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In my days of dying in Track Central, I gave thumbs up to tracks with robot wars and neon overlays, later finding tracks with alien invasions and drops from million-story high skyscrapers. Just last night, in another track, one of my riders smacked his face on the concrete, only to bounce back into the clouds. Track Central gives into core of the Trials experience and allows us to relish in the waste of biomass. Sorry, riders: this is what you're made for.
Sportsfriends reminds us how local multiplayer can be.
The Last Tinker, despite nailing the aesthetic of the games that inspired it, doesn't have this strength. For every one of its lovely vistas there is an unsatisfying bit of platforming to be done; for every quirky character there is a group of enemies at which to swing some floaty punches.
So much of Bound by Flame induces boredom or irritation that it seemed the best recourse to seek out a style of play that facilitated, if not outright enjoyment, at least an absence of hostility. Well, better that an aggravating game permit you to play around its points of aggravation than to force you to suffer them in earnest. In the case of Bound by Flame, I merrily sheared away until nothing remained.
The majority of Full Bore is a balancing act—charging blindly through the map may incite agoraphobia, while obsessing over a particular nook for too long yields claustrophobia. Getting lost in this game is equally fun and frustrating, in almost exactly even measure. I would have liked a little more direction, moving through these extremes.
"Winners don't do drugs," the game tells me as it cycles through its scroll of finite messages for the third time as I inch my way toward the light, the way out of limbo. I can hear Linda growing tired, her breathing laborious. Soon I'll have to slow her to a walk so she doesn't deplete her stamina, the length of which I can only guess at. Mine's just about gone.
Mario Kart 8 warrants another go.
Just as I see Supergiant's uneasiness exercised in the mechanics and themes of Bastion, I cannot help but find Transistor's obsession with performativity a bit telling of its creators' desire to break the sophomore slump.
In Super Time Force, the failures live on, but not as condemnations of my lack of skill. My sloppiness as a player is not useless. Seeing them all hopping around on the screen simultaneously, I realize: there can be grace in failure.
The plot of Tesla Effect really only works in the sense that a) people familiar with the series will twig to shorthanded character reveals and b) explanations are eventually given for things that happened. At no point, however, do you feel like you're sharing in a struggle, and at no point is the game funny enough to get away with having such a paint-by-numbers plot.
Scram Kitty is a game that shrugs off modern-day descriptors. It's not a throwback. It's not an open world. It's not a roguelike. There are no QTEs. No pixellated faux-8-bit art. Everything's slick and beautiful in some weird, Neo-Hanna Barbara future world of space cats and perpetual sunsets.
For all Watch Dogs' wonderful forward-thinking largesse—its very serious aesthetic concern with memory and surveillance and violence—it still thinks small. The plot confuses memes with jokes, confuses hoops with plot points, confuses Deadmau5 with cool. We move from person of interest to person of interest, as in a Raymond Chandler story, but unlike in a Chandler story no larger structure takes shape. We uncover only more hacking, more people of interest; jabs are taken at corruption but the corruption is only a type of information, a thing to hack. We hop up and down the ladder, from club to ghetto to skyscraper, but each setting is just a new set of boxes and cameras and targets. It is assumed that the setting will tell the story, but the city will not speak.
But the game's reliance on establishing such a personal connection in order to meet its noble goal of self-discovery does breed fragility. This becomes apparent in the game's multifaceted ending, which sees the game's creators striving to draw attention to the game's artificiality. Attention is drawn to the puppetry in order to take you out of the narrative and to reveal that your choices were futile.
So much of Episode 4 is table setting for the upcoming finale that the episode never finds its own identity: it's all middle. There's no real beginning or end, no narrative arc.
Monochroma wants you to debate your every move, to drain you of color and splash you with hope when you play well. It's often too quiet to know if you're doing just that.
Tomodachi Life is a bizarre game. It's a tiny world with its own news channel (a popular story involved Roops opening his window and a bird flying in; another was the surge of headphone purchases around the island), its own residents with predictable dreams (they all sing in the concert hall with pre-generated songs lacking depth about love and pizza), and if you're open to it, its own comment. Playing Tomodachi Life is no different than life in its purest sense, but it makes one wonder: who's playing you? Should we care?
Fortunately, Soul Suspect's fairly uninteresting play takes a backseat to a fast-moving plot that, as predictable as it often is, remains engaging from start to finish.
Pushmo World is more of a great thing, and that's hard to complain about. But as the Wii U increasingly looks like a poor child captured in some mysterious restraints, I fear shiny versions from the past won't unlock these unfair shackles. Let's hope Nintendo does their best sumo-cat impression and gets to puzzle-solving like we know they can.
Turning into a machine is both the game's nightmare and its surreptitious fantasy. Isn't every FPS player a brain transplanted into a living weapon? Stuck in stiff undying bodies, gun-arms akimbo, we savor a stretched and distorted and rewound moment of carnage that is never allowed to end. Narrative justifications are appreciated rather than felt. What Blazkowicz really stands for is that mechanical satisfaction that keeps returning for its own sake. In the next Wolfenstein, he might not be human at all. As the philosopher said: he who fights Mecha-Hitlers must take care not to become one.
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.