(Putting a spoiler warning at the top because please go see this episode before you read this, it does spoiler things and you should react to them in the episode instead of hearing me summarize them for you.)
Oh great. Now I have to go and summarize that in a cohesive set of paragraphs? Can I go back to bed instead?
I suspect tackling this one is going to end up like my Spyfall 2 writeup, wherein I tried really hard to summarize stuff before I had to throw up my hands and talk about the thing I actually wanted to bitch about. Fugitive Of The Judoon... well, it's equal parts bitching and equal parts speculation. The ball has not been thrown in the air so much as it has been punted into the upper stratosphere. Chris Chibnall, that magnificently odd son of a bitch, has tossed shit into the mix that actually does feel new and exciting and grandiose in its implications and theories. It's a lot like Spyfall 1 in that regard, but note how let down I was by Spyfall 2's big reveal being "what if... a plot point from 2008... ... ...again?". There are definitely parts of Fugitive that feel like that, but other parts of it feel fresh. The danger one falls into, and I'm doing it here, is treating this as a solely Chris Chibnall script. There are two major additions to this episode that feel like his reach, given that they're arc shit, but the rest of this thing is ostensibly written by Vinay Patel. Holy shit, the same genius who wrote Demons Of The Punjab! Quite possibly the best episode of Series 11! Before we deal with Chibnall's grand reach, let's see what Patel has for us.
Monday, 27 January 2020
Tuesday, 21 January 2020
Doctor Who Series 12 First Impressions: Episode 4 (Nikola Tesla's Night Of Terror)
Well, that's a very strong debut for Doctor Who.
It helps to start there, with the writer herself. Nina Metivier. She was actually around behind the scenes as a script editor for Series 11, tweaking both The Woman Who Fell To Earth and It Takes You Away. Both good episodes (ITYA being slightly better and on great tier), so whatever she did to make them consistent paid off. It's the former job I want to bring up in parallel to this, because I feel that it's key to understanding the main driving theme of Metivier's first Doctor Who script. The Woman Who Fell To Earth had many elements to it, key of which was defining the 13th Doctor. The episode itself settled on this sort of steampunk inventor archetype, and you got Jodie Whittaker wearing goggles and gloves while using Stenza tech and Sheffield steel to hash out her new sonic screwdriver. The idea of Whittaker as this clever handywoman has popped up here and there as her era has gone on, but it's that specific trait of hers that Metivier has locked on to as the theme of her episode. Every idea starts as a stray thought, a simple little seed that a good writer can water with creativity and trim with editing. I can almost see the idea seeds that Metivier's episodes would grow into. Simple thoughts while brainstorming like "Ooh, in her first episode, she was sort of a clever inventor, I should make a story about that" or "She should meet another famous inventor from history, that would be a neat parallel". Ideas like that, and consistency like Woman Who Fell To Earth or It Takes You Away, get you an episode like Nikola Tesla's Night Of Terror. It's brilliant, it has a point, and let's talk about that point.
It helps to start there, with the writer herself. Nina Metivier. She was actually around behind the scenes as a script editor for Series 11, tweaking both The Woman Who Fell To Earth and It Takes You Away. Both good episodes (ITYA being slightly better and on great tier), so whatever she did to make them consistent paid off. It's the former job I want to bring up in parallel to this, because I feel that it's key to understanding the main driving theme of Metivier's first Doctor Who script. The Woman Who Fell To Earth had many elements to it, key of which was defining the 13th Doctor. The episode itself settled on this sort of steampunk inventor archetype, and you got Jodie Whittaker wearing goggles and gloves while using Stenza tech and Sheffield steel to hash out her new sonic screwdriver. The idea of Whittaker as this clever handywoman has popped up here and there as her era has gone on, but it's that specific trait of hers that Metivier has locked on to as the theme of her episode. Every idea starts as a stray thought, a simple little seed that a good writer can water with creativity and trim with editing. I can almost see the idea seeds that Metivier's episodes would grow into. Simple thoughts while brainstorming like "Ooh, in her first episode, she was sort of a clever inventor, I should make a story about that" or "She should meet another famous inventor from history, that would be a neat parallel". Ideas like that, and consistency like Woman Who Fell To Earth or It Takes You Away, get you an episode like Nikola Tesla's Night Of Terror. It's brilliant, it has a point, and let's talk about that point.Tuesday, 14 January 2020
The Harmony Of Hope And The Dirge Of Despair: Introduction (Elegy Of The Eternals)
(What this is all about will become clear in a moment, but here's your spoiler warning: There are spoilers for both Sailor Moon and Puella Magi Madoka Magica in here. Warning over.)
Well, here we are at last. Again. You may be wondering what in the name of God this winter venture of a deep dive is all about. It is my solemn job as writer to like, tell you. And stuff. I'm belaboring the point, I know, but I have my reasons. I'm getting a buildup of steam here, okay? Plus, I got a lovely compliment from someone I care fondly about regarding my words on this blog. They said my writing style is fantastic; that I made each of my pieces feel like I was sitting in a coffee shop with the reader, talking one on one. Let's take that angle, you and I, okay? It's you and I in the coffee shop, it's a chilly winter day, and we both need a little warming up. Sip your latte or your hot chocolate or what have you, and let's catch up, sweetie.
Well, here we are at last. Again. You may be wondering what in the name of God this winter venture of a deep dive is all about. It is my solemn job as writer to like, tell you. And stuff. I'm belaboring the point, I know, but I have my reasons. I'm getting a buildup of steam here, okay? Plus, I got a lovely compliment from someone I care fondly about regarding my words on this blog. They said my writing style is fantastic; that I made each of my pieces feel like I was sitting in a coffee shop with the reader, talking one on one. Let's take that angle, you and I, okay? It's you and I in the coffee shop, it's a chilly winter day, and we both need a little warming up. Sip your latte or your hot chocolate or what have you, and let's catch up, sweetie.
Monday, 13 January 2020
Doctor Who Series 12 First Impressions: Episode 3 (Orphan 55)
Ed Hime. You beautiful messy bastard. You're two for two. Spot on.
So yeah, we get to talk about Orphan 55 now! In the 90 minutes between the episode's end and me going to bed, I saw... a fair few takes. Most of them, a lot of them actually, calling this a goddamned mess. I don't think I can go quite that far. Nope, sorry. Is it messy? Yeah, a little, if we're being honest. The whole Chibnall-era aesthetic of a wild ride roller coaster with everything and the kitchen sink tossed in along the way is definitely still here, and the episode blasts through several different concepts/themes/ideas before eventually settling on something to anchor all this together... or attempt to, anyway. This is where the divisiveness comes in. If that anchor doesn't sell you, if you find it wanting in some way, then the whole ride is just a bunch of half-baked appetizers hurled into your face at 80 miles per hour with an ending that looks directly into the camera and preaches politics at you. You know what? I can just about see it from that perspective. I'm going to do my best to touch on the elements of the ride before getting into that political anchor of a main theme, but I have a feeling it may end up like the Spyfall Part Two writeup. There, after about three or four times of saying something to the effect of "Well this was part of the episode and was... okay... I guess...", I kind of just threw up my hands and talked about what I actually wanted to talk about. This episode is better than Spyfall Part Two for me. Why? Because the part I really want to talk about in Orphan 55 is better than the part I really wanted to talk about in Spyfall Part Two. Before we get there, I will do my very best to shotgun you through the ride the episode takes us, and the concepts left behind that still kind of resonate. Here's words on Orphan 55, and why I loved it. Yes. I loved it. I will bear the cross of being an easily-impressed contrarian if I must, but fuck it. I loved it. Here's why.
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| This is the future liberals don't want. |
Monday, 6 January 2020
Doctor Who Series 12 First Impressions: Episode 2 (Spyfall Part Two)
Oh, Chibnall. Oh, Chris Chibnall. That was so close enough to fine that what I have to complain about almost hurts to do. I want to stress that last sentence again. Last week, I called Spyfall Part One the best story Chibnall has ever put out for Doctor Who. Now that Part Two has aired, I can't say that I want to take that back. Part Two is functional and good and a wild ride that kept me guessing up until the very end. The act of watching it was fun! It's a fine episode when you look at it from broad strokes; not quite as good as Part One, but still a solid like... 6/10, if you want to play the number game, where Part One is a 6.5 or maybe even a 7. Look, I don't know, I don't play the number game, numbers are bullshit. We've got to rip the band-aid off, though. Part Two's revelations, along with a handful of other teeny little nitpicks, compound together to form something that just does not gel with me. We'll get to those, but I really want to start this off with praise. We'll do that, and then I'll let my grievances out. Okay? Okay. Here's Spyfall Part Two.
Thursday, 2 January 2020
Doctor Who Series 12 First Impressions: Episode 1 (Spyfall Part One)
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| I play poker now. Poker is cool. |
Hot damn. Welcome back, everyone, and much sooner than I expected! I was looking over the post I did on Resolution, a year ago, and in that I was so damn sure that we weren't back until April 2020. color me surprised that we only equalled the Moffat gap year of 2016 by having it be exactly a year off. We're back at it again, and it's definitely a confusing and nebulous time that only exists here and now. This is absolutely First Impressions time, where we don't know what's coming and can only read what we got in light of... well, what we got. That means theorizing, looking at the episode carefully, making guesses based on what happens and what we might want to happen. Holy fuck. I missed this in 2018. I don't remember doing much of it during Series 11, because Series 11 didn't give me that much to do beyond watch it and complain about the mediocrity of the day. With the first volley of Series 12, on the other hand, I remain amazed... but still cautious. What's been laid out before us is... you know what? I'll say it. I'll recant it in half a week if this turns out to be a red herring to boredom, but I'll say it here. Spyfall Part One is the best story Chris Chibnall has ever written for this show. Its pastiche and energy make it a wild ride from start to finish, and the mysteries it sets up (along with the big things it reveals) actually make me excited and want to think about where the episode could go! I don't know if this is a case of improvement, or if absence merely made me grow fonder for new Doctor Who, but let's sit back and admire this set up and theorize where it could go before all is said and done.
Sunday, 29 December 2019
Frezno's Games Of The 2019 Thing!
Ahh. Now that was a hiatus well-earned. Things are going to get real busy around here in the new year, both because the Doctor Who First Impressions are coming back and because of yet another massive screed about a utopian idealistic show. So yeah. Did you expect anything less of me? You know the drill at this point, which brings us to the topic of the moment: Games I Played In 2019! I've kept a record of all the stuff I played, and now that the year is all but dusted I'm going to talk about them. Some of them are great, some of them were bad, some of them... just kind of okay and mentioned in passing. Get yourself like, a coffee or something, and let me tell you about my Games Of The Year for 2019. It'll be fun. No, really. I promise.
I almost feel bad for putting a spotlight on this poor little thing. It was only 2 dollars on the Switch Eshop, it's about an hour long, and thanks to the gold coins I technically didn't pay for it. Nevertheless, it was still really quite bad. On the surface, it looks to be sort of a Contra-esque game, but the vibe I got was a little more Mega Man with a deliberate focus on slower platforming challenges. It's hard to express the disappointment of this game without just letting one experience it, but I will try. It uses B to jump and A to shoot, which just feels awkward on a Switch controller and led to a lot of crossed wires and confusion. More to the point, it just does not feel good to play. It's very limited with its weapons, and things soak up just enough damage that they always manage to get a strike off towards you first. It is a slog, through and through, and for that it earns the stinker award. Not a game I'll be going back to any time soon...
14 years. It's been 14 damn years since this game came out and haunted me for very personal reasons, but I have at last managed to blast my way through it. I have to say, it's quite the excellent little gem and still holds up. There may be a naysayer or two telling me the Wii version is the baby easy version and I didn't "really" beat it, but to them I cite the Battletoads Defense. I beat Battletoads. I earned this. Giving me the precision to aim my gun with my own arm helped me get good at this in a tangible way I could really feel, but it never felt too easy at the same time. Okay, so maybe I made the final boss a chump by saving that other rocket launcher for it, but other than that. This game didn't get its legendary status of having revolutionized character action games for no reason, after all. 14 years on, it still holds up and was one hell of a wild ride that I'm glad to have caught up with at long last. Speaking of...
Ah, at long last. This is the game that my pals stopped playing with me during our meetups because Resident Evil 4 came out. To polish them both off within six months of each other is cathartic. At its core, Tales Of Symphonia is a fairly good action RPG that felt more like a strategy game for me at times, swapping between the characters all by myself to queue up spells and whatnot. Story-wise, it's a whole other thing that really resonated with me. Not to give too much of this 15 year-old game away, but it very much is about the organized systems of this world all conspiring together to serve the petty whims of a privileged few. Thousands of years of suffering, torture, death, and false hope, all propagated by the hands of one masterminding asshole with noble intentions turned to bitter rage. Tearing it all the fuck down was satisfying as shit. Really, what else is there to say? If I haven't spoiled too much already, it's worth a go around.
We're running with a bit of a theme, here, as we hit the third entry in a row that's "I did something I should have done a long time ago". Mega Man ZX is, frankly, the game that made me want to get good at playing hard games. I'd like to think I partly succeeded in that goal, but I had never actually cleared the game that started it all on its hardest difficulty setting. There's good reason for that, as Hard Mode ZX doesn't fuck around. You have a piddly little lifebar where you can take all of three hits, and there are no heart tanks to boost it. You have to beat the game with that, and you can only find one energy tank to boot. It was grueling and meticulous, learning boss patterns and playing cat and mouse with each of them to eke out a victory. Then I had to take them all on in sequence and beat a multi-phase final boss. Needless to say, my heart was pounding out of my chest when I pulled that off. I'm proud to have put a cap in a personally resonant hard game, and I'm really looking forward to the Zero/ZX Collection on Switch in February.
Why in the holy hell did I buy Biolab Wars in December for my Contra-like fix when Blazing Chrome was right the hell there for me in July? I'm so glad it was, too, because this game is the legit shit. I cannot believe there was a world where I considered buying the "official" Contra game released in 2019. This thing blows it out of the water. The "loving tribute" games usually manage to pull off this quite well, and when you add the track record of developers Joymasher (who created the also excellent Oniken and Odallus), you've got one hell of a Contra-like on your hands. Aesthetically it will remind a Contra fan of Contra Hard Corps, which is a very good game! Blazing Chrome is also that, but I'd probably rather play Blazing Chrome if we're being honest. Gorgeous pixel art, great run and gun action, and a game that's hard but not too hard. Holy hell I loved this thing. I got to go through it on co-op a while back with a friend as well, and it was a good revisit that held up just as well as the initial plays in the summer. Like ZX, it's a game I was more than happy to put the work into to get good at. Maybe one day I'll put more into it and do its hard mode, but for now I'm good.
Alright, look. For years I kind of gave Zero Mission the side-eye because I loved the original game and this felt to me like it was stripping away the ambiance to homogenize it into a Super Metroid-like (because Metroid Must Be Alike). Turns out AM2R was the one I had to be worried about for doing that, but then a friend of mine started doing this challenge for themselves. I was intrigued and had never done it before, so I dusted off my copy and set about doing it myself. What I found was quite a lot of depth and intrigue in how I had to plan things. Getting 100% on a time limit meant mapping things out and plotting optimal order of item acquisition. Getting a lower time meant knowing what to grab and when was best to grab it. The game accomodates this at at every turn, even if it seems impossible at first. I still adore the ambiance and spookiness of the NES original, but I have to say that Zero Mission sold me on its merits after I played it eight times in various challenging ways. Not a replacement for the NES game, but still very good and incredibly well-designed. I'm happy I pulled this off.
So this one requires some setup. In March 2018 I impulse bought Fire Emblem Echoes, a game in a series I never really got into in the past. I wrote a bit of a thing about me liking it but then never actually finished the game, stopping about... 60% into it, maybe? It actually got a special section at the end of last year's GOTY list called "The Unfinished". Well, I dusted it off and powered through this year, but it was on Casual Mode so I didn't have the nail-biting hell of permanent death hanging over me. Still, it got me into the right mindset, and I played another Fire Emblem game I remembered liking and getting far into; The Sacred Stones. This one does have the permanent death, but you can also level grind in between battles. I really enjoyed Sacred Stones, and I amassed a pretty good murder squad by the end of it. This category exists to highlight these two, and how their graceful concessions to Fire Emblem's perceived hard edge helped me to get my foot in the door. I should mention I also bought Three Houses on impulse this year, but only played an hour of it. I did, however, start it on Classic Mode. Maybe 2020 will see me further break through this hard game barrier and really enjoy this series. We'll see, but for now, special thanks to the two esoteric, weird, and easy ones.
Games can be extra special when you play them with friends, and these two very good games got rocketed up to that extra special status thanks to that. We'll start with Stardew Valley since I did that first. I played this game exclusively in co-op over the summer with one of my best friends from high school. Every week, on his two days off, we'd set aside a few hours to play together and co-run a farm. Laying back on the couch in the cool basement on a warm summer night, Switch laid out in portable mode on the table while the tablet with a voice chat active sat on the floor beneath me so we could talk as we played. I ended up focusing most of my time in Stardew Valley on fishing, since the load of running the farm was shared between us. What all this ended up doing was making Stardew Valley an incredibly soothing unwind after a hard and hot summer day. I could kick back, get away from the heat and the work, and just fish on a pier while talking to a good friend. Stardew Valley almost made Game Of The Year for that alone, so you can believe that this was incredibly important to me. The same friend later gifted me his old PS4 for my birthday, and I got myself a copy of Monster Hunter World with it. Now, by contrast, this is not a relaxing game. It's high-paced action with deadly shit that wants to kill you, but I played what I could solo. When I couldn't or didn't want to deal with the harder stuff myself, that's where friend assistance came in. It gave us a fall routine, not unlike our Stardew Valley fun, and it also helped me grow stronger in the game. I did beat some of the tougher challenges in Monster Hunter World all on my own, including the final boss. As of this writing I have yet to delve into the Iceborne expansion, but that will come in due time. For now, I want to sit back and relax as I thank my pals for their generosity, and making these two lovely games stand out that much more with their help.
My criteria for Game Of The Year has always been a game that fills me with a particular positive emotion. Love, friendship, inspiration. You know. Sappy shit like that. Emotional resonance is the key to winning my heart and being the best computer game I played in a year, and Sayonara Wild Hearts is filled to the brim with that. Even before you get there, though, the presentation is absolutely stunning. Its gameplay is part rhythm game, part fast-paced dodging and weaving action reminscent of a certain Turbo Tunnel from a certain infamous hard game. All of this is conveyed with bright and stylished visuals, giving the game its own unique feel... but, let's get right to it. Sayonara Wild Hearts lands because of that incredible soundtrack. Its soundtrack is almost an album unto its own, merely using the medium of games and going fast on a motorbike or flying tarot card in space to tell a moving and inspiring story about loss and love, heartbreak and healing, regret and remembrance. It is simply beautiful, and helping matters for my own personal resonance is the fact that the game was suggested to me by quite the special person. Finishing Sayonara Wild Hearts, on vacation and away from that person while also reminded of them thanks to this stylish video game we could bond over when I got home? That was something truly special. I can't thank you enough for convincing me to get this game, and I hope I've convinced you at home to give it a shot as well. It's every resonant thing I could want in a game, and it easily earns Game Of The Year for me.
It's fun to make up categories for very special games, but sometimes there are runners-up that could also fill that category. Sometimes there are games you can't easily categorize quite like that. Sometimes a game was just okay, but not bad enough to be ignored on one of these lists. That's where And The Rest comes in, to highlight the rest of the interesting experiences I had this year. These games aren't lesser, and some of them are better than some of the things that got categories, but... well I'm not going through it all again. Let's roll them!
Yeah. I played some Splatoon this year. It's neat. I paid for a used copy of the original Splatoon years ago but only had a CRT, so I didn't get much use out of it. I dusted it off and played some multiplayer, and found it was interesting. Then I did the Octo Valley campaign and enjoyed its style enough to grab Splatoon 2 on the Switch. I haven't touched the Octo Expansion or any single-player, but I did manage to have good times in a few of the Splatfests before they ended. I'm not great at Splatoon or anything, but it served a fun little purpose a handful of times this year.
I wrote a whole thing about this... interesting experience back in January. I still don't know if it was a bad game, or if I played it badly. It's such a strange specimen of a mainline Mega Man game, and it's wild to compare it to ZX's Hard Mode. Their difficulties are nothing alike, but since X6 was one of the only computer games to get a deep dive write-up from me this year, I figured it deserved a slot down here. Good work, you... strange game, you.
I enjoyed Blaster Master Zero for what it was in 2018; a very good re imagining/retelling of a B-list NES game with fancy bells and whistles. Blaster Master Zero 2 is more of that, and though the mists of time have obscured a lot of the specifics of what made it great, I do remember it being solid enough to be worth playing, and thus solid enough to get on this list. Nice one, Inti Creates.
A fun, short, and very cute Metroid-style adventure featuring an adorable kitten running around in a mech suit doing the usual exploratory platformer thing of exploring and getting new items to do... more exploring. Fairly breezy and simple, all things considered, but it had a great deal of charm. It's quite nice, and I recommend it.
For some ungodly reason which still eludes me, I attempted to play the infamously bad Final Fantasy II with a supposed balance patch to make the thing... more balanced. At this point, I am convinced this is one of those games with no middle ground, except the middle ground in this case is "a well-balanced game with just the right amount of challenge". It is either a difficult slog or a ridiculously easy slog, and once again it was the latter for me. I almost wrote about it because of this, so I'm giving my own foolishness the nod here.
A difficult action platformer with a gnarly heavy metal theme going on. You know, I think I'd have to look up a Youtube video to remember most of the tricky stuff in this game, but I am remembering equal parts innate frustation and hard game satisfaction. Let's call it okay, if not a little unmemorable in my scatterbrained head, and move on to another highlight of the year.
Yes, this ended up down here. I mean, it's Mario Maker on the Switch. It is, in the end, very nice. I did enjoy the added story mode levels and had fun going through them, and there was some fun had in building my own levels and playing others. It didn't quite hold my attention all the way through the year, but I'll blame that on my own scatterbrain rather than the game. It's a lovely experience, and I can tinker with it again one day if I have down time and some fun level ideas come to me.
The series finale of the 3DS, if only Persona Q2 didn't come out after it. I love the hell out of some Etrian Odyssey, and I was excited to dig in to this loving tribute swan song to the series as the era of dual screen handheld Nintendo consoles faded away. It's an absolutely great game, and the only reason I didn't put it on the RPG thing over Tales of Symphonia is that it's about 25% too long for its own good. Long enough that I played it for three weeks straight and then shelved it for six months because I'd burned myself out on the dungeon crawling. Still, I did come back to it and get through some tricky challenges to finish the thing. I adored it, even if I had to let that adoration recharge. A fitting end to the series, unless Atlus and friends can figure out a way to make it work on the Switch.
I mean, it's very good. Not quite on the same level as Blazing Chrome when it comes to "new old" games, but very good nonetheless. It's cute girls beating the shit out of everything in sight for 5 hours, in a charming and well-presented way. Some of the beating the shit out of things is just a wee bit bullshitty, though, in that old beat-em-up way, which is a bit of a sour note. I still enjoyed this, and it's again fun to play in co-op with pals. Worth the wait when it was announced.
It's good. I don't really know if it was "80 Canadian dollars plus tax" good, mind you, but it's good. You have the rock solid foundation of one of the Game Boy's top games, with quality of life improvements and one of the best new coats of paint I've ever seen. Seriously, this game is beautiful and adorable and that alone is almost a selling point. Its new additions range from helpful to "okay that's there I guess". It even brings back the Trendy Crane Game, the easiest Zelda minigame that absolutely nobody had any trouble beating ever! I just wish it didn't cost me so much money to play a really really pretty Game Boy game from 1993.
For the third time, I have to throw up my hands and say "yeah it's good". It's another fun Pokemon adventure, but it didn't exactly completely light my world on fire which is why it's here. I still blazed through the main game in a weekend and had an absolute blast, and it's quite breezy with its quality of life improvements. Thanks to them chopping out half those Pokemon, I was able to complete the Pokedex again! Oh, and I look absolutely stylish in it. Yeah. Quite fun.
So this is how Shovel Knight ends. Intriguingly. The new King Knight expansion has some things to like about it. King Knight's moveset and playstyle is definitely interesting, with its dash and bash mechanic offering a balance between feeling great and puzzling your way through platforming challenges. I appreciate the move to a quantity of shorter levels, each with their own set of collectibles within, as it helps makes things nice and breezy in short bursts. I just really don't like that goddamned card game. Yes, it is kinda sorta optional. Yes, you can pay gold to cheat at it. Yes, it gets more tolerable as you go along and earn better cards with better pointy arrows. It still filled me with despair and dread when I saw I "had" to play more of it, and that's a real downer in an otherwise neat capstone to Shovel Knight content. Also the final boss sucks ass and is kind of unfair and unfun. Yikes.
Okay, that does it. Thanks for sitting through however the hell many words that is, and I offer my apologies to my future self who gets to spend Sunday morning and afternoon banging this together into the form of a coherent post with italics and image links and shit. Oh no I just gave you more work, didn't I? What's that? (Intrusion from the future: You son of a bitch.) Can't hear you over the time differential. To all of you at home though, I hope you enjoyed the list and that your 2019s were full of fun and good times all around. It's going to be a very interesting 2020, as I have not only some good new posts lined up but some good new games to crack into. Maybe I'll be writing about how good they are in a year's time! We'll find out. Until then, you all have a good one, and a very happy New Year to you when we all get to it! Much love!
(WORST) GAME OF THE YEAR 2019
Biolab Wars (Switch)
I almost feel bad for putting a spotlight on this poor little thing. It was only 2 dollars on the Switch Eshop, it's about an hour long, and thanks to the gold coins I technically didn't pay for it. Nevertheless, it was still really quite bad. On the surface, it looks to be sort of a Contra-esque game, but the vibe I got was a little more Mega Man with a deliberate focus on slower platforming challenges. It's hard to express the disappointment of this game without just letting one experience it, but I will try. It uses B to jump and A to shoot, which just feels awkward on a Switch controller and led to a lot of crossed wires and confusion. More to the point, it just does not feel good to play. It's very limited with its weapons, and things soak up just enough damage that they always manage to get a strike off towards you first. It is a slog, through and through, and for that it earns the stinker award. Not a game I'll be going back to any time soon...
BEST "ABOUT DAMN TIME" GAME OF 2019
Resident Evil 4 (Wii)
14 years. It's been 14 damn years since this game came out and haunted me for very personal reasons, but I have at last managed to blast my way through it. I have to say, it's quite the excellent little gem and still holds up. There may be a naysayer or two telling me the Wii version is the baby easy version and I didn't "really" beat it, but to them I cite the Battletoads Defense. I beat Battletoads. I earned this. Giving me the precision to aim my gun with my own arm helped me get good at this in a tangible way I could really feel, but it never felt too easy at the same time. Okay, so maybe I made the final boss a chump by saving that other rocket launcher for it, but other than that. This game didn't get its legendary status of having revolutionized character action games for no reason, after all. 14 years on, it still holds up and was one hell of a wild ride that I'm glad to have caught up with at long last. Speaking of...
BEST RPG OF 2019
Tales Of Symphonia (PS3)
Ah, at long last. This is the game that my pals stopped playing with me during our meetups because Resident Evil 4 came out. To polish them both off within six months of each other is cathartic. At its core, Tales Of Symphonia is a fairly good action RPG that felt more like a strategy game for me at times, swapping between the characters all by myself to queue up spells and whatnot. Story-wise, it's a whole other thing that really resonated with me. Not to give too much of this 15 year-old game away, but it very much is about the organized systems of this world all conspiring together to serve the petty whims of a privileged few. Thousands of years of suffering, torture, death, and false hope, all propagated by the hands of one masterminding asshole with noble intentions turned to bitter rage. Tearing it all the fuck down was satisfying as shit. Really, what else is there to say? If I haven't spoiled too much already, it's worth a go around.
HARDEST GAME OF 2019
Mega Man ZX Hard Mode (DS)
We're running with a bit of a theme, here, as we hit the third entry in a row that's "I did something I should have done a long time ago". Mega Man ZX is, frankly, the game that made me want to get good at playing hard games. I'd like to think I partly succeeded in that goal, but I had never actually cleared the game that started it all on its hardest difficulty setting. There's good reason for that, as Hard Mode ZX doesn't fuck around. You have a piddly little lifebar where you can take all of three hits, and there are no heart tanks to boost it. You have to beat the game with that, and you can only find one energy tank to boot. It was grueling and meticulous, learning boss patterns and playing cat and mouse with each of them to eke out a victory. Then I had to take them all on in sequence and beat a multi-phase final boss. Needless to say, my heart was pounding out of my chest when I pulled that off. I'm proud to have put a cap in a personally resonant hard game, and I'm really looking forward to the Zero/ZX Collection on Switch in February.
BEST "NEW OLD" GAME OF 2019
Blazing Chrome (Switch)
Why in the holy hell did I buy Biolab Wars in December for my Contra-like fix when Blazing Chrome was right the hell there for me in July? I'm so glad it was, too, because this game is the legit shit. I cannot believe there was a world where I considered buying the "official" Contra game released in 2019. This thing blows it out of the water. The "loving tribute" games usually manage to pull off this quite well, and when you add the track record of developers Joymasher (who created the also excellent Oniken and Odallus), you've got one hell of a Contra-like on your hands. Aesthetically it will remind a Contra fan of Contra Hard Corps, which is a very good game! Blazing Chrome is also that, but I'd probably rather play Blazing Chrome if we're being honest. Gorgeous pixel art, great run and gun action, and a game that's hard but not too hard. Holy hell I loved this thing. I got to go through it on co-op a while back with a friend as well, and it was a good revisit that held up just as well as the initial plays in the summer. Like ZX, it's a game I was more than happy to put the work into to get good at. Maybe one day I'll put more into it and do its hard mode, but for now I'm good.
BEST GAME ACCOMPLISHMENT OF 2019
Metroid Zero Mission All Endings (Game Boy Advance)
Alright, look. For years I kind of gave Zero Mission the side-eye because I loved the original game and this felt to me like it was stripping away the ambiance to homogenize it into a Super Metroid-like (because Metroid Must Be Alike). Turns out AM2R was the one I had to be worried about for doing that, but then a friend of mine started doing this challenge for themselves. I was intrigued and had never done it before, so I dusted off my copy and set about doing it myself. What I found was quite a lot of depth and intrigue in how I had to plan things. Getting 100% on a time limit meant mapping things out and plotting optimal order of item acquisition. Getting a lower time meant knowing what to grab and when was best to grab it. The game accomodates this at at every turn, even if it seems impossible at first. I still adore the ambiance and spookiness of the NES original, but I have to say that Zero Mission sold me on its merits after I played it eight times in various challenging ways. Not a replacement for the NES game, but still very good and incredibly well-designed. I'm happy I pulled this off.
BEST "BABY STEPS, I'M GETTING THERE" GAMES OF 2019
Fire Emblem Echoes & Fire Emblem The Sacred Stones (3DS/Game Boy Advance)
BEST CO-OP GAMES OF 2019
Monster Hunter World & Stardew Valley (PS4/Switch)
Games can be extra special when you play them with friends, and these two very good games got rocketed up to that extra special status thanks to that. We'll start with Stardew Valley since I did that first. I played this game exclusively in co-op over the summer with one of my best friends from high school. Every week, on his two days off, we'd set aside a few hours to play together and co-run a farm. Laying back on the couch in the cool basement on a warm summer night, Switch laid out in portable mode on the table while the tablet with a voice chat active sat on the floor beneath me so we could talk as we played. I ended up focusing most of my time in Stardew Valley on fishing, since the load of running the farm was shared between us. What all this ended up doing was making Stardew Valley an incredibly soothing unwind after a hard and hot summer day. I could kick back, get away from the heat and the work, and just fish on a pier while talking to a good friend. Stardew Valley almost made Game Of The Year for that alone, so you can believe that this was incredibly important to me. The same friend later gifted me his old PS4 for my birthday, and I got myself a copy of Monster Hunter World with it. Now, by contrast, this is not a relaxing game. It's high-paced action with deadly shit that wants to kill you, but I played what I could solo. When I couldn't or didn't want to deal with the harder stuff myself, that's where friend assistance came in. It gave us a fall routine, not unlike our Stardew Valley fun, and it also helped me grow stronger in the game. I did beat some of the tougher challenges in Monster Hunter World all on my own, including the final boss. As of this writing I have yet to delve into the Iceborne expansion, but that will come in due time. For now, I want to sit back and relax as I thank my pals for their generosity, and making these two lovely games stand out that much more with their help.
GAME OF THE YEAR 2019
Sayonara Wild Hearts (Switch)
My criteria for Game Of The Year has always been a game that fills me with a particular positive emotion. Love, friendship, inspiration. You know. Sappy shit like that. Emotional resonance is the key to winning my heart and being the best computer game I played in a year, and Sayonara Wild Hearts is filled to the brim with that. Even before you get there, though, the presentation is absolutely stunning. Its gameplay is part rhythm game, part fast-paced dodging and weaving action reminscent of a certain Turbo Tunnel from a certain infamous hard game. All of this is conveyed with bright and stylished visuals, giving the game its own unique feel... but, let's get right to it. Sayonara Wild Hearts lands because of that incredible soundtrack. Its soundtrack is almost an album unto its own, merely using the medium of games and going fast on a motorbike or flying tarot card in space to tell a moving and inspiring story about loss and love, heartbreak and healing, regret and remembrance. It is simply beautiful, and helping matters for my own personal resonance is the fact that the game was suggested to me by quite the special person. Finishing Sayonara Wild Hearts, on vacation and away from that person while also reminded of them thanks to this stylish video game we could bond over when I got home? That was something truly special. I can't thank you enough for convincing me to get this game, and I hope I've convinced you at home to give it a shot as well. It's every resonant thing I could want in a game, and it easily earns Game Of The Year for me.
...AND THE REST
It's fun to make up categories for very special games, but sometimes there are runners-up that could also fill that category. Sometimes there are games you can't easily categorize quite like that. Sometimes a game was just okay, but not bad enough to be ignored on one of these lists. That's where And The Rest comes in, to highlight the rest of the interesting experiences I had this year. These games aren't lesser, and some of them are better than some of the things that got categories, but... well I'm not going through it all again. Let's roll them!
Splatoon/Splatoon 2 (Wii U/Switch)
Yeah. I played some Splatoon this year. It's neat. I paid for a used copy of the original Splatoon years ago but only had a CRT, so I didn't get much use out of it. I dusted it off and played some multiplayer, and found it was interesting. Then I did the Octo Valley campaign and enjoyed its style enough to grab Splatoon 2 on the Switch. I haven't touched the Octo Expansion or any single-player, but I did manage to have good times in a few of the Splatfests before they ended. I'm not great at Splatoon or anything, but it served a fun little purpose a handful of times this year.
Mega Man X6 (PS1)
I wrote a whole thing about this... interesting experience back in January. I still don't know if it was a bad game, or if I played it badly. It's such a strange specimen of a mainline Mega Man game, and it's wild to compare it to ZX's Hard Mode. Their difficulties are nothing alike, but since X6 was one of the only computer games to get a deep dive write-up from me this year, I figured it deserved a slot down here. Good work, you... strange game, you.
Blaster Master Zero 2 (Switch)
I enjoyed Blaster Master Zero for what it was in 2018; a very good re imagining/retelling of a B-list NES game with fancy bells and whistles. Blaster Master Zero 2 is more of that, and though the mists of time have obscured a lot of the specifics of what made it great, I do remember it being solid enough to be worth playing, and thus solid enough to get on this list. Nice one, Inti Creates.
Gato Roboto (Switch)
A fun, short, and very cute Metroid-style adventure featuring an adorable kitten running around in a mech suit doing the usual exploratory platformer thing of exploring and getting new items to do... more exploring. Fairly breezy and simple, all things considered, but it had a great deal of charm. It's quite nice, and I recommend it.
Final Fantasy II: Mod Of Balance (Game Boy Advance)
For some ungodly reason which still eludes me, I attempted to play the infamously bad Final Fantasy II with a supposed balance patch to make the thing... more balanced. At this point, I am convinced this is one of those games with no middle ground, except the middle ground in this case is "a well-balanced game with just the right amount of challenge". It is either a difficult slog or a ridiculously easy slog, and once again it was the latter for me. I almost wrote about it because of this, so I'm giving my own foolishness the nod here.
Slain: Back From Hell (Switch)
A difficult action platformer with a gnarly heavy metal theme going on. You know, I think I'd have to look up a Youtube video to remember most of the tricky stuff in this game, but I am remembering equal parts innate frustation and hard game satisfaction. Let's call it okay, if not a little unmemorable in my scatterbrained head, and move on to another highlight of the year.
Super Mario Maker 2 (Switch)
Yes, this ended up down here. I mean, it's Mario Maker on the Switch. It is, in the end, very nice. I did enjoy the added story mode levels and had fun going through them, and there was some fun had in building my own levels and playing others. It didn't quite hold my attention all the way through the year, but I'll blame that on my own scatterbrain rather than the game. It's a lovely experience, and I can tinker with it again one day if I have down time and some fun level ideas come to me.
Etrian Odyssey Nexus (3DS)
The series finale of the 3DS, if only Persona Q2 didn't come out after it. I love the hell out of some Etrian Odyssey, and I was excited to dig in to this loving tribute swan song to the series as the era of dual screen handheld Nintendo consoles faded away. It's an absolutely great game, and the only reason I didn't put it on the RPG thing over Tales of Symphonia is that it's about 25% too long for its own good. Long enough that I played it for three weeks straight and then shelved it for six months because I'd burned myself out on the dungeon crawling. Still, I did come back to it and get through some tricky challenges to finish the thing. I adored it, even if I had to let that adoration recharge. A fitting end to the series, unless Atlus and friends can figure out a way to make it work on the Switch.
River City Girls (Switch)
I mean, it's very good. Not quite on the same level as Blazing Chrome when it comes to "new old" games, but very good nonetheless. It's cute girls beating the shit out of everything in sight for 5 hours, in a charming and well-presented way. Some of the beating the shit out of things is just a wee bit bullshitty, though, in that old beat-em-up way, which is a bit of a sour note. I still enjoyed this, and it's again fun to play in co-op with pals. Worth the wait when it was announced.
The Legend Of Zelda: Link's Awakening (Switch)
It's good. I don't really know if it was "80 Canadian dollars plus tax" good, mind you, but it's good. You have the rock solid foundation of one of the Game Boy's top games, with quality of life improvements and one of the best new coats of paint I've ever seen. Seriously, this game is beautiful and adorable and that alone is almost a selling point. Its new additions range from helpful to "okay that's there I guess". It even brings back the Trendy Crane Game, the easiest Zelda minigame that absolutely nobody had any trouble beating ever! I just wish it didn't cost me so much money to play a really really pretty Game Boy game from 1993.
Pokemon Shield (Switch)
For the third time, I have to throw up my hands and say "yeah it's good". It's another fun Pokemon adventure, but it didn't exactly completely light my world on fire which is why it's here. I still blazed through the main game in a weekend and had an absolute blast, and it's quite breezy with its quality of life improvements. Thanks to them chopping out half those Pokemon, I was able to complete the Pokedex again! Oh, and I look absolutely stylish in it. Yeah. Quite fun.
Shovel Knight: King Of Cards (Switch)
So this is how Shovel Knight ends. Intriguingly. The new King Knight expansion has some things to like about it. King Knight's moveset and playstyle is definitely interesting, with its dash and bash mechanic offering a balance between feeling great and puzzling your way through platforming challenges. I appreciate the move to a quantity of shorter levels, each with their own set of collectibles within, as it helps makes things nice and breezy in short bursts. I just really don't like that goddamned card game. Yes, it is kinda sorta optional. Yes, you can pay gold to cheat at it. Yes, it gets more tolerable as you go along and earn better cards with better pointy arrows. It still filled me with despair and dread when I saw I "had" to play more of it, and that's a real downer in an otherwise neat capstone to Shovel Knight content. Also the final boss sucks ass and is kind of unfair and unfun. Yikes.
Okay, that does it. Thanks for sitting through however the hell many words that is, and I offer my apologies to my future self who gets to spend Sunday morning and afternoon banging this together into the form of a coherent post with italics and image links and shit. Oh no I just gave you more work, didn't I? What's that? (Intrusion from the future: You son of a bitch.) Can't hear you over the time differential. To all of you at home though, I hope you enjoyed the list and that your 2019s were full of fun and good times all around. It's going to be a very interesting 2020, as I have not only some good new posts lined up but some good new games to crack into. Maybe I'll be writing about how good they are in a year's time! We'll find out. Until then, you all have a good one, and a very happy New Year to you when we all get to it! Much love!
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