I did not see this coming, but it turns out that Bubsy and Bit.Trip Runner were each exactly what the other needed?

I haven’t played any other Bubsy game, so I can’t compare this to earlier ones, but reviews suggest it’s the best one yet, which I find completely believable. But I have played all the Bit.Trip Runner games (though not all of Runner3) and oddly enough, it might also be the best one of those yet.

Gone are the readability-destroying visual excesses of Runner3 - the unpredictably-moving platforms and the camera angle changes. We’re back to a Runner/Runner2-style fixed side-view camera, sufficiently zoomed out that you can see what’s coming, and obstacles behave consistently.

Gone are the misguided attempts at variety and replayability - Runner3’s bizarre vehicle sections and the confusing and repetition-requiring multiple paths and oddly-placed bonus levels of both Runner2 and Runner3. Bubsy instead provides four playable characters with their own abilities and play style, so you get frequent changes of pace but under your own control and while you do technically repeat levels multiple times, they feel totally different with each character. (One of the four actually has their own set of levels as well instead of reusing the shared levels of the other three.)

Gone are the ambiguous cues of Runner2 and Runner3 - with 150 collectibles in each level, it’s always clear where you’re supposed to go and you don’t need to rely on the obstacles to signpost the path. Instead, you’re just figuring out how to use or avoid them to follow that path.

Gone is the failure cannon from Runner2 and Runner3. It isn’t replaced with anything; it’s just gone. As it should be.

And while I’m personally requiring myself to get every collectible in each level before moving forward, that’s because I have the experience from the Runner series. The competence zone here is actually nice and big - it’s pretty easy to clear levels if you aren’t going for collectibles, so there’s a lot of room for various skill levels and improvement through practice.

It’s so good. I’ve played for about three hours today and am about a third of the way through the game. I only have two complaints:

1. It’d be nice if the game had Runner3’s self-bonk or a return-to-last-checkpoint option in the pause menu. The only moments of sheer frustration I experience in this game are when I miss a collectible right before a checkpoint or level ending and there’s no obstacle to bonk against, so I have to restart the entire level.
2. The characters each have a unique line of dialog for each level that they say when you start it, which is cool. Unfortunately, they also say it when you restart the level. That gets a bit old. They should probably skip that on level restarts.

Well, I guess a third complaint if you count the fact that the Switch version was delayed so I’m having to play on Steam instead. :)

I’ve been tuning out Bubsy-related news for a while now, because why would you pay any attention to Bubsy, so I completely missed that the new Bubsy game coming out literally today is somehow a Bit.Trip Runner clone made by the actual makers of Bit.Trip Runner. WHAT.

Well, they’ve got my attention. I’ll be checking out the reviews.

I happen to be knee-deep in the Runner games right now for an article I’m working on, so the timing was actually a bit unnerving.

So I mentioned that before Fire Emblem Warriors, Musou characters tended to be homogeneous in capability and differentiated mainly by various trade-offs. One interesting trade-off is demonstrated by what I like to call the Shazam character - one who is normally weak, but has a transformation that makes them very powerful.

Musou games commonly have three levels of attacks. First are the combos triggered by hitting the weak and strong attack buttons in various patterns. Next are the special attacks - you gradually earn charges for these as you deal and receive damage but can only store a few. They vary between characters but are usually short-range high-damage area attacks. Finally, there’s Rage mode (that’s its name in mainline Dynasty Warriors; it gets called other things in other games). A meter fills as you perform critical hits or successful combos or similar, and when it’s full you can enter Rage, which causes the meter to drain but makes you significantly more powerful until it runs out (and it’s usually capped off with a special attack). So, you might use normal combos on fodder enemies, special attacks on officers, and Rage mode on heroes.

Young Link in Hyrule Warriors and Tiki in Fire Emblem Warriors have comparatively weak combos, but have especially powerful Rage modes - Young Link puts on the Fierce Deity Mask and Tiki transforms into a dragon. So the primary way to maximize these characters' effectiveness is to spend as much time in Rage mode as possible - and to help with that, these characters (and only these characters, I believe) have the ability to spend special attack charges to refill the Rage meter.

They’re still fairly awkward to use in the early-to-mid-game, but if you invest in them and get the right upgrades and weapon skills, by the late game they can basically spend entire missions in Rage mode, making them extremely powerful.

This is hardly the first game to make characters with this sort of dynamic, but it occurred to me that this is very much the sort of thing you can only do in non-competitive games. If these games had versus modes, you’d basically have to ban Young Link and Tiki or they would dominate high-level play. But in single-player or even cooperative games, it’s actually okay to have this kind of imbalance. It creates interesting experiences, giving players a chance to invest in characters that then “break” the game - which in that context can be satisfying and fun.

The excellent Saints Row: The Third just came to Switch. Unfortunately, it’s reportedly plagued by performance issues and glitches - and the day one patch has been delayed.

I hate to see a game I love have a troubled launch, but the delayed patch also calls attention to the general practice of day one patches, which is common enough now that it wouldn’t have even registered to me if it weren’t delayed. It’s normal to pop in a new game - even one purchased on launch day - and have it immediately download a patch. Enough so that at least for me, it’s been easy to forget that this means the shipped game - the one you just bought - is unfinished.

And, I get it. I get that it takes time to press/burn/whatever and distribute the physical games, and from a financial perspective it makes sense to use the time between then and launch to continue to polish and improve the game rather than delay the launch (though that does also create the risk of poor early reviews due to delayed patches, as Saints Row: The Third on Switch sadly illustrates).

But one of the supposed advantages of buying games physically is that you aren’t reliant on the internet to play them. Someday, the Switch eshop servers will get shut down. If I lose the data on my Switch’s memory card after that, I won’t be able to redownload and play any of the games I bought digitally. I will still be able to play the games I bought physically. But only the unpatched versions. And looking at my shelf, for almost all of my Switch games that means a noticeably worse version of the game.

Live-service games, patches, and updates mean there’s less and less reason to buy games physically now. The preservation value of the physical media is significantly lessened. These days, I only buy physical because on consoles it often somehow costs less. (Which is its own rant for another time.)

It’s tempting to think of things we buy as permanent, but in many cases we’re really just paying for the experience of having something for some amount of time.

After playing Fire Emblem Warriors, I thought I was super into Musou games. After moving on to the (earlier release) Hyrule Warriors, while I do still enjoy Musou it turns out that what I was super into was Fire Emblem Warriors. In particular, its tactical depth.

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So, one of the positions in the whole Sekiro/Soulsborne/difficulty/easy-mode debate is what I would sum up as “easy mode should be there for the players who need it.” A couple of examples:

• Jarrod Johnston explains why he’s no longer anti-Easy, mentioning that previously he “never thought that someone might not have the ability to improve, and it took a while for [him] to understand that getting through a tough game can be more than just a matter of time and commitment.”

• Mark Brown explains his complicated view on questions like “Should Dark Souls have an Easy Mode?", making a few statements like, “I’m in favor of giving people more ways to play if they need them…” but emphasizing the importance of making sure players know what the intended experience is. He also describes Celeste’s Assist Mode by saying, “This isn’t an easy mode that I might switch down to if the game’s kicking my butt. It’s an assist mode that’s just there for those who really feel they need it.”

On the surface, I’m in agreement with these folks - we all want easy modes or similar accommodations in games. We’re on the same side of the overall debate. But I’d sum up my position slightly differently, as “easy mode should be there for the players who want it.” It’s only one word of difference, but I think it’s an important one.

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