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.