Archive for the ‘Games’ Category

20 May

The Seven Stages of Videogame Re-Releases

Posted by vagrantesque in Games. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , .

NOTE: This article is itself an updated re-release of one originally posted in 2019. This 2024 version updates all the formatting, refines terminology, adds more examples and hopefully makes some clearer arguments. To read the original (outdated) post, CLICK HERE.

It’s been a topic at the forefront of gaming for at least three console generations: the videogame industry is now old enough to look back and draw from its past, and in an age where some games of yore are ridiculously difficult to experience with anything approaching legality, re-releases distinct from their original source in all manner of ways are as commonplace as they are guaranteed to attract online discontent. In many cases, they also represent a near-guaranteed source of revenue for publishers keen on mining nostalgia, so whether you love them, hate them, or pay them no mind until one of your favourites arrives in the spotlight, they aren’t going anywhere.

What I find most interesting about the modern re-release is that the quality and even validity of a given project oftentimes seems to hinge on what labels people are willing to attach to it. As with most things in life, enjoyment is regularly determined by expectation, and the wrong label can instantly diminish the hard work of thankless development teams, sow confusion over lengthy production cycles, or encourage needlessly circular pricing debates. So I feel like it’s worthwhile to break down and categorise those very labels as I see them defined today.

Because seven is a poetic number that looks great in post headers, that is how I have attempted to divide them – even if I have to stretch a bit to do so. It’s all just one person’s take after a couple of decades following the videogame industry – and I can definitely see people disagreeing on the order of the categories – but I’ve tried to articulate with examples as best I can.

Port

Your basic “Take Game A from Platform B and get it to run on Platform C” situation. Nothing more, nothing less. This is regularly seen when a period of platform exclusivity breaks and a title shows up on a competing one within the same generation. Because timed exclusivity within the console space is a rarity nowadays, the platform that is usually either early or late to the party is the PC, but you see more variety of circumstance the lower down you go on the production budget scale. For every big-budget early access title on the Steam/Epic Games storefront, every surprising eleventh-hour Yakuza/Square RPG arrival, there’s a “Nindie” debuting on Switch first, a small ID@Xbox game flying the Game Pass flag straight out of the gate, a former Apple Arcade exclusive that manages to find an unlikely second life somewhere else. When these games inevitably cross over to find new homes – grabbing a handy second wave of buzz in the process – they invariably do so without significant gameplay changes or extra content that hasn’t already been added to their initial versions.

The overwhelming majority of PC ports do offer more flexible graphical options due to the open nature of the PC environment (usually related to resolution, frame rate caps/unlocks, and previously unavailable visual effect toggles), just as a huge amount of Switch ports require technical downgrades by very imaginative and talented people in order to run at all (The folks at Bluepoint, Nixxes, and Panic Button come to mind). But if that’s all she wrote, you’re looking at a bread-and-butter port. There are many who hold the untouched port as the most ideal form of game preservation, and many more who don’t see the point of a fresh release of an older game if the developers don’t update anything, but the simple fact remains that basic ports allow more people to play more videogames and they’re an unavoidable part of the landscape.

IT’S A PORT IF: it shows up on a different platform from the original release, and barely anything has changed beyond what the new platform inherently offers to its games.

Enhanced Port

A game qualifies as an enhanced port in my mind if there has been little to no discernible graphical work done under a game’s hood since its original release, thereby qualifying it as a straight port if not for one or two clear and way-too-significant gameplay changes that have been implemented. Weirdly enough, this opens the door for re-releases to occur on the same platform as their source material, a practice for which the Kingdom Hearts franchise used to be infamous and something the Pokemon main series did with immense success right up until 2020, when it switched to a DLC Expansion strategy instead. The concept of an enhanced port definitely represents a curious semantic pocket of the industry, because while you can theoretically port a game to the platform it’s already on, without any noteworthy enhancements such an endeavour would be literally pointless.

Of course, most of the qualifiers for this category actually do cross over to new platforms, and as you might expect if you’ve invested in any of their recent consoles, Nintendo features heavily among them. The notoriously port-happy Big N greenlit an almost exhaustive catalogue of exports from the tragic Wii U to the hit-making Switch over its long life to give the a stranded titles a chance at sales, each packing little more than a resolution bump in the visuals department but almost always carrying a smattering of bullet points to set the new version apart.

For example, Hyrule Warriors Definitive Edition packs new character skins and integrates content from multiple previous versions of the game, New Super Mario Bros U Deluxe and DK Country Tropical Freeze add new characters and abilities, Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury adds, well, Bowser’s Fury, and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe fundamentally changes the flow of gameplay with more granular kart stats, tweaked balancing and an extra item slot per player (in addition to new characters). Older instances include the Gamecube release of Sonic Adventure 2 with an entire multiplayer mode in tow, the transformed controls and gameplay balance of Resident Evil 4‘s Wii edition and the enabling of the mythical “Stop n’ Swap” functionality in the Xbox 360 version of Banjo-Kazooie.

IT’S AN ENHANCED PORT IF: it basically looks / sounds the same, but substantial gameplay content has been added or even changed.

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3 Mar

The Handheld Lives! 2024’s Unlikely Portable Renaissance

Posted by vagrantesque in Console, Games, PC, PS5, Switch, Xbox Series X.

Somebody pinch me.

A decade ago not only was home console gaming supposedly dying, but it was an even greater certainty that the dedicated portable had been nailed to the wall by the smartphone and all its wonderfully innovative promises. And for good reason: I distinctly remember even the 2010-model iPod Touch making such industry shockwaves with its impossibly high-res screen and array of imaginative games that I could feel them in my hands over the next couple of years. From the simple tactical goodness of the original Plants vs Zombies, to the innovation incarnate within Flight Control, to the addictive simplicity of Jetpack Joyride, to the delirious roguelike highs of the impossibly pretty Infinity Blade; it felt like a genuinely viable new gaming device with a serious future backing up all the well-documented speculation.

But while mobile gaming has certainly made a gigantic pile of money for a select few developers and publishing companies, it’s probably fair to say that for markets outside the free-to-play sphere, it ain’t what it’s cracked up to be. The smartphone did not quite kill the handheld console, but it did leave it on decidedly shaky ground for years; the PS Vita’s awfully misguided 2012 launch didn’t help matters and the 3DS took at least a year to recover from its own initial mistakes. Then half a decade later the Nintendo Switch came along and, well, I’m not going over that story again. The point is the hybrid console was so successful that it has inspired all manner of portable pseudo-competitors: we now live in a world where I can play just about any current-gen game from any of the major videogame ecosystems, on a screen that fits in my lap, with actual buttons and everything. And that was a truly insane thought just a few years ago.

Let’s dive into just how the scene is shaking out for portable enthusiasts in 2024, through the lens of three devices I’ve been using.

In the Green Corner…

AyaNeo Air Pro

Just one of the many, many products of the explosion in popularity of handheld PCs this decade – spearheaded by the amazing Steam Deck – the AyaNeo Air Pro is not the Chinese pocket PC company’s most powerful SKU: in fact, in the 14-15 months since I bought the machine, it has already been superseded within its own niche – twice. What the Air Pro does have going for it, however, is that it’s tiny – as in, narrower than a Switch Lite, though it is much thicker – and yet still leaves Nintendo’s console for dead in terms of processing power. It also boasts a gorgeous 5.5-inch OLED panel at an overkill-worthy 1080p resolution, a comfortable shell design, and hall-effect thumbsticks that physically cannot develop drift problems.

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26 Dec

Best of 2023: Top 5 Game Consoles

Posted by vagrantesque in Best of 2023, Console, Games, Lists. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , .

Better late than never, right?

In the world of dedicated videogame consoles, 2023 felt in many ways like the true dawn of a new generation; in hindsight the pandemic-punctuated pageantry of 2020’s eleventh hour now kinda reads like a pillow-soft launch with only trivia night technicality in mind. It may have been a rollercoaster of a year for PC gaming – an astonishing density of poor ports sprinkled among a fleet of immensely exciting pushes into the handheld space – but the console world brought some semblance of confident, comforting familiarity to 2023. The slow transition from the last generation is finally approaching its end with real intent – bringing a controversial return to normalcy for 30 FPS visuals along with it as Unreal Engine 5 leads the way down a road the last generation cannot travel.

But we can still fill out a top five for now, so let’s do that.

My ranking is based on new developments in each console’s wheelhouse, primarily concerning exclusive games but also taking in factors like firmware updates and hardware/accessory additions. As always, mostly due to how wide and varied their ecosystems are, Mobile and PC are disregarded for this list.

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VR BEST OF 2023 DISCLAIMER

This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. If you agree with me 100%, go buy a lottery ticket. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.

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5. Playstation 4

LAST YEAR: 4th

‘Twas the year the fourth Playstation home console effectively began its last march into the pages of history. Though plenty of major circumstances were out of Sony’s control this time, the company’s famous decade-long support plan for its numbered videogame machines has perhaps been a little easier to uphold in the case of the PS4 than its two older brothers: neither the PS2 nor the PS3 enjoyed quite this many of their allocated ten years as a lead platform for brand-new prestige videogame releases. Yet here we are at the end of 2023, and Sony’s lean exclusives lineup for the year has effectively skipped the fourth home Playstation. A couple of bigger third-party games have followed suit – although back-ports for the likes of Hogwarts Legacy and Star Wars: Jedi Survivor proved that the very biggest are still unable to resist the allure of that ocean of existing last-gen machines.

4. Xbox One

LAST YEAR: 5th

A pretty similar situation to the PS4 here, except the Xbox One console family did receive the same home screen UI update that the newer Series consoles got, so it’s kind of ahead by default. Furthermore, the comparison between the Game Pass and PS+ Extra offerings continues to favour the Xbox side by some margin, but when you filter down the comparison to just day-one indie titles – which invariably have no problem running on last-gen tech – the head-to-head picture becomes even rosier for the ol’ Xbone. With a game pass subscription and a cheap second-hand Xbox in 2023, you could enjoy the likes of Cocoon, Cassette Beasts, Bramble: The Mountain King, Sea of Stars, Thirsty Suitors, Fuga: Memories of Steel 2, Steamworld Build, Party Animals, Venba, The Last Case of Benedict Fox, Planet of Lana, and Roboquest – and the last three are currently unavailable on a Sony or Nintendo platform. Not bad at all.

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23 Dec

Best of 2023: Top 10 Game Re-Releases & Expansions

Posted by vagrantesque in Best of 2023, Games, Lists. Tagged: , , , , , , .

That’s right – 2008’s loudest naysayers were not heeded, and their worst nightmares have come to fruition. Here we stand after a year so positively crammed with quality videogame re-releases and downloadable content expansions that we can gloss over them no longer: they are getting their very own page this year. Much like the K-Pop albums countdown, said page will be separated into two top fives…

…is what I would have said, if the sheer strength of the DLC this year hadn’t forced my hand long after I decided to draft this page, so now it’s a top 4 and a top 6? A bit messier, yes, but hey, a lot of this stuff rivals full games released this year; it had to be done.

If you notice a particularly conspicuous major absence from the re-release section, it’s worth mentioning that only the first five out of the seven categories from this article are eligible for consideration here: “reimaginings” and reboots have to fight it out with everyone else on the main list. Parentheses indicate the platform where I played each entry.

Of course this all means that the rather flexible “Special Awards” list that stood in this slot since 2018 is taking a hiatus; but for the record I would’ve probably given Best Third Party Publisher to Capcom (Resident Evil 4, Street Fighter 6, Exoprimal, Ghost Trick, Megaman Battle Network Legacy Collection), Best Indie Publisher to Team17 (Dredge, Headbangers, Blasphemous 2, Moving Out 2), and Best Videogame Adaptation to HBO’s The Last of Us – although that last category was unusually competitive this year.

All sorted? Let’s kick on with this.

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VR BEST OF 2023 DISCLAIMER

This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. If you agree with me 100%, go buy a lottery ticket. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.

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RE-RELEASES
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4. System Shock (PC)

One of the coolest stylistic game remakes I’ve ever seen, the 2023 System Shock project takes a pixelated first-person PC classic and completely rebuilds the world using low-res 3D “voxels”, ensuring a stunning neon colour palette that runs smooth as butter even on low-power portable PC systems. Drastically modernising the gameplay was not necessarily on the top of the priority list for developers Nightdive Studios, so meticulous menu management and item balancing is still the order of the day, but combat feels nice and punchy while the unsettling weirdness that eventually inspired the brilliance of Bioshock is fully preserved in all its skeevy sci-fi glory. It really sucks that Steam cloud saves still aren’t working properly for the game at the time of writing, though.

3. Advance Wars 1+2 Re-Boot Camp (NS)

One of the most unlikely revivals in Nintendo’s catalogue may already be dead again thanks to an entire year’s delay brought about by real-world events, but if this fantastic package is the only word we hear from the Advance Wars series for the next decade, I’ll have to begrudgingly admit I’m OK with that. Veteran indie outfit Wayforward has absolutely nailed the most crucial parts of the Advance Wars experience, enlivening a controversial toy-like art style with countless animation touches (Kanbei’s CO Power animation, anyone?) and tweaking the enemy AI just enough to balance challenge and nostalgia. Most importantly, this might be the best approach to music in a videogame remake I have ever played, and I’m not just saying that because The Consouls did Sensei’s Theme. Of course I do fervently hope this is not the end, and it now has to be the WF team who are trusted with the next step in this series’ mythical return.

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7 Nov

Ten Insightful YouTube Videos That Helped Me Enjoy Games More

Posted by vagrantesque in Games, Lists. Tagged: , , , .

So here’s something a bit different.

Three quick things about me:

  • I have a slightly unsettling number of YouTube watch hours banked on analytical video essays, particularly of the movie and (most relevantly here) gaming variety;
  • I am a huge believer in the power of properly-managed expectations when it comes to the personal enjoyment I find in entertainment media (which, after all, is meant to entertain);
  • My enjoyment of videogames is often directly tied to my ability to discuss them with others before, during and after I play them (this one shouldn’t shock anyone). To put it plainly, when I enjoy discussing games with people – whether online or in person – I enjoy those games more.

These points have naturally come together over the course of the last several years to ensure I’ve responded strongly to the following ten analytical YouTube videos. These aren’t the only ten that have ever struck me – not even close – but I felt like shouting out these in particular because each one has either given me a perspective-altering revelation that helped me look at the videogames I play and discuss in a more balanced way, and/or laid out in clear terms something I’d already felt about said games but was unable to properly articulate. These ten may total around three and a half hours watched back-to-back, but they also happen to be on the shorter side of my Favourites playlist, believe it or not, so as much as I really want to put a Kotaku-era Tim Rogers video here, I’ll resist.

Yes, that makes what you’re about to read the equivalent of ten separate way-too-long YouTube comments, but I mainly want to highlight the videos themselves. They may definitely skew towards topics that happen to interest me specifically, but have a watch of a few if you want, maybe listen to them while doing something monotonous, and hopefully you’ll find a view or two worthwhile. You might even pick up a new subscription.

Subjectivity Is Implied

Joseph Anderson, 2018

Main Takeaway: “Objective opinions” don’t exist, and entirely objective analyses are boring.

We start with the most reactionary video of the lot – it’s clear Mr Anderson recorded this rant as a frustrated response to wider media literacy trends – but it has to go first because the point at its centre informs (or should inform) every other analytical video, ever.

Despite its title, the video tackles two sides of the same fallacious coin: the silly idea that publicised takes on videogames should be clarified as subjective opinions repeatedly to eliminate all possible option for devious deception, and the even sillier idea that every videogame take must endeavour to be an “objective opinion”, which as Joe describes, is like “asking for the conversational equivalent of hot frozen ice cream”.

That second part in particular has long been a frustration of mine to explain to people, and this Anderson essay is a fascinating breakdown of the issue that ends up with a remarkably charitable attitude to the potential reasons why people might think they want such an oxymoron, despite the author’s gritted-teeth presentational tone. It’s the video that inspired the idea for this list many years ago, and it’s well worth a watch.

Breath of the Wild’s “Disneyland Problem”

Mother’s Basement, 2017

Main Takeaway: Your job – and exposure to videogames – significantly affects your preferences.

This one has rapidly turned into a bit of an odd time capsule – Geoff Thew doesn’t even do videogame content anymore, having long since made his real YouTube fortune through the popular niche of anime openings, and so none of the hypothetical Breath of the Wild videos he mentions in the beginning actually came to pass. Yet despite this, the video he did make is the most compelling illustration of reviewer-to-fandom dissonance I have ever seen, and it achieves this almost as an accident on the way to mounting a wide-angle defense of one specific game against perceived criticism a mere month into its long life.

By the sheer nostalgic charm of a fired-up attitude in a lo-fi-by-current-standards setup, confident enough to oppose “let’s call them idiots” via hastily-assembled bullet points but relatably self-conscious in his repeated links to other video essays, Thew casts light on the high-pressure environmental context that causes many professional videogame reviewers to value polish, novelty, relative brevity and accessible flow-state over other desirable qualities in games. And he’s bang-on the money.

Not only has this distinction helped me filter what I read or watch the weekend of a new game’s launch while preparing for the often-inevitable counter-opinions to come, it’s also helped me work out why I tend to value the same elements highly as well. After all, I may not be paid to write about games, but after decades surrounding myself with constant new releases and reactions to those new releases, my preferences occasionally shake out shockingly similar. As stupid as it may sound, realising all this has helped me relax and enjoy the discourse a lot more.

While the rest of the video isn’t as interested in directly backing up the well-made press point, and I disagree with a couple of Thew’s BotW defenses (I would’ve loved to see that “best story in a Zelda game” claim expanded on), he does go on to make a second argument dissolving impossible expectations around supposedly “infinite” games with a pretty elegant Disneyland allegory that’s also worth watching – and may or may not foreshadow another video further down this list.

Genwunner | The Problem with Pokemon’s Artstyle

Purple Gaming, 2019

Main Takeaway: Years of widely accepted majority opinions on game franchises can completely miss the point.

Refining this list down to ten entries required some self-imposed rules, and one of them dictated that I probably shouldn’t bring in too many videos focused on just one game or series, unless that singular focus brought out or supported a conclusion with much wider-reaching implications. That rule eliminated literally hundreds of my favourite videos, but I just had to keep this one.

Even though the content of the video essentially boils down to one narrator riffing off a viral reddit post, that post and Purple Gaming’s exploration of its implications absolutely blew my mind the first time I watched. The very concept that the battle lines of an all-time knuckle-dragging fandom fight have been drawn in the wrong place for decades short-circuited something inside of me, and then honestly made me excited to see what other mainstream accepted gaming opinions might be open to some prodding.

For what it’s worth, the second half of Purple Gaming’s video attempts to fold the major art style debate into some of the usual criticisms against the modern Pokemon games’ stubborn resistance to change, but those issues are perhaps handled better in other videos out there. Still, this is a fun watch.

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12 Aug

Rating the Return of ‘Traditional Zelda Pillars’ in Tears of the Kingdom

Posted by vagrantesque in Games, Switch. Tagged: , , , , , , .

A while ago I finished the new Zelda game; my 17th completed Zelda title (from a possible 20) is in the books! Tears of the Kingdom was a ludicrously hefty 148-hour journey, and I had to abandon any hope of reaching my traditional Zelda completion percent goals, but there were too many impending game releases in this truly ridiculous year and it simply had to go in the completed pile. So on the pile it is, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to repeat past mistakes and let it float away without writing anything. Now exactly three months after launch, it’s time to delve into some potential spoilers and talk about TotK. Read on at your own risk.

After all the pre-release speculation, it turns out that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom does a whole lot to differentiate itself from its predecessor Breath of the Wild, even though it also retroactively codifies a new formula from that game’s legacy by following in specific footsteps. We are talking many articles worth of new and surprising stuff, some of which I still probably haven’t seen. But of most interest to this time and place and writer is the clear effort Nintendo has put into re-aligning the open-ended structure of modern Zelda with a handful of elements more traditional to the series – to mixed success.

I wrote a whole month of needlessly granular Zelda countdowns on this site a decade ago, so this pleases me greatly. What say we ignore all the newfangled systems that actually make ToTK great and go straight into critiquing how successfully each of these traditional “pillars” of the series brings back the good times? Some of these BotW barely had at all, and some are just significantly changed-up from the last outing. What do you mean none of this matters?

Dungeons

* 3 / 5 *

Let’s start with the big one. That’s right: after a significantly different take on the concept via Breath of the Wild’s Divine Beasts, Tears of the Kingdom actually brings back some semblance of region-appropriate themed dungeons with delineated puzzle rooms/areas. There are four of these bad boys in total and each one even packs a proper boss – but do they scratch that nostalgic itch the Link’s Awakening remake and Skyward Sword remaster have reminded us we had in the last half-decade?

Well, not really, but they are a massive step up from those Divine Beasts. Not just because the game actually calls them “temples” either (although that absolutely helps); unlike BotW’s tileset-sharing brown mobile puzzle boxes, each dungeon looks meaningfully different from the other three in both colour scheme and layout. Each is also preceded by some form of testing approach sequence that channels Skyward Sword by tying the overworld to the temple via warm-up puzzles and/or fights; this builds the anticipation of reaching the building itself on four pretty successful occasions.

However, for better or worse the open-ended design powering the last two 3D Zelda games persists within the TotK dungeons, no doubt in part by necessity given the sheer power of Link’s new abilities. Each time the player is tasked with the activation of four or five thematically appropriate devices – in any order – to unlock the final boss room. The potential for the truly gnarly labyrinthine conquests we dreamed of as kids is there, but only the Fire Temple really nudges the kind of scale to realise it, and only the Lightning Temple really makes an attempt to integrate the puzzles leading to its mechanical MacGuffins in a way that harkens back to the glory days of Zelda dungeons. Unshackle the Small Keys, Nintendo!

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23 Jun

The Winners and Losers of Summer Showcase Season 2023

Posted by vagrantesque in Games. Tagged: , , , , , , , .

Another one has come and gone (mostly – a few smaller shows may still appear around the place): though the name of the period may change, the last 4-5 weeks have unmistakably been the match of any classic E3 period for bedazzling game reveals, gleefully inconsistent presentations and feverish chatter. Because no time of year is more conducive to wildly unfair oversimplification, let’s sum up the fun via a strained list of quickfire winners and losers.

Winner: The Big Three Showdown

It took the better part of half a decade, but 2023 finally gave us a showcase season where Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo all showed up with full, uncompromised presentations bearing their top branding – just like the old days. Whether those presentations lived up to that top branding – or whether they even needed to – are entirely different topics, but it’s certainly worth noting that this was a treat in a post-E3 world where the very possibility of an old-school first-party showdown seemed like a pipe dream.

Loser: Scattered Third Parties

It’s the first set and we’re already exaggerating a bit here, but the craft of the traditional third party participants was a tad lacking this year. EA and Square Enix didn’t have shows in 2023, Ubisoft’s return was mixed at best and Capcom returned largely to 2021 form, where the entire point of staging a showcase got lost in the glow of recent game hype. One of the best shows of the whole month-long festivities was technically only third parties, but it wasn’t beholden to the output of just one. Which brings us to…

Winner: Live Geoff Keighley

You would be forgiven for being apprehensive about Geoff Keighley’s decision to bring his Summer Game Fest kickoff show into the chaotic world of live-in-person events, a space of course shared by his famously ad-driven and bloated annual Game Awards extravaganza. But it turns out a couple years of experience, a keen ear for feedback, and a sprinkling of genuinely great game announcements (plus Nicolas Cage) add up to an event well worth watching.

SGF Kickoff Live was hardly a perfect show – certain reveals felt distinctly contractual and it was an absolute sausage-fest – but the mix of trailers and jovial on-stage interviews felt more like nostalgic fun than dull pace-droppers, and that was due in no small part to Keighley’s deft touch with the microphone. The moment when he playfully shooshed the crowd after mentioning “Final Fantasy” – knowing full well the bombastic Rebirth finale he had in store – summed it up for me. You just could not wipe the smile off the guy’s face all show and it was infectious to watch.

Loser: Live Ubisoft

Coming off an ocean of game delays and the quietest year in its recent history, Ubisoft was poised to make a big statement with its own fully-live show backed by enough announcements to re-establish its relevance. But if the SGF-branded affair showed us all the benefits of the live format, this ‘Ubisoft Forward’ reminded every viewer of just how badly a real stage can tank momentum and drain excitement. It was all downhill from the (legitimately fantastic) opening live Just Dance 2024 transition: far too many nervous waffling presenters, a litany of terrible camera angles, and some head-scratching inclusions (uh, Skull and Bones? What’s going on mate?) sent exactly the wrong message about Ubi’s immediate future – even if the company did bring some believably cool games.

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3 May

My Top 20 Zelda: Breath of the Wild Moments

Posted by vagrantesque in Games, Switch. Tagged: , , , , , , .

In less than one week, it’s probably fair to say the most anticipated game of the Nintendo Switch’s life will release at last. It follows the single longest development cycle for a main series Zelda game in history, six years and two months after Switch launch title Breath of the Wild. To mark this momentous occasion, I’m going to do something I’ve never done before: resurrect an old article I’ve had floating around in my drafts folder for years and publish it in a fresh light.

This one was initially thrown together in the hazy afterglow of completing BotW in late May of 2017, envisioned as a 20-screenshot roadmap of my own (at the time) 140-hour path through the game. However, the draft was already well past 30 entries and nowhere near the end of my journey when I first gave up on it, as I was unable to cut out anywhere near enough moments to prevent the list from ballooning into a true word count monstrosity. It’s also easy to forget in 2023 just how many articles, critiques, videos and morsels of general coverage this revered game was receiving a mere two months after launch, so I hardly felt like I’d be making enough unique noise to stand out from the crowd and justify such a massive piece.

That task is much easier now. Separated from the game by more than half a decade – I have not touched this one since its excellent dungeon DLC came out at the end of 2017 – only the moments I remember the strongest get to stay. Thus, right before the launch of its sequel, we can reflect on the legacy of one of Nintendo’s most impactful games and have a bit of nostalgic fun along the way. After a touch of reformatting and an emotional scroll through thousands of compulsive screenshots, here are my top 20 moments from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, presented in chronological order.

1. The Plateau

It’s been said in approximately a million video essays: The Great Plateau of Breath of the Wild is one of the best tutorials in gaming. Over an area that feels impossibly massive at first, you learn and test interlocking mechanics over four multiple-solution tests that get you well and truly into the groove of the weirdest Zelda in decades. For me, this was undertaken in the small hours of the morning while staying at a mate’s place post-midnight-launch, with my body screaming at me for daring to deprive it. I obviously didn’t care; after multiple rewatches of various gameplay demos from the previous year’s Zelda-only E3 show, I was enthralled at how many new approaches were still apparent.

2. Out of Link’s Depth

I cannot separate my memories of Breath of the Wild from the conversations I was having with anyone I knew or met who was playing at the time. And nor would I want to; in my opinion there have only been two games since that could possibly challenge it for water-cooler chat value: 2020’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons and 2022’s Elden Ring. From those very chats I picked up rather quickly that most people go directly east after the Great Plateau, following the only real suggestion the game gives you other than the refreshingly direct “Defeat Ganon”. But I wasn’t about to let a game that bragged about being this open tell me what to do: I went north, towards the castle. I died. Again and again and again. Soon enough I discovered a shrine and eagerly dived in to escape the high damage output all around me – only to be met with one of the game’s longest and most intricate shrine puzzles: the Trial of Power. Yeah, that took a while, and it left me with some massively overpowered weapons, but I adored the feeling that I could do it anyway.

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30 Dec

Best of 2022: Top 15 Games

Posted by vagrantesque in Best of 2022, Games, Lists. Tagged: , , , , , , , , .

What a weird year for those of us who follow videogames.

The flow of the annual release schedule remains a frustrating thing to predict year-to-year, but it took on an extra-strange shape in 2022: as far as the wider triple-A scene was concerned, virtually all the big game action was localised to the first and last quarters of the year. That meant enough of a relative chasm in the middle to allow me to complete a massive-scale catch-up project I never thought I’d have the time to do, but it also meant an unusually dense December full of release dates that didn’t blink for once. So it’s no surprise that, with a couple of big-name exceptions, this GOTY countdown is defined by the only two consistent sources of quality game releases all year: prestige indies and the Nintendo Switch.

Single-player games don’t qualify unless I played them for over five hours or finished them, which this year eliminates *deep breath* Sonic Frontiers, The Callisto Protocol, Tinykin, Harvestella, Soul Hackers 2, Live A Live, Kirby and the Forgotten Land, AI: nirvanA Initiative, Card Shark, The DioField Chronicle, Metal: Hellsinger, and Evil West from contention, even though any of those games could have genuinely challenged for a place on the list had I got to play more of them – and I’m probably forgetting quite a few others. Extra-special shout-out to Chained Echoes, High on Life and Sports Story, which arrived at the eleventh hour and rocketed up in hype after I had already started the year-end writing process in earnest and had absolutely no hope of playing them.

Parentheses indicate the platform (or platforms – cross-save is truly a wild concept) where I played each game.

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VR BEST OF 2022 DISCLAIMER

This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. To agree with me 100% is as likely as avoiding MCU fatigue. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.

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15. Stray (PS5)

2022 was a year positively teeming with quality indie games, and they ran the gamut of genres and presentation styles. Only one of them was really trying to follow the triple-A game design formula. It was the cat game. The game where you play as a literal cat. In a way, that kinda made it this year’s Kena: Bridge of Spirits: a Sony exclusive with a wide linear level design structure, evolving stakes, tempting PSN trophy design and great use of the Dualsense controller; it is thankfully much easier than Kena though. Stray also has an excellent soundtrack, goes to some pretty wild places in terms of its oddly endearing AI supporting cast, and doesn’t outstay its welcome. Good stuff to kick us off.

14. Triangle Strategy (NS)

Triangle Strategy can perhaps consider itself one of the unluckier victims of 2022’s release schedule quirks, hitting in the middle of arguably Square Enix’s worst PR month in years when it already had enough to deal with regarding its terrible name and warped fandom expectations. Hindsight is 20/20, but it’s tempting to imagine an alternative situation where it let, say, the Tactics Ogre Reborn remaster go first to allow it’s story-first tacical gameplay approach room to breathe around JRPG July or something. But contextual frustrations aside, this game is a treat, fusing a meaty Game of Thrones-infused narrative epic with stunning artwork and rewarding, character-driven progression to add intimate significance to on-field strategic moves and major off-field democratic choices alike. Speaking of which…

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27 Dec

Best of 2022: Top 10 Gaming Moments

Posted by vagrantesque in Best of 2022, Games, Lists. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , .

As long as there are new games, there are moments within those games that will come to define the year in which they first appeared. Future mentions of that year will hurtle these immortalised blends of digital art and human experience to the forefront of the mind like tiny, delicious morsels of nostalgic goodness, transporting the player back to a crystallised slice of time when experiencing this medium felt truly worthwhile.

Actually, that may just be me.

Here are my top ten favourite moments I had with videogames in 2022. Big ol’ spoilers ahead, particularly for a fair few story endings.

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VR BEST OF 2022 DISCLAIMER

This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. To agree with me 100% is as likely as avoiding MCU fatigue. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.

MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

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10. Exiled – Pokemon Legends: Arceus

Raise your hand if you thought the cel-shaded Pokemon spin-off about rounding up historical versions of fan-favourite creatures in steam-powered Pokeballs was capable of an affecting story moment putting you in the shoes of a shunned outcast after an entire town turns on you during a crisis, forcing you to perform a silent walk of shame as everyone judges you for something that isn’t your fault. Yeah, I’m not raising my hand either.

9. Mammoth – Horizon: Forbidden West

Even more than the first game, Horizon: Forbidden West is built on interlocking systems; we’re not talking obscene Breath of the Wild physics shenanigans here, but we are dealing with a richer suite of combat options that builds on Zero Dawn‘s greatest strength to cook up a veritable buffet of viable attack angles in most situations. After throwing you into a handful of scenarios designed to tease out some of these options, the game’s first encounter with a resting, fully decked-out robotic mammoth (or at least the first one I found) is an absolute peach. I almost beat it once with the head-on approach, then after reloading the save tried a completely different combination of weapons, weak points and environmental hazards to chip away and take it down. It’s a sensational spectacle, especially once you factor in all the gorgeous particle effects and the electronic/symphonic hybrid battle music – which goes hard.

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