This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

I couldn’t tell you why, but I have had Smoke and Sacrifice on my radar forever. I must have watched the shortest trailer of it, and was sold before I even knew what it actually entailed. I mean the visuals are striking with the characters seeming like they have big head mode permanently on, but if I had done a little bit more research I probably wouldn’t have bought it.. That’s not an early admission if the game is good or not, but rather a big proponent of this game is crafting, and crafting by itself is one of the mechanics in video games I enjoy the least. This won’t just delve into a crafting rant, but by and large I don’t enjoy the games where crafting is the big tenant. Games like Rust, Ark, Conan Exiles, and to a point Minecraft don’t do anything for me. Yes, do I think people can create amazing things in those games, of course.. Do I think that those games have more than just crafting in them, sure.. but everything in those games is done with crafting being the main gameplay mechanic. Some could argue that Stardew Valley, a game I have very high on my list, is also a crafting game, because you have to build chests, sprinklers, or fences in the game. However, this is the crafting that I can tolerate, because I can also spend multiple a whole month in that game, not crafting and making lots of progress through fishing, mining, or regular farming without having to constantly put rocks and sticks together.

Ok, so we got off track a little bit, but it helps set the stage for Smoke and Sacrifice which is part action game and part crafting game. You play as a mother named Sachi who lives in a post-apocalyptic world where the sun has burnt out. Sachi’s home is a small patch of land that is powered by the “sun tree” which is complex machinery that is acting as a replacement sun but only works for a small area. The community worships the sun tree and in order to keep it running, the first born of every family is sacrificed to it, in order for it to continue working. One day when Sachi’s camp is attacked by monsters, she stumbles through a teleporter and finds that there is a world beneath hers that is very different. Here is where you come in to see if you can figure out what is happening in this underworld, and if you can survive and get back to your home.

We’ll start with the story since its right here in front of everyone. As you might imagine, the underworld is what is powering the sun tree and the people who are toiling in the underworld are all of the children that were “sacrificed” at birth to keep it running. Being down in the underworld for so long has made them forget any part of their life that was before being down here, and the live as slaves being forced to work machines or gather items to hit work quotas to survive. Fairly early on, your adventure turns to trying to find where your child is, and rescuing them from this world and that becomes your driving focus. You will learn that the church, or cult of the sun tree are.. you guessed it, behind this whole thing and while some might believe they are being altruistic and doing this to keep society afloat, some are in it for the power and control they have over the group. The story will then take you into helping out a resistance, fighting against those in charge as well as what you plan to do if your ultimate plans are going to destroy the sun tree. How would the group above ground survive? Will you find your son? What will happen?

The story isn’t actually too bad when you get into the thick of it. I do think it’s a little easy to see what direction it was going as I don’t think you could start this game up and not predict who the bad guys are 5 minutes into the game. This is an issue in video games in general, but where this games story can take a hit is in the pacing of it. Main quests are going to give you the story content you might want, but in order to hit some of those main quests you might need to spend a lot of time looking for very specific resources to then craft into something you need, fighting very specific enemies to gather items all before you can carry on a conversation or make a step towards the end. Again, this isn’t unique to Smoke and Sacrifice, hell I have wasted literal days doing side activities in something like Yakuza before I was supposed to continue the story, but I think the difference here is that I opted to stop in Yakuza to do the side stuff, and in this game you HAVE to stop to do the crafting aspect.

Ok, so lets talk about this gameplay that I keep alluding to. In S & S you navigate the underworld in a Isometric/top down look at your character and their surroundings. The world is divided into different Biomes, but is technically an open world where you can go anywhere you want, as long as you have the correct gear. When you are starting off you are limited to this grasslands/forest esque biome where you can pick plants that are growing, break vases that might have resources, punch trees that might loosen up some fruit or a branch, and fight a few enemies. You have plenty of inventory space (in the beginning) where you can literally pick up everything you ever find (items thankfully stack) and you just expand the map until you can see everything this area has. As you talk to the “drear” (essentially the almost zombified people who work in the underground) you will uncover recipes for crafting, whether that be a lantern, or your first weapon, etc. Eventually as you are completing quests you will eventually be given a quest that has requires you to go to a different biome and you will learn that at the very least you need special shoes before your character can walk around in that area without dying. In the Ice biome you will need warm boots, in the fire biome you will need fire-proof shoes, then there are rubber shoes to walk around the electrical biome, and eventually more gear for the poison biome. Pretty standard stuff, so you first have to get the recipe and then you craft the item and on and on it goes. There are save points and fast travel points around the map (you will have to pay to unlock the fast travel, like 3 coins you find in game.. not real money), but as you progress the recipes get more complex and might require you to make the item at a cookpot, workbench, or factory machine. These are things you can find around the world, and sadly not something you can build.

Eventually your inventory will balloon up and then the real fun beings (or the opposite of that). You will at any given time be carrying around multiple weapons, multiple boots or headgear (because the upgraded boots still only work on one biome), food for healing, and a boatload of other resources because you never know what a recipe is going to call for. You do have a fairly robust inventory space, and in the beginning of the game you won’t come anywhere close to filling it even if you pick up every item, but for the back half of the game, you can expect to constantly be battling with space. There are chests you can unlock (if you find a key) that are scattered around the world which will give you some reprieve, but you will never truly know what you can drop off and never need again, because there is degradation of weapons, items, and many resources. Weapons can break if you don’t keep them repaired, same for armor, your torch can run out of light and need to be fixed. Some resources just go bad like meat or veggies if they aren’t cooked into a proper dish, nearly everything is on some timer that you constantly have to keep paying attention to, or keep the resources in your possession so you can address these issues as they arise. As you start factoring these things in, the amount of space that seemed abundant earlier on now seems very small. By the end of the game I was carrying 5 or so different boots, at least 3 different weapons, a ranged weapon + Ammo (2 separate slots), armor, 2 helmets, repair mix for weapons and armor (2 more slots), at least two different types of cooked food, coins for fast travel portals, a torch + repair part for that, and probably at least 2 quest items.. That is 22 items for what seems like a fairly needed setup, and I am sure this is common in these types of games, but boy do I hate having to constantly travel between chests to just keep swapping around items to progress.

Combat is a fairly large part of this game as well, not just because there are a lot of enemies, but because you will need certain resources that only enemies can give you. There is an attack button, dodge button, and you will eventually learn a full-block button, but a lot of the combat is learning what your enemies can do. Until you start getting more powerful weapons, you will have to learn when to attack and when to get out of the way as each enemy has their own attack pattern. I wouldn’t put any of the fights on par with Dark Souls battles, but you will fight some bosses where you will need to be able to roll in, attack twice, roll out just to slowly wear down their health bar. With that said, it is incredibly rewarding to take down an enemy that has been giving you trouble for the first time, or defeat a mini-boss and watch the bounty of resources pop out of them when they die. There is a day/night cycle that is always in affect which not only requires you to have a working torch for night time (if you don’t you will slowly choke and die in the smog), but also makes enemies more aggressive during night time. I would never recommend standing around until day time just to take on a battle, and there are enemies that are only available at day or night that you will eventually need to hunt down. While the excitement exists for the first time you tackle a new enemy or master their pattern, when you have to fight the giant bore 6 or 7 times in a row, simply because you need to harvest the resource only they have, then it can feel quite tedious.

Should you die, you will automatically reload at the last time you saved the game, there are no checkpoints here and if you get carried away and try to save it only once a sitting, you are eventually going to end up losing a lot of progress. There are some save points that pop up right before taking on actual bosses, so you at least can retry those rather quickly, but getting stuck in an unfamiliar biome can lead to death rather quickly as you attempt to learn new enemies or what you can eat in the area. The game is bound to burn you at least once, just to let you know what you screwed up.

Despite being considered an RPG, there is no leveling up in this game. Your character never gains a level and gets better attributes, everything comes down to your actual skill in fighting and pattern recognition and what items you equip. A better sword will make quicker work of some enemies, and a better armor will allow you to take more hits, standard faire, but there is no goal level you need to be at for any part of the game. You could spend 20 hours of the game fighting slimes and you won’t be any better off then someone who rolls past every enemy and only fights bosses. This is both a blessing and a curse. I am an RPG nut and I just like seeing numbers go up and sometimes over leveling so I can just wallop enemies into submission without putting in thought, obviously I can’t do this here. So while there were some tough boss fights that took me multiple attempts, and I would have loved to go “gain a few levels” before trying again I also know that every victory is one that I earned through my own ability and not because my numbers were better. Fight enough giant bores and you can beat them without getting hit, simply because you have memorized their attack patterns.

I think this game took me around 8 hours, probably less and while on paper I love that length of a game, this game feels long because there are just chunks of time where it is hard to see the progress you are making. Sure I spent a lot of time gathering enough resources to craft fire boots or make a new sword that is going to help in the long run, but at the same time I didn’t clear a single quest or make real progress. Hell I spent about 30 minutes before the final boss, stocking up on food, and that requires fighting lesser enemies, and gathering vegetables and then finding a cookpot to cook everything. It’s not hard work, but it is work.

While Smoke and Sacrifice had a lot to overcome for me, because if I am still being honest, I just don't care for the crafting genre still. I can commend this game being competent or interesting in its other features, but it still has an uphill climb for me to think that this would be a game I would recommend others play, or even one I would like to re-visit. This game does have replay value if you want to unlock all the recipes or try out and craft different weapons, but that is farthest from my mind in terms of a reason to revisit. The story and world are interesting, but as I mentioned there is a pacing problem because at any given time you have to stop and gather resources or craft before you can make progress in a story.. That happens in all games, but felt rougher in this one, since I didn't care for the in-between. I feel like the analogy here is saying, I like Street Fighter games, except for all that fighting.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: ummm... no

Where does it rank: Smoke and Sacrifice was better then I thought it would be, once I started seeing all the crafting tendrils creeping around the game, but that isn't to say its the greatest of all time. I have it ranked as the 125th greatest game of all time. Every step forward I felt I made in terms of enjoying the combat or engaging with the story, would come crashing down when I would have to spend 20 minutes looking for a shoe recipe and crafting supplies before I could move forward. I also hated the constant item countdowns that you would have to manage in the later game. Watching closely to see if any weapon or armor needs repair, because if it broke outright you would have to build a new one, making sure you prioritize cooking or eating food before it goes bad, and constantly having to repair your lantern for every night cycle.

What's it Between: Smoke and Sacrifice sits between Hand of Fate (124th) and Let's Build a Zoo (126th)

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

Another day and another mystery game reviewed for this series. After finishing up the latest Microids’ Agatha Christie game (that is only borrowing characters and not actually from a book that she had a say in), me and my wife needed another game that we could play together on those few nights where we want to solve mysteries ourselves outside of normal parental duties. Enter “Lord Winklebottom Investigates,” a recent switch purchase because it looked just weird enough to be interesting, but also if it turned out to be good would tickle our fancy of being a new mystery game that is more on puzzles then on action. Well we were in luck, because this game was more than just the weird I was promised while looking at the back of the box, and delivered a fairly competent game as well, so lets talk about a game no one has heard of until now.

Winklebottom, as we are going to call the game now, is pretty close to a point and click adventure game that has a lot of roots in Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie detective stories. You will pick up and carry around items to be either combined inside your inventory or used on later puzzles. In addition you will be questioning other characters and travelling through multiple screens, including an “island map,” in order to solve the mystery in front of you. When comparing it to adventure games, this has more in common with the adventure games of the 90s, then it does with the Agatha Christie games of today. You may be solving a murder mystery in both, but this is more of inventory puzzles and less conversation based solutions. The most notable thing about this game is that you play as the titular Lord Winklebottom, who is a Giraffe detective, and are accompanied by your Watson, which is a hippopotamus named Dr. Frumple. Yes, these are actual animals that you play as and not just character stand ins and they are fully voiced, so you don’t have to worry about parsing out the sounds of a Hippo. You will also come across all sorts of other animals (gecko, slug, pigeon, dogs, etc.) as there are no humans in this game… well kind of, there is a plot line that briefly discusses that humans used to exist in this world, but something happened that caused them to no longer exist. It isn’t really touched on further, but there is a story reason as to why you might be playing as animals.

Before we dive into the ins and outs of this game, I will say that this game is very much a comedy game. That might be apparent based on the name of the characters or even the fact that you are playing as animals during a murder mystery, but humor plays a big role in this game. I know comedy can be hard to pull off and it is very subjective to anyone who plays this game. I am no expert, but I would say this game has a very dry and subdued sense of humor as opposed to games that are a little more in your face. Winklebottom and Dr. Frumple are a good comedy duo that play off each other very well, and there were multiple times during the game where me or my wife had actual audible laughter from the game and not just a smirk or smile. I am not going to even pretend that everyone will find this game funny, it has more British sensibilities then Americanized ones, and only you know what you might find funny. However, the reason I want to get this part out in the beginning of the write-up is that if the comedy does not work for you, I don’t know if the game itself will either. It’s a perfectly competent and fine mystery, but I don’t think anyone would play through this entire game if they bounced hard off the humor. The charm is in the characters and the humor, even the timing of the jokes (I was letting dialogue play out, instead of putting through it, because comedy is about timing and you need to hear the timing for some of the bits for it to work), so if you want a murder mystery to be serious, or even somewhat grounded in reality.. then I suppose you can quickly move on from this recommendation.

On to the story, when we join our heroes they are invited to a friends house who has a big announcement to make. No one knows what the announcement will be, so Winklebottom and Dr. Frumple head out in a storm to get to the house of their friend. Only to quickly learn that he was found dead by the maid mere minutes before their arrival. Now due to the storm that is ravaging the island outside, it is up to Winklebottom and Dr. Frumple to investigate and solve the crime and ultimately who is responsible for the death of their friend. As you start to solve puzzles, interview potential suspects, you will of course learn that there are multiple people who all had a motive for the crime, and they almost always amount to: “thought their dark secret was going to be part of the announcement.” Overall I would say the plot is what you can expect from these types of games. The mystery is intriguing enough, and there doesn’t seem to be one character that ultimately stands out to be the villain that you can hone in on early on, so there were multiple occasions where after playing the game (for the night) me and my wife would discuss the case while brushing our teeth about where we think its going. I will offer a BUT here, because I felt like the back 3^rd of the game is incredibly rushed and felt like the developers either didn’t know how to end it, or simply they ran out of money. This is kickstarter game, and while I wasn’t aware of it ahead of time nor did I back it, the game is divided into chapters, but based purely on an hour count, chapter 1 and 2 are maybe 2-3 hours each, while chapter 3 and epilogue are a combined 1 hour. I won’t spoil the end of the game, but it feels like once you identify the culprit (who escapes), the tracking them down, dealing with them, and resolution of everything plays out almost completely absent of you in control. I understand that the game needs to wrap up, and they can’t have you go back to simply combing the whole island once you are searching for the killer, but I still felt there were scenes that could have used a puzzle, and instead just played out like a movie with you (the player) watching instead of actually playing. Outside of the rushed ending, I thought the story was certainly good enough to keep me invested and see what was going to happen. *Spoilers* One final note, is that it did the thing I hate in mysteries where there is no way to solve the real crime by piecing the clues together on your own. Since we are in spoiler territory here, me and my wife had picked out the chameleon as potentially being the guilty party, and we were half right, but there is no indication that the frog (the other guilty party) should even be considered because you don’t know his truth until you are told that he is lying about his name 20 minutes before the end. I know it can be hard to put everything out in the open and still cast doubt on everyone to make the reveal satisfying, but I would like to believe that if given all the clues and thoroughly exploring a location, reading all the notes, that you might be able to draw a conclusion that matches the detective, and not just be told here is the answer. *End Spoiler*

With any adventure game, we need to talk about the puzzles. I can give my usual spiel about how puzzles are going to vary person to person, but overall I feel Lord Winklebottom is a pretty light difficulty in terms of its puzzles. That is obviously not to say all of them are gimmies, and there were a few where you have to be willing to think outside the box, but I felt a lot of the items you get you can figure out just where to use them without having to “try everything on everything.” This is maybe my adventure game experience coming into play, but there were some instances where, before you can pick up the item you need to solve the puzzle, you first have to be “stumped” by the puzzle to “realize” you need an item. I understand from a character perspective, “Why would I carry around the hose all day,” but that perspective breaks when you are allowed to pick everything else up with no questions asked about it. This game is primarily inventory item puzzles, which can sometimes require you to need one item, that unlocks another item, that unlocks another, until you finally get to the item you need to give someone, and there is one puzzle later in the game that requires you to navigate through a forest maze by looking to see about any “disturbance” in the area to help determine which direction you need to go. There is an in-game help system, where you can ask Dr. Frumple what you should do next, but his clues are not gimmies, and it did not seem like if you click it more than once that he will eventually just give you the answer. There was one part where I was stuck as to what to do next, and the clue was simply “we should finish interviewing everyone,” and I had to go walk around until I found the single character that had a line of dialogue that I missed previously. Obviously I can only speak for myself, I was very rarely stumped on puzzles, never had to google an answer, and only relied on Dr. Frumple’s advice two or three times throughout the whole game. Do I think they are easy enough to have my kids solve them? Certainly not, but I don’t think this game has the abstract or random puzzles that were in the adventure games of yore.

Overall I enjoyed Winklebottom quite a bit and considering I bought it as a joke to show my wife, is a fairly good return. Where it ranks on your own personal list will probably depend largely on whether or not you enjoyed the sense of humor for the game, because the story and puzzles are not something on their own that I think this game does particularly better then other games of the genre. While I remember all the puzzles now, I don’t think they stay with me a month after beating the game, and the detective story is fun but also not as mysterious or intriguing to solve as some Sherlock games or even the ABC murders. But, with all that said, the humor can carry it above those things because it worked for me. I wasn’t rolling on the floor laughing everytime we played it, waking up kids in the neighborhood, but even real chuckles over small smirks is enough. I would be very curious about continuing the adventure of Lord Winklebottom as they solve more mysteries, should those games ever exist, and while that might not seem like much, since I have played bad Poirot games in the past and still purchased the follow up, I would love to see more.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: ummm... no

Where does it rank: Lord Winklebottom is a fairly fun albeit brief mystery game that I would gladly take it over all of the Agatha Christie games. Its humor goes a long way for me which helps it lift up a few notches. The ending feels rushed, the puzzles are a little on the easy side for my liking, and I would have loved another location or two in the game. I have it ranked as the 77th Greatest Game of All Time.

What's it Between: Lord Winklebottom Sits between: Elli (78th) and Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars (76th)

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

Ok look, I don’t want to start off hostile, but I finished Mario 3d world and Bowser’s fury about 2 to 3 weeks ago, and I could have written about it for so long, but I really can’t find much to say about the game. I think the Mario 3d world portion is incredibly forgetful and kind of uninspiring for a Mario game. Yes, I know that the switch version is a port of the Wii-U game and it was perhaps magical or memorable at its time (I didn’t play it then, and I don’t own a Wii-U). However, I couldn’t bring myself to muster a lot of energy for the game, while I played or now, while I try to write about it. Let’s put it through its paces, but just know my heart is not in this one.

If we pretend you don’t know what this game is (and we are starting with just Mario 3d world), Mario 3d world is a 3d platformer staring a tradesman who never brings his tools on an adventure. You and up to 3 other buddies take control of Mario and some of his favorite pals as you go through close to 9000 levels attempting to grab some green stars and climb to the highest peak of the flagpole. There are some new powerups, mainly the cat powerup which turns you into a cat that can climb walls, use your claws to break bricks or attack enemies, and soar through the air. Bowser is at it again as he captures all the fairies that I guess have wandered into this game thinking it was a Zelda game, grants himself the wish of being a big cat, and then bottles up the fairies and leaves them strewn around the world, instead of holed up in one castle. Will Mario and friends free the fairies that you are just being introduced to? Who cares.. this summer from Nintendo.

I am trying desperately, while sitting at this keyboard, to think of one memorable level outside the final confrontation with Bowser, and I honestly can’t do it. I mean I remember the different worlds, I remember some aspects of levels where you ride a dinosaur that looks like it came from the Flintstones, but I couldn’t tell you the name of a level that I thought was truly great stuff. The thing is, I did everything there was to do in this game. I collected the 3 green stars from every level, I got all the stamps (not the ones that require playing as the same character for every level), I reached the top of the flagpole in every level, and I even beat the super hard final levels (boss rush, and regular platforming level). I did as much as possible to 100% this game outside of clearing every level with every available character. You may wonder why I would essentially 100% a game I clearly didn’t seem to enjoy, and you aren’t wrong for asking that question, but the thing is even a bad Mario game has a level of quality and polish that others may be missing. The difference with this particular game is that the magic is gone and this seems formulaic, which doesn’t suit a Mario game. Is the cat suit a fun addition? Sure, but it’s the closest we might get to having a P wing in a game again. With the cat suit on you can bypass large sections or even save yourself from certain death. I never felt like I was cheating when wearing it (in fact a lot of collectables require it) but I also felt that I was missing the point of some levels. Oh am I supposed to go up floor by floor in this level? Well with the cat suit I can just climb up like two or three at a time and ignore everything around me.

Maybe the main culprit of this game is time. When this game originally came out, there was no Mario Odyssey or Mario Wonder, or even Bowser’s Fury (which we will get to later). Those three games put some joy back into the little plumber and broke from its formula to inject some exploration, wimsy, fun, and a new perspective. This game doesn’t have any of those traits, and the only thing it has going for it is “multiplayer.” I love the Idea of playing this game with my kids or my wife and we tackle going for stars together, but I just don’t think this game in particular works well in multiplayer. To start, this is a single camera game, and while I don’t know if this game could work in split screen or 4-way split, the issue here is that the whole group has to follow in one person’s footsteps. If a character gets too far off screen, they will either teleport back to you, or die because they can’t see what they are doing. So everyone has to stay together, but there also isn’t enough on screen for everyone to feel like they are participating. You come across one collectable at a time, and whether you play democratically or anarchistic, since everyone has to follow the camera you will find yourself having to play follow the leader to pretend to collect something that isn’t even there anymore. Now the leader is determined by who did best and gets a crown based on previous level performance, so you could technically turn the game into a competition with each other, but if you are trying to actually get the stars and beat the game, you all need to be together anyway. What would put this idea over the top is if you could pull off the dynamic split screen like later Lego games, so that you could have people tackle different aspects of the level at the same time. Now there are certain times in levels when everyone would be forced to come together, boss fights, rolling log, etc. but having a few levels where you have to stick together is tolerable in comparison to every level being bunched up. I just think that it gives everyone something to do, collect coins, beat enemies, gather stars, or just make it to the end, and you don’t have to have one leader who gets to dictate that whole thing.

My kids eventually dropped wanting to play as they preferred going back to Odyssey or Wonder, and one got way into Galaxy, since they have the benefit of those games being out and in our possession. I didn’t blame them, but they never had the desire to see other worlds or levels as while they never stated it, they clearly weren’t as intrigued about what this game held. I’m not intelligent enough to delve into development issues or timeframes, or anything regarding that.. But I just don’t understand their idea with this game. They did the multiplayer all at the same time with Super Mario bros Wii, they have done better 3d in Mario 64, Galaxy, Galaxy 2, and even Sunshine, so were people asking for “what if Super Mario Bros Wii was in 3d?” Did they come up with the idea of a catsuit first and then making a game came second? I am sure there is an obvious answer, I just don’t have it.

Ok, so what nice things do I have to say.. First, it’s a Mario game so there is a base line level of competence, which we already covered a little bit. The platforming is going to feel good, and the world is going to be bright and colorful, and the challenge level is going to ramp up at an acceptable level. It’s a good idea having the character select, like in Mario 2, before each level. I liked using the random function, just to see different flags dot each world, but it allows you to experiment with switching to Peach or Luigi on a level where you want that hover or flutter jump. Uhhh.. the catsuit is fun, but way overused in this game and overpowered. The fun of other powerups is that there is a use case in other games, there are use cases for them. Fire Flowers work great for water levels, or levels with lots of enemies, while the leaf power up is for levels with more precise jumps, or open areas. In Super Mario 3d world, the best powerup in all instances is the cat suit. Level with lots of enemies? Cat Suit. Level with tough platforming? Cat Suit. Level to help you get the top of the pole bonus? Cat Suit.

Alright I have to pivot because I’m just out of things to say. If this review was just for this game, it would be easily bottom half of the list, because it is just a forgettable formulaic entry in a series that is mostly known for being inventive and fun. However, we are going to talk about Bowser’s Fury as it is a pack in with this game (on the switch). Bowser’s Fury is a single player only adventure where you play as Mario who is trying to help Bowser Jr. calm his dad down. The crux of this game is that the whole game takes place in one 3d world that is divided into sections, but you can essentially travel anywhere at any time. You are still earning “Cat shines” which will unlock areas, or count towards your total to awaken bells for boss fights with Bowser, but there is no set order to the shines you have to earn or areas you have to go to next.

Before we go much farther, Bowser’s Fury is a drastic improvement over 3D world. While there aren’t levels per say, there are moments that are more memorable, Bowser feels at his most menacing and getting the shines at some of the sections are more fun then nearly any level in 3D world. If you were sensing a “but” coming up, you were right. Everyone lost their mind over this pack-in and said things like “Mario should go this way in the future,” but I don’t see how anyone could think this is a more interesting take then Mario Odyssey which came out before this. I got all 100 Cat Shines or however many there were, fought final Bowser twice to make sure I got the fully formed picture at the end credits, but I only saw this as a huge leap when I put it in comparison to it’s pack in partner. That’s not to say there aren’t good things to talk about, which we can.. but this is to say that I don’t think this should be the future of the 3d series.

Let’s dissect. The most important aspect is that this is truly an “open” world that Mario has gotten so far. There are no loading screens between areas, and assuming you have the sections unlocked you can run, jump, and swim your way from one section to the other with no interruption. While that is similar to Mario Odyssey, there are certainly more segregated areas in Odyssey. You might have to navigate through 3 change screens to get from one are to the other in Odyssey, while its all one continuous world here in Fury. In Fury the big gameplay mechanic is that Bowser comes out and harasses you basically on a timer regardless of where you are. The weather starts to change from Sunny and bright to rainy and dark, and eventually you start getting attacked with fireballs and angrier enemies then normal. This can create some nice tension while going for your average run of the mill Shine. Something that may have been a simple platforming section, now with the backdrop of angry Bowser is a harrowing race against time so you don’t die. Since these aren’t scripted moments though, they can be missed. Bowser could come out, 5 seconds before you touch a shine, and when you do touch it.. he disappears. I suppose you could wait at areas to give yourself a challenge, but the timing can be long between attacks, and that’s a lot of time to have Mario stand still just for a forced encounter. When he does pop out, you can engage him in a boss fight if you run to an unlocked bell, and these boss fights are certainly some of the best Bowser fights that have been done. You both transform into giant Kaijou and battle in the oceans which is a great spectacle, but admittedly becomes stale after the 2^nd or 3^rd time you have that battle.

When you enter a zone, it gives you the name of a shine you can get at the time, and depending it might be setup in a certain way. So there are certain shines that need to have trigger points for you to get. Whether that is a certain enemy or jumping puzzle that might not normally be in the area it needs to be. Sometimes that does mean that in order for that shine to pop up in an area, you actually have to go somewhere else first. There isn’t a cooldown timer on these, and usually just by the time you walk to a different zone and back the level is setup, but if you were truly trying to complete each area before you move on to the next, just know that the game kinda doesn’t want you doing that. It can be fun to find a hidden shine off the beaten path that you weren’t expecting to be there, but, and I promise I am not doing this to anger you, it still doesn’t reach the heights of Mario Odyssey when you find stars off the beaten path.

As for the kid sniff test, this was one of the first games my kid beat. He actually beat Bowser’s Fury well before I “started” it. He needed help with all the Bowser fights (he is 5), but with the open world he was able to find shines that were in his wheelhouse to get without needing help on every section. While this isn’t the first Mario game to do this, but you can roll credits with only getting about half of the total shines in the world and that was enough for him.

Circling back, really the most exciting aspect that this game does have going for it, that Odyssey didn’t do better is the idea of an ever present Bowser who is mucking things up at any time. When things line up at just the right time it can be a cool and exciting moment for you to navigate around, but things have to line up just right. For the 10% that it did line up, they were some incredibly harrowing moments, but other times its either a minor inconvenience or just a flat waste of time. It’s a cool concept, and at a small scale like this game (8-10 hours) it can work, but I was butting up against being bored with the gimmick by the end of the game, so I don’t think it could work for a larger scale game.

Alright, so where does this collection stand in the grand scheme of things? Listen I stand by my critiques and I will say that perhaps I didn’t articulate them well, because this write-up was the first one in a long time that felt like an actual chore. These weren’t super bad games that I enjoy pointing out all their flaws, or great games I get to celebrate their triumphs, or even interesting games that I don’t think people have heard of. They are instead just competent games that are very forgettable. While Bowser’s Fury picks up this grouping a little bit, I am not nearly as high on this experiment as other people when it came out. Is it fun and a welcome change to 3d World… 1000% yes, but is it knocking on the door of great Mario games on its own, absolutely not. It’s crazy to think about, that there would exist a platformer Mario game that I would probably be ok with never playing again, and I would have never thought that was possible before playing this game. Granted I haven’t played Super Mario Bros Wii, which I also know gets a lot of shit, but I don’t see this game coming up high on the “I should play that game again soon” list.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: No of course not

Where does it rank: I actually have it ranked as the 102nd Greatest Game of All Time. Maybe that seems surprising, but it is still a well-made game, and Bowser's Fury is a good addition to bring up the overall package, but it is just such a forgettable Mario game which is weird. I don't think I would return to this game on my own unless my kids really want to get back into it.

What's it Between: Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury currently sits between Blazing Beaks (101st) and Seventh Cross Evolution (103rd)

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

Sometimes when I look back and examine small parts of my personality, I realize that I am an incredibly weird human being. Like let’s take for instance why I played through the single weirdest game in my collection. I spun this game as one of three to choose between, but despite having it on a shelf from when I bought a bunch of cheap dreamcast games I knew relatively nothing about it. So, I pulled up a quick video on Youtube just so I could see what the gameplay was going to be like. It was a video review of this guy absolutely shitting on the game because he didn’t understand it and was bad at it. I ended up watching almost the whole video, skipping here and there, but the damage was done. This person was so upset about this game, in fact they were refusing to even call it a “game” because there was nothing “fun” about it, that I knew I had to play it. I had no previous attachment to the game, was previously confident that I was going to play one of my other spins, but because this random person whom I had never heard from previously was so against this game, I had to play it. Part of why I had to play this was because the premise sounded interesting, part was to truly see if this was blight club worthy, and a final part was to hypothetically show that I was better at this game compared to this random person.

I need to stress first, that upon playing it or beating it that I didn’t comment on this person’s video or on any social media. This person doesn’t care or even remember the game (it was years ago), and as someone who used to have a Youtube channel where I played and ranked video games, I know the type of ass hat that gets all bent out of shape because you (the reviewer) did not agree with them on a particular game. There is a lot of bad juju on the internet, in general, and I don’t ever feel the need to add any muck to it no matter how small the argument is. So, to that Youtuber who probably doesn’t make any videos anymore, thanks for doing your part in exposing me to the weirdest game I have ever played.

Seventh Cross Evolution is an incredibly hard dreamcast game to define. I will do my best, but it might be something you have to see for yourself. You start the game as an amoeba and work through evolution stages until you become the strongest being in this small world. While the amoeba stage is brief (like 5 minutes tops) you eventually evolve into your starting creature. This creature exists only in a small circular moat (can’t go on land) and you try to survive and gather resources for as long as you can. You try to kill smaller prey animals and absorb their bodies upon death, while keeping an eye out for enemies (in the first world, crabs) that are looking to kill you. For every kill that you manage, you get evolution points which can then be used to… drumroll please…. evolve your creature, but we will get to that in its own section. Eventually you will keep evolving until you can comfortably go into different biomes, fight off “bosses,” and reign supreme. There isn’t really a lot of plot in the game, upon starting the game you are dumped into being an amoeba and you don’t get a lore dump until you basically beat the game.

Now perhaps this game doesn’t sound that weird to you. However in order to truly to portray the magic I have to explain the main crux of this game, the evolutions. When you have enough evolution points, you bring your dumb creature over to a monolith where you can now take part in the magic. This is going to be a long winded explanation, so obviously save your questions until the end. At the start of the game you will have assigned colors to attributes. Basically you are asked which color represents Defense, and which color represents attack power, etc. Well that didn’t matter much at the time, but it matters for evolution time. So, think of this game like an RPG. Your character does have stats, and the evolution process is both the leveling up in an RPG and the equivalent of getting better equipment in a shop. You are shown a big 10x10 grid that you get to populate however you want using those colors that you determined at the start of the game. You can fill out every square with alternating colors, you can make a smiley face, you can fill the whole thing with one color, or put a single drop of color on an otherwise empty grid, literally whatever you want. When you are done with your masterpiece and approve it to move on, it will generate a single body part (Head, Body, Legs, or Arms) at a level from 2-30 (you already have every limb at level 1). You will also gain attributes based on how you filled out the grid. If you built your limb out of just the color for defense, your defense stat will go up by the following formula (attribute increase = Level of limb generated divided by 2). However the more colors you added to your evolution grid, those stats will be ordered by what color was used the most (gets the biggest bump, etc.). Depending on what you are building towards, it might be best to focus on just making limbs with attack power, or defense, so those stats increase instead of trying to balance it out.

Quick aside, the limb you created is an equip-able body part that if you have enough resources, can be put on your body, right now, to make you stronger. Those resources are gained by absorbing the bodies of your prey, but not every fallen prey generates all the resources so you might in fact make limbs that you are not going to be able to equip until you get farther in the game. These same resources are ones that you automatically use to refill your health after battle as well as your magic (yes there is magic, I HAVEN’T GOTTEN TO THAT YET). You can’t turn off the auto healing or magic refilling, you can cast a spell to refill some of your health via magic, instead of using those resources, but you are just moving pieces around. So you will constantly be in a cycle of fighting to kill enemies to gather resources so that you can convert them to either re-fill your health and magic (automatically), or to be spent on equipping a limb that you generated at the evolution change. Those limbs that you DO generate belong to different animals, presumably on this planet, that then give your stats an additional boost while equipped. Change your legs to that of a shark (yes sharks don’t have legs, really it just means lower body), and the terrain you can go on changes. Changing your arms can allow you to potentially attack from a distance (ranged attack) or even just do more damage with your melee attack, and so on. There are even hidden buffs if you decide to collect and equip a full set of limbs from the same animal.

Here is where things are truly bonkers, this game has been out forever and no one has cracked the evolution grid, because supposedly you train it by what you make. I don’t know if I adhere to that belief, but when you are starting off you never know what you are going to get. I probably spent more time then most in that opening area, because I could not generate a pair of legs that allowed me to travel on land (that I could equip) for the longest time. The instruction book and materials online are not very helpful either, purposefully vague, and you won’t find any help trying to build a specific limb, because they can only go based on what they “taught” the model and not what you have been doing. Some people say it is a mix of certain colors that generates a certain limb, others say it is the quadrant that you put the pieces in, but no one is sure. The good news is that, unless you are going for a weird 100% run, you won’t need all 30 limbs for each section, and you will be jumping from level 1 to level 5 or 10 as long as you have the right resources and don’t need to equip each limb in succession. Needless to say you will have a the weirdest amalgamation of a creature imaginable at some point. I was rocking a human head (level 30), metal body (level 28ish), Devil arms (level 25ish), and some weird hovering limbs that allowed me to move quick because I didn’t actually have legs when I fought the final boss. As you progress through different biomes, you will presumably change your body quite a bit to fit the situation, but also because you never know when you might unlock a better limb for the situation you are in.

Ok, so outside of the evolution aspect what is the actual game.. Well most of the game is traversing through a 3d biome that comprises of 3 to 4 screens (doors or caves will separate the screens) while fighting enemies that come looking for you. There are no towns, no friendlies, no creatures that don’t want a piece of you (no matter how strong you get), so while you are navigating the screens you are almost always in a constant fight, which we will touch on in another second. While you are navigating looking for doors or caves to move between screens, you are walking around a fairly barren 3d environment. Doesn’t matter what biome you are in, we are talking about a few hills, trees, and rocks of different sizes composing of the area. Your character can’t jump, can’t switch from walking or running, climb, nothing that you might be accustomed to doing from the dawn of 3d gaming, you just move at the speed that is determined by your attached legs. Outside of finding the boss screen of each area (mainly designated by its music change) you will just be meandering around an area to either grind out killing enemies to go through the evolution process and upgrade stats or find new body parts, grind for resources to equip new body parts or attempt to take on the boss. There are some optional bosses you can stumble upon, and some enviro pickups (mushrooms, plants, etc) that might give you a small resource boost without fighting, but there isn’t a lot to discover. You are never going to stumble upon a treasure chest or whatever the equivalent would be here. The areas can be rather maze like when you are starting off, but since you are going to be in an area for awhile (grinding) then you will quickly get the lay of the land and know where each entrance and exit to the area is. Really the only thing to look for are monoliths where you can save your game and (once you beat the first boss) can teleport between in case you want to grind at an older area.

For as much as you will be in combat, it is a rather simplistic system. You don’t go into a combat screen as all battles take place while you are exploring and free moving around. The combat is semi turn based, and while you aren’t filling up a bar or taking turns 1 to 1 on attacks, you can’t hammer on the attack button and have the character attack for every time you pressed the button. I am sure that the speed at which you attack, is perhaps determined by your AGI stat, but I didn’t notice much change as that got increased and I mainly focused on other stats once I truly grasped how to level up. When you do see another creature there will be a targeting box that changes color based on how far the enemy is from you, and that determines how you can attack it. Depending on what type of limbs you have equipped (ranged arms, Close combat arms, or both), if the color is Orange, you can hit your ranged attack button and it will do what it is going to do, if the box is red you can do melee, and if it is green it means you would only be able to reach with magic. So let’s talk about magic.. You have multiple stats that pertain to this, but the one I want to focus on is INT, which determines how many spells you actually have access to. Does not matter if you have a fish head or a person head you can do magic, but the difference in INT means you might only be able to cast fire 1 versus megaflare. Those aren’t exactly the same spell names the game uses, but its pretty close and they might as well be final fantasy spells. Those spells can be anything from healing yourself, cleansing yourself of poison, or doing damage based on one of the 4 elements (air, earth, fire, water). So much of combat though is a guessing game, because you will never see damage #s come up when attacking, either through spell or regular attacks, and you won’t know how many hit points anyone has that is not your main character. I would sometimes kill one bird in a single melee attack, and then kill that same bird (not literally, but same type in the same area) after three melee attacks. Did that first bird I killed have less HP, meaning that the enemies have variable amounts? Did I land a critical hit and not know it? I can’t tell you. I also can’t tell you if enemies have natural weaknesses to one of the 4 elements.. You fight a dinosaur that can breathe fire on you at one point. My gut tells me to use water to take care of him, as water is usually highly effective against fire enemies in all other RPGs, but without damage numbers I have no idea if I am right. You will eventually come to this realization too, and worried that you are healing or not hurting an enemy means you will revert to a lot of combat just by mashing the attack button to kill anything that is not a boss. All that is to say that combat can get very samesy and very quickly.. Some of the spell attacks seem cool or have fun animations, but I never wanted to burn through those on just level grinding, because since refilling my magic came at the expense of resources, I wanted to only use it for healing with the worry of death hanging above me. What this game does do well, is seeing in relative real time, the effects of those stats. Fighting an enemy with defense at 100 and then fighting that same enemy at defense 150 is a big difference. Attacks that might have caused you to panic and heal after every two hits, suddenly barely moves the needle on your HP. There was even one boss where my defense was so high that their physical attack did not damage me at all. I was able to get in close and just tank it to death because the AI is not very smart.

So you go through 6ish different biomes, everytime you defeat a boss transferring to a new area and having to level up so you can feel strong enough to take on the next boss. If you die, you are transported back to the beginning of the game and all of your equipped limbs are lost. This is where my friend the Youtuber lost it. Now when you revive you will still have whatever stat gains you had previously, you will still have unlocked all those limbs that can then be equipped again, but you will have to harvest all the resources to do so, and depending on how far you were.. that might not be worth it. Like in any video game ever around this time… I would suggest saving fairly regularly, and especially before you make a boss attempt. The reason for that is simple, if I died I would just reload my save so that I wouldn’t have to re-gather resources to equip my character again. Sure I might have lost out on 10-20 minutes of progress hiking to the boss and attempting to fight him, but regaining that 20 minutes will be a lot easier than whatever time it would take me to get back to the same area with the same limbs as starting from scratch. The way I see it, in the context of the game, this is Darwinism. It is survival of the fittest and if you are not the fittest and get killed or eaten, you get to hopefully go through the evolutionary steps again for a second attempt, you don’t get to just start over already as a shiny golden god. Perhaps that is too cruel, but it literally never bothered me because I had a save I could load if I died, and I will specify that I really only died while attempting boss fights and not just walking around an area.

I will touch super brief on the actual plot of the game, which gets dumped after you fight the final boss. If you don’t want to be spoiled, you can skip this paragraph, but trust me its really not that amazing. You are on Earth and it was uninhabitable after world war 3 and after a virus deployed. Hundreds and thousands of years later, scientists wanted to see, since other creatures evolved on earth and survived, if they could harvest those evolutionary genes and put it into humans so that they could return to earth. You end up being that experiment. There is a good ending and a bad ending, that is dependent on whether you have researched all lvl 30 limbs before you fight the final boss. You don’t have to have all the limbs (for instance you can be missing whatever the 28^th head is) only that you have the lvl 30 limbs which are all human parts. If you beat the boss and see the pre-end, then play a little bit longer while dressed as a human, you can essentially “re-start” civilization on Earth. I did get that ending, but I can’t say I played this game for the plot.

For some reason this game had a unique hold on me. I can fully admit this is not a great game. The combat isn’t crazy inventive and can be seen as quite boring, there is no real plot or character to keep you motivated, and the environments aren’t interesting to explore, but all of that aside I found I played through the roughly 10 hour game over the course of 3 days which is a rarity for me. Partially it was because the game is a perfect game to listen to a podcast or music with. A lot of the game is grinding and fighting the same enemies over and over until you turn in your points for new limbs or for stat boosts, so you can really turn your brain off while you play. However, the other part that kept me playing was how truly strange this game was. I loved seeing all of the weird limbs I could connect, the strange creatures I could become with parts mixed from all sorts of real and fake animals. I enjoyed the old school “numbers go up” mentality of getting stronger and stronger, fighting a boss, and then doing it all again. It was the basic joy of making it through a biome and then waiting to see what weird bullshit would be in the next one. I would almost never recommend that someone play this game to completion, but I would encourage everyone to play or watch someone just do the opening area (granted not the person who refused to call it a “game”). Is it the greatest game of all time, oh heavens no, but it is certainly the most weirdly fascinating game I have played. One that I would have never experienced if it wasn’t for Joe Youtube for telling me how bad it was.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: No of course not

Where does it rank: I suppose this could be controversial but this game is ranking higher than it should based solely on uniqueness. Is the combat great, no.. are the environments interesting, no.. is the story worth exploring, no... but I can say with some certainty that outside of the SNES game Evo: Search for Eden, I'm not going to play another game like this. I had a surprisingly disproportionate large amount of fun playing a game that I know isn't good because it just caught me at the right time. I have this game ranked as the 102nd greatest game of all time. This is out of 187 total games.

What's it Between: Seventh Cross Evolution currently sits between Blazing Beaks (101st) and Mario Golf (103rd).

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

I’m old, maybe not grew up playing Pong old, but certainly old enough where I remember playing some of the greatest games of all time at a young age. I was born in 87 and when I was really ready to start playing video games it was at the start of the SNES. I played some of the greatest games of all time when I was the perfect age to play them (in school, without a care in the world). I could spend countless weekends renting Final Fantasy 6 and playing during a long summer or winter break and soak it all in. I lived through essentially two golden ages of video game genres that were still/and are currently two of my favorite genres. I got to live through the 90s which happened to be when adventure games were at the height of their power (Sierra and Lucas Arts duking it out), and I got to experience the highs of the RPG boon that started on the SNES and bled over into the PS1 (Final Fantasy 4, 6, 7, Chrono Trigger, Breath of Fire, Lufia 2, Shining Force, Secret of Mana, Earthbound, Super Mario RPG, and so much more). To this day it is probably the genre that I have gone back to over and over, hoping that I find another one that will capture my time and imagination like so many others.

To be fair, I didn’t play all those as a kid, sure I had some of those but certainly not all, rented others either for a weekend of two and never finished them, but it wasn’t until much later in life (college) where I would emulate the ones I missed to see if there were any great ones that passed me by. It is weird to look back on, because I never really did that with any other genre. I never searched out to see what fighting games I missed when I fell in love with Street Fighter 2, I played Warcraft 2 and Starcraft and never cared about checking out all the other strategy offerings. It was only RPGs where I felt I needed to have some complete knowledge in my head, as if it would ever come relevant. It is why my hair would stand up whenever (prior to this year) I heard people talk about Golden Sun. Here was an RPG that people fawned over as if it belonged in the pantheon of great RPGs of that era and I haven’t played it. It was always on my bucket list, but I grew out of emulating games on a PC, and I no longer owned a GBA, so I all but wrote off playing it. Then Nintendo puts it on Switch Online, many years later and I could finally play it. As Nintendo does this, the fervor once again builds with all the Golden Sun fans clamoring that people need to play this game now, because it is just that good, and so I broke my own protocol and played it without waiting for it’s turn to come up. Now here we are.

To start, this is only a review of the first Golden Sun game.. Spoilers.. The story certainly doesn’t conclude at the end of this game and we will need to keep that in mind when we are discussing this as a whole. Is it possible that eventually I play the 2^nd half of Golden Sun, think of the games as one entity and it changes my mind? (either direction) of course. However, I say this so that the Golden Sun Community who wants to comment, might pause and realize that I don’t know what happens in part 2, or what gameplay/story point pays off later, or why my opinion is what it is. Since we are talking about it, I will add how much I love the idea of carrying over an adventure between multiple games in the series. For those unfamiliar, when you beat Golden Sun 1, you can have a finished save file, that can then be converted to the longest password ever, which you can enter into Golden Sun 2 that will carry over various degrees of your progress (depending on the password level you choose.. it’s a whole thing). Its an idea I have always loved from other games. In the Quest for Glory series, you could save your hero on a floppy disc that could then move to the next Quest for Glory, all the way to the 5^th and final game of the series. They would be brought over with the stats and spells you have worked hard to level up, some equipment or money that you earned, and the same childish name you gave them 10 years ago when the series started. Despite the fact that you could always roll a new character if you didn’t have one, just seeing the hard work you put in one game be brought over to another was rewarding. For a brief time it felt that it wasn’t time wasted, because those stats boosts, or spells gained would give you an edge in future games. Shenmue for the Dreamcast originally promised the same thing, and I remember spending countless hours training to level up moves and become a beast, only for the Dreamcast to fail and for Shenmue 2 to be given life on a new system that couldn’t carry over your progress. Mass Effect was the last big game series where I remember things carrying over, but it was really only story choices. The games changed how they played with each one, removing RPG elements, adding different ones in, so by the time my character made it to game 3, they were nothing like the character that finished the 1^st game. As games got more and more complicated to make, took longer and longer to do, and the technology changed so quickly, this wasn’t really an option anymore. No company knew if making a sequel 2, 3, or 5 years later was going to land it on the same console or even come out at all. Maybe the first game doesn’t do well and now you don’t even make a follow-up to deliver on that promise. It’s a shame, because I love the idea and I don’t think it will show up much more in my lifetime. Now you are more likely to just get a bonus skin or some tokens if the newer game detects a save file of a previous one.

Now it’s time to talk about Golden Sun properly. Golden Sun is an RPG that came out for the Game Boy Advance. The main story is that the elemental stars that keep the world in balance are eventually stolen by the bad guys and it is up to you to track them down, retrieve the elemental stars and bring peace back to the world. Your characters are chosen because they have the ability to use magic (known in this game as Alchemy), which allows them to solve puzzles in temples and deal with monsters much easier then your average people. I could add that the bad guys kidnap your mentor and your childhood friend to kind of force your hand into inadvertently helping them at times, but the main story is nothing to write home about. Its not that it is particularly bad, its just not memorable, it’s the same story of nearly all early RPGs. The world is falling apart because the balance has shifted, and you need to restore the balance by finding the crystals, books, elemental stars, etc. The main enemies aren’t even very memorable, because we don’t (or maybe just I don’t) know what their motivations are. They presumably want to steal the stars and release alchemy into the world for power, I guess, because in the first game it’s not that clear. Now, I am sure this is something that gets picked up in game two, and we learn all about why this plot is important, I feel like I am judging a book or a movie by only getting halfway through, but this was a finished and shipped game.

There are some interesting side stories here, rescuing a town from an evil tree curse or breaking into a thieves town to rescue someone… but from what I gathered these are kinda of optional side quests and not something you need to do to beat the game. I also wouldn’t go to say these side stories are riveting, but I did find some of them interesting in comparison to the main plot. For me a good RPG is about the story, something that is compelling me to continue playing the game. I want to see what happens in the end in terms of the overall plot, or in terms of individual characters. I think this game is missing that component here. Including your main silent protagonist, you will have a total of 4 characters in your party, but none of these characters had strong personalities. Gareth, your best friend, maybe has the strongest personality, but it comes and goes. In one instance he seems reluctant to divert from the critical path and do anything that isn’t tracking down the bad guys, and in other instances he could care less. We know that all these characters are ‘good’ but that kinda goes without saying. They leave their towns or temples in order to fight for justice, but they don’t have individual goals or anything that motivates them. In FF7 or FF6 which is a bad comparison because they are kind of heralded as two of the greatest games ever made, each individual party member is uniquely defined with their own wants and needs. They may all join together to save the world, but they have reasons outside the main plot that make them characters. In Golden Sun, what are the motivations of the characters outside of stopping the bad guys? If the answer is just ‘play the next game’ that is sadly not a good enough reason. Hypothetically, I would have bought Golden Sun 1 for $30 or $40 whatever it normally cost, and if the carrot that is dangled in front of my face requires me to spend another $30 or $40 bucks to see an ending that makes up for a lackluster setup, it might have used up its goodwill.

I also have to mention two instances in this game that really make me question its ranking in the pantheon. The first is all the repeated dialogue, which happens throughout the game. It seems like every conversation goes this way:

“The door is locked” – P1

“Are you saying THAT door is locked” – P2

“Yes, I think that door is locked and we will have to find another way” – P3

“I dunno, that door was open yesterday.. let me try… yep, it’s locked” – P4

“Ok, so we all agree now, that the door is locked” – P1

“Yes, the door is locked and we can’t go this way” – P2

That is almost certainly a verbatim set of dialogue that occurs in this game, and it happens over and over again. Characters repeat and repeat things to each other as if the writers (or translators) of this game learned that people only retain information if they hear it 3 times. Any story moment was immediately underscored, when I had to hear the same revelation 3 or 4 times as if the game was checking to see if I was paying attention. Was this geared for younger gamers, who maybe need their hand held more to understand the story, or is it just bad writing? The other aspect that ties into this, is the boat ride that happens in the middle of the game. This is a complain about a particular instance that grinds the game to a halt. It is not a particularly difficult series of battles, but the fact that this scene couldn’t have been handled better is baffling. If you play RPGs you have seen this before, you take a boat and the boat gets attacked by monsters that you need to deal with. It is a trope that has been done dozens of times, but for Golden Sun to think we need to watch the same cutscene 3 times, make decisions about who is going to row the ship 3 times, and then continuously be surprised that the ship is going to be attacked 3 times is bonkers. Have the boat get overwhelmed all at once, you can have the same # of fights, but we didn’t need this starting and stopping.

So, clearly we aren’t here for the story, so then we have to talk about gameplay. This is a turn based RPG with random battles and big sprites. If there is anything some people will point to as why this game is great, it is the battle system. It is a dynamic camera that doesn’t just have your good guys on one side and bad guys on another that Final Fantasy popularized. These are bigger character and monster sprites then you have seen in the overworld or in the menu. You have your normal choices during battle. You can attack with your weapon, use magic, use a summon, or use an item. It does have one of my least favorite systems in place, which is if you target an enemy who then dies before their turn, your character just defends rather than re-targets. We can yell about Strategy and how the game is making you think and not waste actions, but it’s a bad system, especially for the generic attack action. You want to tell me that a spell or summon won’t go through, fine. But if there are two enemies on screen and one dies, it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to realize who ELSE should be attacked with that action. We do need to clarify that this is not ATB (active time battles) or old school turn based (all allies go, and then all enemies). Each character and enemy has their own stat to determine the order or the round. You won’t see the round order displayed anywhere, but unless that stat is being buffed or debuffed each round will follow the same order. That might mean that Isaac goes first, then the enemy, and the rest of your party. This is the type of strategy I am here for, because once you understand the order, you can do things that work in your favor. We should talk about the equivalent of magic and summons, but to do so we need to have an aside.

This game has a unique semi-job like system for its characters. Those jobs determine the stats and spells that your customer will learn and be able to use both in combat and out of it. All of this is connected to the summons, which in this game are called Djinn. You will find these little creatures throughout the game, some you have to fight while others will just willingly join you. Each one is assigned an element (one of the main 4) and has it’s own unique summon ability. This is where it gets tricky, so stay with me, but the Djinn can be equipped to someone which usually gives a stat boost, but also may change their job which in turn will change the spells they can use. This is a very rudimentary example, but if you just have a fire Djinn equipped you can cast fire, but equip a water and fire Djinn to a single character and now they can cast steam.. or something. If a Djinn is equipped on you, you get it’s benefit in and out of combat, but during combat you can have you Djinn attack (do their special move) but that essentially means the Djinn gets unequipped during a set time. That unequip attack by the Djinn, may lower your stats or change what spells you can use in battle for several turns. Here is where the kicker is, If the Djinn is unequipped it can be used to summon (presumably a different monster) before it re-charges and gets re-equipped on the character who initially had it. The more Djinns you have “unequipped” of the same type, the stronger the summon you can call forth. Still following? It’s supposedly a risk and reward system. Keep the Djinn equipped the whole time and there is not much risk there, because you aren’t going to be able to unleash a huge attack, on the flip side, make your party weaker for a little bit, and in a few turns you can unleash hell on the enemies.

Circling back to the job system. There are a ton of jobs in this game, but there is nowhere that I saw (outside of online faqs) that actually show all the possibilities you can create, which can be exciting. Do you want to have one person have all the fire Djinns, or do you want to try and mix 2 here and 3 there in hopes of creating hybrid classes? Of course there is no guarantee (especially early on) that you are actually working towards anything useful. I don’t want to necessarily mess around with moving Djinns around on two people who are my only healers, because I wouldn’t want one of them to lose the cure or revive spell. See, there are very few spells that a character retains forever. You could gain 20 levels as a healer, but once you change jobs all those healing spells might be gone with the job change. Its fun to find cool combinations that give you unique spells, but I wasn’t someone creating a flow chart to find all the combinations. I was pretty boring and I had two characters who were all purely one type of Djinn, and then two characters that were a mix. This system really struck me as the perfect system for the Min/Max crowd that would be comfortable constantly moving parts for each area of the game they are in, to make sure that they are at maximum benefit. It’s not that I don’t see the appeal, because I do, I also just don’t know that it is worth all that trouble.

My RPG experience led me to play the game in a fairly set way. I bought the best weapons and armors I could at every shop, I ALWAYS equipped Djinns for stat boosts, and I made sure not to mess with a system that got me far enough, making sure I had multiple people capable of heal spells. I tried to never run from battles, and I really only focused on using the big summons for the last 5-10% of the game. What did all that get me, a pretty easy experience through the game all things told. Hell, I didn’t even learn about using the big summons until I was well over 50% done with the game, I assumed the summon was just the pretty basic one, which led me to handle most fights like other RPGs. Attack with my strong melee characters, and cast the best spells I could with other characters. It might not have been pretty, and I might have missed the ‘fun,’ but it kept moving me forward and I was doing almost zero grinding between story beats. I don’t know if I should have been able to do that. I feel like I skipped the system that is a big draw for everyone else, and perhaps the game should have stopped me. I don’t know how the game could have stopped me, It’s sole purpose was to open up this free wheeling job system where anyone could be anything, so making a puzzle dungeon where everyone is forced to be a certain job type, is not the solution, but something should have made me re-visit my setup more and nothing did. Feel free to criticize me for not learning about the big summons until late in the game, I could have easily missed the dialogue or training in the game that stated that, but it clearly didn’t impact me, so either you believe that I made the game harder for myself by avoiding summons for so long, or the opposite.. and in both instances I made it and the game didn’t course correct me.

The only thing that ever got me to switch was for a small puzzle room, where I needed a character with gust to clear away some leaves (this is like one of the last two dungeons).. I would unequip all djinns so this character could cast the spell, then re-equip everything once concluded. Rarely was there a battle that was had where I wasn’t set up the same way. Which I think brings us up to one of the other “positive” points, the puzzles. In most RPGs, there are little dungeon puzzles that you need to solve to get to a treasure chest or open a locked door. Usually this might just be going in the opposite direction, but sometimes it would be pushing buttons or putting a code in somewhere all pretty surface level stuff. Golden Sun changes this a little bit by allowing your characters to cast their magic in the open world (some spells, not everything) in order to affect the objects around you. Maybe you use an ability to move a statue out of the way of a path, in order to grant you passage, or you use a growth spell to create a vine ladder that gets you to a higher ground. There are a lot of spells that can be used in this puzzle fashion from freezing puddles to create ice blocks, to creating a wind gust to remove debris and find a hidden door. In theory this opens up a lot of possibilities, because as mentioned above you could have different jobs assigned to different characters which would make what spells they have access to up for debate. There are some spells that are given to you, like an item, for story reasons or as a treasure, that can then be taught to one of your characters assuring that you always have that ability. This allows the game to make a puzzle room or dungeon focused on that ability, because it can assume you have that ability on at least someone. While the puzzles can certainly be far more inventive then just standing on a switch to walking in an opposite direction, I feel that this is an under-utilized aspect to the game. I was hoping to see dungeons with these little spots littered everywhere, perhaps you would only be able to magic 3 or 4 spots out of 10, but it would either give you a reason to re-visit the location, or to swap around jobs, or even a re-playability as you navigate the dungeon a different time on subsequent playthroughs. Instead it felt that the puzzles were used so sparingly and at such a basic level, that we might as well just put in pressure plates or switches in like other RPGs. While it sounds like a knock, I think the idea is good and am tentatively excited if they carry this on in a more robust manner in the 2^nd game, but I think the execution here is lacking. Yes, I know there are parts in nearly every screen where you can use the “reveal” spell to find hidden items or a secondary path, that is not my complaint. My complaint is that how can I have 2-3 of these “outside combat” spells for puzzles PER PERSON, but only use like 30% of them to get through the entire game?

I will state that I certainly didn’t 100% the game, I didn’t find every Djinn, certainly didn’t open every treasure chest or learn every spell. If all of my hangups are solved by draining the game completely dry of content then I suppose I rescind my complaints. However, I think I was kinda letdown while playing this game, but I don’t want that to be taken the wrong way. Golden Sun is not a bad game, its probably a solid 7 or 8 out of 10 game. I finished the game and was genuinely excited about importing my save (perhaps the excitement was more about the ability to import), but I don’t think the game is really on the same level of the great RPG’s of yesteryear. Having never played the game and just hearing about it in chats, seeing IGN at one time put this game in the top 100 games of all time list (and its sequel even higher), I was prepared that this would be perhaps not dethrone the ultra-greats (Chrono Trigger, FF6, FF7) but it would at least enter the pantheon one level below them, but I just don’t see it. So it begs the question, do I just not get IT? or, is there something else happening here? Lets go point by point and see if we can decide.

So in terms of me not getting IT, lets discuss the facts.. I am not the type of person that wants to Min/Max or do crazy experimentation with my RPGs. I have gone on the record, (and if not, consider this the record), but I do actually prefer games with defined characters rather than a Job system where anyone can be anything, if both are done well. Obviously a good job system game (FF5 for instance) is better than a bad game with no Job system, but I think about FF6, FFX, Chrono Trigger, my quick top 3 of RPGs and they all have characters that already fit an archetype and while you can mold them here or there, it takes a lot of work to change them completely. I am also very into the narrative and character development as some of my most important pillars to a good game. I think it would be hard to argue that the story (at least in this part 1 of the series) is not particularly strong. The characters’ personalities are at best weak and at worst undefined. I thought the combat sprites were cool, but for all the “strategy” of when and how to equip Djinns, and when to summon them, I largely was able to ignore that because a large portion of the game was easy and I was in no real danger of failing. By, not engaging with this level of strategy bypass the draw of the game? Did I play it too easy (normal difficulty), or casual by just attacking with good weapons and using regular magic from my jobs to best most of the game?

On the other side, this was a game that came out in 2001, 6 and 7 years after FF6 and Chrono Trigger.. That means it hits a different generation of gamers at potentially the sweetest spot in the nostalgia goggles. Is there a generation of gamers who Golden Sun is their first RPG? Certainly possible, and for those people I can see why they would hold this game in their hearts. It has an awesome soundtrack and you get to save the world as a bunch of plucky teenagers, something you can certainly imagine as if you were a plucky teenager. There is a genuine mystery to playing this game, not knowing what combination of Djinn you equip will equate to what job class. If you were playing with your friends, or even siblings, you could have entirely different builds, with entirely different spells to tackle the bosses. That in itself can be interesting enough in terms of playground discussions being amazed at what one person has compared to the other.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: Nada

Where does it rank: I don’t actually have an answer in terms of what category makes more sense. It’s not that Golden Sun is a bad game, but its just a serviceable RPG from yesteryear and that is perfectly fine. I wouldn’t even say it’s the best RPG on the GBA without adding some caveats that limit the pool of games. Whether or not it belongs with the titans of old school RPGs I don’t think it ranks, and even if we are just looking at this greatest list of all time (where I haven’t played and ranked all the hits) its far closer to “Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars” (#76) then it is to “Lost Odyssey” (#20). It’s hard for me to really sell out for Golden Sun, when I think its story, characters, villains, and dialogue is weak AND it is an RPG which are normally important points to the RPG formula. It’s music, battles, and puzzles bring it back a little bit, but overall I do still think that this is an okay RPG that wasn’t worth the hype. I have it ranked as the #74th greatest game of all time, see I told you I don’t think it’s a bad game, just not worthy of the pedestal people have put it on. This is out of 186 total reviewed games.

What's it Between: Golden Sun currently sits between Psychonauts (73rd) and The Dig (75th)

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

Future games coming up 1) Mario 3D world + Bowser's Fury 2) Seventh Cross: Evolution

This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

I know it’s pretty easy to clown on the state of sports video games. I’ll even start by saying that real iterations are almost non-existent year over year, the focus has pivoted solely to trying to capture whales who want to spend hundreds of hours and dollars in order to play online, and competition has been bleed out of the industry where there is really only one company making each major sports game (2k for Basketball, San Diego studio for Baseball, and EA for football and futbol). Those are all terrible things that I would love to change about sports video games, but it also got us to a point where we are now playing the most realistic virtual sports games we have ever done so. And while that can be said at nearly any point in time (The Atari Basketball game in 1978 was the most ‘realistic’ version of virtual basketball at that time), I think even back then it was easy to see what was lacking comparing the real sport to the virtual one (more than 2 people on a court, comes to mind). So, let’s enter the way back machine and see what a basketball video game was like over 20 years ago with NBA Inside Drive 2002.

First though, how did I specifically get here? Well, since we have some time (this won’t be a long review) let me quickly re-hash how I select games for this series. In the past I used to use a website called wheeldecide.com and to be fair I used it before it was cool. I would sit there and painstakingly add in my whole collection of video games to that website, but they had a limit of only 100 different slices per wheel. So, I had to instead create wheels (sometimes multiple) per system so that I could list out all the games that I owned, and then I need a wheel that told me what other wheel to spin to find out the game (largely, one for system, and one for game). However, games would get left off a wheel because there was precious space to be used. All the Yakuza games would get squeezed to one tile, that if spun just meant I played the next game in order, and sports games would go missing or I would pick a favorite that I wanted to revisit. There was no need to list 5 different NBA 2k games, because reviewing 2k5 and 2k6 wouldn’t be a worthwhile endeavor. I lived like this for several years, back when I ran my youtube channel (now defunct) and when I started this series… but that has all changed as I found a better (some would say worse) system. There is now an app (and maybe there always was) that is called “Spin the wheel” which has no restrictions in loading as many slices on a wheel as you want. I no longer have to make cuts or split things off into multiple pages, every game from A-Abzu to Z-Zork could all be on the same list and presumably have the same odds as being spun. With no restrictions I re-went through a multi days progress of typing out and adding EVERY SINGLE GAME I have access to, that I have yet to write about, including all my sports games, xbox live arcade games, and individually titled Yakuza games. I could finally spin the wheel and true randomness would come out.

I have still kept the 3x rule, which is for every single game selection I make, I spin the wheel 3x and pick from those 3 results as to what game I am going to play. This helps weed out the possibility of playing back to back large JRPGs or now, back to back sports games. Not only would that not make for compelling game playing for me, but it also wouldn’t be interesting for you folks to read about small iterations in sequential numbered basketball games. So, in its inaugural first spin.. NBA inside drive 2002 came up, and I selected it, because I wanted a quick win as I work through finishing up a longer game. So now that we know why this game has just suddenly shown up, let’s talk about it.

NBA Inside Drive is a basketball game, the end! Just kidding, I mean, it is a basketball game, but that isn’t the end. First we should set the scene, this roster is pre Lebron James, you could still play as Jordan (though on the Wizards), and had Vince Carter as the cover athlete (presumably decided after his 2000 Dunk Contest victory). The Lakers had won the 2001 title, and would eventually go on to win the 2002 title (but the game didn’t know that yet), and the Bulls were the worst rated team in the entire game. Ok, now that we got that out of the way, we can finally talk about the game proper. This was the era where the camera was more zoomed in then you are used to, sprites were bigger, and games still had much than a little twinge of arcade action. Games are fast paced, nearly no possession bumps up against the shot clock, and your best offense is finding the fastest player on your team to just run around their defender.

While today’s 2k game gives you over the top notifications, trying to get you to improve your game, with arrows pointing to players you should be guarding, to feedback regarding the timing of your jump shot, and diagrams of plays you are running; Inside Drive is weirdly bare. While this was the style at the time, it is surprising going back to and something that you may now miss. Did I miss that three because of the timing of my release, or because he is just a bad shooter? Does my contest on a shot actually mean anything, if I don’t block it? I don’t have answers to those questions. Yes, I think the timing of your jump shot matters, but this game doesn’t have a perfect release that automatically makes a shot go in, and No, I don’t think a contest does anything if you don’t actually get the block. What this game did remind me of, is how in the older games, you would win a game by getting 90% of all your baskets from just inside the paint, and your leading assist getter would finish the game with 3-4 total. Now, we have all been conditioned to shoot 30 3s a game, but your best offense was to try and dunk or do a layup on every possession.

AI for teammates or for opponents hasn’t evolved yet, even for the most basic of moves. There is no pick and roll for big guys, or even for people to spread out while running a fast break. You can bait the computer into pump fakes every other possession, and if you get good enough you can steal every dead ball by just positioning yourself correctly (and I mean every dead ball). It’s these little details that just make you appreciative of how games have evolved to now. I don’t say this to dunk on this game, and just say “Dur.. not greatest game, 2k24 did it better,” because I do think there is merit in this game, but the way we play them has to adjust with the time.

I played through an entire playoffs (you can either pick season, playoffs, or exhibition game) during my time with the game and I still had a lot of fun. Part of that fun is the nostalgia of playing with NBA stars that I remember back in my time, and part of it is that the game is certainly more arcade-y then any version of 2k. I played through some nailbiter games, especially as I got my feet back under me and I would sell out for steals, only to have Vince Carter or Kobe get easy dunks on me, but it was still exciting. I could finish 2 games during the time it would take me to play a single 2k game, and I would finish with roughly the same score. If you enjoy the game of basketball, you can probably still enjoy it through a diminished scale. It wouldn’t take much convincing to get me to play through an entire season as my lowly bulls, or to do a fantasy draft like how I currently play and mix up the rosters and see if I can create a new dynasty with players the game doesn’t know are good yet. Yes, this game is missing the presentation factor that came with more TV deals. While there are replays for occasional dunks or highlight plays, there is no pre/post/ or half-time show. When you aren’t playing a game you are navigating a barren menu that really just points you to your next game as this wasn’t the type of game that had you diving into the minutiae of running a team.

This was Microsoft’s first foray into an NBA game on the Xbox console, so there are things missing that just became the norm. There was an NBA inside drive 2000 that released only for Windows, which has to be an interesting relic, but sadly I haven’t played it to tell what they improved upon or ended up removing for console content. For 2002, the biggest glaring item missing is a franchise mode, which means that some of the luster of long play is gone. I can’t see if I can turn a crappy team into a legitimate powerhouse in x years, because there is no multiple years option. There also is no side content for this game, no 3 on 3, no coach mode, park mode, nothing. Listen, I don’t really play those modes anyway, even with newer games, but this game is just playing games from one season locked in time.

Supposedly the Inside Drive games got a lot better after this iteration, which is usual for sports series. Better graphics, more modes, better presentation are all to be expected as you put out more copies of your basketball game, but all of the Microsoft sport titles were eventually sold to Ubisoft after the release of the 2004 season and were never seen again. I know I moved on to “ESPN Basketball” and eventually the “2k” series pretty early on, but it’s a shame now that we don’t have more of these sports franchises to compete. Listen, I know making games is hard and costs gazillions of dollars, and if NBA live can’t compete with 2k, then NBA inside drive would have no chance… but boy would I love any competition for 2ks “micro-transaction: The game” which they release year over year. So, while, No… this isn’t the greatest game of all time, nor is it even the greatest basketball game of all time, it was an interesting look back on what games were like when realism wasn’t the driving force of sports games.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: Boy, that would be weird if it was... but no

Where does it rank: As much as I had fun in the short amount of time I played this game. It was more fun as a trip down memory lane and less about the game itself. Yes, I love the game of basketball, and I could still spend hours of my life playing through a season or two of this game, just because its basketball, but all things considered this game isn't worth much on the ranking of all games forever. For one it's barren in options for how to play the game, there is no long term mode here, and the gameplay itself while faster and more arcade-like then today's 2k games, it also is easily manipulated and not very representative to its real life product. Do I like dunking and doing layups every other possession? Sure, but that's not much of a challenge, and if I actively take that stuff away to give myself a challenge, then the game isn't as fun. So, while I can tell you this game is a fun throwback, and worthy of a 2 hour re-visit.. when it comes to ranking it as the greatest game of all time, it falls pretty low on the list, because it would be hard to recommend a bare bones basketball game that has decades of improvements missing from it. I have it ranked as the 167th Greatest Video Game of All Time, Some sports games just do not age well, and while this was great 20 years ago, its not close to par for what we accept as basketball games today.

What's it Between: NBA Inside Drive 2002 will sit between Extreme Exorcism (166) and The Bridge (168)

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

Future games coming up 1) Golden Sun 2) Mario 3D world + Bowser's Fury 3) Seventh Cross: Evolution

This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

Good news everyone… Over the past weekend I was somehow lucky enough to build up a small backlog of games we can talk about. Its not anything crazy and really only gets us through the first week of April, but it’s in a lot better position to be in then how I felt writing up Ghostbusters. One of those said backlog of games to talk about came about because me and my wife finished playing a game together. Not every night, mind you, but on occasion we will sit down and play a game together that is interesting or intriguing enough for us both to enjoy. She doesn’t want to watch me grind levels in an RPG or play my millionth NBA game, so we come up with a game that we will both enjoy. This game in particular has the very easy to remember name of: “Agatha Christie – Hercule Poirot : The London Case.” Years and years ago, I wouldn’t even look twice at this game, but we have since set ourselves up by playing both previous Agatha Christie games (ABC Murders (96th) and First Cases(130th)) and other similar ilk games (A Layton (69th), a Sherlock Holmes (110th)). While no one else in the real world paid attention when this game got released, for us this came became a top ticket for the holidays. Now, granted, I didn’t know it was coming out… I’m not that close to these Agatha Christie games that I have a release date circled on my calendar, but we did see it on some Target circular and that is when alarm bells went off.

I know everyone is dying to get to the review of this game, they definitely are interested in picking up, but a couple more knowledge points I need to leave here. I have never read a single Agatha Christie book. The reason I am saying that is I don’t know if this game is connected to any previous book, or if (and this is my suspicion) this game just wanted to use the famous detective of Hercule Poirot, so they had to stick Agatha Christie’s name on the box because that is part of the licensing deal. I’m no novice to Poirot (I just told you I played two previous games with him as the star), and I have seen his representation in movies and Tv for years. So, this is all to say that if I criticize or question a decision in the story or a character made, if the solution is “because the book did it,” then that is just my ignorance for not knowing about it.

Let’s dive in.. The London Case has you the player once again stepping into the shoes of super detective Hercule Poirot who for some odd reason is tasked with safe guarding a very important painting on its way to a museum for the grand opening of a new exhibit. While the transportation goes well, you will be shocked to learn that during the event of the private gala to witness the painting for the first time, the painting has gone missing. Thankfully there is only a handful of about 8 potential suspects (thank god this gala didn’t host 50 people), and you will begin your investigation as to where is the painting and who stole it. If that isn’t enough drama for your momma, well during your investigation someone dies as well and it was clearly murder, so Hercule adds that case onto his caseload and the work continues. Without spoiling too much about who did what and where, lets just say everyone has skeletons in their closet and Hercule will find out about them through 10 chapters of discovery. However, it is funny that Hercule is in a country where he has literal 0 authority, and the lead detective who actually has authority basically brushes him aside, yet all these people agree to be interviewed and questioned and have their stuff looked into, when they don’t need to. It’s funny because this story can only happen when set in the past and in another country, because in America, Poirot wouldn’t get a minute with any of these suspects and he wouldn’t have solved anything.

The gameplay for this game is very similar to the most recent previous game (first cases). That is, you spend most of your time walking around tiny 3d environments, interacting with the few hotspots that exist in each area and then talking to whatever people you can talk to. Most of the puzzles that you are going to solve come in two different forms. The first is drawing connecting via an internal mind map, which sounds more confusing then it actually is. For each part of the case that Poirot is investigating, he has a mind map that is where he houses all his thoughts, at multiple point throughout the investigation, you will need to combine two thoughts to link them together to draw a conclusion. So, if you are trying to figure out why you heard glass breaking, you would need to tie the thoughts of “Heard Glass Breaking” to the thought of “broken glass by the TV,” and if the game wanted you to connect those two thoughts it would spit out, “The glass I heard breaking was because Phil smashed his beer bottle against the wall after playing this game for too long.” The other main puzzle is simple questions and answers. Usually when wrapping up a chapter you will talk to your partner (an insurance claim specialist) and a question will pop up “Who has a motive” and you simply need to select the right answer to the question. Sometimes these Q and A puzzles, you won’t have the correct answer listed right away, so you need to find the clue or connect your mind map in your head before you can answer, and move on.

Good news, you can’t ever get a wrong answer. If you select the wrong answer, or try to connect the wrong mind map points, or even try to use an item where it shouldn’t be used, then the game just doesn’t let you progress. Get the answer wrong enough times in a row, and depending on the puzzle, the game might just show you the solution so you aren’t stumbling in the dark. This is again similar to how it worked in previous games, and I don’t have strong feelings either way on whether or not this is a good system. In one instance it helps move the game along when you are lost, so you aren’t just stumbling in the dark, but it kind of also removes any stakes from the game.

The bigger problem I have with the puzzles and logic of the game is that there are still wild leaps of logic that occur that I couldn’t make sense of no matter how much I thought about it. I am ignoring the fact that once again there is never a thought that someone is lying to you.. which ok, the game wouldn’t be able to handle that aspect, but you will seemingly connect a small point and then that opens up a conclusion that you can’t actually prove. In one instance, you find out that one suspect is getting counterfeit art commissioned and putting it up on their walls, but they also have in their budget book that they received money for something (you don’t know what). When you eventually connect those dots, Poirot very confidently says that the solution is that the authentic art is being sold and being replaced with counterfeit art so that no one would notice. I don’t know how we come to that conclusion in an absolute. We have never seen a sale, no one admits to it, the ledger doesn’t specify what the $ value is for, and we don’t know if this person ever even had the authentic art in their possession to sell at one time. However, the game just takes it as gospel and we move on. The problem is that this happens on multiple occasions in both bigger and smaller form, where the game clearly just wants to move the story forward and does not want to bore you with actually trying to piece that information together. Instead we have a whole chapter that roughly boils down to getting a cat out of a confession booth, but we don’t have time to go over how we cleared someone of actual murder.

By making this game “Kinda Open World,” they opened themselves to you being able to go to different locations in different orders. So if you want to interview the politician before the priest, you can do that, but the game frequently fumbles the order of operations and you can have whole conversations in the game without actually knowing what they are talking about. I visited the politician once and our whole interview was about a newspaper article that he was in, that Poirot spoke about with extensive knowledge, but I (the player) had no knowledge over.. Well, that is because I went to the wrong location first. If I would have gone to the newspaper building I would have learned all about that article first and then that scene would have made more sense. This also wasn’t a one time bug, often I would find myself lost in why someone is discussing something with me that I don’t actually know about, only to learn that it was because I skewed off the game’s course and the game didn’t correct itself. For what this game is trying to do I don’t actually need it to be an open world game, heaven knows this team doesn’t have the resources to do that. But, if you are going to try and be ambitious with making this game more open, then you still have to make sure the story flows together coherently, its all this game has going for it.

But by far the biggest gripe I could ever have with this game is the length of the loading times in between scenes. Listen, I am not one to complain about graphics, but this game is at best an early Ps3 or X360 game in terms of graphical achievement, the characters barely animate at all, and each environment is smaller than a single store in the Yakuza games, and yet the load times to transition between locations are downright criminal. It would be almost excusable if whole chapters played out in a single location, but outside of the gala (like chapter 2 or 3), you actually have to travel to different locations to solve puzzles or interview suspects, but in later chapters you are constantly going back and forth in order to work through longer puzzle strings. While I didn’t time it, we are talking about close to if not over a minute long loads for each location, and when you have to go back and forth to hit certain triggers to open up more of the game, you can easily spend 10 or more minutes sitting on load screens for one hour of play, which is inexcusable.

The thing with these Poirot and Sherlock Holmes games is that they don’t really even have to be great to still be fun, like a campy movie. I don’t come to these games to have them look great or to wow me with the technology of the future. The gameplay can be stiff and they just have to hit a 6 out of 10 average and me and my wife can still have fun going through the story together. I play them because they can make an interesting 5-10 hour game that tells a mystery that I want to see unravel, but what started as a surprisingly competent game (ABC murders) has since gone down in quality two times in a row and has left me questioning whether I would even invest in another Poirot game by Microids. I thought the last game (first cases) was weak, because I thought the story just wasn’t that interesting but it was at least competently made, but now we are even further along and while the premise for this story is better, it bungles so much of the actual game that the story comes out confusing and makes the game a slog to finish. It seemed like this game needed another pass on everything from story outlining, to script writing, to location testing, and everything in between. Everything from the twist at the end, to how we determined who was innocent seemed like someone had to wrap up a 20 chapter book in only 10 chapters, and the first 9 were already written. I would not advise anyone to really give this game a go regardless of what basket you fall in. It certainly shouldn’t be your first adventure with Poirot or being a detective as there are other games much better that have more satisfying mysteries to solve, and even if you have done them all and played all the others, this one isn’t good enough to recommend paying for when people are selling it for more than $5. If you read all this and are honestly intrigued to just play a mystery detective game, I would strongly suggest ABC murders which you should be able to get for a song now.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: no, its pretty far down

Where does it rank: I can ignore a lot of garbage for the sake of these games, because I enjoy the mystery and playing with my wife.. but the London Case stretched what I can accept. The load screens, the constant travel, and messed up order of information makes this an incredibly hard recommend even for the most die hard Poirot fans. I have it ranked as the 164th Greatest Video Game of All Time, out of 184 total games.

What's it Between: The London Case sits between: Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch (163rd) and Golf Peaks (165th).

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

Future games coming up 1) Golden Sun 2) NBA Inside Drive 2002 3)Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On

This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

Let’s just say it has been a slow start of the year for me in terms of finishing Video Games. We are at the midpoint of March and I have finished a grand total of 3 games, I don’t even have some small indies on the back burner that I can write about during these slow times. Sure, some of that could be me taking the month of January off for work, or how I’m now working through a JRPG, or numerous other reasons.. but regardless of how I got here, the train don’t stop rolling.

Today we are going to discuss Ghostbusters: The Video Game. Can I just say, right off the bat, what a breath of fresh air compared to coming off MDK2 and Operation Darkness. But, lets start where we always try to and let’s lay out some basics. Ghostbusters is a third person action game where you play as a new recruit in the Ghostbusters office surrounded by all the original stalwarts. Most of the original movie cast is here (no Rick Moranis, or Sigourney Weaver) and that allows your character to be that of a silent partner to the characters, allowing those characters time to shine and less time focused on trying to force you into the plot. In fact, it would be easy for you to forget that for large portions of this game you are playing as an unnamed ghostbuster. Since you are mainly watching your character from over the shoulder anyway, you might as well pretend you are playing as Ray or Peter.

So let’s talk more about that gameplay. As stated you are playing a 3^rd person action game, that has a emphasis on shooting and capturing ghosts, but the game does a surprisingly good job of not making that part an overwhelming part of the gameplay. Sure, you will shoot and weaken ghosts with a variety of different weapons (all different modes of your proton pack), and once the ghosts are weakened you will have to capture them in the standard trap that you slide on the floor and then direct ghosts to. However, there is also a good deal of time exploring your environment, not just in looking for collectables (there is that too), but just as a way to add some more story to the game. You will use your PKE meter to locate ghosts, or areas that are haunted, or to catalogue things that you are seeing that isn’t just having you run from one room to the next shooting ghosts ad nauseum. It even has some light (very light) puzzles where you have to manipulate objects in the environment, or determine where to go next, but nothing too taxing. Sure, the later levels where things get more intense, has you doing a lot more shooting then exploring, but that’s because the Ghosts are looking to take over the world, there isn’t time to find the one spooky thing in a hotel, the whole damn world is spooky.

What I did really enjoy, is that the proton packs are as unwieldy in the game as they appear to be in the movies. Now you might think that design is a bad thing, but it’s actually kind of funny and it works, because this really isn’t a game that requires pinpoint accuracy and fast reflexes. As ghosts are zooming back and forth in a room, your shots are bound to miss, and the game takes that into consideration by making most objects destructible, and even things like walls or doors get large burn marks in them for when you hit them. While you certainly don’t need to do it after every combat encounter, its interesting to look at the room when you are done with it, and see what is still standing based on your awful shooting. Now, I could see how this could be frustrating for new (younger) players, or even people who just want to enjoy the ghostbusters story without being good at shooting, and the game does kind of offer a solution. For one, there are a lot of different attachments for your weapon that can allow you to contribute even if the proton beam is not your favorite weapon. For instance there is a slime gun that can just douse enemies and doesn’t require too much accuracy, or a stasis gun that has an alternate fire that just kinda works like a shotgun allowing you to spray it in an area and hope for the best. For two, in nearly every stage you are accompanied by an AI companion or multiple that are playing as the other Ghostbusters. While I won’t try and pretend that any AI companion is as good as a player controlled one, these do a capable job and can at least handle or weaken some ghosts without your help. Now, I wouldn’t test to see if they can take care of a whole room without your assistance but they can certainly buy you some time to figure out how to aim.

I won’t pretend to be the biggest Ghostbusters head out there. I watched the original movies and liked them both, grew up around the song and action figures as much as the next almost 40 year old, but I didn’t base my whole personality around the movie, and I certainly didn’t freak out when they added women, or continued the story years later. With that being said, though, this is a game that is very much set around the time of the movies, with the same themes, same humor and same vibe. It’s lighthearted and despite dealing with the supernatural and beings that certainly want to kill you, it never feels like you are in danger. Which is an astonishing feat! When you get “downed” by a ghost, it’s the equivalent of your proton pack shorting out, you can be picked up by any of your allies, and as long as one ghostbuster is still fighting then there is a chance that you will be revived. Now your AI companions will also get downed on occasion, and you can pick them back up just like you, but this safety net allows you not put much worry into each combat encounter. You are a team, and while I still encountered a few game-overs nothing felt insurmountable. Can the game be creepy, sure.. but never to the point of unease. Its goofy and silly, its light and it doesn’t take itself too seriously… But it all works.

I need to stress that a lot of what makes this game work as well as it does comes down to two key points. The first and most obvious is the voice acting. It’s great to hear the actors voice their roles, and play off each other in the way that they do. Could this same game work with a different voice cast, if everything else is the same? It’s possible, but the games whole existence seems to be trying to capture the vibe of the original movies and I don’t think you can have a plot revolving around Gozer, a battle with the Stay Puff Marshmallow man, and worrying about if your practice is going to be shut down by Peck, without losing something by bringing in other voice casts. I’m sure Troy Baker would be a great ghostbuster, but having a generic “Danny” or whatever they would call the new group, would make it harder to care about them. That’s the thing, this game builds on characters that we already know. We don’t need to spend time building up the lore or their backstories in order to already be immersed in the world, that was done for us (40 years ago now… Good Golly!)

It’s also the game’s biggest weakness (I know I have another key point I have to get to, but this comes first). This game relies on your love and nostalgia for the Ghostbusters and everything about the series. You have to come in with that knowledge and want exactly more of what it was dishing out because this game is a celebration and extension of those movies. The incidental music (the 2^nd of my key points) is all stuff you have heard between scenes in the movies, and while I never thought about how iconic any of that music was (Outside of the Ray Parker song), every song took me back to those movies. Here is the wacky hijinks music, and here is the something creepy is about to happen music, and then over here is the back at basecamp music. It all bleeds together to make you feel like you are snuggled up on the couch watching one of your favorite films, something you have seen hundreds of time before. However, if you don’t come in with that knowledge, or you frankly don’t care or didn’t like the ghostbusters then this game won’t work in the same way. You won’t “Pop” the first time Peter yells “A little help here” or when Ray gives you praise as the rookie, if you have no attachment to these characters or story.

Now you might be thinking, who the hell is playing a ghostbusters game or buying one if you don’t have some love for the series or franchise a little bit.. and you are probably right, but I have certainly bought games with no prior engagement to the source because of word of mouth or the game looked interesting. I mean I bought the One Piece game that plays like an old JRPG, having not watched a minute of One Piece. I fully expect when I get around to that game, for a lot of it to go over my head, but I digress.

The other biggest gripe is that this game has no customization options for your white toast avatar. I know this game came out on like 30 systems, including PS2, but I remember making wrestlers on an N64 that at least allowed me to pick between some shaders, but there are no options to change your gender, color, hairstyle, or look in anyway. I can understand making you a silent protagonist, but you can't give me like the worlds most basic character customizer so I can feel like that extra Ghosbuster is me or my wife? I'm not even being one of the "iconic" characters, I'm a nobody who at the end of the game they want to ship out to franchise in another state.

There is a multiplayer mode, that I played a long time ago, back when I cared about achievements. From what I remember, the multiplayer was actually pretty enjoyable. I don’t think the Remasters brought back the multiplayer, and I doubt you are going to find many players on the 360 looking to get into a room to play, but I certainly didn’t hate it… but perhaps the adage of just playing the game with people you like talking to, might have covered up any cracks that existed in the multiplayer, because I don’t remember much from 10 years ago.

Here is where I do want to pose a question, because I don’t really remember the review world when this game came out. Maybe it is because I am comparing it to two rather bad games that I recently played, but I think this game is a solid 8 out of 10 kind of game. It’s not the greatest game of all time (spoilers), but its something that I certainly enjoyed playing for the whole run-time and a game I would gladly go back to sometime in the future when I need that nostalgia hit. However, I feel like the sentiment at the time was either very middling or forgettable and I just don’t see that. Yes 2009 was a pretty good year (Assassins Creed 2, Uncharted 2, Batman Asylum, Dragon Age Origins, Rogue Warrior, etc..) But I think I hear more about the good and bad games of 2009 way more than I hear anyone talk about this game. It’s certainly possible I’m off base with this one, wouldn’t be the first time that me and the general public didn’t agree. Anyway… Ghostbusters is good.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: I had a real good time with it, but it's not the Greatest Game

Where does it rank: I really enjoyed my time with the game. It's like one of those quick read books, you know that other art form, where you can sit down and finish a 200 or 300 page book in two sittings. I fully realize that I can't rank this game as if I was someone who isn't familiar or didn't like the original movies. For those people, this game won't register or will fall so much farther down the list, but as much as I can try to stifle some nostalgia in playing old games, I can't also pretend I'm unfamiliar with the source material. So keep that in mind.. If you are like " I don't think I like / or / I don't know about Ghostbusters... then maybe don't take my word on this game. When I was looking at the list trying to decide where this goes, I actually have it fairly higher than some people might think it should go. But, the best part is, without intending, it ended up right next to the game that it is the most similar to. I do have Ghostbusters: The Video Game as the 29th Greatest Video Game of All Time.

What's it Between: Ghostbusters: The Video Game sits between: Return to Monkey Island (30th) and Luigi's Mansion 3 (28th).

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

Future games coming up 1) Golden Sun (at some point) 2) Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On! 3) TBD

This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

Anyone who has been following this list knows that I am a sucker for games with tactics. I could re-hash my credentials for days, but I will just say that I played through Operation Darkness to completion and found things to enjoy about it, so I clearly have a stomach for slow moving, tactical games. So, if any company wants a shortcut to my attention, they simply have to put “tactics” in the title of the game. Thus the game we are talking about today would have probably gone unnoticed if it wasn’t called “Wintermoor Tactics Club.”

Wintermoor is a turn based tactics game (who would have thought) that has you alternating between playing the games version of D&D, and walking around a university doing sidequests and learning the story of the game. However, I think we need to start with the actual plot as that kinda informs the rest of the game. You play as Alicia who is attending college at the great Wintermoor academy. Alicia is a somewhat reserved nerd who belongs to a student club where her and her two best friends play D&D. The headmaster of the school for seemingly no reason at all decides to pit all the student clubs against each other in a snowball fight tournament. Any club that loses in the tournament has to be immediately disbanded until only a single student club remains for all of campus. Your group of friends isn’t quite the snowball athletes that you would expect to do well in a tournament, but they decide to treat their snowball fights like D&D fights and thus are able to thrive on tactics alone. Eventually, shocker, it turns out that the headmaster was looking to recruit the strongest kids on campus to help save the school from something much more nefarious, but that was probably to be expected. The game is trying to be humerous and while it isn’t as in-your-face as MDK2, it also isn’t as cringeworthy. For instance some of the other student clubs range from the Psychic club (kids who think they can see into the future) to the People-pretending-they-are-animals club and the Equestrian club (that doesn’t have horses). There was nothing that made me laugh out loud, but I am sure I let out a “Ha” on more that one occasion.

The biggest aspect of the game is actually playing actual D&D. The snowball fights are essentially end of chapter bosses for each round you advance, but the in-between is you continuing your normal campaign and drafting up new campaigns for new friends that you make during the game. To be clear you aren’t really playing D&D except for the fights, there is no exploring or ad-libbing, or even any real choices that you make. It is just small setup and then straight into a battle. The battles themselves are played on a standard grid where you control three characters (even when you unlock more characters you can only place 3 on the board) and your goal is to win the fight while hitting certain goals (more on those later). Each character is given a class and plays like that in both the D&D and in the snowball fights. So, Alicia is a mage who can do some big damage from far away, but can’t take a lot of hits. Colin is a paladin and he is your tank, and the third character, whose name I am blanking on, is a rogue. Each character has their own kind of stats with how much they can move, the damage they take from either physical or magical attacks, and the damage they output. While your main goal is to just beat each mission, there are little goal targets to shoot for. I think these targets are really only important for 100% the game, as I don’t think they lock out any of the actual content, but it was easy enough to hit the targets that I ended up just full starring them all. Those goals are almost always: “Win with no characters being defeated,” “Win with taking X damage or below,” “Win in X amount of turns,” and “Win using X number of super moves.” The good news is that if you get two out of the four on one playthrough, you can do the level again and just focus on the other two goals, and they will stack.

So how does combat actually work? Well its similar to all other tactics games, you essentially get two actions for your characters mainly to either move and then attack. Each character will only possess two to three moves to use, but one of those is their special that requires the expenditure of tactics points which you accumulate in battle for multiple reasons (doing damage, boosts, equipped items.. etc.). Once you unlock the other characters, the real challenge will just be in which characters synergize with each other well. For instance Alicia has a lightning bolt spell that will chain through enemies, so pairing her with a partner who can manipulate moving enemies around the board, means you can chain together more enemies and do more damage. After all of your characters take their turn, then the enemy takes theirs and you rinse and repeat until you either win or lose the fight. The good news is that characters don’t really level up or gain XP, so you don’t have to feel like you need to spread the wealth or worry if your characters are under-leveled for the mission you are about to take on. The only buffs you can really get is by equipping different items which you get by completing side quests throughout the game. While you will eventually earn about 6 items for each character, at most you can only equip two, so you will have to decide what is the most important for you. For instance one item for Alicia allows her to chain her same lightning spell through allies (without hurting them), while another may allow her to charge the team’s tactics points faster, meaning you can use specials more frequently.

Snowball fights work in the same way, and even though its supposed to take place in the real world.. you still get to cast lightning and use whatever magic powers your character has in the D&D Campaign. I think there is a line of dialogue somewhere in there that probably just says you throw snow extra fast or extra hard like you were hitting them with a hammer, but in reality it doesn’t need to make sense.

When you aren’t taking part in battles you are walking around the school, visiting different locations, and talking to other students trying to figure out what is happening. Some other students will give you sidequests, but they are almost exclusively fetch quests that just has you walking back and forth between areas or between students until you fulfill the brief. While it may seem boring to do, these are miss-able side quests that could lead to miss-able items. Almost all of the items you get are from completing side-quests, and they are usually only available for a single chapter or two, so you don’t want to throw away a chance that can help improve your team. If you are looking up this game you will see the phrase “Visual novel” thrown around to describe this non combat aspect, and it’s not entirely wrong. You won’t get in random combat encounters during your walk around school, and you really are just having conversations until your next combat event. One interesting little aside, is that when you are welcoming new people to your D&D group, you specifically get to help write a campaign to “hook” them. It’s really just picking some multiple choice options, but it can be fun to see that play out and see the reception of the people that you are bringing into the club. It is possible to write a campaign bad enough that you have to go for a second draft (that happened to me once), but I think it’s pretty forgiving.

Wintermoor is a fairly easy completion, especially if you aren’t looking to 100% all the battles, but it does have around 50 battles and the visual novel stuff can eat up a good portion of time. Really most of my frustration came from trying to figure out how exactly to 100% certain levels, and if you are avoiding that headache then it will be a quick playthrough. While I was enjoying the game, and I like the ending fights as a final culmination (made me think of FF6 briefly), it does drag on a little longer than it should. There were some characters that I just disliked using, not because I found the character specifically annoying, but rather that I just didn’t find them useful when I was limited to 3 characters (*Ahem cough COLIN cough). I think the real question is how does this compare to other tactics games? While a fair question, this certainly skews closer to “Kid’s first tactics game” rather then something deeper. If you are coming in with some experience you will very quickly find your way and be able to stomp most missions without missing a beat by just using other lessons learned from other games. Without having the depth of worrying about levels, experience points, specializations, it doesn’t really make you stop and think about how you are going to get through a new level. It certainly isn’t going to stand up to the titans like X-com or FF Tactics, but the game is certainly polished enough that if you are craving a SRPG to play on the go, then this will hit the spot.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: Nope

Where does it rank: Wintermoor Tactics club is a solid game, but it doesn't have the nuance of games that I feel are better SRPGs. I think this is a great game to ease people into playing SRPGs or even if you want a game similar to other of the genre but without the stress, but that doesn't make it necessarily better. I want a game that challenges me more, I want a game to make me occasionally re-think my tactics, and this game doesn't do that. Once you find the three characters you like to use, you can wipe the floor with a lot of the levels. While the story is endearing and some of the characters are genuinely charming or funny, it's also not a story that I think people Need to experience. There weren't shocking twists and turns that could make the somewhat easy combat worth slogging through just to see the game to the end. All that is to say it's not a bad or broken game, and I would recommend it as a great sale game.. it's just not going to crack the upper echelon here. I have it ranked as the 110th Greatest Game of All Time out of 182 total Games.

What's it Between: Wintermoor Tactics Club sits between Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments (109th) and Simpsons Road Rage (111th)

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

Future games coming up 1) Ghostbusters (X360) 2) Golden Sun (at some point)

This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

When I was just a wee lad and owned a Dreamcast I had a fairly small game collection. I had some of the classics (Power Stone, Sonic, Dynamite Cop, etc.) and one of the games I had forever was MDK 2. I don’t really remember why or how I had the game, because I never played the first game so there was no affinity for the series. Is it possible that I got the game through a birthday or Christmas gift and the gift giver was just following the prompt of “Dreamcast game,” perhaps. However it came to be, I remember reading the manual and looking at the case and being really excited to play as the Doctor (one of the three main characters), because his levels sounded like they were the most interesting (more on that later). As a kid, I never made it to the doctor’s levels. It wasn’t really because of difficulty, but rather I would tell myself I am going to finally play MDK2, sit down and beat the first level, have some modicum of fun, see that level 2 was not the doctor, and then move on to something else. No matter how resolute my intentions were, I never made it that far in the game, and for a game that only has 10 levels, it really is an achievement to not even see what level 3 has to offer. So, I have finally righted my past and played through all of MDK2, including playing as the Doctor, but was I right as a kid to move on from this game early or did I miss out on a real gem?

I won’t leave you in suspense long… Someone is going to have to tell me what the appeal of this game actually is. I don’t normally look at review scores for a game, especially not before I have written my little piece on the game, because I don’t want it clouded with the thoughts of another person, but how the hell did this game score in the 80s. Sure it is in the low 80s, but this is not an 8 out of 10 game, by any stretch of the imagination. It wasn’t in 2000 when it released and it certainly isn’t now. I imagine the true MDK2 fans are gonna get “shoot hot” over this comment, and they will claim that its because new games have coddled me too much and I couldn’t handle the difficulty or lack of hand holding this game does (as was the style at the time). In reality, I just don’t think this game is any fun. See what you made me do MDK2? I went and spoiled the end in the second paragraph and we haven’t even talked about the game yet.

Ok… calm down Phil.. let’s be professional here. MDK2 is a hodgepodge of a game in terms of genre. You play as three different main characters who each play their levels in a semi-unique way. All of them are 3^rd person action-platformers, but if you are playing as the Dog it becomes a shooter-action-platformer, because the Dog levels play as a gun blazing, kill anything that moves kind of level. The Doctor is supposed to be more of a Puzzle-action-platformer, as you collect items like an adventure game and then combine them together to solve puzzles.. Sure one of the things you build is a nuclear toaster that acts as a gun, and then once you build that you find your levels involve a lot more shooting then puzzle solving, but it was billed as a puzzle character. And finally our main character (Kurt) is supposedly a stealth-action-platformer, because they are given a sniper rifle and items like a cloaking device… but I guess if we are being honest, the minute you fire a shot all enemies know where you are, so there isn’t much stealth and then you just use your machine gun to mow down everyone in sight… Hmmm.. I guess every character is actually just a shooter-action-platformer. Well so much for nuance.

So we established that all the levels are 3^rd person shooter levels with some light other elements. But, it’s not like you are playing the same level three different times just with each character, I don’t want to give that crazy opinion. I mean the levels are all super varied. So you have the inside of a ship for lets say 8 out of 10 levels.. I mean not always the same ship… Ok so sometimes it’s the same ship, like more than you would want with a game with only 10 levels, and then you have 2 levels where you are on an alien planet or homeworld and you go from the metallic inside of a spaceship, to the metallic… outside… homeworld. Ok, I see the problem here. I am not discussing the nuance of the corridors that you run down to get from one spot to the other, because those are so different it is going to blow your mind. So get this, one of the corridors is kinda blue, and there is one that is just like black, and then one that kinda has a green color to it.

Alright, you got me, I am still bringing that negativity in to the review.. So lets try to take it from the top again. MDK2 is a 3^rd person shooter where you run through “futuristic” levels solving puzzles and killing baddies with an assortment of guns. Each level comprises of multiple checkpoints and puzzles that are “unique” to each character. Levels with Kurt have puzzles revolving around his use of the sniper rifle, hitting certain objects at a distance or using some “wacky” shots that allow bullets to ricochet off walls or bounce to hit switches. Kurt also possess a parachute that allows him to float long distances and get caught in up drafts that allow him to get to higher areas. The Dog has multiple arms allowing him to hold up to 4 guns and fire them all at the same time. His levels are very combat focused but might require the solving of jetpack puzzles, which can sometimes be picked up in a level. The doctor uses his brain and his kleptomania to gather and combine items to solve puzzles like putting a ladder on an ‘X’ on the floor, or disarming a bomb by hitting switches in the right order. Each level alternates what character you control, and the very last level allows you to pick your favorite. Kurt has level 1, 4, 7.. Dog has level 2, 5, 8.. and Doc has levels 3, 6, 9.

The plot of the game is fairly boring sci-fi. Aliens are planning to once again blow up Earth, and our heroes are the only ones that can stop them. The game attempts a comic book aesthetic, but outside of loading screens you tend to forget that the game is going for that, as there is nothing throughout the level that screams comic book. Now I never played the first MDK, I hopefully never will (if this is the better one), so there might be some carry over story between the two, or maybe the big bad is in both games so it feels like this is a continuation of the epic story. What I can attest to is that the story is pretty bland. It is not bad, but the only reason it isn’t bad, is because it basically doesn’t exist. Each level starts with some small dialogue of your character saying something that amounts to; “I got to rescue Kurt,” or “I gotta stop these aliens on this ship,” but none of it matters, and if you skipped all the dialogue you would get the same out of the story as I did for watching them.

Now lets talk more about these levels. As established each level plays slightly differently based on the character, but Kurt and the Dog aren’t really all the different. The levels are very linear with only an offshoot here or there that might have an item, but ultimately you alternate from going into open enemy rooms with spawners where you have to do a lot of strafe dodging to kill all the enemies and their spawners and then you go into a puzzle room. For combat encounters, outside of bosses, they are fairly bland. One on one versus an enemy you can just strafe back and forth while holding down fire and you will take down every enemy without getting hit. Obviously they counter that by just throwing more enemies at you, but it seems like the enemies almost always fire at where you were, so if you stay on the move you can take down big waves of enemies without much difficulty. There are enemies that fire different weapons that you will have to look out for, but in general keep on the move and fire and you will be fine through most of the encounters. It breaks up this monotony by having puzzle rooms which are truly where the levels can feel unique, but not always in a good way. Kurt will almost always have to find a glowing orb to hit with his sniper rifle (only bullet that works). Hitting that will unlock the next room or make a bridge or something that allows you to continue the game. Since Kurt is fairly immobile while sniping (can strafe, but you only see your character in a PIP in the corner) most of the difficulty of these puzzle rooms is just an endless spammer of enemies, so you either have to be fast with your sniping, eat some damage, or utilize your few pickups to allow you to cloak, or upgrade your armor for these areas. The Dog has a lot less puzzles, but all of his puzzles rely on using a jetpack, and boy is it terrible. There are two different jetpacks that he can pickup (depends on the level you are in). One of the jetpacks recharges whenever you aren’t using it, and one that needs to be recharged at certain stations. You can probably figure out how the puzzles for both of those work. The one that recharges on its own, has you mastering a fluttering technique to travel long distances or land on small edges to charge, while the other jetpack has you trying to use as little as possible to get to the next fill up station.

What all the characters have in common is some truly awful platforming sections, as this is a game that just doesn’t lend itself well to platforming. In some earlier stages you are usually given a much bigger window to land a jump, or more jetpack juice then you need to get to where you want to go, but obviously the further along you get it just becomes a battle of your will to continue. Now that isn’t a surprise, the later the level the harder the level, I should have mastered jumping in level 10 far better then I had in level 1, and that is certainly true. The issue is that this game doesn’t do platforming particularly well at all, it’s not “blight club” bad, but it never felt good, and some of the readability of where you are supposed to land can just be chalked up to early 2000s muddiness when it comes to all video games. The amount of times my jump didn’t read (press the button and it doesn’t respond) or the ledge grab didn’t take are too numerous to count.

Good news is that this game does have multiple mid level checkpoints so you don’t have to worry about trying to knock everything out in one run. There are no lives or continues to worry about so you can die and restart at a checkpoint as much as you want without really any penalty outside of having to keep playing the game. I think the newer (2011) PC HD version comes with being able to use save states wherever you want, and that would certainly improve some of the issues with this game as you can save after beating a hard puzzle or enemy room and not have to wait until you hit the checkpoint which can be a surprisingly long hike between them. That’s the thing about checkpoints though, if they are right before a difficult room it can feel like a godsend because any deaths in that difficult room mean an easy retry, but that also usually means you will have to go a long way before another checkpoint.. meaning a stupid death later on and you have to do the difficult room again. On the contrary a checkpoint right after a difficult room means that if you don’t quite beat the room on the first go, you have to replay a big portion just to get back to it. So there isn’t much else to add, each level gets about 4-5 checkpoints and they seem like the right amount, but their placement can be suspect on some of them, but it all depends on where you struggle.

I do want to talk about the two things that came up a lot when reading up on this game after I finished it. One which is highly suggestive, but is the humor of this game. I am not going to tell anyone what is funny and what is not funny. I personally didn’t laugh, chuckle, chortle, or even smirk at a joke told in this game. Enemies dying and letting out fart noises is, dare I say, beneath me in terms of humor. Naming the common enemy a Bottrock (play on Buttrock) isn’t funny to me, and the quips the characters say after beating a boss or to each other would make even Arnold cringe. Now maybe I’m jaded and old, and maybe if I played this game 24 years ago at the tender age of 12-13, maybe I would be squirting milk out of my nose in the middle or recess or something… I don’t know what kids do anymore. Now I think some of this is a “of its time,” where video games still weren’t expected to have interesting plot, or characters, or well written jokes, so the reviewers probably should have wrote “funnier then watching paint dry.” The problem why it doesn’t work for me, is I grew up playing genuinely well written or funny games. The adventure game scene at the time actually had funny games whether it was Monkey Island, Space Quest, or the Discworld games. Don’t bring your weak jokes and fart noises and then pass your game off as a comedy. I didn’t feel that the comedy was shoved in my face, so I was able to ignore most of what it was throwing at me, but there were a couple moments where I rolled my eyes far enough back in my head that I did briefly worry that they wouldn’t come back. Who knows, maybe I’m the broken one here and this game is knee-slapping hysterical.. I mean there are so many reviews that mention it as being wacky, or funny.. that it must be me who is wrong.

The other issue that I saw come up was the discussion of difficulty. Usually it was from try hard bros, that want to comment on how games were good “back then,” because of x reasons. “The game didn’t hold your hand” or “The game was hard and you had to git good.” I don’t usually give to much thought into what a bunch of sad gamers think, but lets dissect this. The game is difficult, its not impossible by any means and I have played harder games, but it is not something that you will cake walk through, and much of that is because the game is obtuse in what it wants you to do. I talked about how individual combat is relatively easy, you hold down the button and strafe, but bosses can be far more difficult, because a very specific thing needs to be done to hurt them. That one very specific thing, is never called out and you are left throwing shit at the wall until it sticks. For one boss, you play as the doctor and you have to consume an item, turn into a monster, climb a series of boxes (something the doctor can’t do without being a monster) and then jump at the enemy when he is at a very specific spot, in order to damage him. If you jump at him too soon, or too late, nothing will happen. The boxes you also need to climb, don’t really look like any pile that stands out that signify you need to be up there, so there were endless restarts where I was trying to shoot the boss with my regular gun, hit him with grenades, find a button around the level, change into the monster and bunch him, etc. before I stumbled upon the correct answer. That isn’t a “so cool cause it doesn’t hold my hand” level, it is just bad design. There is one jetpack puzzle room where you have to follow a refill machine for at least 2-3 minutes over a lava pit, before it leads you to where you need to go. The whole time just feathering that power so you stay close enough to stay charged, but still in the air so you don’t die to the lava. I remember that part being a pain, because the checkpoint isn’t close by, so your instincts are to explore that room but after a few deaths you just get sick of replaying the early part of the checkpoint. I am not even going to talk about an entire level (level 8) that had a part that was so difficult that the Dreamcast and PC version added in a shortcut (hard to find, but still there) that allowed you to bypass a 20 minute puzzle. There is nothing more “radical” then trying to figure out what exactly the game wants me to do, so I can move forward with playing the game.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: Hahaha. No

Where does it rank: So, yeah… in case it is not obvious, I didn’t really enjoy my time with this game. I only got one ending (the last level can be played with any character, and each character has their own ending), and despite being able to just start at that level again, I never felt like really playing this game again. Somehow my kid brain at 12 years old, knew to not invest much time in the game and instead to pick up so many other Dreamcast games that actually were enjoyable to play. It’s weird now to think about it, but Bioware worked on this game between the first two Baldur’s Gates and before KOTOR or Mass Effect. Now, Bioware also made a sonic game when they were probably at their peak of their power, so I know not everything is going to be a hit, but there was a time where if it had this name on the box, I would have assumed good things. Obviously not the case. Where does that put MDK2 in the greatness list? Well some may be shocked to find out that it isn’t to high up on the list, but it also isn’t as terrible to grace the bottom of the list. It falls into what I would consider the worst area to be in, which is the, “bad, but not fun or interesting, or even SOOO bad” list. Even while I am typing this sentence, I feel like I am ranking it too low, but I keep re-examining the list and being like… “no I would rather play all those other games more.” So I have this ranked as the new 166th greatest game of all time.

What's it Between: MDK 2 sits between Lost Lands: Dark Overlord (165) and Manual Samuel (167)

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

Future games coming up 1) Wintermoor Academy 2) Ghostbusters (X360)