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My name is Robin, and this is my website about computer games. Here you can find essays about old games, industry commentary, free games I've made for fun, and funny songs.

Previously: 2018 – 2019 – 2020 – 2021 – 2022 – 2023 – 2024

So only by forgetting can I see the place again as it really is.

– David Byrne, True Stories (1986)

I played and completed more games in 2025 than in the previous year, although I only played one game that was originally released in 2025. I had little interest in any of the year’s high profile releases although I suppose I might play Baby Steps at some point.

In the immortal words of Francis Ford Coppola, let’s go, Mr. Driver:

Astro Bot

Astro Bot: Rescue Mission was my second-favourite PSVR game (after Paper Beast) and the first game I’d encountered in many years that had recaptured the feeling of a game doing something startlingly new and sensorily overwhelming that I associate with the golden age of the arcades.

Team ASOBI followed this up with Astro’s Playroom (the PS5 pack-in game) which went partway to convincing me that a non-VR Astro Bot game could still be worthwhile.

This full length sequel is More Like It, cranking up the presentation (and overall scope) several notches. At the time I played through it at the start of the year I was fairly confident I wouldn’t see anything that would top it in terms of visuals. (Read on to see how wrong I was.)

While it inevitably lacks the sense of scale and physical solidity of its VR predecessor, Astro Bot is still an exceptionally visually impressive game. Every level is packed with convincing materials and elaborate physics simulations (plus subtle haptic effects) making traversal through even the most straightforward platforming courses feel rich and satisfying. Water looks astonishing. There’s one set piece where a boss parts the ocean which even on a flat screen comes close to the frequent theme park ride spectacle of Rescue Mission.

When the game launched last year a lot of people got carried away and hailed it as a credible counterpart to the 3D Mario games. I wouldn’t go that far.

While the generous parcels of (mostly very tough) free DLC levels that have appeared post-launch have redressed the balance somewhat, many of the core levels of the game are very easy, with overly generous timing windows for many jumps and attacks and some suspiciously magnetic platforms. While it’s not as patronisingly devoid of any real peril as, say, Portal 2, it does mean that a competent player can rattle through the game very quickly.

There aren’t a huge amount of secrets or alternate routes to encourage revisiting completed levels, and you’re not really afforded much opportunity to play around with Astro’s moveset for its own sake in the same way as you are in Super Mario Galaxy et al.

By far the weakest elements of the game are Astro’s special abilities. In the previous Astro Bot games these served as embedded tutorials for features of the PSVR and Dualsense interfaces. They were used in brief sequences that introduced some much-needed variety to what was a very linear experience.

Repurposed as part of Astro’s platforming toolset it quickly becomes apparent that several of them (the Monkey, Frog and Elephant for starters) are quite unreliable, annoying and, well, a bit crap. Once you get to the ‘challenge’ levels it’s groan-inducing to see one of these gimmicks immediately glue itself to poor old Astro on the starting line. They really ought to have designed a new set of abilities from scratch.

Outside of the mechanical shortcomings, I’ve seen a few people get hung up on Astro Bot’s overly slick and emotionally hollow vibe, seeing him as a sort of gaming equivalent of Jimmy Carr or a Funko Pop (or a Jimmy Carr Funko Pop). I can see where they’re coming from but don’t mind this particularly.

An Astro Bot game is never going to give you a lump-in-the-throat moment of emotional connection, but the character’s positivity and charm is agreeable enough without becoming cloying. Astro Bot is a mascot character in the traditional sense, which feels a bit like an anachronism in world that has largely reframed mascots as either postmodern agents of chaos or conduits for lazy meme humour.

The degree to which the game leans of nostalgia for other (often better) Playstation-adjacent franchises doesn’t really get my hackles up either. (The game’s collection mechanic revolves around rescuing several hundred bots who are cosplaying as different famous video game characters, who then act out little animated scenes in the game’s hub area/trophy cabinet.)

It’s kind of amazing to see intricately designed homages to titles like Wipeout and Croc in a modern game – it’s certainly a better and more earnest tribute than most of the great UK studios of yesteryear are ever likely to receive from an indifferent industry establishment. Sure, I can see how this could be viewed as a cynical attempt to promote back catalogue games, but frankly the more people who are encouraged to play e.g. The Last Guardian the better.

If you have a PS5, this is the exclusive game you should buy, assuming there is more than one to choose between by now. It is to the PS5 what Brothers in Arms was to the CD player. Is it likely to become your favourite game of the generation? Probably not. But it’s a solid demonstration of Team ASOBI’s virtuosity.

(Also as with the previous installments the writing is amusing and surprisingly self-deprecating, making me suspect that the people who dismiss these games as Sony corporate cheerleading haven’t been paying close enough attention.)

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

Indy’s Big Circle (as the kids are calling it) is an odd game. It’s lavishly produced, at least by the standards of a second tier Bethesda game. It clearly had a bigger budget than the Wolfenstein games while at times feeling like the bare minimum amount of content they could get away with shipping for seventy quid, buoyed by franchise goodwill.

Indy is structurally quite unlike Wolfenstein, or Uncharted (which I think is what many people were expecting when it was announced). It’s based around a small number of sprawling (though strictly walking-scale) pseudo-open-world levels more akin to the hub structure of the modern Deus Ex games. This feels like quite a brave gamble for Machinegames (especially coming off Wolfenstein II, where the big payloads of story and level production their silos launched into orbit never quite docked together convincingly), but one that pays off handsomely.

It could be argued that this diffuse structure negatively affects the pacing of the (essentially movie-length) story they’re trying to tell, but (assuming you realise you can go back to earlier levels at will and don’t spend aeons in the Vatican trying to tick everything off, ahem) it just about hangs together.

The game opens with a meticulously recreated flashback to the prologue scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. It really feels like Machinegames’ goal was to make a direct sequel to Raiders, and they’ve taken a holistic approach to achieving that. The story is on a similar scale in terms of globetrotting locations and action setpieces. The new characters who are introduced are (more or less) as charismatic and memorable – and intelligently written – as Marion, Sallah, Belloq et al.

The production design feels more like a representation of the 1930s as would be practical for filmmakers to achieve and familiar to a 1980s cinema audience than an authentic period piece. There are lots of little anachronisms, as the technology that would realistically be available to Jones in the circumstances would result in a grittier (and more tedious) survival experience better left to the likes of Kingdom Come Deliverance.

There’s a brilliant mini-documentary on YouTube about the efforts the developers went to to ensure that the performance capture sequences were shot in a style authentic to early 1980s Spielberg. (Aside, I found this video to be much more enlightening than the recent noclip Machinegames documentaries, although those are also worth watching. I don’t think noclip always ask particularly probing questions of their interview subjects. Machinegames’ works tend to have something a bit more thoughtful to say than the typical AAA blockbuster fare, but that sadly isn’t explored in much depth.)

I would go as far as saying that the efforts to making a period-authentic sequel to Raiders extend to the gameplay as well, after a fashion. Someone from 1982 would struggle if you placed a modern controller in their hands, sure, but they’d easily understand what was going on here if watching someone else play: the room names that flash up on screen, along with ‘adventure points’ and Indy’s satchel inventory were all familiar concepts to players of the early Infocom adventure games.

The player is constantly challenged to think like Indiana Jones, and the organic way that stealth, combat and environmental puzzles are presented make it easy to suspend disbelief. (Right up until the end of the game I was never quite sure how safe I was when walking around in disguise.)

The only aspect of the game that contradicts movie serial logic is that enemies never surrender, opting to charge towards Indy regardless of whether they’re outnumbered or outgunned. (Obviously being able to stick up enemies would have been too exploitable if it was always available, but it would have been nice to have a couple of instances of it happening to make it feel like something that could happen all the time, if only circumstances allowed.)

The frequent puzzles dotted around the levels are just challenging enough to be satisfying without ever bringing progress to a halt. I never had to resort to the hint system, although it is nice that it’s there for beginners. I think I made the action side of the game marginally more difficult for myself by usually forgetting to use Indy’s whip or that I could grab enemies to pummel them, sometimes resulting in Benny Hill chases to find more broom handles, rifle butts and frying pans to fend Nazis off with.

We really have to talk about the graphics. You might have noticed that the incessant whining about new games requiring raytracing hardware ended abruptly after Indy launched. Playing through the game on PS5, where the game has raytraced shadows (and I think some global illumination gubbins?) albeit not the full range of RT features, it’s immediately, strikingly apparent that they’re an integral part of the game.

Sending a Nazi crashing through a table where every bit of debris casts a shadow, anchoring it in the scene; having to shift around to get suitable illumination for maps and letters; raising a torch to illuminate ancient tunnels; cresting a rocky outcrop with the sun at your back to see Indy’s iconic silhouette cast on the sands – so many awesome moments and so much of the artists’ intentions would be lost if you could toggle this off in an options screen.

At one point they angle an arc lamp into the mouth of a tomb, and you can bet your sweet bippy that the shadows cast are used to alert you at the most dramatic moment to some patrolling Nazis on your tail.

Most of the maps have a few ‘setpiece’ rooms where the level designers have splurged on having hundreds of unique hyper-detailed objects scattered about (the Vatican treasure room that’s the site of an early boss encounter is a particularly impressive one). Later in the game there’s a bridging section of more linear levels before reaching the final hub, which is basically a couple of hours of steadily escalating visual spectacle (and the final hub level jungle is no slouch either).

Notably there are at least two areas in the game that I suspect are intended to be directly comparable to similar areas in the Wolfenstein games (specifically, the catacombs in The Old Blood and the ruined New York tableau in The New Colossus) to demonstrate the massive leap in visual fidelity over their previous-gen games.

The cinematic scenes look uniformly fantastic and Troy Baker’s Harrison Ford is convincing. There’s one scene (Indy and Gina on the airfield) in the ending sequence that’s so perfectly lit and animated that it sidled right up to the far edge of the uncanny valley for me. At the other end of the scale a lot of the generic civilian NPCs look a bit ‘last gen’, with dead eyes and static faces. (And there are some very odd looking cats.)

Indy is one of the very few games where I’ve gone to the bother of achieving a Platinum trophy, so I clearly didn’t want the experience to end. Winkling out the last few secrets on each map did reveal a few disappointing rough edges (there is one cave area later in the game that has an exit so poorly signposted I worried I’d softlocked the game by saving there; also one secret involving – barely-used and camouflaged in the environment – ‘firebombs’ to burn an obstacle that’s immune to your thrown torches and lighter, which is kind of bullshit), but these were tiny blemishes.

Is it the best Indy game? Even better than Fate of Atlantis? What ultimately clinched it for me was going back to Indy’s lecture hall in Marshall College, thinking “I wonder if…”, and finding a graffito on the desk of Indy’s lovesick student. It’s the best Indy game.

Robocop: Rogue City

Whereas Indiana Jones is a character designed to be dropped into an unlimited number of stories, Robocop (and his world) is designed to support exactly one: Robocop (1987).

I’ve never watched the Robocop sequels. I think Paul Verhoeven enjoyed the way Robocop ends – that hoary old trope of the ending that feels good as you file out of the theatre, but becomes more poignant if you think about it objectively. Murphy hasn’t won his freedom or compelled OCP to rethink their plans for Detroit, the police, or clinically dead government workers in any way. The villains are vanquished, the system goes on.

I mention this purely to set expectations for how necessary any piece of Robocop follow-up media can hope to be. Rogue City is one of the more respectful efforts to revisit the character – not a high bar when he’s been turning up in Mortal Kombat and Saturday morning cartoons admittedly.

Rogue City (from the nonsensical title down) is a low budget Eurojank game through and through. It almost feels inappropriate that the creators have splashed out for actor likenesses and Peter Weller’s voice. Someone with a lot of money (just, not anywhere near enough to make an AAA game) clearly likes Robocop a great deal.

Robocop being such a self-contained story and the developers being so squeamish about contradicting the established canon results in some problems. Most of the juiciest characters from the first movie are dead by the end of it, prompting the need for approximate stand-ins who aren’t anywhere near as well written or performed. The surviving characters mainly served one story-advancing function in the script and aren’t deep enough to work as dramatic characters in their own right.

The police chief is against striking! Officer Lewis is on Murphy’s side. The OCP CEO (referred to, ridiculously, as “The Old Man” even in news bulletins) is fatherly to Robo. The glimpses of the wider cultural landscape (TJ Lazer, the SUX 9000, etc.) we see in mediabreaks and flashbacks are reproduced ad nauseum. Quotable lines from the film appear all over old Detroit as graffiti, which is some ‘Doom total conversion’ level fanboy nonsense.

The writing is as threadbare as you’d expect. I’m guessing that the recording sessions covered the script in chronological order, as Dr. Peter Weller gets audibly more tetchy as the levels progress, and he’s called on to say “…trouble” in his trademark funny way many more times than is strictly necessary. The writers do at the very least understand that Robocop is a satire and don’t give us the surface-level ‘copaganda’ version of the character some of the early video game adaptations did.

It cuts loose a little bit in the few parts that aren’t remixing over-familiar scenes from the movies. An archetypal 1980s b-movie ‘punk’ villain gets some good quips. There’s a subplot about Robo having to take psych evaluations that doesn’t really go anywhere but varies things up a bit. Sadly the budget doesn’t stretch to Bixby Snyder or mediabreaks, with some rather limp satirical radio ads taking their place.

Gameplay-wise it’s fairly unique among modern shooters, feeling a bit more like Virtua Cop than your Dooms and Call of Dutys. Robo is a lumbering tank who can easily obliterate punks one at a time, but risks getting mobbed and pelted with grenades if you don’t proceed carefully.

Striding down corridors blowing bits off enemies does get a bit repetitive after a while. A boss encounter with ED-209 is a highlight, finally answering what a duel between the two would have been like. ED-209 is a ruthless but predictable bullet-sponge, and it feels suitably like hard work to grind him down into scrap.

There’s a neat sequence where you get ambushed by Hell’s Angels on circling choppers. I’d blocked it out until I sat down to write this, but there’s also an unbelievably stressful ‘bomb defusing’ puzzle at one point.

To pad out the game length and because someone had clearly been playing the Yakuza series, there are some sections where you’re free to wander around a little Detroit neighbourhood (and the police precinct) and perform mundane police work and a few side-quests. This aspect of the game is pretty weak stuff.

There is one location that is extremely unsettling for people of my generation though – a video arcade that’s been modeled by an art team who have clearly never seen a coin-op arcade cabinet in real life. None of the attract sequences have ‘INSERT COIN’ messages! One of them displays an options menu! I have never felt so old.

While the amount of art assets (and the standard of detail and polish in the level design) make the low budget nature of the proceedings apparent, the actual quality of the UE5-powered visuals is impressive. Robo and the rest of the primary cast look great (although oddly better at 1080p than 4k, where the slight too-clean contours of the models become a bit more apparent).

Outdoor areas are well lit, luxuriating in ‘infinite’ geometric detail and accurate shadows resulting in near-photorealism at times (particularly when viewed through the analogue video feed-like ‘robovision’ filter). Indoors there’s destructible scenery all over the shop and we get a tour of virtually all of the iconic locations from the movie. There’s some unsightly glitching on camera cuts on console, and the facial animation is rather stiff, which tends to pull you out of the experience during cutscenes.

Robocop is definitely hovering at the low end of 7/10 by any rational analysis, but if you’re a fan of Robocop (i.e. a 10/10 person) it still comes highly recommended. I would not buy it for a dollar because I already own it, as you must surely have gleaned from the above, and also I am not in America. What a silly question.

Dragon Age: Veilguard

I’m not part of the target demographic for this, but it was another PSN freebie, plus I’d heard that it had a protracted and troubled development, which as we know often results in a more interesting end product than if everything went smoothly. (Example: Rage.) Veilguard is clearly a game that’s Frankensteined together from several production reboots and changes of direction, but in a weird way I think it sometimes benefits from that.

I’ve never played any of Bioware’s previous games and came with no expectations, other than what I knew of their reputation: they make story-focused casual RPGs for young adults who get overinvested in pulpy genre fiction. (‘BAFTAslop’.) In that regard the game delivered pretty much what I was expecting (although I had also been led to believe that Bioware’s games were full of gratuitous sex and violence, of which there was none whatsoever).

Maybe if I’d played the previous Dragon Age games I’d put more stock in the fans’ argument that the game the developers wanted to make (but were stymied by corporate meddling) would have been some generational masterpiece, but I doubt it.

The writing in this game on the micro and macro levels is mediocre. Even before ‘Whedonesque’ quippy dialogue became old hat, it just doesn’t jibe with trying to tell a high stakes fantasy story. The game sets up some good scenery-chewing villains and a suitably apocalyptic threat but rarely manages to make the stakes feel very high or the choices faced by the player feel very consequential.

The game’s technical underpinnings feel archaic. The world consists of a few sparse, minimally-interactive and heavily occluded themed levels. The clunky third person camera results in feeling cordoned off from inspecting the world in close detail.

Remember how Deus Ex Mankind Divided was built on some shonky in-house engine intended for a Tomb Raider game, and felt really hamstrung as a result? The way Frostbite has been deployed here feels similar. Using mature tech does at least mean the game is very stable and the loading times are near-instant.

(Aside, I have no insider knowledge of what went down between Electronic Arts and Bioware during the game’s development, but if a game is negatively affected by publisher meddling perhaps some of the responsibility lies with studio management failing to effectively push back against it? Although if EA had no faith in what they were making at all I don’t suppose any amount of negotiating guile on Bioware’s side could have helped.)

(Also: they were probably right to be sceptical of the game’s commercial prospects. The audience has moved on from games structured like Bioware’s big hits from over a decade ago. Abortively trying to bend Dragon Age into a live service game might’ve been the wrong answer, but the only commercially competitive answer – make a Baldur’s Gate 3 – was clearly never on the table.)

Veilguard could be more credibly called an RPG than the Horizon games could, but not by much. It’s more like an overly verbose beat-’em-up. The aim of the game is to exhaustively check off a todo list of quests, which involves travelling back and forth many times between the (admittedly often visually striking) mostly flat corridor-based levels, fighting the same few enemies (and seeing the same two ‘finishing move’ animations over and over again) and solving incredibly basic hunt-the-button and platforming puzzles to pad things out a bit more.

By doing everything (as opposed to deciding not to experience some of the content in your full price video game) and making the right dialogue choices, you secure the favour of different factions in the world and obtain high level gear and abilities for your party members, improving your chances of getting the best ending.

In between shooting 3-5 buttons and spamming special attacks against humanoid enemies, there are boss encounters. Or should I say there is one mechanically identical boss encounter with differently skinned dragons in different arenas throughout the story.

These do look suitably epic, but they all boil down to spamming special attacks to fill up a ‘stagger’ bar then wailing on the prostrate dragon’s tummy with heavy attacks until it eventually dies. After about the fourth instance I started to wonder if this was a clever homage to early 1990s JRPGs like Sword of Vermillion with their endless palette-swapped boss encounters.

The game opens with an extremely comprehensive character editor, allowing your avatar’s appearance to be tweaked at a far greater level of detail than they ever appear in the game. To Bioware’s credit, they do an excellent job in integrating the voice performance (of which there are four options), animation and costumes to make this custom character feel like a seamless part of the authored content of the game. (I approached the character editor in good faith rather than making a bright orange comedy Tango ogre – perhaps this helped.)

The game focuses heavily on the party members you can recruit and ‘romance’ (the titular Veilguard). You can definitely sense that large passages of content have been cut or reworked when it comes to how these characters are presented.

The initial two companions (Harding and Neve) are framed as being incredibly important characters that you’re supposed to be invested in from the outset. (I assumed they must have been returning from a previous game in the series, but apparently not.)

Each character in the party has some ‘high concept’ that informs their interactions with the others and their dedicated story quests, and in some cases it feels like these have been abandoned at some point in development or changed without considering whether their new characteristics make sense in terms of the other characters and world.

Harding’s whole deal is that she’s a lightning rod for some ancient magic. But this is also Taash’s deal, and their story is much more fleshed out.

Neve’s deal (as far as I could make out, they’re particularly underwritten) is that they’re a detective, but we’re shown elsewhere that Emmrich the necromancer can literally commune with murder victims, so Neve’s story thread is instead about factional intrigue between different generic gangsters in a dull and tedious to traverse medieval city level. (Called, imaginatively, ‘Dock Town’.)

Some of the other companions’ arcs have a bit more depth to them. Taash (a surly teenage ogre dragon hunter) has a sensitively done story about figuring out their gender identity, while at the same time having to come to terms with being able to breathe fire. (Bioware know authors that settle for choosing between subtext and text and they’re all cowards.)

(Taash also gets the best joke in the game: On the party stats screen, each character has a little blurb ‘heroically’ describing themselves that changes as the game does on. Taash’s just says “Here.”)

Emmrich is a necromancer who is secretly scared of having to submit to being ritually killed to be resurrected as a lich. (So there’s lots of thoughtful stuff about coming to terms with grief, etc., which is only slightly undercut by everyone commenting on how utterly ridiculous he looks as a seven foot tall magic skeleton at the end.)

Lucanis is an assassin who has been possessed by a demon who takes control when he sleeps (so spends the entire adventure chugging strong coffee). Davrin the paladin is sworn to stop gryphons from going extinct, because gryphons look cool and unfortunately there was no budget left over to give him a personality beyond that. Bellara (the elf mage) gets quite a good story about tracking down her brother who has done a deal with nefarious elven gods.

Bellara’s character is a good case of the game’s troubled development possibly resulting in a better outcome. Bellara is heavily implied to be autistic, and much of her incidental dialogue is commenting on what’s going on in the current game state in fourth wall breaking terms (a lot like Abed in Community).

I can easily imagine an earlier version of the character who was doing this consistently throughout the game which would have gotten old fast. But as it only pops up sporadically in the final script, it retains the element of surprise. (I could be completely wrong and the character was written this way from the start, but it feels like multiple partially-overlapping rewrites to me.)

Again, I don’t know how much of this is established convention for the series, but the use of modern language just didn’t work for me. I don’t think that fantasy games need to use fake Olde English dialogue like the Ultima games, but you can either have a volcano be called something like ‘sleeping dragon mountain’, or have a character straight up describe it as a “dormant volcano”, but you can’t do both.

It feels lazy and sloppy to have characters responding to everything with wisecracks and yammering on about their cosy hobbies in between fights to the death. The approach of having regions of the world be loosely based on different real world countries and cultures is also a bit cheesy – at times almost feeling like a Discworld game (not necessarily a bad thing, just not the tone I think they were going for).

Maybe I’m being unfair. I just couldn’t get invested in this world, in spite of playing to the end. I read every scrap of text and picked clean every dialogue tree in Cyberpunk 2077, because everything deepened the authenticity of what the lived experience of that world must be like. Dragon Age’s world (at least this version of it), by comparison, doesn’t have consistent rules.

In Veilguard there were whole tabs of the menu system full of lore I didn’t bother to read, and before long I was weaving out of the way of no-name NPCs to avoid their boring dialogue like they were high street chuggers.

The technical weirdness also became gradually harder to ignore. There are almost no elderly people anywhere in this world, and the few (maybe two or three) you encounter in the story make it apparent that this was likely driven by the shortcomings of the character generation tech.

During the game’s finale, where you go through a series of battles and story-thread-ending choices, I wasn’t sure whether the game had glitched as I’d effectively become invincible. I don’t know if this is a deliberate choice to control the pacing and ensure that the decisions feel more impactful by not having players repeat them, or if the game balance just finally broke. Either way it made the game feel like it was in a hurry to wrap up.

The lack of any post-game content or New Game+ option whatsoever after the credits rolled (they might as well have just put UNINSTALL on the main menu, like Battlefield 6’s campaign does) felt incredibly jarring.

It looks great. The voice acting (apart from Varric, holy shit that performance is terrible) is competent enough, in spite of the writing. You’ll probably find at least some of the companions tolerable. And from the sounds of things it’s a minor miracle that they actually shipped the game in a finished state, so kudos to Bioware for that. But I don’t think I’d unreservedly recommend it and I don’t think I’ll be playing another one.

Alan Wake 2

I’ve not played the first Alan Wake and I bounced off Control pretty hard so I was a bit wary of diving into Alan Wake 2. All the promotional material I’d seen seemed to suggest that it was squarely aimed at die-hard Remedy fans, and would be full of references that would go over my head.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that it’s actually a very accessible game for newcomers. And while it’s seriously self-indulgent in parts, it is acutely aware of this and at least tries to provide some thematic justification.

The game uses a mixture of live action video and realtime 3D graphics, using Remedy’s in-house engine technology. The presentation is flawless. Dynamic lighting, cloth, hair and facial animation are all among the best I’ve ever seen in a modern game.

There’s a level later in the game set in a large 19th century American townhouse (converted into a nursing home) at dusk that looks jawdroppingly convincing. This high standard is maintained throughout the rest of the game. The levels are relatively small and the strictly controlled scope has allowed them to cram the world with detail.

The live action content is integrated cleanly with the in-engine parts, in some cases (where they can just about get away with it) being projected onto billboard sprites in the scene. While it’s all professionally shot and decently directed and acted, it is kind of funny that the highest-budget entertainment product in Finnish history still has video inserts with production value on par with an unremarkable SNL sketch. (I think there are perhaps one or two quite small practical sets and a lot of bluescreen stuff.)

Without getting into spoilers too much, the game is split into two parallel threads, one half where you’re controlling Saga Anderson, an FBI agent investigating ritualistic murders in an isolated town, and the other where you’re Alan Wake, stuck in a supernatural purgatory operating under a dream logic that is somehow linked to his writing.

Saga’s partner Alex Casey (played by writer/director Sam Lake) ‘coincidentally’ shares the name and likeness of the protagonist of Alan Wake’s books, and as the story unfolds it becomes clear that Wake’s writing is affecting Anderson and Casey’s reality. Can Saga depend on her memories or are the contradictory findings of her investigations the real truth? And will Alan make like Uncle Peter and avoid getting sent back t’ Dark Place?

Remedy have said that their publisher Epic Games gave them complete creative control over the project. This is mostly a positive thing, as I imagine a ‘two-and-a-half-A’ game like this (about 20 hours long, quite strictly linear, and with little to offer beyond that apart from a couple of DLC data disks) would normally struggle to get funding in the current climate.

They don’t seem to have taken all that much advantage of this freedom. I know that their creative intention is to make something in Alan Wake’s (and by extension Sam Lake’s) head, drawing heavily from detective fiction and Twin Peaks. While there is a fair amount of horror and gore, the world presented is quite inert and bloodless.

Everyone is old. There are two sets of comic relief characters, a pair of grifting twins whose skits descend into increasingly bleak black comedy, and a pair of elderly rock musicians who seem like a big Remedy in-joke, the sort of wacky late-game idea early-2000s PC games (like Max Payne come to think of it) would pad their length with after they’d burned through all the cool stuff on the back of the box. Even bouncing between the two narratives every few hours, it tends to feel a bit claustrophobic after a while.

The real tragedy is that even given complete creative freedom, Remedy still somehow felt it was necessary to include combat, and worse still, boss fights. It should be abundantly clear to everyone by now that Remedy have no interest in or particular flair for action gameplay. There is easily enough adventure game content in Alan Wake 2 for them to have dispensed with it entirely but I guess they are still clinging on to some conventional wisdom that it’s a bullet point they need to include to be commercially viable.

There isn’t any depth to the combat, it’s entirely a test of awareness and resource management. My time-tested game design law (that every game that includes a bow and arrow weapon would be made objectively better by its omission) is further strengthened here. Thankfully you can bump the difficulty down to ‘story’ and skip these bits of busywork.

The boss fights are less forgivable. Well, one in particular: There’s a sequence where two highway patrolmen spawn endlessly out of a hole in the ground. To beat them, you have to attack a bunch of glowing nodes to break the ‘spell’.

Trying to attack (constantly healing) targets in pitch darkness, in a thunderstorm, with a load of clattering noise, while hitscanning enemies repeatedly shoot you from behind cover, resetting your attack animation and sending the camera weaving around like a drunken heron on rollerskates is not, in fact, ‘fun’. Even dialled down to easy it’s completely random.

This is easily the most incompetently designed boss I’ve seen in any game this century, and I find it hard to believe that Remedy weren’t alerted to this by playtesters.

So what is there outside of the combat? In Saga’s levels, you’re doing detective work and solving puzzles (and ticking off collectibles dotted around the world that reward you with weapon upgrades and special abilities).

Your walking speed is quite slow and there’s not a huge amount of backtracking so it’s not usually an issue that the levels are quite small (and the engine sometimes struggles a bit moving between ‘chunks’ of the larger levels), although there’s a fetch quest in a theme park area where everything is practically within sight of the starting point with feels a bit silly.

The current state of the investigation is tracked in detail via a ‘case board’ that you can access at any time. It was never quite clear to me whether the player was expected to actively use the case board to work out what to do next, or if it was intended purely as a hint system and reminder of the story so far if you stopped playing for a while.

Having to manually pin new clues to the board seemed somewhat redundant. I don’t recall any point in the game where the case board revealed new information that wasn’t overtly spelled out (or really easy to infer) from the information given during gameplay, and if all it’s doing is recapping things the player already knows, there could perhaps have been a more organic way to do this.

Alan’s levels are a bit more abstract, mostly taking the form of exploration puzzles in a discrete level, or linear setpieces (such as the much vaunted ‘musical number’). The ‘case board’ is replaced by a ‘plot board’. Alan is tasked with finding different ‘plot ideas’, then going to specific key locations and combining a plot idea with that location on the board, magically reconfiguring it to reflect that stage of the ‘story’.

This is quite a cool effect, but the puzzles generally boil down to trying all the keys on all the locks and it’s not very satisfying. These sections (based as they are on the conceit that Alan is writing an Alex Casey murder mystery) also provide an excuse for Sam Lake (and voice actor James McCaffrey) to do extended legally distinct Max Payne bits. The ‘dark place’ is linked together with a New York street hub area which reminded me (with its hyper-detailed phone booths and wandering spectres) quite a bit of Ghostwire Tokyo.

The video-heavy ‘fantasy’ levels (a talk show, a musical, Alan’s wife’s video diary, etc.) are … okay. Sam Lake does some acting in them (wisely, mostly as a self-aware gag about his acting chops) but they’re largely handled by professional actors.

It’s funny, because of the intentionally ‘off’ performances and the use of domestically famous Finnish actors, it’s not always immediately clear whether you’re watching some highly regarded film actor or a member of the development team in a bad wig.

The most severely self-indulgent part of the live action production is a several minute long ‘arthouse film’, but the game scores some style points by presenting this incredibly casually: ending a level with Wake in the cinema where it’s running, and letting the player either awkwardly watch the whole thing over his shoulder or just have him walk out, without it being acknowledged in any way.

The absolute highlight of the game for me, in terms of integrating a ‘cinematic’ story into an adventure, oddly enough came in a quiet moment directly after one of these flashy video-fests. In the backrooms of the TV studio after Alan’s talk show appearance, you have a brief chat with Ahti the enigmatic janitor (played by Martti Suosalo, a very highly regarded Finnish actor).

The performance capture and facial animation in this short scene are remarkable – I think it’s the single most impressive realtime sequence I saw in any game this year. (That YouTube video really fails to do it justice. And do people really just put the controller down during in-game conversations? What are you doing?)

I enjoyed Alan Wake 2 but came away a little bit unsatisfied. I know it’s a meta-commentary about the role of the writer in fiction, but (again, probably pointlessly trying to skirt spoilers) there aren’t any dramatic stakes if it’s Alan all the way down.

I know that the mystery is never the point of a good detective story, but if I’m going to spend many hours with a story based game it needs to add up to something.

I think this has to be the logical end point of Sam Lake’s trademark approach of deconstructing genre fiction (and thereby conveniently spending 80% of the time writing stock characters delivering hokey dialogue). The budgets may be creeping up to the level of actual David Lynch productions these days but the writing isn’t. I hope the next thing Lake does (I’ve no idea what that will be – a game, a book, a film or something completely offbeam) is fully in their own voice.

Stray

I was really knocked sideways by how good this game looks, especially knowing it was made by a small team with a modest budget. The lighting is so naturalistic, the reflections and distortions so crystal-sharp, the vibrant HDR colours almost hallucinatory (they really love their ‘Marty McFly Jr.’s cap’ iridescent material shader in this game).

It makes me wonder whether people are getting desensitised to good graphics and art direction. I know there was some hype when the game was announced, but I’m surprised there wasn’t more gushing over players’ screenshots after it came out. Maybe I missed it.

We open on a group of stiffly-animated cats exploring an overgrown urban ruin, which doesn’t give a very accurate impression of the rest of the game. The ginger cat controlled by the player gets separated from the group and falls into what is gradually revealed to be a technologically advanced city sealed in a bunker, populated solely by humanoid robots after a catastrophe has wiped out humanity.

Spurred on by the instinctual need to find food, water, shelter and to go outside, again, the cat is coaxed to an abandoned apartment where they make contact with a tiny Batteries Not Included*-style robot drone, desperate for assistance in carrying out the plan of the scientist who built it. The pair stick together for most of the rest of the adventure.

At this point Stray turns into a very different game, where the drone essentially turns the cat from a Trico-like dumb animal to a tiny JRPG protagonist, able to talk to the city’s inhabitants, read signage, stash items and undertake quests requiring abstract reasoning.

It’s almost as if the developers wanted to make two different and only very slightly compatible games – a cat-scale platform puzzler and a story-driven sci-fi adventure. The little drone’s personality and story arc are interesting enough, but none of the other NPCs’ dialogue really justifies the story not being told wordlessly. Another World, The Last Guardian and Machinarium could manage it, after all.

In fact I often thought about how Machinarium (while lacking Stray’s hyper-realistic visuals) did a better job overall of realising a twilight robot-world, and a protagonist fumbling through it with only a dim recollection of how the old world had worked.

Even Inside (a game nowhere near to deserving its bizarrely inflated critical status – being essentially a bog standard Box2D platformer slathered in millions of dollars of evocative but meaningless music video imagery) had more to say about the disconnect between the motivations of the player and the character they’re controlling.

The game can be completed in a couple of evenings, and is structured in a somewhat uneven way, with surprisingly little time spent in the final sprawling downtown adventure hub. This neon-drenched labyrinth looks staggeringly beautiful, amping up the quality of the presentation substantially from the earlier locations in the game, and the fact that there’s precious little to do there hints at the developers running out of money or time to flesh it out further.

The more sedate ‘adventure’/exploration hubs are linked with linear action and stealth sequences, which feel a bit undercooked.

I’ve seen some criticism of the ending, but I found it quite satisfying. You get a nice dramatic birdseye view of your journey and its effect on the world, before leaving without turning back. There’s no final boss battle or emotional payoff like The Last Guardian’s final moments, but, well, you’re a cat.

Stray has plenty of shortcomings (we’ve not even mentioned the music, which is so keen on unpleasant crackling and popping analogue synth noises that at one point I was genuinely worried my amp was dying), but it’s short enough and visually spectacular enough that it’s easy to recommend.

Lies of P

Lies of P was the game I played last year that furthest exceeded my expectations. On paper it doesn’t sound very promising. A Korean F2P studio with no console games in their softography, making a very late Bloodborne clone – one with the additional handicap of being based on the story of Pinocchio, no less – does not sound like a recipe for a compelling or memorable game. Surely this is going to be another Stellar Blade, a style-over-substance collage of ideas photocopied from other games?

Trying to describe Lies of P to people inevitably puts them in mind of ‘edgy’ fairy tale retellings like American McGee’s Alice and Todd MacFarlane’s nonsense. I’ve even seen some professional reviews frame the game in this way, which is bizarre as there honestly isn’t really a whiff of campy Jim Steinman-ness to the proceedings at all.

Spend some time with Lies of P and it becomes apparent that the creative team behind it didn’t pick a public domain property at random (or if they did, they’ve gone above and beyond in disguising the fact) to make a ‘grimdark’ version of it, rather having some interesting ideas of their own that they want to explore.

The player takes the role of “Geppetto’s Puppet” (never referred to by name anywhere in the game, out of fear for Disney’s lawyers presumably), a lifelike automaton who has been awaked by a psychic signal into an opulent northern European city (Krat) in a late 19th century where such advanced clockwork automata are commonplace.

This society’s robot servants have gone berserk, slaughtering most of the human population, with the few survivors slowly succumbing to a mysterious plague. A few of the city’s powerful figures have holed up in a hotel and have activated you to drive back the occupying puppet forces and get to the bottom of the mystery of why this catastrophe has happened and why you’ve been created in the first place.

While Lies of P may copy whole passages of Fromsoft’s homework in terms of mechanics, it does so in the service of creating a mood, a world and a lightly-sketched narrative that genuinely doesn’t feel like any other game. To my mind, a key point of reference for Lies of P’s art style is the Soulcalibur games: both games explore a distant past and culture viewed through a foreign lens, and pick up on odd details that one more familiar with the trappings of that culture might overlook. The Belle Époque setting (explicitly chosen as virgin territory for games) is a perfect choice for presenting a heightened, dreamlike version of turn of the century Europe.

Lies of P is a bit more streamlined than Bloodborne and its ilk. There’s no rolling a character (with the only choices at the start of the game being the difficulty level and one of three fighting techniques), and the levels are mostly quite linear affairs, typically only looping back to open a shortcut to the last save point after you’ve cleared an area.

I completed the game on Hard (go me), while playing in a quite ‘suboptimal’ button-mashy way and guarding much less than you’re probably supposed to. If you engage with all the game’s systems (various flavours of items, upgrades and buffs) the game is quite generous in helping you to even the odds in boss encounters.

While I did run into a brick wall at a few points (requiring a bit of grinding and rooting about for secrets in earlier levels), conversely there were a few bosses that I beat on the first or second try. (The very first boss in the game is an excellent skill check to ensure you’ve been paying attention.)

As to be expected, there are a fair few ambushes and traps scattered around the levels, but as these can usually be recovered from or kill you in such absurdly Knightmarish ways (rolling flaming boulder from offscreen, gap in a bridge neatly hidden from the camera by your body, etc.) that I was mostly laughing rather than spitting with rage. Mostly.

Also as per the conventions of the genre, nothing is really explained to you about the game’s systems at any point. I never quite understood the odd ‘weapon customisation’ system (where you can mix and match weapon handles and blades to balance different stats and abilities) and didn’t realise that three of the opaquely named stats you can upgrade correspond to the three distinct combat styles, but neither proved to be an insurmountable obstacle.

The art direction in Lies of P is hard to fault. Almost all of the dozen or so main levels are highly visually distinct. The weather and time of day changes as you progress through the story, and these changes are applied on revisiting previous areas, sometimes resulting in levels looking wildly more impressive than on the initial visit. I’m a sucker for Unreal Engine rain effects, and they’re used to great effect here. The period appropriate music is excellent as well, and heightens the immersion considerably.

There are loads of enemy types (robots, monsters, bandits and things that defy easy classification) and they’re all highly detailed and expressively animated. (And you can gib them! It feels like years since a game has let you fire an explosive shell into a rabid bear and turn it into cascading chunks of steak.)

A few rough edges suggest the developers ran out of time or money before they could polish everything up to the ideal standard. Character models for the other story characters are fairly ropey (there’s no lip syncing and most are rooted to the spot – Geppetto’s peculiar beard looks like it came from a joke shop and all).

Some less important areas of the game are pared back to ‘GTA3’ levels of environmental detail (you’ll find some very boxy hedges, a dull cable car ride, and one end of Gepetto’s state room is basically a cuboid box with a fireplace), which stands out among all the sumptuous detail elsewhere.

The final level of the game is a major drop in visual polish, replacing the moonlit cobblestone streets, palatial corridors and lush wilderness of the earlier stages with bare stone walls and wooden scaffolding. It’s clear by this point that they’ve sunk their remaining resources into capping the game off with three suitably epic final bosses.

And yes, okay, if we’re being honest (nose shrinks slightly), there are a fair few ‘homages’ to other games dotted about among the more original material. The merchants are ripped straight from Resident Evil 4. There’s a magic blue substance marked by butterflies (The Last Guardian), a creepy band leader boss very similar to one from Black Bird (I assume they’re both taking inspiration from some earlier source), dogs jumping through windows (Resident Evil), sharpening and poisoning swords (Betrayal at Krondor et al), and the game even opens on a train in a post apocalyptic European rail terminus (Half-Life 2).

But that’s by-the-by. The single most impressive element of the game is the extremely gradual way in which your character becomes more human.

At the start of the game you’re a Jacquet-Droz style automaton: silent, unblinking, with a porcelain complexion and stiff, deliberate movements. As the game progresses you’ll be presented with moral quandaries in conversation with other characters and given the chance to tell a lie. Each lie raises your hidden ‘humanity’ stat, and very subtly changes your appearance and progressing your enchalametfication.

Very rarely, you’ll find or be given a gramophone record which you can play at the hotel to raise your humanity a further notch. This is where the genius of this system becomes apparent. As you wait 3-4 minutes for the song to play, you get a chance to observe your character up close and will notice… changes. A twitch in the face. Blinking. Light reflected in the previously glassy eyes. Skin blemishes. A slight asymmetry that wasn’t there before.

You’re never sure exactly what has changed (or indeed if something has changed or you simply didn’t notice it before), or when the change happened. While there are other elements of the Pinocchio story dotted about (yes I went back and read it), it seems clear that this was the main reason they picked it as their theme.

Without spoiling anything, the game dropped a final M Night Shyamalan twist for me during the credits: it’s running on Unreal Engine 4! The beautiful environments and lighting that I’d assumed were UE5 infinite-geometry, self-shadowing whizziness (as per Robocop) are all being achieved through brute force and cunning art direction choices.

I think this has to be the most impressive overcranking of a previous-gen engine I’ve seen since Batman Arkham Knight. (Though it does also go some way to explaining the framerate dips and extreme amounts of popup that sporadically occur.)

Not only that but one of the characters is voiced by Peter Davison (the ‘best’ – i.e., my childhood – Doctor Who). Lies of P is the best kind of 7/10 game and I’d recommended it to anyone with a bit of patience for (or more skill than me at) this sort of thing.

Jusant

There isn’t a whole lot to say about Jusant (French for ‘low tide’).

Jusant is quite a dreamlike experience. It’s brief, aesthetically pleasant without doing anything amazing, and mechanically quite samey throughout, making it hard to pick out many notable things to say about it a few months removed from playing it.

Jusant is a very short, very French action/adventure game about climbing a mountain in a post-apocalyptic world where the oceans have dried up.

Imagine the climbing bits of Uncharted (except with actual gameplay and some mild puzzle elements) interspersed with some brief platform/adventure interludes where you collect gewgaws and read snippets of (largely redundant) story text. Aesthetically it reminded me quite a lot of Paper Beast (I’ve not looked up whether they shared any artists but would not be surprised).

It also feels quite heavily influenced by The Last Guardian (the player character especially), which at least makes a change from the usual Wind Waker pilfering so popular with indie games of this scope and genre over the past few years.

The climbing system is pretty solidly implemented (although it does suffer some rare glitches), although I did find it strange that it doesn’t seem to make use of the DualSense controller’s haptic feedback at all. The ending is very satisfying.

Overall Jusant makes quite a nice companion piece to Stray so well done PSN Basic/Legacy/Essentials Tier’s curators on picking them both as freebies.

Everything else

Battlefield 6: I played the beta solidly for a weekend. It’s really good. I’ve not gotten super into a BF game since Star Wars Battlefront and BFBC2, and am probably getting too old to hack it in a hardcore multiplayer shooter these days, but I had a blast. It’s nice to see the last EA game that it will ever be even notionally morally acceptable to pay money for be a fitting swansong for the soon-to-be-mismanaged-into-oblivion veteran publisher.

Psychonauts 2: Bounced off it pretty quickly. The original Psychonauts seems to have been retroactively elevated to classic status by dint of Double Fine still being a going concern. Psychonauts was a quirky but unexceptional platformer (in a sea of them) made by a team stuck in a situation where publishers didn’t want point and click adventures any more. Psychonauts 2 is … another one of it. It’s not anything to write home about as a platform game, and as you sit through another lengthy tangent being delivered by an extremely 90s-looking stop motion puppet character, you have to wonder who this is aimed at.

Revisiting Psychonauts really drives home that PC games could get away with very threadbare ‘IP’ in the brief window just before they went properly mainstream: Mafia was a grab bag of gangster film scenes. No One Lives Forever was funny James Bond, except, y’know, not ‘Austin Powers’ funny. Interstate ’76 was the Beastie Boys Sabotage video put through a Virtua Fighter filter. (Also it rules and they should absolutely make a new one.) Psychonauts is… Tim Burton’s X-Men. That is the entire idea! It doesn’t sustain a modern 40+ hour console game.

I mean, they let Christopher Guest keep making quite poor movies every few years but at least he started with Spinal Tap. I’m sorry, I know lots of lovely and talented people work at Double Fine but I will never quite understand how they keep bumping along year after year releasing clearly very expensive to make but unswervingly mid games like this.

Diablo IV: I’m not going to piss off Blizzard fans as well. I sunk a few hours into it and will probably go back to it at some point. You just realise after a while that you’ve been doing nothing except hoovering up enemies for hours. It looks terrific and is very efficient as a dopamine delivery system, I think you just have to be in the right mood for it.

Suicide Squad: Immensely frustrating to see glorious Rocksteady artwork lashed to a complete nothingburger of an online arena battle lootbox nonsense game.

Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe: While I was playing Alan Wake 2 I wondered what the UK equivalent of an incredibly self-indulgent, meta game like that would look like and oh right it’s The Stanley Parable isn’t it. I assume everyone has played some iteration of Stanley by now, and this sequel ekes out every possible thing that can be done with the premise.

Also, it’s odd that this game will probably ensure (by its inclusion and unequivocal evisceration) that a review by one of the most notorious hack writers of recent times will survive into posterity, long after the site that hosted it has disappeared. (I still don’t quite understand how they got away with that.)

No Man’s Sky: I jumped back in for all the expeditions this year. The new corvette (custom ship building) system is (after a somewhat shaky start) one of the best updates they’ve ever released, and has sparked a huge wave of creativity in the community. Finding out that you could stow away on other players’ corvettes during the expedition was absolutely hilarious. Douglas Adams would’ve loved NMS wouldn’t he?

Cyberpunk 2077: I still fire it up at least once a week or so just to enjoy the ambience. And I almost always end up finding some new tiny secret or easter egg tucked away, even after all these years. Night City is a miracle of modern game design.

Balatro: I loaded up UFO50 on my Switch with the intention of properly getting into it over Christmas and, erm, ended up playing Balatro again just like last year. Dangerously addictive, but with oceans of depth to discover while you’re in its grasp. Also I’m glad to note that the ridiculous PEGI 18 rating it got lumbered with in 2024 has since been overturned. Hurrah!

Tags: alan wake 2, annapurna interactive, another world, astro bot, astro bot rescue mission, baftaslop, balatro, battlefield 6, battlefield bad company 2, bethesda, bioware, blizzard, CDPR, cdprojekt red, control, Cyberpunk 2077, diablo iv, double fine, dragon age: veilguard, ea, Electronic Arts, Eric Chahi, Hello Games, indiana jones and the fate of atlantis, indiana jones and the great circle, jusant, lies of p, localthunk, lucasarts, lucasfilm games, machinegames, max payne, Night City, nintendo switch, No Man's Sky, Paper Beast, PC, playstation 5, psychonauts, psychonauts 2, Remedy, robocop: rogue city, rocksteady, stanley parable ultra deluxe, star wars battlefront, stray, suicide squad, Team Asobi

My most recent contribution to the Maraoke video game karaoke songlist – first performed 12/09/2025.

I felt that the songlist was lacking in positive Cyberpunk 2077-themed rewrites.

I originally started rewriting Robert Palmer’s ‘Bad Case of Loving You’ (“Viktor Vektor, gimme the news” etc.), but in addition to being a song where everyone remembers precisely one line, the rest of it is also quite crap (sorry). No such problems with good ol’ Zavid.

“(Too Much) Stuff In Night City”
– after “Suffragette City” by David Bowie

(Hey man) I’m just off the phone, y’know
(Hey man) Yeah it was Paweł Sasko, he got that-
(Hey man) He got that egg on his face
This yellow mess-age
Just put ’em right out the race
(Hey man) They’re dissing your game
(Hey man) Your work’s down the drain
(Hey man) We thought you’d all been shitcanned
But then the DLC hit, then V –
And then V –

Ah now CDPR
Could you hold on for a minute?
There’s too much stuff in Night City
Oh don’t lean on GameFAQs
You should take some time to check it
Enormous depth in Night City
There’s gigabytes
It’s not shite
(Oo-ooh)

(Hey man) Nintendo got folks in line, to play
(Hey man) But I would rather take mine raytraced
(Hey man) Ch-choom it don’t crash here
Since version 2.1 see how it runs
Here we come

Ah now CDPR
Earning back their Metacritic
I’m back to hustling Night City
It’s a deep open world
Not a load of Ubi-gimmicks
There’s even pubs in Night City
The Afterlife
It’s alright

Oh Skippy!

[BREAK]

Ah, Placide is the man
Who is gonna punch V’s ticket
They’re getting snuffed in Night City
Ah stay clear of the scavs
Cause they’re gonna sell your kidneys
To nomads smuggling Night City

Johnny Silverhand
Says you can’t remove the Relic
So they’re both stuck in Night City
Says he’s got a plan
But V can decide to wreck it
Who can ya trust in Night City
I met a guy
(Waaah) With blue eyes!

I’m chuffed with Night City
So chuffed with Night City
Max-Tac is up in Night City
Us Cracks rocked up in Night City
(Woah!) The Mox in Night City
(Woah!) Doc Paradox in Night City
(Hoo-ha) Fed up with Night City?
(Hoo-ha) Ah not just yet-

Aaaaahhh, Panam Thank You Ma’am!

What’s up in Night City?
What’s up in Night City?
(Ride a bike) Break stuff in Night City
(Do crimes) Get buff in Night City
(Oh) No Crufts in Night City
Oh my love for Night City
(Oh) my love for Night City
Ah… (not just yet)

…CD PROJEKT!

More Maraoke songs

Tags: CD Projekt Red, CDPR, Choom, cyberpunk, Cyberpunk 2077, David Bowie, Gonk, Johnny Silverhand, karaoke, maraoke, Mike Pondsmith, Night City, nintendo, Nova, Panam Palmer, Pawel Sasko, pc games, Phantom Liberty, Preem, Robert Palmer, The Afterlife, Us Cracks, V, Viktor Vektor, Ziggy Stardust

My most recent contribution to the Maraoke video game karaoke songlist – first performed (by Ste Curran, James Scott and myself) 02/05/2025.

It was supposed to be about boasting about being good at multiplayer FPS games (focusing on the Q3A era) with the posse cut format being used to represent different players joining a server, but then somehow morphs into a potted career bio of John Romero partway through.

This is a song that not many people know/remember, that doesn’t have an easily available instrumental backing track, and involves five quite long and structurally unique verses some of which were almost too fast to transcribe into the system let alone perform. It’s pretty much the definition of a ‘high risk’ Maraoke song. It was completely worth it though – the energy level carried the audience along on the night.

“Third Quake (No One Dies Alone Remix)”
– after “Earthquake (All Stars Remix)” by Labrinth (feat. Tinie Tempah, Kano, Wretch 32 & Busta Rhymes)

Labrinth, come in

Tinie Tempah, come in

A hundred thousand people everybody deathmatching
I make the most of every weapon when the drops happen
So overclock with me, everybody logging out
I rocket jump till there’s a HOLE in the fucking ground
Quake 3 Arena, leaderboard, a permanent fixture
All I take are shots (shots shots)
I don’t use no scope or no scripts yeah
I drop all my foes like a Witcher, and I spam grenades constantly
To LANs I’m def’nitly coming if it’s B.Y.O.C.
It’s like five hundred PCs at Insomnia every August
See half the nerds on your server they probably been on my gauntlet
Go back to PUBG
Where my Monster Energy with caffeine in?
And a BFG – got some g-g-g-gibs happening

Kano, come in

You’re getting pwned till the frag limit
Who put these jokers in my map rotation?
Back like boomer shooters, OGing it
But you might see me out on Deva Station
Once I was on dialup, now on fibre cable
So much scores, call this an annihiliation
Fans inside my case cuz I can’t get complacent
To be play’ble I can’t even let a single frame drop
Quake Guy’s not called Ranger, that’s retconned appellation
Got Twitch and kept dying when we started Quaking
“Design is Law” but not the brother of Mister Data
And this ain’t Quake 4 but tell my brothers I’m planning to Kane ’em
(“Finish Him!”)
Played the original GabeN?
Fuck with PC but never Playstation
Rockets go whoomph, make a man blazing
Capture that flag, gimme gimme that nailgun
GoldenEye, what? I’m double-oh Agent
And the gyal dem call me Oddjob
Cos my hitbox pure frustrating
I’m elite

Romero, come in

Been making maps, I started out with Dang’rous Dave, hey
They’re calling me the Doom Slayer
I always get called up when people need a tech base
I make ’em user friendly like Mac’s interface
So raise the Sewer Count again
Pure maze full of death traps, like a thousand, then
Put some secret fiends in the map, telefraggin ’em
John Romero hopes that you are well, Sandy pack it in
Pack it in, pack it in, didn’t design the packaging,
Or invent the Bruiser Brothers, so stop your imagining
Labels throwing out Doom clones, why put ’em on your shopping list?
96% in PCZONE, you ain’t topping it

id said I disappeared
I just went and played some Chrono Trigger, made plans for another gig
Now everybody’s scared
Cause the money that I’ll spend on Tom Hall and also one guy from Origin
Be afraid, be afraid, Warren Spector
Little ‘Mack’s making third Quake with American
Carmack’s no designer but they call him the creator
When he made dynamic lights how many cards did he break, huh?
Yeah I’m costing Eidos much
Got some sidekicks who look like their AI is bust
Even swapped the engine once to refine this flop
Got some flaws inside the game, that’s right it’s botched now
Levels levels, I’m making levels for Sigil,
I make a sequel called Sigil 2, I’m “Go Hard” John
I’m the icon, better games than Marathon
But you better watch Bungie when their Spartan’s born:
Halo

Fragging since the first Quake up in here
Say yeah
Fragging since the first Quake up in here
Cuz there’s no bots on it, no bots on it
Next map with me, say ‘haxx’ with me
Hey yeah (Oh my God)
Fragging since the first Quake, up in here

Busta, come in

(Ay!)
BSP Labyrinths, coming to a WAD near you
Like ya ’bout to get ya ass kicked (Oh!)
Try to front, little newbie I dare you (Come on)
When this type of banger logs on for the dub nobody wanna hear you
Then a Shambler step up in the place, like I’m comin’ in to kill you
Bang ’em nerds, Quake
Every time I camp on the quad and I won’t stop
Then I hit ‘em and I get ‘em all again
Gotta shut ’em down, e’rybody knows that I bunny hop
Yes yes yes, OK:
Now we’re in a BUILD game, do what I say
Jump around, hands in the air
And I’m gonna stomp on ya cuz I got a shrink ray
And let us get it poppin’ and then we turn it up a little
Cuz you know we gotta do it and we doin it well
I’m about to explode, heat it up a little more,
Beat it up a little more, boy you can’t tell
T-Trust me homie, do not walk into my grapple
Just respect my handle while we bang and make your death rattle, GO!

Yeah!
I just clicked the third Quake up in here
Say yeah
I just clicked the third Quake up in here
Cuz there’s voice comms on it, voice comms on it
Talk trash on it, get cross for me
Hey yeah
We can play the third Quake up in here
(So here we go we go we-)

Carmack, come in

More Maraoke songs

Tags: american mcgee, build engine, bungie, busta rhymes, chrono trigger, civvie11, daikatana, dangerous dave, design is law, eidos, gabe newell, goldeneye 007, halo, Id Software, insomnia, ion storm, john carmack, john romero, kano, karaoke, labrinth, maraoke, marathon, PC, pc games, pczone, player unknown battlegrounds, quake 4, quake II arena, rare, sandy petersen, sigil, sigil 2, tinie tempah, tom hall, warren spector, wretch 32

As of this writing it seems likely that Machinegames (or another studio in Bethesda’s orbit) is making a sequel to/soft reboot of the original Quake. Given the success of the Doom and Wolfenstein revivals (and the earth-salting failure of Rage 2) it’s the obvious next cash cow to milk.

While I’m confident that this rumoured project is in good hands (Machinegames rarely miss, and the expansion packs they made for the Quake re-releases alone show that they ‘get’ Quake), I still have reservations. Quake is a different kettle of fish to Doom and Wolfenstein. A direct reapplication of the Doom 2016 formula (a bit like how Quake 4 was a retooling of Doom 3) wouldn’t do Quake justice, I feel.

It’s hard to overstate what a staggeringly important game Quake was at the time of its release. For those who could muster enough PC hardware into one place, Quake deathmatch over a LAN was the best gaming experience available in any context in 1996, and there wasn’t a close second. Quake’s level design was mind-blowing, realising recognisable places while other 3D games were still futzing with Freescape-style boxes and ramps.

Beyond all that, Quake laid down the blueprint for how PC games were going to work in the age of the internet – in terms of multiplayer, modding and supporting evolving 3D hardware. It was the capstone of 15 years of DOS games. This has all been discussed exhaustively (including on this very site a few times over the years, I’m fairly sure), but it’s worth stating again as it fades into history – particularly for the younger generation or the (majority of) people who didn’t have access to PC games until much later.

But Quake is unusual as seminal classic games go, in that the end product wasn’t one that anyone involved seemed very happy with, or had any appetite to revisit. The core of id were at the height of their creative powers, so what they ended up shipping was still astoundingly good (and still holds up almost 30 years later in a way almost no other prototypical 3D games do), but the pressure of following Doom permanently fractured id as a team – meaning almost all of the key people other than Carmack left soon after.

(I’d recommend John Romero’s memoir and Sandy Petersen’s YouTube channel as solid – albeit sometimes contradictory – sources about what went down during Quake’s development.)

While there have been several games marketed as Quake sequels, none of them use the original game’s story or setting, at most making attempts to retcon it into the backstory of the (originally completely unrelated) Quake II. Quake’s setting wasn’t planned: it’s stitched together from the most viable work that was made based on different interpretations of a vague initial outline.

Romero wanted to make a medieval fantasy game; the artists started making several different thematic texture sets as they had done for Doom; the monsters seem to be mostly 3D modelling experiments or direct lifts from Sandy Petersen’s Call of Cthulhu bestiary; the Doom-echoing weapons and structure were decided on late (and to Romero’s dismay) in a bid to get the game out the door.

So how does one go about revisiting this orphaned world, this game that almost unconsciously reflects the mood of a specific time and set of circumstances that can’t be recreated in the cubicle farms of a modern triple-A developer decades later?

Well first off you probably need to have some of the following things on your mood board:

1. Twin Peaks The Return.
2. David Bowie’s final album and accompanying videos.
3. H.P. Lovecraft, obviously.
4. Army of Darkness, probably.
5. Piranesi. (The novel and, I suppose, its namesake.)
6. From Software’s games, inevitably.
7. Roadside Picnic.
8. Oh, let’s say… The Lighthouse.

I’ll try to explain some of these as we go.

1. Bin off the lore

As I mentioned above, none of the later games in the Quake ‘franchise’ (such as it is) really have anything to do with the first Quake. Quake 2 was going to be the start of a separate franchise before they opted for the bankable name. Q3A is a Smash Bros-esque ‘daydream’ about pitting id Software’s all-stars against each other outside of time and space. Quake 4 is a sequel to Quake 2. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars actually makes a pretty valiant effort to connect Quake 1 and 2, but it’s mostly a straight prequel to Quake 4. Quake Champions is like dining in a questionable Quake theme restaurant with service staff in bad costumes.

(QC is fun, but it’s firmly an idsploitation game rather than a proper canonical Quake game. I feel that Tim Willetts’s understanding of what id collectively achieved with Quake can be compared to any individual member of the Beatles’ contemporary grasp of Being In The Beatles.)

Attempts to retroactively give Quake a backstory have been consistently stupid. This was a tweet by the Quake Champions account in 2018:

“In Quake, Ranger used his Dire Orb to teleport directly into the mother of all monsters, Shub-Ngurath(sic)—ripping her apart. He’s been searching for a way out of the Dreamlands ever since.”

Not one single proper noun in this paragraph (aside from that iffy Lovecraftian monster name, in its original even sketchier spelling) existed during the development of Quake.

If Quake is supposed to be anything it’s (a precursor to) a generalised Metaverse, and the player character is supposed to be the player. (Following the tradition that had persisted from Colossal Cave right the way up to Doom.) The name ‘Ranger’, as far as I can tell, only turned up in Q3A (applied to one of the skins for the Quake Guy character model) as a cute nod to the ‘Ranger Gone Bad’ machinima.

The places where you find yourself are an approximate idea of how a medieval castle worked, shaped and populated by the premise that you’ve been brought there by some ancient, unknowable enemy to fight your way out. The level names and the text scrolls at the end of episodes are evocative rather than literal – they’re there because it would’ve been awkward if they had been left blank.

Unfortunately modern big budget games generally can’t be this vague. The good news for probably-Machinegames is that (as with Wolfenstein) the skeletal nature of id’s narrative affords them plenty of opportunity to offer their own interpretation.

My personal take is that Quake (the big baddie, whatever it is that picks up at the other end when humanity starts opening interdimensional rifts) is some elder being so fantastically long-lived and powerful that it has exhausted its home dimension. Biological life is perceptible to it in the way individual electrons in a powered circuit are to us. It’s been waggling its interdimensional tendrils around in manifold space like an anteater’s tongue to find weaknesses in space or civilisations discovering slipgate technology, and trying to influence them.

Anything getting slorped through a slipgate is being spat out in Quake’s dimension(s) of the doomed, where the laws of physics can be rewritten with conscious intent. As per Roadside Picnic, the tangible effects of this can be so strange as to be almost like magic.

Death and aging don’t work normally. (The medieval architecture and humanoid enemies the player encounters have arrived from technologically primitive worlds, maybe aeons before.) The protagonist quickly figures out that they don’t need to sleep. Perhaps gravity, the workings of electronic devices or specific chemical reactions are sometimes simply ‘commented out’ (explaining why there are loads of pneumatic nailguns and pre-industrial machinery around the place?).

One could tell quite a compelling Shaggy Canine Parable of the protagonist figuring out the rules of the world, in the early stages of the game. Make it a mystery, and make the ultimate resolution satisfying in game terms (a big monster dies, a secret is revealed, etc.), but don’t spell everything out to the n-th degree.

2. Don’t make the main character a sad dad

Machinegames did a good job of subverting this tired trope for their Wolfensteins. Sure their version of B.J. Blazkowicz is a maudlin elderly man, but it’s in the service of a thought experiment: what if an all-American comic book WWII hero was a real person, in a universe where the Nazis were real (historically accurate) Nazis, but amped up to the same exaggerated level (causing them to be able to take over the world)?

How does someone whose approach to any problem is “kill all the Nazis and escape” react to a situation where they’ve emerged from cold storage decades later to find the entire world is chock full of Nazis and there’s nowhere left to escape to? It’s a trick that probably works once, and relies quite a lot on Wolfenstein 3-D being so inherently ridiculous and having so little narrative meat of its own to fall back on.

Quake’s premise as described in Quake Champions would suck: a sad old man is stranded in another dimension and wants to get back to his family. No.

If Quake is about anything, it’s an expression of the exhilaration and terror of a group of young(ish) guys having their horizons expanding at a rapid pace. It’s a 20-something Carmack at the wheel of a Ferrari. It’s graphics hardware power doubling every few months. (It’s not a legacy act shuffling around the stage for one last paycheck, please.)

Which isn’t to say that a Quake game should be a rollercoaster thrill ride or a power fantasy, in mechanical terms. But the feeling that it has to convey (and the non-trivial challenge that the developers have to overcome, now that gamers are so deeply jaded) is one of the player stepping into the unknown, and that anything might now be possible.

Refer back to the first two items of the mood board list: artists at the very peak of their craft, taking the viewer on a journey that confounds their expectations and is seered, moment by moment, into their memories. The feeling of witnessing an Event. This was what booting up QTEST was like. Michael Lopp talks about ‘holy shit’ moments, where the implications of something you’re seeing rewrite what is possible in the world. As someone who likes computer games, Quake is probably the most significant one of my lifetime so far.

If money were no object, the obvious way to recapture this feeling would be to design a new Quake as a VR native game. (That would certainly be in line with Carmack’s ambitions at the time.) But in reality the developers would sadly be constrained to having to support the mainstream platforms, and using the de facto standard industry control interface. (Though it would be nice to get some VR-style motion control in there, I always thought this was abandoned too quickly for first person games after the Wii/PS Move generation.)

Still, as Nintendo have repeatedly shown, there are plenty of other ways to surprise and delight players that don’t require bleeding edge technology. And there are probably some things id envisioned for Quake that would be technically feasible now.

Shamblers, for instance. If you look at the relative size of the character models, a shambler is supposed to be the size of a small house, but because of the way they’re lit and animated (and because like everything else they don’t interact with the environment much) this never really comes across. A shambler that functions more like El Gigante in Resident Evil 4 could be cool, and could be used as sparingly. Or how about finally having first person melee combat that isn’t rubbish?

3. You’re not making a movie

Ideally a new Quake game would eschew cinematic conventions as much as possible – no cut-scenes (or cutting away from the first person), no dialogue, no conversation trees, no exposition dumps. Sadly the modern blockbuster game market (and certainly the people holding the purse strings) would baulk at this, much as children once complained about that dialogue-free issue of the Superman comic because they ‘read it too fast’.

If Quake Guy simply has to be a dramatic character, at least don’t make them a generic action hero. (Strike Nolan North and Troy Baker from your call sheet.) The role demands a performer with two (or maybe three) main strengths:

• A mesmeric screen presence (and voice, ideally).
• A physical build that would be plausible for running around and shotgunning fools (but not tearing them limb from limb – no Rambos).
• An eccentric streak that would make the player believe that they really wouldn’t be phased by Lovecraftian nightmares unfolding, and to suspect that they might in fact be getting up to far crazier things in their daily life.

I’m thinking someone in the Willem Defoe, Spalding Gray, Dean Stockwell, Cory McAbee, Timothy Carey, Peter Weller vein (most of whom are either too old or dead). Bruce Campbell would be eye-rollingly obvious.

But then I’m failing to follow my own ‘no sad dads’ advice here – there’s no reason it has to be an aging white guy, and in fact it probably shouldn’t. Fill in the most exciting name you can think of to come before the word “VERSUS” on the opening title card of your E3 trailer here.

If the developers are obligated to include a Famous Name Talent for the sake of marketing they should at least try to do something interesting with them (either that or completely take the piss – see Yul Brynner in Futureworld or Dolph Lundgren in Johnny Mnemonic).

4. Don’t make it po-faced

A major part of id’s charm is how rambunctious and life-affirming their games often are. No matter how horrific the subject matter, there are always goofy jokes to leaven it. They understand that extreme violence can be hilarious and cathartic – as far back as Wolfenstein 3-D they were making key decisions about game features, graphics and particularly sound effects based on whether they got a big laugh.

(This is why id’s games will always be cooler than Bungie’s – id’s games feel like they’re channeling Sam Raimi, whereas when Bungie games try to have ‘comic relief’ it’s like, I don’t know, Peter Gabriel or someone trying to tell a joke.)

For Quake specifically, there’s a strong impression that they earnestly wanted to make a dour, grimdark gothic horror game, keying into the contemporary fashion for grimy, industrial decay (think Darkseed, MDK or Azrael’s Tear, or films like Alien 3 or Se7en) but couldn’t fully disguise their big goofy nerd personalities.

Ogres are hilarious. Quad Damage is hilarious. Having to messily blow up zombies with grenades is hilarious. The appalling noise Shamblers make when they teleport in to jump scare you is hilarious. As is falling in lava. The player model’s chonky appearance (what are they even supposed to be?) and Benny Hill animation conspire to make multiplayer look absurd, combined with the (very Freudian) tongue in cheek death messages resulting in a game that feels tonally starkly at odds with the gruff militarism that would come to dominate FPS a few years later.

I’m not saying that the Quake Guy should be cracking wise every few seconds like Duke Nukem, or making reference to memes (the lamest and most immediately dated part of Doom 2016 and Eternal). But making the player laugh (for whatever reason) is a valid emotional response to go for, and should be factored into the design process.

5. Give it an injection of fresh blood

The stakes for mainstream blockbuster games are now so high that it’s almost impossible for the senior roles at studios to be held by anyone under 40. Risk aversion and inertia at big publishers was already becoming creatively stifling in the 1990s – it’s no accident that Doom was an independent project even though the major publishers at the time had ample resources to make a similar (albeit probably still slightly technically less advanced) equivalent.

I think that Bethesda/id/Machinegames would do well to reach out to up and coming developers either from the mod scene or the commercial boomer shooter and indie horror subgenres if they’re not already doing so.

Amon26 or Cyriak or Amelie Langlois or Robert Yang or Brendon Chung would probably have more exciting ideas about digging into the guts of Quake than a Powerpoint jockey like Marty Stratton. (Please don’t remind me the ages of anyone on that list. Feel free to substitute in whatever the modern equivalent is – some zygote making games in Roblox or whatever.)

6. Don’t make multiplayer an afterthought

Bethesda recently confirmed that Doom: The Dark Ages is going to ship without any multiplayer component. While this is a sensible business decision (although I’m not sure if it’s going to look like a great deal for consumers if it’s still carrying the same price tag as a Call of Duty game), it’s still a bit disappointing if you consider what an integral role multiplayer has always held for Doom and Quake games.

The problem is that any discussion of multiplayer modes in big budget games inevitably degenerates into the publisher asking why they’re not trying to carve out a piece of Fortnite’s market. I’m really not sure how you could get them to agree to a straightforward mode that recreates deathmatch, team deathmatch and CTF without committing to endlessly churning out new content and cosmetics.

There would be some poetic justice if Quake was made into an ‘always on’ game with players dropping in and out of each others’ sessions, finally realising the vision for the game that John Romero would describe to journalists early in development, where all the servers were running maps that were linked together, and players would roam the world challenging each other to melee combat.

I realise I’ve still left a lot of the specifics vague. (Should it be open-world? My instinct says probably not. Small environments with tons of detail and interactivity would be better.) But these are the guiding principles by which I think anyone trying to make something worthy of the name should be steering their decisions.

Now we just have to wait and see what Machinegames (or whoever) actually come up with. I really, really hope it’s not just God of War in Quake trousers.

Tags: bethesda softworks, boomer shooters, bungie, doom, Doom Eternal, doom: the dark ages, enemy territory quake wars, etqw, FPS, gibs, hugo martin, Id Software, john carmack, john romero, machinegames, marty stratton, microsoft, PC, q3a, quake, quake champions, Quake II, quake III arena, quake iv, retro, sandy petersen, tim willetts

Previously: 2018 – 2019 – 2020 – 2021 – 2022 – 2023

I think I actually played enough games this year for me to curate some highlights rather than discussing absolutely everything for once.

As usual I’ve skipped a fair proportion of the year’s big releases – I have been holding off on starting Astro Bot or Indy (and other things) until I upgrade my ‘home cinema’ setup a bit.

So, in the approximate order in which I played them:

Animal Well

2024 was a good year for solo- (or at least tiny team-) developed games. Animal Well is a good an example of the potential benefits of this approach (in the same way that Transport Tycoon, Undertale, Horace, Fez, Jeff Minter’s games, etc. etc. are). It was built from the ground up by designer Billy Basso over a period of several years and has a very distinctive look and feel as a result.

Animal Well’s USP is that it’s a Search Action game (what we’re calling Metroidvanias now) where the available tools that you can collect to unlock more of the world can (in theory) be acquired in any order. This works surprisingly well – among my friends who played around the same time, everyone seemed to take a different route. (It must have been an absolute nightmare to playtest.)

As many reviewers have noted, the game really does manage to recapture the thrill of discovery of the early ‘arcade adventure’ games – secrets are everywhere and the player frequently feels clever for working out novel uses of their toolset.

It’s usually fairly obvious when you need a specific tool to progress, and there’s quite a lot of leeway for overcoming obstacles with the ‘wrong’ tools – it’s well worth checking out speed running videos (after you’ve finished the game) to see what’s possible if you have ridiculous concert pianist dexterity.

Filling out the map and beating the end boss takes enough time and effort to leave the player coming away feeling satisfied, but for hardcore completionists there are several further strata of secrets to unlock. This leads to probably my main criticism of the game – there isn’t quite a clear enough delineation between puzzles that can be solved entirely with the tools and information available in the game itself, and those that are intended to be solved with external information (or by comparing notes with other players on Reddit).

It would surely not have been that much trouble to hide some of these meta-puzzles until after the credits to prevent players who don’t want to engage with ARG mysteries from wasting their time banging their heads on a brick wall. Beyond my personal distaste for the current fad of putting Kit Williams style cryptic treasure hunts in games that don’t really need them, it could also be argued that they have implications for game preservation – the clues external to the game will eventually go offline.

But let’s not end on a sour note. Animal Well is a great self-contained experience. It’s also worth pointing out that it has a sense of humour – I was a bit wary based on the pre-release trailer as the gloomy lighting and eerie ‘medieval tapestry’-like character design (typified by the nightmarish Dog/Cat Ghost Thing that has become the game’s Dobkeratops), but there is a lot of playfulness in there too (especially once you obtain a specific powerup that lets you see graffiti and murals painted on many of the game’s walls).

Animal Well gets a ‘strong recommend’ from me.

Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga

Speaking of mysteries, if anyone can enlighten me as to why I wrote down the bullet point “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” in my notes for this game I’d appreciate it.

I think I was alluding to how the modern Lego games are a somewhat dubious fusion of cutting edge AAA visual techniques grafted onto extremely dated and creaky engine technology.

It’s very jarring to go from appreciating the stunning materials, lighting and microscopic details on the ‘careworn’ plastic characters one moment, only to spend the next 20 minutes slipping off a narrow platform, or getting trapped behind one of the game’s many, many invisible walls forcing a reload, while the camera lurches around like a drunken seagull as if the last 20 years of interface refinement hadn’t happened.

I think it had been at least 15 years since I last played a Lego game before I picked this up as a PSN freebie. The amount of technological advancement that TT Games have brought to bear in the intervening time is of course extraordinary. However a worrying amount of ‘progress’ seems to have come in the form of scale.

Skywalker Saga has thirty or more huge pseudo-open world levels covering all the major locations in all nine of the main Star Wars films, and each and every one of them is packed with hours of collect-’em-up activities. (The game shrewdly opens with the original trilogy, before the Disney movies and finally the prequels – my interest tailed off pretty sharply once Jar Jar Binks turned up.)

There are also hundreds of playable characters to unlock and reams of ‘lore’. The game’s Marvin The Paranoid Android-esque H1NT Droid constantly berates the player for caring about collecting all this stuff, which seems less and less like a joke and more like a cry for help from the crunched developers the longer the game goes on.

Maybe I’m being a hypocrite (as someone who has happily sunk hundreds of hours into No Man’s Sky – as well as other open world games and MMOs – over the years), but I think there comes a point where you have to question the social responsibility of making a kids’ game that would take several children working in round the clock shifts the entirety of their summer holidays to 100%. At the very least I think the market can do without another Lego Star Wars game for a few years now.

Bonus Trivia: Alternative comedy fans take note that this is (to my knowledge) the first game ever to have a playable character both voiced by and modeled on Adrian Edmondson – previous games (such as How to Be a Complete Bastard on the Spectrum and the Pepperami licensed game Animal! for the PC) offering only one or the other. I love living in the future.

Thank Goodness You’re Here!

I’ll admit that I haven’t played an awful lot of modern point-and-click adventure games (outside of the early Telltale games, Amanita Design and Ron Gilbert’s new games), but I’m confident in saying that TGYH represents the genre evolving into its ultimate form. It’s strictly linear and features what can only very loosely be classed as ‘puzzles’ (usually little more than a hotspot somewhere on screen that your tiny character has to slap), and yet somehow it still manages to be one of the best games of the year.

TGYH is the story of a salesman who is sent to a town in the north of England, and spends a day getting caught up in the increasingly bizarre drama of the locals’ everyday lives while waiting for a meeting with the town’s mayor. It’s been compared to the Beano, Viz and Reeves and Mortimer by those attempting to pigeonhole the style of slightly grubby surreal humour, but none of those comparisons are entirely accurate.

The humour is very childish and broad, and mostly hearty and good-natured, but you may detect a slight streak of mean-spirited art student snickering sometimes poking through (fnar). I don’t think the game is looking down on working class people as some have argued, but it has a tendency to reflexively make the stupidest joke to fill any silence (e.g. “I’m eating for two… and I’m pregnant!”) landing somewhere between Zucker Abrahams Zucker and Beavis and Butthead.

There are plenty of laugh out loud moments, brought off with panache with some very slick and inventive animation and one of the most naturally hilarious voice casts ever assembled for a game including Matt Berry, David ‘Swatpaz’ Ferguson, Em Humble and Jon Blyth – who I saw the other day had been deservedly nominated for a Games BAFTA. (Congratulations Log, sorry I made it sort of weird when you didn’t immediately recognise me as the guy you once gave a reproduction of The Fallen Madonna With The Big Boobies painting from ‘Allo ‘Allo to over a decade earlier when we last met at the PCZONE party last year. For you, it was Tuesday.)

If the game was longer, or more saggily paced, I can easily see it not working anywhere near as well, so the developers should get some credit for judicious editing. Really the only issues I found with the game were maybe one or two slightly too well hidden hotspots blocking my progress for a matter of minutes, and the subtitles going out of sync during fast scenes (which has probably been patched by now anyway). Another ‘strong recommend’ from me and another solid hit for publishers Panic Inc.

Tunic

The (very early) point at which I stopped playing Tunic was when I couldn’t find anything else on the map except an enemy blocking the route. I turned on ‘god mode’ to at least see if getting past this enemy was what I needed to do, and found myself in a dark, ugly industrial late game area that looked like every cheesy Renderware Gauntlet clone I’d played on the Gamecube, where my character was continuously bombarded with noisy explosions by offscreen enemies.

The thought of inching through the game’s mysteries to get to this nightmarish location the long way round was so unappealing I immediately uninstalled. Congratulations, Tunic’s developers, on somehow creating the opposite of the ‘Super Nashwan Power‘ abilitease.

I don’t have the patience for games like Myst. I bounced off Tunic very quickly and you could (justifiably) argue that I probably didn’t give it a fair shake. But in my defence I will say that the argument that you have to play a game for several hours before it clicks can only be stretched so far. If the advice to new players is also ‘turn on invincibility’, my suspicions as to how much goodwill you’re extending to this game purely because it reminds you of playing Zelda III for the first time are going to be raised further.

Tunic is a somewhat technically wobbly game (fussy collision, lots of framerate hitches on PS5 – I dread to think what it’s like on Switch) that confuses early Sierra/Infocom style smug obscurantism for enjoyable puzzle solving. The central conceit of recreating the experience of playing an untranslated game without the manual in practice just leads to a lot of tedium early on as the game withholds a functional map or a short term goal to work toward (or even a sprint button, at first) from the player.

It’s also something that doesn’t really read in the same way for players outside the age bracket and geographical location of the developers. Playing import games might seem novel to American millennials, but grey imports were commonplace for 1990s console players in Europe (where many games were released much later – if they were at all – than in the rest of the world), so Tunic’s insistence that Japanese games of that era are intentionally inscrutable and exotic comes across as… dubious at best.

I can’t really speculate on the circumstances of Tunic’s development. It’s a game that had a protracted development cycle but didn’t release with the level of polish that would usually imply. There are lots of cases of games following this kind of ‘Apocalypse Now’ development trajectory, where project scope and schedule don’t quite meet in the middle for whatever reason. Maybe if things had gone slightly differently I’d be moaning about Animal Well and praising Tunic here. I do wonder how early that ‘god mode’ option went into the menu, though.

And yes it’s presumptuous of me to say that my personal reaction to the game trumps the generally glowing critical reception it got. It’s found an audience, sure, but I suspect that it won’t be remembered as enthusiastically as more obviously compelling games of its ilk ten years from now.

A strong ‘play Death’s Door instead, it’s much more polished and will frustrate you in a GOOD way’ from me.

Immortals of Aveum

I think the most interesting thing about this game is that it presumably went through the conventional publishing process, and yet still somehow made it all the way through to release in spite of being clearly broken in really obvious, fundamental ways.

I can just about see the game making sense in the abstract, presented as the proposition “we’re going to make a fantasy Call of Duty, in the same way that Titanfall 2 was a space sci-fi Call of Duty”. If we assume Titanfall 2 made enough money to answer the follow up question of “Why?”, it’s peculiar that nobody thought to then ask “How?” before greenlighting development.

The player character (an insufferable young adult fiction trainee wizard) walks down a series of highly detailed, perfectly generic disguised corridors, intermittently shooting stock fantasy enemies (men with impractically tall medieval helmets, etc.) with colour-coded plasma balls. There is no discernable audiovisual feedback for taking or inflicting damage. Missing this fundamental component of an FPS, criticism of how well or poorly it does anything else is redundant. It’s a house with no roof or walls.

If there is one positive outcome that can come from Immortals of Aveum existing, I hope it’s that id Software’s art department play it and notice that it’s worryingly difficult to distinguish screenshots of the maps from screenshots of Doom Eternal, and this leads them to contemplate whether a game franchise about space marines kiling demons in hell needs to be slathered in quite so much Dungeons & Dragons sauce.

*Holds finger to earpiece* “Doom: The Dark Ages?” Oh. Oh dear.

Days Gone

I’ve had this game sitting in my PSN account forever, but it took the Summer games drought and endorsements from several people whose critical opinions I trust to finally give it a spin – and I’m glad I did.

One thing that it quickly made me realise is that my impressions of last gen open world / ARPG games have been hopelessly spoiled by Cyberpunk 2077. It’s really not fair to compare a PC-native game which had a vast blockbuster budget and a 12 year development cycle to obviously much more modest endeavours, and Days Gone manages to hold up pretty well. It gets the (clearly overstretched) Unreal 4.0 engine to do some miraculous things (much in the way that Batman Arkham Knight pushed the previous gen engine to its limits), so for the most part I found I could overlook the invisible walls, slightly janky traversal, lack of any environmental interaction and the extreme paucity of incidental dialogue from NPCs.

Days Gone is a game about a man called Deacon St. John (Sam Witwer), a squeaky clean biker gang member employed as a bounty hunter by a succession of terrible people who have emerged as camp leaders in the wake of a zombie apocalypse in rural Oregon. ‘Deek’ is driven through the game’s narrative primarily by the search for his missing (and possibly dead) wife, as well as by trying to keep the remaining outposts of civilisation from collapsing due to internecine fighting or attacks from zombies and cultists, while at the same time (sort of) investigating the nature of the zombie plague in an uneasy alliance with some mysterious FEMA-ish scientists.

There’s also a side plot about trying to keep Deacon’s best pal ‘Boozer’ alive as he battles blood poisoning, depression, comedy alcoholism and general existential malaise – which feels like someone decided to take the Sony blockbuster trope of finding a universal experience that most of their core demographic can relate to and apply it to ‘having aging parents’ rather than ‘having kids’ for once.

Days Gone is built around three technical pillars which work extremely well:

1. Motorcycle. Deacon’s bike (which behaves more like a dirtbike than a Harley Davison) handles fantastically. You can in theory ride it during combat, but for the most part I found it a bit fiddly for this, mostly using it to run over the odd zombie and act as a mobile save/ammo refill point during big fights.

Chucking the bike around with wild abandon, GTA-style, will damage it (and can easily get Deacon injured or killed). It has to constantly repaired (with salvaged scrap in the field, or at camp) and refueled, and if it becomes inoperable it doesn’t magically respawn somewhere convenient. Early in the game (when the bike’s fuel tank is tiny and Deacon is noisy and weak), running out of fuel can be a major setback, but as you start to capture more of the map it becomes less of a pressing concern.

It could be argued that the bike’s limited range discourages exploration of the world (which is very hostile to the player on foot, spawning a rabid wolf behind the camera approximately every 15 picoseconds), but as there’s not a lot of interest to find in the world perhaps that’s just as well.

2. Dynamic weather. While it doesn’t have a major impact on gameplay (getting stuck in mud or buried in snow would get annoying), Days Gone’s weather system is impressively well implemented. Rain affects bike handling (for instance you can slide down hills to conserve fuel) and enemy behaviour. Streams and rivers can freeze over in cold conditions. The transition from deep snow to balmy sunshine can sometimes happen a bit quickly, hurting the illusion somewhat, but other than that it’s beautifully realised especially considering the engine tech and target hardware.

3. Crowds. This is the biggie. There are hordes of (sometimes many hundreds of) zombies roaming the map following pheromone trails and congregating in specific areas to rest or feed. Early in the game, Deacon is so puny and useless that dealing with one zombie at a time can be touch and go (a bit like Resident Evil 4), so alerting a swarm is usually immediately fatal. But the brilliant thing is that right up to the end of the game, even as your odds of survival gradually improve, the sound and spectacle of being chased by hundreds of zombies doesn’t stop being a white knuckle experience.

You can sneak around a horde setting up traps, or thin out their numbers by leading them through choke points and throwing molotovs, but you’re almost guaranteed to end up running away with your stamina depleted as they nip at your heels. (Right at the end of the game you get machine guns that can reliably drop one zombie per round, and a long list of all the remaining hordes to mop up, but even then it still manages to be stressful – a bit.)

From the earliest days, games (from Space Hulk to ZOMGies) have known that being chased by a crowd of angry baddies terrifies some deep primordial part of the human brain, and Days Gone is the game that finally capitalises on that.

(There are also the obligatory crafting, stealth, tracking and fighting human enemies as per Horizon Zero Dawn, The Last of Us, et al, which are functional but never challenging or interesting.)

While the core loop (tool up, drive somewhere, kill things, repeat) remains sufficiently compelling throughout the game, some other aspects are a bit more disappointing.

Days Gone is a needlessly long game, where a lot of the playing time is taken up with busywork and actual narrative and character development are spread very thin.

The player is never once given any meaningful decision to make. The game is structured so you can either see through each of the story threads to completion or miss out on some rewards. Nothing you decide to do can ever block of any other ‘content’ from being accessible.

You’ll sometimes find hostages in the world that you can choose to send to one or other of the camps to gain favour (in practical terms, meaning leveling up your weapons or your bike faster), but all the camp leaders (with one exception) are objectively evil scoundrels. One of the leaders you encounter early on is using their camp’s inhabitants as slave labour, and while Deacon grumbles for a moment he doesn’t challenge the status quo at all.

Later on you encounter a militia leader who is presented as a quite out-of-his-depth religious zealot, driven mad by power (who you eventually do overthrow – spoilers I guess?). But the game falls over itself to stress that actually he’s not an evangelical Christian conservative type (which he obviously would be in reality), he’s actually really progressive but just has to make tough decisions, what with the zombie apocalypse and all. Which feels like the writers trying to have their cake and eat it (in terms of trying not to offend any potential audience segment). And don’t get me started on what the game seems to think ‘anarchists’ are (presented rather unconvincingly as what the unworldly protagonist thinks they are).

The writing in this game is, in a nutshell, a load of old cobblers. While I vaguely recall that the game’s director has made some dickheaded comments on social media, I don’t think the problem stems from the game trying to push any specific worldview – it’s just too inarticulate in what it’s trying to say and too easily buffetted by publisher pressure to commit to any position strongly.

On the more basic level (some charismatic characters go on a genre TV adventure), it all works well enough, largely thanks to Sam Witwer not being annoying or obnoxious, and trying his best with the generic material.

Which reminds me, the worst decision the developers made in the game was having Deacon and the other characters constantly announce the current status of the game through speech barks. I guess they did some market research that said that players don’t like it if they come back to a game after a long absence and aren’t immediately reminded of who they are and what they were doing, but this is an absolutely terrible solution to that problem!

Every single time you get into the vicinity of human enemies, Witwer has to give an extremely awkward speech about how they’re DEFINITELY murderers so it’s okay to kill them all in spite of whatever musings about frontier justice the game might be making in the plot at the same time. It’s very silly.

(Also, regarding the thing that went around about how nobody in the game remembers what lavender is (ROFL! LOL etc.), in spite of the zombie apocalypse only having happened two years prior: yeah, this is the game doing the ‘status barks’ thing above, where the characters have to awkwardly mention lavender a bunch of times in case the player forgot what you were looking for, it is not an example of bad writing, it’s quite possible that they were using a more obscure plant name earlier in development and didn’t rewrite one particular line when they changed it, this is not an effectual dunk on the game’s writing, shut up.)

In summary I’d say Days Gone is a solid 8/10. Mechanically it’s streets ahead of most of the big Sony blockbusters (Horizon Zero Dawn had a much stronger mystery story though). It’s a shame they’re not making another one.

Ghostwire Tokyo

First things first: If you have this game on PS5, for the love of god put it in ‘performance’ mode. The game either defaults to, or offers without adequately explaining, a ‘quality’ mode with raytracing that absolutely tanks the framerate to little perceptible benefit.

I didn’t know what to expect when I started playing this game. Would it be a horror game? An action game? An RPG? Having finished it I’m still not really sure.

Ghostwire Tokyo is a supernatural fantasy/horror story about a human everyman who gets caught up in a supernatural cataclysm caused by a powerful occultist who has kidnapped his (the player character’s) sister to use in a ritual that will connect the mortal realm and the spirit realm and bring back his dead wife and daughter.

This cataclysm has caused a large area of central Tokyo to be trapped in a ‘time bubble’, with all the human occupants frozen as ‘spirits’. Interlopers from the spirit realm (the manifestations of negative energies in the living) have broken through and are trying to harvest the spirits.

The protagonist is brought back from the brink of death by the ghost of a paranormal investigator who possesses his body and grants him ‘supernatural fighting techniques’ that let him banish these visitors and harvest the spirits themselves (so they can be whisked away to safely via ‘ghost transmission devices’ hidden in phone booths). Cue several hours of wandering around the empty city doing errands for ghosts and investigating mysteries as you tail the main baddie back to his lair in Tokyo Tower.

What this entails in gameplay terms is exploring a quite small, almost entirely static urban open world, doing all the generic Ubislop open world activities (collecting things, fighting wandering monsters, feeding many dogs, doing side missions, expanding your map by purging ‘Torii gates’). This sounds quite dull, and indeed it mostly is, but it’s where the game diverges from that formula that it starts to get more intriguing.

The game’s tone is quite enjoyably weird. It takes the same ‘slice of life’ presentation of Tokyo as the Like a Dragon games (although with an even greater level of real world veracity), but just takes it as read that all Japanese folklore and mythological creatures are real and tangible forces in the world. It does for Japanese folklore what Deus Ex did for conspiracy theories. (How’s that for a box quote? Several years too late?) It’s somewhat educational, for a player who hasn’t read up on this stuff.

The combat is simplistic and a bit ponderous (99.95% of battles take place on a flat plane, you move slowly and can’t take cover, and enemies delight in attacking you while you’re winding up an attack, cancelling it, which can get frustrating), but once you get the hang of it (and once you get the magic attack that is basically a machine gun) it’s becomes quite engaging.

Combat is built around a mechanic where if you visibly damage an enemy almost to the point of death it becomes stunned and you can remotely yank out its ‘core’ for a bonus, even (with a bit of skill and timing) doing this for multiple enemies at once. You can also rip out the cores from unalerted enemies which feels great every single time (much like Adam Jensen’s takedowns), and the game delights in setting up situations with very generous ‘stealth’ criteria (the enemies always prioritise syphoning souls over noticing the player) so you can perform this move over and over again while cackling like a loon.

(I also appreciated that the developers took advantage of the fact that the enemies are ghosts to not bother making any animations for them traversing the environment, and simply having them teleport away as soon as they hit the edge of whatever surface they’re on.)

Because you’re also technically a ghost, you can walk on water and don’t take falling damage. You eventually get a grappling hook and gliding ability, and can parkour around the city’s rooftops freely to grab extra loot and engaging in (or avoid) combat at will.

One of the highlights of the game are the ‘hallucination’ sequences which sometimes occur during story missions in indoor locations, where the ghosts perform mindbending visual tricks. These start out as fairly basic effects (elongating corridors, upside-down rooms, chairs and clutter spontaneously stacking up to block doorways, etc.) but as the game progresses they become properly impressive demoscene-like choreographed sequences. It’s just a shame there aren’t more of them, and they’re bookended by so much repetitive collecting and fighting.

One of the lowlights of the game is that the quest-giving NPC ghosts all look a bit crap – fuzzy indistinct blue blobs. I think the developers have done this intentionally to disguise that they’re using the same few character models over and over, but it’s a bit of an oversight considering how often you encounter them. If they’d used the ghost shader from Luigi’s Mansion they’d’ve easily earned another point out of ten.

(Also there’s a ‘gesture based’ spellcasting mechanic which the game lets you skip every time with no penalty – which begs the question of why they bothered to retain it, as it’s clearly a failed experiment that adds nothing to the experience.)

Ghostwire really feels like nothing more than a tight, linear ten hour game that has been stretched into a very thin open world based on publisher dogma that it has to offer 40+ hours of ‘content’. It doesn’t quite come off as a ‘full length’ AAA game, but it’s not like any other game I played this year. Also it has capsule vending machines and Shinji Mikami plays the piano at one point.

Queens

Queens is LinkedIn’s answer to Wordle. No wait, come back. Of all the recent web games in this ‘coffee break’ appointment game format, it’s the only one that has had be returning to most days (when I remember) to keep my streak going.

It’s such a simple puzzle that I assume it has to have been done previously. A 10×10 grid is divided up into ten coloured regions. The object of the game is to place exactly one chess queen into each region so that there’s only one in each row and column and none are touching (including diagonally). The challenge is to place all the queens as quickly as possible without making a mistake or using a hint. The puzzles are authored rather than algorithmically generated, and they can get quite fiendish.

I assume in the fullness of time there will be a way to play it without needing to look at LinkedIn, but for now it’s enough of a draw for me to tolerate glancing at a feed of genAI garbage and people who I worked with for a week twenty years ago promoting their rancid political views for a few seconds every day.

My First Gran Turismo

This actually is my first Gran Turismo, my only previous experience of the series being watching a petrolhead mate play the first one for hours on end over 20 years ago. It’s a little stand-alone demo of the most recent game in the franchise, letting you play a few races and challenges and carry your unlocked cars through to the full game if you decide to be upsold on it.

It’s a really nice visual showcase of the PS5. And it really drove home to me that I have no idea what I’m doing when I play ‘serious’ driving sims (erm, I can’t drive). I’m not going to rush out and buy a steering wheel controller and a ‘racing chair’ any time soon, but I might pick up the full game if it’s ever on sale. There’s not much more I can say, really – if you came here looking for expert driving game opinions you typed “Mike Channell” really wrong into Google.

Marvel Rivals

I guess I’m out of the loop with the current state of the art in production values for PC/console F2P games, because Marvel Rivals (the character models in particular) looks absolutely jaw-dropping to me. Once you get into the game it is, to my old eyes and atrophied reflexes, the same basic shooter grey goo as: TF2, Fortnite, Overwatch, etc. There are dozens of characters and squillions of synergies between their abilities. Nothing is explained in the game itself – I think you’re assumed to have watched someone stream it for hours before starting.

It didn’t get its hooks into me in the same way Apex Legends did a few years ago, or even The Finals (briefly) earlier in the year. I assume there’s some strategic depth to be found in there – or maybe mainstream shooters really are just glorified chatrooms now. I’m mainly noting it down here so we can all laugh at this amazingly stupid tweet from Blizzard’s Mike Ybarra again.

Balatro

I played many, many hours of Balatro over the Christmas holidays. I feel like I’ve still only scratched the surface. It’s a brilliant achievement of design, and I’d happily call it my game of the year. I think it’s particularly exciting to me because it hints at other games that could be made using these design conventions. It’s opened up a new genre branch which has a lot more scope for diverse and thoughtful design (and not just ‘Balatro but with insert-different-casino-game’ clones) than the last game to catch on like this (Vampire Survivors), which really was little more than a Skinner Box at heart. I think I’ll have more to say about it once I’ve digested it fully.

For now I will add my voice to the chorus that PEGI’s decision to stand by their 18+ rating for Balatro (imposed on the basis of the 100% gambling-free game referencing poker’s mechanics) is outrageously, indefensibly stupid.

Arbitrarily ruling elements of game design as harmful is a direct threat to artistic expression and innovation.

What next? Any game that makes reference to anything that can be gambled on in the real world being rated 18? All forms of sporting competition? Horses? Money? Fixed odds betting terminals have graphics, better rate every game with graphics 18+ to be on the safe side. Teaching someone the scoring card combinations from poker is not functionally equivalent to showing them step by step how to shoot heroin or build a bomb, you absolute freaks.

But of course the EA Sports FC games, trojan horse for the lucrative, real money FUT lootbox game, are still rated 3+ ever year. I think PEGI should ruddy well (diplomacy mode engaged) try to be a bit more consistent in how they apply their rules.

Evergreens

(Deep breath.) Now we come to those games I’ve had in rotation every year for the past few years.

I think I’ve reached the end of the road with Marvel Snap. Every living card game has a finite lifespan, and for me I think the rot started setting in with the ‘Activate’ card ability (which didn’t seem to open up any particularly interesting new gameplay to justify the extra level of complication), as well as some unappealing monthly events (I think I’ve seen enough slight variations of Spawn for one lifetime now thanks). The really ugly new shader for foil cards was also a puzzling choice. But the main thing that’s broken the habit for me has been how unstable the mobile client seems to be now. Oh well, more time for Balatro.

In spite of the game being largely considered to be in its twilight years now that Light No Fire is on the horizon, No Man’s Sky saw some really strong updates (and accompanying expeditions) this year. The arrival of fishing, launched in tandem with the new water system, is a great case study for technology creating new affordances for gameplay. The Halloween expedition found a way to (at least momentarily) make the survival mechanics interesting again and is probably the nearest the game has come yet to having decent planetside combat. Ship customisation, overhauled space stations and ambulatory buildings all got added to the game in 2024 as well! Aside from earning the boy scout badges in the expeditions, I’ve also been getting back into basebuilding, following BeebleBum’s excellent tutorials on YouTube for some tips.

And yes, I’m still sometimes loading up Cyberpunk 2077 even though I’ve completely rinsed it at this point, just to soak up the atmosphere. I hold on to the (very irrational) sliver of hope that the most recent patch (which added a few verrrry minor features) was a dry run for getting the external Virtuos studio who worked on it to continue to support the game with more substantial new content in future.

Flash!

(Aa-ahh.) The Ruffle Flash emulator has come on in leaps and bounds over the last year, with the percentage of ActionScript 2 and 3 games that are now playable again steadily climbing. Some computationally complex later games (like Ant Karlov’s Knightron) are still running at far slower than full speed but I’m sure we’ll get there eventually.

I strongly recommend anyone who was into Flash games before Apple killed it in the early 2010s has a browse around Newgrounds to see what games have been brought back from the grave. Or if you are a young person who has no idea what anything in this section means, I also urge you to do this. There were a ton of interesting games and genres in the Flash ecosystem that didn’t make the leap to mobile or GameMaker/Unity and which are still worth playing and studying today.

YouTube

No time for a full roundup of good games-related video essays this year (you’ve probably already seen the Half Life 2 20th Anniversary documentary anyway), but Radio TV Solutions came through with a Christmas miracle – the whole of Breaking Bad retold in Half Life 2 VR. (You will probably want to watch Breaking Bad and/or Half Life But The AI Is Self Aware beforehand to ‘get’ this.) Until next year!

Tags: animal well, balatro, bend studio, bethesda, billy basso, CD Projekt Red, Cyberpunk 2077, days gone, Doom Eternal, flash, game title, ghostwire tokyo, Hello Games, Id Software, immortals of aveum, jeff minter, lego star wars: the skywalker saga, Light No Fire, linkedin, localthunk, marvel rivals, marvel snap, my first gran turismo, newgrounds, nintendo switch, No Man's Sky, panic, PC, pc games, playstack, playstation, polyphony, ps5, queens, second dinner, Shinji Mikami, tango gameworks, thank goodness you're here!, ttgames, tunic, unreal engine, WayneRadioTV

My most recent contribution to the Maraoke video game karaoke songlist – first performed 13/12/2024.

The previous version of this song from 2017 was removed from the system for a while on the basis that the joke was too obscure (referencing as it does a TV show from almost 30 years ago).

This revised version features a fully rewritten third verse (which is easier to perform and more thematically coherent than the stream of consciousness wibble of the old version) and some other minor changes, and now makes use of the Maraoke system’s ability to show images and video during the song. (Thanks to Lupine for deploying this to the system at the last minute.)

Merry Christmas.

“The David Perry Incident (2024 Mix)”
– after “Lose Yourself” by Eminem

Look
If you had
One shot
Or one opportunity
To seize everything you ever wanted
In one moment
Would you capture it?
Or just let it slip?
Yo

His palms are sweaty,
knees weak, arms are heavy
Has Dominik upset him already?
David Perry
is nervous, but on the surface he looks calm and ready
to grab coins, but he keeps on forgetting
the controls now, to bowl down Cool Cool Mount’n
He tries to turn ’round, but his plumber’s freaking out
He’s chokin’, wow, everybody’s jokin’ now
The clock’s run out, times up, over, blaow!
That’s Project Reality, yo
There’s no parity, nope
He’s not played Mario
Now he’s mad that he won’t
take back tha trophy so
He won’t have it he knows
That backstage he’s a joke
He’s not rattled he’s stoked
and that pad wasn’t broke
The Games Animal? Nope
Now he’s known as a dick
As he moans, “Actually –
N64 won’t be out till past January”
Keep going back to this moment
why can’t we move past it?

You better fool yourself with excuses
The truth is you’re useless
The web’ll never let it go (yo!)
You only had one shot, you flopped
Missed your chance at gold
Mid-afternoon TV comes once in a lifetime, yo
You better fool yourself with excuses
The know that you boned it
The web’ll never let it go (yo!)
You only had one shot, you flopped
Missed your chance at gold
Mid-afternoon TV comes once in a lifetime, yo
You better…

His reputation:
Lord of all British gaming
Games World was yours for the taking
Kirk Ewing
Falls off t’ward the second corner
Performance is appalling
But Perry’s tantrum throws the host’s boredom
He knows he’ll cause drama, knows that he’s gotta
Befo’ the show’s over uphold his old patter
Expose the shows flaws, they know he’s no importer
Owns the code, needs no Game Genie to master this role
he’s outclassed ’em
He’s known to blow those high scores with one quarter
But let’s-a-go ’cause here goes the cold water
He moans he’s no journo no mo’: He sells product
The true Dave Perry who rotoscopes nematodes and that’s not ‘im
And now that GamesMaster is old and not shown
but he still provokes laughter:
Not the Shiny one, the one with the bandana

You better fool yourself with excuses
The truth is you’re useless
The web’ll never let it go (yo!)
You only had one shot, you flopped
Missed your chance at gold
Mid-afternoon TV comes once in a lifetime, yo
You better fool yourself with excuses
The know that you boned it
The web’ll never let it go (yo!)
You only had one shot, you flopped
Missed your chance at gold
Mid-afternoon TV comes once in a lifetime, yo
You better…

No more fame
‘s an outrage, he’s been upstaged
Now he’s making videos ’bout bikini babes
He was plain at the beginning
His vibe’s all changed
He’s tattooed up, and bearded
A YouTube sage
But he kept writing, and kept an eye in at Street Fighter
Best believe next when you’re staying inside Brighton
Shoulda been hired for that revived pilot
Flanked by that Rab from VideoGaiden
“Why can’t I even slide the right way to wipe the smile
off the face of that damn disgraceful Dom Diamond?”
He won’t rest till he’s reclaimed his old title
Cause he’s wildlife!
And these games are so hard, and they’re getting even harder
Now he turns up on QVC (but! no bandana)
But come evening he’s got his N64 controller, Jolly Roger
Bay he’s on the way to Bowser soon but-
Cuz he’s been tryin’a play it a lot,
another year of luigi, his fluency,
at this point has kind of raised a notch
He’s mastered Big Boo’s Haunt, he’s speedrunning Tick Tock Clock
Success is besting e’ery fucker’s time on Dire, Dire Docks
“Dear Gamesmaster,” as they’d say to Patrick Moore
“I cannot progress my game I’m stuck”
So Mario was a shock, now geeks wail a lot
This must be the only YouTube video that they watch

You better fool yourself with excuses
The truth is you’re useless
The web’ll never let it go (yo!)
You only had one shot, you flopped
Missed your chance at gold
Mid-afternoon TV comes once in a lifetime, yo
You better fool yourself with excuses
The know that you boned it
The web’ll never let it go (yo!)
You only had one shot, you flopped
Missed your chance at gold
Mid-afternoon TV comes once in a lifetime, yo
You better…

More Maraoke songs

Tags: David Perry, Dominik Diamond, Earthworm Jim, Eminem, game genie, games world, GamesMaster, karaoke, kirk ewing, Lose Yourself, maraoke, marioke, Nintendo 64, one life left, patrick moore, rewrite, robert florence, Shiny Entertainment, Super Mario 64, The Games Animal, videogaiden

My most recent contribution to the Maraoke video game karaoke songlist – first performed 08/11/2024.

It’s pronounced gibs as in “giblets”.

The full length version may (eventually) follow.

“American McGee”
– after “American Pie” (Radio Edit) by Don MacLean

A long, long time ago
I can still remember, how I’d boot that
DOOM.EXE file
And at school I would run some patch
Then I would host a new deathmatch
And maybe they could frag me for a while
But in the .plan file of Scott Miller
I read they’re making a Doom killer
BlueNews said they’d played it
Some kid called Ken had made it
I can’t remember if I sighed
When I heard his pilfered movie lines
But something ’bout the Doom scene died
The day Duke Nukem arrived

So, I, I miss American McGee
John Romero had long hair-o, ‘Cool Guys At The Beach’ Tee
And them id old boys, are tinkerin’ with their PCs
Saying soon they’re gonna make a Doom 3
Carmack wants to make a Doom 3

Did you try that voxel mod?
And did you complete MyHouse.wad?
(Not the ‘fire’ ending though?)
Did you dial in to DWANGO
On off-peak evenings long ago
And did your modem make you move real slow?
Well I know you’re not a ’90s kid
Cause I heard you mispronouncing gibs
Sat at my beige compute’
Man I dig those boomer shoots
I saw a former human zombie grunt
With a pinky demon and a mancubus
But could I make the Doomguy cuss?
And so Duke Nukem tried

And we were singing
I, I miss American McGee
John Romero drove Cameros, Carmack tuned up GTs
And them id old boys, are with their NextStep machines
Saying soon they’re gonna make a Doom 3
Carmack wants to make a Doom 3

Over ten years, they’d polish and hone
And send new snaps out to PCZONE
But it just wasn’t meant to be
Well investment ran out for Apogee
They were forced to raffle their IP
To Gearbox, the home of Randy P.
They defiled the King and they did him down
At best he’s just a horny clown
The critics’ words were stern
The unsold stock returned
So Forever came and was dunked on hard
We cursed the name of George Broussard
And traded in our graphics cards
The day Duke Nukem died

We were singing
I, I miss American McGee
John Romero had long hair-o, ‘Cool Guys At The Beach’ Tee
And them id old boys, are tinkerin’ with their PCs
Saying soon they’re gonna make a Doom 3
Carmack wants to make a Doom 3

I, I miss American McGee
John Romero had long hair-o, ‘Cool Guys At The Beach’ Tee
And them id old boys, are typing IDSPISPOPD
Saying soon they’re gonna make a Doom 3

More Maraoke songs

Tags: 3d realms, american mcgee, apogee, bluesnews, boomer shooters, cool guys at the beach, doom, doom 3, DOS, duke nukem 3D, duke nukem forever, gearbox, george broussard, Id Software, john carmack, john romero, karaoke, ken silverman, maraoke, marioke, myhouse.wad, nextstep, PC, pczone, randy pitchford, scott miller, shareware

One of two songs most recently contributed by me to the Maraoke video game karaoke songlist – first performed 04/10/2024.

It’s about interactive fiction (text adventure) games. I think I originally wrote this circa 2020 but it took a long time to get added to the system due to its complexity/obscurity.

We’re going to parse, and have some fun.

“Grues Live in the Dark”
– after “Groove Is in the Heart” by Deee-Lite

(Dig!)

[INTRO]

The frills that you fill
Up your box keep me thrilled
Not arcade action, Infocom
Interactive funky fiction

I had no lamp, I discovered
No – lamp in your hand, you’ll discover

(You know that’s right)

Your moves, they’re all WYSIWYG
All words, no point and click
That Babelfish
You’ll suffer for this

(Sing it baby)

I had no lamp, I discovered

(Uh huh, uh huh)

Now, why take a lamp? You’ll discover

[BREAK]

Grues live in the dark
Grues live in the dark
Grues live in the dark
(Mythological!)
Grues live in the dark
(Hit me)

[BREAK]

(Watch out)

The text can be so cruel
You can use Invisiclues™
We’re playing through Zork
Volume one and two-hoo

I had no lamp, I discovered
No, without a lamp, you’ll discover

Seeking gold, just finding trolls
I’ve been told, this style is old
There’s no pictures! No images!
Would you rather play The Witness?

I had no lamp, I discovered

Done with playing that Zork, so (yeah)
Hot on the heels, Magnetic Scrolls
Designed to truly beguile you
Infocom implement everything in prose (prose)
XYZZY since the mainframe days (days)
Twisty little passages like a maze (maze)
Not done graphically
Even Trinity (yeah)
Text parser system where I wanna be (c’mon)
Homegrown eclectic Twines (ha)
Or Hitchhiker’s Guide, Ballyhoo or Deadline (yeah)
Maybe no tea in your inventory
Maybe you’ll see a fish can be a key (hmm)
Lamp lamp lit it (lit it)
Axe axe hit it (hit it)
Game got you beat? They’ll sell you a cheat sheet (sheet)
J.R.R. Tolkien
Never gets old
Thorin just sing about the gold (sing it)

Grues live in the dark (na na na na na)
Grues live in the dark (na na na na na)
Grues live in the dark (na na na na na)
Grues live in the dark

[BREAK]

(Pop)
(Click)
(“One Two Three!”)
(Brlbrblrblrlb)

Prose by Infocom

(Grues *live* in the dark)

Grues live in the dark (Yeah!)
Grues live in the dark
Grues live in the dark
Grues live in the dark

More Maraoke songs

Tags: Activision, ballyhoo, colossal cave adventure, deadline, deee-lite, douglas adams, groove is in the heart, grue, infocom, interactive fiction, karaoke, magnetic scrolls, maraoke, steve meretzky, the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, the hobbit, the witness, trinity, twine, xyzzy, zork, zork II

One of two songs most recently contributed by me to the Maraoke video game karaoke songlist – first performed 04/10/2024.

“Game Gear Collection”
– after “Rainbow Connection” as popularised by Kermit the Frog (Jim Henson)

Why are there so many
ROMs for the Game Boy
When most are in black and white?
Game Boy’s a prison
With low resolution
And 8 hours of battery life
So Sega told us, we used to believe it
So it’s not the handheld for me
Someday we’ll find it
My Game Gear Collection
There’s Columns, I’ll stream it, you’ll see

[BREAK]

Who said that Tet-er-is
Would keep nerds entranced there
When Game Gears can play Gunstar
Somebody ported that
It’s hard to believe it
I’ll let you loan my cart
Who’ll scour eBay for
The Lucky Dime Caper?
There’s one bid from Frank Cifaldi
Someday you’ll try it
My Game Gear Collection
It’s “poggers”, I’m sure you’ll tell me

Only one console can sell
We loathe this improbable gadget

I wish the public then
Had made different choices
I’ll go on keeping the flame
Ryo Hazuki goes looking for sailors
(But that’s in a much later game)
Now that I have me an Analogue Pocket
A screen you can finally see
Time to revisit
My Game Gear Collection
Both Frogger and Alien 3

La da da dee da da doo
La da da dee dee da Se Ga

More Maraoke songs

Tags: alien 3, columns, console, frank cifaldi, frogger, game gear, gunstar heroes, handheld, jim henson, karaoke, kermit the frog, maraoke, portable, sega, shenmue, the lucky dime caper, the muppets

Previously: 2018 – 2019 – 2020 – 2021 – 2022

You know the drill by now. Aside from finally upgrading from a PS4 Pro to a PS5, my playing habits were broadly similar to last year – dipping into the (surprisingly decent) Playstation Plus offerings with minimal interest in new games released this year (with one big exception). Almost no new commercial games piqued my interest.

Please note that I haven’t included web games in this roundup – although there were probably one or two that deserve a mention – simply because I’ve not kept a comprehensive record of which ones I played this year.

Cyberpunk 2077 2.1 / Phantom Liberty

I played a frankly unhealthy amount of Cyberpunk this year – it replaced No Man’s Sky as my go-to casual sandbox game to pootle about in. As anticipated, the game’s critical rehabilitation continued apace and Phantom Liberty releasing around the same time as Starfield did indeed result in lots of critics questioning exactly what Bethesda’s designers have been doing for the last decade.

With the release of Version 2.0 I started a fresh playthrough (with the new skill tree) in anticipation of Phantom Liberty. It wasn’t until late December that I rolled the credits on the main game, and I’m still dipping (sorry, ‘chippin’) in now and then. The completionist urge is hard to resist, and CDPR have added a substantial amount of new secrets to the already content-stuffed Night City.

I can’t cover all the changes and new content that came to the game in detail here, but I will note that the new radio stations are excellent, many of the new vehicles look great and are much more fun to drive (I particularly love the sports car that looks like a Syd Mead version of the Delorean, and popping wheelies on the new motorbikes), the greatly more frequent text messages from side characters make the world feel more alive, and being able to ride the NCART metro train, while completely pointless, is a nice touch.

My main takeaway from replaying the main game: frequent surprise at how much branching is supported from player decisions. Everyone knows about the myriad ways the showpiece ‘obtain the flathead’ mission can diverge (the first time through, my lack of situational awareness meant I completely failed to notice or save Brick) – but did you realise that the whole Pacifica/Imperial Mall/Netwatch chapter could play out completely differently whether or not you side with the Voodoo Boys? Rejecting their plan is not a bluff! The game will let you do it, replacing a lengthy passage of expensive-feeling environments and cutscenes with a whole different chain of events.

A few missions even have branches that go off menu, where the presented dialogue options are misdirection and you can take another action in the world that the game will consider a valid resolution. (‘Swedenborg’ is a minor example of this.) (Also, holy crap I did not realise Ozob Bozo’s story could go THERE.)

I mention all this as I recently read a Substack review of the game that managed to completely fail to clock that any of this was going on, instead carping that the game was offering a rigidly linear ‘Uncharted’ style experience but taking an interminable amount of time presenting what the writer assumed were fake (Deus Ex HR/MD style) dialogue choices at every turn. I can’t imagine how boring it must be to be this aggressively bad at engaging with games, I suppose boring enough to think that starting a Substack newsletter is a good idea.

Where were we?

Let’s consider Phantom Liberty as a discrete entity. While it’s technically more satisfying that it exists as part of the main game (and probably the right decision overall in terms of maximising player freedom to approach the game in different ways), I do wonder if it would have worked better as a story if it were presented as a fully separate ‘expandalone’ campaign.

After the linear thrill ride spectacle of the opening hours of PL, the player is free to come and go from the new district (Dogtown) at will, which makes it very easy to kill the pacing and momentum of this new ‘spy thriller’ quest line. While this issue affects the main game as well, the stakes there are more obviously personal and the dramatis personae are easier to get emotionally invested in, so you gravitate back to the main quest line pretty organically.

Phantom Liberty’s writing and direction suggest it was built under much tighter resource and time pressure than the main game’s narrative. It feels like they planned it out pretty rigidly with no time for do-overs if a certain character or story beat didn’t land. (Quite possibly there may have been some content that was cut and not replaced with anything?)

The two main characters (Songbird and Solomon Reed) are both trying to use V to their own ends, as the espionage setting dictates. Neither gets a lot of screen time to explore their characters beyond driving the story forward with terse exposition dumps.

(Aside, I think Idris Elba as Reed gets a bit of a raw deal from CDPR’s character animation – while Johnny Silverhand can just be put into a generic slouching idle pose while Keanu Reeves furnishes 90% of the performance with his vocal delivery, Elba really needs more subtle facial performance capture than he’s afforded here to sell Reed’s reactions.)

President Myers (your bulletproof escort in the opening sequence) is no Jackie Welles. The fixer Mr. Hands (re-voiced and retooled since version 2.0) is slickly presented but his ‘mystery’ aspect goes nowhere, really. Kurt Hansen, the Dr. Breen-like omnipresent warlord of Dogtown is (intentionally) a replaceable cypher. Only the pair of French netrunning twins (whose identities you have to steal using Mission Impossible tech to get near the final MacGuffin) really pop off the screen as characters.

(The level where you have to infiltrate an exclusive party and gain their trust over the roulette table – between meeting a zillion Night City celebs and taking in a demoscene-level holographic stage show – is a clear highlight.)

Dogtown is an impressive feat of visual (and level) design, but it’s markedly more fantastical than the rest of Night City. The rather small footprint and vehicle-unfriendly infrastructure make the whole place feel a bit like a theme park (and not just the part that literally is an abandoned theme park) – and yet it’s simultaneously a war zone under martial law. Night City proper is at least able to put a bit of physical distance between the glitzy billionaires’ playgrounds and the bombed out ghettos. Coupled with the giddy “only you can save the president!” catalyst to the Phantom Liberty’s plot, CDPR have really cranked the ‘Paul Verhoeven tonal inconsistency’ dial until it’s fallen off here.

As inarguably cool as fighting a giant spider tank mech in a collapsing building is, it’s in the small details and moments that Night City still transcends all other open worlds. I’ve waxed lyrical about this in previous years’ round-ups so I won’t rattle off a long list here, but –

Rain, neon. The NCPD are breaking up a gathering at the finish line of a street race in the wasteground by the riverside shanty towns. You slip into the crowd and away from the lights and sirens and duck down an alley, just as a group of street kids bundle down the street in the opposite direction, one of them flashing a revolver, cartoonishly oversized in their hands. A few steps further down the street and you find the recently aerated body of the dealer who had been employing them as runners. Nice neighbourhood.

You’re searching a dingy motel for a person of interest. As immersive sim tradition dictates, you know their room number via at least three separate means before you’ve finished your recon. But you’re still going to look in the other rooms. And you’re going to find some security droids indulging in distinctly non-security droid pastimes out of hours. And this is going to happen more than once, because how you play games is how CDPR’s level designers play games.

A trio of Maelstrom gang members huddle in the corner of a parking lot. Random baddies, something you’ve seen hundreds of times. But one of them is crouched and rocking back and forth. The initiation ritual has gone wrong, the cybernetic implants have taken but they’ve wiped his memory. What now?

There are a million stories in Night City, and yes, a lot of them are a note on a corpse in an unusual place saying “Oh yeah, well I bet I CAN survive doing that”, but still.

Oh yeah this is supposed to be a ‘review’ isn’t it? In spite of my nitpicking above I think RPS’s pull quote that Phantom Liberty is “the best expansion pack ever” is fair, and it’s a massive shame we’ll never get to see the other planned DLC, and that (as far as I know) CDPR have mothballed the engine and aren’t letting anyone else make any new content for this iteration of Night City. It’s going to be a long wait for Project Orion.

Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order

I think my impressions of this game are coloured to some extent by how sick to the back teeth everyone is of Star Wars at this point, plus the nagging feeling that I’d much rather be playing a good new Battlefront game than a decidedly ropey re-re-reboot of Dark Forces/Jedi Knight.

Fallen Order feels like a game that was made in separate silos with little communication, much like the prison factory in the celebrated Disney Plus TV show Star Wars: Andor.

Why did they pick easily the visually worst level as the first place you go after the tightly scripted cinematic prologue? I don’t think I’ve seen a tiny ‘Uncharted/Tomb Raider’ type level feel less convincingly like it was on a planet’s surface since Unreal 2.

Why is the performance so terrible, with ‘disguised loading screen’ elevators sometimes freezing the game for several seconds? The level where Forest Whittaker has a cameo feels like it’s going to fall to pieces. Did nobody test this?

Why do the Wookiees look like that (one forum wag described them as looking like Tony Hart’s pal Morph after having been attacked with a fork, which I now can’t unsee)?

Why are we supposed to care about customising a lightsaber? Why does the main character look weirdly like a young John Mulaney in flashbacks? And why is Debra Wilson in every game now? (She was great in Wolfenstein but doesn’t get a lot to do here.)

The best parts of the game are when it stops leaning on original trilogy memberberries and tries something a bit different, such as the level where you’re fighting undead witches and recruit their last surviving member (easily the coolest character in the game). But it’s not enough.

Mafia: Definitive Edition

I’ve long been an advocate for the Mafia series (probably defending them a bit more vocally than was warranted at times). A full remake of the first game from the ground up seems like a really improbable thing to exist, but I’m not complaining. (It’s particularly odd that the wildly more commercially successful GTA games from the same era were remade so poorly, by contrast.)

The result is a game that largely looks and plays like players of the original remember it in their heads. It’s surprisingly close to the original in terms of content and mechanics – this isn’t a situation like Resident Evil 4 where sections have been cut or heavily reworked to better fit modern tastes.

The main changes, in effect, are the character models (which look a bit less obviously like e.g. Joe Pesci and Paul Sorvino now), and the heavily rewritten script by PCZONE veteran Will Porter. This is much needed – while the game occupied the same bracket as Max Payne and Half-Life 1 in terms of convincingly replicating the feel of a movie circa 2002, the original script could charitably be described as a victim or poor localisation from Czech to English.

The problem, as with a lot of these remakes, is that the underlying game is a bit slight by modern standards. A streaming open world city and realistically simulated pedestrians and traffic were major innovations at the time but they’re almost trivial today. Having the whole city essentially be atmospheric window dressing was a bold decision in the early 2000s but it just feels a bit empty and small now.

Still it’s a good few nights’ entertainment and it’s great that all three games in the trilogy now exist in an easily accessible form with roughly the same level of production value.

Resident Evil 2 Remake

This is the same basic deal as the above. Flawless production values wedded to a design that is a bit skeletal by modern standards. I don’t have any nostalgia for the PS1 era Resident Evil games so I bounced off it pretty quickly.

KID A MNESIA Exhibition

My PC wasn’t up to the job of running this when it came out, but the PS5 has no such problems. Again, there’s an element of nostalgia involved in what you’re going to get out of it. I don’t think Kid A or Amnesiac were as good as OK Computer but they lend themselves well to remixing for the weird demoscene-like vignettes here.

It’s a fairly good Unreal 5.0 showcase and honestly one of the better walking sims I’ve played (maybe a notch or two below Edith Finch). I recall there’s a room with a load of CRT TVs that works particularly well. Plus you’ll occasionally just find a big horrible caricature of Stanley Donwood or Tony Blair.

Sackboy: A Big Adventure

It’s good to see the tradition of launch games for a console getting an easy ride from reviewers is still alive and well. Sackboy is very disappointing if you’ve played Sony’s Astro Bot games and expect something in the same class.

The positives: It looks beautiful, with lots of lovely materials and shaders that show off the PS5 hardware. A few of the levels are synchronised to pop songs, and these are generally delightful little theme park rides. And of course Dawn French and Richard E. Grant sink their teeth into their voice roles. (It’s a shame we don’t get any direct Withnail-isms from Grant as the ranting and raving baddie, although I like to think that Sumo’s writers at least tried and were politely rebuffed.)

Unfortunately there are some minor problems, namely: the level design, the visual design and the spongy controls. You’ll die a lot in Sackboy because it’s not obvious what’s a hazard, or what’s part of the background, or where things are in 3D space in relation to the camera, or because of automatic scrolling, or because a jump won’t register in time, or because it’s simply not clear what you’re expected to do.

Sackboy is a charmless knitted prick who makes a sound like he’s straining on the toilet whenever he’s made to perform a jump-extending mid-air run, which is all the time because you can never jump far enough.

There’s a pervading feeling of ‘that’ll do’. Unlike Mario, or Astro Bot, or any modern game, almost nothing in the scenery reacts to your presence. Levels clearly built for four players aren’t reworked in any way for fewer players. The hundreds of character costume pieces are endlessly messily clipping into each other, and are too small to make out during play anyway. Mario has nothing to worry about.

Astro’s Playroom

I didn’t think a ‘pancake’ version of Astro Bot could work anywhere near as well as the PSVR1 version, but Team Asobi make a pretty convincing effort here.

Astro takes what could be a quite cynical and calculated marketing-driven premise (it’s a celebration of five generations of Sony games hardware, plus a showcase of the specific platform exclusive benefits of the PS5 console and Dualsense controller), and makes it palatable with charming animation and self-deprecating writing. It’s not as frustrating as the previous game, and keeps things varied with different gadgets, vehicles and minigames strewn through the short levels.

I’m not opposed to Sony celebrating their industrial design from time to time. They used to take a lot more pride in their weird hardware ideas in the 20th century, before gradually seeing their various product lines devolve into glossy black rectangles serving as vessels for various flavours of horrible bespoke Sony firmware. And let’s face it, it’s not like this is something Microsoft could fast-follow. I can’t really see a central atrium with the exhibits: “Subsidised Piracy Machine”, “Machine That Shipped Millions of Faulty Units”, “Machine Where We Tried To Stop You Buying Physical Games” and “Machine Where We Tried To Get Rid Of Media Ownership Altogether” and “Zune” having quite the same nostalgic buzz.

(I realise that discussing this game is a bit like talking about Snail Maze on the Master System, so let’s move on.)

Tails of Iron

A neat hack-and-slash adventure platformer (what we would have called an ‘arcade adventure’ in the Spectrum days), with an attractive and distinctive visual style, spoiled by having stupidly harsh Soulslike combat for no reason.

Descenders

A BMX racing game that seems nice enough to control and has lots of game modes and features, and one that because it has a level editor and thousands of user-created levels, feels weirdly like an old public domain game. Still it’s sold trillions of copies so it’s a formula that works for someone.

The Last Guardian

If you have a PS5 and haven’t yet played The Last Guardian, remedy this at your earliest convenience. I replayed it this year for the first time (all the way through at least) since launch. It still has the same impact. It feels timeless. It’s very clear that almost all of the problems reviewers had with it at the time were due to one of three things:

1. The game engine struggling to run on the base PS4, making moving the camera and getting inputs to register more cumbersome than necessary at times.

2. They are my friend Ricky, who keeps complaining of progress blocking difficulty spikes, and when I look up the room they’ve reached in the big coffee table companion book, it will invariably say something like “We made this room just to give the player a quiet contemplative moment with a nice tree and a bird bath, it is impossible for the boy to die here. [Laughter] Imagine dying in this room! It is not an eventuality that we have even considered [More laughter]”. (Sorry, Ricky)

3. The reviewer in question being a pillock who needed to be spoonfed the exact sequence of button presses at every moment. These reviews are very, very easy to spot by one simple tell: they refer to Trico as the boy’s ‘pet’.

There’s a scene in the TV show Lost when Jim from Neighbours (Alan Dale) dismisses Desmond, a suitor asking for permission to marry his daughter, by saying something like “I won’t let you have my whiskey, why would I let you have my daughter?”.

This is the appropriate level of contempt Fumito Ueda should justifiably have for people who assume Trico – the culmination of millions of hours of work to breathe life into a completely fantastical being, an achievement reached by only a small list that goes: Disney, Studio Ghibli, genDesign – is essentially one of those fucking Chicken Leg things you can ride in Golden Axe.

Trek to Yomi

This is a good example of the ‘massively over deliver on a strictly constrained scope’ school of design.

Trek to Yomi is intended to look like a 1950s black and white samurai film and it pulls this off incredibly well. The dynamic lighting and shadows are almost always seamless and the zoomed out and carefully framed camera shots always show just enough detail to convincingly portray a wide shot captured on 30mm film.

Mechanically it’s very much in the mould of Karateka or Prince of Persia with a dash of Bushido Blade. The action primarily consists of sword fights on a 2D plane. Your strategic options really don’t change very much throughout the game (you get better projectile weapons and unlock a few moves/combos, if I recall correctly), and there aren’t a huge number of different enemy types, so it does start to feel a little repetitive after a while.

I found some of the bosses very frustrating with my atrophied reflexes, but I still hammered away at them and it was very cathartic to eventually overcome them by the skin of my teeth. It’s in the same ‘difficulty ballpark’ as Hotline Miami 2, I’d say.

While Trek to Yomi is a little limited and shallow, I still think it was reviewed a bit unfairly in some places – a lot of complaints were about it not having RPG elements, when that doesn’t seem like the sort of game the developers were setting out to make. It’s a decent beat-’em-up which is pleasant to watch.

Call of Duty: Black Ops: Cold War

I think the last Call of Duty game I’d played before this one was Modern Warfare (CoD 4). Come to think of it, I think the last AAA FPS I played in the modern era was Wolfenstein II, so my thoughts on this game are possibly going to have ‘guy who has only seen Boss Baby’ vibes.

Ronald Reagan weirdly shows up in both games. In this, he turns up in a very short prerendered cutscene (the game is set in the 1980s), and is treated reverentially as Call of Duty’s hawkish Tom Clancy politics dictates. In Wolfenstein II, he travels to Venus only to be immediately shot in the head by a syphilitic Hitler. Microsoft owns both of these companies now!

Cold War has a diverting (albeit very short) single player campaign. The graphics are (naturally) richly detailed, and it gets some decent action setpieces out of its aging engine. There’s a ‘deep cover’ level where you get to explore the Kremlin (or something?) and do some rudimentary puzzle solving, which isn’t very long or deep but at least shows they’re trying to move beyond straightforward gunfights.

I’m surprised that there wasn’t more kerfuffle made about how the campaign’s ‘twist’ ending cribs pretty blatantly from both Bioshock and The Stanley Parable.

I didn’t play the multiplayer which I understand is the main event these days. I had more important FPS games to play:

Quake II Remaster

I’ve always regarded Quake II being a slightly poor relation to Doom and Quake. It’s not quite representative of the id of a few years later once they’d fallen into a pattern of releasing a big game every few years and hiring in other studios to fulfil their contractual obligations to publishers in the fallow periods, but it probably marks the end of their golden age. It was also the first id game that had critical bugs and missing features that needed to be patched after launch.

Nightdive’s Quake II remaster follows the template of their earlier Quake re-release: a straight port of the game to their new modern multiplatform engine, adding some minor quality of life improvements plus a completely new episode of single player levels developed by MachineGames. This time around they’ve actually made some small tweaks to the way weapons and enemies worked which improve the game in subtle ways.

The new MachineGames chapter is fantastic fun, weaving in some elements of Quake 1 and letting a different designer take each ‘unit’ of levels in their own direction. The package also includes all the expansion packs and the N64 port’s levels, plus a surprisingly extensive ‘Museum’ mode including concept art and playable demo levels from trade shows among other goodies.

I maintain hope that this is all building towards MachineGames producing a new mainline Quake game.

Dreams

I think I like the idea of Dreams a lot more than the reality of sitting down and trying to learn it.

I don’t know if the problem is how they’ve designed the interface, or the tutorials, although as I chewed my way through a seemingly endless list of guided lessons I couldn’t help but think that Minecraft, Fortnite and No Man’s Sky (and Stunt Island if we’re going back that far) did a pretty good job of teaching you to build potentially quite complex things just by putting you in the world and labeling everything very clearly.

I don’t know if the physical edition of the game comes with a big fat ring-bound reference manual, but I really hope such a thing exists as it would be much more practical than digging through endless videos with chirpy ‘RE teacher who has brought in a guitar’ voiceovers.

It might just be that the dangled carrot being offered isn’t compelling enough. Making a 3D game from scratch with a versatile engine and no programming required is enticing, but it would be considerably more enticing if the end product wasn’t constrained to a walled garden of other Dreams users on Playstation.

I enjoyed browsing the user creations for a few nights. I didn’t think much of the Media Molecule ‘demo game’ Tren, which very much feels like the product of a team that has been acclimated to the weird quirks of their in-house engine for a long period of time, and who are more interested in graphic design goals than making something that’s actually fun for normal humans to play.

Death’s Door

Oddly I played two indie games this year that feature crows prominently and use realtime 3D graphics to mimic prerendered scenes – Crow County by SFB Games (of which I only played the demo but enjoyed a lot) and Death’s Door by Acid Nerve.

Death’s Door is an isometric hack and slash game with some mild ‘Soulslike’ elements, and a fair amount of visual inspiration from Grim Fandango as well as prerendered isometric games like Mario RPG and Little Big Adventure.

You play as an anthropomorphic crow, one of a team of crows who have taken on the responsibilities of the grim reaper under the management of a mysterious dimension-hopping being called The Lord of Doors. Death has gone missing, and you’re tasked with finding out what happened, which will involve opening Death’s Door, which can only be accomplished through gathering several Giant Souls (i.e. defeating the bosses of each of the game’s main areas).

You’re dripfed new weapons and stat buffs at a steady rate, which makes exploring the world feel rewarding and backtracking feel less of a chore. The bosses are tough but very fairly designed with learnable patterns and telegraphed attacks, and the controls are responsive enough that (for the most part) the frequent deaths don’t feel cheap.

The levels are (for the most part) tightly designed with frequent and varied skirmishes, puzzles and secrets, with only one section (the dungeon under the Ceramic Manor) feeling like the scale is starting to get out of hand. The game doesn’t outstay its welcome and doesn’t feel padded with needless combat to extend its running time.

The game’s main shortcomings are the lack of any sort of map (there are quick travel points to each of the main areas, but it’s sometimes a pain to work out how to get to a specific room from the maze-like overworld rooms), and that one of the types of secret is based on a move your crow can perform that is never explained to the player, which you might reasonably never discover by chance.

I couldn’t quite believe how short the credits list was. This is an incredibly polished little game, and one that I imagine would be a good fit for handheld play.

Mafia II: Definitive Edition

2010’s installment of the Mafia series didn’t get a full remake like the first game, with 2K instead opting to give it a relatively minor revamp, bumping up some texture and model detail and bringing the lighting and draw distance up to more modern standards.

I’ve revisited the game a couple of times in the intervening years and I’ve liked it less each time. It’s harder to overlook the rough edges now it’s been leapfrogged many times over by more advanced open world games. The characters are unsympathetic and the script is full of tiresome ‘ironically’ sexist and racist edgelord crap, as if written by a teenager who has taken films like GoodFellas and Scarface at face value. Plot beats are strung together very unconvincingly (it’s obvious that a lot of content was cut) with offscreen phone calls and other quick fixes.

The game’s inability to quite nail down the period each given scene is supposed to be set in is a bit annoying as well. 1950s music crops up on the radio in the mid-1940s, and come to think of it, would all the cars you encounter have radios? When we’re shown one of the characters having a huge, chest freezer sized valve radio in their apartment? (It’s also odd that Django Reinhardt songs are present in this game but were removed from the soundtrack of the Mafia 1 remake, the game with which they’re more associated.)

The decision to build on the existing somewhat creaky foundations rather than take the more expensive option of reimplementing the game on modern tech doesn’t help. It doesn’t seem like a game that should be taxing modern hardware at all, and yet it still chugs along at 30fps with frequent dips.

The game’s greatest strength is probably carrying on the commitment from 2K Czech’s earlier games to simulate the world realistically. Empire Bay still manages to feel immersive which is helped a lot by the varying weather conditions (e.g. the level of snow on the ground varies), the wide range of ambient NPC behaviours (posting letters, opening the trunk of cars, slipping on ice, etc.) and the many little details modeled into the simulated vehicles.

No Man’s Sky

I’ve overcome my NMS addiction, just in time to start getting (over)hyped for Hello Games’ next procedural sandbox, Light No Fire.

One of the expeditions this year included objectives that were completely at the mercy of the procedural generation, which is something I’d hoped they’d do eventually. Unfortunately visiting many, many, many planets to try to find a creature over seven metres tall eventually got boring enough that I parked the game temporarily and haven’t gone back. Be careful what you wish for I guess!

Marvel Snap

I’ve still been casually playing Snap all year. The publisher’s parent company is planning to get out of the games business, so here’s hoping the game will land safely somewhere else rather than suffering the same fate as Android: Netrunner. It’s still probably the best quick CCG out there (even though they persist with the no-skill cards that are Galactus and Hela).

Tags: 2K Games, Acid Nerve, Activision, Astro's Playroom, Call of Duty: Black Ops: Cold War, capcom, CDPR, Cyberpunk 2077, Death's Door, Descenders, devolver, Dreams, Electronic Arts, Epic Games, game title, genDesign, Hangar 13, Hello Games, Id Software, Kid A Mnesia: Exhibition, Light No Fire, Mafia II: Definitive Edition, Mafia: Definitive Edition, marvel snap, Media Molecule, No Man's Sky, No More Robots, Nuverse, pc games, Phantom Liberty, playstation, Quake II, radiohead, Resident Evil 2, Sackboy: A Big Adventure, second dinner, sfb games, Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order, SUMO Digital, Tails of Iron, Team Asobi, the last guardian, Trek to Yomi

My most recent contribution to the Maraoke video game karaoke songlist – first performed 13/10/2023 by James Scott.

Also co-written with James – well, he came up with the joke, I eventually wrote the verses to go with it.

“Dwarf Fortress”
– after “You’re Gorgeous” by Babybird

Remember that laptop you bought me
Installed Dwarf Fortress on it
Up until then I thought computer games
Were stuff for kids like Sonic

I got them to built some pit props
And then they dug some shafts
And by the time I’d read the manual
My halls were strewn with goblin parts

Because Dwarf Fortress
They’ll hew anything for you
Because Dwarf Fortress
It’s even fun to lose

It said my dwarves were hungry
I ordered, strike the earth
You sprung the traps around my chests
Trapped in my culverts

Because Dwarf Fortress
They’ll hew anything for you
Because Dwarf Fortress
It’s even fun to lose

[INSTRUMENTAL]

The remake wasn’t cheap
You charged me 20 pounds
You promised to take me on a palanquin
Through every mountain and every town

Because Dwarf Fortress
They’ll hew anything for you
Because Dwarf Fortress
It’s even fun to lose

Because Dwarf Fortress
They’ll hew anything for you
Because Dwarf Fortress
Oh no I’ve let them,
No, I’ve let them fugue

Oh I’ve let them fugue
Oh I’ve let them fugue
Oh I’ve let them,
Oh I’ve let them fugue
Oh no I’ve let them,
No I’ve let them,
No I’ve let them fugue

Because Dwarf Fortress
They’ll hew anything for you
Because Dwarf Fortress
It’s even fun to lose

Because Dwarf Fortress
They’ll hew anything for you
Because Dwarf Fortress
It’s even fun to lose

More Maraoke songs

Tags: 1996, babybird, bay 12 games, dwarf fortress, karaoke, kitfox games, maraoke, palanquin, pc games, sonic the hedgehog, strategy, you're gorgeous

My most recent contribution to the Maraoke video game karaoke songlist – first performed 20/05/2023 by Grey.

The first Maraoke song about Marvel Snap. Also one of the hardest songs to perform on the system – good luck if you pick it. (It’s tracked to the 2023 ‘Rock’ remix of the song to make it even more challenging.)

“Marvel Snap”
– after “Heart Attack” by Demi Lovato

Put in my defensive buff
And I’m about to call your bluff
If I went and did that,
I think I’d win at Marvel Snaaaa…

Never put my cards on Jotunheim
Room in my deck for a Strong Guy
Jubilee triggers summoning Ultron
And now I don’t have anywhere to play my Wong
Your Hobgoblin
He can drain me like a Game Boy
But I’ll still win
Just watch me pounce with my Hank McCoy

But you make me gotta have one more turn
I’m this way with CCGs
It’s true, game is so moreish
That I just can’t play one hand

You play Cosmo
But I follow up with Magneto
So I put down a defensive buff
Think I’m not gonna call your bluff?
Then I went and did that,
I’m beating you at Marvel Snap
I’m beating you at Marvel Snap
I’m beating you at Marvel Snap

Played Professor X on the other side
When he turns around you get paralysed
And every time you play that Fuzzy Elf
My Killmonger puts him on the shelf
It’s just not fair
When your Juggernaut does his work
My cards are rare
But steer my deck like a total berk*

But you make me go and snap on my turn
Then get played by Doctor Doom
Four cubes, wasted on purpose
And I just can’t understand

You send me Rogue
Stole the power off Devil Dino
So I put down a defensive buff
And you know I won’t call your bluff
Then I went and did that,
I’m beating you at Marvel Snap
I’m beating you at Marvel Snap
I’m beating you at Marvel Snap

I’m failing these cards are all wrong
Was it Agatha all along?
(Agatha all along?)
Let an A.I. lose the game
(A.I. lose the game)
So scared that turn six is a bust
I finally draw Galactus
And I burnt both your lanes

It’s by Ben Brode
Bunch of other folks who made Hearthstone
So they’re called something like Second Lunch(?)
They’re coming out of years of crunch**
Take the industry back
They made a game called Marvel Snap
They made a game called Marvel Snap
(Marvel Snap)
…made a game called Marvel Snap, Snap
They made a game called Marvel Snap
(Oh, I’d play a game of Marvel Snap)

A little game called Marvel Snap

* Or ‘jerk’ if you’re American, I suppose.

** Who can say if this is an accurate portrayal of the working environment at Second Dinner, however it does rhyme with ‘lunch’.

More Maraoke songs

Tags: ben brode, blizzard, ccg, cold open, demi lovato, disney, heart attack, hearthstone, karaoke, maraoke, marvel, marvel snap, mobile games, second dinner, silly songs

My most recent contribution to the Maraoke video game karaoke songlist – first performed 18/03/2023 by myself and Lupine. (Thanks to Lupine for transcribing and adding images to the version on the Maraoke system.)

This is a song about the infamous 1980s home micro game The Great Giana Sisters. Please note that some dramatic license has been taken – as far as I’m aware, the developers of the game never actually went to court or got sued by Nintendo, and withdrew the game from sale before things could escalate to that level.

“The Great Giana Sisters”
– after “Lady Marmalade” by Bob Crewe and Kenny Nolan and popularised by Christina Aguilera, Lil’ Kim, Mya & P!nk

Where’s all my clone sisters?
Don’t pick up that phone, sisters
(Hey sister, cloned sister,
phoned sister, owned sister)
Uh
(Hey sister, cloned sister,
phoned sister, owned sister)

He played Gi-a-na on the old Commodore
Borrowing someone’s IP
He said, hello, hell no,
I represent Nintendo-oh

Bitchy bitchy ‘tendo lawyers
(hey, hey, hey)
Gitcha with that C & D (yeah)
Knockoff of your plumber brothers
(ooh, yeah)
Miyamoto‘s marked ya card

Oh, woah
You assumed we gave you
carte blanche, but nah
You knew who those
trademarks were? Ours
(Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah)

He sat in the courtroom
as they’re fessing up
Pressed them for an extortionate fine
Oh verdict’s bleak,
we could make minor tweaks? Yeah?

Bitchy bitchy ‘tendo lawyers
(da-da-da)
Gitcha with that C & D
(ooh, yeah, yeah)
Copycatters play with fire
(yeah, yeah)
We could call it an homage, uh

You assumed we gave you
carte blanche, but nah
You knew who those
trademarks were? Ours

Yeah, yeah, uh
Coming through from Germany
cuz we’re Rainbow Arts
Let ’em know about our fake
unlicensed remake (uh)
We’re ignorant of
intellectual property laws
I’m saying why make mine,
when I can clone yours?
(When I can clone yours?)
Disagree? Well that’s fair
and we’re sorry
Gotta bury these unsold games
like Atari (like Atari)
Swap girls for dudes,
swap sweeties for shrooms
Big N got wind now our game is doomed
Hey sisters, soul sisters,
…bit like Mario, sisters?
To save time and cover our own ass
We’ll erase,
avoiding an expensive case
If you’re a snitchy, bitchy lawyer
(C’mon)
Fingering our collar (what?)
Sleazier than David Cage

One more time c’mon now
Giana (ooh)
Playing Giana (ooh, yeah)
Giana (o-o-oh, yeah)
Hey, hey, hey!
(Uh uh uh uh uh uh uh)

Just a reskin,
scrolling’s silky smooth
Isn’t as much fun to play (alright)
Made those European guys
learn ’bout copyright
Law (law), law (law), law
(uh uh uh uh uh uh uh)

Now they’re back home
ripping off R-Type
He’s coding new look-a-likes
But he just wanted to see,
Mario on C-sixty
-Four (four), four (four), four

Bitchy bitchy ‘tendo lawyers
(da-da, yeah)
Gitcha with that C & D (ooh) (oh lord)
Product recall for Giana (Oh oh oh oh)
They saw through your
camofla- (aa, aa, aa, yeah yeah) -ge

You assumed we gave you
carte blanche, but nah (but nah)
You knew who those trademarks were?
Ours (Plagiarism, yeah)
You assumed we gave you
carte blanche, but nah (but nah)
You knew who those trademarks were?
Ours (whoa-oh) (c’mon, uh)

Chris Huelsbeck (Ooh-ayayay-oh)
Manfred Trenz (Playing Giana)
Armin Gessert
(hey, hey, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh)
Miya (moto, oh oh)
Rainbow Arts, baby (baby)
Full on sued (ooh-oh, da-duh, da-duh)
Yamauchi here
Miyamoto rode ’em hard

Oooh, yes-ah!

More Maraoke songs

Tags: 1987, armin gessert, chris huelsbeck, christina aguilera, clone, commodore 64, hiroshi yamauchi, karaoke, lady marmalade, lil' kim, manfred trenz, maraoke, missy elliot, moulin rouge, mya, nintendo, parody, pink, rainbow arts, retro, shigeru miyamoto, super mario bros., the great giana sisters, urban myths

Previously: 2018 – 2019 – 2020 – 2021

Once again the year draws to a close and it’s time to do my homework for the internet.

I realise I managed to avoid playing nearly all the big releases this year. This isn’t a boast. I’m not really a Dark Souls guy so didn’t bother with Elden Ring, and most of the medium-sized indie hits that came out this year I didn’t have the time or motivation to play, when weighed up against the gaming comfort food and new-to-me titles into which I ended up putting the most hours (below).

Yakuza: Like a Dragon / Like a Dragon 7

I spend a good few weeks this year exclusively playing Like a Dragon 7, a Playstation Plus freebie and my first experience of the franchise.

The game’s art direction (there’s a whole other essay in discussing how the Yakuza games find and celebrate beauty in the mundane) and execution of it’s story content is top notch. The story is driven along through frequent and lengthy cutscenes that mix together in-engine and prerendered scenes fairly seamlessly. While I’m sure I missed out on a lot of nuance by not having played all the previous installments of the series, the game spends lots of time fleshing out the main characters and explaining in broad strokes where people, places and events tie into the established story. It’s very funny as well, relentlessly undercutting itself and RPG conventions.

LaD 7 is designed to be an entry point for new players, introducing a new protagonist (Kasuga Ichiban) and turn-based JRPG style combat. Unfortunately it doesn’t feel quite as clean a break from established series conventions as Breath of the Wild did. There are lots of poorly integrated minigames dotted around the game world that mostly feel like they’re there out of obligation. While one or two feel like they have enough content to hold the player’s interest in their own right (such as the Dragon Kart racing game, the business management sim, and I suppose the emulated Sega coin-ops if you’ve not already played them to death), most are tucked out of the way and given such a needlessly cumbersome UI (the golf, baseball and UFO catcher games being particularly bad offenders) they almost feel like they’re discouraging the player from wasting too much time on them.

Aside from the minigames, the game itself is very obviously a patchwork of a few siloed-off systems (battle, world exploration, story) that rarely need to interact in a meaningful way. The game world is pretty enough to look at, but is pokey in open world game terms and lacking in interaction beyond random battles, shops and a very thin smattering of side missions. The game’s economy is a bit of a mess. You earn a trickle of currency from random battles and some moderately sized rewards from story and side missions, but the only practical way to afford the high end weapons and items in the game is to grind through a static battle arena that seems to have been stuffed with easy loot as a last minute kludge.

Aside from pivotal boss battles and a few ambushes from high level mobs to keep you from getting complacent, most of the combat can be steamrollered through without much strategic thought, in typical JRPG fashion. The game’s artists (and localisation staff) have had a lot of fun reskinning each of the game’s basic enemies (of which there are loads, even if they mostly boil down to different variants of ‘dude with specific melee weapon’) with progressively wackier themes, which the game explains away as Ichiban daydreaming about being a Dragon Quest hero whenever a fight kicks off.

Completing certain characters’ quests adds them as a contact in Ichiban’s phone, allowing them to be summoned in combat for a fee. At normal difficulty the game is balanced to make these gig economy summons rarely needed, but they’re worth using at least once as the elaborate cutscenes they trigger are in many cases hilarious.

The modest budget and creaky tech sometimes distracts. The main characters other than Ichiban tend to not change their appearance or costumes throughout the course of the game. Long exposition scenes sometimes take place in fairly generic rooms, suggesting a more ambitious or expensive scene was cut (the story arc involving the Korean mafia feels particularly short on on-screen action).

There’s an obvious difference between the appearance of characters modelled after their voice actors, and some of the later antagonists who have a much more stylised look – an intentional choice but one that looks much more incongruous given the game’s general level of fidelity than it presumably would have in the PS2 era. The animations whenever the script calls for a character to laugh are also very peculiar.

In spite of the series having now broken through in the West, it’s still fairly obvious that teenage Japanese boys are the primary audience. All that minigame content is geared towards players with vast amounts of free time to fill and a completionist streak. Women don’t factor into Ichiban’s world in a very significant way. More positively, the game does try to challenge lazy adolescent conservative attitudes, showing Ichiban the error of his boneheaded opinions, and accurately framing a cultish right wing protest group as cowardly misguided rubes.

My understanding is that the Like a Dragon games stories are intended to follow the conventions of pulpy yakuza genre films. With this in mind, the story works well (as should be expected given how many chances they’ve had to perfect the formula at this point).

There are a few unsatisfying bits. The melodramatic late-story revelation is a bit far fetched, but it’s kept ambiguous enough (hinted at through an unreliable narrator) that the story still resolves satisfactorily even if you don’t buy it.

Character motivations are monkeyed around with for story or gameplay convenience – most of Ichiban’s companions have reasons for joining (and sticking with) the party that really don’t bear a lot of scrutiny.

Midway through the story a minor character is murdered which turns out to be important to the overarching plot, but the level of determination Ichiban shows in avenging/investigating this murder seems wildly incongruous – this being a character who he has only recently met and who up until that point has been presented as not being very sympathetic or worthy of their loyalty at all.

In spite of all this, the opening and closing few hours are a tour de force of cinematic storytelling (by video game standards) and there are lots of high points in the intervening chapters as well. Like the best gangster flicks, Like a Dragon is a game that has something to say about the futility of the underworld lifestyle. It’s also a game where you fight a runaway chimp who has comandeered a JCB. Truly, something for everyone.

Slay the Spire

The problem with most deck building games is that they’re essentially a very convoluted way to play Hungry Hungry Hippos.

There’s an optimum strategy that players are required to gravitate towards. Individual playing style and improvisation are fed into the mincing machine to be replaced with card counting and spreadsheets. Board game nerds consider this to be a positive, a game requiring a ‘hobby grade’ time commitment to master being seen as a validation of their leisure choices. It’s this mentality that holds StS back in several regards.

The game’s onboarding doesn’t go nearly far enough to emphasise the importance of carefully limiting the size of your deck or seeking out duplicates of strong cards to further improve your odds of drawing them. While obviously a lot of the fun in the game is in building a mental model of the comparative values of cards and their synergies, one could end up struggling for a long time if they don’t realise the way that the game suggests playing it (with each new square landed on / battle won offering cards as a generally positive additive reward) isn’t the ‘correct’ way.

The game’s solution to extending it’s playing time and increasing variety is to have four characters, each with their own unique extra rules and unique cards. This is successful to an extent (and it is very cool that all the cards are compatible with all the characters), but by the time I’d unlocked the fourth character (having spent a lot of time playing the third one), I just didn’t want to scale the mountain yet again. I put the game aside for a few weeks, then sat down and consciously applied the rules in the previous paragraph with the third character and completed it on my first go. I’ve never felt compelled to go back since.

Finally, it’s safe to say that the game has been a significant commercial hit at this point. Why haven’t the developers ever gone back and fixed the frankly amateurish artwork? The card illustrations are for the most part passably good and readable, but the Spine animation of the battle scenes (as always) looks very ropey, and some of the event illustrations (the ‘campfire’ scenes in particular) are so crude you have to assume they’re placeholders that never got finished.

The fact that the deluxe physical edition of the game also uses some of this artwork suggests they’re scared of changing anything because the game has been successful. Please, don’t be so precious about it! You don’t need Valve/Blizzard-level production values, but if you want people to spend a large number of hours with your game at least you can make it pleasant to look at.

I played a ton of StS this year and enjoyed it a lot. I don’t want to sound like I’m diminishing it’s achievements – it’s a very well designed game. But at the end of the day, Slay the Spire, while powerfully addictive, doesn’t quite secure it’s place in the all-timer tier alongside Card Fighters Clash, Android: Netrunner and Marvel Snap.

Return to Monkey Island

It’s still too early for me to have any definitive opinion about Return to Monkey Island. I’ve played through the first two games several times over many, many years and thought about them a lot. (I last chewed over Monkey 2 when the Special Edition was released, which you can read here.)

It’s strange how something that’s seemed like an impossible pipe dream for so long feels like a bit of an anticlimax now it’s out. With the original cycle of SCUMM games in the 1990s, both the developers and players were stepping into the unknown. Monkey Island 2 and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (and the later ones, with diminishing returns) were the state of the art for point and click adventure games at the time, as long and complex and visually cinematic as they could possibly be achieved with the technology available.

Return to Monkey Island is… another one, at approximately the same scale. Even if we accept that it was never going to do anything mindblowing (we’ve already seen cel-animated and 3D takes on Monkey Island, and point and click adventure games are still prohibitively expensive to make), it still feels a bit conservative: a handful of characters, a few dozen rooms, a few hours of gentle puzzles. There are no big changes to the formula, not a lot of character development – we’re firmly in the ‘weekly reset sitcom’ version of the Monkey Island world rather than the ‘real life if disappointing and messy, you naive idiot’ Monkey Island 2 version.

Coming from Ron Gilbert and most of the same team who made Thimbleweed Park, I was fairly confident that this was going to feel like a legitimate Monkey Island game. I didn’t expect it to carry on directly from the ending of Monkey Island 2 and convincingly segue from that into a new story.

For someone who played the original Monkey Island 2 on PC at release, the whole prologue sequence feels like an amazing magic trick. It feels like the part that Gilbert has been thinking about the longest. It provoked the same response as some of the stuff in Blade Runner 2049 (“Oh shit, they can do that? They can in fact do ANYTHING with these characters who have, for us, been trapped in amber for years? Because they invented them and know them?”) that Hampton Fancher had clearly been waiting to share for a looong while.

The writing, vocal performances, character design and of course the puzzles themselves stay commendably faithful to the earlier games. Rex Crowle’s art has about as much ‘information’ in a given scene as the VGA originals and isn’t distracting as some had feared. There are lots of little close up shots (at least, early on) that allow the characters to be more expressive.

Outside of the prologue, the chapter of the game where the action is confined to Le Chuck’s galleon feels the most fleshed out. Most of the game is structured in such a way that each main location is usually a self contained mini-episode of puzzles, without too much hopping back and forth until the final act.

Unfortunately not all of these sections come up to the same standard. Some have lots of elaborate backgrounds but a minimal amount of puzzling and character conversations. There are rather too many of those LucasArts ‘mazes’ built of mixing and matching background chunks (as in, more than one). There are cameos by series regulars (Stan, Herman, Carla, etc.) that go nowhere, and a cute subplot about scurvy (riffing on real world conspiracy chumps) that comes across as a faint imprint of a longer and funnier conversation that didn’t make it into the game.

I was a bit disappointed that Le Chuck was a non-threatening Saturday morning bumbler again rather than the being of pure malevolence he was in Monkey 2. I thought the ending was okay. It leaves the door open for anyone to make more Monkey Island games in future, but also works as a good coda if this really is the last one. (I was more annoyed about the last puzzle, which seems to go against all Gilbert’s complaints about bad puzzle design, as well as objectively having accessibility issues particularly if you were to try to solve it on the Switch’s screen.)

I hope this isn’t the last point and click adventure that this team makes, Monkey Island or otherwise – I kind of hope they’ll revisit the Thimbleweed Park characters one day. (The cool ones like Delores and Ransome anyway, not that hotel manager guy.)

Marvel Snap

See everything critical I said about deck building games in Slay the Spire above? None of that is true here.

Marvel Snap is one of the best new mobile games I’ve played in several years. It’s a competitive card battling game that has been streamlined (over a 4+ year development cycle) to the point of near-perfection. You and your opponent each have twelve cards and six turns to play them in three lanes. Most cards (and locations) introduce a new rule that either happens once or keeps happening each turn unless something else happens that removes it from play.

Infinite diversity in infinite combinations – as Mr. Spock used to say – is the key to why this works so well. There’s no perfect deck that can beat any strategy or the luck of the draw every time. Almost every time I play I’ll come up against a player who has figured out a new and unexpected synergy between certain cards, rewriting my mental model of their relative value again.

This is given a whole extra psychological dimension with the ‘snap’ mechanic – basically at any time, either player can hit a button to double the ‘XP’ stakes for the game, announcing they’re confident of their hand (or are bluffing). You start to be able to better predict what players are going to do from their early actions and frustrate them. I’m currently finding that the Beast card (particularly in concert with the Cloning Vats location) gives almost endless scope to be a dick, shifting the goalposts on which lanes my opponent needs to defend and cheekily neutralising lots of final turn ambushes.

I think I might have to concede that Card Fighters Clash has finally been bettered? Bearing in mind I’m currently addicted to this game, so that might be like proclaiming that cigarettes are inarguably great. (Maybe check back with me in a few months on this.)

Also, Disney/Marvel/Second Dinner if you’re reading this, I do hope (semi-seriously) that Biz Markie’s people are getting some appreciation for tens of millions of people hearing his catchphrase every day.

Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk saw some major patches this year which further improved performance, fixed the driving and added a sprinking of new content (apartments to buy, a couple of new gigs and weapons, plus greatly improved options for customising your character’s appearance and outfits on the fly). Between this and the (surprisingly excellent) Edgerunners anime, I was tempted back to spend more time exploring Night City.

I wrote at length about the game when it came out, but in spite of it ticking so many of the boxes for my personal tastes in games, I was still somewhat hesitant to put it on too high a pedestal. At this point though, I think it’s fair to say that it’s one of my top ten games of all time. I think it’s probably time we bit the bullet and started calling it an immersive sim as well.

The many hours I’ve spent in the game this year haven’t been re-doing the main story and side missions. I’ve just loaded up my old all-missions-complete, meet-Hanako-at-Embers save and explored the city. There are no more mission markers on the map, but there’s still a lot left to see and do. The amount of secrets and tiny unique details hidden in the world continues to be completely astonishing.

CDPR’s level designers have taken snap-together architecture and props, and judiciously placed corpses with loot and written notes in their pockets, and used these as art materials to pile up seemingly thousands and thousands of micro-doses of worldbuilding. There are whole areas of the game (containing specifically crafted platforming, trap-avoiding and combat capsule challenges) that you might not stumble across until hundreds of hours into the game.

There is so much to find. The survivalist bunkers under buildings in the desert. The water purification plant on the river whose hacked security system has killed the engineers sent to investigate. The crime scene of a political assassination near the oil fields to the North where you can snag a sweet machine gun. The Easter Egg hunt for a unique weapon prototype in the Arasaka complex, seeded in an email on a laptop you could easily miss. Plus all those corpses halfway up fire escapes, stuffed in lockers, on rooftops, washed up on the beaches with their own little stories.

I think my favourite recent find was “Scraps”. A short way down the road from a mission location in the desert (a Wraith-occupied motel), there’s an unassuming junk yard of this name. It’s fully enclosed by razorwire fences, leading the player to an entryway that (if they’re observant) they’ll notice is strewn with corpses of attempted looters. You have to pick your way through a minefield and deactivate turrets, cameras and laser tripmines to get into the main building. Once you’re inside, you find a body face down on the floor in front of a number pad locked door. The game uses maybe five small epistolary texts (emails, a journal, etc.) to let the player piece together what happened.

There’s no achievement for doing this. It’s a quick twenty minute detour that feels like a one-shot short comic set in the world. The game is chock full of stuff like this, and it’s alarming to think that many players, trained on Ubisoft open world trash to make a beeline to the next mission marker until the credits roll, will have missed loads of it. It certainly proves that the established model of mainstream game reviewing (speeding through games before an embargo lifts), that led to some reviewers astonishingly complaining that Night City “felt empty”, is irrevocably broken at this point.

The upcoming Phantom Liberty expansion is one of my most anticipated games for 2023. Until then there’s always another storage locker to jimmy open, rooftop to scale, conversation to overhear, or unique clothing, weapon or vehicle variant to snag in Night City.

No Man’s Sky

Yes, I’m still playing it, but not anywhere as near as much as the last few years. NMS has reached the point where it’s starting to get very creaky on older systems (the most recent round of optimisation coinciding with the Switch release giving image quality a severe kicking), and after so many updates it’s difficult to keep track of what exactly was added to the game in the last 12 months. I think the freighter base overhaul, solar sail ships and pirate systems, and revamped, now at least somewhat challenging/interesting, sentinel combat were all this year, right?

Probably the biggest single improvement from my point of view was the new custom difficultly menu. Among lots of other options, you can now completely disable ship to ship combat which is a godsend. Dogfighting in NMS has always just been there because it was expected to be – it has no depth and no stakes (compared to Elite Dangerous for example where it’s an integral part of the game), and just ends up being a time-wasting annoyance when you’re trying to fly between planets.

There were also some good community expeditions (timed events) this year, although it’s getting to the point where the game chugs too much with real-time multiplayer enabled which spoils things a little bit. I won’t embed a selection of my screenshots this year, but you can find them all (assuming Twitter is still functional when you read this) here.

Everything else

I spent a pleasant few evenings playing Codies’ Dirt5. I enjoyed the casual, arcadey structure of the metagame. I was a bit less keen on how “how do you do, fellow kids?” the whole presentation was (I had to instantly mute the terrible ‘podcaster’ commentary that constantly burbles away) and the sporadic ‘novelty’ races with cars that handle like bricks. It was also amusing to see how the visual quality on console has gradually been whittled away (compared to the still amazing looking Dirt Rally) as they try to shoehorn more content onto the old hardware – the amount of pop-in and liberal use of billboard imposters sometimes made the game look like a remaster of Power Drift rather than a modern racing game. In spite of all that the driving model still feels ultra-responsive and satisfying.

I also played a bit of Beatstar. Which is basically Tap Tap Revenge (if anyone remembers that) with a proper modern F2P metagame and a ‘blanket’ music streaming license (a tie-up with Apple Music I think?) ensuring there’s a decent selection of old and new tracks in lots of genres to collect. It’s apparently Space Ape’s most successful game to date and it’s easy to see why. I don’t think I’ll get into the routine of playing it every day but I can see myself dipping back into it to kill time.

I tried to get into Deep Rock Galactic. It’s a very odd game, based around a quite unconventional game loop of mining out procedurally generated caves in first person. It’s very reminiscent of the sort of limited appeal ‘B-game’ that you used to find on the 3 for £10 rack for PC in the early 2000s. It seems heavily geared to being played as a hobby, and I guess it has found an audience that will sink a lot of time into it week in week out. Personally I bounced off the annoyingly fiddly controls after a couple of sessions. Sorry!

I also played a bit of Into the Breach, a game I’ve held off on playing for a long time based on the screenshots. The turn-based tactical genre has seen so many games with really beautiful 2D art over the years, and Into the Breach looked like it had a ‘Newgrounds fan game trying it’s best’ aesthetic by comparison. I was pleased to discover it looks a bit better in motion. But sadly again it didn’t hold my interest.

I have a sneaking suspicion (which is completely unfair and might well be dispelled if I went back to play the game for longer) that a lot of the gushing praise that the game enjoyed was down to a lot of indie PC game developers and critics having not played many games in the genre before, and the whole ‘randomly generated skirmishes’ thing is a crutch to get out of having to make well balanced, playtested static levels (which in fairness is massively difficult to do – a big part of the reason there are so few new entries into the genre these days). It seems more of a ‘Chess Puzzle’ game than an SRPG anyway, so perhaps it’s unfair to view it in those terms.

Oh, and the best games-related thing that I watched on YouTube this year was hands down Tim Rogers’s Boku No Natsuyasume review. (It’s split into chapters, you don’t need to watch it all in one sitting.)

Tags: Action Button dot Net, android: netrunner, Beatstar, Boku No Natsuyasume, card fighters clash, CDPR, CDProject Red, Codemasters, Cyberpunk 2077, Deep Rock Galactic, Dirt Rally, Dirt5, Elden Ring, from software, game title, ghost ship games, Hello Games, indiana jones and the fate of atlantis, Into the Breach, marvel snap, megacrit, mobile games, monkey island 2: le chuck's revenge, netrunner, Night City, nintendo switch, No Man's Sky, PC, return to monkey island, ron gilbert, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, second dinner, sega, slay the spire, snk, Space Ape Games, subset games, Terrible Toybox, The Secret of Monkey Island, tim rogers, yakuza, yakuza: like a dragon

The second of two new songs contributed this month to the Maraoke video game karaoke songlist – first performed 19/11/2022 by Robert Wells.

It’s about the Sega Saturn.

“No-One Bought A Saturn”
– after “Nothing Ever Happens” by Del Amitri

GameStation staff put up signs saying previously owned
And stack the shelves with Fighting Vipers and Densha de Go
And consoles go back into crates
To be stripped down for parts or resold
And Virtual On doesn’t warrant a blink
The reception’s as cold as gazpacho
And they won’t be sold here tonight
Or sold here tomorrow

Gentlemen time please, you heard what he said, Peter Moore
We’re giving this console the chop ’cause its sales were so poor
Now your platform’s a House of the Dead
They say your hedgehog was a fad
And ignorant people need to play Gex
While they don’t buy Nights though you’re Sonic’s dad

And no-one bought a Saturn
Not one Saturn at all
The Dreamcast was seen as a return to form
but the writing was long on the wall
And we’ll all play Sony tonight
And Sony tomorrow

Ten-player Bomberman’s slick but there’s no-one to share
We put out Panzer Dragoon Saga still nobody cares
Sega must’ve thought “hey we’re in with a shot, we can port Daytona USA”
But the only thing people remember you for
is the high cost of Snatcher (eBayed)

And no-one bought a Saturn
Not one Saturn at all
The Dreamcast was seen as a return to form
but the writing was long on the wall
And we’ll all play Sony tonight
And Sony tomorrow

A PlayStation spokesman is standing on stage at E3
While Edge through to Gamesmaster write endless praise
about how it does ‘proper’ 3D
Now Computer Exchanges price up your games
like they’re rare as the Shroud of Turin
While the snotty-nosed kids take one look at Last Bronx
then go back to Xbox Elden Ring

And no-one bought a Saturn
Not one Saturn at all
The Dreamcast was seen as a return to form
but the writing was long on the wall

And no-one bought a Saturn
Not one Saturn at all
Cause Radiant Silvergun wasn’t enough to beat Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4
And we’ll all play Sony tonight

And Sony tomorrow

More Maraoke songs

Tags: CeX, Daytona USA, Del Amitri, densha de go!, Dreamcast, e3, Edge, Elden Ring, fighting vipers, GamesMaster, Gex, Hudson Soft, karaoke, Konami, Last Bronx, maraoke, marioke, Nights into Dreams, Nothing Ever Happens, Panzer Dragoon Saga, peter moore, playstation, Radiant Silvergun, Saturn Bomberman, sega, sega saturn, Snatcher, sonic the hedgehog, sony, The House of the Dead, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4, treasure, virtual on, Yuji Naka

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