As a completionist, my thoughts about achievements are complicated. But here’s a simple illustrative anecdote.

I’ve been meaning to play Stick it to The Man for a while now, since I found out the story was written by Ryan North. I have it on my PS4 from when it went free on PlayStation Plus, which means it has trophies, which means I look up the trophy roadmap whenever I’m getting ready to play it. And thus far I haven’t managed to get past that step and actually play it. And Stick it to The Man doesn’t even have a particularly bad trophy list. There’s really only one trophy that sounds at all frustrating or unpleasant.

Then I saw the game was only a couple of bucks on Switch during the holiday sale. Switch doesn’t have trophies. So I paid a couple of bucks to buy a game I already have so that I’d have a version without trophies that I could just play and enjoy. I paid extra to not have trophies.

One of my all-time favorite video game gadgets is the jetboard from Jak II. Apart from just being really cool, it made navigating the open world of Haven City much more interesting - it was faster than walking, capable of a variety of tricks and maneuvers, and got brief speed boosts from successful execution of certain tricks. This meant that even just going from one mission to another could be engaging as you practiced stringing tricks together along the way to maintain the top speed boost for as long as possible. This then paid off in the missions that required skilled use of the jetboard.

Effie is a recent 3D platformer by a small team that explicitly takes inspiration from genre classics including Jak & Daxter. It includes a “surfing” ability that’s superficially very reminiscent of the jetboard, as it involves taking your shield (which normally stays collapsed on your back), expanding it, and using it as a hoverboard.

But that’s where the similarities end. Surfing allows you to move faster, but it’s not really any more engaging than walking. You can’t do any tricks, and the only speed boosts are at fixed points in the environment spaced such that you’re not likely to be able to maintain max speed if you’re taking a direct route to your destination. You’re mostly still just holding forward, not practicing anything or getting rewarded for mastery of anything. Even the character’s body movements are bizarrely stiff while surfing, like there wasn’t time or budget to animate it properly (the rest of the game is much better animated).

It’s certainly possible the designers wanted to do more with surfing, but in the end it feels like it mostly exists to justify how wide open the game’s Red Plains of Oblena is - which in turn seems to be so wide open in order to justify the presence of surfing. The Plains’ points of interest are quite spread out and take a while to get between, which is improved by surfing but still not interesting, and this is also the only place you can surf. You can’t do it in the main levels, and the only goal that actually requires it is a fairly easy and dull ring course that’s one of the Plains’ points of interest.

It makes me really curious what the conversations were like during development. I can easily imagine grand plans for both surfing and the open area that there just wasn’t time or money to fulfill, and it would be difficult to remove either late in development (taking out the Plains would require restructuring the game, as it currently bridges all the linear levels, and taking out surfing would make the Plains incredibly obnoxious to traverse), resulting in the unfortunate half-baked state they ended up in. But who knows whether that’s what happened.

Let’s say you were walking along and came to a platform suspended above deadly spikes. To proceed, you’d have to jump to the platform.

I wish it were standard practice for cross-platform games to allow sharing save files across platforms.

I played Dragon Quest Builders 2 on PS4, and now I find myself wishing I could relax by puttering around my end-game Isle of Awakening in handheld mode on my Switch. But I don’t want to play through the entire game and grind out all the Tablet Targets and scavenger hunts again on Switch just to get back to that state.

Somewhere around 2007, I remember there being hand-wringing about how video games had started out as tests of skill and were transitioning to delivered experiences.

There had always been some variety in games, but the culturally-dominant games had once been things like Tetris or Asteroids or Space Invaders - games with strict failure states and no actual victory condition. The long-term hook was understanding and developing the skills required to do better and better on repeat attempts, so these games had high score tables. They were analogous to challenges like the high jump or 100-meter dash.

And as technology improved and games became more mainstream, the culturally-dominant games were becoming things like Half-Life and Uncharted - games where failure was a temporary setback and there was a clear victory condition. Here, the hook was the game’s atmosphere and story and characters and the goal of finishing the game, so these games had save files. These were more analogous to literature and cinema.

A lot of people weighed in on whether it was good or bad that games (as an overall culture force) were becoming more and more focused on delivering experiences. Some people were excited about the possibilities while others feared losing their favorite hobby. But in hindsight, the fact that the discussion was framed this way at all makes it clear just how twisted and limited our view had been by the prevalence of skill-test games leading up to that time. Because in hindsight, it’s obvious that games have always been about delivering experiences. “Mastering a skill” is just one small subset of the many, many kinds of experiences a game can deliver.

Back then, people were talking like there were two types of games - skill tests and delivered experiences - and the market was moving from favoring the first to favoring the second. But the truth is that the market was growing, branching out from the small area in experience space that had been staked out by skill tests, developing areas like “interactive storytelling” and “self-expression” and “relaxing escapism” and many, many more. Skill test games are still around, but now they can be seen as the niche they always were, since games themselves have grown beyond them.

The old perception of games as skill tests does still linger, but that’s not actually inherent to what games are - it’s more a consequence of the limits of the technology of the time and the social and economic structure of game arcades. It’s an accident of history that a lot of people my age grew up in a culture that saw games this way, rather than as (say) a vehicle for exploring emotional states or experimenting with identity or creating collaboratively.

The situation is improving as more people grow up with access to a wide and varied gaming landscape, but you still run into people who think that Gone Home is a failure of a game because it’s a bad skill test, when it was never trying to be a skill test in the first place. And things are a lot murkier with games that overlap niches and provide multiple experiences - some people will tell you that the only proper way to enjoy these games is to embrace their skill-test elements, even as other people plainly state they are only interested in the other elements and the skill-test aspects are an outright obstacle to enjoyment. And of course, the truth is that every game is an overlap that provides multiple experiences.

Based on how much joy they brought me, not on objective greatness.

1. Dragon Quest Builders 2
2. Bubsy: Paws on Fire!
3. Dragon Quest Heroes II
4. Wandersong
5. Senran Kagura Burst Re:Newal
6. The Touryst
7. Cat Quest II
8. Final Fantasy XIV (not yet reviewed)
9. Muse Dash
10. Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition

Honorable mentions to Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King, Archlion Saga and Quarantine Circular.

Most anticipated game for 2020:

1. Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Top five games I’d like to see announced:

1. Disney Magical World 3
2. Dragon Quest Heroes III
3. Dragon Quest Builders 3
4. Fire Emblem Warriors 2
5. a followup to either Bubsy: Paws on Fire! or Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back

Some more Bithell shorts and KEMCO pocket-sized RPGs would be nice too.

So, there’s a genre for which we don’t quite have a consensus name. Games like Devil May Cry, Viewtiful Joe, Bayonetta, Vanquish, etc. were dubbed “spectacle fighters” by Yahtzee in 2009 and this seems to be the most popular name, though I’ve also seen them referred to as “character action” or “stylish action” games.

I’m mostly okay with “spectacle fighter”. After all, these are games where you fight a lot of enemies but there’s a mechanical emphasis on the spectacle you create by doing so with uninterrupted combos and varied moves, tracked by some combination of style meters, high scores, and grading systems. The problem is that a fighting game is something else - a game like Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. The name we have for games where you fight a lot of relatively weak enemies is a “brawler” or a “beat ’em up”. So really the Devil May Cry genre should be called “spectacle brawler” instead of “spectacle fighter”. It’s a subgenre of brawler in which spectacle is emphasized. The name fits (and conveys more information than “character action” or “stylish action”). Take out the spectacle scoring system and you’re left with a brawler.

By analogy, we can imagine spectacle-focused subgenres to other game genres. And in fact, I think a lot of extreme sports games qualify as “spectacle platformers.” Think of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater or SSX - these are games about navigating a platformer-like playground, but your goal isn’t just traversal. It’s getting long varied combos along the way. These combos are of tricks rather than attacks, but it’s still the case that if you took out the spectacle scoring system you’d be left with a platformer.

And in practice, it turns out I dislike spectacle platformers in roughly the same way I dislike spectacle brawlers. I understand the appeal of spectacle as a way to raise the skill ceiling (once you finish the level, you still have the goal of doing so with a better score/grade) but I like my challenges, successes, and failures to be inherent to the game’s world rather than imposed by an external scoring system. If I meet a hard challenge and find a way to deal with it, but have used a lot of health or ammo or time because I made mistakes, I’m still satisfied that I rose to the challenge and it’s up to me whether to try to do it better - which would mean doing it faster and more efficiently with fewer mistakes. If instead I deal with a hard challenge and then get told I only earned a D because I didn’t do it in the way the developer decided was stylish, that feels like an arbitrary constraint on my experience and makes the game less fun.

To me, Bayonetta will always be the franchise that got away.

When I started using GameFly over a decade ago, I loaded up my queue with tons of games I was curious about. One of the games that made its way into my list early on was the original Bayonetta. It wasn’t my usual type of game - I’d never played Devil May Cry or Viewtiful Joe. But the game was very well received - it got “universal acclaim” according to Metacritic, and people were talking about the game a lot. About its “very easy automatic” mode (which I talked about too) and whether its portrayal of its title character was sexist or empowering.

In short - Bayonetta was clearly an Important game, and I wanted to be part of the cultural moment and contribute to the conversation. But I wasn’t impressed by the demo, and whenever I did try a “spectacle fighter” or “character action game” or whatever we’re calling them these days, I didn’t like it. So as much as I wanted to experience Bayonetta, I didn’t really want to play it. I put it in my queue, but it stayed there for years as I kept sliding it further down and the cultural moment passed.

Eventually, I had to admit to myself that even with GameFly, games were coming out much faster than I could play them. I had to prioritize. I had to admit to myself what games were in my queue just because I felt like they should be and take them out to make room for the games I actually wanted to play.

I have a tiny twinge of sadness any time I take a game off of my GameFly queue unplayed. It’s a small admission of defeat to the inevitable march of time and entropy. It’s an acknowledgment that we can never do all that we wish we could. And whenever I add a game to my queue, in the back of my head I wonder if I’ll just be removing it in a year or two.

But Bayonetta is always the game I think of. It’s the highest profile game that had been in my queue for the longest amount of time, before I admitted I was never going to play it or its sequels. It’s the one that got away.

I’ve been thinking about boss fights in platformers. Mostly because I just played Effie, a 3D platformer whose boss fights… kinda aren’t boss fights.

In Effie, you play as young warrior Galand cursed by evil witch Melira. Melira is the villain for the whole game and shows up for a boss fight at the end of every chapter. But you never fight her directly.

Instead, she hovers menacingly nearby while you deal with waves of normal enemies that she’s apparently summoning and/or traverse a hazardous platforming course. Melira’s only direct contribution to the fight is a telegraphed area-of-effect attack you need to avoid periodically. She does get a health bar, though - sometimes you deplete it just by defeating her summoned minions, other times by reaching and activating levers that trigger hazards she just happens to be in range of - and once her health bar is empty you win and (except in the final fight) she retreats. (The most perplexing encounter has you damage her by pouring wine on her and then when she’s had enough she escapes by diving into the vat of wine.)

So, okay. Is this a boss fight? It’s narratively framed as one. It’s a climactic chapter-capping encounter with the game’s antagonist in which she tries to kill you and you fight back until there is a clear winner and loser. And it’s also mechanically framed as one, challenging you to use your accumulated combat and platforming skills in a high-pressure gauntlet. The only thing I can point to that makes it not a boss fight is that you never really fight the boss - the encounter still serves every other purpose of boss fights I can think of.

But I think the fact that she doesn’t engage you directly undercuts her as a villain. She’s much less threatening if all she can throw at you is an easily-avoidable area attack and things you’ve defeated many times before. She’s much less impressive if you can compel her to retreat just by defeating a bunch of other enemies or if she repeatedly positions herself exactly where she needs to be in order to be vulnerable to triggerable hazards.

It’s normal for bosses in platformers to test you on combat and platforming skills that you’ve learned and practiced earlier, and thus in a sense not actually provide anything new and unique. Especially if the boss is supposed to be much more powerful than you and it would be silly to let you attack them directly. But I think it’s a lot more satisfying if the game finds a way to frame the conflict as a direct battle, even if you can’t use brute force.

I find myself thinking, for example, of Klaww, a boss in Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy. Klaww is gigantic and you can’t just, like, walk up and punch him. So the fight is mechanically a series of platforming challenges in which you avoid Klaww’s thrown boulders and navigate platforms suspended over lava to reach him, where you don’t damage him directly so much as cause him to stumble and drop a boulder on his own head. It’s not especially cathartic because Klaww himself hadn’t been built up as an emotionally-significant antagonist - he’s just a gate you have to get through to proceed to the next area. But he still scared me the first time I played and the fight is clearly framed as you outmaneuvering a much stronger foe. I wish fighting Melira in Effie had felt that way.

I like Space Pioneer, but it does one thing that bugs me a lot. To properly explain it, I first need to talk about a PS2 JRPG from 2003 because that’s how I roll.

The first game in the .hack multimedia franchise is called .hack//Infection. It’s a sci-fi JRPG taking place in an alternate near-future - but it focuses on a fictional fantasy MMORPG in the vein of Phantasy Star Online that your character spends most of their time playing. So in practice, the actual gameplay is a JRPG pretending to be a MMORPG.

In 2003, I was way into JRPGs and curious about MMOs, but was quickly repelled by .hack//Infection’s approach. The way I remember it, in the game’s first hour or two you find yourself in a blocky, procedural-looking dungeon teaming up with another “player” to kill some monsters. You add each other as friends and later you sign on for another session and your friend isn’t online so you have to solo for a while.

Now, this was some sixteen years ago so I might have some details wrong and I was definitely dumber about game design back then, but this setup struck me as obviously wrong-headed. The (probably unfair) vibe I got was that the game was made to cash in on the rising popularity of MMORPGs by imitating one in a cheaper-to-make single-player RPG, without recognizing that the things that are easy to copy about MMORPGs aren’t the good things about them - they’re the unfortunate consequences and limitations required by the good things which you can’t copy without actually being a MMORPG.

MMORPGs are appealing because you can work together with real people to progress. That’s the good part. You can’t copy that in a standard JRPG. A consequence of your allies being real people is that they aren’t always playing at the same time you are (or in a position to play the same content). And blocky, procedural dungeons are a consequence of the need to provide gobs of content for players to chew through together over time and keep their subscriptions up. In a single-player single-purchase game with a story and ending, incorporating these negative consequences is just making the game worse without providing the positives that outweigh those problems in an MMO.

To be fair, I don’t actually know whether .hack//Infection does something worthwhile that justifies these choices; I dropped the game pretty quickly. But in those first couple of hours, it felt like the game was trying to make me feel like I was playing a MMORPG through superficial imitation that could only ever copy the downsides and I couldn’t understand why anyone would make a game like that.

Okay, so, that brings us to Space Pioneer.

Space Pioneer’s progression is all about upgrades. Virtually everything about your character and their arsenal can be upgraded. You pay for these upgrades using coins earned by defeating enemies and completing objectives, but to be allowed to purchase an upgrade, you need to have enough cards for that upgrade. And upgrade cards are rewarded in what can only be called loot boxes.

There’s no way to buy them with real-world money. (Definitely not in the microtransaction-free Switch version of the game, but from what I can see they don’t look purchasable in the freemium mobile version either.) But completing certain in-game objectives awards you with random bunches of upgrade cards that differ by rarity and are presented with a box-opening animation. It seems very clearly intended to be evocative of loot boxes - and why would you do that?

Nobody actually likes loot boxes. They are a consequence of a particular type of monetization, and while often profitable their consequences for a game’s experience are usually negative. The reason to include them is to make money, not because people actually like them - so why add them if you aren’t going to use them to get money?

And indeed, I’d absolutely argue their impact in Space Pioneer is negative. The first few I received were a little exciting, but when I realized that I wasn’t actually earning upgrades but rather the opportunity to buy upgrades and that I was much more constrained by coins than cards and always had plenty of available upgrades I couldn’t afford, I stopped paying any attention to what cards I received and it no longer felt like a reward. In fact, the only real impact it ever had was when I got unlucky and stopped getting cards for the frag grenade and then got a mission objective to use a higher level of frag grenade than I had access to. I couldn’t complete this objective until I finally randomly got more frag grenade upgrade cards.

In other words, rather than being a reward system, the upgrade cards were only a wall to progression that randomly blocked off upgrades and objectives - in a game where the progression is all about upgrades and objectives and where you can’t even spend money to get past the wall.

I don’t know what the designers of .hack//Infection or Space Pioneer had in mind, but to me these both seem like cargo cult design, incorporating popular elements without an understanding of why they’re popular or what impact they will have when superficially imitated. Only the costs are incurred with none of the benefits. They’re just the game getting in its own way.

I’ve seen a lot of variations of the question “If you could erase your memory of one game so you could play it again for the first time, what game would you pick?” And, like… I don’t get it.

I know the question isn’t meant literally. It’s like the question of what books you’d take to a desert island; if you give a practical answer you are missing the point. The desert island framing is just an evocative way to sum up the harder-to-express actual question, which is more along the lines of “if for some reason you had to pick right now a short list of what books you could read for the rest of your life, which would they be”? Which in turn is really a way to ask for someone’s favorite books - but specifically weighted toward longevity and re-readability. The extra constraint changes the ranking and is thus more interesting than just asking someone to rattle off their already-decided favorites.

Similarly, I know the forget-a-game question must also be trying to get at something related to but distinct from just asking someone what their favorite game is. Responding practically, I’d minimize unnecessary memory loss by picking a tiny game I’d played ages ago and already mostly forgotten. That’s clearly missing the point, but what is the point?

To me, most of the value of a good game comes from the memory of it. That’s the part I get to savor and enjoy for much longer. I get to look back and understand how the game’s parts come together to form a greater whole. I get to talk about it with others and share our experiences and insights. And I get to see how games influence each other as the medium grows and evolves. I love playing good games, but I might love more the way that every game I play increases my understanding and appreciation of games as a whole.

From that perspective, replaying a game I do remember can be more valuable than recapturing the original experience, as it provides opportunities for experimentation or for seeing new things I missed before. (Studies suggest that people consistently underestimate how much new stuff there is to find in repeat media and experiences, and thus underestimate how much they’d enjoy revisiting them.) This can leave me with a more complete picture of the game and a more nuanced appreciation and understanding - made richer by what I’ve learned and observed from other games in the meantime.

So okay, what if the question is really about your best gaming experiences that you can’t come close to matching through replaying today? When I think of games like that, the difference isn’t something you can surmount with a memory wipe. As a teenager, I fell completely in love with Chrono Trigger - but that’s because I was a different person then (and not in an entirely healthy way). I couldn’t recapture that experience without regressing to my adolescence. And in college, I had a complete blast playing City of Heroes, but that was more about the people I played with than the game itself - and the community has largely moved on from MMORPGs, and that particular game is no longer even playable. I’d need a time machine for that one.

I think for a lot of us, our favorite gaming memories are only partially about the game. They are about who we were, what our life was like, and what the world was like. Trying to recapture them with a memory wipe would just destroy a treasured memory and replace it with an inferior imitation that couldn’t possibly live up to the original.

All I can really find in this question that makes any sense to me is “What is your favorite game with little to no replay value?” Which I guess does act like the desert island question as a new constraint on the favorite-game question, though it seems like a less interesting one to me.

…but I guess my answer is Portal.

It always frustrates me to see someone describe a game’s story as “good for a game”.

Video games are a young medium relying on young technology. They started with significant technical limitations which made it very difficult to do much traditional storytelling, creating a lingering negative perception of their capabilities. Even when a game rises above the average, it’s likely to be damned with faint praise that its story is good “for a game” but not as good as a proportionately high-quality book, film, stage production, radio play, etc.

And, like, this is sort of true. But it’s a weird and misleading way to look at it.

There’s the obvious objection that story is just one element of games. Comparing a game’s story to a novel is weird in the same way as comparing a game’s graphics to a painting or its soundtrack to a symphony. Taking one element from a multifaceted medium to compare to a medium that is just that element is kind of dumb. The more fair comparison is the overall experience - is playing the game an experience of similar relative quality as reading the novel, observing the painting, or listening to the symphony?

But this prompts the equally-obvious rejoinder that a game is still improved by improving its constituent parts. A beautiful game with a great soundtrack and excellent storytelling is more enjoyable than an ugly one with bad music and poor writing. So it can still be worthwhile to look at those parts and to use as measuring sticks the great works in media that focus on those elements.

The real objection is that these comparisons are always made in a way that completely destroys the core value of games as a medium.

Games are interactive and dynamic to a degree unmatched by other forms of art or media. Players don’t simply consume the experience of a game - they co-create it.

Jotting down a static plot summary of a game and seeing that it compares unfavorably to a novel is like taking the audio from a film - stripped of all visuals and cinematography - and seeing that it compares unfavorably to a radio play. You can’t remove the core of an art form and then declare it worse than other art forms that still have their cores. Converting it for comparison destroyed what made it work.

Do games have worse storytelling than novels? Maybe. But if so, it’s because they aren’t supposed to have storytelling. They are supposed to have storyplaying, and no novel has that.

(In other words.)

So, like, I understand the economic realities that have resulted in games launching unfinished and then getting substantial post-launch updates. I did complain about how this devalues physical media, but I’ve mostly made my peace with it. However, I am a busy adult with a substantial backlog who basically doesn’t have time to replay games. And the more interested I am in a game and the more I’m anticipating it, the more I care about getting the best and most definitive experience of it. So for games whose release I’m actively following - if it launches with a roadmap of major updates scheduled over the next year, for me that basically means the game actually launches a year later.

But that’s all fine. Like I said, I get it - there are a lot of reasons (especially for smaller studios) that this Early-Access-lite approach makes sense. And it’s not like I don’t have other games to play in the meantime. What isn’t fine is when this happens with multi-platform games and all the roadmaps and update announcements just talk about the game getting the update and don’t say on which platforms and it’s unclear whether the update is rolling out at different dates or skipping some platforms entirely (especially when you find out that, say, the PC version is made by the primary developers and the console ports are handled by a third party with much less transparency) so you don’t even know what the trade-off choice is.

Most games that are on Switch and something else, I’d rather play on Switch for the portability - but it’s often bizarrely difficult to find whether the updates that came to the Steam version have come to the Switch version, are going to come to it at some unknown date, or are just never coming at all. And so I end up just… never buying the game.

I love finding clusters of games that are built around similar concepts but which differ in important ways. I’ve previously argued that good games are beacons in design space, pointing us to an area likely to have many other good potential games nearby - it’s fun to see it prove out.

Helldivers, for example, is a top-down co-op shooter starring space marines killing aliens and completing tasks on hostile worlds. It’s clearly a good game, but I’m not quite in the audience for it. The tone of Starship Troopers-like dystopian satire casting the players as obvious bad guys if you pay attention to the mission descriptions isn’t an appealing fantasy to me, and I dislike the way the game basically must be played online with strangers, especially when its mechanics (friendly fire, easy-to-alert enemy patrols, etc.) require coordination and cooperation between the players. I played it a bit with Senpai-chan, and when we screwed up near at the end of a mission in a way that delayed our escape shuttle, our online teammate team-killed us in order to safely escape themselves - and as far as I can tell, this was mechanically the correct choice to make. I’m not attacking this design - but I want to be clear it is not for me.

But there’s so much else about Helldivers’s theming and structure that is for me. I like twin-stick shooters! I like co-op! I like sci-fi! I like mission-based structure! If Helldivers let me pop the hood and tweak things, then - like Razbuten with Halo 2 - I’m sure Senpai-chan and I could have found a version of the game we both loved.

That’s not an option, so I’m glad there are other games exploring nearby regions of design space. There’s Battle Planet - Judgement Day, which casts the players as escaped criminals and has a more roguelike structure but otherwise hits a lot of the same beats - twin-stick co-op shooter about killing aliens and completing tasks on hostile worlds. I tried it, it was also clearly solid, but still not for me (I don’t find playing as a murderous criminal more appealing than playing as a fascist soldier, and roguelikes are the wrong kind of repetitive for me).

But now we’ve also got Space Pioneer - another top-down co-op shooter starring space marines killing aliens and completing tasks on hostile worlds. And this one finally tries a version of the formula that resonates with me. You don’t play as a bad guy. You don’t need to go online. Your progress is never lost. Gameplay varies at a good rate, with objectives that encourage you to change up your play style, weapon, and gear on a regular basis. It’s Helldivers with much more chill and that’s was I was looking for. I’ve barely put the game down since starting it.

Some might call Space Pioneer a Helldivers clone, but I wouldn’t. I like when games take inspiration from each other but don’t stop there, and bring their elements to new audiences.

Given that attention is more important than price on the Switch eShop, I’m impressed by the marketing-through-discounts done by QubicGames.

In addition to periodically putting their older games on sale, QubicGames often offers launch-window discounts on their new titles - if you already own a QubicGames-published game. This basically means they can send launch announcements for their new titles to people through the news channel for the game they own where it won’t get buried in the huge list of games coming out every week - but in a way that is less annoying, because it’s a coupon and not just an ad, and it’s positioned as a loyalty reward rather than just a devaluing of the game.

It’s a clever system, and it got me to purchase Space Pioneer during its launch window (and I’m really glad I did - but we’ll talk about that game later). But of course this only works once you own one of their games - so it is important that they still do regular sales as well. I didn’t know about it until I picked up One Strike on sale, and for all I know there are a bunch of other publishers doing the same thing whose ecosystems I just haven’t entered.

But now, QubicGames is doing a much more aggressive push to get people on board - over the second half of December, they are giving away ten games as long as you own a QubicGames game. The magnitude of this promotion has gotten a lot of attention, resulting in people online pointing out that one of their games is free-to-play, meaning you can get the games without spending any money at all.

The giveaway is structured such that as long as you pick up a given day’s free game, you are eligible to get the next game for free the next day - but all the games are also on sale, so if you miss a day you can cheaply get back on track. And the final game is not yet announced, so the mystery encourages people to do so even if they fall off near the end.

This is going to get a lot of people owning QubicGames games, feeling good about the publisher, and in a position to be marketed to for future titles. Clever stuff.

Why am I still excited when a game has an arcade with playable games in it? I find myself going “Ooooh, video games!” having completely forgotten that I am already playing a video game, one I chose to play instead of the many, many more arcade-like ones to which I have constant access.

So like - I knew that Persona 5 Scramble was gonna be awesome. But that’s because I’ve played Hyrule Warriors and Dragon Quest Heroes and Fire Emblem Warriors and I know that when modern Omega Force makes a crossover Musou game, they are deeply respectful of the source material and they find interesting ways to incorporate it into the Musou formula, often in ways that improve both. They don’t just, like, reskin Dynasty Warriors and call it a day.

But not everybody knows that, and outside of its fan base Musou in general has a reputation as samey and shallow. Plus, back when “P5S” was being teased and nobody knew what it was yet, there were hints that it might be a Switch port of Persona 5 and a lot of people got excited for that possibility. So when the reveal was Persona 5 Scramble, a crossover Musou game by Omega Force, a lot of people were very disappointed.

Persona 5 Scramble thus had an uphill battle to fight. But it’s been doing a really good job managing expectations.

First, it was probably the right choice not to call it Persona 5 Warriors. As compelling as that title would have been to players like me, for other players it’s better to avoid baking the Dynasty Warriors expectations right into the name.

Second, Atlus and Omega Force have been aggressively marketing the game via many trailers. Early trailers focused on gameplay that is clearly not just Dynasty Warriors and is strongly influenced by Persona 5. This resulted in write-ups saying things like “Persona 5 Scramble: The Phantom Strikers – the upcoming action role-playing game from Koei Tecmo and Omega Force – isn’t just some Dynasty Warriors-style spin-off. As evidenced by the title’s most recent livestream blowout, Scramble is actually an in-depth sequel to Persona 5.” The trailers keep coming, showing off gameplay systems and the game’s cast of beloved characters, and the response is always something like “The game continues to look like much more than your typical Dynasty Warriors-like experience, meaning it’s one we’re hotly anticipating as we head into 2020.”

The game is being seen as an action-based sequel instead of a lazy cash-in spin-off. And as much as I already knew what it was going to be, and as frustrated as I am that this sort of marketing push is necessary for people not to just say “DYNASTY WARRIORS BOO!” and shut down when they hear “Omega Force”, I recognize that this is really good marketing and expectation management. It gets past the unfair, inaccurate perception people have and paints a clearer image of what the game actually is - to the benefit of both the developer and the game’s potential players.

And I’m hoping it’ll help change Omega Force’s reputation, and future Musou crossovers won’t need as huge a marketing budget to get a fair shake.

PlayStation wants to move its established community from PS4 to PS5 quickly. Here’s PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan, as quoted by gamesindustry.biz:

These are gamers who are networked and sticky and engaged and passionate about PlayStation to an extent that we’ve not seen in previous generations. As we move towards the next-generation in 2020, one of our tasks – probably our main task – is to take that community and transition it from PlayStation 4 to PlayStation 5, and at a scale and pace that we’ve never delivered on before.

He goes on to talk about how impressive the PS5 is, and how easy it is to develop for, and how great its games will be, as well as how PlayStation itself is improving its internal organization. But I was really hoping he’d talk a bit about how the transition will be made appealing to the existing community. To me, the obvious thing is to make the PS5 not be a hard break from the existing PS4 ecosystem.

When the PS4 came out, I was very disappointed to learn it wouldn’t have any backward compatibility. I’m sure this saved money during development, and of course it meant that old games could be sold to us again as “classics” or via PlayStation Now or whatever, but it still seemed like a mistake. It meant that the PS4 wasn’t just an upgrade to the PS3, the way the PS3 had (originally) been to the PS2 and the way the PS2 had been to the PS1. For the first time, a new PlayStation console came with an entire separate ecosystem. Its value wasn’t enhanced by your existing investment in games and the community. It wouldn’t replace your existing console. It was more analogous to buying a Nintendo or Xbox console to supplement your existing console. And in that case, suddenly it’s a lot less obvious that you shouldn’t just buy one of those instead.

It was a while before I bought a PS4, and longer before I was confident I’d been correct to do so (and my PS3 is still hooked up next to it). If the PS5 wants me to be more confident that I should move over to it quickly, it should at least play every PS4 game, disc and download alike. Similar compatibility for games for older PlayStation consoles would be even better, and while I personally don’t do much online play, cross-play with gamers on at least PS4 seems like it would help too. There are rumors (supported by a patent) that the PS5 will in fact be backward-compatible (though perhaps not for the unusually-architected PS3) but it’s unclear yet whether this is true and whether it would mean we could reuse our old discs and downloads. Guess we’ll still just have to wait and see.

Bubsy: Paws on Fire! was my first Bubsy game and I loved it and thought it set a new standard for rhythm platformers. After 100%ing it on Steam, I’m playing it again on Switch and it’s still great. And I guess Bubsy must have gotten into my head, because I decided I wanted MORE BUBSY and went ahead and tried the only other Bubsy game made more recently than the 1990s: Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back. And… it’s decent!

I wasn’t expecting to like it. The game was not well received and got a metascore in the mid-40s on both PS4 and PC. But honestly, I don’t think the game got a fair shot. It was the first Bubsy game in over two decades and even the announcement that the series was getting revived was met with hostility. With expectations like these, the game would have had to be fantastic to overcome reviewers’ predispositions to dislike it, and… it isn’t that. The core gameplay is solid and I enjoyed playing through the levels, but the menus and other connective tissue feel a bit unpolished (including bizarre omissions like not being able to see your current high score per level), the boss fights are tedious, and perhaps worst of all - the game is very short. I fully completed it in something like five hours (about one-third of the time it took me to do the same with Paws on Fire!).

To me, these flaws don’t destroy the game’s strengths and I think a fair rating would land in the “mixed” range rather than the “negative” one. But with the baggage carried by the Bubsy IP, this game was never going to get a “mixed” score. Either it would be good enough to smash preconceptions and rate “positive” or it wouldn’t and it’d be dismissed out of hand. A mediocre Bubsy game is not, in most people’s eyes, a sufficient reason to revive the franchise.

Or maybe I’m just biased because of how much I liked Paws on Fire!. Or both. Who knows.

Anyway, the people I feel sorry for are the long-time Bubsy fans who saw their beloved series was returning. They had to watch the internet mock the very idea of a new Bubsy game. Then when the resulting game was middling and quite short but had promise and could easily have had an excellent sequel, the fans had to watch the internet call it pure trash. Then when another Bubsy game followed, it turned out to be by a different developer in a different genre. The result might be a game that I love, but when I imagine one of my favorite dormant franchises getting this kind of treatment - oof.

So, I’m definitely keeping an eye on Bubsy. I’m quite interested to see what happens next here, and I really hope something does. And for the record, I would be excited to see a follow-up to Paws on Fire! but I would also be excited to see a follow-up to The Woolies Strike Back.

In the meantime - folks like me who enjoyed Woolies and aren’t sated after its short runtime are best advised to move on to its developer’s previous work: Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams. The gameplay is actually quite similar. That might also have been a knock against the reviews for Woolies (some felt it showed the game was a rushed cash-in that reused most of an existing game design) but it’s definitely a bonus if you’re looking for more Woolies-like game to play.

I applaud the intent behind Celeste’s Assist Mode that allows for tweaking aspects of the game and lets players of varying skill level and physical capability enjoy overcoming an appropriate challenge. And I hate to come across as complaining about it. But the fact is that Celeste is a game that I found very frustrating and I wasn’t able to fix that with Assist Mode - because Assist Mode doesn’t let you tune punishment.

Celeste is a precision platformer. You have a set of abilities: running, jumping, wall-jumping, wall-climbing, and an air dash. Some abilities are limited and get refreshed by standing on solid ground. You must use these tools to get through a series of platforming challenges in varied environments with their own varied mechanics, such as platforms that move when you air dash or midair gems that replenish your abilities without you needing to land.

Most challenges in Celeste really have two parts: the puzzle of figuring out how to use your limited abilities and the particular environment to navigate each obstacle course, and then actually executing your solution with precise timing and positioning. To use my own terminology, this is a tactical challenge (figuring out what to do) followed by an action challenge (doing it). They are difficult in different ways and can separately be interesting/dull or hard/easy to individual players.

This is risky, because it means a player has to enjoy and be sufficiently competent at both the tactical and the action challenges in order to enjoy and progress through the game. Someone who likes charting a path through each screen but then lacks the reflexes to actually follow that path is not going to have a good time.