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If you hold certain made-up heroes in higher regard than others, you may blanch at seeing them debased like this. But these heroes, like all others, are just toys in a bin. Play with them as you will.
Today, of course, Destiny is a mess, but I sympathize with it. It contains multitudes, and I see the multitudes in it. Like Destiny, we all struggle with what came before us. We struggle to measure up to it, to change it, to learn from its mistakes. We want to be bigger than our parents, and in some ways, we always are. But ultimately we, too, are human. Like Luke, we can't live up to others' expectations; no one can be everything to everyone. What else could we call such failure but destiny?
Even spread out over about 9 hours, there were times when the plot was a little too outlandish, and I say that fully understanding the absurdity of criticizing a pigeon dating sim for implausibility. It draws a clean line: if you prefer plots that are weird to begin with and just get weirder, you will be extremely happy with Hatoful Boyfriend; if you don't feel excited by every single Japanese pop culture trope re-enacted by pigeons, Hatoful Boyfriend might not be for you.
In this series we look at Clementine, see a child, and then experience where she ends up, getting to feel the disconnect between what it means to be a kid and how to be an adult. You can make the argument that being an adult requires making the hard decisions, and that's what The Walking Dead series comes down to.
As a system built for story delivery, everything just works beautifully.
Madden NFL 15 is a truly impressive football videogame, and probably the best I've ever played. But it is still the NFL, and I am still figuring out what that means to me.
Bad puzzles are easy to design; good puzzles (whether easy or hard) require logic, care, even a touch of the narrative Hohokum pointedly rejects. Good puzzles tell a story in their physical parts. Over time, Hohokum demands story, even as it tells you it doesn't have one, and it demands progress, even as it works so hard to act like it doesn't.
Mind: Path to Thalamus is, at times, messy, but it's a beautiful mess, one that still exhibits powerful moments of emotional impact that are so true to the game and the medium that it's almost painful. If the narrator is the creator—or vice versa—he seems afraid of letting the player and himself falter emotionally or logically, as though there were something wrong with offering a player a piece of a broken heart.
It's easy to forget that, as with Clementine, there is still more to come. Episode 5 is on the horizon. We just had to sit through something else to get there.
DSII remains a skilled, often clever impersonation of the game everyone wanted. But I can't see the point of teasing out its journey with ever more kings, dragons, and Havels. The more DSII overlaps with its predecessors, the less reason there is to play it at all.
Unrest is a short, smart work. Most roleplaying games are about those in power, but Unrest is also about those who aren't.
Abyss Odyssey is an oasis in the desert for a 2D Castlevania fan.
ARID is a wonderfully interesting character, although she has little opportunity for personality within the space of this game (the first of a trilogy).
Cry Wolf lacks a sense of inevitability. The Telltale Engine telegraphs social consequence to players throughout (in the form of notifications such as "She will remember that" during play) which lends a sense of weight to player decisions. Yet there never came a moment in which my decisions caught up to me, when I was caught helpless.
Wildstar, then, is gratuitously good-feeling. Last night, I spent another five hours in the game. I went to a village where I licked bugs that made me feel like I was tripping on acid. There were giant rabbits dancing in happy circles and chanting. Why would I leave this? A lot of Wildstar's content draws from all of the MMOs that have come before it, but this outlandish dedication to fun is its own. It's unashamed to be a delightfully cheesy animated space adventure.
I'm not sure Original Sin has a clue what it's about, beyond "feeling like an old game." It gets more strung out as you go along, introducing towns that feel curiously bereft of quests and dungeons padded out with tedious switch hunts. There's no strong character to center it, no perspective to ground it, no consistent challenge to weight it. It's an impressive novelty, but it fades fast.
Still, there's something to be said for small pleasures. Clicking the left joystick to make my teenage rave robot transform filled me with the same sense of glee I felt when playing with these toys as a kid. Inasmuch as a game might be an exercise in nostalgia, Dark Spark brought those toys to life. Being a robot that can transform into different shapes and use cartoony weapons to blow up other robots is fun, and maybe story is unnecessary for this kind of play. Sometimes, all you need is for neon strobes, dry ice machines and deep house bass to blast your senses into joyful oblivion.
I don't think I've ever enjoyed a sled ride more in my life, because I've never had to work as hard for one. A task which once felt insurmountable had been met. That's not a feeling I've had with games for a long time—not even in Dark Souls. But somehow, the small scale trials found in the levels of 1001 Spikes bring me back.
Shovel Knight may be retro, but it's forward-thinking.
The great pity is that Lifeless Planet is not entirely without merit—Board has a good eye and ear for aesthetics. He'll make you trudge through a Mars-like landscape for five minutes and then have you turn a corner to find a 1970s-era Brutalist Soviet apartment block. Board loves this Duchamp readymade approach to level decoration, where mundane objects become striking by being dropped into an alien context. The Rich Douglas-composed soundtrack is majestic and mysterious, and Board uses it sparingly to preserve its power to move you. It is genuinely impressive to arrive at a Lifeless Planet vista, received by a stirring musical crescendo. It's a place that deserves a more compelling reason for you to visit it.