DP’s Games Crunch 2019 Part #2

January 12th, 2020

The turn of the decade has prompted me to revive this ‘year in review’-ish article series I began 11 years ago (has it been that long? Wow!). The list below catalogues my brief thoughts on the games I’ve completed over the past year.

Yoshi’s Story (N64)

Pretty bad for a Nintendo EAD game.

Mischief Makers (N64)

A Treasure game through and through. Inventive and diverse level concepts. Some are touch and go. Few outstay their welcome. Amazing boss battles. Tuning is 90% of the way there, but some extra polish would have been welcomed.

Killer Instinct Gold (N64)

I’ve always been attracted to KI’s distinctive character designs, but the combo system reduces the game to a static war over input strings.

1080 Snowboarding (N64)

As a mega fan of 1080 Avalanche, I wanted to love the original, but couldn’t execute a 1080 despite hours of practice. Failing to land particular jumps also marred the match race experience. A technical marvel which looks and runs far better on the Virtual Console than on original hardware.

English of the Dead (DS)

A fun curio I picked up when travelling in Japan earlier in the year.

Battalion Wars (GCN)

Like other genre mash-ups, Battalion Wars ends up having to compromise the strategy and third-person shooter essence to keep its gameplay together. Take for example, the challenges of balancing the early 2000s third-person camera and zoomed out strategy cam. The camera perspective during action gameplay limits the player’s view of the battlefield. With less information to work with, it becomes harder to make informed decisions and respond “just in time” to a constantly evolving game state. The unit design space and mission designs are great, but the aforementioned limitations shift the gameplay towards perspective management.

Battalion Wars is one of those games I invested a good deal of energy into, even though I recognise the weaknesses of the game’s design. Some friends and I recorded a super productive but yet-to-be-releasedi podcast working through the contradictions in BW’s design.

River City Ransom (NES)

Feels like a demake of the Yakuza games. People rightfully say that River City Ransom was ahead of its time. The secret kunio-kun game Nintendo World Cup was one of the first games I owned, so it was nice to see the same sprites and similar mechanics in their original manifestation.

Battletoads in Battlemaniacs (SNES)

Bad game. Contextual attacks interfere with the player’s agency. Story sequences make no sense. Bad 3D problems.

Superscope 6 (SNES)

Weird. Both the Blastris games are pitifully easy and barely warrant their own existence. On the hardest difficulty, Blastris A withholds the piece you need to win to artificially prompt a loss. Blastris B is super slow. Conversely, the two shooting games are pretty tough.

Super Punch-Out!! (SNES)

Super Punch-Out!!‘s sound effects, animation, and use of dramatic pauses are highly satisfying. However, fights need a dynamic element to diversify the scripted sequences and free the player’s learning process from dry rote.

The final two boxers broke the fairness test for me.

Super Metroid (SNES)

After subjecting myself to a number of rather strict and challenging titles this year, returning to Super Metroid reinvigorated my love for the medium. Most of my old SNES carts have kicked the bucket, but Super Metroid fittingly lives on.

It’s amazing that people put Symphony of the Night in the same sentence as Super Metroid. SOTN isn’t in the same league. Metroid’s room challenges are finely tuned and each unique within the game’s diverse palette of game concepts. Space and time play breathe dynamism into combat, with a strong foundation of aiming and moving through space. Unlike SoTN’s litany of abstractions, Super Metroid communicates its confrontations visually.

The atmosphere and macro level progression are medium-defining.

Metal Gear Solid: VR Missions (PS1)

One word: redundant. Metal Gear Solid’s design space is much broader than it is deep. VR Missions explores the nuance that is there, but it ain’t enough to substantiate a game of its length. A decent proportion of challenges are either arcanely nuanced or 100% gimmicky lolz (never on the level of Super Monkey Ball 2 crazy, though). Some challenges are super strict. Most others are a cakewalk. The slew of missions is fairly inconsistent.

The package’s nuanced-focused nature draws out quirky examples of poor tuning of game mechanics. For example, the way Snake holds out his left hand when holding a grenade makes him appear orientated slightly to one side. The contradicting visual reference makes it difficult to throw grenades straight.

The aiming is similar to Metroid: Other M, but Snake doesn’t register enemies as quickly and the bullets don’t home. Aiming from a distance is futile.

Final Update

In terms of my own writing, I spent the entirety of 2018 rewriting Adventures in Games Analysis and completing Speed Boost (both of which I endeavour to release this year). In 2019 I didn’t do any game-related writing, aside from some research for the next Game Design Companion book. Overhauling my original writing with the help of a professional editor was a laborious but necessary experience and I wanted to give myself a break before getting back in the game. In a few months, I hope to invest more time into the next GDC book.

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