I thought this would be a cool idea. I'm not super into movies a lot of the time though, or at least not as much as the general populace, so please forgive me for forgetting your favorite movie. Also, that's your favorite movie so maybe just don't be butt-hurt about stupid stuff that doesn't matter. Like my blog. Here we go!
1920's: Metropolis (1927)
I'm not going to pretend like I love movies from the 20's. As interesting as the era is from a film studies standpoint, I don't really study film any more than any average Joe. But something about Metropolis in a high school film class made me watch it again on my own. I enjoyed its general concept at the very least. I lean more towards sci-fi more than most things and for its time it is very well done. Since this was the 20's, there was a very small amount they could do in terms of story-telling and yet they kind of pulled it off. Like Nosferatu from the same decade, something about it is just more ominous than most modern horror. With Nosferatu (yes, that's another 20's movie I have actually seen and one of the only ones I have seen) there is just this horror element that I don't like of "when is this person going to die?" or "is the scary monster going to die?". Metropolis is scary because its concept is timeless. Just like the Matrix did a damn 72 years later, it brings something you have probably thought about before and cast the thought aside and slams it up in your face in ways that make you uncomfortable but also unblinking. Is this movie loads of fun by today's standards? Am I going to recommend you all watch it or you know nothing about culture in general? Hell no. It's dated as fuck. However, in this early of an era of film, I just so happened to notice a few movies on the lists I found online that I had actually seen. If you are really into film or are thinking about working in film one day, I would say Metropolis is interesting and won't feel like a waste of time. Otherwise, skip it. Sad, right? It's my favorite 1920's movie but even I'm like "dude, don't worry about it, Y'all watch some 90's Disney with me".
1930's: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
The 30's didn't have much I cared about or have seen, but I have always had a soft spot for Snow White even when I was a kid. It's animation at the very least still holds up and that in itself is impressive. I always say something along the lines of "if you have to tell yourself that certain things in media are okay because of their time period, then they really aren't that great". Snow White however just looks really nice. Something about it is still pleasing for me to watch, probably more now than when I was a child. Maybe its the sweet ass on Snow White! Eh? Ehhh?
...kidding.
Its settings, all hand-drawn, are thematic and breathing. Everything in the movie feels alive, even if its an inanimate object. The fight scene with the queen in witch form near the end is still daunting because of the way the cliff merges with the water and lightning. Something about it is just visually striking to me and I think the simplistic plot centered around greed and jealousy is just solid enough without being overbearing to make the real focus the visuals. I'm okay with this.
Okay but before I move on, the first big musical number where Snow White is making a wish into the wishing well, Prince Charming interrupts her song and scares the ever-loving shit out of her and it makes me laugh out loud every time. Alright moving on.
1940's: It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
So when you saw 20's and 30's on this list, you probably thought I was a hipster fuck, right? Well eat your own words mister miss mister and just have a damn seat. Let me tell you a thing or two about It's a Wonderful Life. Are you ready? It's a Wonderful Life is not only my favorite movie from the 40's (an era where I think I have only seen 2-4 movies), it is one of my favorite movies of all time. I'm not kidding. This isn't the thing I do where I reveal in a few sentences that I'm joking or actively being facetious. Me saying "I'm not kidding" is not a mislead. Everyone should see this movie, it is quite the bomb, and in my opinion, it might as well be storytelling perfection.
I know it's old as fuck and it's a Christmas movie to boot, which is why most people ignore me when I jizz all over my own face in public about how fucking awesome It's a Wonderful Life is, but just hear me out. The whole first act seems like it is setting up an angel character by showing him his target, George Bailey, who is really the main character, hands down. George Bailey's life isn't necessarily a life that all viewers will relate to: not everyone lives in a small town with a brother who almost died but they saved his life and girls that they grow up with that end up being potential love interests like some kind of pervy dating sim. It doesn't have to be. The point of the first act is that you see the synopsis of a man's entire life unfold. It takes for-fucking-ever, and in a modern movie or hell, even most books, this would be a sluggish chore on a burning, crashing train to sit through. But every little segment that the angels show the audience is fun on its own in its own special way. You feel like you know George Bailey. You don't have to relate to George Bailey and they didn't have to make him a superhero to make him interesting. At the same time, they didn't make him a boring, wash-up comedian to try and make him relatable while boring the audience half to death. George Bailey is a guy you know because you had fun watching a synopsis of his life, so you associate this character with good times and bad times but all the while still entertaining, which thematically sets up the whole fucking movie. And that's just the beauty of act I, and I'm majorly paraphrasing.
Act 2 turns into a dark comedy that makes The Life of Brian look like fucking My Little Pony and then transcends into full madness that makes Alfred Hitchcock fully erect in his grave every time someone buys the movie on DVD. James Stewart does such a fantastic job of transforming the eccentric and jovial nature of George into earnest servitude when necessary, and this just makes his insane moments even more gripping. The writing alone could make a lesser actor in this role pull it off okay, but James Stewart, in assistance by the cinematography, makes you feel uneasy.
"But this is just a Christmas movie, it can't be that scary, or at least not as unnerving as A Christmas Carol!"
We all know Christmas Carol and we all know its scary because ghost people holding a mirror to our face is a terrifying concept in its own right. Showing us our own greed and what it can do to hurt others is something that anyone with a general conscience has probably thought about at least once in their lives. The reason It's a Wonder Life does this so much better is because it actually does the opposite, and it's much more terrifying. It brings your own selfishness of leaving your life or just leaving people behind in general and shoves that in your face. It tells you to buck up because the pain you cause in your current life is nothing compared to what may have happened without you on the planet. This probably hits home for me more than most people because of my own mental health issues, which might just speak to why I think It's a Wonderful Life is such an important movie for people to watch in general. It shows you that you or anyone you know has value. You have known George Bailey for about an hour and a half, and already the thought of him being gone is not great. To further accentuate this is the terror of a world without him; a fantasy element to the movie so based in reality that it hits close to home for anyone, and hits three times as hard for those who actually paid attention in the first act.
Going into any more detail might spoil the movie and/or bore the shit out of you so uh.... Next!
1950's: Alice in Wonderland (1951)
The 50's was a real stretch. I wanted to say Sleeping Beauty but I haven't seen that since I was really little. Equally impressive on a visual scale was Alice in Wonderland. I thought about Vertigo too but I don't think I made it to the end of that one, so again, I defaulted to Alice in Wonderland because I have no idea what happened in the 50's at all. In any case, Alice in Wonderland still earns the slot it has in many people's hearts as a timeless fantasy adventure. It shows why I love animation so much because when it is done right, it is timeless by default. Alice in Wonderland isn't one of my favorite Disney films or even one of my favorite animated films, but again, the 50's eluded me on this one. I'm just a sucker for animation and a well-balanced mix of trippy shit, and I think this iteration of the Alice story fulfills that.
1960's: The Producers (1967)
Mel Brooks is a big name in comedy, with good reason, and while most people almost strictly think of Blazing Saddles and Spaceballs when his name is brought up... well I also think of those two things but I also think of The Producers. Something about The Producers is just thoroughly entertaining to me from beginning to end. It feels varied, which can be hard to pull off in a film while still keeping a concise story that goes from A to B. Each scene in The Producers could be its own sketch. The scenery changes up a lot and the characters met along the way are all silly and memorable in their own ways. The finished musical that the characters make is so bombastic, and since the production is part of the story, you feel like you were in on it the whole time... well kind of. Obviously, that sounds stupid, you know you aren't in the movie. The Producers isn't set up like Blues Clues or something dumb. Gene Wilder is incredibly cartoonish but still believable and attention-demanding with his performance in every scene he's in and Zero Mostel's character has a great dynamic with his. It's been about 5 years since I've seen this all the way through but its a comedy classic for a reason.
I'm not going to say "it's dated but you have to think about for its time" because I don't know jack about the 60's, especially in regards to film and as I stated above that argument is bullshit. What I will say is that it has a kind of older sense of humor and its delivery is affected as such. This is something that I personally find charming and part of what brings it to the top of the 60's for me, but I can see it being a turn off for a lot of modern audiences. Something to think about for anyone who hasn't seen it or might be debating on checking it out.
1970's: Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a comedy that I watched way too many times as a young teen. I thought in adulthood it would get old and all the quirkiness that made this movie such a mainstay in my life would lose their luster. I was wrong. There are still multiple scenes in the movie that make me smile uncontrollably and remind me of why I love the movie so much in the first place. It tells a very simple tale but one that splits the knights in the story onto different routes that give way to completely different scenarios in the tale. These bring the protagonists together in the final act of the movie in a way that would be a dramatic odyssey of conquest and valor in a fantasy adventure film, but in Holy Grail, it kind of does that but its ultimately just silly. It does so many goofy things and mixes in cartoon elements where they shouldn't work but they do. Even the fourth-wall breaking humor works here because it completely diffuses situations of tension where you as the viewer are actually curious how the main characters will survive, and then they end up surviving in the stupidest ways possible because the main characters have also proven to be too dim-witted to actually solve most of anything on their own. Beyond that just go watch it, because otherwise, I would be explaining jokes, and that is never funny. I know you think it is. It's not. Don't explain jokes to people from a movie that they haven't seen. Your half-assed, unorganized depiction of one scene in a movie with no build up doesn't even do as much justice as a shitty movie trailer would. That was irrelevant to the movie, I just thought I would get that off my chest. Phew! Onward!
1980's: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984)
Anyone who has heard of Studio Ghibli knows that even the worst films this studio crafts are masterful. My Neighbor Totoro (one of their most esteemed and arguably most popular movies) knows what you came for and makes the story take a backseat to glorious animation that is entertaining enough on its own. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind came out before Totoro and I can't believe more anime weabs don't talk about Nausicaa because its the only Ghibli production I've seen so far that has a plot that actually kept me glued, and in my opinion, its character design and backgrounds are some of the best I have seen in any anime production, especially one the length of an average feature film. Actually shit, this one's two hours I think too. But a lot of you nerdos, like myself, think of one movie in particular when you think of one of the best movies ever and one of the best movies from the 80's as a whole.
Get ready to get mad...
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.
This is probably my favorite Star Wars movie out of the 7, if we are to ignore Rogue One, which in my opinion should be called Chode One because honestly, that would make the movie exponentially more fun for me. So don't get me wrong, I like Empire a lot, but I like Nausicaa more. You already know Ghibli is awesome and you know that Star Wars is one of the most well respected and successful franchises on the planet. So I'm going to try to argue why it isn't blasphemy to rank Nausicaa over what is considered one of the greatest films ever created and one of the greatest films that will ever be created... you know, other than the fact that this whole thing is just a giant opinionated soapbox and nothing I say should sway the way you feel about Star Wars but eh ya know whatever time to piss off some internet kids.
Since I was young, I always loved the Star Wars movies. Looking back on the main seven as an adult now, The Empire Strikes Back, in my opinion, is the one with the best overall production value, best script, best plot depiction, set design, character development, satisfaction from previous titles in the series: Empire just simply has "the works" as they say in "the biz". Calling Empire specifically one of the best movies of the 80's is like saying urinating is one of the best things to do in the bathroom. Even amongst the competition, it is a no-brainer, which is why I'm sure I look like when I say I like Nausicaa more, a complete psycho.
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind is also sci-fi and has a "good vs. evil" mechanic just as easy to grasp as Empire, but Nausicaa does it on its own. Nausicaa introduces endearing and interesting characters, captivating scenery, believable yet fantastic geography, and delightfully designed creatures all in the beginning without the movie feeling like a total drag. Even its one-on-one talk shots suck you in because you want to know what's going on in this universe after the first scene, and the first scene is just gorgeous and barely relies on dialogue at all. You're already strapped in for the ride and its barely even begun.
Empire, especially if you were dumb enough to start the series from Episode I all the way to V, does have fun characters, but the only ones that are really enigmatic enough to consider interesting would probably be Boba, Luke, and Vader. If you started in the prequel movies, then Vader already loses a lot of the mystique that helps make him such an intimidating villain as well. Luke is the main character and he is getting progressively stronger so you kind of already suspect that he isn't going to die in these movies, or at least not in Empire. We all saw what happened to Boba Fett. Star Wars, and this isn't a pun but get ready, has no sense of space. The screen pans and the main cast is instantly on another planet. Maybe they break away to Luke on Dagobah to give some illusion of time, which is not necessarily a flaw by any means, but when comparing it to Nausicaa it loses something that Nausicaa has and I have to commend. When Nausicaa's lead character, Nausicaa, goes to different locations, there is a sense of urgency and a feeling of losing home in so many ways that this makes you want the main character to succeed, even if you don't fully grasp the politics of the movie as explained in the first act. In A New Hope, Luke begs to get away from home, which is why the audience feels a guilty sense of relief when Luke's aunt and uncle are attacked because it was obviously depicted by the movie that they were tying Luke down from the adventurous life he wanted to lead. In Nausicaa, the audience is propelled to feel appropriate remission of the comfort of The Valley of the Wind of the movie of the overuse of the "of" of the English language. To make further comparisons, the creatures of Empire are memorable and pretty alright but I think Nausicaa's are better for lack of a better term than better. Not only are Nausicaa's fauna and hell, even flora, more unique and identifiable, but they are a central part of the plot and an extension of one of Nausicaa's most recognizable character traits. The Tonton scene in Empire shows that Luke is more kind to all life forms and Han will only do what he sees as necessary for survival by cutting it open. Nausicaa, as a character, has a love for all life that is so beyond any other character in the movie that no matter how terrifying and dangerous the wildlife in this movie gets, the audience still feels something for them. This makes you root for your main character throughout the whole movie because every step and little victory she takes is coming full circle from every single fucking scene she has been in.
Empire has a lot of things that also make Nausicaa a fantastic film as well, but if you aren't convinced of my point yet, I'm going to make one more. No, I swear, only one more point. I promise. Nausicaa is one movie. Empire is an amalgamation of different ideas and themes cast about from other films. You either need to see all of IV, V, and VI or all of I through IV or maybe even all six of the original films to fully appreciate what the film is going for, which is the problem with a space opera as ambitious as Star Wars. Take Kill Bill, for example, Christ, I am referencing a lot of movies just to defend myself for liking some anime bullshit. Vol 1. and Vol 2. of Kill Bill almost feel like different movies despite having direct story connections. You remember what happened in each individual movie with no confusion. Yes, Vol 1. is necessary for Vol 2., but it doesn't feel like an elongation of the same ride. 2 feels like a different ride that cools down from 1 and then amplifies with pure tension to make 2 appropriate for what was intuitively set up in 1. Empire requires so much investment and time from the viewer not because it's a bad movie, but because it's a Star Wars movie, and there's so much to digest that could, in theory, be condensed. My evidence for this theory is Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, which made my jaw drop in more moments within a two-hour time span than the original trilogy of Star Wars ever has even when I was a child and thought that Darth Maul was scary.
You don't have to agree, most won't, and I understand. Star Wars redefined what science-fiction was capable of and made it something that any audience could latch onto and enjoy to some extent, and for that, I will be eternally grateful, especially for Empire. But if you asked me what my favorite movie that came out of the 80's was, to my own surprise upon writing this, I am much more taken aback by the animated masterpiece, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind of the Repetition of the Joke of the Previous Paragraph of the Stupid Blog.
1990's: Reservoir Dogs (1992)
I'm a big sucker for Tarantino's movies, so this wasn't so much a question of "what is my favorite 90's movie" but rather "do you like Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs more?" In the end, I don't have any concrete answers. As much of an overanalyzing goon as I am, I can't tell you why I like one more than the other. Maybe I think the gimp scene in Pulp Fiction is too long or something. Pulp Fiction I think is more fun for a general audience. Of the two I think Pulp Fiction is the most accessible and I can see why most people would say it is the best. Reservoir Dogs actually excites me every time I see it though. It speaks volumes about a movie if it revolves around a mystery that you already know the answers to and the story still floors you. Let's say there was a drama movie with a nearly identical plot to Reservoir Dogs but instead of people dying, people getting tortured, and instead of being in a shady warehouse all of the characters were in a family mansion and they were politely asked to leave because they lost a game. Their tension would have to be shown on each others' faces and would have to have killer acting to make this consistently entertaining for the audience. Going home to their families is not that daunting of a task without a lot of build-up. Tarantino is often criticized for an excessive use of violence in most of his movies and where most people may say its gratuitous bordering on adolescent, I see something else. I see the primitive trigger in the human mind when they see fictional murder, or rather murder that they don't have to feel bad about. It is a release, and it is instantaneous. The reason why this is usually seen as childish in film is that there are a lot of movies where a lot of people just die for no reason, and there's just this hardass character that likes to be overtly violent because the writers thought that would be cool. In Reservoir Dogs, every death is the result of some fault in someone's character and in Reservoir Dogs specifically, it does not take the world's best attention span to think about this while watching the movie. Everything is expertly put in place to set off a mental trigger for character development in characters that don't want the other characters to know about their personal traits. Every conversation metaphorically becomes a bullet that becomes someone's death by the end of the movie and even if it wasn't the outcome you thought would happen or what you wanted to happen, the tension is relieved in the most satisfying way possible. What I find even more impressive because I have seen it tried and failed in other forms of media is that the entire movie effectively takes place in one building, and it's better for it because of what Reservoir Dogs sets out to do with your brain. It still has enough charm and superb acting that it could be background noise or what they call a "popcorn movie" as well... I think that's the term anyways. Reservoir Dogs works best as a mind-rattling thriller though, because it doesn't need constant weapon fire to illicit turmoil to the audience. To explain further would spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen the movie.
2000's: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
Every time I am too sick to move, I actually get a little excited because it gives me a lazy excuse to watch some Lord of the Rings! In my opinion, the Lord of the Rings trilogy is three of the best movies ever made. The adventure looks just as exciting for the cast and crew as it is for the viewers. I will admit that you have to keep your eyes and ears glued to what's happening in nearly every scene to fully understand what's happening but most of the time that is not super difficult. The incredible cast, impressive CG, and tasteful use of breaks and timing make every scene near perfection. Even if you don't pick up every single detail in a dialogue-heavy scene, the body language of the invested cast gives your brain enough context to be able to decipher enough to enjoy the films to their end. The most entertaining of the three for my brain is the third; the grand finale: The Return of the King. Now it's time to piss some more people off though, okay here we go:
Remember early when I was saying that The Empire Strikes Back requires a lot of effort and invested time from the audience because they have to pick up hours of information from other movies to even have a grasp on what's happening in this movie? So by this logic, I should hate The Lord of the Rings movies and especially despise The Return of the King right? Well, obviously I don't so I'm not sure why I wrote that shit in question form. The Fellowship of the Ring already sets up this precedent that there is going to be this long drawn out quest, so much so that a lot the main characters are originally opposed to it even though they were specifically gathered for the quest. It takes a little guy with basically no combat experience to say "yo pussies, let's do this shit! It's only going to take three movies that last like four hours a piece! What are you, babies?!?" Fellowship already sets up the use of magic, politics between whole cities, and not only does it set up this world in a constantly entertaining way but it sets up the characters that go on this journey. The characters by this point are endearing because the script shows that they can make you cry, make you laugh, and make you want them to succeed for whatever goals they are going towards all in one movie, again, something that took Star Wars... six... fucking... movies. Now I'm not saying that Lord of the Rings is better, more practical, and more immediately entertaining than the god that is Star Wars, but what I am saying is... well... upon further reflection that's exactly what I'm saying.
The Two Towers brings these characters along and twists them with the turmoils of their journey. Two Towers had every reason to be the Matrix Reloaded, the Dumb and Dumberer, the shitty Disney sequel cash-in to follow Fellowship, but from the beginning, everyone involved in these movies knew that they wanted a trilogy and they wanted them to blow every other fucking film of the time out of the water. Every impressive thing that Fellowship had in visuals, choreography, and in the script was topped in Two Towers to keep you invested because they knew that this had to serve as the bridge from the humble beginnings to the blood-soaked and exhausted end.
The Return of the King, in every way, is that blood-soaked and exhausted end. Every scene in this movie is so over the top and even one of the earliest scenes in this movie smashes your expectations of what this installment is going to do by unexpectantly killing off a major character before half an hour has passed. Every scuffle, battle, full-out war, and death thereof has some connection to every character in the main cast that you have grown to love for the ridiculous amount of time you have invested in this series of movies. A lot of people argue that Fellowship and Two Towers are more fun because of this, but without Return of the King, nothing that any of the beloved cast did has barely any meaning at all. Even the main quest of the series takes a backseat to some of the political conflicts that directly affected different individual characters, some already dead, making almost every scene satisfying.
I mean, other than this I'm just a big ol' dweebus and you have every right to think I'm an idiot for liking Return of the King and its dark, bloody, emo bullshit as much as I do.
2010's (so far): Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
This is probably not a surprise, especially considering the movies I have picked up to this point. For me, it was a no-brainer. The 2010's haven't ended yet but already it has been an embarrassing decade for the world of cinema. There are so many shitty reboots and worn-out tropes that even titans like the Marvel universe and Star Wars have fallen victim to this sweep of mediocrity and general lack of imagination. I think Marvel answered this with Guardians of the Galaxy. On purpose? Eh. Who knows? What I do know is that, unlike a lot of the recent superhero movies or just movies in general, there was so much care and emotion put into every crevice of Guardians of the Galaxy as a production, that it is objectively okay at its worst. I hate to say it is the movie that has everything, but it basically does. Its comedy is persistently funny after seeing it however many fucking times I have seen it. Its tear-jerking moments still hit me just as hard. Its visuals are easily some of the best computer-generated 3D visuals in most movies, not only of its decade but ever. Even the motion-capture for a fucking raccoon makes most of these stupid modern shooter video games look laughable in comparison. Its romantic subplot is not just for the main man to get his dick wet but more importantly it focuses on pointing out flaws and insecurities in two very important characters in the story, arguably the two most important characters. Guardians of the Galaxy is a crazy ride because it doesn't follow a simple hero's journey. It abducts a child and raises him in a directionless world, and that lack of direction works in the best way possible. The main cast is constantly being jerked around by the faults in their past and threats of their future. The main cast members join together and become friends in a way that friends do, only on a way bigger scale that involves gunships and all that. Most of these action movies when characters end up becoming friends despite all of their differences usually just hinge on the simplicity of that sentence and force a fictional friendship with no consequence. The friendship of the main cast makes them stronger and admitting it makes them stronger, but their baggage directly affects all of them by almost killing them. If they hadn't teamed up, a lot of the villains would affect only the characters that brought them along, but together they had to combat all of them. Friendship does mean added strength, but if that strength isn't used for anything then it just falls flat. They all have to keep tabs on each others' dangerous personality faults and the demons they carry from their past, in the form of actual villains, some of which just happen to be carrying infinity stones and can blow up entire cities to build up into entire worlds.
The movie does beg for a sequel, but not in the way where it negatively effects the rest of the movie. Vol 2. could have never been made and Guardians of the Galaxy would still be a great movie where further adventures are just an idea that adds to the ending. But of course, with this stupid cinematic universe thing, they are going to have to reuse these characters in other movies where they are completely out of place just for the sake of crossing over for the cha-ching. Oh well.
I made this because I think to study storytelling, you have to go way back. Do you have to go to Egypt and translate ancient tablets? No. You just have to see more examples of the things you like and hate evolving from something else that you also might love and hate. Comparing the old to the new is important because you wouldn't be able to make the new so easily if we all just completely forgot about the old. We would make mistakes that older media would make again. Especially in film, which in comparison to literature, theater, visual art, and music is a pretty new art form. I feel we are still working out a lot of the kinks and a lot of it just comes down to being aware of origins and what's current and why that's important to you as a creative person, or maybe even just as a consumer. Also, I like to spout out my opinions on the internet to try to convince you that I'm smart and know shit about movie production.
Only Games I Give a Crap About in 2018
I did this last year and then revisited the list in late December and it was fun to write and surprisingly fun to look back on. Since this blog has somehow lasted long enough for me to make something annual, welcome to the 2018 edition of me preemptively judging games that I haven't played.
DIGIMON STORY: CYBER SLEUTH - HACKER'S MEMORY (PS4)
Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth is still one of my favorite games that I own for PS4. It's not that it really does anything revolutionary in the RPG genre or even for Digimon. This is, however, probably one of the best Digimon games ever made. That isn't saying much because most Digimon games are pretty broken. Cyber Sleuth wasn't without it's faults but it was a very solid RPG with a decently gripping narrative and some genuinely funny moments. It never really felt grindy to me either. Hacker's Memory looks about the same game. I'm really scared that they are just going to microwave the first game and make it again but hopefully I'm wrong. Even so, of all of the games to rehash for a quick buck, Cyber Sleuth would be one that I wouldn't be infuriated by.
DISSIDIA FINAL FANTASY NT (PS4)
Dissidia has always seemed like a really cool concept to me and being able to pit Terra, Squall, Cloud, Sephiroth, and a bunch of other people together is a weeb's dream, to say the least. I never had a PSP so I could only enjoy the original Dissidia through YouTube footage of what potential the game had. When I heard they were porting it to console, I got really excited, really fast. Upon further reflection and research it seems they are unfortunately taking a page from the book of Capcom and making separate versions of the release. Certain versions have more characters and they haven't really specified which ones are on which versions. On top of this, there are certain characters that were in the original Dissidia that appear missing from the Dissidia official website. For example: Squall, last I checked was not on the website. Are you really going to market a Final Fantasy fighting game to edgelords and leave Squall as a bonus character that they have to spend money on? I really hope I'm wrong because Dissidia looks very fun and unique. I usually don't get excited for fighting games that aren't Super Smash Bros. so please Square Enix! Please don't make me incredibly disappointed in you!
KIRBY STAR ALLIES (Switch)
I fucking love Kirby. Kirby has been going down a similar road that Mario has been going down where they have just been streamlining each new installment and nothing too exciting or refreshing has happened. From what I've played and seen of both since the Wii era, I can say Kirby has not been doing as bad or pandering as Mario, and this gives me hope for Kirby Star Allies. It looks very visually appealing and although nothing crazy groundbreaking for the series has been shown yet, they are implementing some very interesting mixes of mechanics from older games and some new powers that I'm very curious to see play out. The only problem is I do not own nor do I want to own a Switch. I think the console is an overhyped nuisance and it's game library is stifled to insulting. But between Breath of the Wild, this game, and the recently announced Bayonetta 3, they may or may not have my materialistic hands tied. Truth be told on a more personal note, I have way too many games on my shelf right now that I haven't beaten, so I can hold off on games for a while. Let's say they start developing say Super Smash Bros 5 or something and it actually looks good and new to some degree, they will definitely have me at hook in mouth. Hell, at this point, you could really sell me on Smash Bros and Kirby if they come up with Smash 5 because that's just how much I love Kirby platformers.
FORTNITE (PC)
I haven't played Fortnite yet but it sounds like it's just a rip-off of Player Unknown's Battlegrounds. Usually, I hate it when developers rip off of other developers in any sense but for one, a 100-man battle royale with guns and slight survival mechanics is a fun idea but not a very nuanced or genre-shattering one. For a second point, PUBG has supposedly been a mess since launch and on its full release was somehow worse. Fortnite, from what little I know of it, seems to actually function and have virtually all of the same things that make PUBG fun without having to spend any money to start having fun. On top of that Fortnite has technically not hit 1.0 release yet, hence how it is allowed on this list. Even if you are a huge fan of PUBG or like it over Fortnite, you can at least see why I find Fortnite to be way more appealing to try out of the two, I'm sure. Unlike most of the games that I get excited for I actually have friends who will probably play this one with me frequently too, making it even more enticing.
KINGDOM HEARTS III (PS4) (let's try this again, Squeenix)
Square Enix is making me look like a fanboy jackass. On this blog and in my own real life I keep bringing up Kingdom Hearts III and how it is going to be one of the only games I feel like I absolutely need to purchase coming out soon and the damn thing just keeps getting pushed back. Good on them for this decision on paper because I'm really getting sick of companies dishing out a deadline to their development team knowing that the game is faulty and just letting future patches take care of it. On the other hand there is no guarantee that they are fixing anything notable or doing anything beneficial to the game. We wouldn't know this to be factual or falsehood even if they weren't being super vague about most things in the game as is. Honestly, at this point, I wouldn't even be shocked or upset if they pushed it back to 2019. I feel like I've been thrown around in a pool of my own adolescent disappointment since Dream Drop came out in 2012 so as it stands now... whatever... whatever is my stance on the game finally coming out. In other words, I'll believe it when I see it... but replace "believe" with "get irrationally excited".
RED DEAD REDEMPTION 2 (PS4)
Oh yeah. I guess they're making a second Red Dead. I never beat the first one but I did enjoy the many hours I sunk into it and will say it is easily one of my top three favorite Rockstar games if not my absolute favorite. Yes, even rivaling Grand Theft Auto 5. I don't know how excited I really am for a sequel but if I hear that it is actually pretty phenomenal then I might spend way too much money to give it a whirl.
THE WORLD ENDS WITH YOU -FINAL REMIX- (Switch)
I give a crap about this game but not for the reasons that I usually do for the other ones on the list. I'm actually a bit pissed. The World Ends With You is a very special game to me and one of my favorite RPG's ever made. Part of what made it stand out is its ridiculous control scheme that in my opinion can only be delivered through the dual screen systems they were designed for. The Switch has a portable option and I already read that the game will let you change views between Neku and your partner or something like that. This entirely defeats the purpose of the original game, not just in combat, but in overworld exploration and almost every single other thing I can think of. Even the stupid pin mini-game will probably not be as fun anymore! If you don't like it, don't buy it, I hear you say... in my head... Fine. Again, I don't even own a Switch. That is the reason you don't hear me ranting too often about things like Pokken Tournament, Shovel Knight, or Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze getting Switch ports. Even if a few new elements are added, they are still virtually the same game and have come out recently enough to have nearly identical control schemes. TWEWY is one of the few games in history to have a gimmicky control scheme and simultaneously pull off a unique and gripping story AND be an innovative and well-designed game. So what's the real problem here? Nobody gave a fuck about it! This game has a dedicated cult-following, which I guess is a decent reason for a Switch port? But the reason it has a cult following and not just a normal following like more popular IP's is because, at least over here in the states, it got zero traction. Even Nintendo Power magazine, back when that was something people cared about, talked it up and did articles and a review on it, its sales still weren't so hot. I can't blame people for not being instantly enthralled with the idea of TWEWY. I can even see it being intimidating or just generally unattractive at first glance. I think this means that they will release this decade-old game that didn't leave that big of an impact and make a worse version of it. Since it is the most recent version and nobody played the DS version, its legacy won't be the masterpiece that I bought on release day; it will be that one weird Switch game with Kingdom Hearts pixel art and shitty controls. My advice? Dust off your DS and find a cheap copy of the original. Save yourself the trouble. I'm glad they're adding new scenarios and whatever but why on Switch? Maybe I'm being overly presumptuous and it won't be that bad. They are taking one of the few games on the planet that I have a deep emotional attachment to and stringing it up on a cross. They better resurrect it in three days and make it so glorious that people make a holiday out of it, or I'm gonna be pissed. Did I just compare a DS cartridge to Jesus Christ?
BAYONETTA 3 (Switch)
I really liked Bayonetta 1 and 2. I bought them on impulse not too long after I got my Wii U and have fond memories of both games. I thought they were both equally pretty great for different reasons from one another. I thought though, based on where the plot went, there could never be a Bayonetta 3. I got really pumped at the short teaser, even though it's just a really glowy number. Then I was slapped in the face with the reality that since Nintendo owns Bayonetta now, and the Wii U is essentially dead, Bayonetta 3 will be exclusive to Switch. Fuck you... but well played. If they can release enough shit that interests me, they will coax me into buying a Switch, even though I really do NOT want one. At this point, as I said above, if they make a new Super Smash Bros., I will gladly buy a Switch, Breath of the Wild, Kirby Star Allies, and Bayonetta 3. You're starting to twist my arm and I don't like it, Nintendo. I dun liek it wun bit...
THE LAST OF US PART 2 (PS4)
I honestly almost forgot to put this here. The Last of Us was a fairly unique, intense, and overall enjoyable experience. I thought that upon release it was one of the best games I had ever played and from a design standpoint it was nearly perfect. Since then my views have changed but I still think it is worth revisiting and an above average game. I'm really interested to see, if only in story depiction, where they go with a second installment. I like the fact that several years have passed already and I haven't seen much more on it. I will say this is one of the games I am the most excited for this year, if it even comes out this year. Nothing beats Kingdom Hearts III though. But this and Digimon are the only games on this list where I'm thinking "alright, if they do this right, they have earned my purchase". The rest of them are like "yeah, okay, that's pretty cool, I guess".
So all in all, based on that last statement, you can tell that I'm not super pumped for 2018's future games so far. Maybe I'll be proven wrong. Did I miss anything? Don't say Monster Hunter World. I'm sure that game will be awesome, I just don't want to invest time into Monster Hunter right now. Did I miss anything that isn't Monster Hunter World? Tell meh! TELL MEEE PLEASE! In any case I hope that I am pleasantly surprised by the games on this list. On top of all this, the game industry works in mysterious ways, especially when indie developers are in question. If something else grabs me, I'll tell you about it next Winter. Thanks for reading! New videos coming soon on my YouTube channel so check that out too. I guess. Whenever they come out.
DIGIMON STORY: CYBER SLEUTH - HACKER'S MEMORY (PS4)
Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth is still one of my favorite games that I own for PS4. It's not that it really does anything revolutionary in the RPG genre or even for Digimon. This is, however, probably one of the best Digimon games ever made. That isn't saying much because most Digimon games are pretty broken. Cyber Sleuth wasn't without it's faults but it was a very solid RPG with a decently gripping narrative and some genuinely funny moments. It never really felt grindy to me either. Hacker's Memory looks about the same game. I'm really scared that they are just going to microwave the first game and make it again but hopefully I'm wrong. Even so, of all of the games to rehash for a quick buck, Cyber Sleuth would be one that I wouldn't be infuriated by.
DISSIDIA FINAL FANTASY NT (PS4)
Dissidia has always seemed like a really cool concept to me and being able to pit Terra, Squall, Cloud, Sephiroth, and a bunch of other people together is a weeb's dream, to say the least. I never had a PSP so I could only enjoy the original Dissidia through YouTube footage of what potential the game had. When I heard they were porting it to console, I got really excited, really fast. Upon further reflection and research it seems they are unfortunately taking a page from the book of Capcom and making separate versions of the release. Certain versions have more characters and they haven't really specified which ones are on which versions. On top of this, there are certain characters that were in the original Dissidia that appear missing from the Dissidia official website. For example: Squall, last I checked was not on the website. Are you really going to market a Final Fantasy fighting game to edgelords and leave Squall as a bonus character that they have to spend money on? I really hope I'm wrong because Dissidia looks very fun and unique. I usually don't get excited for fighting games that aren't Super Smash Bros. so please Square Enix! Please don't make me incredibly disappointed in you!
KIRBY STAR ALLIES (Switch)
I fucking love Kirby. Kirby has been going down a similar road that Mario has been going down where they have just been streamlining each new installment and nothing too exciting or refreshing has happened. From what I've played and seen of both since the Wii era, I can say Kirby has not been doing as bad or pandering as Mario, and this gives me hope for Kirby Star Allies. It looks very visually appealing and although nothing crazy groundbreaking for the series has been shown yet, they are implementing some very interesting mixes of mechanics from older games and some new powers that I'm very curious to see play out. The only problem is I do not own nor do I want to own a Switch. I think the console is an overhyped nuisance and it's game library is stifled to insulting. But between Breath of the Wild, this game, and the recently announced Bayonetta 3, they may or may not have my materialistic hands tied. Truth be told on a more personal note, I have way too many games on my shelf right now that I haven't beaten, so I can hold off on games for a while. Let's say they start developing say Super Smash Bros 5 or something and it actually looks good and new to some degree, they will definitely have me at hook in mouth. Hell, at this point, you could really sell me on Smash Bros and Kirby if they come up with Smash 5 because that's just how much I love Kirby platformers.
FORTNITE (PC)
I haven't played Fortnite yet but it sounds like it's just a rip-off of Player Unknown's Battlegrounds. Usually, I hate it when developers rip off of other developers in any sense but for one, a 100-man battle royale with guns and slight survival mechanics is a fun idea but not a very nuanced or genre-shattering one. For a second point, PUBG has supposedly been a mess since launch and on its full release was somehow worse. Fortnite, from what little I know of it, seems to actually function and have virtually all of the same things that make PUBG fun without having to spend any money to start having fun. On top of that Fortnite has technically not hit 1.0 release yet, hence how it is allowed on this list. Even if you are a huge fan of PUBG or like it over Fortnite, you can at least see why I find Fortnite to be way more appealing to try out of the two, I'm sure. Unlike most of the games that I get excited for I actually have friends who will probably play this one with me frequently too, making it even more enticing.
KINGDOM HEARTS III (PS4) (let's try this again, Squeenix)
Square Enix is making me look like a fanboy jackass. On this blog and in my own real life I keep bringing up Kingdom Hearts III and how it is going to be one of the only games I feel like I absolutely need to purchase coming out soon and the damn thing just keeps getting pushed back. Good on them for this decision on paper because I'm really getting sick of companies dishing out a deadline to their development team knowing that the game is faulty and just letting future patches take care of it. On the other hand there is no guarantee that they are fixing anything notable or doing anything beneficial to the game. We wouldn't know this to be factual or falsehood even if they weren't being super vague about most things in the game as is. Honestly, at this point, I wouldn't even be shocked or upset if they pushed it back to 2019. I feel like I've been thrown around in a pool of my own adolescent disappointment since Dream Drop came out in 2012 so as it stands now... whatever... whatever is my stance on the game finally coming out. In other words, I'll believe it when I see it... but replace "believe" with "get irrationally excited".
RED DEAD REDEMPTION 2 (PS4)
Oh yeah. I guess they're making a second Red Dead. I never beat the first one but I did enjoy the many hours I sunk into it and will say it is easily one of my top three favorite Rockstar games if not my absolute favorite. Yes, even rivaling Grand Theft Auto 5. I don't know how excited I really am for a sequel but if I hear that it is actually pretty phenomenal then I might spend way too much money to give it a whirl.
THE WORLD ENDS WITH YOU -FINAL REMIX- (Switch)
I give a crap about this game but not for the reasons that I usually do for the other ones on the list. I'm actually a bit pissed. The World Ends With You is a very special game to me and one of my favorite RPG's ever made. Part of what made it stand out is its ridiculous control scheme that in my opinion can only be delivered through the dual screen systems they were designed for. The Switch has a portable option and I already read that the game will let you change views between Neku and your partner or something like that. This entirely defeats the purpose of the original game, not just in combat, but in overworld exploration and almost every single other thing I can think of. Even the stupid pin mini-game will probably not be as fun anymore! If you don't like it, don't buy it, I hear you say... in my head... Fine. Again, I don't even own a Switch. That is the reason you don't hear me ranting too often about things like Pokken Tournament, Shovel Knight, or Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze getting Switch ports. Even if a few new elements are added, they are still virtually the same game and have come out recently enough to have nearly identical control schemes. TWEWY is one of the few games in history to have a gimmicky control scheme and simultaneously pull off a unique and gripping story AND be an innovative and well-designed game. So what's the real problem here? Nobody gave a fuck about it! This game has a dedicated cult-following, which I guess is a decent reason for a Switch port? But the reason it has a cult following and not just a normal following like more popular IP's is because, at least over here in the states, it got zero traction. Even Nintendo Power magazine, back when that was something people cared about, talked it up and did articles and a review on it, its sales still weren't so hot. I can't blame people for not being instantly enthralled with the idea of TWEWY. I can even see it being intimidating or just generally unattractive at first glance. I think this means that they will release this decade-old game that didn't leave that big of an impact and make a worse version of it. Since it is the most recent version and nobody played the DS version, its legacy won't be the masterpiece that I bought on release day; it will be that one weird Switch game with Kingdom Hearts pixel art and shitty controls. My advice? Dust off your DS and find a cheap copy of the original. Save yourself the trouble. I'm glad they're adding new scenarios and whatever but why on Switch? Maybe I'm being overly presumptuous and it won't be that bad. They are taking one of the few games on the planet that I have a deep emotional attachment to and stringing it up on a cross. They better resurrect it in three days and make it so glorious that people make a holiday out of it, or I'm gonna be pissed. Did I just compare a DS cartridge to Jesus Christ?
BAYONETTA 3 (Switch)
I really liked Bayonetta 1 and 2. I bought them on impulse not too long after I got my Wii U and have fond memories of both games. I thought they were both equally pretty great for different reasons from one another. I thought though, based on where the plot went, there could never be a Bayonetta 3. I got really pumped at the short teaser, even though it's just a really glowy number. Then I was slapped in the face with the reality that since Nintendo owns Bayonetta now, and the Wii U is essentially dead, Bayonetta 3 will be exclusive to Switch. Fuck you... but well played. If they can release enough shit that interests me, they will coax me into buying a Switch, even though I really do NOT want one. At this point, as I said above, if they make a new Super Smash Bros., I will gladly buy a Switch, Breath of the Wild, Kirby Star Allies, and Bayonetta 3. You're starting to twist my arm and I don't like it, Nintendo. I dun liek it wun bit...
THE LAST OF US PART 2 (PS4)
I honestly almost forgot to put this here. The Last of Us was a fairly unique, intense, and overall enjoyable experience. I thought that upon release it was one of the best games I had ever played and from a design standpoint it was nearly perfect. Since then my views have changed but I still think it is worth revisiting and an above average game. I'm really interested to see, if only in story depiction, where they go with a second installment. I like the fact that several years have passed already and I haven't seen much more on it. I will say this is one of the games I am the most excited for this year, if it even comes out this year. Nothing beats Kingdom Hearts III though. But this and Digimon are the only games on this list where I'm thinking "alright, if they do this right, they have earned my purchase". The rest of them are like "yeah, okay, that's pretty cool, I guess".
So all in all, based on that last statement, you can tell that I'm not super pumped for 2018's future games so far. Maybe I'll be proven wrong. Did I miss anything? Don't say Monster Hunter World. I'm sure that game will be awesome, I just don't want to invest time into Monster Hunter right now. Did I miss anything that isn't Monster Hunter World? Tell meh! TELL MEEE PLEASE! In any case I hope that I am pleasantly surprised by the games on this list. On top of all this, the game industry works in mysterious ways, especially when indie developers are in question. If something else grabs me, I'll tell you about it next Winter. Thanks for reading! New videos coming soon on my YouTube channel so check that out too. I guess. Whenever they come out.
"Only Games I Give a Crap About in 2017" Revisited
I just stumbled on an old post I made about games that were coming out this year and how interested I was to see where they would go. Here's an update on those since a lot of them are out now.
NIDHOGG 2
Didn't bother. It looks like Nidhogg with uglier graphics. There are notable changes, but I really don't care enough.
PROJECT SONIC 2017
Sonic Forces.... nope... fuck all that shit. I haven't played it. I have no desire to. I think even if you are a Sonic fan, you know why and have to agree that it's at least fair. It is at least fair to assume that the game will make me angry and therefore you can't blame me for avoiding it.
MARVEL VS CAPCOM: INFINITE
Capcom can suck my dick. You have to pay like, what, $80 to have the game and all of its characters. But as a game, it looks too similar to MvC3 and I wasn't crazy about that one to begin with. This is really sad because MvC2 is one of my favorite fighting games ever and there are a lot of cool characters in Infinite. Too bad. Sorry, Capcom. You won't be stealing my lunch money this day!
THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: BREATH OF THE WILD
I didn't play much of it, but its fun (I played the Switch version). I don't think it is as good as people are saying it is, but I think that about every Zelda game because everyone pumps up the games to god tier. Breath of the Wild only pisses me off with its stamina system. I don't mind the food system. I like the weapon wearing system. The controls feel great. The visuals, frame rate drops aside, are great. It's really almost everything you could want in a Zelda game and I didn't care enough to buy it, but what little I did play was enjoyable. I think it is a worthy addition to the series. But I don't like Ocarina so I don't have the right to say that, do I? BRB, fucking myself.
SHINESS: THE LIGHTNING KINGDOM
I'm sorry, Shiness developers. I still haven't gotten around to this one, but I want to. I didn't want to get it on the recent Steam sale because if I finally get around to it, I want to do a full-price purchase or at least a very small discount.
KINGDOM HEARTS 2.8 HD FINAL CHAPTER PROLOGUE
No complaints here. The Dream Drop Distance remaster is really clean and fun and Fragmentary was fucking great. If KHIII is anything like Fragmentary, it will be my new favorite game in the franchise, barre none.
SONIC MANIA
Sonic Mania exceeded every expectation I had and it's still fun to fuck around with every once in a while now. It's not my favorite Sonic game, but it has a strong argument for the best. It was made by fans with a budget. In other words, it was made by people who actually gave a fuck. Play Sonic Mania. You can thank me later.
PIT PEOPLE
Yep. Still haven't played this one either. Whoops.
YOOKA-LAYLEE
What a huge damn disappointment. I don't completely hate Yooka-Laylee but at the same time fuck Yooka-Laylee and fuck me for being so excited for it in the first place. I feel violated by a green, personality-less chameleon...
KINGDOM HEARTS III
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Um... what other games came out in 2017 that I got and thought were fun?
SHOVEL KNIGHT: SPECTER OF TORMENT
This is one of my new favorite games ever. No, I'm not joking. It's fucking amazing. If you like platformers, you are doing yourself the biggest disservice by not playing Specter of Torment. It's worth the price of everything else you get by buying Shovel Knight. If they greedily released it as its own game, I would still buy it. It was free DLC. Fuck you, Yacht Club TAKE MY MONEY!!!
A HAT IN TIME
This is such a great game. I bought it day one as kind of a "fuck it, why not?" It is one of the best games I've ever played. I sound like Buzzfeed or something stupid right now but trust me, A Hat in Time is fantastic. It isn't super time-consuming either unless you are a mad-man like me and want to complete the game.
CRASH BANDICOOT N. SANE TRILOGY
Okay, I couldn't think of anything else. No, for real. I think N. Sane Trilogy is pointless. Crash 2 and Crash Warped are two of my favorite games of all time and I can say with certainty that the N. Sane versions are objectively worse. However, Crash 1 is a bit more of a gray area. There are many things that I personally believe were greatly improved with this bitch of a game. If you can find it pretty cheap, it might be worth it just to have a playable version of Crash 1?????????
HORIZON: ZERO DAWN
I didn't really like Horizon: Zero Dawn...
Yeah, that's it. What other games came out in 2017 that were super gosh dang dope?
Hopefully I'll do this next year too but honestly, meh. Kingdom Hearts III and Dissidia NT (and maybe The Last of Us Part II?) are the only games that strike my fancy coming out in 2018. Let me know if I'm missing something. Strike my fancy!
NIDHOGG 2
Didn't bother. It looks like Nidhogg with uglier graphics. There are notable changes, but I really don't care enough.
PROJECT SONIC 2017
Sonic Forces.... nope... fuck all that shit. I haven't played it. I have no desire to. I think even if you are a Sonic fan, you know why and have to agree that it's at least fair. It is at least fair to assume that the game will make me angry and therefore you can't blame me for avoiding it.
MARVEL VS CAPCOM: INFINITE
Capcom can suck my dick. You have to pay like, what, $80 to have the game and all of its characters. But as a game, it looks too similar to MvC3 and I wasn't crazy about that one to begin with. This is really sad because MvC2 is one of my favorite fighting games ever and there are a lot of cool characters in Infinite. Too bad. Sorry, Capcom. You won't be stealing my lunch money this day!
THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: BREATH OF THE WILD
I didn't play much of it, but its fun (I played the Switch version). I don't think it is as good as people are saying it is, but I think that about every Zelda game because everyone pumps up the games to god tier. Breath of the Wild only pisses me off with its stamina system. I don't mind the food system. I like the weapon wearing system. The controls feel great. The visuals, frame rate drops aside, are great. It's really almost everything you could want in a Zelda game and I didn't care enough to buy it, but what little I did play was enjoyable. I think it is a worthy addition to the series. But I don't like Ocarina so I don't have the right to say that, do I? BRB, fucking myself.
SHINESS: THE LIGHTNING KINGDOM
I'm sorry, Shiness developers. I still haven't gotten around to this one, but I want to. I didn't want to get it on the recent Steam sale because if I finally get around to it, I want to do a full-price purchase or at least a very small discount.
KINGDOM HEARTS 2.8 HD FINAL CHAPTER PROLOGUE
No complaints here. The Dream Drop Distance remaster is really clean and fun and Fragmentary was fucking great. If KHIII is anything like Fragmentary, it will be my new favorite game in the franchise, barre none.
SONIC MANIA
Sonic Mania exceeded every expectation I had and it's still fun to fuck around with every once in a while now. It's not my favorite Sonic game, but it has a strong argument for the best. It was made by fans with a budget. In other words, it was made by people who actually gave a fuck. Play Sonic Mania. You can thank me later.
PIT PEOPLE
Yep. Still haven't played this one either. Whoops.
YOOKA-LAYLEE
What a huge damn disappointment. I don't completely hate Yooka-Laylee but at the same time fuck Yooka-Laylee and fuck me for being so excited for it in the first place. I feel violated by a green, personality-less chameleon...
KINGDOM HEARTS III
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Um... what other games came out in 2017 that I got and thought were fun?
SHOVEL KNIGHT: SPECTER OF TORMENT
This is one of my new favorite games ever. No, I'm not joking. It's fucking amazing. If you like platformers, you are doing yourself the biggest disservice by not playing Specter of Torment. It's worth the price of everything else you get by buying Shovel Knight. If they greedily released it as its own game, I would still buy it. It was free DLC. Fuck you, Yacht Club TAKE MY MONEY!!!
A HAT IN TIME
This is such a great game. I bought it day one as kind of a "fuck it, why not?" It is one of the best games I've ever played. I sound like Buzzfeed or something stupid right now but trust me, A Hat in Time is fantastic. It isn't super time-consuming either unless you are a mad-man like me and want to complete the game.
CRASH BANDICOOT N. SANE TRILOGY
Okay, I couldn't think of anything else. No, for real. I think N. Sane Trilogy is pointless. Crash 2 and Crash Warped are two of my favorite games of all time and I can say with certainty that the N. Sane versions are objectively worse. However, Crash 1 is a bit more of a gray area. There are many things that I personally believe were greatly improved with this bitch of a game. If you can find it pretty cheap, it might be worth it just to have a playable version of Crash 1?????????
HORIZON: ZERO DAWN
I didn't really like Horizon: Zero Dawn...
Yeah, that's it. What other games came out in 2017 that were super gosh dang dope?
Hopefully I'll do this next year too but honestly, meh. Kingdom Hearts III and Dissidia NT (and maybe The Last of Us Part II?) are the only games that strike my fancy coming out in 2018. Let me know if I'm missing something. Strike my fancy!
Sonic Questions I found from @wounkun
Some Twitter account labeled @wounkun posted this survey kind of thing. Spazkid (check him out if you haven't) retweeted it and I thought it was kind of interesting to see what kinds of general consensuses people did or did not mutually come to.
My Sonic background: Sonic 2 was, to my memory, the first video game I ever played and it made me want more. I started to make my own creative things (music, cartoons, scripts/stories) based on stuff I saw in video games because I was so enthralled with the medium and how it tied in so many other forms of media to make a whole new work of art. I'm not one of those "the old games were better" kind of guys because I played a lot of the old games (1991-2001) and a lot of the more recent ones. With every great Sonic game there is a wide array of installments that are so-so at the very best. A lot of which are rushed messes though. At least that's just my opinion, to get you started with this thing. Okay, here are my answers:
1. Favorite Sonic Game:
A: Sonic 2, though I'm usually torn between 2 and 3.
2. BEST Sonic Game:
A: Sonic Mania. It's the only Sonic game where I have to go hypercritical to think of flaws.
3. Worst Sonic Game:
A: Everyone knows it's Sonic '06 so to not be boring I'll say the runner-up is probably either Shadow the Hedgehog or Unleashed on Wii.
4. Best Adventure Game:
A: Adventure 2, assuming Sonic Rush Adventure doesn't count.
5. Best Boost Engine Game:
A: Sonic Generations. The only ones I can think of that even come close are Colors and Rush Adventure. Rush Adventure's mini-games aren't as fun as Generations' and Colors' alien color mechanic was too contrived.
6. Best Classic Game:
A: Sonic 3 & Knuckles
7. Most Underrated Game:
A: Sonic Rush Adventure
8. Most Challenging Game:
A: Again, Sonic '06 for the wrong reasons. I would say the most consistently challenging while still being varied, albeit sometimes also for the wrong reasons: Sonic and the Secret Rings? Sonic Advance 2 and 3 if you don't want to count "bullshit" as a challenge.
9: Favorite Sonictuber:
A: I guess Tails' Channel. I don't really like channels that focus on one game series or topic, even it is one I like or find interesting. Tails' Channel is news, sometimes presented in a fun way. Even when it's not super entertaining, it's practical.
10: Favorite Character:
A: Sadly, probably Shadow... I know.
11: Least Favorite Character:
A: Amy. Fuck Amy.
12: Most Annoying Character:
A: Still Amy. Even Charmy, who is supposed to be annoying by design, ends up rattling my skull less than Amy.
13: Favorite Playable Character (in what game?):
A: That's really broad. I guess Sonic in almost any combination in Sonic Advance 3?
14: Favorite Fan Game:
A: Does Sonic Mania count? I don't really play the fan games but Utopia looks promising.
15: Least Favorite Sonictuber:
A: Basically all of them. I really can't single out just one. Sorry, "Sonictubers".
16: Do you want more playable characters? If so, who?
A: Again, really broad. It depends on the general focus of the game and if it has multiplayer or a reason to have multiple characters at all. So in the case that the answer may be yes, I really like Blaze, Metal Sonic, Shadow, and Espio. Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles are some of the only characters that have powers and backstories of their own. Most of the other characters in terms of ability (other than the seven I just mentioned and Silver) are typically just worse versions of Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles.
17: Favorite "Alternative" Gameplay:
A: Any special stage in Mania.
18: Favorite Sonic YouTube Video:
A: Knuckles Chaotix by Egoraptor.
19: Favorite Sonic Song:
A: Tie between Emerald Hill from Sonic 2 and Ex-Boss from Sonic Advance 3.
20: Least Favorite Playable Character:
A: Big from Sonic Adventure 1. No, I'm serious.
21: Do you dislike the Sonic community?
A: I dislike people using the Internet's general anonymity for excusable aggression. Asking if someone dislikes the Sonic fanbase is a loaded question, and because Sonic is such a varied, popular, and long-running franchise, generalizing them is like trying to generalize the world's population. I sometimes make videos about Sonic, listen to the soundtracks, and occasionally play the games. Sometimes I even enjoy them! So by these similarities, I'm in the same boat as a hypothetical artist who draws homosexual Sonic-themed porn, am I not? It's the people that try to pick fights with people over Sonic that make me avoid the community and I think a lot of people would agree with that. So the short answer to that loaded question is "no", but I think the question is important so people will study internet/video game culture as a whole.
My Sonic background: Sonic 2 was, to my memory, the first video game I ever played and it made me want more. I started to make my own creative things (music, cartoons, scripts/stories) based on stuff I saw in video games because I was so enthralled with the medium and how it tied in so many other forms of media to make a whole new work of art. I'm not one of those "the old games were better" kind of guys because I played a lot of the old games (1991-2001) and a lot of the more recent ones. With every great Sonic game there is a wide array of installments that are so-so at the very best. A lot of which are rushed messes though. At least that's just my opinion, to get you started with this thing. Okay, here are my answers:
1. Favorite Sonic Game:
A: Sonic 2, though I'm usually torn between 2 and 3.
2. BEST Sonic Game:
A: Sonic Mania. It's the only Sonic game where I have to go hypercritical to think of flaws.
3. Worst Sonic Game:
A: Everyone knows it's Sonic '06 so to not be boring I'll say the runner-up is probably either Shadow the Hedgehog or Unleashed on Wii.
4. Best Adventure Game:
A: Adventure 2, assuming Sonic Rush Adventure doesn't count.
5. Best Boost Engine Game:
A: Sonic Generations. The only ones I can think of that even come close are Colors and Rush Adventure. Rush Adventure's mini-games aren't as fun as Generations' and Colors' alien color mechanic was too contrived.
6. Best Classic Game:
A: Sonic 3 & Knuckles
7. Most Underrated Game:
A: Sonic Rush Adventure
8. Most Challenging Game:
A: Again, Sonic '06 for the wrong reasons. I would say the most consistently challenging while still being varied, albeit sometimes also for the wrong reasons: Sonic and the Secret Rings? Sonic Advance 2 and 3 if you don't want to count "bullshit" as a challenge.
9: Favorite Sonictuber:
A: I guess Tails' Channel. I don't really like channels that focus on one game series or topic, even it is one I like or find interesting. Tails' Channel is news, sometimes presented in a fun way. Even when it's not super entertaining, it's practical.
10: Favorite Character:
A: Sadly, probably Shadow... I know.
11: Least Favorite Character:
A: Amy. Fuck Amy.
12: Most Annoying Character:
A: Still Amy. Even Charmy, who is supposed to be annoying by design, ends up rattling my skull less than Amy.
13: Favorite Playable Character (in what game?):
A: That's really broad. I guess Sonic in almost any combination in Sonic Advance 3?
14: Favorite Fan Game:
A: Does Sonic Mania count? I don't really play the fan games but Utopia looks promising.
15: Least Favorite Sonictuber:
A: Basically all of them. I really can't single out just one. Sorry, "Sonictubers".
16: Do you want more playable characters? If so, who?
A: Again, really broad. It depends on the general focus of the game and if it has multiplayer or a reason to have multiple characters at all. So in the case that the answer may be yes, I really like Blaze, Metal Sonic, Shadow, and Espio. Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles are some of the only characters that have powers and backstories of their own. Most of the other characters in terms of ability (other than the seven I just mentioned and Silver) are typically just worse versions of Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles.
17: Favorite "Alternative" Gameplay:
A: Any special stage in Mania.
18: Favorite Sonic YouTube Video:
A: Knuckles Chaotix by Egoraptor.
19: Favorite Sonic Song:
A: Tie between Emerald Hill from Sonic 2 and Ex-Boss from Sonic Advance 3.
20: Least Favorite Playable Character:
A: Big from Sonic Adventure 1. No, I'm serious.
21: Do you dislike the Sonic community?
A: I dislike people using the Internet's general anonymity for excusable aggression. Asking if someone dislikes the Sonic fanbase is a loaded question, and because Sonic is such a varied, popular, and long-running franchise, generalizing them is like trying to generalize the world's population. I sometimes make videos about Sonic, listen to the soundtracks, and occasionally play the games. Sometimes I even enjoy them! So by these similarities, I'm in the same boat as a hypothetical artist who draws homosexual Sonic-themed porn, am I not? It's the people that try to pick fights with people over Sonic that make me avoid the community and I think a lot of people would agree with that. So the short answer to that loaded question is "no", but I think the question is important so people will study internet/video game culture as a whole.
Mai feverit pokemun generations
I can't bring myself to do anything so it's time for a blog with a premise so pointless, I could never bring myself to make it into a video. So this is probably going to be two lists.
The first list will be a brief look into the mainline RPG titles in the Pokemon series (spin-offs and remakes excluded). The second list will be scrutinizing the actual creatures themselves. Why do I do this to myself? Eh. People read it. I am curious to see agreements and disagreements though considering people I have met in my actual offline life have come to some interesting points occasionally.
I am also going to exclude Generation 7 because I haven't played Sun and Moon. That would be unfair to compare them here because all of my knowledge of Sun and Moon is based on heresy and minor Google searches. I do like Salazzle and Lunala though, if that means anything to you.
FAVORITE GAMES:
#6: X and Y (Gen 6)
The thing with Pokemon, and this isn't necessarily a bad thing, is that its core gameplay in the main series has remained unchanged. It is so unchanged, in fact, that most of the stats of the creatures have not changed since 2001. Since all of the main games are turn-based RPG's, and the stats remain the same, it has been difficult to make a Pokemon game a chore to get through.
Welcome to X and Y, where aesthetics and gimmicks are the focus instead of comfort and any form of reward to the player! Yeah, so, a lot of the gripes you'll hear on these games from me specifically may be exaggerated to get a point across. I tend to do that. But I can assure you of my sincerity when I say that I hate X and Y, and out of all six main Pokemon RPG's, I can say with certainty that it is the only one I can say I truly don't like. It did revamp the Exp. Share system and did a lot of things that were brought to their full potential in Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire (which by the way are goddamn incredible games), in X and Y they just brought ease to an already watered down version of Pokemon. If you didn't know, Pokemon's main stories are already pretty easy to get past. The story depiction in X and Y is tryhard but directionless, the game gives you handouts even up until you catch Mewtwo, and the roller blades are garbage. These should be optional items to put on a la the bicycle in umm.... hmmm... EVERY OTHER GAME SINCE GOLD AND SILVER! The bicycle in X and Y functions but you can't use it everywhere and most of the places you can are not necessarily beneficial to use the bike in. In other words, X and Y forces you to use its most unattractive gimmick. Don't even get me started on the stupid 3D city where the controls make 3D Sonic look reasonable. Holy wow!
Traversing areas needs to at least be functional in a Pokemon game because it is the mechanic in the game that gives players a sense of choice and the illusion that they have gone on a journey. If this aspect isn't fun, then crunching numbers is all that's left. I mean, the visuals look great, but I think I've established by now that in the grand scheme of this game, it really doesn't matter.
#5: Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum (Gen 4)
I had Diamond but got so bored with it that I ended up selling it back after a few months. I know they were going for an online Pokemon experience but added too much fluff and unnecessary design choices on paper to make a great game. I'm mainly griping about little things like the transfer system that puts arbitrary time caps on things based on real time for no real reason. This and some things I don't fully remember from the underground mini-game portions are what brought Diamond and Pearl back. They were just overly ambitious games in a franchise that was already at its prime and didn't need to try this hard to win people over. There are a lot of things I do have to commend though.
As much as most people probably don't like the designs of some of the new evolution Pokemon such as Honchcrow, Gliscor, and Mamoswine, their inclusion in the game is actually very smart and something I would kind of like to see more of in future installments. For example of this, Generations 3 and 4 revealed some pretty powerful Pokemon, making the pool of powerful Pokemon that were once taken over completely by Pokemon such as Articuno, Dragonite, and Entei seem a lot less intimidating in relativity. Even in a slightly lower tier, a lot of Pokemon with cool ideas that could possibly survive some high-end battles in Generation 2 were later nearly useless. These are basically just updated Pokemon, and the challenge of evolving and teaching specific moves is still there too. So if you really like Sneasel, you probably shouldn't use Sneasel in most forms of competitive play, but certain tiers could be a good opportunity for Weavile, which is close enough. Touch screen functions in Pokemon are fantastic too. Controlling a Pokedex or even your fighting team with PDA-like controllers was a great idea that only got better as time went on. These reasons alone and the fact that, again, the Gen 4 games didn't try to fix too much of what wasn't broken, make DPP obviously better than X and Y... I think anyways. I know a lot of people will probably disagree because I didn't want to believe it myself, but after restarting X and Y several times to leech its starters and legendaries, I can't help but see it for its flaws, even in comparison to what used to be my least favorite: DPP.
#4: Black and White (Gen 5)
Then we get into what I actually consider to be not just good, but great games. Black and White isn't the best, but a solid RPG that continues to remind me of why I fell in love with this cock-fighting series in the first place. Black and White also tried at a plot and didn't shit itself like it usually does when it tries a story. Not essential but it's nice to see. I didn't appreciate this the first time I played it, but after starting over about a year ago (again, to leech starters and legendaries) I realized that this game is really damn fast. This is one of the fastest-paced Pokemon games ever. It runs really fast, the combat I mean. Well, I guess also the text. It also just does everything DPP did but better, which sounds like it's more complicated than just saying that, but it isn't. BW just does everything that DPP did but better. I guess if you really loved fucking around in the underground portions then you will miss that, but that's about it from what I can remember off the top of my head.
Black and White being so fast-paced, despite consistenly-animated sprites in battle and several 3D effects outside of battle, is something I really appreciate. This makes grinding or just hunting down a specific Pokemon slightly less of a chore, which is a big deal for any RPG ever. To put in perspective, XY or ORAS for example have great-looking 3D models on screen with several animations for different attacks or reactions to other things that effect them. This is really cool but takes longer to load, even in between each and every turn you take. BW speeds through. I swear it is almost doubly fast. As an RPG, Black and White functions really well, and honestly if I knew someone who only had a DS and wanted to get into Pokemon for the first time without blowing the bank on a 3DS, I would probably recommend this one. Unless their DS is an old backwards-compatible model like mine, in which case I'm not a complete idiot: RSE and FRLG are way more simple for a newcomer.
#3: Red, Blue, Green, and Yellow (Gen 1)
That's not a typo, I did say that *gasp* RGBY is not the best Pokemon game ever! Oh MY! Seriously, why do people leap to defend this fucking game so much? Yes, it's revolutionary. Yes, it's still kind of fun. Yes, it's interesting to look back on. But as a fun game, remembering that fun is the point of games, the Gen 1 games have not remotely aged well. I feel like it should be without question, and yet it's still blasphemy to say it in public. It laid down the groundwork, the other games came in, cleaned up the debris, and built three malls and a group of classy restaurants. Even the stats are outdated; there wasn't very much balance even in comparison to Gen 2. Most of the Pokemon don't look that great, and even if they did, their names are almost all just various forms of grotesque wordplay.
But it's okay though because it's about the journey right? Remember that one... brick.... you walked past? Oh, or how about... cave? Seriously, Victory Road isn't even that visually appealing and it's building to the climax of the game!
Like I said before though, RGBY are interesting pieces of technology at the very least, and the character designs are pretty choice. Remember what I said about the previously mentioned games having unnecessary fluff? This was the first of its kind and it pushed the Game Boy technology nearly to its limits with how much information was stored, so fluff wasn't an option. Geez, I love cartridge games.
#2: Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald (Gen 3)
This was the perfect evolution left off from the Gen 1 and Gen 2 games where almost everything was just bigger and better, especially if you are just talking about Emerald. Abilities changed the game forever, running shoes took away the only thing I hated about the games as a kid, and the plot in this one was delightfully over the top without being overbearing. After the giant rants on the other games, I have kind of run out of things to say about this one other than that. I like the characters, the Pokemon, the color palettes, the progression, the stupid PokeBlock mini-game that serves no real purpose but was still goofy. I love it all. But from sheer innovation, there is a game that trumps the rest.
#1: Gold, Silver, and Crystal (Gen 2)
I haven't played this one in a while but have sunk enough hours into it to have a decent grasp on what it's about. This one just mechanically revamped everything from the first games and added things that were innovative for RPG's. Some of the innovations were even unheard of for games in general for the most part. It was one of the first games ever to use actual real-world time to effect in-game events. So that's a pretty big deal. All in all there isn't much else to say other than you go back to Kanto from the first batch of games, so it has double the content, done smoother, and it feels welcoming to go do more in the game. So this one's pretty awesome. I also really like some of the Pokemon that were new here, which leads to giant list number 2!
FAVORITE POKEMON GENERATIONS:
#6: Generation 6 (Kalos)
Maybe it's just my general disdain for X and Y but X and Y's Pokemon were kind of a waste of space. Even the developers kind of knew this too: the starters are so lame that you get one of the starters from the first game not too long after you get one of the new ones. Even X and Y are those kids that go "fuck all that, original 151 are where it's at!" I do really like Greninja and there are a few other exceptions like Hoopa, but even those can't be saved from such Pokemon as Klefki, Inklay, or Honedge. When you have to start putting eyes on inanimate objects to fill more Pokemon slots, maybe it's time to stop making so many new Pokemon each generation and just focus more on making the games good. Is that too much to ask? Yes. I'm no game developer, I can fuck myself.
Fav Gen 6 Pokemon: Greninja (for anyone who cares)
#5: Generation 4 (Sinnoh)
I know I said that the evolutions of older Pokemon were a cool idea, and I still stand by that. But if we are talking about Pokemon I actually care about or like the look of, Generation 4 just doesn't have it. Even Generation 6 had exceptions, and 4 does too (Dialga, Weavile, Leafeon) but Pokemon is a game where you are supposed to be enticed by all of these different creatures. If the creatures are boring then you are just collecting data, and that's pretty lame. Their usefulness and the fact that I like a few Gen 4 designs way more than that of Gen 6 put it over Gen 6, just not by much.
Fav Gen 4 Pokemon: Dialga
#4: Generation 5 (Unova)
Generation 5 added in way too many Pokemon and I felt like most of them were really lame, while others were really cool. Lame: Trubbish, Pansage, Emboar. Not as lame: Zekrom, Victini (one of my favorite Pokemon ever), Hydreigon. There wasn't really much meta-game use for these losers either but at least out of the giant slew they shelled out after Gen 3, Gen 5 I like the designs of a lot more than Gen 4 and 6, even if some of the designs are literally garbage. A HAW HAW HAW HAW!!!! Seiously though, Trubbish? Really?
Fav Gen 5 Pokemon: Victini
#3: Generation 1 (Kanto)
Oh no, I've done it again! Some of my favorite Pokemon (Charizard, Mewtwo, Eevee) do come from Kanto, and even I can't knock the original 151. At the same time, much like a YouTube comments section, being first doesn't matter. Most of these things are just stupid puns (not that they got too much better later) and for my taste, I don't like the fact that they resemble real animals that closely. Pokemon takes place in a world of fantasy, and as such, I want to feel like all of the creatures that live there are noticeably different from the ones that we know here on Earth. You could argue that there are no flaming horses or giant three-headed birds, but there also isn't anything about most of these creatures that really make them stand out from the animals that they are obviously based on. Even when it comes to things that aren't animals, there are sentient rocks and magnets. Is that still cool? Was it ever cool? And before you retort, remember two things: 1) Voltorb is just an angry-ass Pokeball that can give off electricity 2) Electrode is supposed to be the evolved form of this, and it's just the same thing but slightly bigger and upside down.
Fav Gen 1 Pokemon: Mewtwo
#2: Generation 2 (Johto)
Gen 2 added more weird type match-ups and new types entirely that not only gave more variety but more balance to the game. On top of this I think the Generation 2 Pokemon look more fantasy than most of the other generations. All of the generations have Pokemon that are just directly based on animals but Gen 2 made them look more original in comparison to animalistic Pokemon like Pidgey, Michael Bay Transformers Pokemon like Giratina, and Klefki. Fuck Klefki. That's really all I have to say about it off the top of my head. I just feel like the Gen 2 Pokemon had more memorable designs and color choices than most other generations did.
Fav Gen 2 Pokemon: Umbreon? (hard to choose really)
#1: Generation 3 (Hoenn)
I won't lie, it is a close call for me between 2 and 3, so I had to go a little nitpicky. The one thing, and maybe the only thing, that I can argue Generation 3 over 2 is location. In GSC, geography wasn't much of a factor for where certain Pokemon would spawn. Baltoy appears in deserts, Zigzagoons and Sevipers appear in various patches of grass, Surskit can be found in grass but usually found easier on the water, and even Groudon is in a volcano. They did this to an extent in the other games too, but Gen 1 didn't have much variety in terms of setting anyways, and Gen 2 had the luxury of recycling Gen 1 Pokemon into that gimmick. Gen 3 also utilized that idea, but more importantly they used geographical placement to accentuate the adventure. In Gen 3 you can go "oh yeah, I remember that Pokemon, you catch it in this area" whereas most of the Gen 1 and Gen 2 Pokemon you think the other way around. Actually, I would go as far to say they haven't taken advantage of this design philosophy since Gen 3. Beyond that, just copy and paste what I said about Gen 2 and Gen 3 basically has that too.
Fav Gen 3 Pokemon: Sceptile
Sorry that this wasn't a particularly poignant blog. Usually, at the end, I try to emphasize a point to take away from all this but for this one, I think the point is that I have spent too many hours of my life playing Pokemon. That's about it.
More to come. The blog has been kind of dead, which is good. That means I have been more focused on more important things. At the same time, this blog is a good therapeutic tool that I have been neglecting, and that's not cool. So again, more to come.
The first list will be a brief look into the mainline RPG titles in the Pokemon series (spin-offs and remakes excluded). The second list will be scrutinizing the actual creatures themselves. Why do I do this to myself? Eh. People read it. I am curious to see agreements and disagreements though considering people I have met in my actual offline life have come to some interesting points occasionally.
I am also going to exclude Generation 7 because I haven't played Sun and Moon. That would be unfair to compare them here because all of my knowledge of Sun and Moon is based on heresy and minor Google searches. I do like Salazzle and Lunala though, if that means anything to you.
FAVORITE GAMES:
#6: X and Y (Gen 6)
The thing with Pokemon, and this isn't necessarily a bad thing, is that its core gameplay in the main series has remained unchanged. It is so unchanged, in fact, that most of the stats of the creatures have not changed since 2001. Since all of the main games are turn-based RPG's, and the stats remain the same, it has been difficult to make a Pokemon game a chore to get through.
Welcome to X and Y, where aesthetics and gimmicks are the focus instead of comfort and any form of reward to the player! Yeah, so, a lot of the gripes you'll hear on these games from me specifically may be exaggerated to get a point across. I tend to do that. But I can assure you of my sincerity when I say that I hate X and Y, and out of all six main Pokemon RPG's, I can say with certainty that it is the only one I can say I truly don't like. It did revamp the Exp. Share system and did a lot of things that were brought to their full potential in Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire (which by the way are goddamn incredible games), in X and Y they just brought ease to an already watered down version of Pokemon. If you didn't know, Pokemon's main stories are already pretty easy to get past. The story depiction in X and Y is tryhard but directionless, the game gives you handouts even up until you catch Mewtwo, and the roller blades are garbage. These should be optional items to put on a la the bicycle in umm.... hmmm... EVERY OTHER GAME SINCE GOLD AND SILVER! The bicycle in X and Y functions but you can't use it everywhere and most of the places you can are not necessarily beneficial to use the bike in. In other words, X and Y forces you to use its most unattractive gimmick. Don't even get me started on the stupid 3D city where the controls make 3D Sonic look reasonable. Holy wow!
Traversing areas needs to at least be functional in a Pokemon game because it is the mechanic in the game that gives players a sense of choice and the illusion that they have gone on a journey. If this aspect isn't fun, then crunching numbers is all that's left. I mean, the visuals look great, but I think I've established by now that in the grand scheme of this game, it really doesn't matter.
#5: Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum (Gen 4)
I had Diamond but got so bored with it that I ended up selling it back after a few months. I know they were going for an online Pokemon experience but added too much fluff and unnecessary design choices on paper to make a great game. I'm mainly griping about little things like the transfer system that puts arbitrary time caps on things based on real time for no real reason. This and some things I don't fully remember from the underground mini-game portions are what brought Diamond and Pearl back. They were just overly ambitious games in a franchise that was already at its prime and didn't need to try this hard to win people over. There are a lot of things I do have to commend though.
As much as most people probably don't like the designs of some of the new evolution Pokemon such as Honchcrow, Gliscor, and Mamoswine, their inclusion in the game is actually very smart and something I would kind of like to see more of in future installments. For example of this, Generations 3 and 4 revealed some pretty powerful Pokemon, making the pool of powerful Pokemon that were once taken over completely by Pokemon such as Articuno, Dragonite, and Entei seem a lot less intimidating in relativity. Even in a slightly lower tier, a lot of Pokemon with cool ideas that could possibly survive some high-end battles in Generation 2 were later nearly useless. These are basically just updated Pokemon, and the challenge of evolving and teaching specific moves is still there too. So if you really like Sneasel, you probably shouldn't use Sneasel in most forms of competitive play, but certain tiers could be a good opportunity for Weavile, which is close enough. Touch screen functions in Pokemon are fantastic too. Controlling a Pokedex or even your fighting team with PDA-like controllers was a great idea that only got better as time went on. These reasons alone and the fact that, again, the Gen 4 games didn't try to fix too much of what wasn't broken, make DPP obviously better than X and Y... I think anyways. I know a lot of people will probably disagree because I didn't want to believe it myself, but after restarting X and Y several times to leech its starters and legendaries, I can't help but see it for its flaws, even in comparison to what used to be my least favorite: DPP.
#4: Black and White (Gen 5)
Then we get into what I actually consider to be not just good, but great games. Black and White isn't the best, but a solid RPG that continues to remind me of why I fell in love with this cock-fighting series in the first place. Black and White also tried at a plot and didn't shit itself like it usually does when it tries a story. Not essential but it's nice to see. I didn't appreciate this the first time I played it, but after starting over about a year ago (again, to leech starters and legendaries) I realized that this game is really damn fast. This is one of the fastest-paced Pokemon games ever. It runs really fast, the combat I mean. Well, I guess also the text. It also just does everything DPP did but better, which sounds like it's more complicated than just saying that, but it isn't. BW just does everything that DPP did but better. I guess if you really loved fucking around in the underground portions then you will miss that, but that's about it from what I can remember off the top of my head.
Black and White being so fast-paced, despite consistenly-animated sprites in battle and several 3D effects outside of battle, is something I really appreciate. This makes grinding or just hunting down a specific Pokemon slightly less of a chore, which is a big deal for any RPG ever. To put in perspective, XY or ORAS for example have great-looking 3D models on screen with several animations for different attacks or reactions to other things that effect them. This is really cool but takes longer to load, even in between each and every turn you take. BW speeds through. I swear it is almost doubly fast. As an RPG, Black and White functions really well, and honestly if I knew someone who only had a DS and wanted to get into Pokemon for the first time without blowing the bank on a 3DS, I would probably recommend this one. Unless their DS is an old backwards-compatible model like mine, in which case I'm not a complete idiot: RSE and FRLG are way more simple for a newcomer.
#3: Red, Blue, Green, and Yellow (Gen 1)
That's not a typo, I did say that *gasp* RGBY is not the best Pokemon game ever! Oh MY! Seriously, why do people leap to defend this fucking game so much? Yes, it's revolutionary. Yes, it's still kind of fun. Yes, it's interesting to look back on. But as a fun game, remembering that fun is the point of games, the Gen 1 games have not remotely aged well. I feel like it should be without question, and yet it's still blasphemy to say it in public. It laid down the groundwork, the other games came in, cleaned up the debris, and built three malls and a group of classy restaurants. Even the stats are outdated; there wasn't very much balance even in comparison to Gen 2. Most of the Pokemon don't look that great, and even if they did, their names are almost all just various forms of grotesque wordplay.
But it's okay though because it's about the journey right? Remember that one... brick.... you walked past? Oh, or how about... cave? Seriously, Victory Road isn't even that visually appealing and it's building to the climax of the game!
Like I said before though, RGBY are interesting pieces of technology at the very least, and the character designs are pretty choice. Remember what I said about the previously mentioned games having unnecessary fluff? This was the first of its kind and it pushed the Game Boy technology nearly to its limits with how much information was stored, so fluff wasn't an option. Geez, I love cartridge games.
#2: Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald (Gen 3)
This was the perfect evolution left off from the Gen 1 and Gen 2 games where almost everything was just bigger and better, especially if you are just talking about Emerald. Abilities changed the game forever, running shoes took away the only thing I hated about the games as a kid, and the plot in this one was delightfully over the top without being overbearing. After the giant rants on the other games, I have kind of run out of things to say about this one other than that. I like the characters, the Pokemon, the color palettes, the progression, the stupid PokeBlock mini-game that serves no real purpose but was still goofy. I love it all. But from sheer innovation, there is a game that trumps the rest.
#1: Gold, Silver, and Crystal (Gen 2)
I haven't played this one in a while but have sunk enough hours into it to have a decent grasp on what it's about. This one just mechanically revamped everything from the first games and added things that were innovative for RPG's. Some of the innovations were even unheard of for games in general for the most part. It was one of the first games ever to use actual real-world time to effect in-game events. So that's a pretty big deal. All in all there isn't much else to say other than you go back to Kanto from the first batch of games, so it has double the content, done smoother, and it feels welcoming to go do more in the game. So this one's pretty awesome. I also really like some of the Pokemon that were new here, which leads to giant list number 2!
FAVORITE POKEMON GENERATIONS:
#6: Generation 6 (Kalos)
Maybe it's just my general disdain for X and Y but X and Y's Pokemon were kind of a waste of space. Even the developers kind of knew this too: the starters are so lame that you get one of the starters from the first game not too long after you get one of the new ones. Even X and Y are those kids that go "fuck all that, original 151 are where it's at!" I do really like Greninja and there are a few other exceptions like Hoopa, but even those can't be saved from such Pokemon as Klefki, Inklay, or Honedge. When you have to start putting eyes on inanimate objects to fill more Pokemon slots, maybe it's time to stop making so many new Pokemon each generation and just focus more on making the games good. Is that too much to ask? Yes. I'm no game developer, I can fuck myself.
Fav Gen 6 Pokemon: Greninja (for anyone who cares)
#5: Generation 4 (Sinnoh)
I know I said that the evolutions of older Pokemon were a cool idea, and I still stand by that. But if we are talking about Pokemon I actually care about or like the look of, Generation 4 just doesn't have it. Even Generation 6 had exceptions, and 4 does too (Dialga, Weavile, Leafeon) but Pokemon is a game where you are supposed to be enticed by all of these different creatures. If the creatures are boring then you are just collecting data, and that's pretty lame. Their usefulness and the fact that I like a few Gen 4 designs way more than that of Gen 6 put it over Gen 6, just not by much.
Fav Gen 4 Pokemon: Dialga
#4: Generation 5 (Unova)
Generation 5 added in way too many Pokemon and I felt like most of them were really lame, while others were really cool. Lame: Trubbish, Pansage, Emboar. Not as lame: Zekrom, Victini (one of my favorite Pokemon ever), Hydreigon. There wasn't really much meta-game use for these losers either but at least out of the giant slew they shelled out after Gen 3, Gen 5 I like the designs of a lot more than Gen 4 and 6, even if some of the designs are literally garbage. A HAW HAW HAW HAW!!!! Seiously though, Trubbish? Really?
Fav Gen 5 Pokemon: Victini
#3: Generation 1 (Kanto)
Oh no, I've done it again! Some of my favorite Pokemon (Charizard, Mewtwo, Eevee) do come from Kanto, and even I can't knock the original 151. At the same time, much like a YouTube comments section, being first doesn't matter. Most of these things are just stupid puns (not that they got too much better later) and for my taste, I don't like the fact that they resemble real animals that closely. Pokemon takes place in a world of fantasy, and as such, I want to feel like all of the creatures that live there are noticeably different from the ones that we know here on Earth. You could argue that there are no flaming horses or giant three-headed birds, but there also isn't anything about most of these creatures that really make them stand out from the animals that they are obviously based on. Even when it comes to things that aren't animals, there are sentient rocks and magnets. Is that still cool? Was it ever cool? And before you retort, remember two things: 1) Voltorb is just an angry-ass Pokeball that can give off electricity 2) Electrode is supposed to be the evolved form of this, and it's just the same thing but slightly bigger and upside down.
Fav Gen 1 Pokemon: Mewtwo
#2: Generation 2 (Johto)
Gen 2 added more weird type match-ups and new types entirely that not only gave more variety but more balance to the game. On top of this I think the Generation 2 Pokemon look more fantasy than most of the other generations. All of the generations have Pokemon that are just directly based on animals but Gen 2 made them look more original in comparison to animalistic Pokemon like Pidgey, Michael Bay Transformers Pokemon like Giratina, and Klefki. Fuck Klefki. That's really all I have to say about it off the top of my head. I just feel like the Gen 2 Pokemon had more memorable designs and color choices than most other generations did.
Fav Gen 2 Pokemon: Umbreon? (hard to choose really)
#1: Generation 3 (Hoenn)
I won't lie, it is a close call for me between 2 and 3, so I had to go a little nitpicky. The one thing, and maybe the only thing, that I can argue Generation 3 over 2 is location. In GSC, geography wasn't much of a factor for where certain Pokemon would spawn. Baltoy appears in deserts, Zigzagoons and Sevipers appear in various patches of grass, Surskit can be found in grass but usually found easier on the water, and even Groudon is in a volcano. They did this to an extent in the other games too, but Gen 1 didn't have much variety in terms of setting anyways, and Gen 2 had the luxury of recycling Gen 1 Pokemon into that gimmick. Gen 3 also utilized that idea, but more importantly they used geographical placement to accentuate the adventure. In Gen 3 you can go "oh yeah, I remember that Pokemon, you catch it in this area" whereas most of the Gen 1 and Gen 2 Pokemon you think the other way around. Actually, I would go as far to say they haven't taken advantage of this design philosophy since Gen 3. Beyond that, just copy and paste what I said about Gen 2 and Gen 3 basically has that too.
Fav Gen 3 Pokemon: Sceptile
Sorry that this wasn't a particularly poignant blog. Usually, at the end, I try to emphasize a point to take away from all this but for this one, I think the point is that I have spent too many hours of my life playing Pokemon. That's about it.
More to come. The blog has been kind of dead, which is good. That means I have been more focused on more important things. At the same time, this blog is a good therapeutic tool that I have been neglecting, and that's not cool. So again, more to come.
Fan Games Exist
I saw an article header for a Zelda fan game getting shut down and I don't feel like working on anything else right now before bed... so instead of going to bed, I'm blogging.
A fan game is where a team of people (or sometimes in today's age, just one person) takes intellectual properties from a previously published source and uses it to create something fairly new. Like the whole "fair use" clause that we have seen thrown around on YouTube lately, it is kind of a gray area. This is a blog where I share a lot of personal opinions on a wide array of stuff, so if you are wondering if I have a problem with fan games, I say no. Are you kidding? I still think they should make a Digimon vs. Pokemon crossover fighting game, Kingdom Hearts fighting game, or a Sega x Capcom (Project Cross Zone doesn't count). If I had the time and knowledge now in my 20's to create something like that and two-twenty other people wanted to join me unpaid, I would work on it as much as possible without going homeless! Alas, I can only observe from the distance.
Nintendo has been pretty big on shutting down fan games recently, and as a game enthusiast and supporter of indie games, I guess it is expected that I am supposed to say "boooo! Fuck you, Nintendo! Leave AM2R alone!" I both am and am not that guy here, and that's what I want to get across in this blog post. I think a bit of reflection should be taken by both independent fan game developers and whoever pulls the trigger to their skulls over at Nintendo.
Fan games get a bad rep sometimes because of the Newgrounds prime era where a fan game could be something as impressive as a Sonic Advance 2 fan port or as dumb as a seven-year-old with a shitty mic moving Mario and Kirby sprites around on the screen while you frantically shoot things with your mouse. Every once in a while you have your Super Smash Bros. Crusade, Super Smash Flash, Super Flash Bros., League of Fighters, Sonic Utopia, that one I can't think of right now that was essentially multiplayer Super Mario World or something... Those are cool. They are different concepts based on already existing formulas, and that's not inherently bad. When you go to school for game design, art, music composition, programming, they don't start you off going "alright, freshman project is to make a rough draft of your magnum opus. If you don't make your life's calling right here and now, you're expelled!" They start you off with something that has already been done a million times over, and hell if you were passionate about the subject you are studying before you went to college then you have probably done this hypothetical thing at least a few hundred times yourself. I can say this from experience, it's why I dropped out of music education, among other reasons. Over here in America, or at least where I grew up, game design isn't something that everyone is/was throwing around as a glorious career or even as a viable option in some areas (like the one I grew up in). Notice I said game design. The thought of working for a video game in the environment I was raised in was a few steps short of witchcraft. Ripping previously existing material may seem lowbrow to those who create new characters or story premises when they brush their teeth every morning, but to those presented with less support in this field, an independent, grassroots fan game is the only way into this field.
Let's also be honest with ourselves here for a bit longer and realize that everything has been done. This is a tried and true mentality. Want to start a fictional religion in a screenplay? Probably based on some form of Christianity. Want to write any joke at all into a screenplay for say... television? Simpsons did it. Want to make anything creative? Look back on several thousands years of recorded art. You were beaten to the punch. So if I want to make a PC game that plays like Star Fox but has updated anime-inspired graphics, maybe I should just make it Star Fox rather than an obvious rip-off of the characters and story from Star Fox. At least then I can reel in more people who are also interested in Star Fox. Star Fox, just as an ongoing example here, is a pretty popular series, so people who don't have your gift of game creativity may be wanting something similar to what you have dreamt up. Look on a wider scale: you have a Star Fox fan game that was played by a couple thousand people, or maybe even shut down by Nintendo because so many people were downloading it. Congratulations: you have something on your resume that you made with a limited team, little-to-no budget, and it got a following! You already look just as good if not better than other people looking for the same kinds of work you are that just graduated with their respective degrees. This is the good that fan games can bring, with the obvious point I left out. The point being that fan games like the hypothetical I mentioned or even games like Super Flash Bros. were probably created because the original developers weren't doing it themselves. I think companies like Sonic Team see this good and leave it be. Notice you don't really see a whole lot of Sonic fan games get shut down. Just Mario, Metroid, Pokemon, and Zelda ones. At the end of the day, these companies still own the franchises, so you could, albeit evil to do so, use the idea and polish it up. I heard that something like this happened with Super Mario Maker actually but I haven't been able to dig up much on the story since I first heard it, but supposedly Nintendo shut down some guy that made a custom Mario stage builder game, non-profit mind you, and then coincidentally released Super Mario Maker on Wii U shortly after. Hmmm. Which leads me to my next stance, and this is where a lot of people might hate me a little.
That guy didn't make Mario. He's not Shigeru Miyamoto. Not Satoru Iwata. Just a fan making a fan game. There's nothing wrong with that and I think shutting the game down completely was a little extreme, but on the other hand, fans know now more than ever that these companies are able and within legal right to do so. So why play with that fire? Am I crazy? Am I an asshole for thinking this? I don't think I am. Let's go back to Super Flash Bros. This Smash clone specifically seems to impersonate a GameBoy Color OS using sprites representing a select few Smash characters (and also Vaporeon). Another notable aspect beyond its retro gimmick was that it had smooth, intricate, and complex maneuvers emulating that of later Super Smash Bros. installments, especially Melee. The guy who made that game? Dan Fornace? If that name rings a bell, it means you probably played the recently fully released Steam game known as Rivals of Aether. This game, which I really like by the way, is a Melee clone consulting pro Melee players and fans to create a balanced fighting game based on the intricacies of Super Smash Bros. while still giving it a fun atmosphere. This atmosphere despite being based on older graphics is original and even comes with a story mode now to bring more life to the original cast of characters. A lot of them mechanically still share moves similar to those in the Smash Bros. series, but the game rules and whatnot are, by copyright law, fair game to use. You just can't name the main character Pikachu. This is understandable, and the crossroads I think must be had between fan game makers and the big corporations that the fans are trying to pay homage to.
Final Fantasy was inspired by Dragon Quest, and the company that made that game ended up buying Dragon Quest out. Sonic was inspired by the running in Mario and Sonic ended up closely competing with the Italian plumber that saved console gaming. Imitation doesn't have to be cheap, so long as you are trying to do something wholly original and new with the mechanics of the game to offer a new experience to the consumer. Weird to call them consumers in the case of free fan games but whatever. Experimenting with what is already there is what allows us to grow creatively as individuals and as a species, otherwise, we would be driving with stone wheels still.
The only thing that eludes this topic in this blog post is when companies shut down people putting their assets in a different engine. You know, like those "Zelda Ocarina of Time in Unreal 4" videos on YouTube that Nintendo still doesn't like? Yeah, in that case, the companies can chill out.
I have said this on this blog before, and I will say it again: I think you should do whatever makes you happy in this life. If that is making a game where Pikachu and Sonic kiss each other and then fight Bowser while he does the fusion dance with Batman, then have at it, but you kind of don't have room to bitch about DC, Nintendo, and Sega all putting the hammer down on you at once when you post it everywhere online.
A fan game is where a team of people (or sometimes in today's age, just one person) takes intellectual properties from a previously published source and uses it to create something fairly new. Like the whole "fair use" clause that we have seen thrown around on YouTube lately, it is kind of a gray area. This is a blog where I share a lot of personal opinions on a wide array of stuff, so if you are wondering if I have a problem with fan games, I say no. Are you kidding? I still think they should make a Digimon vs. Pokemon crossover fighting game, Kingdom Hearts fighting game, or a Sega x Capcom (Project Cross Zone doesn't count). If I had the time and knowledge now in my 20's to create something like that and two-twenty other people wanted to join me unpaid, I would work on it as much as possible without going homeless! Alas, I can only observe from the distance.
Nintendo has been pretty big on shutting down fan games recently, and as a game enthusiast and supporter of indie games, I guess it is expected that I am supposed to say "boooo! Fuck you, Nintendo! Leave AM2R alone!" I both am and am not that guy here, and that's what I want to get across in this blog post. I think a bit of reflection should be taken by both independent fan game developers and whoever pulls the trigger to their skulls over at Nintendo.
Fan games get a bad rep sometimes because of the Newgrounds prime era where a fan game could be something as impressive as a Sonic Advance 2 fan port or as dumb as a seven-year-old with a shitty mic moving Mario and Kirby sprites around on the screen while you frantically shoot things with your mouse. Every once in a while you have your Super Smash Bros. Crusade, Super Smash Flash, Super Flash Bros., League of Fighters, Sonic Utopia, that one I can't think of right now that was essentially multiplayer Super Mario World or something... Those are cool. They are different concepts based on already existing formulas, and that's not inherently bad. When you go to school for game design, art, music composition, programming, they don't start you off going "alright, freshman project is to make a rough draft of your magnum opus. If you don't make your life's calling right here and now, you're expelled!" They start you off with something that has already been done a million times over, and hell if you were passionate about the subject you are studying before you went to college then you have probably done this hypothetical thing at least a few hundred times yourself. I can say this from experience, it's why I dropped out of music education, among other reasons. Over here in America, or at least where I grew up, game design isn't something that everyone is/was throwing around as a glorious career or even as a viable option in some areas (like the one I grew up in). Notice I said game design. The thought of working for a video game in the environment I was raised in was a few steps short of witchcraft. Ripping previously existing material may seem lowbrow to those who create new characters or story premises when they brush their teeth every morning, but to those presented with less support in this field, an independent, grassroots fan game is the only way into this field.
Let's also be honest with ourselves here for a bit longer and realize that everything has been done. This is a tried and true mentality. Want to start a fictional religion in a screenplay? Probably based on some form of Christianity. Want to write any joke at all into a screenplay for say... television? Simpsons did it. Want to make anything creative? Look back on several thousands years of recorded art. You were beaten to the punch. So if I want to make a PC game that plays like Star Fox but has updated anime-inspired graphics, maybe I should just make it Star Fox rather than an obvious rip-off of the characters and story from Star Fox. At least then I can reel in more people who are also interested in Star Fox. Star Fox, just as an ongoing example here, is a pretty popular series, so people who don't have your gift of game creativity may be wanting something similar to what you have dreamt up. Look on a wider scale: you have a Star Fox fan game that was played by a couple thousand people, or maybe even shut down by Nintendo because so many people were downloading it. Congratulations: you have something on your resume that you made with a limited team, little-to-no budget, and it got a following! You already look just as good if not better than other people looking for the same kinds of work you are that just graduated with their respective degrees. This is the good that fan games can bring, with the obvious point I left out. The point being that fan games like the hypothetical I mentioned or even games like Super Flash Bros. were probably created because the original developers weren't doing it themselves. I think companies like Sonic Team see this good and leave it be. Notice you don't really see a whole lot of Sonic fan games get shut down. Just Mario, Metroid, Pokemon, and Zelda ones. At the end of the day, these companies still own the franchises, so you could, albeit evil to do so, use the idea and polish it up. I heard that something like this happened with Super Mario Maker actually but I haven't been able to dig up much on the story since I first heard it, but supposedly Nintendo shut down some guy that made a custom Mario stage builder game, non-profit mind you, and then coincidentally released Super Mario Maker on Wii U shortly after. Hmmm. Which leads me to my next stance, and this is where a lot of people might hate me a little.
That guy didn't make Mario. He's not Shigeru Miyamoto. Not Satoru Iwata. Just a fan making a fan game. There's nothing wrong with that and I think shutting the game down completely was a little extreme, but on the other hand, fans know now more than ever that these companies are able and within legal right to do so. So why play with that fire? Am I crazy? Am I an asshole for thinking this? I don't think I am. Let's go back to Super Flash Bros. This Smash clone specifically seems to impersonate a GameBoy Color OS using sprites representing a select few Smash characters (and also Vaporeon). Another notable aspect beyond its retro gimmick was that it had smooth, intricate, and complex maneuvers emulating that of later Super Smash Bros. installments, especially Melee. The guy who made that game? Dan Fornace? If that name rings a bell, it means you probably played the recently fully released Steam game known as Rivals of Aether. This game, which I really like by the way, is a Melee clone consulting pro Melee players and fans to create a balanced fighting game based on the intricacies of Super Smash Bros. while still giving it a fun atmosphere. This atmosphere despite being based on older graphics is original and even comes with a story mode now to bring more life to the original cast of characters. A lot of them mechanically still share moves similar to those in the Smash Bros. series, but the game rules and whatnot are, by copyright law, fair game to use. You just can't name the main character Pikachu. This is understandable, and the crossroads I think must be had between fan game makers and the big corporations that the fans are trying to pay homage to.
Final Fantasy was inspired by Dragon Quest, and the company that made that game ended up buying Dragon Quest out. Sonic was inspired by the running in Mario and Sonic ended up closely competing with the Italian plumber that saved console gaming. Imitation doesn't have to be cheap, so long as you are trying to do something wholly original and new with the mechanics of the game to offer a new experience to the consumer. Weird to call them consumers in the case of free fan games but whatever. Experimenting with what is already there is what allows us to grow creatively as individuals and as a species, otherwise, we would be driving with stone wheels still.
The only thing that eludes this topic in this blog post is when companies shut down people putting their assets in a different engine. You know, like those "Zelda Ocarina of Time in Unreal 4" videos on YouTube that Nintendo still doesn't like? Yeah, in that case, the companies can chill out.
I have said this on this blog before, and I will say it again: I think you should do whatever makes you happy in this life. If that is making a game where Pikachu and Sonic kiss each other and then fight Bowser while he does the fusion dance with Batman, then have at it, but you kind of don't have room to bitch about DC, Nintendo, and Sega all putting the hammer down on you at once when you post it everywhere online.
The Obvious Yooka-Laylee Comparison
I am planning on making a video about Yooka-Laylee, a short video in which I don't compare Yooka-Laylee to the games it is obviously trying to call back to. In that spirit, I am compelled to make a blog post about the comparisons that everyone is making: Yooka-Laylee vs Every Rare Game from 1997-2002. I didn't look up those years for accuracy, I wonder how close they are. Obviously the comparisons are justified but not everyone has played the games that set up Yooka-Laylee's existence, so I think at a certain point, we should look at the game on its own before slamming it up against a 15-year old wall, granted again, it's justified to do so considering they made this game obviously tugging at nostalgia of consumers.
I haven't beaten Yooka-Laylee yet, but I have sunk in about 5-7 hours. That was more time than I expected to spend in such a short time span, but still I'm only in the beginning. So I'm going to compare Yooka-Laylee to some Rare games that inspired the creation of Yooka-Laylee.
The four main games that come to mind are Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie, Donkey Kong 64, and Conker's Bad Fur Day (although you could make some pretty loose Donkey Kong Country comparisons and still maintain some illusion of sanity, in my opinion). We could compare it to Battletoads, Jet Force Gemini, and Goldeneye, but that's obviously not what Playtonic was trying to do, so for the purpose of this blog post, it would be stupid to do that. Interesting otherwise perhaps, but for this cause, pointless. DISCLAIMER: I haven't played Banjo-Tooie very much at all so it isn't on the list. So I'm actually just going to compare Yooka-Laylee (Yooka for short) to its spiritual predecessors Banjo-Kazooie (BK), Donkey Kong 64 (DK64), and Conker's Bad Fur Day (Conker).
BANJO-KAZOOIE
I have no nostalgic ties to Banjo-Kazooie. In fact when I played Banjo-Kazooie for a very brief period of time when I was a very young child, I remember hating it. I gave BK a fair chance in my early twenties... I'm still in my early twenties... it was a few years ago. I beat 99% of the game and thought it was great. I never felt bored. I never felt that the game had no direction. I only stopped when my gaming guilt kicked in. I have gaming guilt by the way. The longer I play video games by myself, the more I feel like a piece of shit for playing video games. Through fantastic level and overworld design, Banjo-Kazooie felt like one strung together experience to the very end. Although some things were arbitrary (how many things were collectible in each world and the note doors), they were arbitrary for the sake of having a constant sense of progress without having to go to the pause menu every other minute to find out how many collectibles you still needed.
Flip everything I just said and you have a poignant list of my complaints with Yooka-Laylee, some bigger than others. I'll elaborate, because if I were reading this, I wouldn't go back and try to figure that statement out either.
One similarity: I have no nostalgic ties to Yooka or BK. So when I play Yooka, I see a video game that is mechanically a sequel to BK, which in itself I have no problem with at all. Yooka has a lot of things in it I find a lot more boring in comparison to that of BK. My first time exploring a world in BK is like waking up late on my day off after a long week and realizing that I have a bunch of Lucky Charms and just also happen to be in the mood for Lucky Charms. Everything is set in place in an exciting and constantly rewarding way. A string of notes will lead to nearby feathers and eggs in case you are low on those. They are probably put in that place because another puzzle nearby requires them, or more scattered because a certain puzzle may have you going across the whole map in a short span of time (a la the Gobi's Desert flying missions... or most of the flying missions). Although the camera is easily controllable for the player, the initial camera angles that the game defaults to are not just a static default camera angle, but one that gives you a photo-worthy glimpse of where you are in this new world and in turn can hint at what to do next, which as stated before creates a domino effect in your brain to keep doing everything that the world has to offer, provoking you to keep going and keep being satisfied by your efforts. Once the world has been drained, you want more. I don't feel this at all in Yooka. Quills (the equivalent to notes) seem to be set across the map to signify a place you haven't been before, so if you are looking for something later, and you don't find quills, you probably already searched that area. This isn't a bad idea, but there are sluggish missions where you are required to go back and forth to different corners of the world. Along the way you find other missions to trigger, and it all becomes a mess, on top of the fact that you have to remember where everything is and the worlds are enormous. Yooka also has a camera issue that I kind of mentioned but didn't elaborate on. The default camera angles sometimes show you more than just Yooka's ass in the form of a shiny landscape, but even a bird's eye view of the stage won't show anything of use because the missions and their layout in the stage are so spastic. Instead of making maybe ten (give or take a few) worlds, each with a unique theme and set of memorable missions, Yooka has five overly huge worlds that you have to make even bigger by expanding them, requiring you to crawl through the same locales for hours, picking up litter. Sorry, did I say litter? I meant quills and whatever. Just kidding; I meant litter.
There are a few things I think I do like more about Yooka than that of BK, but they aren't drastic and they are scarce. I feel more in control of Yooka than Banjo. A lot of the stressful moments in BK, for example all of Click Clock Wood, were more of a matter of me trying to keep Banjo in a path where I didn't steer him into trouble or hurtling to his death. Yooka walks around a lot smoother I feel and the camera controls are objectively better. However, these factors don't make the game better. Banjo in BK didn't feel overly clunky, I'm not trying to imply that, but a lot of things you did with Banjo felt more risky because the notes would reset every time you die or exit the level. Yooka doesn't even have a life system. Yooka's punishment is solely wasting your time. In the first world where you transform into a plant, there are only so many ways to transform back to normal, but since there is no consequence for fucking anything in the game whatsoever, I just jumped off of a cliff when I was done. This is because not only is there no consequence, but the plant transformation was stupid and ultimately not fun. It was funny that the game is implying that you are a male flower jizzing plant juice on a bunch of lonely and horny female plants, but that didn't make up for the horrifically sluggish movement of the plant transformation. In BK, even the termite form had a wide mobility and could actually do some things easier than normal Banjo, so if you weren't done with the world, going back to Mumbo to transform again just felt like something you had to do, but not an egregious mess.
BK is the aforementioned Lucky Charms analogy. Yooka is when I'm done eating breakfast and go to my office to work on things, only to realize that every single cable of every device around my desk is impossibly tangled. However somebody is showing me pretty pictures and telling me jokes along the way. It doesn't make the mechanical flaws forgivable, but it makes them slightly more tolerable and gives them a somewhat memorable and endearing soul.
I could go on about how much better Banjo-Kazooie is than Yooka-Laylee and do another rant on how nostalgia is a stupid concept, but I'm going to move on to a different game. This is as good a time as any to clarify that so far I don't hate Yooka-Laylee, but I'm finding a lot of people on the internet saying that it is on par or better than BK. Said people are entitled to their opinion, but I myself cannot see that. Using a simple Venn diagram, you will find that the lesser points of Yooka-Laylee far outweigh that of Banjo-Kazooie, and that there are (probably) way more rage-inducing and/or tedious parts in Yooka-Laylee than there are in Banjo-Kazooie. This is not the kind of blog where I actually go out of my way to make that diagram though.
DONKEY KONG 64
I do have a bit of nostalgic ties to Donkey Kong 64 but this is primarily for the multiplayer mode. I actually never really played the single player mode very much at all as a child. I bought a copy about six months ago, still haven't beaten it, but had a genuinely good time with it. In terms of arbitrary collection and the fact that none of your totals reset, I would say Yooka is a lot more like DK64 than it is like BK. I know its supposed to be "Banjo-Threeie" so saying that it is more like DK64 than BK is taboo, but that's stupid because that isn't even a bad thing. In a world as expansive as the worlds in DK64 or Yooka, it would be cruel to make the player start collecting things over again every time they died. But let's talk about why that works better for DK64 than it does for Yooka because I'm an asshole and I'm trying to say I don't hate Yooka, yet have a lot of negative things to say about it at the same time.
The tiny colored bananas that you collect in DK64 are a trail of breadcrumbs for exploring the stage. This makes DK64 more like an amusement park which makes Yooka more of a metaphorical abandoned stadium. There are signs for fun things to do at an amusement park, which are the subliminal purpose of the bananas in DK64. Some are colored differently for different monkeys, which makes backtracking very tolerable and for the sake of the amusement park analogy, we will say that these are signs that lead to different subcategories of entertainment or perhaps even restaurants, or in this case upgrades to your characters. Trowzer in Yooka is always just in some stupid place because it doesn't matter where he is because you buy upgrades from him and you're done with him forever. Yooka just has a bunch of scattered quills laying around in arbitrary groups. This is stupid. Oh, was that too harsh and opinionated? Yes. Oh well.
When I swing from vines over treacherous areas in DK64 it mixes the euphoria of being a child swinging on a tire swing with the risk/reward system of speed and clunkiness that I mentioned in BK. Yooka doesn't have either of these things, at least not for me.
I can't think of a staggeringly great thing that Yooka does over DK64. It is widely accepted by the public that DK64 is not as good as Banjo. I know that is all subjective but that's why I don't understand why people are blindly accepting Yooka to be on par with more focused and cleverly designed games like BK but somehow miles better than DK64, when mechanically there are so many smarter mechanics and more focused attention to detail moments in DK64 than Yooka.
On that note I love Grant Kirkhope but the Yooka-Laylee rap is fucking trash. It makes me want to bury myself alive. That's probably a fine point to transition with.
CONKER'S BAD FUR DAY
I haven't played too much of Conker because that game is more expensive than antiperspirant for church-going hookers, but I think I got about halfway through it and enjoyed it for the most part. These are a bit harder to compare because I have always seen Conker as more of a cinematic adventure platformer whereas Yooka-Laylee is a collectathon. That said, I think Conker's world is something that Yooka-Laylee should have taken a few hints from. You could say this about Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64 even more but I think Conker is a pretty prime example because of its source material. Conker is an average story about an average man in the form of a squirrel and the first main world after the intro and tutorial is a barn, and yet it is endearing. The worlds also have you doing a bunch of menial tasks for silly characters while fighting equally goofy enemies, but the way the music and visuals are set up make it feel like a polished experience (again the camera helps as well). Conker is not a collectathon like BK, DK64, and Yooka, but knowing this helped the developers make more concise worlds with less fluff because the focus was more on the story than the collectibles, and every story needs some kind of memorable setting. There are so many classic moments in Conker because from the beginning the game sets up Conker as a bit of an anti-hero, or at least an ironic hero. His selfish disposition makes the player wonder whether or not they actually want Conker to succeed. Whoops. I started rambling about good points on Conker. Yooka doesn't do any of that. I think the theme set up with books and whatnot is actually done fairly well but they could have done so much more with it. That potential, in my opinion, leaves a bleeding black hole present throughout every second of the game. If all the worlds are books then why is one world a boring, generic ice world after a kind-of-okay Aztec-themed world? They should have done something more like Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time where each world has a different theme that you would want to explore based on an overall theme in the game. Thieves in Time is a cartoony game starring criminals featuring time travel. Visiting old west America, ancient Japan, Prehistoric times, and so on and so forth is all endearing and each world in turn has memorable themes, mechanics, and landmarks as well as gimmicks all based on the theme. Yooka-Laylee has no fucking theme, and the fact that the worlds are so pretty yet have no inherent personality shows this. Conker literally has a world made of shit. There is a shit world in Conker and it is memorable for all the right reasons. When this happens, things that make the game obnoxious (swimming past swimming blades for example) are in turn more forgivable. On the other hand you have Yooka, where the good points don't feel very satisfying or poignant so moments you find displeasing are what you remember more when you put the game down.
Again, at its core, that doesn't make Yooka a terrible game, because in the moment I think there is a lot of good in Yooka, but ultimately the more I think about it, the more disappointed I am in the game. I'm also disappointed that this is how far the concept of nostalgia has grown that a game this cloying and unapologetic not only gets a free pass but is praised for being cloying and unapologetic. All of the fourth-wall breaking video game jokes in the world can't save it from itself.
CONCLUSION (finally)
I could probably go on but those were the main points I wanted to make and they were easier to make in the form of other games, which in itself is a testimony to how Yooka-Laylee is not its own experience and why I would rather recommend Banjo-Kazooie, Donkey Kong 64, Conker's Bad Fury Day, and Banjo-Tooie (which I pretty much haven't even played) over Yooka-Laylee. Somewhere in development, Yooka-Laylee lost its soul in the form of trying to clone the soul of games from the late 90's/ early 2000's. If you haven't played Yooka-Laylee... hmmm.... If you are a huge enthusiast of platformer games like I am then Yooka-Laylee is very interesting, I'm just not sure it's worth $40 because it is $40 of arbitrary fluff. If you are looking for a solid platformer that you will actually want to revisit for FUN later on in your life, save yourself the money and order DK64 on Amazon. Or if you haven't played Banjo-Kazooie, the game that Yooka-Laylee rips off in the guise of an homage, what the actual hell are you waiting for? Banjo-Kazooie is awesome!
Maybe my next blog won't be a big angry game rant. I just honestly don't have a positive note to end on.
Oh! Yooka-Laylee has a Shovel Knight cameo. If you haven't played Shovel Knight, spend all the money on it, because that is a rare example of a crowdfunded game that actually delivers on everything it promised and is an actual solid experience that you can actually enjoy without having fogged up nostalgia glasses! I said fogged up. Oh, right, this is a blog. In text... well buuyuyyyyeeeeeeeeeee
I haven't beaten Yooka-Laylee yet, but I have sunk in about 5-7 hours. That was more time than I expected to spend in such a short time span, but still I'm only in the beginning. So I'm going to compare Yooka-Laylee to some Rare games that inspired the creation of Yooka-Laylee.
The four main games that come to mind are Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie, Donkey Kong 64, and Conker's Bad Fur Day (although you could make some pretty loose Donkey Kong Country comparisons and still maintain some illusion of sanity, in my opinion). We could compare it to Battletoads, Jet Force Gemini, and Goldeneye, but that's obviously not what Playtonic was trying to do, so for the purpose of this blog post, it would be stupid to do that. Interesting otherwise perhaps, but for this cause, pointless. DISCLAIMER: I haven't played Banjo-Tooie very much at all so it isn't on the list. So I'm actually just going to compare Yooka-Laylee (Yooka for short) to its spiritual predecessors Banjo-Kazooie (BK), Donkey Kong 64 (DK64), and Conker's Bad Fur Day (Conker).
BANJO-KAZOOIE
I have no nostalgic ties to Banjo-Kazooie. In fact when I played Banjo-Kazooie for a very brief period of time when I was a very young child, I remember hating it. I gave BK a fair chance in my early twenties... I'm still in my early twenties... it was a few years ago. I beat 99% of the game and thought it was great. I never felt bored. I never felt that the game had no direction. I only stopped when my gaming guilt kicked in. I have gaming guilt by the way. The longer I play video games by myself, the more I feel like a piece of shit for playing video games. Through fantastic level and overworld design, Banjo-Kazooie felt like one strung together experience to the very end. Although some things were arbitrary (how many things were collectible in each world and the note doors), they were arbitrary for the sake of having a constant sense of progress without having to go to the pause menu every other minute to find out how many collectibles you still needed.
Flip everything I just said and you have a poignant list of my complaints with Yooka-Laylee, some bigger than others. I'll elaborate, because if I were reading this, I wouldn't go back and try to figure that statement out either.
One similarity: I have no nostalgic ties to Yooka or BK. So when I play Yooka, I see a video game that is mechanically a sequel to BK, which in itself I have no problem with at all. Yooka has a lot of things in it I find a lot more boring in comparison to that of BK. My first time exploring a world in BK is like waking up late on my day off after a long week and realizing that I have a bunch of Lucky Charms and just also happen to be in the mood for Lucky Charms. Everything is set in place in an exciting and constantly rewarding way. A string of notes will lead to nearby feathers and eggs in case you are low on those. They are probably put in that place because another puzzle nearby requires them, or more scattered because a certain puzzle may have you going across the whole map in a short span of time (a la the Gobi's Desert flying missions... or most of the flying missions). Although the camera is easily controllable for the player, the initial camera angles that the game defaults to are not just a static default camera angle, but one that gives you a photo-worthy glimpse of where you are in this new world and in turn can hint at what to do next, which as stated before creates a domino effect in your brain to keep doing everything that the world has to offer, provoking you to keep going and keep being satisfied by your efforts. Once the world has been drained, you want more. I don't feel this at all in Yooka. Quills (the equivalent to notes) seem to be set across the map to signify a place you haven't been before, so if you are looking for something later, and you don't find quills, you probably already searched that area. This isn't a bad idea, but there are sluggish missions where you are required to go back and forth to different corners of the world. Along the way you find other missions to trigger, and it all becomes a mess, on top of the fact that you have to remember where everything is and the worlds are enormous. Yooka also has a camera issue that I kind of mentioned but didn't elaborate on. The default camera angles sometimes show you more than just Yooka's ass in the form of a shiny landscape, but even a bird's eye view of the stage won't show anything of use because the missions and their layout in the stage are so spastic. Instead of making maybe ten (give or take a few) worlds, each with a unique theme and set of memorable missions, Yooka has five overly huge worlds that you have to make even bigger by expanding them, requiring you to crawl through the same locales for hours, picking up litter. Sorry, did I say litter? I meant quills and whatever. Just kidding; I meant litter.
There are a few things I think I do like more about Yooka than that of BK, but they aren't drastic and they are scarce. I feel more in control of Yooka than Banjo. A lot of the stressful moments in BK, for example all of Click Clock Wood, were more of a matter of me trying to keep Banjo in a path where I didn't steer him into trouble or hurtling to his death. Yooka walks around a lot smoother I feel and the camera controls are objectively better. However, these factors don't make the game better. Banjo in BK didn't feel overly clunky, I'm not trying to imply that, but a lot of things you did with Banjo felt more risky because the notes would reset every time you die or exit the level. Yooka doesn't even have a life system. Yooka's punishment is solely wasting your time. In the first world where you transform into a plant, there are only so many ways to transform back to normal, but since there is no consequence for fucking anything in the game whatsoever, I just jumped off of a cliff when I was done. This is because not only is there no consequence, but the plant transformation was stupid and ultimately not fun. It was funny that the game is implying that you are a male flower jizzing plant juice on a bunch of lonely and horny female plants, but that didn't make up for the horrifically sluggish movement of the plant transformation. In BK, even the termite form had a wide mobility and could actually do some things easier than normal Banjo, so if you weren't done with the world, going back to Mumbo to transform again just felt like something you had to do, but not an egregious mess.
BK is the aforementioned Lucky Charms analogy. Yooka is when I'm done eating breakfast and go to my office to work on things, only to realize that every single cable of every device around my desk is impossibly tangled. However somebody is showing me pretty pictures and telling me jokes along the way. It doesn't make the mechanical flaws forgivable, but it makes them slightly more tolerable and gives them a somewhat memorable and endearing soul.
I could go on about how much better Banjo-Kazooie is than Yooka-Laylee and do another rant on how nostalgia is a stupid concept, but I'm going to move on to a different game. This is as good a time as any to clarify that so far I don't hate Yooka-Laylee, but I'm finding a lot of people on the internet saying that it is on par or better than BK. Said people are entitled to their opinion, but I myself cannot see that. Using a simple Venn diagram, you will find that the lesser points of Yooka-Laylee far outweigh that of Banjo-Kazooie, and that there are (probably) way more rage-inducing and/or tedious parts in Yooka-Laylee than there are in Banjo-Kazooie. This is not the kind of blog where I actually go out of my way to make that diagram though.
DONKEY KONG 64
I do have a bit of nostalgic ties to Donkey Kong 64 but this is primarily for the multiplayer mode. I actually never really played the single player mode very much at all as a child. I bought a copy about six months ago, still haven't beaten it, but had a genuinely good time with it. In terms of arbitrary collection and the fact that none of your totals reset, I would say Yooka is a lot more like DK64 than it is like BK. I know its supposed to be "Banjo-Threeie" so saying that it is more like DK64 than BK is taboo, but that's stupid because that isn't even a bad thing. In a world as expansive as the worlds in DK64 or Yooka, it would be cruel to make the player start collecting things over again every time they died. But let's talk about why that works better for DK64 than it does for Yooka because I'm an asshole and I'm trying to say I don't hate Yooka, yet have a lot of negative things to say about it at the same time.
The tiny colored bananas that you collect in DK64 are a trail of breadcrumbs for exploring the stage. This makes DK64 more like an amusement park which makes Yooka more of a metaphorical abandoned stadium. There are signs for fun things to do at an amusement park, which are the subliminal purpose of the bananas in DK64. Some are colored differently for different monkeys, which makes backtracking very tolerable and for the sake of the amusement park analogy, we will say that these are signs that lead to different subcategories of entertainment or perhaps even restaurants, or in this case upgrades to your characters. Trowzer in Yooka is always just in some stupid place because it doesn't matter where he is because you buy upgrades from him and you're done with him forever. Yooka just has a bunch of scattered quills laying around in arbitrary groups. This is stupid. Oh, was that too harsh and opinionated? Yes. Oh well.
When I swing from vines over treacherous areas in DK64 it mixes the euphoria of being a child swinging on a tire swing with the risk/reward system of speed and clunkiness that I mentioned in BK. Yooka doesn't have either of these things, at least not for me.
I can't think of a staggeringly great thing that Yooka does over DK64. It is widely accepted by the public that DK64 is not as good as Banjo. I know that is all subjective but that's why I don't understand why people are blindly accepting Yooka to be on par with more focused and cleverly designed games like BK but somehow miles better than DK64, when mechanically there are so many smarter mechanics and more focused attention to detail moments in DK64 than Yooka.
On that note I love Grant Kirkhope but the Yooka-Laylee rap is fucking trash. It makes me want to bury myself alive. That's probably a fine point to transition with.
CONKER'S BAD FUR DAY
I haven't played too much of Conker because that game is more expensive than antiperspirant for church-going hookers, but I think I got about halfway through it and enjoyed it for the most part. These are a bit harder to compare because I have always seen Conker as more of a cinematic adventure platformer whereas Yooka-Laylee is a collectathon. That said, I think Conker's world is something that Yooka-Laylee should have taken a few hints from. You could say this about Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64 even more but I think Conker is a pretty prime example because of its source material. Conker is an average story about an average man in the form of a squirrel and the first main world after the intro and tutorial is a barn, and yet it is endearing. The worlds also have you doing a bunch of menial tasks for silly characters while fighting equally goofy enemies, but the way the music and visuals are set up make it feel like a polished experience (again the camera helps as well). Conker is not a collectathon like BK, DK64, and Yooka, but knowing this helped the developers make more concise worlds with less fluff because the focus was more on the story than the collectibles, and every story needs some kind of memorable setting. There are so many classic moments in Conker because from the beginning the game sets up Conker as a bit of an anti-hero, or at least an ironic hero. His selfish disposition makes the player wonder whether or not they actually want Conker to succeed. Whoops. I started rambling about good points on Conker. Yooka doesn't do any of that. I think the theme set up with books and whatnot is actually done fairly well but they could have done so much more with it. That potential, in my opinion, leaves a bleeding black hole present throughout every second of the game. If all the worlds are books then why is one world a boring, generic ice world after a kind-of-okay Aztec-themed world? They should have done something more like Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time where each world has a different theme that you would want to explore based on an overall theme in the game. Thieves in Time is a cartoony game starring criminals featuring time travel. Visiting old west America, ancient Japan, Prehistoric times, and so on and so forth is all endearing and each world in turn has memorable themes, mechanics, and landmarks as well as gimmicks all based on the theme. Yooka-Laylee has no fucking theme, and the fact that the worlds are so pretty yet have no inherent personality shows this. Conker literally has a world made of shit. There is a shit world in Conker and it is memorable for all the right reasons. When this happens, things that make the game obnoxious (swimming past swimming blades for example) are in turn more forgivable. On the other hand you have Yooka, where the good points don't feel very satisfying or poignant so moments you find displeasing are what you remember more when you put the game down.
Again, at its core, that doesn't make Yooka a terrible game, because in the moment I think there is a lot of good in Yooka, but ultimately the more I think about it, the more disappointed I am in the game. I'm also disappointed that this is how far the concept of nostalgia has grown that a game this cloying and unapologetic not only gets a free pass but is praised for being cloying and unapologetic. All of the fourth-wall breaking video game jokes in the world can't save it from itself.
CONCLUSION (finally)
I could probably go on but those were the main points I wanted to make and they were easier to make in the form of other games, which in itself is a testimony to how Yooka-Laylee is not its own experience and why I would rather recommend Banjo-Kazooie, Donkey Kong 64, Conker's Bad Fury Day, and Banjo-Tooie (which I pretty much haven't even played) over Yooka-Laylee. Somewhere in development, Yooka-Laylee lost its soul in the form of trying to clone the soul of games from the late 90's/ early 2000's. If you haven't played Yooka-Laylee... hmmm.... If you are a huge enthusiast of platformer games like I am then Yooka-Laylee is very interesting, I'm just not sure it's worth $40 because it is $40 of arbitrary fluff. If you are looking for a solid platformer that you will actually want to revisit for FUN later on in your life, save yourself the money and order DK64 on Amazon. Or if you haven't played Banjo-Kazooie, the game that Yooka-Laylee rips off in the guise of an homage, what the actual hell are you waiting for? Banjo-Kazooie is awesome!
Maybe my next blog won't be a big angry game rant. I just honestly don't have a positive note to end on.
Oh! Yooka-Laylee has a Shovel Knight cameo. If you haven't played Shovel Knight, spend all the money on it, because that is a rare example of a crowdfunded game that actually delivers on everything it promised and is an actual solid experience that you can actually enjoy without having fogged up nostalgia glasses! I said fogged up. Oh, right, this is a blog. In text... well buuyuyyyyeeeeeeeeeee
I Briefly Played the Switch
My friend got the Switch and told me "come over and PLAY THAT SHIT!" So I did with him and two of his other boiz. BOYYEEEZZZZ!!!! Alright so here are my brief amateur thoughts on that crap.
Ultimately I could talk about some major model design oversights, the joycon system is super innovative and the controller itself is surprisingly comfortable, yadda yadda, The Switch is still just a game system, so maybe I should talk about the games. He has four games and we played all four, so I'm going to hit them one by one, then talk about more general thoughts about The Switch afterwards.
SUPER BOMBERMAN R
(Total time spent playing: roughly 3.5 hours)
This is the game we played the most of, but I don't think it was because the game was super fun and well-designed. Anything bad you have heard about Super Bomberman R on the internet is most likely true, albeit a lot of game critique is subjective. This is still, at its core, just another damn Bomberman game, however, they managed to fuck that up even, so I think this is easily the worst Bomberman game I have ever played (in opposition to Super, Party Edition, 64, and Jetters). The online multiplayer is incredibly frustrating. The lag is ungodly, and if someone ditches the game, their bomber is still in play, meaning they can win by doing literally nothing and more accurately, not even playing the match. They don't even need to have their Switch on. Local multiplayer between three people seemed to have input lag as well, which makes zero sense. The single player mode is what my friend and I played after everyone else left. Two people can play the story mode together, and after doing so I can't imagine playing it solo. We started on World 2 because he had already beaten 1 and this may shock you but I wasn't super invested in the in-depth lore of Bomberman.
The story mode follows a group of Bombers that each have a different personality, oh, sorry, different lazy, caricatured personality gimmick. White Bomber is the leader that is hell-bent on saving the world and training to save the world. Yellow Bomber is optimistic to a fault, Blue Bomber has unrealistic narcolepsy, I don't know what Green Bomber's deal is, Black Bomber is vain, Pink Bomber is girl, and Aqua Bomber is also girl. I really wish all that was not accurate. Each world features ten stages in the style of old Bomberman games like Super Bomberman and Party Edition. Sometimes you just have to beat all of the enemies and get to the goal, but now there are more objectives such as finding randomly hidden keys, touching hidden switches, or escorting really stupid Bombers to a safe zone. There is also a world that hurt our eyes because it is all purple and way too luminous (see the internet worlds in Shadow the Hedgehog... and then multiply the burning sensation in your retinas by five). Each world ends in a two-phase boss. The first one is just them moving around as a bomber, like you, and you only have to hit them once, but each has a gimmick that makes it nearly impossible. Instead of a crafty puzzle to figure out how to get past this gimmick, these bosses all amount to randomly throwing bombs down and avoiding their bombs in hopes that one of your bombs kills him. This leads to their second form, which has 3D movement a la 64 and Jetters, but your bombs explode in the shape of a cross based on tiles... invisible tiles... These bosses are much easier and more intuitive than their first forms, but are way more tedious and waste a lot of your time. Most of them can only be hit after they use a certain move, so all of their other randomly selected moves purely waste your time.
I think we played this for so long because by the time midnight hit, we had made it to World 6, which is the end of the game. This only has two bosses, which are unbelievably identical. If the rest of the game didn't already feel slapped together, this feels like it was rushed even further. This boss is easy because most of the time he doesn't even target you. It takes forever and nothing telegraphs how close you are to defeating this particular boss so you have to rinse and repeat the same strategy over and over again until he eventually dies, again after waiting for the right move to hurt him at all. With these complaints, I have only scratched the surface with my gripes on the gameplay of Super Bomberman R, but let's talk about two other things that really annoy me before I move on to something else already. GEEZ!
Super Bomberman R's story mode does run on a life system, but its continue system breaks it. When you run out of all nine lives, you spend points that you earn by playing the game to continue. What difficulty you are in determines how many points that costs. These points are also the only way to unlock things, and there are a lot of bullshit deaths, especially because everything is a one-hit kill. I wish this game was a one-hit kill. After you beat the game, the shop allows you to unlock most of the Bombers you fought on your journey, however they cost almost five times what you actually earn by beating the game. The only other way to get points is to spam the story mode. So you have to really love this game, to an unhealthy amount of love, to unlock anything. Because this is also the only way to unlock stages and extra antennae or skins. Loop back around again to where I started talking about this game and you will realize that this is not impossible, but why the hell would you want to do this?
This is by no fault of The Switch supposedly. Other games seem to work online, according to other people on the internet. We also didn't discover any input lag on any other games we played, so all of the issues are just Super Bomberman R being a shitty game, and Konami being a shitty company. The only redeeming quality of the game is the multiplayer because again, it is still just Bomberman, that much functions. But due to aforementioned lag (even in local multiplayer at times), you are better off just playing one of the older ones. Really. Almost any one of the older ones.
THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: BREATH OF THE WILD
(Total time spent playing: roughly 10 minutes)
I'm sure Breath of the Wild is awesome but it is not a party game so I messed around with it while we were waiting on another game to download. My friend just started me up on his file and told me what was what when I asked him about basic stuff. As I only spent a few minutes with it, I don't remember much. I remember liking the control scheme once I got used to it. I mainly just glided off of tall things, glided off of a hill onto an enemy on a tower and killed him while landing on his tower. I found a few chests, it is pretty cool that chests are actually just salvageable items in the game and not just "map", "compass", or "thing you need to get out of the next room". The cooking system I thought was pretty genius. I played with a chicken, then beat said chicken, because it's a Zelda game so I have to do it at least once. It doesn't murder you as hard in this game... or at all. But that's okay. The game implores you to hunt animals for food, so according to my friend, you learn that mechanic and then afterwards find chickens. Instead of giving you food, then chickens beat you pretty decently, but not enough to kill you (granted you have about 6 hearts or more) so you aren't punished by playing by the games rules. The visuals are really clean and pretty to look at while still looking like it belongs in the franchise. The weapon-breaking system was really cool. It was not nearly as annoying as I thought it would be at all, but ironically the Master Sword pissed me off. I know its Zelda tradition to have a Master Sword in the game and let you wield it but fuck tradition in video games. I don't care about tradition in video games. The Master Sword can't be broken, but has a battery. A fucking battery. So overtime it just dies out and you have to put it away to charge it. This gives you a weapon that hails over all other weapons just for not being able to break alone, but then it runs out and instead of switching to one of the other fifty weapons in your inventory, Link just grabs at an imaginary sword. Why is he sassy at you? He's the one that is going to die if he doesn't pull out another weapon! And one morrreeeee thingg!!!! The stamina meter can suck my dick. It can suck my dick dry. It has way too short of a time span so getting anywhere without the quick travel mechanic is more of a chore than it should be. Why can't he always just run at that speed? He did it in Ocarina. Link to the Past, he had Pegasus Boots and was zipping around everywhere! Is he an asthmatic in Breath of the Wild? Is the name of the game a cruel pun? My other friend when I said my only major complaint so far is the stamina meter said, and I quote "you know you can increase it right?" Yeah! It WAS increased! I was playing it on a file that had poured many hours in and was towards the end of the game, and I still can't run through a fucking field! But sure. Yeah. 10/10. Perfect fucking game. Why? Just why? I get the stamina meter for things like gliding (failsafe for glide-related glitches), climbing walls, or pushing large rocks. But why running? That's like having a Batman game where Batman needs to catch his breath after punching too much. Fuck this.
The rest of what I experienced was really cool though. I might get it for Wii U one day because I still really like the Wii U and nothing has convinced me to get a Switch yet.
FAST RMX
(Total time spent playing: roughly 1.5 hours)
This game surprised the hell out of me. It's like F-Zero, exactly what it looks like and what you probably expect it to be at first glance, but it has a few differences that really grabbed my attention within just a few seconds. There are boost paths on the ground that are orange and blue, and your vehicle has two different boost modes corresponding to orange and blue. If you ride an orange panel with orange on, then you get a speed boost, but if you are still in blue mode, it slows you down (like the hazard space in F-Zero). There is also a boost meter which works similar to F-Zero but not identical. You hold in the analog stick to activate the boost, which is not as uncomfortable as I thought it would be. You would think swerving around and holding in the button at the same time might be annoying, but that boost is so unbelievably fast that you really shouldn't activate it around any remotely tight corners anyways. The boost comes in short doses and can get you in a lot of trouble if you don't know the stage well enough or use it in the wrong place at the wrong time. There are a lot of moving obstacles to account for as well that could move right in front of your boosting vehicle when you least expect it. You just have to play it for yourself to understand how fast it is. I mean, I know I am probably the 10,000th person to say this, but it has earned the right to have a generic name of just "Fast". The stages all look really nice too and split-screen is done as well as it can be. You only start with three vehicles but you can unlock about eight more if I remember correctly. Honestly I loved my time with Fast RMX, and if I had The Switch, I would probably pour way too much time into it. In my opinion it is every bit as good as F-Zero from a mechanical standpoint. I will say it lacks a certain flair of personality in general and just kind of feels like future racer big whoopty doo in comparison to F-Zero, but maybe years of playing F-Zero X have just spoiled me. That's a nitpick at the very most though. Fast RMX is awesome. And it's only $20! Super Bomberman R was a full-priced title and that game blows!
SNIPPERCLIPS
(Total time spent playing: roughly 1 hour)
One friend had left and the remaining three of us played Snipperclips. It's a lot of fun! I honestly don't know how well it plays alone, but with three people it was seamless and so goofy. In Snipperclips, you play as weird paper creatures that can overlap and snip each other to make new shapes out of themselves. This is how you solve puzzles. The puzzles are really intricate and left us stumped a few times, even with someone in the room who had played the game for much longer than the others. It requires clear communication and strategy which leads to utter silliness between the human players as well as what is happening on screen. I can't imagine anyone buying a Switch just for this though, or a group of 3-4 people wanting to spend their entire night playing a puzzle game together. But wait! Snipperclips does not just offer puzzles, but some form of arena mode very reminiscent of BattleBlock Theater (not that BattleBlock Theater has a patent on 2D basketball or punching your friends). This has a few mini-games that you can play competitively, but it works really weird. So in BattleBlock, for example, if you play with 3 people, the game automatically goes 2v1. One player is always alone, and almost always screwed, because there is no AI stand-in. A similar problem persists with Snipperclips, but it works much weirder. At the start of the game, there are obvious, color-coded score markers for two of the players, and the third seems to just be left as a wild card. They can side with whoever at whatever point in the game. I don't know if this is a positive or a negative thing for me or anyone reading this. There is also a free-for-all fight mode where you use the cutting each other mechanic to just simply cut each other until there is nothing left of them and they disappear. We did this in a three-stock match for way longer than we thought we would. Snipperclips offers both brain-dead simplicity and mind-boggling complexity to make a complete package of a party puzzle game, and since there aren't too many of those around, I think Snipperclips is really something to behold. Just not a reason to get a Switch.
MY OVERALL IMPRESSION
The Switch is simultaneously one of the coolest and most disappointing consoles I have ever seen. I have always seen it as a mold breaker but something that won't be perfected until one or two generations from now, and after playing it for myself for roughly seven hours, my opinion there still holds. The Switch has a few minute technical issues that lie in the form of syncing glitches and that weird thing where connecting the joycon on its cover thing the wrong way makes it nearly impossible to take back off, but these are fairly easy to overlook. The real crime here is the games. The Switch is another system like many before it where the developers seem to forget that games are one of the main things customers buy game consoles for. I know it seems stupid, but I have no other explanation. The system is really fast, has a lot of functionality, and is set up comfortably in addition to its intuitive controller design, but all of this is moot with no games. I was recently looking back on titles from older systems that have already discontinued, and I stumbled on the Nintendo 64 library upon launch. Its library wasn't great either. However it made up for lack of quantity with quality. It launched only with Super Mario 64, but within just a few months had Wave Race 64, Mortal Kombat Trilogy, and Mario Kart 64, and after a huge dry spell the world was graced with Star Fox 64 as well. That was just the beginning of what is now seen as one of the best consoles of all time. I'm not saying The Switch might be one of the best consoles of all time, but I'm saying if Nintendo and/or the developers of Switch games get their shit together and consumers get their heads out of nostalgia's ass, The Switch has a chance. This isn't a Wii spin-off, to customers and developers. You can make actual games on this now. An open mindset can make The Switch a system worth buying beyond its mere amusement and potential. Who wants to pay that much money for potential? No one. In case that wasn't clear, the answer is no one.
If you don't have a Wii U, The Switch might be right up your alley. If you do already have a Wii U, hold on to it and wait for bigger games to come out. Not even bigger games, just games that more effectively retain your interest that you can't get on other systems (Breath of the Wild included; the Wii U version is 99% identical to the Switch version). Personally right now there is nothing on the Switch that interests me enough to buy a Switch. I have Yooka-Laylee pre-ordered on Steam, I have Shovel Knight on Wii U, I can get Sonic Mania on PS4, and even Breath of the Wild is also on a console that I already own. This is just where the console game market is unfortunately heading, but I think there are a lot of smart ideas on The Switch as a console that can change that and keep consoles relevant.
At the very least, they can always entice me with Pokemon and Super Smash Bros. That has unfortunately worked before. Could admittedly work again.
Ultimately I could talk about some major model design oversights, the joycon system is super innovative and the controller itself is surprisingly comfortable, yadda yadda, The Switch is still just a game system, so maybe I should talk about the games. He has four games and we played all four, so I'm going to hit them one by one, then talk about more general thoughts about The Switch afterwards.
SUPER BOMBERMAN R
(Total time spent playing: roughly 3.5 hours)
This is the game we played the most of, but I don't think it was because the game was super fun and well-designed. Anything bad you have heard about Super Bomberman R on the internet is most likely true, albeit a lot of game critique is subjective. This is still, at its core, just another damn Bomberman game, however, they managed to fuck that up even, so I think this is easily the worst Bomberman game I have ever played (in opposition to Super, Party Edition, 64, and Jetters). The online multiplayer is incredibly frustrating. The lag is ungodly, and if someone ditches the game, their bomber is still in play, meaning they can win by doing literally nothing and more accurately, not even playing the match. They don't even need to have their Switch on. Local multiplayer between three people seemed to have input lag as well, which makes zero sense. The single player mode is what my friend and I played after everyone else left. Two people can play the story mode together, and after doing so I can't imagine playing it solo. We started on World 2 because he had already beaten 1 and this may shock you but I wasn't super invested in the in-depth lore of Bomberman.
The story mode follows a group of Bombers that each have a different personality, oh, sorry, different lazy, caricatured personality gimmick. White Bomber is the leader that is hell-bent on saving the world and training to save the world. Yellow Bomber is optimistic to a fault, Blue Bomber has unrealistic narcolepsy, I don't know what Green Bomber's deal is, Black Bomber is vain, Pink Bomber is girl, and Aqua Bomber is also girl. I really wish all that was not accurate. Each world features ten stages in the style of old Bomberman games like Super Bomberman and Party Edition. Sometimes you just have to beat all of the enemies and get to the goal, but now there are more objectives such as finding randomly hidden keys, touching hidden switches, or escorting really stupid Bombers to a safe zone. There is also a world that hurt our eyes because it is all purple and way too luminous (see the internet worlds in Shadow the Hedgehog... and then multiply the burning sensation in your retinas by five). Each world ends in a two-phase boss. The first one is just them moving around as a bomber, like you, and you only have to hit them once, but each has a gimmick that makes it nearly impossible. Instead of a crafty puzzle to figure out how to get past this gimmick, these bosses all amount to randomly throwing bombs down and avoiding their bombs in hopes that one of your bombs kills him. This leads to their second form, which has 3D movement a la 64 and Jetters, but your bombs explode in the shape of a cross based on tiles... invisible tiles... These bosses are much easier and more intuitive than their first forms, but are way more tedious and waste a lot of your time. Most of them can only be hit after they use a certain move, so all of their other randomly selected moves purely waste your time.
I think we played this for so long because by the time midnight hit, we had made it to World 6, which is the end of the game. This only has two bosses, which are unbelievably identical. If the rest of the game didn't already feel slapped together, this feels like it was rushed even further. This boss is easy because most of the time he doesn't even target you. It takes forever and nothing telegraphs how close you are to defeating this particular boss so you have to rinse and repeat the same strategy over and over again until he eventually dies, again after waiting for the right move to hurt him at all. With these complaints, I have only scratched the surface with my gripes on the gameplay of Super Bomberman R, but let's talk about two other things that really annoy me before I move on to something else already. GEEZ!
Super Bomberman R's story mode does run on a life system, but its continue system breaks it. When you run out of all nine lives, you spend points that you earn by playing the game to continue. What difficulty you are in determines how many points that costs. These points are also the only way to unlock things, and there are a lot of bullshit deaths, especially because everything is a one-hit kill. I wish this game was a one-hit kill. After you beat the game, the shop allows you to unlock most of the Bombers you fought on your journey, however they cost almost five times what you actually earn by beating the game. The only other way to get points is to spam the story mode. So you have to really love this game, to an unhealthy amount of love, to unlock anything. Because this is also the only way to unlock stages and extra antennae or skins. Loop back around again to where I started talking about this game and you will realize that this is not impossible, but why the hell would you want to do this?
This is by no fault of The Switch supposedly. Other games seem to work online, according to other people on the internet. We also didn't discover any input lag on any other games we played, so all of the issues are just Super Bomberman R being a shitty game, and Konami being a shitty company. The only redeeming quality of the game is the multiplayer because again, it is still just Bomberman, that much functions. But due to aforementioned lag (even in local multiplayer at times), you are better off just playing one of the older ones. Really. Almost any one of the older ones.
THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: BREATH OF THE WILD
(Total time spent playing: roughly 10 minutes)
I'm sure Breath of the Wild is awesome but it is not a party game so I messed around with it while we were waiting on another game to download. My friend just started me up on his file and told me what was what when I asked him about basic stuff. As I only spent a few minutes with it, I don't remember much. I remember liking the control scheme once I got used to it. I mainly just glided off of tall things, glided off of a hill onto an enemy on a tower and killed him while landing on his tower. I found a few chests, it is pretty cool that chests are actually just salvageable items in the game and not just "map", "compass", or "thing you need to get out of the next room". The cooking system I thought was pretty genius. I played with a chicken, then beat said chicken, because it's a Zelda game so I have to do it at least once. It doesn't murder you as hard in this game... or at all. But that's okay. The game implores you to hunt animals for food, so according to my friend, you learn that mechanic and then afterwards find chickens. Instead of giving you food, then chickens beat you pretty decently, but not enough to kill you (granted you have about 6 hearts or more) so you aren't punished by playing by the games rules. The visuals are really clean and pretty to look at while still looking like it belongs in the franchise. The weapon-breaking system was really cool. It was not nearly as annoying as I thought it would be at all, but ironically the Master Sword pissed me off. I know its Zelda tradition to have a Master Sword in the game and let you wield it but fuck tradition in video games. I don't care about tradition in video games. The Master Sword can't be broken, but has a battery. A fucking battery. So overtime it just dies out and you have to put it away to charge it. This gives you a weapon that hails over all other weapons just for not being able to break alone, but then it runs out and instead of switching to one of the other fifty weapons in your inventory, Link just grabs at an imaginary sword. Why is he sassy at you? He's the one that is going to die if he doesn't pull out another weapon! And one morrreeeee thingg!!!! The stamina meter can suck my dick. It can suck my dick dry. It has way too short of a time span so getting anywhere without the quick travel mechanic is more of a chore than it should be. Why can't he always just run at that speed? He did it in Ocarina. Link to the Past, he had Pegasus Boots and was zipping around everywhere! Is he an asthmatic in Breath of the Wild? Is the name of the game a cruel pun? My other friend when I said my only major complaint so far is the stamina meter said, and I quote "you know you can increase it right?" Yeah! It WAS increased! I was playing it on a file that had poured many hours in and was towards the end of the game, and I still can't run through a fucking field! But sure. Yeah. 10/10. Perfect fucking game. Why? Just why? I get the stamina meter for things like gliding (failsafe for glide-related glitches), climbing walls, or pushing large rocks. But why running? That's like having a Batman game where Batman needs to catch his breath after punching too much. Fuck this.
The rest of what I experienced was really cool though. I might get it for Wii U one day because I still really like the Wii U and nothing has convinced me to get a Switch yet.
FAST RMX
(Total time spent playing: roughly 1.5 hours)
This game surprised the hell out of me. It's like F-Zero, exactly what it looks like and what you probably expect it to be at first glance, but it has a few differences that really grabbed my attention within just a few seconds. There are boost paths on the ground that are orange and blue, and your vehicle has two different boost modes corresponding to orange and blue. If you ride an orange panel with orange on, then you get a speed boost, but if you are still in blue mode, it slows you down (like the hazard space in F-Zero). There is also a boost meter which works similar to F-Zero but not identical. You hold in the analog stick to activate the boost, which is not as uncomfortable as I thought it would be. You would think swerving around and holding in the button at the same time might be annoying, but that boost is so unbelievably fast that you really shouldn't activate it around any remotely tight corners anyways. The boost comes in short doses and can get you in a lot of trouble if you don't know the stage well enough or use it in the wrong place at the wrong time. There are a lot of moving obstacles to account for as well that could move right in front of your boosting vehicle when you least expect it. You just have to play it for yourself to understand how fast it is. I mean, I know I am probably the 10,000th person to say this, but it has earned the right to have a generic name of just "Fast". The stages all look really nice too and split-screen is done as well as it can be. You only start with three vehicles but you can unlock about eight more if I remember correctly. Honestly I loved my time with Fast RMX, and if I had The Switch, I would probably pour way too much time into it. In my opinion it is every bit as good as F-Zero from a mechanical standpoint. I will say it lacks a certain flair of personality in general and just kind of feels like future racer big whoopty doo in comparison to F-Zero, but maybe years of playing F-Zero X have just spoiled me. That's a nitpick at the very most though. Fast RMX is awesome. And it's only $20! Super Bomberman R was a full-priced title and that game blows!
SNIPPERCLIPS
(Total time spent playing: roughly 1 hour)
One friend had left and the remaining three of us played Snipperclips. It's a lot of fun! I honestly don't know how well it plays alone, but with three people it was seamless and so goofy. In Snipperclips, you play as weird paper creatures that can overlap and snip each other to make new shapes out of themselves. This is how you solve puzzles. The puzzles are really intricate and left us stumped a few times, even with someone in the room who had played the game for much longer than the others. It requires clear communication and strategy which leads to utter silliness between the human players as well as what is happening on screen. I can't imagine anyone buying a Switch just for this though, or a group of 3-4 people wanting to spend their entire night playing a puzzle game together. But wait! Snipperclips does not just offer puzzles, but some form of arena mode very reminiscent of BattleBlock Theater (not that BattleBlock Theater has a patent on 2D basketball or punching your friends). This has a few mini-games that you can play competitively, but it works really weird. So in BattleBlock, for example, if you play with 3 people, the game automatically goes 2v1. One player is always alone, and almost always screwed, because there is no AI stand-in. A similar problem persists with Snipperclips, but it works much weirder. At the start of the game, there are obvious, color-coded score markers for two of the players, and the third seems to just be left as a wild card. They can side with whoever at whatever point in the game. I don't know if this is a positive or a negative thing for me or anyone reading this. There is also a free-for-all fight mode where you use the cutting each other mechanic to just simply cut each other until there is nothing left of them and they disappear. We did this in a three-stock match for way longer than we thought we would. Snipperclips offers both brain-dead simplicity and mind-boggling complexity to make a complete package of a party puzzle game, and since there aren't too many of those around, I think Snipperclips is really something to behold. Just not a reason to get a Switch.
MY OVERALL IMPRESSION
The Switch is simultaneously one of the coolest and most disappointing consoles I have ever seen. I have always seen it as a mold breaker but something that won't be perfected until one or two generations from now, and after playing it for myself for roughly seven hours, my opinion there still holds. The Switch has a few minute technical issues that lie in the form of syncing glitches and that weird thing where connecting the joycon on its cover thing the wrong way makes it nearly impossible to take back off, but these are fairly easy to overlook. The real crime here is the games. The Switch is another system like many before it where the developers seem to forget that games are one of the main things customers buy game consoles for. I know it seems stupid, but I have no other explanation. The system is really fast, has a lot of functionality, and is set up comfortably in addition to its intuitive controller design, but all of this is moot with no games. I was recently looking back on titles from older systems that have already discontinued, and I stumbled on the Nintendo 64 library upon launch. Its library wasn't great either. However it made up for lack of quantity with quality. It launched only with Super Mario 64, but within just a few months had Wave Race 64, Mortal Kombat Trilogy, and Mario Kart 64, and after a huge dry spell the world was graced with Star Fox 64 as well. That was just the beginning of what is now seen as one of the best consoles of all time. I'm not saying The Switch might be one of the best consoles of all time, but I'm saying if Nintendo and/or the developers of Switch games get their shit together and consumers get their heads out of nostalgia's ass, The Switch has a chance. This isn't a Wii spin-off, to customers and developers. You can make actual games on this now. An open mindset can make The Switch a system worth buying beyond its mere amusement and potential. Who wants to pay that much money for potential? No one. In case that wasn't clear, the answer is no one.
If you don't have a Wii U, The Switch might be right up your alley. If you do already have a Wii U, hold on to it and wait for bigger games to come out. Not even bigger games, just games that more effectively retain your interest that you can't get on other systems (Breath of the Wild included; the Wii U version is 99% identical to the Switch version). Personally right now there is nothing on the Switch that interests me enough to buy a Switch. I have Yooka-Laylee pre-ordered on Steam, I have Shovel Knight on Wii U, I can get Sonic Mania on PS4, and even Breath of the Wild is also on a console that I already own. This is just where the console game market is unfortunately heading, but I think there are a lot of smart ideas on The Switch as a console that can change that and keep consoles relevant.
At the very least, they can always entice me with Pokemon and Super Smash Bros. That has unfortunately worked before. Could admittedly work again.
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