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 have always liked puzzles growing up. From doing jigsaw puzzles on the family dining table, to books and books of crossword and jumble puzzles for long vacation drives with the family. Hell, some of my first video game memories are playing through classic adventure games (Monkey Island, Space Quest, etc.), those games were puzzles in their own right. That love of puzzles hasn’t died down at all as I have grown up. I still do puzzles and play adventure games, but I have become quite the convert on escape rooms, as they have grown in popularity. However, whenever I start a new puzzle or escape room I always have a small wave wash over me that questions if I am smart enough to solve these puzzles. It’s a weird form of imposter syndrome that somehow makes me feel like I am going to be exposed as being a dumb person. To who? I have no idea, but it has been this feeling that has kept me from playing any of the Layton games previously.

See my wife has loved the Layton series on 3DS for a long time. Pre-marriage she played basically three types of games. She played Farming games, she played dancing games, and she played the Layton games. I have a vivid memory of us laying in bed, pre kids, playing on our handhelds and she showed me a puzzle from one of the Layton games, asking for help and I sat there and couldn’t solve it. I don’t remember the puzzle, but I remember making two guesses incorrectly and watching the picarets decrease and then declaring myself stumped. That was enough for me, at the time, to scare me away from those Layton games. I just knew if I played them, I would fail at every puzzle and it would be a struggle to complete them with my dignity intact.

Fastforward to the era of the Switch and the release of “Layton’s Mystery Journey: Katrielle and the Millionaires Conspiracy,” has just happened. I purchased the game for my wife, because I knew she would appreciate it. She played it, enjoyed it, and then shelved it and I didn’t really think about it until it came up on the whole spinner as one of the potential 3 games I have to play next. I don’t remember what the other 2 games were, but I made the choice that I was finally going to face my fear and play a Layton game and if it wrecked me mentally I would at least have an interesting tale to tell.

“Layton’s Mystery Journey: Katrielle and the Millionaires Conspiracy” or as we are going to call it moving forward “Lady Layton,” is a puzzle game where you play as Katrielle Layton who is the daughter of Prof. Layton who helms the other 3Ds games of yore. In this game, Katrielle is opening up her own detective agency and is looking to take on cases from the lovely people of England as a way to establish some money all while trying to track down her father who disappeared. Well you can ignore the missing father piece, because that really doesn’t come up often in this game, but it helps set the scene as the people of England have certainly heard of Prof Layton, but Katrielle has to earn their respect by solving puzzles. The game takes you through 12 cases of Katrielle, which seemingly have no bearing on the previous cases, outside of a small comment, until you get to the final 12th case that ties everything together.

During each case, Katrielle is asked to solve a mystery, for instance the first case is about finding a missing hand on the big ben clock. You move through locations (not free movement, just screens), and click on people to talk to them, or to examine something in the background. Essentially every screen will have multiple hotspots that can be found by moving your cursor (a magnifying glass) over the screen and when it lights up, there is something to click on. Outside of the obvious (people), other things you might click on might be a clue or something Katrielle and her assistant discuss, it might be a hidden collectable (hint coin or literal collectable) or it will be an actual puzzle. In this world, puzzles are just a thing you find in the world that need to be solved, they are a tangible thing and apparently scattered everywhere, but more on these later. As you advance the story of the case, more locations will open up, and eventually you will start getting real clues to solving each case’s mystery. These clues are un-missable and you can’t interpret them incorrectly, collect all the clues and Katrielle can solve the mystery. Whether you see this as a detriment or a benefit, you don’t actually have to do any solving of the actual mystery. When you have gathered all the clues, Katrielle solves the mystery for you, even if the real you hasn’t drawn any real conclusions. Solving one case will unlock the next (sometimes more than one, that can be tackled in any order), and at any time you can jump back into cases you have solved to look for missing puzzles or coins that you might have missed your first time through.

The stories themselves are all fairly light hearted and while you do solve cases involving murder, theft, and financial ruin, it never really feels as dire as those crimes actually are. The characters and bright and cheery, they make quips, they have overexaggerated faces and it all feels nice and cozy. Katrielle is never in real danger, you can’t game over, and the game isn’t violent. I loved most of the characters that look as if they came straight from the anime, which surprise, they did do an anime in 2018 (a year after the 3DS release and a year before the Switch release), but again this game just looks and sounds lovely and despite being a fictitious game set in a real world location, made me want to move even more to London (or I guess visit) in order to see the sights from the game. It was so comforting, that the game plus the music, plus the puzzles did actually lull me asleep more than once. That isn’t a critique on the game, but perhaps more a comment on me.

Alright onto the puzzles, but these are going to be hard to talk about because there are over 100 puzzles and they can be very unique. In general though, these are all single screen puzzles that have you solving all manner of things, from doing math and geometry, to sequencing and brain teasers. Now everyone is going to be different, sometimes the answers just seem to pop out at you and it takes you 2 minutes to solve a puzzle, and others you might need to graph out on paper (I did) and it takes you 10 minutes to solve. If you get stuck, the hint coins that you collected can be redeemed on any puzzle to get a hint about the solution or where to focus your attention. Most puzzles have four hints available to them, and you do have to purchase them in sequential order, but if you end up purchasing all 4 hints for a puzzle, the game will all but tell you the answer. Of course finding those hint coins can involve a little bit of hunting, and there aren’t enough hint coins for you to use multiple on every puzzle, so you will have to solve some of these clean in order to preserve them. Before each puzzle you are given a clue to its difficulty in terms of how many points (picarets) you will get upon completing the puzzle. The more points it is worth, presumably the harder the puzzle is going to be. Since puzzles can be subjective this is not going to be a flawless system, as there are puzzles I struggled with that were only worth 25 points, and aced puzzles that were worth 45 without a second thought. For any puzzle, should you guess incorrectly, you can opt to try again but the puzzle will be worth less points than it was previously.

What are these points worth, I hear you asking? Well essentially nothing. In Layton games, the more points you had unlocked more bonus content. Artwork, sound files, etc. from the game you just completed. However, these points would tally at the end of the game, meaning that these points don’t mean anything during the course of a campaign. I don’t know what the cutoff is in terms of points, or if there even is one for this game, but when I finished the game, it would appear I had everything unlocked despite the fact that I did not have a perfect score and did not do any of the extra post-game puzzles. Perhaps I was missing something that I didn’t notice, but you don’t need these points for any aspect during your playthrough.

For some of these puzzles, you can get them wrong and still move forward with playing the game. There are some that are pivotal to the story and can’t be skipped over, but bonus or extra puzzles you find along the way can be passed over as long as you attempt it at least once. I made it a point to complete every puzzle I came across, because if you aren’t playing Layton for the puzzles, then I don’t know what you are playing it for.

So this begs the question posed at the start of the email as to whether or not I was a puzzle fraud, and the answer is a “no.” I was far from perfect, and there were at least 10 puzzles where I had to use 3 or 4 hint coins on in order to solve the puzzle, but a majority of the puzzles I was able to solve without the help of any hint coins. As my first foray into the Layton-verse, I was happy to see that I wasn’t a giant mess in solving puzzles, but there were far more “trick” puzzles than I was expecting. These are puzzles where the solution is “0” or to not do anything. You still get a word puzzle and instructions just like any other puzzle, but because our brains want to jump in and try to solve the problem in front of us, we solve for something when the answer was to not touch it. I will give an example, but I am doing this out of memory, so my wording may be off. “Little Joey wants the clock to read 12:00 but it is currently 4:15. What is the least amount of touches of the clock for Joey to make it 12:00?” or something like that. My initial thought of this puzzle was physically moving the hands, or using a mechanism to wind the clock so that it reflects the time that Joey wants it to be, but the answer is to not touch the clock at all, and it would eventually be 12:00. It makes sense, but the question would make it seem like you actually have to solve for something, when that is not the reality. There were other puzzles like that, but it was nothing egregious and once you know that there is a possibility of a trick puzzle out there, you are more inclined to see them when they pop up. The phrasing and the wording on the puzzles are super important to re-read because they might offer a little tell as to what the game wants you to think about. Of course if your brain is fried, or you are just not in the mood for puzzles, then some of these puzzles will feel like they are written in hieroglyphics.

There are a few things I forgot to mention about Lady Layton, such as being able to dress her up in different clothes (all child friendly), unlocking mini-games (more puzzles), and decorating your office but these are all just little asides that won’t eat up any of your time. It can be fun to see that the clothes you put on Katrielle or Sherl (dog assistant) will be there for any discussion scenes, but for obvious reasons they won’t be in the interstitial anime cutscenes that play sometimes during exciting moments of the cases. I made it a point to dress up Katrielle and Sherl in a different outfit for every case just for fun, but you could ignore it completely if you so choose.

As for the whole game, I enjoyed it and was surprised at how many puzzles were included. When I saw my hour count creep over the 15 hour cap it was certainly not what I was expecting, but I wasn’t disappointed that it happened. In fact playing this game, made me excited for the new Layton game that is supposedly coming out later that might actually promise a full 3D environment to explore, but I will worry what that means for the type of puzzles they are going to include. Lady Layton probably works best as a game that you might sit down and either complete half or 1 full case in each sitting, but give you time to recoup and get in the right state of mind before playing the game. I didn’t feel it was incredibly difficult or an unfair game, but there are puzzles that exist in the game that do not go easy on you. Obviously it’s a no brainer if you already like the Layton games, but I would recommend this game to people who like puzzle games or adventure games. It’s not quite the same thing as combining random objects in your inventory, but it itches that same part of your brain about solving weird puzzles that seem to come out of nowhere.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: Sorry, no

Where does it rank: Lady Layton is a pretty good game and has lots of puzzles if you are so inclined to solve some puzzles. There are some puzzles and stories that just don't make sense, but I didn't play this game for realism. It did make me want to live in London, even though I know it won't look like this. I have it ranked as the The 62nd Greatest Video Game of All Time. It sits between 61 (super Dodgeball) and 63 (The Lost Vikings), this is out of a total of 161 games

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 Golf (n64) 2) The Magister 3) Sparkle 2

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?

Recently my kids have been out on the video game hobby. They are 4 and it isn’t uncommon for their hobbies to be in starts in stops. I would never try and force my kids into any hobby that they are not interested in, as I know all to well, that never works out for anyone involved. However, I know that my children aren’t opposed to playing video games they might just be bored with the same faire that they have played over and over again, so while I was perusing the Switch store one day that I stumbled upon a game that I thought would be a fun diversion for them that would at least capture their attention, and give them another activity to do. Not only did the game look cutesy and entertaining, but I made the assumption that it is probably also relatively easy and short. Well let’s just say that I wasn’t batting 100% with all my bets.

Today we are talking about “Rain on Your Parade,” which is a little indie game where you play as a cloud that hops around levels and fulfills different passing requirements. For instance in the first level you need to disrupt a wedding by raining on all the guests, and in later levels you are doing everything from starting fires with lightning to raising the dead and a whole lot in-between. As you progress through 50 levels you gain different abilities until you are the ultimate weather cloud. There is an overworld much like an overcooked or moving out, where you can fly around and interact with some objects maybe even find a secret or two, but ultimately the main thing to do, is just to move to the next level.

Now I don’t know if I would call this a “funny” game, but essentially the premise is supposed to be humorous and thus the game doesn’t take itself very seriously. This reflects in the level design as it starts off pretty innocuous, from ruining people’s wedding or day at the beach, to eventually trying to mimic levels or themes from other games. There is a late game level that is a Zelda clone, complete with a heart health bar, rupees, and enemies that you kill by hitting them with your lightning. They also have a Metal Gear themed level, where you have to avoid detection with vision cones and everything, a Katamari Damacy themed level, a level based on the US Office TV show, and much more. There are a lot of references to other games, some jokes and just an overall cheery presentation that never makes the game seem daunting. Outside of that Zelda level most of the levels can be completed in 5 minutes or so, but here is where things get tricky.

As stated earlier each level has objectives that you are trying to complete, but some levels have hidden objectives that only pop up when you either complete it or are a certain % away from completing it. Even if you beat the level, you won’t know that you missed an hidden objective because it doesn’t pop up at the end as a way to entice you to play the level again. As someone who still feels the pull to be a completionist from time to time, I would play some of these levels and do things that were not objectives to see if it was perhaps a hidden object. What if I break all the vending machines with lightning bolts? What if I soak everyone in the office? Etc. Outside of some achievements and cosmetics (yes you can dress up your cloud), finding all these bonus objectives really nets you next to nothing (especially if you play on the switch, where there are no achievements), but that didn’t stop me wasting precious minutes of my life trying to find hidden things that may or may not have been there. My solution? Don’t hide objectives from me, and if you do, give me a hint or something after the level is complete as to what I missed. Should I learn to let things like this go, yes… but I can’t

I realize I have gotten this far, and not really talked about the gameplay of this game. You play as a cloud that flies over these levels and creates mischief. On each face button is a different weather impact button (Rain, Snow, Lightning, Tornado), and for lightning and tornado you have unlimited uses, but for snow and rain you have a moisture meter that can run out if you use that power too much. In some levels there are areas where you can re-fill (over the ocean, a fountain, oil spill, etc.) Balancing that meter with your objectives is the key to beating most early levels, as you only get so much rain and have to do the most with it. Is this a big issue, no… but this was the breaking point for my kids when they did give this game a try. The first level they could essentially hold the button down to soak everyone and everything and beat the level, but later when they had to carefully use their water, then they immediately checked out, because they are goblins and just want to ruin everyone’s day. Even as I got past those initial levels, it never reclaimed their interest. That’s just the tricky tightrope with kids.

There is a story, in a sense, which is just someone trying to tell a kid a bedtime story and they come up with this cloud idea. Eventually the cloud gets an enemy, but these “story” interstitials are few and far between and are only meant to be a laugh. I am not going to really downgrade the game for not having a story or having a flimsy one, because I don’t think it needed one, but I will argue that this game does not need to be as long as it is. I understand the length of games has to be incredibly tough thing to nail down. You want there to be enough for the people that enjoy it, and not something that people complain about because they beat it too quickly, or that a game is filled with bloat. So, this is a personal complaint, because there are probably people who didn’t wear down as much as I did, or loved it until the end, but I felt that the game ran out of ideas for levels well before 50 and were just marching towards that arbitrary goal. What is even more questionable is why this game has a new game plus, it adds more objectives to certain levels a handful of new levels and a presumably difficulty increase to go along with those objectives and levels. I can safely say that I did not re-visit and play the bonus levels or complete the bonus objectives. 50 Levels was enough for me and I was burnt out of what the cloud could do by that time. Is there a cool new level hiding in that treasure trove of new content? Maybe, but I won’t be re-visiting unless my kids find this game again and decide they want to play through it.

So, “Rain on Your Parade” is a fine game as a diversion, but it is certainly not one I would expect people to play through completely. Not to sound like Dan, but it’s a gimmick game where you understand the whole thing in level one. I’m pretty sure this was on gamepass at one point (or is on it now) and that is the perfect place for this game. Something you can play for 2 hours in one sitting, get your fill of the game and then not feel weird about putting it down or having in languish on your system after a purchase. It’s just not a fun or interesting enough game to play all the way through if you were a regular person. For every cool level (Zelda, Zombies, Katamari) there are also levels where you just float around and spray water or snow on people until the level is over.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: Sorry, no

Where does it rank: I kinda said this in the previous paragraph, but "Rain on your Parade" is fine, but it is a game that hinges itself on a single gimmick for the whole thing. I still think this is best if you play it once for 2 hours and you laugh at ruining a few scenes and then you put it down to never think about it again. I, personally, don't think it is a game that warrants a new game plus or DLC to extend out the adventure. I have it ranked as the 128th greatest video game of all time out of 160 total games. It sits between Down in Bermuda (127th) and Figment (129th).

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) Layton's Mystery Journey (Switch) 2) The Magister 3) Sparkle 2

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?

Do you ever have those games that you avoid but don’t have a good reason to avoid? I’m not talking about avoiding buggy or broken games upon release, or even avoiding games that aren’t genres that you normally play (because those are potentially legitimate reasons). I can’t really explain why I avoided Guacamelee! for so long because I like the whole elevator pitch. In a vacuum there isn’t that should scare me away, but for some reason I wrote the game off early and didn’t get around to playing it until just now. It wasn’t a console war issue because it came out everywhere, it was on sale plenty of times, and it had a sense of humor about it that seemed more genuinely funny then other games that try to sell itself as being “funny.”

All that doesn’t matter now, as we are here now and need to move forward. Guac-a-Melee is a Metroid-vania game that takes a lot of inspiration from lucha libre wrestling and Mexican culture. To rush through the plot here, you go from being a simple man to a hero with the help of a Lucha mask in an attempt to save the woman you love from an evil skeleton that is looking to merge the worlds of the living and the dead. We can talk about that plot a little more later, but you navigate a big world through the normal faire of jumping and fighting enemies, but as you progress in the game you will unlock moves that allow you to either double jump (that’s an easy one) or moves that can break down barriers between maps allowing you to traverse to new areas. For the most part Guacamelee!, actually color codes these sections, which is a surprisingly nice touch. This allows you to get a new ability (let’s say the red one) and then if you are so inclined, to look through the map for any red barriers that you can now break.

As I mentioned earlier, and what you can tell from the box art of this game. Lucha Libres are a huge inspiration for this game, so when you fight enemies on the screen your move set includes a lot of wrestling moves and some fantastical wrestling moves. You can grab stunned enemies and throw them, or suplex them, or even piledrive them into the ground. You unlock headbutts, a falling splash, uppercuts and more but these aren’t all just to break barriers to help navigate the world or find secrets, but because a big emphasis of this game is on fighting. Like in games of similar ilk there are enemies on every screen, but Guacamelee! has sections on some screens where you are locked into fighting waves of enemies before you can proceed. Here the game might even feel like you are playing a fighting game, because you can make your own combos outside of just single punches or kicks. Obviously as the game moves on, you have to worry about enemies with color coded shields and boss characters that can recover from combos quickly, but ultimately you will need to develop a few go-to combos that can keep the regular enemies at bay and finish them off quickly in order to advance.

Around the midpoint of the game, you actually earn a new ability that allows you to switch between the world of the living and the world of the dead. This is a fairly neat feature (and probably cost effective) because it takes the maps that you already know and are able to traverse them differently. For instance a cliff that seemed impenetrable in the world of the living, might have platforms across it in the world of the dead that allow you to cross. Switching between the worlds is as simple as pushing a button with no load between them, so if you were looking to 100% this game you could essentially switch between the worlds on every screen to make sure you are not missing anything. I like finding secrets with this technique but I loathe fighting with this technique. See, for some of the combat encounters have enemies attacking you from both worlds simultaneously, however you can only hit enemies that are in the current world you reside in, so not only are you trying to pull off combos or break color coded shields, but now you are adding in another element to each fight. This is by no means a dealbreaker for combat (something I actually enjoyed), but it can get frustrating and tough quick when adding another variable in. You won’t notice it that much when you are fighting 1 or 2 enemies between worlds, but when you are in a cramped challenge room and there are 10 enemies in various worlds it can be tough simply to keep track of what you and they are all doing.

I didn’t really talk about it, but there is a fairly small amount of enemy variety in this game. Most of the game will have you fighting against the same 3 different skeleton types (regular, ranged, fast). Once you get a little farther they start to peel back a few more layers, but outside of bosses we are probably only talking about a max of 10 varieties of enemies. The bosses themselves are few and far between (5 total) but are worthy challenges for a combat system you should be very familiar with before tackling the first one. Knowing how to dodge and unleash your best combos at precisely the right time is how you will survive, because even with a few upgrades bosses can whittle through your health bar fairly quickly.

Speaking of upgrades, at shrines, you can pay money to upgrade some abilities (health, energy, etc.) or buy new abilities (not traversal ones, but like a stronger piledriver). You use Gold to purchase these upgrades which you can get from fighting regular enemies or completing side quests (yes there are those). The better you are at fighting (long combos, not getting hit) can add a multiplier to your coinage that allows you to upgrade quicker. By the time I reached the end of the game (did not 100% it) I purchased all the abilities I wanted and never had to grind for cash. You get a special reward for those challenge areas, that can be redeemed for costume changes which have unique abilities tied to them as well. The costumes have both positive and negative traits associated with them (More money from fights, less overall health.. etc.), so I ended up playing the whole game without a costume change, but was still able to afford all but 1 costume.

Final notes… There is co-op (at least on PC) where you can Metroid-vania together if you would like, and plenty of things to unlock if you wanted to 100% this game. There are 3 different equivalent to the heart pieces in Zelda (one for health, mana, and Stamina). There are bonus orbs that if you find all of them you unlock the true ending of the game and probably a plethora of other things that I didn’t look for. I had a good time with Guac which I am glad I did, but I think I finished at or around 60% which tells me there was so much other stuff I missed. I think, especially now, that Guacamelee! is a very competent and probably on sale Metroid-vania that you can pick up for cheap now and have a good time playing. Some of the challenge areas can be tricky and I imagine that in not 100% the game that I saved myself some serious headaches at probably the more grueling aspects of the game. There isn’t anything that Guacamelee does poorly, its colorful has good controls, deeper than average combat, and some compelling characters. Are there some minor improvements I would like (the map can be very busy per section, more enemy variety, etc.) I don’t think there is anything category that I would give a failing grade to. Instead I would just give everything a C+ or B to… I had fun, glad I finally played, would recommend, but it also isn’t the greatest game of the world and no single thing it does is amaze-balls that needs to be seen or experienced.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: Sorry, no

Where does it rank: Guacamelee! is a fun game, and I enjoyed it every time I played it. However, if I went a full 24 or 48 hours without playing it, it would never enter my mind, so despite it being a good game it is also just a solid B game. Its a good Metroid-vania, it has some humor and unique moves, and while the combat is good and the platforming is solid, I don't know if I would actively try to recruit friends to play this game over other games. I have it ranked as the 70th Greatest Game of All Time. It sits between Captain Toad (69th) and Blazing Dragons (71st), this is out of 159 total games, so it is a little bit above the top half of the games. Maybe the draw to this game is a full 2p campaign, which I sadly didn't get to play, but as I played single player I had fun, but just not CRAZY fun.

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) Layton's Mystery Journey (Switch) 2) Rain on your Parade 3) Sparkle 2

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 am a very recent convert to the Yakuza series, but once I converted I was all in. It’s probably not an unlikely story at this point, but I started with Yakuza 0 and it rocketed up my best games of all time list. Then I went and played Kiwami 1 and 2 and everything I have played from that team I have enjoyed. It is the right combination of silly and serious, the right mix of open world and linear experience, that it is a no brainer for me to purchase all the games that the team creates, because even though they haven’t all lived up to 0’s lofty goal, I have still enjoyed each one. More surprisingly was that my wife also fell in love with watching these games. She would enjoy seeing the wacky stuff that Kiryu would get up to in the side stories, or the high soap-opera drama of the main story, and of course she poured hours into the hostess club on her own. These games became a rare series where we could sit and play and both be fairly locked into the game.

Judgment is the first offshoot I have played by the team (I haven’t played Like a Dragon, yet.. or the zombie one) and I was very intrigued how the team making it would handle a new leading character, who has a very different skill set than Kiryu did in the Yakuza games. So, after a false start (we started it initially not long after it came out, but dropped it due to kids and other games), both me and my wife were dialed in to playing and finishing this game once and for all.

Lets start at the top. Judgment is at it’s core an action-RPG-Beat em’ up. You play as private investigator Tak (Takayuki Yagami) who, through circumstances, gets involved into looking into a murder of a Yakuza member who ends up dead with their eyeballs cut out. That is the start of the whole story and eventually leads to Tak researching drug companies, city council members, other Yakuza families, etc. Much like previous Yakuza games, the plot and everything that it entails is told over multiple chapters that have far reaching effects. But we can dive into the plot more later and trust me there is a lot to get to there.

However your moment to moment in this game is not just watching cutscenes, you walk Tak through a very familiar Kamurocho (if you have played early Yakuza games) getting into street fights with local thugs and other street ruffians as you make your way to different objectives whether they are side quests or main quest lines. Like in other Yakuza games, you can stop at restaurants, bars, arcades, and other spots along the way if you want to explore everything the city has to offer. Whether this is your first game or your 7 game visiting Kamurocho, it is always exciting to just exist in a world that seems to be living and breathing. Pedestrians walk through the city streets, cars drive by, barkers stand outside shops trying to get people to come inside. Restaurants and bars have their own patrons having dinner or grabbing drinks, arcades have the sounds of machines in the background going off, and it is all just a spectacle to behold. Fights start right in the street and people gather around to watch, people react to you running into them, standing on top of a car will have people stop, stare, and record you on their phones. You can sometimes see their thoughts or hear their conversations on the street, and it’s nothing really groundbreaking, but it again just makes it feel more alive. These pedestrians don’t impact the gameplay at all, but its just a nice addition to making the game feel like its own world.

Fights are a huge part of this world and for the most part the fighting system hasn’t changed too much from previous games. There are two styles to change Tak between which are supposed to be for fighting in groups vs fighting individual characters, but I will be honest, I barely touched this and don’t even remember which one I stayed on for 90% of the fights. Heat actions exist in this game, and for those unfamiliar these are more powerful moves that can be cashed in once you have enough power that are usually more violent than your normal repertoire. Heat actions have existed in all previous Yakuza games I have played, but they are severely toned down in this game in comparison to other games. For example, Tak refuses to take weapons with him or from fight to fight, so there are just a lot of missing heat actions dealing with weapons. Daggers and swords essentially break once an enemy drops them, and while there are some gruesome actions that still involve smashing heads into walls, knees, or baseball bats, a lot of the other ones are missing. There are no bladed weapons or guns that Tak wields, so you don’t see him stab or shoot anyone like Kiryu did, and we can argue that Tak is just a different kind of person compared to Kiryu, but something that brought a lot of variety to Yakuza 0 has been removed which makes fights become a little more monotonous quicker than in previous games. The best two heat actions are clearly jokes but that is nothing new, and something very familiar to people playing Like a Dragon, but you have unique heat actions when you are by swingsets or in the middle of the road that are great, but if anything it makes you wish there were more unique ones in the game. This is a huge game and you will get in a lot of fights across multiple different locales, and while those locales are a welcome addition to just fighting on the street every five minutes, but the moments always seemed to underperform based on expectations I had for this team. In Yakuza 0 – 2 there are moments in each of the games where Kiryu essentially has to fight through a gauntlet of enemies in quick succession for some story based reason. In all of those moments, the story, the fights, the impact of the moment would almost literally get me to stand up as I play through it, pumping me up to a point where I would say something akin to “this is some cool shit.” In Judgment you go through a couple of those gauntlets as well, but that same feeling of excitement is gone. Tak’s fighting style, the lack of weapons, the lack of heat actions, the sense of a lacked aggression don’t raise these moments above the common street fights you get into. Most of the fights don’t even feel connected but individual fights in a big building, I want the Tak who uses a finisher on one enemy to put him through a door, that then leads to a fight with more enemies. I want the Tak to jump kick a man out a two story window, or have some sense of emotion, but this game never gets there.

However we do need to talk about a sad note to Judgment (and a reoccurring one), and that is for such a seemingly big world it has so much less to do than the Yakuza games. I have heard speculation that it is because they used a real actor, who has his own handlers and they denied some of the more outrageous extra activities so as to not be associated with it. That might not be true, but a lot of side activities are missing in this game seemingly with no reason. Karaoke, dancing, bowling, hostess club, golf, fishing, slot-car racing, and more are all gone as possible fun activities to do in the city and they have been replaced with VR (just more fighting, really) and drone racing. I understand that not every game has every mini-game, but Judgment seems barren for activities outside of the main questline. I like playing darts just fine, and drone racing is fun for a little bit, but variety is the spice of life, and that variety can’t just involve going to different restaurants to try and eat all the food. Yes, you can go on dates which is a welcome change… but all your dates want to go to one of three locations and while each girl is different, there is almost always a darts option and a casino option. I ended up just picking darts at every opportunity because it was the mini-game that was the quickest to beat and still score a ‘successful’ date. While this isn’t an exact comparison, I probably spent 10-15 hours in other Yakuza games doing side activities that weren’t tied to a quest-line compared to like 5 hours in Judgment. Maybe some of that novelty wore off by playing multiple games of the same ilk, but outside of spending a session just doing drone racing and VR (thinking I was going to get the unlimited play passes), I never ventured to do those activities again outside of dates.

Before we get into the main story, Tak is a private detective, and gets to take jobs centered around his career as he tries to make a living. There are a couple different places that Tak can go to take up a side quest, but they all (usually) require Tak to use his detective skills to get to the bottom of a case. Most of these are what you would expect a private investigator to handle. Seeing if someone is cheating on their spouse, or looking into the disappearance of an item or a person. Of course, there are some weird cases here and there, including looking for a collection of perverts who keep harassing the same girl, or trying to help a publisher land a book deal with an author. Almost all of these cases involve tailing someone and taking their picture, or tailing them and then fighting them, or even tailing them and then tailing them some more. There is so much of this game that is just Tak following people from a distance trying not to be noticed that it becomes a real problem. The game makes a big show of this early on that Tak has disguises, a drone, and a partner for cases, but in reality you rarely get to use any of that. Perhaps I’m not the right person to ask, but does everyone who is off to do something fishy, constantly stop in the middle of the road to spin around and look for someone tailing them at all times? These are people that A) don’t know what Tak looks like, or B) shouldn’t expect to be followed, so why is everyone as skittish as a cat. Being a private eye certainly isn’t a glamorous job, but where are the other actions for you to do. Make me have to dig through trash, or investigate a building without being caught or something. Make me use the lockpicking skill, or the cigarette smoking skill (smoking in random break rooms) for any use at all. How is tailing the one thing that everyone is ok with being 70% of this game.

I digress (tailing is one of the worst parts about this game, and I never actually failed one), the side quests in Judgment are some of the laziest and weakest side quests I would associate with this team. They re-use bits constantly for side quests that don’t need a drawn out series. There are 3 side quests just dedicated to helping a publisher secure a book deal, and all 3 side quests have you in the same room solving a puzzle for the same characters. There are 3 more side quests where you just play hide and seek with a little kid by trying to find him in the town from a single photo. There are about 3 or 4 quests where you chase a wig on the breeze. This whole game has about 50 total side quests and its not that so many are bad, its that so many are uninspired. In Yakuza 0 nearly every side quest ended in a fight, but even though it always ended up in a fight, most of the quests still felt unique. In Judgment, I remember feeling so let-down that when I finally unlocked a new side case by progressing in the story, or because I made enough friends in the world, only to see that it was hide and seek for the 3^rd time or another publisher quest. That’s not to say that there weren’t some good side quests, but the hit rate in this game is much lower than it as for either of the other 3 Yakuza games I played.

Ok, lets get on to the main plot. There will be spoilers ahead, but I don’t want to just block out this whole section so this is your warning that I am going to spoil something with this game’s story. So, I covered some of this earlier, but this game is mainly about a series of murders around Kamurocho. A bunch of dead bodies are appearing in the city with their eyes gouged out, but a relatively clean crime scene. While the cops are certainly investigating, the people that are being found dead (yakuza’s, homeless, etc.) are not really a collection of people that are making this a super high priority. Tak is a former lawyer, now a private eye that gets hired by the yakuza to get one of their generals off who is being charged for the string of murders. You eventually get him acquitted because he has an alibi, but this piques your interest and you make it your mission to catch the killer. That is the setup for the first few chapters, but then the story seems to fall off the rails a little bit. Tak’s focus shifts from investigating the murder spree to diving back and investigating a robbery his friend was involved in which seemingly has no relation to the murder case. From there Tak starts reviewing a case that was the reason he quit being a lawyer, about a man twice convicted of murder who is now serving a sentence and on death row. Eventually the story pivots to focusing on a potential new dementia drug being developed that could solve a lot of the country’s problem with dementia patients. Much like other Yakuza games, these stories all eventually come together in a Rube Goldberg kind of way. With Tak and crew deciding where to go with their investigation based on no real evidence and a potentially dangerous accusation. Of course it ends up being right, and then Tak and co. get to be a hero and take down a huge group of corrupt people in the process. It is soap-opera in its extreme-ness and an enjoyable story if, and I say this lightly, a little predictable.

I enjoyed the story and all, but this is a big ole ranking list, so I have to rank it against other games. The judgment story doesn’t hold up when compared to Yakuza 0 or even Kiwami 1. What I thought could have been a really good detective story about stopping a serial killer gets derailed by its own story multiple times that even our main characters don’t seem to find it important. Why did we drop everything to re-litigate a robbery that happened 5 years ago, no one really asked us to look into it? It seems for multiple chapters of the main game, we seem less interested in catching a killer and just putz around instead. Of course, because this is a video game, it all comes out in the end that everything was related to some degree, but it asks that the player make these wild jumps in logic with the characters without really offering a good reason to do so. I remember sitting with my wife after finishing up a chapter and discussing with her if we both missed something, because there seemed to be a big missing connector piece that tied everything together. *Spoiler* I am of course referencing that seemingly out of nowhere, Tak and crew associate the new dementia drug with being tested on human subjects, and those are the people who are found dead… and while that ends up being the case, at the moment they make that suggestion there is no reason for them to believe that to be the case. *Spoiler*

Which can we talk about Tak for a second here? He has this troubled history where he got someone off for murder, and that person seemingly commits another murder which haunts him to this day. It gives Tak a persona, it gives him some convictions, because of this past screw-up. However, and I hate when games or movies do this, they take all that away in the end. Turns out that Tak was right all along and that the rest of the world got it wrong! He didn’t accidentally defend a real murderer and get them acquitted, no there was a huge elaborate plot that went out of its way to re-convict this same guy and he was innocent the whole time. Do we need a main character who is perfect and just? I would much rather our hero have this blight on his resume as a reason why he now strives to do his best, it gave him a driving force. Tak can now be righteous without having to wash away his failings. One of the many reasons that make Kiryu a better character than Tak, is that you knew that Kiryu rose through the ranks of the Yakuza before we play as him. That means that he probably put the squeeze on business for protection money, hell in 0 he gets in trouble because someone he roughed up for loan money ends up dead. Kiryu may be a big softie that is constantly trying to do what’s right, but you know that he isn’t perfect. In comparison Tak is just a boring character that doesn’t make mistakes (unless you count all the times he is real creepy to women). The best character in all of Judgment is Tak’s associate Kaito, who is (shocking) a former Yakuza. The best detective stories are almost always because the detective has some bad history that haunts them. Tak starts with that, but by the time the game ends, Tak has an untouchable record and is Joe Perfect. Our heroes are more interesting when they have failings, taking away the only failing Tak had, immediately makes Tak a much less interesting character.

There are other things I forgot to mention that we will cover in one or two sentences each below:

Friendship meters – Meet and befriend people around town and they might show up in a fight or toss you an item when you need one. You need to make friends to unlock side quests, its like the Sims.

Leveling up – Leveling up is a chore as it is based on a currency that is much harder to come by. I was not even close to be maxed out.

Drone flying – a lot is initially made of your drone, but unless you plan on racing with it, it only exists for like 3 quests.

Quikstarter – An obvious play on kick starter where you can thrown money at some unlockables. Money is less plentiful in this game than other Yakuza games, and the things you can fund are only there if you want to spend more time with drone racing or more time in VR.

There are probably other things I am forgetting, but that is Judgment in a nut shell. I won’t shy away from it, it will be the lowest ranked game from these creators who I think have struck gold with their other series. There are a lot of reasons why, but this game just feels and plays like a side story compared to the Yakuza proper series. Less side activities, less heat moves, less fighting styles, and a much less interesting main character all make this a much lesser experience. I have “Lost Judgment” and I have seen that they put a few more activities in that game, but any momentum for me to roll right into that game is gone. Now to be clear, this game isn’t bad in that I think this is falling in at the bottom of the list, but rather it is bad if I compare it to other similar games all made by the same studio. I still think people can have fun with this game for the $10-15 its being sold at now, but if I am trying to win people over to this type of game.. I am not putting this high on the list to show people first.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: Sorry, no

Where does it rank: Judgment had a fairly negative write-up but I am being harder on it because I care. It needed more variety in its cases, more variety in its side activities, and more variety in fighting. Kiwami games got a pass, because they were remakes of games that came out will before 0, and they can claim they are playing it close to the original. Judgment doesn't get that pass, this game should have had plenty of time to incorporate even just the side activities or heat actions into Judgment, and it opted to not do that. I have it ranked as the 51st Greatest Video Game Of All Time. It sits between #50 Super Mario Party and #52 Rune Factory 4. This is currently out of 158 games, so it is still in the top 3rd of games available, so not at all a big loss, but nothing compared to the 2nd greatest game of all time (Yakuza 0) and the 37th greatest game (Kiwami 2)

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) Layton's Mystery Journey (Switch) 2) Rain on your Parade 3) Guac-a-Melee

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?

My wife has been on a kick recently of cozy games, but as she isn’t quite as invested into the world of games as I am so when it comes to the research that falls on me. So after hitting on some winners (telling her to play Tinykin and Dorfromantik), I created a nice big list, divided it into categories for her and now she can look into getting a new game when she feels like branching out. She is far less rigorous in her desire to beat a game before moving on to the next one, so she would buy 2 or 3 at a time and then alternate between them until she loses interest. I think that is what we call a healthy hobby, but I’m losing the thread here. Anyway, one of the games that piqued her interest was a game called Lonesome Village, which she played for a little bit and then moved on to another game, but not before she accidentally downloaded it to my switch (we have 2). Well I was looking for something to play as a relaxing, play without thinking kind-of-game saw it was already installed and fired it up. Much like pringles once I started playing, I had to see it through to the end.

In Lonesome village you play as a character that finds a deserted town. Upon your entry you are kind of thrust into the mystery as to what happened to the habitants of the town and directed to a large tower where they are all being held captive in. On each floor there is a puzzle that needs to be solved that gives you an item that can then be turned in to break the spell and rescue some townsfolk. Those people start repopulating the town and the goal of the game is to obviously save the whole town and solve the mystery as to why these folks were stuck in the tower in the first place. As you climb the floors you will eventually hit an impasse where you need to acquire either a particular item to advance (something you cant get from being in the tower) or you need to have hit a certain amount of friendship points. When those instances happen, you exit the tower and start talking to all the people you saved previously and the loop is born.

Even though the setup might sound mysterious there is no combat or death state in this game, this is more of an animal crossing/Stardew Valley crossover. Each floor of the tower has a different puzzle, but even the ones that seem “dangerous” a failed state on the puzzle just has you restart from a set point. The puzzles range from mirror and light puzzles, block pushing puzzles, jigsaw piece puzzles, maybe a pipe dream puzzles thrown in for good measure. There are very few levels that require either a fast reaction or a time-limit that you need to beat to progress and the game does a good job of putting discoverable clues in the puzzle areas for you to utilize if you need help. Rarely did it take me more than 2 attempts on a puzzle to complete it, and it never feels like you are under duress. Even the last puzzle which does take place against a boss fight (despite the fact you can’t fight) didn’t really feel harrowing. Sure you would have to dodge some lighting patterns, and then do a puzzle from earlier in the game under a time-limit, but it’s still a pretty cozy feeling. Also the plot doesn’t really stand on its own. It exists to setup the tale and end it, but you never feel propelled forward to see the end of the story. Even the townsfolk don’t seem that concerned. You might have just rescued them from being abducted, but they are fine re-opening their flower shop in the shadow of the same tower. For this game, you come solely for the cozy vibes and maybe some of the puzzles.. If you are looking for more, then you are out of luck.

This is a game in two halves though, when not in the tower rescuing friends, you are spending the time exploring the area, about 10 screens large, uncovering secrets and doing fetch quests. You might rescue an alchemist from the tower, but in order to earn their friendship points you will need to bring them three different potions. Of course each potion is acquired doing different activities; from finding in a random treasure chest, buying from a shop, a reward for a different fetch quest, but if you want to max out the characters friendship meter that is what they will ask of you. Like in most games, the more characters you rescue the more the town opens up and the more access you get to explore. You might get an axe from rescuing a carpenter that now allows you to cut down a tree blocking the beach, or you might get a pickaxe that allows you into the mine. The secrets you reveal almost always lead to either a new townsfolk or an item you need for a friendship quest, but there are some that the game doesn’t really bring attention to which are certainly more alluring. A broken statue in the desert or a missing diamond in the jungle are never set quests that get attention, but you can interact with them or fix them and doing so gets you a little reward. Now that reward might just be a new outfit to wear or a fetch quest item, but its fun to see that there are in fact “secrets” in this game. The problem with that is, you start looking for secrets everywhere and it takes awhile to realize they are few and far between. I would find that you can interact with bookshelves (just moving a book) and then assume that it must be a weird puzzle to unlock something, when it is really nothing at all.

One good thing is that if you are just looking to beat the game, you really only need around 30 friendship hearts to make it all the way through the tower. Each character can give you a maximum of 3, so that may seem like a lot (10 full characters), but the maximum hearts in the whole game is close to 100 (like 105). I will admit that some of those hearts can only be accessed after beating the game, but I finished the game (not knowing how many I would need) with 70 hearts. My strategy was always the same, I would do all the tower floors that I could during a section, until the game basically kicked me out, then I would do all the people quests I could in the town. Once there was no new quests in the town, I went back to the tower. Unless you are getting the one required item and then going back into the tower, you will never be behind. However, I will warn you… This is a game that is very heavy on the fetch quests. When you get later in the game, you will almost certainly be asked to deliver items that either need to be grown in your garden (more on that later), or an item that needs to be crafted at a shop, which then means you need to get the required items and bring them to be crafted together. While some rewards might be a missing item you need for another character, oftentimes you are gifted money that is a smaller amount then what it cost to acquire the item.

Which brings me to my biggest negative in this game. This is a game that tries to do a little bit of everything. There is gardening, mining, decorating, building, fishing, etc., however most of these things are not well thought out or fun to do. Gardening and mining which have a strong late game need, just have you waiting for results. Gardening requires you to dig a hole, plant a seed, and then water it once, and then you just wait 5 minutes for the item to grow. Mining has you click your pickaxe on a rock and then just wait 2 minutes for your character to finish mining and get a random assortment of goodies. The amount of time I had to plant flowers or fruit and wait for them to grow were killing me to fulfill a fetch quest in this game. Fishing doesn’t require any skill as you just push the a button once your bobber goes underwater and you will automatically catch the fish. Crafting or decorating your house isn’t rewarding because you can’t do anything with these items and villagers don’t move around or pay you a visit. I applaud this game for being cozy and for including these different systems, but they seem like checklists on a white board with no real thought behind them. Sure you can sell extra fish you catch or plants you grow, but I would advise strongly against that as you never know what the next fetch quest is going to ask for, and you don’t want to have to re-buy seeds to plant, because you sold your excess strawberries early.

I get a weird sense that there was supposed to be more to this game, that either missed the final cut or were just too costly to implement. There is a day/night cycle but it only affects what type of fish you are going to collect and one puzzle with a ghost. Your character doesn’t need sleep despite the town having a working inn that costs money. Other characters don’t really move around the map and can be found in only 2 places (their house, or right outside their house). While the tower feels large and there are a lot of townsfolk that you will rescue, the tower does feel like it needs to be higher, especially with the goals for hearts so much lower than what you can have at any given time. I was intrigued enough to keep playing for the end, and outside of some lengthy plant waits didn’t feel it overstayed its welcome, but I was still waiting for something else to happen in the game. Even finding out what happened to the town, or finding the big bad, it was over fairly quickly. Now that could be a positive in some regards. The game ends, but you can still exist in this town befriending townsfolk, decorating your house and character to your hearts content. Heck, there are some characters that don’t appear until the epilogue so you could play this game for a few more hours after credits roll if you truly want to see it all. For me, I wanted to leave with a good taste in my mouth. I restored the town, saved the townsfolk and earned some of their love and admiration, but I wanted to get out before they got too accustomed to me being around.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: Sorry, no

Where does it rank: Lonesome Village is a little less than what it is billed as. It's an intriguing cozy game that I can see people who are really into that vibe spending many more hours than I did playing it and maxing it out. However, it doesn't have the crossover vibe that is going to transcend further, this isn't Stardew or Animal Crossing. Oddly enough I am putting in virtually the same spot I just put the previously reviewed game. I have it ranked as the 76th Greatest Game of All Time. It sits between Goldeneye 007 (75th) and Sonic Adventure (77th).

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) Judgement 2) Rain on your Parade 3) Guac-a-Melee

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?

This is just an early aside (is it an aside if I haven’t started yet?), but I certainly wasn’t expecting to finish 3 games over the course of about 3 days and it wasn’t really planned. Like sometimes you have nothing going on for the day and you can churn out like 4+ hours of gaming over the course of a day in order to make a huge dent or finish a game that is close, but this wasn’t that instance at all. I finally finished “Judgement” and “Guac-a-melee” by maybe putting in an hour into each of the games before credits rolled. Those rankings will come up later, but those games were beaten after I finished this beauty heading into the weekend. I went from what seemed like a large gap between beating games, to now being backlogged in the ranking writing process. However, let’s get to the star of the show

I don’t normally do this, but I want to discuss my history with the game first. I was a Nintendo 64 kid, it was the first system that was truly mine in our household (I have an older brother and sister). Whatever that ownership does to ones brain, I played the hell out of every 64 game I had with very few exceptions (looking at you Hybrid Heaven). I made sure to get all the Stars in Mario 64, I got all gold medals in Blast Corps, and medaled all levels in Starfox 64 in order to unlock the new start-up screen and multiplayer characters. I would obsessively complete games back then, because as a kid/teenager you only get so many games a year (birthdays, holidays, saving up chore money, etc.). It was no different for Goldeneye. I completed every level, at every difficulty and beat the target times in order to unlock the different cheat codes that came with beating levels at certain speed. I did this feat well before I was very internet savvy, so most of those target times were beaten through intense trial and error about learning exactly what enemies had keys, and how to use the C button’s to strafe through levels faster and avoiding all encounters. I remember distinctly having that final save file with all the cheats unlocked playing on 007 difficulty and just overall exhausting everything I could with the game. On this playthrough I was amazed at some of the things that I still had memories of, but even more things that I had forgotten.

For perhaps the 2 people that don’t know, Goldeneye 64 is a first person shooter that follows the movie’s plot of the same name. You play as James Bond who eventually gets tasked with shutting down the Goldeneye laser, rescuing the girl, and squaring off against another agent. In this game, depending on the difficult you select, you will get objectives that you have to complete throughout each level that require a little more work than just shooting and walking through the level. For instance you might have to take pictures of important documents, destroy security cameras, hack certain terminals, or steal classified secrets. There are 3 difficulties at the start of the game that you can select, and each step up not only makes the enemies harder, but adds 1-3 objectives on from the previous lower difficulty. On Agent (easy) you might simply have to get to the end of the level and pickup an item, but on Secret Agent (medium) you will have to do those two things in addition to destroying all security cameras and planting a tracking device. It is a fairly good way to make playing through the game at different difficulties feel a little bit fresher assuming you start on the lowest and work your way through. On the first level there is a whole underground area that you wouldn’t need to even see playing on Agent, that you will then have to explore on harder difficulties.

While the missions obviously tell the story of the game, each mission acts as a standalone to the ones before and after. Weapons, ammo, health, or armor does not carry through from previous levels, so there is never a need to save specific weapons for late game moments. If you find a grenade launcher in a level, the only reason to not use it, is because you are afraid of the splash damage it might cause. While this means that you can’t paint yourself into a corner by finishing a level nearly dead, it also weans out any advantage you would have by conserving ammo and avoiding fights. It took me a good few levels to get this through my head, because I instinctually want to conserve, constantly in fear of running out in the moment that I might need it. However, its worth noting that this game is old school, before some of the benefits that we have now gotten accustomed to. There are no mid-level saves or checkpoints, there is no replenishing health, and the game doesn’t really hold your hand at any moment. I played the game at Secret Agent difficulty, because I don’t hate my life, and there are objectives that you just have to fail before you learn otherwise. In the first level on Secret Agent you have to throw a sensor onto an object to download data, but you only get one sensor and it is possible to throw it away and not get it back. The game doesn’t have an objective marker or throw up any big arrows as to what it wants you to do, you might throw it on something and realize you screwed up and have to start the whole level over to try again. You will either respect that madness or play this game with a guide in your lap. Yes, there is a briefing ahead of each level, should you read it all, but they don’t always send you a picture of everything you need to do.

The game also employs a weird way to re-spawn enemies. In some levels, enemies will re-spawn as long as you have not cleared out a room. Think of Gauntlet having a spawner that needs to be destroyed before it stops spitting out enemies. In this game the spawner is another enemy, that as long as that enemy does not die, more enemies will re-spawn from them. It’s hard to explain, but essentially this is a tactic that prevents you from sitting in one spot and goading all the enemies into charging you, as you sit back and kill them from a choke point. While those new spawned guards will drop ammo allowing you to repeat this dance for eternity, it will never stop enemies coming for you until you push forward and clear that room of its original enemies. Seeing as your health doesn’t re-fill and there are no health pickups in a level (only armor pickups) that war of attrition will never go in your favor.

Perhaps my skills were rusty, but I had a hard time believing that a game I beat so handedly in the past (and on the hardest difficulty) would routinely kick my ass nowadays. I’m not saying this is some super difficult game, as I was able to run through a whole playthrough in a short amount of time, but there are certainly some difficult points that can kill your level run and knowing you have to start all over might make you just put the game down and walk away for the day. There are some straight up bad levels in this game that are a pain at any difficulty, but especially harder ones. These levels either require you to hunt and peck for small details, or just offer a gauntlet of enemies with no armor in sight. Hell, I failed the level “statue” so many times because at the end of the level your girl is taken hostage, and your instinct in this game is to try and free her by shooting the guards holding her up, but by doing so she ends up getting shot and you have to start the level over. I tried being faster with my shooting, approaching from different angels, trying different weapons, before I finally realized that you are just supposed to get captured there. The level “Depot” and “Train” are a 1-2 combo of back to back bad levels for very different reasons. In “Depot” you have to hunt for all your objectives by navigating a maze of shipping warehouses looking for certain items, and in “train” you face an entire level of narrow corridors with no armor pickups. Its harder to dodge and juke enemies, when the hallways aren’t much bigger than you. I could talk about even more levels like “Control” and “Jungle” but I would be belaboring the same point, the game is about 40-50% bad levels. There is a reason that anyone who dips their toes back into this game, just plays through “facility”, because that’s the best level and it comes way too early.

I will admit though that I made this game harder on myself than I needed it to be, by playing on Switch. The game just does not feel the same playing it on anything outside of the N64 controllers. I felt the joystick was way too sensitive, but only when it came to aiming down the sights, which made shooting turrets a test of patience. I over relied on auto-aim for shooting soldiers because trying to use the reticule (which requires a button press, and for you to be stationary) would have killed me more often than not. The nostalgia of playing this on a Nintendo 64 might be clouding my memory here, and if that is the case then you can just ignore this whole critique, but I don’t remember having nearly the same problem with aiming of the controls in general playing it. However, seeing some of those target times that were required in order to get certain cheat codes means that I wasn’t stuck spending 2 minutes slowly lining up my aim to destroy a turret in a room that would have killed me otherwise.

Of course let’s be honest with ourselves here. The reason Goldeneye has a special place in anyone’s heart is because of the multiplayer. Back in the day you could gather 4 friends together on one screen and play competitive multiplayer on a console that just wasn’t done that often. People would come up with house rules such as; No oddjob, or slapper-only duels. This game was certainly the first I remember where screen peeking was a real concern. Well I have good news and bad news for you if you were nostalgic about the multiplayer. The good news is that it can still be the game that you remember it to be. The bad news is that games have come a long way since Goldeneye’s multiplayer that you realize that it can’t really hold a candle up to what modern games are doing now. Now don’t get me wrong, a game is not ranked on my list based on if other games do it better, because it would almost exclusively rate every older game below newer games because of it, but this game was of a time and place. The multiplayer maps are still pretty fun, and once you unlock all the custom characters that gives you a big selection of people to pull from, but this game thrives when its four people all in the same room playing against each other. Playing online is a nice addition, but it doesn’t feel the same as couch-coop can. I get it, not everyone has 3 other friends or family members who are willing to play this game in the same room at the same time, I don’t either, but if you are going to do a walk down memory lane with Goldeneye you have to get that setting back.

Without that feeling of playing next to each other, you are left with a pretty average single player shooter campaign and an online multiplayer mode that does not compare to so many other games. I won’t say that Goldeneye has aged like milk left out in the sun, but it is certainly a game that you can ignore if you have no existing nostalgia for the game. I would normally use my boys as a litmus test, but they were too young to play this game and something tells me that when they are ready in 2 years I probably won’t remember to put it in front of them. So with some sadness this is the first FPS that goes on the list, and it doesn’t stand up to the lofty position it has been in people’s nostalgia brain.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: no

Where does it rank: I think at it's best Goldeneye is a historic game that can help tell the story of console games and multiplayer and how it evolved, and that is high praise. However, unlike some of the other historic games, Goldeneye needs to be played with nostalgia glasses on to truly appreciate the game. Is there fun to still be had here, yes, but it comes from having played it in the past or experiencing something that used to be important. I can say that I liked playing Goldeneye 007, but its warts were way more apparent playing it now, then when I played other older games for this project. I have it ranked as The 75th Greatest Video Game of All Time. It sits between Dicey Dungeons (74th) and Sonic Adventure (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

Future games coming up 1) Judgement 2) Lonesome Village 3) Guac-a-Melee

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?

What a weird F-ing weird game! Catherine is a game that has been on my radar for a while, because the elevator pitch of the game sounded so appealing for me. I had even started it multiple times, but would peter out fairly quickly, from either getting distracted with other games or life reasons. However, when I spun this game on my roulette wheel, I was genuinely excited to pick it up again and have a reason to stick with it. (Yes, this blog is enough of a motivation for me to finish games that I spin, even if I have fallen off them before). Of course I am getting way ahead of myself we need to educate the world on what Catherine even is.

It’s actually hard to describe this game in a nutshell. At it’s core, the game is a puzzle game, but just a very specific type of puzzle (sliding box puzzle). However, while the puzzles make up the main gameplay, there is still a large emphasis on what amounts to watching a soap opera, and making small choices in terms of how you respond to texts, and who you are going to talk to in the bar. I referenced the elevator pitch earlier, and if I was the one making it, I would describe the game as a “life and death puzzle game with a story.” The game even sets up at the very top that you are watching what amounts to a TV show or movie, granted that is in-world, but it would explain why there is a just as much an emphasis on the puzzles, as there is on watching cutscenes.

However, we should talk about those block puzzles first, as it is your main gameplay and something you are going to have to get good at, if you want to make it very far. Without getting into the story much (that comes later), every night in your dreams you are transported to the puzzle area where you are asked to climb a tower. The tower is made of blocks that, for the most part can be pushed and pulled in any direction, allowing you to climb up. Your character can only climb up anything that is one block high, so you find yourself trying to create steps as often as possible, so you can climb as fast as possible. Now obviously there is a lot more to it then that. Some blocks have certain characteristics, such as having traps on them, or being immovable. There can be enemies on the map, that will try to push you off the tower or potentially move blocks. While it is not stated, each map has a time-limit to complete as the bottom floors start falling into the abyss as time ticks away. Also there are boss fights that occur, where you are being chased up the tower by a boss that has different move sets that can mess up your plans.

One of the obstacles that certainly took me by surprise was the need to quickly come up with new techniques as you climb in order to solve these climbing puzzles. It’s not that I was cocky going in, but I remember thinking to myself that there really can’t be that many different ways to create a climbable tower outside of typical stairs. Early on in the game, you will certainly have that difficulty jump, where you can’t just approach each tower that you are climbing in the exact same way. You have to learn different techniques, because there are some towers you are going to climb that are going to break your brain. Maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise, as clearly the game would get harder, but there were multiple incredibly frustrating moments for me in this game, where that happened. I would get to a certain part in the tower, and my brain could not wrap around how I was supposed to get higher up. The problem in these moments is that you don’t have endless time to piece this stuff together. The timed levels, the enemies, the sound of the game is constantly propelling you upwards. This is not a game where you have time to outline each step before you start moving blocks, this isn’t a sudoku puzzle, you just have to start employing a strategy and see if it works. That can get you into trouble, as it is very possible that you can build yourself into an impasse, or that you pushed a block out that you needed. There is a fairly generous ‘undo’ button that lets you backup up to 7 moves, but even employing that rigorously, you might find yourself having to reload checkpoints or the start of the level because you messed something up that can’t be fixed in 7 moves. Towards the end of the game when you are employing strategies that involve having blocks fall, you can realize too late that a tower fell too far, or a block you needed you pushed down earlier in the building process.

Now that can all sound like garbly-gook, because if you haven’t played the game before, what I wrote means absolutely nothing to you. Until you start experiencing these towers, you might not appreciate the difficulty some of these towers hold. Even watching an expert on Youtube won’t educate you, because it will look so effortless and easy, because it doesn’t show all of the careful planning that led up to that victory run. It’s not all bad of course, there are items that you can collect that can change the landscape including items that kill all enemies within a certain range, items that can create a block out of thin air, and a plethora of extra lives. I played the game on normal, and it is fairly generous in terms of dolling out extra lives, especially if you know that the items will re-populate even when you restart a level from a checkpoint or from scratch. An extra life (in the form of pillows for this game) might be two steps away from a checkpoint, and even if you die on the third step 20 times, that pillow will re-appear every time you restart meaning that as long as you make it to the same space everytime, you aren’t losing lives. I was fairly late in the game and had a bank of 50+ lives for the final run of levels.

I mentioned it earlier but you also have to keep an eye out for trap blocks and enemies that roam the regular levels. Enemies come in really two forms, early on in the game they will just push you off a block if they get close enough, causing you to fall to a lower level. Something that you can usually recover from fairly quickly depending on your setup. In later levels the enemies wield weapons, and instead of just pushing you, they might just outright kill you. While there are items that can take care of the enemies, they really aren’t that big of an issue, and I found that I could usually build around them or push them out of the way without too much worry. The trap blocks on the other hand can be a run killer if you aren’t paying attention. There are spike blocks that trigger….spikes.. that in order to avoid you have to step on and off of the block as quickly as possible. Ice blocks that will impair your pushing and pulling of other blocks and cause you to slip should you try to move on them. Bomb blocks, blocks that prevent you from hanging on them, and even instant death blocks. All of them are a pain, and can destroy your flow, but in some levels you will need those blocks to progress because even if they are traps, they can still be stepping stones. I died far more to trap blocks then I did to regular enemies or even bosses, so watch out.

Speaking of bosses, they are big creatures that chase you up the tower and have a variety of different moves. While I found the boss towers easier to climb as I think they tax less on your puzzle solving skills and more on your reflex and avoidance skills, they are still harrowing nonetheless. Any wasted time gives the boss a chance to catch up, and some of them have moves that can wipe away entire rows of blocks, or send saws up through the floor which will obviously mean an end to the run. Each boss signifies the end of your night, and beating them offers you a reprieve to re-visit the story, as the bosses are there to be projections of what your character is thinking about at the moment. I think when all is said and done, I think the bosses are more of a footnote for this game rather than anything more interesting. Yes, there are bosses that chase you that are fetuses and angry vaginas, the bosses themselves might be memorable, the fights are not on par with how you might remember a Dark Souls or Final Fantasy boss.

Ok, that is all the block talk we are going to do. It makes up the majority of the gameplay, because the other times you are experiencing a story. The rest of the time you are playing, you are talking to people, responding to texts, making choices and watching cutscenes that all further the story. I will warn now, that there will be some spoilers ahead for the story, this is a very story oriented game so even if I avoid speaking of the ending, some aspects will get spoiled. Warning out of the way? Great… The story of Catherine revolves around a character named Vincent, who is a 30 something, who is in a long relationship with a girlfriend that wants things to get more serious. One night while out drinking, a younger girl stumbles into the bar and starts chatting him up. One thing leads to another and he ends up cheating on his girlfriend with this younger girl. That is the main crux of this story, and there are different paths you can take because there is a morality meter that affects the story in different ways. That morality meter can change on almost all actions you take outside of the tower climbing gameplay. You will get texts from your girlfriend and the girl you cheated with, and how you respond can make you good or bad. If you act towards being faithful to your girlfriend you are considered good, and if you lean into the cheat then you are more evil. The biggest variable to the morality meter is that at the end of each round of the puzzle climbing, you get asked a question. These questions are meant to be ambiguous but only have two answers. For instance, do you want a short life full of experiences or a long life that is relatively boring? How you answer will move the needle towards one direction and sometimes it makes sense, and sometimes your interpretation doesn’t align with the game and it is something you will have to live with.

Now there is a bonkers act 12 reveal that somewhat saves the game for me (see.. this is why I play to beat), but I will admit that the story itself and the questions seem like they are written to appeal to teenage boys. As a 30 something year old man myself, I found all the behaviors of Vincent incredibly frustrating because he behaves like an idiot and not how I would act. Granted, I have never cheated on my wife or previous girlfriends, but if you are even remotely serious about your relationship you cant just bumble your way through and hope for a resolution. He doesn’t call it off with the girl he cheats with, to the point where she starts to act like his girlfriend, he never has an honest conversation with his real girlfriend about anything. Eventually he gets told some heavy stuff involving a potential pregnancy and marriage, it takes him the whole game to work up the nerve to say anything to his girlfriend (in my story). However, here is where I think the writing was meant for adolescents, outside of the normal titillating factor of almost seeing nudity. The morality questions the game asks and how it portrays the two women are fairly juvenile. The long-term girlfriend comes off as callous and mean in interactions with Vincent, she does one “nice” thing for him in the course of the game that we see. The other girl talks about all the dirty stuff you do in bed, sends you naughty pictures, and is way to into you based on who you are. I think the makers of Atlus want you to see this sexualized, “younger”, submissive girl as a better option because that is what you are led to believe. We don’t see any history that Vincent has had with his long time GF, they have clearly been together forever, but we never see the good things. The questions that you are asked are meant to paint marriage and having one partner as this boring life that is unfulfilling, which is something that I certainly believe 16-19yr old boys probably believe. You will get questions like:

Do you prefer to stand out in a crowd or fit in?

Is Romance annoying?

Who would be responsible if you cheated? (you, or someone else)

Are actors in sex scenes lucky?

Maybe not everyone will see those as leading as I do, but the answers that lead you to “order” or good morality is almost always just choosing the boring option. Sorry game, I don’t think marrying my wife was the start of the end of my life. I don’t envy the life of a 30yr old who gets black out drunk every night at the bar, so that he can’t remember if he cheated on his girlfriend again. There are also other men you will meet in the dreams and in the real life, that are also haunted by these nightmares and it is because they are all crappy human beings too, and while I think there are a lot of terrible men and women in the world, I find it hard to believe that more than half the clientele to the same bar are all cheats and abusers.

I am glad I completed Catherine, I am glad I saw the bonkers reveal and got an ending, and I am glad I had some truly triumphant moments playing this game. However, I am a little sad that I didn’t like this game more. It is a game that should have been up my alley, because I love stories and I love puzzles, but both of those sections felt off for me. The towers range from what felt pretty straight-forward to excruciatingly difficult, and it isn’t just a difficulty spike. You will be tempted to just look up solutions to puzzles, because there are only so many times you can bang your head against the wall when it is not coming up with a solution that works. For the story bit, I started off intrigued, then got annoyed, and then just found it funny, but if the game was trying to have a deeper meaning (and I think it is obviously trying to do that), then it failed in its execution. I didn’t finish Catherine feeling any different about relationships whether in general or the ones I have had, I don’t feel I learned more about my tendencies and what that says about me. I played the whole game and felt bad for Katherine (GF), because she seemed like she could do a million times better then Vincent, and Vincent acted like a child throughout the whole game. Hey I got a crazy idea, if you keep blacking out drunk and waking up next to Catherine and worry that you cheated on your Girlfriend, maybe try staying at your GF’s place, or having her stay with you for a night. Maybe crash at a friends, or maybe don’t get blackout drunk.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: no

Where does it rank: I wanted to like Catherine more than I did, but I have to admit that it was a bit of a let down. I found Vincent as an unlikeable protagonist and his friends weren't much better. I found his hesitation to make things right, infuriating, and the canonical ending, no matter how you play should have been him ending up alone. Do I think it is funny that they went so crazy at the end, sure.. but I don't think that wipes away the rest of the story that felt very amateur. Climbing the towers was mix of euphoria and mind-melting frustration. Keep in mind this is just OG Catherine and not Catherine Full Body which would be a separate entry if/when it gets played. I have OG Catherine ranked as the 87th Greatest Game of All Time. It sits between "Flower" (86th) and "WCW NWO World Tour" (88th) out of 155 total games.

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 (actively playing) 1) Judgement 2) Lonesome Village 3) Goldeneye 64

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?

Remember the Kinect? There was a magical time when the Kinect was first released, before the debacle of Kinect 2.0, where it seemed like the greatest evolution of the Nintendo Wii motion controls. I won’t lie, I was fully bought in to the original Kinect. I missed the boat on the Nintendo Wii, sure I played Wii sports, but never owned the system, and I have gone on to ignore the frenzy over VR, but the Kinect was my hardware of choice. I wasn’t a complete idiot, I knew that it had limited uses, but I was excited for the stepping stones that could expand on this. I was able to play video games and get a workout in, my wife (girlfriend at the time) loved the dance games that no longer required you having to hold a controller or phone to measure motion. It was something that stayed hooked up for years in my house, because Kinect games were in such a rotation that it never made sense to put it away. Now that time is passed, and Kinect sits in a drawer for when I want to show my kids some of the hits, but lets dust it off and talk about this week’s game, “Kinect Sports.”

Kinect Sports is the spiritual successor to Wii Sports and I can tell you that I think this game still exudes all the excitement that the Kinect initially promised. All the fun everyone had with Wii sports (assuming you had any fun) is back in Kinect Sports, but only if you approach it how it was meant to be played. What I mean is that there are limitations to the technology, and I remember going down the rabbit hole in unlocking achievements where you could break the game fairly easily by navigating those tricks. Knowing how to cheat at the discuss throw, or the secrets to bowling perfect strikes, while can be fun also ruin what I think is the joy of trying to use your body to do these things for real. I felt genuine joy when I won the track and field gold, because I was running my fat ass in place to try and win the sprint and hurdles as if I was really running them. It won’t compare to doing those activities in real life, I don’t think anyone is suggesting that, but playing this game as intended is far more enjoyable then using the camera against the game so you can set world records every time.

There are 6 different sports to pick from (Boxing, Track and Field, Volleyball, Table Tennis, Soccer, and Bowling), multiple mini-games for each sport, multiplayer party modes, and even difficulty selections for each sport. Now how does one actually beat this game for a ranking? Well, I played each sport and beat the “professional” CPU and then played each mini game at least once so that I was up on all the nitty gritty. Granted, I have previously played this game ad nauseum, including getting all the achievements, but that was during previous years. I will briefly talk about each sport, but some might be lighter than others.

Up first, Boxing. Boxing is perhaps my least favorite of these motion sports. You stand in front of the camera swinging your arms to punch or holding them both up to block. Depending on how you swing your arms you can throw jabs, crosses, uppercuts and haymakers which will reflect in the game, with haymakers and uppercuts dealing the most damage, however boxing is more strategy than just swinging wildly. Hitting or being hit 3 times in a row will stagger which will make the person being staggered more vulnerable to damage as well as make their punches weaker. Blocking will grant your next punch swing to do more damage, but not if you get hit before you throw the punch. While you can dodge by moving slightly, outside of ducking some punches being thrown high, you aren’t really going to move side to side to avoid punches. I know I am starting off with my least loved sport of the bunch, but unlike the other sports, I feel the camera has the hardest time tracking you during boxing. Punches can get misread easily, dodging is almost nonexistent, and while the game wants you to play a cat and mouse kind of game, the best strategy is to throw continuous windmill punches until your opponent is knocked down. This was easily tested by “boxing” my 4 yr old son. While I was initially planning on letting him beat me anyway, there is no way to counter someone who doesn’t stop making punching motions. What started as a game I was going to let him knock me down 1 or 2 times, but still make it a close fight, turned into me fighting for my life 3 minutes in. I wasn’t expecting perfection, or some form of real life training to eventually step into the ring, but the whole draw of Kinect was physical movement, and I didn’t feel this really improved on the Wii Sports formula.

Switching from the sport I played the least to the one I played the most, we are moving to Volleyball. Volleyball is played as a 2v2 game, as you play first to 7. While spiking has it’s difficulties, I feel this game does a much better job of tracking what you are doing in the game. If you do a “setting” motion, you will set the ball to your teammate, hitting the ball overhand will try to get it over the net quickly, hoping to take them off guard, and spikes require you to jump and swing with either hand to direct the ball. Granted, the game takes the movement of the character away from you, so you don’t actually have to run to spots on the floor, but the ball tracking seems much improved over something like Boxing. There were many a nights where I played this in the basement, and really selling out for the spikes as if I was doing it in real life, it was a good workout. Volleyball also has the two best minigames for the series. One has you returning shots with called body parts (Heads, hands, or feet) which can be fun and hectic as you get later in the game, and the other game has you trying to avoid objects being hit at you (bowling pins and balls, fruit, etc.). Both of these minigames, mixed with the actual game of volleyball will have you working up a good sweat because they require you to do some quick movements in order to give it an honest go.

Soccer and Table Tennis are both fun, but neither game really shows off the promise of the Kinect. In Soccer the ball pings between players and on defense you have to stand in front of the passing lane, or shot. When on offense, you are given the option to kick the ball in 2 or 3 directions, until you are in position to shoot where you have a little more freeform. While not as hard to read as fast hands in boxing, if you aren’t doing overexaggerated kicks, you might find the ball not travelling where you want it to. You can have some fun, especially playing with others, and its certainly nice to see a sport that we aren’t accustomed to seeing in a motion game, but you can quickly rattle off wins in this game with minimal effort. Table Tennis behaves how you would expect, like a motion controlled game of Pong. There is some nuance here based on how you swing to affect the shot, and poorly timed hits can setup the other player for spikes which are hard to defend. The most comical part of all of Kinect Sports is seeing a highlight of a Table Tennis spike, and seeing your paddle and behavior not match what happened at all.

Alright, final two. Bowling and Track and Field are both great for very different reasons. Bowling is an old staple that now feels even better than it did in previous motion games. You physically have to move left or right to align yourself how you wish, the follow-thru with your arm is important as to how you control spin, and the game reads the speed you do it as power on the ball. Again, this isn’t something you are really going to take to the lanes, but rolling a strike feels good, because you can convince yourself that you had to actually physically do it. As for Track and Field, this was the game that got the most movement out of you. 5 events (Sprint, Javelin, Long jump, Discuss, Hurdles) all of them involved some combination of running, jumping, or throwing which was obviously the point of the Kinect. Now you weren’t just alternating button pushes to run a character faster, or shake a remote to speed a character up, but actually stand up and run in place. In long jump or hurdles you had to time your jump after running. In my replay of this game, I had the most fun with Track and Field. It maybe only lasted 10-15 minutes, but it is the only event that feels like a full event, as other selections are all single games that can end very quickly depending on your skills.

Now this is a loving look back at Kinect Sports, because in order to fulfill the brief of beating this game, I did it in only two sittings. I didn’t have a chance to get sick of the game or struggle with any issues, because I was “finished” far before that point, but that doesn’t make Kinect Sports free from critique. The game has flaws, as did a lot of the Kinect system and other games. For one this game is not accessible for a lot of different people. Even if we ignore the need for an add-on (the Kinect), you would have needed a large play-space to setup the game and play. Much like Ring-Fit after it, this game isn’t really friendly for Apartment dwellers or even people who play games on the 2^nd floor of their house. Adding to that list anyone who have any impairments when it comes to mobility, the elderly, etc. These aren’t necessarily new concerns or issues, and while Microsoft has done wonders in terms of addressing accessibility issues with controllers and games, the Kinect was prior to that time. I am sure these things were taken into consideration, but they had a vision that “your body would be the controller,” so they then couldn’t just map these games to buttons as well, because they weren’t programmed that way.

As with other games launched around the same time as the Kinect, this game was a little lite on content. Sure there were multiple sports to play, mini games, and party modes, but you could essentially see everything in one long play session. While this isn’t much different then Wii Sports, this is nothing short of being classified as a party game. Sure you could play it solo, and by golly, I did, but you had to make your own fun to get that far. I used it to sub for a workout during bad weather days (especially the DLC), and I was big into achievements back in the day and got 100%, however that was me extending the life of a game that didn’t have much life to give. I would fully expect that most people probably played this game only 10 times and that it probably didn’t have the longevity of Wii Sports.

Upon revisiting Kinect Sports, it briefly brought me back to the time when the Kinect was new and exciting. I was younger, I had no kids, and I had a close friend network where these games were no brainers for me. I knew that I would be able to organize a game night in person, and have people come hangout and play Kinect games. Maybe we would play some Bowling, and then switch to Dance Central or Kinect Adventures. Now the gimmick of motion controls has worn off. There might be some exceptions here and there, but it has been decided that when people play games they want to sit on their couch or in their computer chair to play the games, and not clear their living room and jump around. It’s easy to reflect on that time and think that it was obvious that Kinect was going to fail, but at the time I think it was far cloudier.

So what about playing it now? Well it feels more like playing a gimmick now then it certainly did at the time. However, it is still incredibly fun for what it is, and can entertain friends or families for a few hours as everyone gets a turn. Getting everything setup now, is a pain in the ass, as it always was. Clearing the space you need for two people to play at the same time is just as daunting, despite now owning a home instead of a small apartment. I can see the slights the game has in terms of tracking, but if you ignore all of the downsides you can still get a group together and have a fun session. Are you setting up weekly nights to play Kinect, or playing more than an hour at a time? Probably not, and it certainly isn’t in the running for the greatest game of all time, but I could probably argue that this game has aged pretty well all things considered.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: Fun, but No

Where does it rank: Kinect Sports is still fun, and if you can look through some of the technical issues that belong to the Kinect as a piece of Hardware, you can have some real fun. It's niche, and requires you to want to physically move, but its still fun to bowl a strike, spike a volleyball, or score a goal in soccer. It's certainly not the greatest game, but I don't think anyone would ever confuse it for that. I have it ranked as the 59th Greatest Game of All Time out of 154 games. It sits between Pathways (58th) and Super Dodgeball (60th).

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 (actively playing) 1) Judgement 2) Lonesome Village 3) Catherine

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?

Its been a little bit since my last post, but I promise it’s not because I don’t love you, I really do love you, but rather because I am moving closer to finishing a bunch of bigger projects. For those in the know, I am on the last day of “Catherine”, I am in the last chapter of “Judgement,” and only one session away from finishing “Kinect Sports,” so more to come on those bigger games soon. However, we have two mini games to talk about today, and one I really don’t want to discuss, but lets start with the smaller game here.

Do you like jigsaw puzzles? Do you like building mosaics? Well then you should play “Glass Masquerade” or “Glass Masquerade 2,” but if for some reason you want to go even deeper, may I present to you “Mosaic Chronicles.” I suppose I would say that MC is a puzzle game with a story, in that there are two campaigns you can go through that have a plot. You, the builder, don’t get to influence the plot and there is no agency for you to hurry up and complete the puzzles, but before starting each puzzle in a sequence you get a little bit of story. Both stories have a similar theme of a hero making their own luck and not relying on others to make it for them. For instance one story is about a knight who goes to fight a dragon, and the other is about a kid going on a treasure hunt. I don’t want to spoil the “riveting” story to either of these campaigns, but lets just say that some things are not always what they seem.

The actual puzzle solving is fine. Every puzzle is the same size (not necessarily same number of pieces, but same shape). The pieces resemble broken pieces of a picture, so you won’t always know what piece is going to fit into each spot. You can rotate each piece 4 times (90 degree turns each time), and depending on how finnicky the game wants to be at a particular moment, pieces will snap in as long as you are kind of close to where they are supposed to go. The reason I would say this is finnicky, is because I have had pieces feel like they snap-in even when I am half the puzzle away, and then I will struggle to put in a single piece in when I have it a pixel off from its designated spot.

There is no timer, and every 2-3 minutes of working on the puzzle you can ask for a hint, which will tell you where one piece, chosen at random, goes. It doesn’t move that piece there for you, but rather puts a little sparkle effect on the board so you can do the moving yourself. I relied on that hint more then I ever would have wanted, but some puzzles felt like they had no edge (border) pieces, so sometimes I would just get sick of trying wrong pieces.

I didn’t do an exact count, but there are close to 50 puzzles in this game, with one campaign eating up about 35 of those puzzles. However, this game just lacks a lot of polish for something seemingly so simple. There is a gallery viewer after you clear puzzles, so you can re-visit the story, but the screen doesn’t scroll with your curser, so after you look at the first 10 puzzles, you just have to trust your instincts in terms of which one you are going to view next. To start a puzzle from the menu (especially when you have ones that are locked) you click on the puzzle before the one you want to do, which means that if after beating a campaign you clicked on the last puzzle picture, it would take you to a blank board with no puzzle pieces, that require you to quit to menu in order to get out of. There are a few background music tracks, but I legitimately feel like each track is 30 seconds to a minute long, so you will cycle through all the music at least once in a single puzzle. I know music can be a very personal taste issue, but I felt that the tracks weren’t something I would put on to complete a puzzle as they seemed too loud and bombastic for an activity that is a little more slow and relaxing.

I don’t have much more to say about this game then that. If you are itching for a jigsaw puzzle game that is about re-creating mosaics (somehow that genre has more than one game) then I would recommend both Glass Masquerade games over this one, by a large margin. This is still a jigsaw puzzle game, and the puzzles are fine and serviceable, but they won’t wow you. Its not the worst game I have spent < $5 on, but even in terms of just jigsaw puzzle games, it is a big drop in quality compared to the other ones we have already reviewed.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: Cmon? Really? No

Where does it rank: Mosaic Chronicles is the equivalent of buying a discount puzzle at Target or Walmart. It might be enough to pique your interest on a rainy day inside, but you aren't going to recommend the purchase to anyone else, and you will probably donate it to Goodwill the same day you complete it. It is the 145th Greatest Game of All Time. It sits between Tharsis (144th) and 99 Vidas (146th)

Ok, that one was short and sweet, because I wanted to save time for a game and a scenario that I hope to never repeat. This is a warning, but I did not beat “Building’s have feelings too,” but not because I didn’t try, but rather because the game became unplayable for me.

Before we get into the game, let me explain. My goal with this series is to complete games (run credits, not all achievements) and rank them on a list. If I invest enough time in a game, even if it is bad, I will force myself to finish the game so I can see it through. I think assessing the completion of a game is important, there are good games that end poorly, and other games that have a profound ending that makes you re-think the whole game. If, for whatever reason, I bounce off a game and just can’t bring myself to keep playing it (very rare occurrence but has happened), then I just won’t do a writeup on the game. I don’t want to misspeak and base my incomplete time with the game as if it was a whole game. However, I am willing to make an exception for this game. I will admit that I did not particularly enjoy my time with this game, but I decided to keep plugging away at it, so I could finish it, but then stumbled upon a bug that will not only allow me to progress any further, but would need a full restart of the game just to hope that it doesn’t happen again at the same moment. I waste my time with bad video games all the time (look at my list), but playing a bad game twice just for the hope I can get through it the second time, is a bridge too far, even for me.

So let’s talk about “Building’s have Feelings too.” The first time I saw this game I was very intrigued about it. It had a style that appealed to me, and seemed like a unique take on a city-builder game. The driving thought behind this game is what if buildings could move on their own, and what if they had needs and wants. It is a city building game that took place one block at a time that tasked you with making your buildings happy, which in turn would make your citizens happy.

This might be easier to explain with an example. If you build a family home, it wants to be close to amenities in order to be at its maximum happiness. That will mean that it wants to be close to a grocery store, or other family homes. It wants to avoid being near factories or smelly locations. However, that grocery store wants to be close to a fish market and maybe a café, two things that produce negative smells. Your job is to try and find a way so that most of the buildings are happy, because happier buildings mean they can rank up and produce things that other buildings might need. For instance a fully ranked up restaurant will start offering fine dining, and a lawyers office may need fine dining nearby in order for them to rank up. Depending on what the mission is for the block you are on, you may need to focus on some buildings at the expense of other buildings.

It sounds like and kind of could be an interesting puzzle game that merges with a city builder. Outside of some missions on each block (levels), you have some free reign into how you want to build. Granted this takes resources, in the form of bricks, and you can screw yourself over by building too many buildings you don’t need, but as long as you complete the task, you can then perfect the block as much as you want. It feels good to solve a puzzle and rank up a building to maximum happiness, and unlocking new building types is its own reward as it allows more diversity on a street.

Each level, that I played, had a unique challenge also associated with it that add additional obstacles to whatever goal you are working towards. For instance in one level you are building by the docks, and no matter where you build, each building gets a negative smell trait. That just means you have to work harder to overcome that obstacle. In another level, there are buildings that refuse to move around, which means that your placement plan of building needs to work around stubborn buildings. It’s an added puzzle wrinkle that at least makes levels feel a little more unique, and you can’t employ the same strategy to each level in order to build up happiness.

However, that is where the potential good times end for this game. I played this on the switch, and right off the bat none of the buttons felt like they were mapped to the right keys. Despite playing for ~5 hours, I would still routinely struggle to find the right buttons to navigate through the game. I also did not see or find a way to change things around in terms of button mapping. I like to think of myself as fairly adaptable when it comes to games, but for some reason this game’s controls, never clicked with me.

When it came to its puzzle solving, I always felt that the rules were changing, and that I was probably getting more lucky then learning the system. I understood that buildings have certain ranges where their positive or negative benefits would reach, but I would find myself upgrading a building, and then for some reason a nearby building would just decide that it was so unhappy it was going to risk closing. In these instances you have a limited amount of time to move that building somewhere it is happier, but if you fail that business closes for good (costing you more upgrades). Once you are under that time pressure, you are trying to slot buildings around as fast as possible (not easy, since you manually have to walk each building to a location) and all your best laid plans are gone. Eventually I developed a strategy that involved moving a building somewhere it disliked just so I can upgrade it, and then moving it back to where it used to be. This seemed counter to what the game wanted, surely if I was fulfilling all of a buildings upgrade needs, it would be happy in that location.

Now I could have been missing some detail about why any of these buildings were unhappy, but that is because the information about this game is almost non-existent. The tutorial doesn’t explain enough for you to fully understand all the mechanics, and even when I broke down and started looking up a way to get unstuck, there are no guides that exist from literally anyone, and only a half hearted FAQ on it’s steam page. Do you know how uncommon that problem is? In today’s day and age, with a million people trying to make it on twitch or youtube, for a game to release and not have a single person have a full playthrough of the game posted. There was one person who had multiple videos on youtube, and they got stuck from a different bug in the same level that I did, I can’t even watch videos to see later levels. The game is all but dead.. the few people who have stumbled upon the game have posted bugs or issues in the steam forum, but they all go unanswered and unaddressed. This game isn’t that old, really only about 2 years old, but my guess is that it has been abandoned.

Of course the game breaking bugs are issues that warrant a special demerit, but they (as far as I understand) are all caused by an over aggressive auto-save. This is a game, that you wouldn’t think that would be an issue. This isn’t a FPS where you can get autosaved in a bad situation with health and ammo, this is a city builder, where at most you might have selected the wrong building to build, but something you can come back from. However, my issue comes from the aspect that I entered a new level, fixed a broken building before I was prompted to, and then got the task to fix a broken building. The building can’t re-break, and because I broke sequence, the game won’t recognize that I already fixed the building. Thanks to the auto-save the kicked in right after I repaired the building, I can’t reload a save, or even restart the level, because that is not how the game works. And just to make things clear, I didn’t have to jump through hoops to sequence break the game. You spawn into the level, and the first building you come across is a broken building. I talked to the building like you would expect, seeing as it is the first thing in the level, and saw the option to fix it.. Why would I not take it? How was I to know, that I should have ignored it and talked to the building 1 screen away who would start the mission proper? How is there not an option to just restart level to prevent this issue from becoming a game breaking bug?

Now I don’t foresee many defenders for this game coming to this review, but I can see the concern that I should have kept a backup save after every level, just in case a game breaks. The problem with that, there are only 3 save states, and the autosave will overwrite whatever file you are playing on, so you would have needed the foresight to save two files at the start of every level, so that one file can be overwritten with the auto-save and one can be the backup. You would only do this, for this game, if you were starting over because of bugs and you knew there were problems.

Where does that leave us? How do I rank a game that I didn’t finish, and have no plans to go back to? Well even before the bugs, this wasn’t a great game. The controls, the puzzles always feeling like you were stepping backwards into solutions as opposed to actually solving them, and the lack of good information on playing the game was never going to put this towards the top of the list. However, with the game breaking bugs I have to slot it even lower then it would normally have been. How can I, even slightly, recommend this game over an actual functioning game? Is 5 hours of an incomplete broken game a better recommendation than a game you can actually finish? Is it even worth the length of this write-up? The answer to that last one, is certainly “No.”

Is this the greatest game of all time?: Its busted, so no

Where does it rank: I questioned putting it at the bottom, because its broken and I would rather recommend (thats what all this list is.. recommendations) a game that you can finish, then one that dies on you 5 hours in, but I suppose those 5 hours have some validity to them. So it is not the WORST game of all time, but it is in the bottom 5. It is the 150th Greatest Game of All Time. It sits between "Revenge of the Bird King" (149th) and "The Wardrobe" (151st). This is out of 153 total games.

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 (actively playing) 1) Judgement 2) Kinect Sports Season 1 3) Catherine

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?

After such a long post last week talking about Final Fantasy, lets get back to what people really want to hear about, a much smaller indie game that people probably haven’t played. Today we are talking about a Dorfromantik, a tile laying builder where you try to build the perfect little town. For all intents and purposes, Dorfromantik is a good cozy game where you play a quick session before bed or when you want to just decompress from a long day or harder video games. If you are coming into this game for anything but calm vibes and calming music, then you are going to be disappointed.

To set the scene a little bit more, Dorfromantik is a tile laying game. You are laying hexagonal pieces as they come up on a board in order to build out the town around you. Each side of the hexagon can have different things reflected on it: houses, water, wheat fields, railroad tracks, forests, or blank. Each piece you lay has to be connected to another piece, so you can’t just drop pieces into nothingness in order to get rid of unwanted pieces, so you are slowly sprawling out the town/country-side/etc. Now you could play those pieces willy-nilly, but the ideal way is to try to match sides on various hexagonal pieces. You want to match a forest side on one piece to another forest side, or a house side to another house side. If you can match all 6 sides of a hexagon, you earn yourself a ‘perfect’ placement, which not only gets you more score, but more importantly, earns you another tile to place. However, let’s table that stuff for a little bit. Back to basics, tiles can be rotated so you can line edges up, and items on your piece can touch multiple sides on your hexagonal piece. You could have a piece that has 4 out of 6 edges being forest, or houses, so when you are placing those you will need to build accordingly. Your bank of tiles is randomly generated off to the side of you, and you can’t skip pieces (at least in the main mode) so it is a very real possibility that you will not be able to have a perfectly laid piece everytime, so don’t shoot for that initially. Pieces can essentially be laid anywhere with two exceptions; railroad tracks and rivers cannot be played anywhere. For railroad tracks, they have to be played so that there is room for them to continue, you cant just have them crash into a town. The same can be said for rivers, and there are end pieces (railroad track ends, or river ends… aka a lake), but I wouldn’t bank on those coming up in every playthrough.

On occasion you will find pieces in your stack that start a quest. These quests will ask that you make a continuous grouping of said item either to an exact specification or to exceed a set number. For instance you may lay down a house piece, and above it, it states 5+. To complete this quest you would need to have 5 or more houses grouped together to fulfill the quest. As long as there is an unbroken chain that connects 5 houses, you are in the clear, it doesn’t have to be pretty, it just has to be functionable. These quests are important! Not only do they give you something to aim for, but upon completion of the quest you will gain points and more tiles to your bank. Since the game ends when you run out of tiles, the more ‘perfect’ placements and more completed quests you do mean that you can keep growing your remaining pieces to lay and thus keep wrapping up a score. As the game goes on, the quests will obviously require more and more items to fulfill a request, and some of these can even be stacked into the same grouping of trees or houses or whatever the quest is for. So you might have three quests for trees all going at the same time, and if you just have a big section of forest land laid out already, you might be able to just keep building it out and hitting all the quests at once. The quests that are a real pain in the ass, are the ones that require an exact number. These quests are a lot harder to just stack anywhere, as if you go over the threshold the quest fails and you get nothing, and sometimes waiting for a piece with just 1 house or 1 wheat field might not be something possible based on the pieces you have left. There are some hidden big quests out there that you have to work towards. If you zoom out from your map, you might notice a ghost like piece in the distance. If you can build our little world out to that piece, it will start a large quest, that if you can complete will unlock a new challenge to work on.

So, lets talk about challenges and scoring. This game does not have a story or a main goal, so each time you start you are potentially working towards one of three goals. You can play for total score and try to rise up a leaderboard of other players. You would do this by focusing on completing quests, making ‘perfect’ tile placements, and just trying to extend your game for as long as possible. The more pieces you place the higher the score you can get. You can play for challenges, which are overarching goals that you can work towards at the onset of the game. For instance you might have a goal to connect 60 water pieces together, or play 5 games in a row where your score is over 5000 points for each game. Completing these challenges will unlock unique pieces or biomes, or just variants of current pieces. The new pieces are fun to unlock and add new variety to your available bank, but they won’t change the way you play the game as they aren’t guaranteed to show up in each game. For instance you might unlock a windmill piece which has wheat fields cover the whole hexagon, or a forest piece that has a fox walking around on it. These pieces won’t change how you play, but they offer variety. There is one piece that is actually more useful, and that is the water train station, which allows you to have train tracks and water intersect, or doubles as an end to a train track. Perhaps the best thing to unlock are new biomes which allow the countryside that you are building look more interesting. On its own it is just a different color, or variant to pieces you already have, but when viewed as part of your whole countryside, you can see the change of the biomes. Pieces in one section might appear wintery, muted, and cold… while in another section they seem more bright and vibrant. Again, this does not impact anything gameplay wise, but its nice to see that change.

Finally, you can ignore all of that and play for fun, aesthetics or to relax. There is a separate mode where there are no limits in the tiles you can place, there is no scoring, and you can change out the pieces you are about to place. This mode is just to make a nice looking world. If you want to attempt to build your own ideal hamlet, or just want to listen to the music while you make a pretty diorama, they have you covered. I have only dabbled in that mode, but it is peaceful and you can really fill up the world around you. Obviously this mode is exempt from scoring, or beating challenges, because you are able to swap pieces in and out as you please, but I found it works just as well to have my kid toy around with. The game has very calming music that fit the needs of the game, as well as multiple tracks so you don’t get sick of just one song over and over again.

That’s kind of it though, it’s a great indie puzzle game that is exactly what it tries to be on the box. Your city won’t go to war with other cities, you don’t have to build realistic trade routes, you just get to build how you see fit. It is a great cozy game that I really enjoyed. It might not be something that you play long term, and I don’t think this will ever be the “main” game you are playing at any minute, but it fits that mold of being your backup choice. When I finished Final Fantasy X, it was nice to play a game where you could have a relatively good run and still be finished after about an hour. I am sure better scores can have you making the same hamlet for days on end, but I never had a run that took me over 2 hours, and I am fine with that.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: No, but it is great at what it does

Where does it rank: Dorfromantik is a really relaxing and fun game, but i don't think anyone would confuse it for the greatest game of all time. What it is aiming to do, it does really well, but for me personally I would like more to unlock and maybe more unique pieces that might mix up the game in crazy ways (like the water train station). It may seem low on this list, but it is certainly worthy of your time for the 1-5 hours you might play it. I have it ranked as the 54th Greatest Game of All Time. It sits between Rock Band (53rd) and WCW/NWO Revenge (55th).

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 (actively playing) 1) Judgement 2) Kinect Sports Season 1 3) Catherine