return to some of them in the glorious retirement I envision starting in 2036. Will I return to a finished game with unfinished content, though? My character in Assassin's Creed Odyssey sits there, on a rooftop forever, wondering if I will come back and get on all those unfinished side missions.

I cannot say if I will do that, because if I want to scratch the Assassin's Creed itch, there is already another installment in the series that just came out, featuring Vikings and such. At this moment in time, I can safely say that it will be years before I pick up another one of their gigantic open worlds, and if i do, it will probably be Watch Dogs Legion anyway.

To sum up, Assassin's Creed Odyssey is as good as the real critics say. As long as you're not burnt out on the Ubisoft open world games, you will enjoy it as the testament to annual mass-production open worlds that it is.