It's 2024 and we're all used to constantly being cheated, manipulated, scammed, and nickeled and dimed in our real lives. It's just part of living in modern society, especially in the U.S. Whether it's grocery store shrinkage labeled as "new and improved," printers that have chips to avoid you using after market ink replacements AND that refuse to print in black and white after emptying their own magenta cartridges while "cleaning" themselves, or the constant barrage of robocalls for various scams even on cellphones, modern life just involves a bunch of predatory companies and people trying to take advantage of us.

It was always this way to some extent but the Internet has made it worse, as has consolidation of companies. When Amazon has driven most of its competitors out of business and damaged local retail in a lot of places it can afford to ship you the wrong products (or clearly used products sold as 'new' for 'new' prices) and what are you going to do about it? Go to the local department store that closed in 2012? Get mad about the cheap print on demand books and order your books from ebay, only to end up with a print on demand cheap copy?

When you can set up a new company with a few clicks of a mouse and be exposed to tens of millions of new suckers customers there's just no reason not to cheat people, besides morality and scruples but who cares about those? And conversely when you're a huge monolith and the only game in town there's also no reason not to cheat and steal. What are your customers going to do? Go to a fly by night Internet only operation that will cheat them even worse?

Health insurance denies valid claims. Telecomm companies tack on hidden fees. Online ticket sellers charge more than the cost of the ticket for "convenience" fees. It's a non-stop barrage of bullshit that insults your intelligence and plunders your wallets.

And it's in games too and only getting worse.

I think that this is behind a lot of the outrage over seemingly smaller issues when it comes to live service games. People play games to escape the bullshit of life. They play games to go into a fantasy world where they're a wizard or the First Baseman for the Yankees or a Race Car Driver or a college senior with a bunch of hot suitors or whatever fantasy a particular game is selling. It's escapism because we all need to escape sometimes.

But now when you escape to a fantasy world the bullshit follows you. When you bought a copy of Final Fantasy VII in 1997 you got to go to Midgar and be ex-SOLDIER Cloud fighting to free the people and the planet. And for some games, including the FF VII Remake games, this is still mostly true (though those games do have DLC.) But when you buy a copy of Suicide Squad you do not get to be King Shark bounding over the rooftops of Metropolis fighting Superman with a gun (for some reason.) I mean you do, but you also get a virtual used car salesman trying to get you to buy cosmetics that 25 years ago would have been unlocked through in game achievements or cheat codes. And when you buy a copy of The Crew Motorfest you get a virtual used car salesman trying to sell you virtual cars for real money.

And it sucks. It's one of the worst things about modern life transported into games in a REAL WAY. It's as if Gran Turismo found a way to really injure you when you crashed your car. Or if Spider-Man's subway based fast travel system forced you into 30 minute delays like the real subway does. Or if you could marry a girl in Fable only to have her cheat on you with the milkman and take your house in the divorce.

We don't play games to experience the shitty parts of life unless they're very specific games and those shitty parts are presented in very specific, generally, cathartic, ways. We play games to experience some kind of curated, enjoyable, experience. If I wanted to experience sunburn from going outside I could just go outside without sunscreen. Games don't make you worry about high UV index days because that stuff' not fun.

And neither is the hard sell. But games DO make you experience that. And they reshape their worlds to make it more appealing. Whether it's lowering XP curves to make the booster more appealing or making the free costumes boring to inspire you to spend real cash on the "premium" ones, games make your fantasy worse so they can upcharge you. Like a car company intentionally nerfing its software so you'll buy a more expensive package. More nickel and diming, more manipulation, and even more scams.

Helldivers II recently added a PSN login requirement for PC players. And people will say it's free, it's just to get you into the PSN eco system and to be able to spy on you a little. It's just to sell your information to data brokers and track you and that kind of thing. No biggie. We all deal with it constantly. But that's for now. Who's to say what the future will hold. And this is a game people already bought and paid for and were playing. They were already in the fantasy world of Super Earth spreading Managed Democracy and here comes real world Sony wanting to pry into their data and maybe their wallets in the future having already gotten $40 plus microtransactions for their game. Here comes the greedy real world business guy sneering with his hand out wanting more and more and more.

It's not fun. And it ruins a lot of what IS fun in games. Because it adds predatory bullshit to a fantasy world that you already paid for.

This is one of the big reasons modern gaming feels less fun. It isn't every game, of course. If you buy Penny's Big Breakaway you just get a fun little platformer adventure. And Tears of the Kingdom just sent you off to save Hyrule the same way the original game did, just with more bells and whistles. Super Mario Bros. Wonder partially helped keep its wonder by NOT turning the Mushroom Kingdom into a big scammy mess where you log in to see advertising and a bunch of bullshit currencies with "best value" plastered all over. It's not every game.

But it's more and more games, and it goes against what makes gaming valuable and fun. It goes against the spirit of escapism. It's like a reverse version of The Ring, where the horrors of the real world crawl through the TV into the virtual world to stalk you and take your money. And it sucks.

I went into Tales of Kenzera: Zau with high expectations. The New York Times called it “a gem of human experience made all the more profound because of its self-assured heart.” Other publications hyped it up as a polished game with a lot to say and an excellent way of saying it. I was ready to be pulled into another world and maybe even shed a few tears at a story about love and loss. I came away from it thinking “well, that was a decent game. What’s next?”

Tales of Kenzera: Zau is, at its heart, a very straightforward exploration platformer (I’d call it a Metroidvania if @Mento wouldn’t ban me for it.) You play the titular Zau (except for brief future segments where you play a very similar character named Zuberi in an afrofuturist framing element where you walk around doing nothing like an Assassin’s Creed game but less annoying). Zau is a young shaman who has inherited the masks, and thus powers, of his father, who has recently died, and wants to use those powers to bargain with death, named Kalunga in this game, for the return of his beloved “Baba” (father), who he thinks was taken unjustly and far too soon.

Kalunga agrees to return Zau’s Baba if Zau can help him bring three powerful spirits across the veil to the land of the dead, as is the role of a shaman, and so you set off on your journey to find and defeat them so they can rest.

I don’t normally start talking about games by focusing on the story, but here the story and aesthetics are obviously the standout elements. This is far from the the first game to draw on African myths and culture for its story and setting but compared to European or Asian traditions it’s a less common source of inspiration. Here, specifically, the game is drawing on Swahili language and culture, though without a lot of specificity, more using it as set dressing than deeply diving into the stories or mythology. It does freshen up what is otherwise a pretty rote game in an overdone genre, and the African setting is both beautiful and a refreshing change, managing to keep the game from feeling like just a copy of a literally hundreds of other games. The music is also influenced by traditional African music, though I wish the soundtrack had gone further in this direction instead of including a lot of more overused tropes in its primarily orchestral score. It’s generally good music, but it’s not very memorable, and I think an entirely traditional African soundtrack would have stood out more.

Unfortunately the story and characters do not elevate the material as much as the world building and locations. This game is supposedly a deeply personal story about loss, and it certainly does explore themes around losing a loved one, but aside from a few moments where some of the cultural inspiration influences character or story it’s all pretty rote. Kalunga is very chill for a god of death, and shines in quieter moments when he shows true empathy towards Zau, but Zau himself is a pretty standard grieving young man trying to take a stand against the inherent injustice of the universe. It’s not bad at all, but it feels competent and satisfactory rather than enthralling, and doesn’t do much to elevate the game.

The gameplay similarly offers mostly competent versions of well-worn concepts. You can run, double jump, air dash, and fight. The “hook” is your ability to switch between sun and moon masks. The sun mask focuses on powerful melee attacks and close in damage while the moon mask has ranged attacks (with an active reload, which is weird in a game where you wield magic). Eventually you’ll get different utility powers for the different masks and they each feature special ultimate attacks but we’ve all seen these gameplay concepts before. Eventually enemies get elemental shields that are only vulnerable to one of the masks, which is really annoying when one particular enemy who has an invulnerable dash gets a sun shield, since the shields regenerate and tracking them down to do enough melee damage before they dash around invincible and recharge is frustrating. But in general it’s all old hat at this point. Enemy variety is also quite limited, with about a dozen foes showing up, and the game has quite a lot of combat, including locking off progression until you finish multi wave combat arenas and also having multiple optional combat arenas you can fight in to get extra goodies like an extended spirit power bar or a slot for your “trinkets,” which are essentially charms that give Zau abilities like gaining more health when he heals or taking less damage from projectiles.

If the combat is just passable the platforming at least feels good most of the time…but has more significant issues in the later game. Zau is very quick and responsive and his jumps and dashes feel good to control. This is important because the game has a lot of negative space; large stretches of map where there aren’t many obstacles or all that much to do. It’s not a problem your first time through when you’re taking in sights and Kalunga may be talking with Zau, but it makes backtracking annoying, especially with the game’s somewhat limited fast travel system that only has a couple spots even in very large areas (and the game’s map is quite big and sparse compared to more tightly designed entries in the genre.) There are plenty of one hit death kills on spikes and other traps but checkpointing is generous and the game is generally pretty easy. The two exceptions are platforming gauntlets that are specially marked and that require you to pass a series of tougher than normal obstacles in order to get rewarded with a trinket, and two boss-related chase sequences that are extremely annoying and frustrating because of…

The camera. Even though Tales of Kenzera: Zau is a 2024 2D game it has serious camera issues. Mainly the camera just doesn’t move fast enough to keep up with Zau, which can lead to unearned deaths when you fall into spikes you literally could not see because the camera didn’t pan down until it was too late, or run head on into an obstacle for the same reason. In the chase sequences this is very pronounced because you need to move fast, and while you are being chased from behind hazards will appear from the front. The game also sometimes has readability issues with a lot happening on screen and Zau sometimes being pretty small (this is an issue in combat where I lost track of Zau pretty frequently given that the enemies can look like him and there can be a lot going on) but in the chases it can mean that a slow camera and difficult to read screen elements lead to a lot of frustration. The second chase I finished angrily and mostly out of spite, and it has a pretty low completion rate even on Xbox (that will rise over time because the game is new, but it does seem like a potential chokepoint for some players.) But the camera is generally a problem in a game where it shouldn’t be.

Also a problem, especially in the second chase, is some inconsistency in how moves register. You eventually get an enhanced air dash that can punch you through certain obstacles, but it doesn’t always trigger, at least on PS5, and when it does it doesn’t always break the obstacle, and it’s supremely frustrating. There’s nothing worse than something unresponsive in a generally responsive game. To make matters worse, even when the move does register it sometimes doesn’t break the barriers that it should. And while other moves are more reliable there are things that don’t feel quite right where it seems like a couple additional weeks or months of polish might have really helped things.

Boss battles are another area where some additional polish might have helped. While I didn’t experience any technical issues during them they are extremely unbalanced. Essentially the battles seem to be designed as normal wars of attrition, where you do small bits of damage over time and try to avoid taking too much damage from the boss, but in practice what I found was that it was extremely easy to damage the boss using Zau’s ultra moves, and the only real danger was from moves they have that can push you off the platform and cause a falling death, which forces you to restart the battle. So the battles actually play out as charging up spirit power for an ultra move and learning to read and avoid the moves that push you off the platform, with everything else being pretty irrelevant. They’re not the worst bosses I’ve faced in a game, and none of them are too difficult, but they aren’t very satisfying either.

The last issue I’d like to bring up is the backtracking. It’s weirdly limited. In exploration platformers one of the most common design elements is to include a bunch of goodies that you can see but can’t quite get yet because you don’t have the right ability. This game does have a bunch of collectables such as the aforementioned trinkets as well as various XP boosts and health upgrades etc… but almost all of them are attainable with that area’s movement ability. So in the area where you get the grapple hook there will be XP boosts to grapple hook to, and they may also be in subsequent areas, but none of the prior areas will have them. This is…unusual as a design choice. There are a couple exceptions where you do need to backtrack to get everything, but very limited. I don’t even know that I’m complaining about this, since being able to get everything your first time through if you’re vigilant is nice in a game where the fast travel is bad, but it did surprise me.

Tales of Kenzera: Zau is not a bad game, it’s just unambitious and kind of average for a 2D exploration platformer with a significant budget. The African setting does make it interesting enough to be worth playing, and it’s competent enough that I saw it through to the end and even got the platinum (though tracking down those last collectibles really showed me how big and empty the map is.) It’s enjoyable enough to recommend to people who like the genre and dig the game’s look, and it’s on the higher tier of PlayStation Plus so it might not even cost you anything. But while playing it I couldn’t help but think of how many other games in the genre are more ambitious and interesting in so many ways. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night with its absolutely insane powers and systems that you can break in so many ways. Shadow Complex with its foam gun and shooting into the background. The recent and fascinating Ultros with its storytelling and weird gameplay. Even something like Forgotton Anne with its deeper focus on story and elaborate animated cut scenes. I would recommend all those games over Tales of Kenzera: Zau for anyone with any familiarity with the genre, except perhaps Forgotton Anne, which is not that fun to play.

Tales of Kenzera: Zau is not a bad game but it is a victim of its own hype. As a $20 game from a new studio it’s a fine and competent game in an oversaturated genre that does enough aesthetically and is enjoyable enough to play to justify a look. But it’s not particularly special, and I hope that whatever the studio does next tries to focus on at least some aspect to make that project stand out more.

I wasn't going to play Helldivers 2, and I didn't until well after the hype cycle had died down. That might be part of the problem. Ultimately what pulled me in was a friend who rarely gets into games saying he loved it and wanted to play with me. I don't trust his taste in games at all, and he tends to be fickle, but I do like playing online with him just because I so rarely play with friends these days (I'm OLD) so I took the plunge.

He and I have played together all of once since then but I've put in a significant amount of time on my own, about 12 hours total. There are things I really like about the game. I think the shooting feels good. I think the "strategems" (essentially special equipment or attacks you can call in from orbit like a heavy weapon, airstrike, or sentry gun) are a very fun idea and feel great to use. I think the levels are atmospheric, the objectives generally varied and interesting, and the enemies are well designed both aesthetically and from a gameplay perspective. I think the world building is grimly amusing.

I also really like how the game is harsh, with lots of things that can kill you quickly, but gives you enough tools and respawns to survive. Friendly fire is essential for maintaining the feeling of danger and chaos that envelops the battlefield and so while I normally don't like it I think it's pretty core to the Helldivers 2 experience (though I wouldn't be against it being turned off at the lowest difficulties.) The feeling of vulnerability also encourages randos to play pretty well together. People do go off and do their own things sometimes but most of the players I've been grouped with are pretty focused on objectives and naturally tend to work together in order to survive. This is a sign of good game design that channels players into the desired playstyle without forcing them. Helldivers 2 has a lot of impressive small decisions that get people to play together and play the objectives. Other developers should take notes.

But as well made as the game is I find myself starting to suffer the same live service burnout that I always do.

• Helldivers 2 encourages you to play every day, with one personal objective every day and community wide objectives every few days that reward you with points for the battlepasses, which are not just cosmetic in this game but feature basic loadout components.
• The battlepasses themselves are structured in a way where you HAVE to buy cosmetics in order to advance to the next "page" of the pass and get equipment. And the cosmetics in this game are very boring. So in terms of progression you're often grinding for stuff you may not care about in order to get that piece of crucial equipment you need for your loadout.
• Paid battlepasses in a $40 game still bother me, especially when they contain real equipment and not just cosmetics. You can get at least some premium currency through play, but each battlepass costs 1000 of this currency and you find the currency in units of 10 (distributed to everyone in the group so at least you don't have to worry about competing for it) so you'd need to find 100 such units to get a battlepass and on average you probably find some every 2-3 missions. You can do the math there. You get more on higher difficulties, and the battlepasses themselves do contain some currency, but you're clearly being channeled towards spending.
• There are too many currencies. Yes, only one is paid, but you have XP (for levels, which unlock access to being able to buy more advanced strategems), requisition points (which you use to purchase strategem unlocks), war medals (used to unlock portions of the battlepass), the paid currency used to buy battlepasses or cosmetics independent of the battlepass, and at least 3 to 4 types of "samples," which are used to unlock permanent buffs that improve your strategems or reduce their reload times. It's not unmanageable but it's a lot, and it feels restrictive as you can't really control how you develop your loadouts. Also some of the sample types are restricted to higher difficulties, which skill caps your access to certain things and means people just play an easier experience if they want to advance, which is an accessibility issue.
• There's just the general sense of doing the same thing over and over with no story advancement or progression. I get how this is just what these games are, but for me I like some kind of narrative progression in games like this. You can call it a commentary on the nature of war and all that, and there's validity there, but after awhile you're still just running the same maps doing the same things. This is probably my biggest issue.

I'll probably keep playing Helldivers 2 off and on for a while and come back when they add new interesting things, but I'm already feeling the grind setting in when playing on my own. If my friend wants to play I'll join him, and I can definitely see why it'd be a good hangout game if you have a consistent squad, but I just can't vibe with the live service model. Even in a really good game like Helldivers 2 where a lot of the "game" stuff is extremely my vibe it just starts to feel like a tedious grind after a while. I had the same experience with Diablo 4 after finishing the main story. You're just playing to progress and to...play. Philosophically I'm fine with that (it's not like you actually accomplish anything real in story-based games) but it just doesn't work for me psychologically. The seams are too obvious.

I can see how if you have a regular friend group it would work better, but you can also play through a lot of games with more story progression and variety in co-op. I had a ton of fun playing the Halo and Gears campaigns in co-op, and I played It Takes Two a few years ago online with a friend and that was really great. Even something like EDF has a campaign and set pieces that increase variety and a sense of progression and accomplishment.

I'm glad I played Helldivers 2, I enjoyed it, and I have played enough that it doesn't really feel like a waste of money because there are plenty of campaign based games I've gotten less time out of (especially since I'm not done and will probably be at 20 hours or so before I am.) But it's shown me pretty definitively that live service games just aren't for me. I may play another if a friend wants to or if one comes out that seems REALLY up my alley in other ways, but in some ways it's good to find a game that fires on a lot of cylinders and where I can say "they made this kind of thing about as well as it could be made for my tastes" and still not fully jive with it. At least now I know, it's not really the game, it's me.

ETA:

And....now Steam players are suddenly required to link PlayStation accounts if they want to keep playing. A requirement added well after launch. This may get repealed eventually (don't know yet) but what a completely player unfriendly decision. Again, this is software people already paid for and now they have to do something new (it's free but it's something a lot of people don't want to do) to use it. LIVE SERVICES!

I regret to inform you that Nintendo has gotten into the Acclaim N64 catalog. Reggie help us all.

Iggy's Reckin' Balls is not the worst N64 game ever made (Lauren Fielder gave it a 6.7) but I think that young people today will never really understand what games like that meant back in the day and specifically on the N64. Today Iggy's Reckin' Balls would be a $10 downloadable game, maybe launch on Game Pass or something, and would quickly fade into obscurity.

But in 2000 releasing a game on the N64 meant printing cartridges, and that meant that this game had to retail for at least close to as much as one of Nintendo's first party offerings (though cartridge games did vary in price a bit.) It meant that there was a big or at least medium sized publisher behind it, which meant magazine and Internet ads. They didn't just quietly make a weird puzzle racing game and put it out in the hopes of finding a niche audience. They tried to make Iggy's Reckin' Balls an actual THING. They wanted gamers to KNOW about Iggy's Reckin' Balls. They wanted gamers to spend at least dozens of dollars buying Iggy's Reckin' Balls or at the very least go rent it from Blockbuster. This was big business!

There's a reason Acclaim doesn't exist anymore.

I think that when I look back on the video games of the past that's one of the reasons that games like Iggy's Reckin' Balls, which I barely played if at all at the time (I MIGHT have rented it at some point just because of the weird cover) stand out to me more than their modern equivalents. Today a game like this would be quickly buried and forgotten. Back then there were ads, reviews, articles, everyone who followed N64 knew about it. And it was just this weird thing we all kind of laughed at together. Again, it's not a bad game, it's just a game that you're never going to convince hundreds of thousands of people to pay $50 or more in 2000s money for.

I think kids today fundamentally can't understand that. They never lived in a world where physical media was pretty much everything, and understand the barrier to entry that created. Even if they were born in the late 2000s they grew up at a time where digital distribution of everything from movies and music to games and books was extremely normal. They will NEVER get the full Iggy's Reckin' Balls experience.

But you can!

You remember the ads and the reviews and all of it. And now you can play it in glorious Switch emulation. I played a little of it! It controls like a second tier N64 game, which is to say, kind of okay but not like you'd want it to. It's pretty ugly because it has four race courses at any one time (you play a ball with a grapple tongue competing with other balls to climb to the top of some towers in a puzzle racing game that also has a battle mode) but it's an N64 game so.... The sound is all crushed with short music loops because N64. It would have made an okay rental while waiting on Gamecube to release!

As for Extreme-G...that game's okay but we have Wipeout at home.

Wayforward is making another 2D platformer starring a young female protagonist. As news goes this is the equivalent to "today is Thursday." It doesn't happen every day, but it happens quite a lot. What's semi notable about this particular 2D platformer from the company that seems to churn them out as frequently as Nintendo churns out takedown notices for emulators is that it's based in the "Yars" series.

What is the "Yars" series you might ask if you're not in your mid 40s or later? It's a "series" of video games that started with a legitimate classic of the 2600, Yars' Revenge. Yars' Revenge is a 1982 shooter game that's important mostly because it was a high watermark for mechanical complexity and innovation in a console video game at the time. Most 2600 games were incredibly simple affairs where you did one or maybe two things in a pretty straightforward manner, like driving around and shooting in a tank or...playing blackjack. By the 80s even as the 2600 aged things were getting more complex and we saw a bunch of games that pushed design forward with more complex ideas. Games like Pitfall! or Adventure (from 1979) where the player was given more to do and more depth to the action.

Yars' Revenge was part of this wave of later software. At its heart it's a shooter but it's a very weird one, where you chip away at a wall of blocks to expose the enemy's core and then use a separate weapon with time limited shots to actually destroy it. There's also a couple floating pixels to avoid and a neutral zone where you can't hurt or be hurt. It's very interesting and innovative and it works well, with later levels having variations to keep things fresh, but it's so weird it was a big of an evolutionary dead end for the genre, more influential in the way it showed that games could be very outside the box and still work than in having any direct imitators. It also had a bit of an inside baseball appeal, with the name "Yar" being a reversal of "Ray," a former Atari employee, and Howard Scott Warshaw hiding his initials in the game if you performed just the right series of actions.

Yars' Revenge was also notable for its story, which is total early 80s sci-fi gibberish about alien species and unexplained concepts and entities. It was enough to give a little context to the game, and quite good by the standards of early 80s video game stories, but there was no deep lore there and it was more cool in how it set this tone of a truly alien conflict than presenting any kind of coherent story.

Like most early 80s games not named Pac-Man or Donkey Kong Yars' Revenge didn't really develop much of an IP presence. I think there might have been some comic books and there was a sequel released many, many, years later but it's not like Yars' Revenge was a presence on later platforms like the NES or even the ill-fated Atari 7800. Older gamers may have had some nostalgia for the game, but it wasn't even on the level of something like Centipede or Missile Command, which would get halfhearted low budget revivals from time to time. Eventually there was a very weird Panzer Dragoon style game that came out in 2011 for...some reason and it did make its way into Atari's "Recharged" lineup of reimagined early 80s games for modern platforms.

The Recharged title makes a lot of sense because of what that series is and how it actually tries to iterate on and evolve the concepts from the 2600 game, but the other releases in the Yars series just seem...completely random. The 2011 game isn't terrible (I've played it) and does have some semi-interesting attempts to incorporate elements from a very early single screen shooter into a polygonal rail shooter game, but it totally reimagines the Yars from their original concept as evolved Earth house flies who got into space aboard a human ship into a race of humanoid creatures with wings. It mostly just used the "Yars" concept as window dressing for a totally different game.

And now it seems like that's happening again. Now apparently Yars creator Howard Scott Warshaw is consulting on the new game, so he presumably approves of it, but did we really need a 2D platformer "based" on this ancient 2600 game? It's another repurposing of some of the words and concepts into something entirely different.

I'm not offended by the existence of this game, I'm more perplexed by it. Who is it for? You can say "Hey, you're talking about it, so it did its job," but this is a Wayforward game and I pay attention to basically everything they do. They're the Shantae and River City Girls team. They just made a Contra game. They're not exactly an obscure developer that desperately needs to cash in on some ancient nostalgia.

It's also possible that someone at Wayforward is just a fan of the old game and wanted to work with Howard Scott Warshaw, a true gaming pioneer, but there I'd say...why a platformer? When Housemarque wanted to work with Eugene Jarvis they made a twin stick shooter, and Nex Machina is a hell of a game. It really shows how Robotron might have evolved over time. Yars Rising might be great too (it's a platformer from Wayforward so it's at least going to be competent) but it won't show how Yars Revenge might have evolved. We already got the Recharged game for that.

I don't really know why I wrote all this up except that I just think it's strange and maybe a little sad that this thing exists. This constant recycling of IP with vague ties to something older that some people might remember or a name you might have heard feels like it stifles creativity and innovation. Granted Yars Rising hardly seems wedded to the old concepts (the protagonist is decidedly not an evolved house fly) and if Warshaw and Wayforward really wanted to make this...fine, if it's good I may play it and I wish them the best, but what's wrong with new stuff? The gaming scene is just full of these ancient franchises. The biggest platformer is Mario. The biggest fighting games are Street Fighter, Tekken and Mortal Kombat. Fortnite is newish (kind of) but a lot of its appeal is pulling in old IP. It's just our childhoods being remixed and sold to us over and over, except in the case of Yars' Revenge most of us weren't even cognizant when it was actually released.

Jeff Gerstmann recently has been talking about how Call of Duty added Cheech and Chong and how HE'S too young for Cheech and Chong, and he's firmly entrenched in middle age. There was also a Ninja Turtles game revealed in the indie Direct yesterday.

I've been playing Dave the Diver and that game is pretty good, but has some issues. However none of those issues are that it doesn't call back to some property from the 1980s for a hit of nostalgia. There's nothing wrong with presenting something wholly new. The Yars have had their revenge. Do they really need to rise, too, 40 years later?

As someone who complains a fair amount about the state of "AAA" gaming, one of the solutions that I often hear is to play more indie games. Indie games are not plagued with a lot of the issues that infest the big company games these days. They're reasonably priced, often single player focused, and rarely riddled with microtransactions or other unsavory practices like always online DRM. If you like gaming the way it used to be then indie games provide a limitless supply of new games to play, and while a lot of them are mediocre, or even trash, enough are sublime that you'll never run out of good things to play.

On its face this is definitely true. I play my share of indie games, both new and old, and some of them are among my all-time favorites. Hades and Neon White on Switch can stand toe to toe with all but the very best that Nintendo puts out. Limbo and especially Inside were spectacular. Sea of Stars manages to capture a lot of the magic of old school JRPGs while not being dragged down by outdated design conventions. Indie games are fantastic.

And right now I'm playing a few indie games that I really enjoy.

Agent Intercept is a throwback to those PS2 3D Spyhunter games, with graphics that use a flat-shaded type look (though they actually are textured) to create a bold and stylish aesthetic. It's got solid gameplay and presentation and feels like a remake of a B-tier Dreamcast game, which is not at all an insult.

Anomaly Agent is a 2D game that's part platformer, part 2D beat 'em up (more like Kung-Fu Master than Streets of Rage), part platformer, and part Rolling Thunder but with powers. It's got surprisingly good level design, a fun story, and a pretty deep combat system including parries and special powers.

Ultros is a gorgeous and trippy 2D Metroidvania with an absolutely gorgeous art style and some unique game play ideas and mechanics, as well as an abstract and weird story that manages to be intriguing rather than annoying. I played through to the "bad" ending within a few days of getting it, even though it's a 10+ hour long game.

And of course Balatro is one of the best deckbuilders of all time.

So that's a number of great indies, three of which are from 2024 (Agent Intercept is from 2021) that I can say I really enjoy and have played at least some of within the last week. The indie hater has emphatically not logged on.

And yet there are things that I just cannot get from indie games. Polish is perhaps the most debatable one, and varies from game to game. I would say that Balatro is exactly as polished as it needs to be, with a simple presentation that works perfectly for the kind of game it is. Anomaly Agent also feels pretty polished, though its presentation is pretty scaled back and it sets its sights towards very achievable goals, with graphics that are fine for what they are, but other than resolution and the speed at which they move wouldn't really feel out of place in a mid 90s PC game.

Agent Intercept is the only game of the lot with voice acting, and it's fine, but it doesn't have cut scenes (other than quick in engine action shots) just talking heads, and it definitely takes away from the presentation when compared to what it would have been like on Dreamcast or PS2, with some cool CG action or even live action actors hamming it up. It's not game ruining by any means, but it makes it feel a little bit like an imitation of the real thing rather than a "real" game from that era. The controls are also a bit janky, especially in flight mode, and could have used another pass or two. Neither of those issues are game ruining, but they are detriments to the experience.

Ultros has lush and gorgeous graphics, but again the controls can be a little wonky, some of the level design is very inconvenient to navigate (though I think that was intentional, even though the game's combat is ludicrously easy so it's not meant to be a super challenging game) and there's a major mechanic I don't want to spoil that could have used significant polish work to make it less of a giant PITA, which did reduce my enjoyment of the game. It also has semi roguelike elements, but poorly implemented, so they just amount to you replaying the exact same sequences a half dozen times, and while those fit into the narrative very well they add nothing to the gameplay and should have been streamlined.

Now of course you can point out that many AAA games these days ship not just unpolished but completely falling apart, and you'd be right. Most of them do eventually get to a fairly polished state, but it's ridiculous how happy companies are to take people's money in exchange for a game that barely works. But I'm not really comparing indies to the bad AAA games of today. I'm more saying that at the top end of polish, something like Super Mario Bros. Wonder, you're almost never going to get that from an indie. The sheer aesthetic ambition and the time Nintendo, specifically, takes to make sure everything works properly doesn't seem possible at the smaller scale. There are some exceptions, like Hades, which went through extensive early access revisions, but even there we're talking about a 2D action game with relatively simple interactions, and it's notable for the sheer level of polish applied.

Then there's spectacle. I think this is a clearer argument. For big bombastic sequences you need big budgets. Of the games I'm directly discussing here, the 2D titles don't even really try. They're not spectacle games, and that's fine. They have fun moments and big reveals but they're not aiming to make you say "whoa" in the way that FF VII did all those years ago with its fancy CG. Agent Intercept does have some big explosions and the like, but because it kind of looks like a Dreamcast game from almost 25 years ago and it does everything in engine none of it comes off as spectacular, even if some of it is kind of cool. Spectacle requires budget, and when you play Spider-Man 2 with that opening Sandman fight it feels like something no indie can provide. It had a huge budget but at least it put it up on the screen for you in this spectacular and immersive way that is really unique to AAA gaming, and is something I do enjoy.

Finally there's discourse. And this is perhaps the most unfair because it occurs outside of development itself. Almost every AAA game will have some interesting discourse about it. Whether it's posts on this forum, articles on websites, videos on major Youtube channels, discussion on the Bombcast, Quicklooks (less so these days I guess), there will be plenty of places to read or watch thought provoking stuff and have conversations.

With indie games its a crap shoot. Yes, if something breaks through like Balatro or Hades there will be plenty to mull over, but for other games it's much harder to find. I picked up Ultros on a whim because it was released this year and was half off on a PSN sale with great graphics and good reviews. I did enjoy it, but I haven't seen a lot of discussion in my normal outlets. I suppose I could seek stuff out, and I will, but for the most part I am left alone with my own thoughts about what is a really thought provoking game, mechanically, narratively, and artistically. That's frustrating! The same is pretty much true of Anomaly Agent and Agent Intercept. Some of these may get a Bombcast mention or whatever, but the fun part of comparing your impression of a game to other people's and talking about it muted when so few people have played something. And these are all good games that deserve to be played.

In Stars and Time still doesn't have a Wiki page on this site (I should fix that) and if you look at trophy tracking sites basically nobody played it, and that game was fantastic in the first half, and fascinating throughout. For someone who likes talking about games, that's frustrating. Heck even Penny's Big Breakaway seems like it's mostly slipped under the radar and that was from the Sonic Mania guys. Sonic Mania was a big deal. Penny's Big Breakaway is really interesting! Everyone's talking about Dragon's Dogma 2 and Helldivers 2 instead.

And of course I get it. Those games are huge, have more players by a factor of probably at least a thousand, and in some ways have a lot more to them. But if the future of games for people who like more single player experiences is mostly in indie games, with a few Nintendo releases and a couple bones thrown by big publishers a year, then the discourse is going to fracture even further. Part of the reason that I loved Giant Bomb in the first place was getting to hear people I admired talking about the games I was playing, whether it was contemporaneously or after the fact. Getting to compare my opinion to those of numerous Jeffs. And now that's getting harder and harder because while there's still stuff I love to play, a lot of it is kind of at the periphery of the industry.

There was more discussion of Gollum, an awful game, than of all these games combined (even Balatro) and that's because the game had a license and a budget to put it on the radar. And most indie games can't do that.

So while I do love indies, I miss being closer to the mainstream discourse. I know this happens in almost every medium as you get older, but with something like movies they haven't really changed. Dune and Oppenheimer are the same kinds of movies I liked when I was younger, just newer. And even the movies for the kids are basically the same. Movies themselves are less culturally important than they were in 2000, but the movies haven't changed. AAA games have, and indies can't replace everything that the older single player titles used to deliver.

There's a story making the rounds (originally from a place called Newzoo) that market research shows that 60% of console and PC game time is being spent on live service games that have been around for more than half a decade, and in general gametime has consolidated around a small number of releases, making the gaming industry even more of a feast or famine proposition than it ever was before. Only 8% of game time is being spent on non-annualized (i.e. not Madden or Call of Duty) new release games, meaning that companies making the kinds of games that I'm excited to play are competing for a relatively tiny slice of an already stagnating pie.

Now game time doesn't translate directly to revenue, so it's probably true that your average Fortnite player spends much less per hour than someone who picked up Alan Wake II, so the numbers aren't quite as gloomy as they look, but it's clear that the gaming model has shifted substantially and that to some degree publishers are right that the future is in live services, even if their approach to the style of game is often terrible and counterproductive. There's a certain logic that it makes sense to make 10 live service games hoping that 1 will hit big and provide revenue for the next decade, vs 10 single player games where even if you get 6 hits you might make less money than a single Apex Legends or Destiny 2 might throw off.

From my perspective...these just aren't the games I want to play. I don't really like multiplayer games, I often don't like playing games at release, and barring my time with EverQuest and to some extent WoW, I almost never want to play the same game exclusively for months on end. I like variety and exploration and new worlds. I like playing both Spider-Man 2 and Tears of the Kingdom, and having them be extremely different experiences. I played a lot of Destiny and at the end hated my time with it because of how grindy and repetitive it was. I want to play stuff and move on to the next.

Of course single player games will keep being made. If nothing else there are hundreds of incredibly talented indie teams out there making great stuff. And you can still make money in the single player space. But the big publishers have seen the writing on the wall and the times are changing. To some extent they have changed. Gaming is my main media hobby and like a lot of aging people I'm starting to see my tastes a little marginalized. It'll be fine; my backlog will last longer than my lifetime anyway at this point (especially if you count games I want to play but don't own), but a lot of my favorite games of all time have come out recently and I like playing new stuff.

At least Nintendo seems to continue to have success with the older model. It has relatively few live service games (I guess Splatoon sort of counts?) and it is still doing fantastically, though of course a lot of Switch playtime is spent in Minecraft and Fortnite. I do love some Nintendo games. But I love other games too and to see their numbers dwindle is a little upsetting.

What I'm saying is...THE KIDS PLAY TOO MUCH DAMN FORTNITE!

Contra: Operation Galuga has garnered mixed reviews upon release, and seems to have been disappointing for a Wayforward project, though not out of character for a modern Konami game. Personally I think the graphics are pretty ugly and the gameplay looks a little...off for lack of a better word. It's a wait for sale for me.

But I'll be waiting a long time because the game launched at $40 (with a small launch window discount.) This seems pretty high for a 2D game without outstanding production values or anything else to drive up the costs. I thought that Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown was priced high at launch (and it is already seeing discounts) but that game, at least, has excellent production values and clearly had money put into it. Operation Galuga doesn't look much better than an XBLA game from 2011, and in fact it looks worse than the Contra game released on XBLA in 2011, Hard Corps: Uprising.

That would be fine if the game played excellently (it seems like it doesn't) but accounting for inflation Hard Corps: Uprising, which launched at $15 in 2011 dollars and $20 in 2024 dollars cost about half as much for a game with a similar amount of content and more polish. And Operation Galuga is far from the only "XBLA sized" game that has launched much higher than games did back then. Almost all the recent Konami games of this size, like Super Bomberman R2, have launched at $40 or higher (Bomberman was $50 but includes more content) and most recent Wayforward games, like River City Girls 2, also seem to launch at a similar price (though Shantae and the Seven Sirens is $30.) Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night remains at $40 base price, albeit with frequent discounts. Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator, a recently released game that got poor reviews and has not gotten any attention also launched at $40. It seems to be a pretty common price point for a new tier of games that sees itself as a cut above most indies and closer to AA games.

Of course there are still lots of true indies that are still launching at $15 (Balatro, a recent GOTY candidate, is an example) and in general there is much more price diversity than ever before, especially among digital games. Games launch at $10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 40, or 50 pretty regularly, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that when there are games of so many different sizes and budgets these days, but in my view a lot of games seem to be pricing themselves high for what they offer and what they cost to make. The rise from $60 to $70 for "AAA" games was justified by the increased production costs with more powerful hardware, but that's not applicable for something like Operation Galuga, which if anything should be cheaper to make (in inflation adjusted terms) because tools are much better than they were in 2011.

I don't really know how the economics of all this works because I am not privy to internal revenue reports for game companies, and maybe starting higher allows for deeper sales while extracting maximum revenue from your hardcore fan base, but at a time when there are more ways to get games cheaply than ever before I don't understand these big price increases. It certainly puts me off from buying a lot of games at launch that I might otherwise try, and just generally seems like a poor value proposition. Hi-Fi Rush came out at $30, and that game has incredible production values including licensed music and clearly cost a lot to make. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge came out at $25, and that's both a major license and a polished and excellent game. Helldivers 2 is $40 and, well, we can see that hasn't stopped anyone there.

I'm not claiming every 2D or smaller 3D game has to stay at XBLA prices forever, but some of the pricing seems totally out of whack with what's being offered, and as someone who likes to try a lot of games and likes to play games when they're new for "zeitgeist" purposes at least some of the time, it's scaring me off a lot of titles. I have to think I'm not alone here. I just don't understand the strategy. A lot of people will say "if you don't like the price just don't buy it" and...of course I don't. And a lot of other people aren't. But it keeps happening and more than complaining about it (I don't care that much about Operation Galuga, which looks very mid at best) I would like to understand the reasoning behind it.

The Crew is kind of a bad game with one great gimmick. The map.

The Crew is a (mostly) racing game that takes place on a compressed map of the contiguous United States, covering everything from Florida to Oregon, albeit shrunk down to a manageable size. You play Alex, a car guy who watches in horror as his benevolent gang leader brother is gunned down in front of him and he is framed for the murder, only to be pulled out of jail by the FBI to help them take down a corrupt agent and the evil gang leader who murdered, and has now replaced, your brother.

If this sounds incredibly stupid, I am, if anything, underselling just how bad the story and writing in this game are. Every mission, and there are about 60 of them, starts with some kind of story intro and many have post mission cut scenes too. You travel from region to region, working your way up the ranks of the gang to get at the leader, and meeting various baddies you have to take down on the way. That’s okay, though, because you’re also building your own “crew” of allies to help you, including a mechanic, a hacker, and a stunt man.

It's all shallow and stupid. You basically talk to a single ally in each region, who provides such helpful advice as “stay in first place during a race” while you do your missions, and a bunch of dumb and cliché game stuff happens. A bad guy tells you to meet him at a certain location, you show up, and oh noes it was a betrayal and now you have to escape his minions. Packages get air dropped into the desert and you have to run over 80 of them within the time limit to damage the operations of a rival gang. You could write most of this stuff yourself and it would be better.

Now of course most racing games are not known for their stories, so I don’t really think that this hurts The Crew, but it is worth noting because it reaches levels of stupidity rarely seen in the history of gaming. At one point the hacker character informs you that she’s smart, really really smart. At another point the stunt man, who you’ve known for all of 12 hours in game, tells you to abandon your quest for justice for your brother because your “crew” is your family now. Dire stuff.

While the bad story doesn’t really hurt the game much there are some deeper flaws that cause a lot more damage. I should note here that there are technical issues (I had several crashes playing on my Xbox Series X, which shouldn't happen at all, let alone in a game this old). There are also issues with microtransactions. I didn't really notice those because I wasn't interested in collecting cars in a game that will be unplayable at the end of the month, and you can upgrade the "free" car to be good enough to do all the single player stuff pretty easily, but they bothered a lot of people, and hampered the game. I'm not going to defend them except to say they weren't a factor for me, personally.

The mission design is also all over the place. Most of the missions are fine, if a little boring. Win a race against other cars, finish a checkpoint course before time runs out, things we’ve done a billion times in racing games. The course design is pretty mediocre, probably because the map seems to have been built to be a cool map of the US first and as a fun racing playground second, but these types of missions mostly work (a little more on that later.) However there are also missions where you have to chase and smash up an enemy car, and these are among the most frustrating experiences I can remember in recent gaming. Everything about them is inconsistent, from the damage you inflict from collisions to the other car’s speed and maneuverability, to the fact that the other car can crash into things and even get hung up on them but takes zero damage from doing so, so forcing it into oncoming traffic is actually a bad thing as it harmlessly and safely pinballs away from you. They’re terrible missions, I had to replay most of them several times to learn the route and get lucky on some of the hits, and I had no fun. There’s maybe nothing in gaming less fun than lining up behind a car to deliver a big hit with your nitro, only for it to accelerate away from you even though it was already going at top speed. Unless that’s trying for a big sideswipe only to get dodged at the last second and end up hung up on some piece of geometry as your quarry speeds away.

And those are not the only bad missions in the game. There are also races against rivals that require hairpin turns and shortcuts that seem literally impossible to win without the right car stats. Which means you end up grinding. In a racing game. That’s right, The Crew, despite being a gritty crime story, is also actually kind of a CaRPG, where your cars have stats that you can raise both by leveling up in general and by collecting loot that you equip for stat bonuses. Unlike most car games, like Forza or Gran Turismo, we’re not talking semi-realistic car loot like “racing tires vs street tires” that give some kind of semi-realistic performance boosts to your car but rather randomized stuff with actual stats attached, so you could get a new “gold” level 33 motorcore that somehow improves your car’s grip by 14. It’s an incredibly strange system that seems to be designed to encourage microtransactions but for me just made me go do random ‘challenges’ dotted around the environment. These are repetitive Ubisoft map vomit tasks like a slalom course that appears on a stretch of highway, or trying to drive as far away from the start of the challenge as you can in a time limit, or staying on the road and above a certain speed for as long as possible. They’re…mostly kind of fun, and after every successful run where you get at least a bronze medal (they go from bronze to gold, and then up to platinum after you reach level 50 near the end of the campaign) you get a car part for your current ride. So if you have an event that requires a dirt car and your dirt car isn’t high enough level you can grind it up until it meets spec. That was the only way I was able to get past certain missions and for a driving game it feels cheap and stupid. You don’t feel accomplished for raising your car’s level to the point where you can win easily, and frankly this would have stopped me from playing any more of the game if it weren’t for the fact that the grinding activities themselves are fairly enjoyable.

They also encourage you to engage with the one thing the Crew really has going for it. That map. You start out in the Midwest before moving to the East Coast, down to the South, and then making your way West through the Mountain States and to the West coast, doing a dozen missions in each region as you go. The Midwest kind of sucks, mostly being bland and flat, but once you get to the more urbanized East with some additional variety and then especially the South onwards you end up with a lot of great environmental variety, from salt flats to bayous. The road trips between the regions are perhaps the best thing in the entire game, these long stretches of highway where you just drive and soak in the environments as they change around you and do the challenges doting your route. It’s Zen-like gaming that you rarely get in a racing game, much more grounded than something like Forza Horizon (which encourages you to plow across fields and through obstacles) and thus much more chill. I even used the cockpit view for some of these drives and they reminded me of actual long drives I’ve been on in my life, and the feeling of calm you can get on the open road.

The layout of the map and the number of environments is great but as an actual reflection of the United States it is, of course, quite limited. There’s something charming about its various fake roadside businesses and generic advertising, but of course the game only had so much budget behind it so regional differences in architecture and building style all get erased in favor of reusing assets. There are “landmarks” dotted throughout the map that you can go on for a small XP and cash bonus, but they’re unimpressive, as are the cities, which feel closer to small regional cities like Stamford Connecticut than sprawling metropolises like Vegas or New York. It’s an impressive map and can be fun to explore, but the game’s roots in the 360/PS3 generation are clear in its limitations.

The true limitation, however, is in the gameplay. I’ve already mentioned the hit or miss mission design and the RPG elements, but the base racing is mediocre at best. I played Need for Speed The Run, a game with a similar tone and story, a few years ago, and while I probably liked The Crew better overall I think even that game had better handling. There are five types of “tuning” in the game, ranging from circuit cars to dirt specialists, and most vehicles can have at least a couple different types applied to them. The upgrades mean the cars feel different but not distinct because their stats area constantly changing. Couple that with the parts that upgrade individual stats and you end up with a handling model that has way too many variables, with sometimes disastrous results. While you can play through the whole game in just your initial car (which can be tuned in all five styles) I decided to get an SUV for the dirt courses just to have a little variety. This was a disaster. It steered like a boat. On one optional mission the race course went over a wooden bridge and my car would spin out and flip whenever I drove over it at speed, even going completely straight. This made the race unwinnable and was…not fun. The same thing happened in a different car in the desert where I crashed on a small rock I never even saw, but at least there I could just steer around it. Finally, the random traffic on the roads is a huge pain in the butt and can ruin races or challenges by creating severely disruptive obstacles at random. When everything is working well the Crew is a passable racer, but I’d say that only happens 70% of the time, and it’s very frustrating the other 30%. Additionally, it can be hard to tell what obstacles are destructible at first glance (bus shelters yes, some roadside railings no) and cop chases can be very frustrating because like the cars you need to chase down and crash the cops can do ludicrous things, like easily keep up with your dirt tuned racer while driving their street tuned interceptors cross country. They have helicopters too, and we all know how villainous video game helicopters are.

So as a single player experience The Crew has a bad story and below average racing that’s partially redeemed by an excellent map and an engaging challenge system. There are other niggling problems too, like how if you have the DLC your FBI handler will call you up to tell you to go do DLC races and forcibly change your waypoint to direct you to them even if you’ve set another destination. You can change it back, but it’s impossible to overstate how much I loathe this kind of thing. Developers who decide that they know what you want to do better than you do should stop making games and go do something else with their lives. The game also has EXP and perk systems, but they offer disappointing benefits like making your nitro 2% faster or slightly increasing the radius of the map your car uncovers around it as you travel.

Maybe it’s unfair to focus on these single player issues, though, because The Crew is, in some ways, intended primarily as a multiplayer experience. Coming to the game so late I wasn’t able to get into a PVP race, let alone find a “crew” of fellow enthusiasts to co-op with (and the whole main story can be played in co-op) but I’ve played enough racing games to know that this one’s handling issues and progression systems would make it a very mediocre choice compared to better handling games. The base issues with the racing wouldn’t be solved by having a “crew” and if I wanted to roam around a map with some bros I’d just play Forza Horizon. It’s worth noting that even in its prime this doesn’t seem to be a game that people primarily played in multiplayer. The most basic multiplayer trophy for completing a mission in a “Crew” has a 26% completion rate on PlayStation. Other multiplayer trophy and achievement rates show that the majority of people played this game as a single player experience. This is true for a lot of these games that claim they need to be always online in order to facilitate player interaction. The only real interaction I had was when I stepped away from the game to pee and a griefer drove up behind me and pushed my car down the road quite a way just to mess with me. Thanks for the always online fun, Ubisoft!

The Crew received poor reviews at launch and has now been delisted in anticipation of being shut down at the end of the month. That’s why I played it when I did. Ironically, if not for the shut down I may never have pulled it out of my backlog. The thing is, divorced from its initial price and context it’s not an awful game from the early XBONE/PS4 era. The map gives it a unique hook even if it could have been better and had more interesting things to find and do. The challenge system makes it a decent game to just drive around in playing little snippets of gameplay for CaRPG rewards. The awful story can be amusing at times. It’s the kind of game that’s ideal for booting up when you just want something to grind away at or a virtual space to spend a little time in. Since finishing the story I’ve gone back to polish off some achievements and in 30 minute sessions just trying to finish off some random objective it can be enjoyable despite its problems. Are there better racing games out there? Lots. But The Crew isn’t awful, and it is unique. It deserves to be discovered by people delving into the games of the past or hunting through bargain bins for random games to have a little fun with. It deserves to be inaccurately labeled as a hidden gem by someone who just really likes the admittedly cool map. It deserves to still be a game after the end of this month, and it won’t be.

I’m glad I played the Crew before it shut down. I put over 25 hours into it all told, and even though it’s not a great game it scratched that arcade open world racing game itch I get from time to time. It’s not as good as any of the Forza Horizon games, or even the modern Need for Speeds (we don’t have to discuss Burnout Paradise here because…well…) but it’s doing something a little bit different. If the multiplayer servers nobody really used were shut down and the game was stripped back to its single player missions, challenges, and that map it would probably be something I at least think about going back to from time to time. Instead I won’t be able to. It’s getting shut down for good and it will become lost media. All those cute little art assets and carefully constructed map areas will just be gone. No kid will find a copy at a flea market and pick it up for $10 and enjoy laughing at its dumb story or wring some enjoyment out of polishing off all its Ubisoft map vomit content because they’re bored one summer. No old person, like me, will be able to look back it because they were always curious, or because it holds good memories. It will just be gone, and it didn’t have to be. It will be gone because Ubisoft doesn’t care about games except as products, and built in an expiration date. Come March 31 we’re all going to be kicked out of the Crew, and the whole world they built will be lost like tears in the digital rain.

Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle is one of those delightful experiments that seem to happen most often at the beginning of a console’s lifecycle. The pitch of “Mario with guns in an Xcom-lite game” was so insane that it seemed hard to believe when it was announced. Here was Ubisoft, which had already transitioned into its “open world factory” phase and was well on the way towards its “everything is a live service you have to pay for constantly” final(?) form, making a contained, level based, tactics game unlike basically anything else in their contemporary catalog, using Nintendo characters in a way they not only weren’t often used but seemed like they shouldn’t be allowed to be used. It called back to the CD-I Mario and Zelda games, except this was for Nintendo’s own system and, as it turned out, was quite good.

The early days of the Switch were not quite a software desert, but were pretty sparse before the Eshop floodgates fully opened and everyone started porting everything to the handheld. After the Wii U nobody was quite sure how well the Switch would perform, so while Zelda was a massive, industry defining, hit and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Splatoon 2 added some depth (along with smaller games like Snipperclips and Fast RMX) some of the early whiffs like 1-2 Switch and Arms left room for other games to get some attention. Kingdom Battle was one such game that slotted comfortably into the gap, providing a tactics experience unlike anything on the console (and in some ways unique for all of gaming) with an appealing aesthetic and some nice visual humor. It was a modest hit, and I was one of the people who bought it. I really enjoyed playing through the first few worlds, culminating in the incredible spectacle of the third world boss fight, but lost steam in the fourth world, where I was too much in a groove to change my team but not really enjoying grinding through the fights or solving the overworld puzzles that started to repeat. I put the game down and didn’t pick it back up, thinking I might eventually finish it but not overly concerned since I’d gotten about 15 hours and had other stuff to play. Some games are neat for awhile but wear out their welcome and that’s better than being a bummer to begin with.

I did pick up the game a couple times over the years, playing a chapter or two before falling off, but slowly moved it to the “permanently retired” bench and moved on. That was until a sequel was unexpectedly announced.

Sparks of Hope came out in October 2022, five years after the first game, and earned a solid 85 in Metacritic. I instantly put it on my wishlist to pick up when it dropped to a lower price, and I think a lot of other people did the same. Five years in the Switch had more games than anyone could play, and a fun but slight little tactics game just wasn’t a priority. The first game stood out because it was a unique premise nobody had seen before and was released on a console still finding its footing and lacking a strong library beyond the heaviest hitters. The second game had neither going for it, and it bombed.

One nice thing about Sparks of Hope not being Nintendo developed, though, is that Ubisoft games do eventually get cheap. I snagged the second game with all the dlc for $20, which is about the price I was looking for, and that reminded me of the unfinished business I had with the first one. To my memory I wasn’t that far from the end and even in a series with only the most basic of stories my preference is always to finish a game before playing its sequel. So I decided to pick up the old game and see how long it would take me to roll credits, and I instantly remembered why I’d put it down.

Kingdom Battle has some serious quality of life issues that get worse towards the back end of the game. The game is divided into chapters and there are multiple battles per chapter. This is fine, but for some insane reason if you leave in the middle of a chapter it resets things (you can save and shut the game down you just can’t leave.) In a 2017 game it just seems deranged for it not to keep your progress. I quit out of a battle I couldn’t win in the wrong way and had to refight one I’d already cleared, and solve a puzzle I’d already done years earlier (and one I’d done upon booting the game up.) Good times. There are also multi-phase battles where you defeat one wave of enemies and then have to face another wave without healing and on the same battlefield with some cover destroyed. This is…fine in theory, if tedious, but it turns out there’s no checkpoint in between the sub battles so when I tried to reset after botching an opening I was back to the front of the line again. Friends, I had to walk away for a bit and do something else.

After more attempts than it should have taken (including one where I lost due to terrible luck on a series of 50-50 chances that went bad four in a row) I defeated the sub boss through shameless cheesing (I have little shame when I just want to move forward) and found out that I was actually one puzzle away from the final battle. I’d been even closer than I thought. The final boss battle was mechanically pretty sound but annoyed me with too many minions added and the old “boss heals itself” trick. I beat it my first try, but wasn’t able to fully enjoy it despite the decent mechanics because of how annoyed I was with the sequence beforehand (which might have been less frustrating if I’d known it was the final sequence before the last boss and so the hardest in the game.)

Overall I think that Mario+Rabbids Kingdom Battle is a good, though flawed, game. I actually think the overworld puzzles add a lot to it, some of the world themes are a lot of fun, the tactics are deep but approachable, and it’s charming and well made. One of those 8 out of 10 experiences that won’t blow your mind but is still a solid and polished experience. As an early Switch game you can see why it was a hit, and I can also see why nobody was really clamoring for a direct sequel, even a good one. In Jeff's review of the first game he said it wore out its welcome by the end, and in Dan's more positive review of the second he also thought the first game became "rote" before it was over. I understand why I stopped playing before I hit the credits.

But I’m also glad that I finally beat it. Not because the ending was good (it was…okay) or because I had some deep need to complete it (I did not) but because I no longer have to look at the icon on my Switch and remember I have unfinished business and all my curiosity about how much longer the game is and what, exactly, the final boss is like has been sated. It also made me reflect on the Switch and gaming and my own life over these past seven years. A lot of people have talked about that experience of finding an old cartridge in a dusty box and plugging it in to finally beat it, and while this was not some childhood white whale there’s some of the same satisfaction.

I still haven’t played the Donkey Kong DLC for Mario+Rabbids: Kingdom Battle, so I’m not quite done with the game yet (though I plan to take a break) but just knowing I’ve rolled the credits gives a nice little feeling of satisfaction. It also enables me to think about where it fits in the overall Switch library (somewhere between 10-20 of the games I’ve played) and in the history of the two companies it belongs to. For Nintendo it represents a willingness to license out its characters and experiment that was not realized as much as I’d have liked during the Switch’s lifetime but did lead to some other interesting projects like Cadence of Hyrule and Star Fox showing up in Starlink: Battle for Atlas (remember that one?). For Ubisoft it represented one of the last examples of a game outside their formulaic wheelhouse, though Sparks of Hope and the Prince of Persia Metroidvania show that they haven’t fully given up on games that aren’t just Tom Clancy’s Assassin’s Farcry. Ultimately Kingdom Battle represents the kind of game that I wish there were more of today. An interesting experiment with a lot of love and polish intended for broad appeal and mass popularity, without microtransaction or live service mechanics. A dying breed I sorely miss. That’s another reason I’m glad I finally finished it. It deserves respect for taking the kind of risk I wish we saw more of. Eventually I’ll check out the (somewhat unnecessary) sequel too. But first that DLC.