A while back, I got Jumping Joe & Friends for free on Switch - one of many free games I’ve gotten from being in QubicGames’ ecosystem. It’s a simple reflex-testing runner-like game (though you jump vertically rather than run horizontally) that you can get into a good rhythm with, so I felt like it would be a better fit for mobile, and of course it actually is a port of mobile freemium title Jumping Joe! I picked that version up, and while the gameplay is indeed well-suited to the sort of casual kill-a-few-minutes experience that mobile enables, it’s both better and worse as a mobile game. Worse for the standard freemium reasons, but better because it has missions - side objectives to complete during runs that provide extra variety and depth to play.

Missions are great for this sort of game. They’re what elevated Jetpack Joyride from good to great. They add another layer to gameplay that keeps things fresh far longer. I don’t understand why the Switch port of Jumping Joe doesn’t have them. Why are they mobile-only? Why can you only get them if you also get the scummy monetization? As is, I find the Switch port dulls quickly and the mobile version feels obnoxious and greedy, and I stopped playing the game pretty quickly.

A bit later, I finally tried Mario Kart Tour, which I’ve complained about before. (Don’t judge me; it was for the mission to get the stupid Mario pins that ran out of stock in five seconds anyway.) And I found that in adapting the experience to mobile, Mario Kart had made several changes that felt like straight-up improvements.

The PS5’s DualSense controller has a microphone array that is on by default in multiplayer games. It sounds like it doesn’t even light up to indicate that the mic is on - it does so to indicate that the mic is muted.

With no visible headset or microphone, no light, and no opt-in to the mic being on, there are ZERO CUES that you are transmitting audio across the internet. No cues for you and no cues for anyone around you. You can easily forget this and broadcast a private conversation with a third party who has absolutely not opted in to this and may not even know it’s possible.

I can’t understand how this happened. It is so obviously a bad idea.

I think my favorite game genre is “go places and do things”. Especially when there are multiple objectives that I can pursue in an order and pace of my choosing.

Prominent examples include 3D platformers like Jak & Daxter and Ratchet & Clank, open world games like inFAMOUS and Saints Row, and action RPGs like Dragon Quest Heroes II and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.

Some games from adjacent genres qualify as well, such as MMO City of Heroes, Metroidvania SteamWorld Dig 2, and life sim Disney Magical World.

Here’s how I know game discovery is broken: there’s a picross superhero dating sim out now and I had no idea it was coming.

I wrote some weeks back that revisiting Super Mario 64 with a guide was allowing me to work around the parts of it I found the most frustrating and I thought that this time I might actually persist long enough to beat Bowser. Well, I did do that, and I felt proud of myself for doing it, and then horrified at how proud I felt.

Let me back up.

I’m revisiting Super Mario 64 as part of Super Mario 3D All-Stars and it really strikes me how much the game’s strictness and punishment get in the way of what makes it great, and in particular the way it treats learning challenges as though they were mastery challenges.

To me, Mario 64 is a colorful toybox that invites exploration. It’s at its best when imparting a real sense of discovery, presenting the player with a series of shiny toys and allowing the player to experiment and discover new ways to play with them. And it’s at its worst when it’s slapping the toys out of your hand because you are playing with them wrong.

As I wrote in my review, as you progress it’s increasingly “the case that a single mistake kills Mario, which ejects you from the level completely and requires you to carefully make your way back to where you were before you can experiment any further.” (And unlike the Virtual Console on the Wii U, in 3D All-Stars there are no save states available to guard against this - one way in which this release is actually a step back.) I find myself much less interested in, say, scouring levels for all eight red coins if I’m likely to die while looking for number six and then have to collect the first five all over again. That kind of thing is what got me to put the game down when I played it before. I like the exploration by itself, and I can handle a tough skill challenge, but when the skill challenge interrupts the exploration - when I can’t experiment or practice because I keep getting kicked out of the level - that’s when I just get frustrated.

So I’m trying something different this time: I’m using a guide. Not for every star, but for any where I die at least twice trying to figure it out. That means that for stars where the fun exploration is unhindered by punishment, that experience can remain intact. And stars that are just difficult without requiring exploration are also fine. But for stars where there’s a punishing skill challenge interfering with the exploration, I just skip the exploration part and take it as a skill challenge.

If it were up to me, I’d turn off the punishment instead of the exploration for those mixed cases. I’m pretty confident I’d enjoy this game more if Mario couldn’t die. But I’ll take what I can get, and this might be enough that I’ll actually defeat Bowser this time.

After eleven years, FarmVille is shutting down at the end of 2020.

I never tried FarmVille. As I once discussed, I wasn’t exactly a fan of what it represented - games successfully hijacking prosocial behavior for profit. Now, though, it seems almost quaint. I mean, on the same day I saw this news, I also saw that EA is promoting FIFA lootboxes in a children’s magazine. Keeping in mind all the other controversies of the past decade, it’s hard not to feel bizarrely wistful about the gaming culture problems of yesteryear.

But here’s what really does bother me about FarmVille’s shutdown: the reason for it and the impact on games preservation. Per the announcement, this is happening because “Adobe will stop distributing and updating Flash Player for all web browsers, and Facebook will stop supporting Flash games on the platform completely after December 31st, 2020.”

Whatever your feelings about FarmVille as a game, it’s undeniably a significant part of gaming history. It peaked in 2010 at 83.76 million monthly active users (about seven times the peak World of Warcraft reached in the same year of 12 million subscribers). It would be difficult to overstate its legacy on the design of social and mobile games over the next decade (not to mention directly inspiring Ian Bogost’s infamous Cow Clicker).

There are many, many reasons to be nostalgic for Flash and sad for its passing. Few of them had as much impact as FarmVille.

Another entry for the list of modern sorrows: reading about a cool-sounding game and going to check it out, only to find that it was retired almost two years ago and is no longer playable.

I desperately want a Bill & Ted Face the Music tie-in game that plays like Harmonix’s Amplitude.

Just change the frame story to be about repairing the space-time continuum with your band from across time. It’d be perfect.

I’ve seen a lot of different breakdowns of the different kinds of players and what they look for in games, but only now has it occurred to me that the reason the breakdowns keep changing is because games themselves keep changing. This analysis by Nick Yee presents nine different “player segments” - and two of them (Skirmisher and Gladiator) are described as looking for “team arenas” for different reasons.

“Team arenas” haven’t always been available as a gaming experience and only rose to prominence in the past decade or so. Before then, the sort of people who would seek out team arenas were around, but there were fewer games (if any at all) to scratch that itch, and these people were less likely to get into games. Thus these personality types were less represented in the overall subculture of “gamers.” Once these experiences became more feasible, these people became gamers and emerged as distinct player segments.

This is why I’m saddened by loss of variety of game experiences. It’s also why I like seeing game experiences outside the mainstream narrative find success. And as games continue to grow, I can’t help but wonder at the as-yet-uninvented types of game experience on the way that will create brand new player segments by giving even more people what they’ve been looking for.

I think it’s the case in general that games that have significant non-mechanical content (like, say, a lot of story and dialog scenes) should ideally provide players with means to skip the mechanical challenges and still enjoy the other content (an argument that deserves a fuller treatment, but here’s where I’ve given it the most attention so far).

But I think this is the case especially for New Game Plus modes or repeat playthroughs. Even if you’d argue that normal first playthroughs shouldn’t have this option and the player must earn their fun, they’ve done that now. Why not let them revisit the parts they’re most interested in?

A couple years back, I played Solo, a relationship personality quiz / puzzle platformer. It was interesting, and I’m a bit curious to replay it to consider how my views on relationships have changed since then - but I have no interest in going through all the same block-moving puzzles again in order to do so. Why not let me load my clear save to restart with all the puzzles still solved?

And now I’m playing CrossCode, which does some great stuff with story and characters. In theory, I might like to do a close reading article about it like I did for Q.U.B.E: Director’s Cut, but there is simply no way I’d suffer through everything that frustrated me about the game again, especially now that I knew the story and will no longer be driven by needing to find out what happens to these characters.

Even if we can’t get full-on “story mode” in most games, I wish it were normal to at least unlock it upon completion of a playthrough.

It turns out that more people are playing CrossCode on Xbox Game Pass than on Switch and PS4 put together. This is wholly unsurprising.

On console and on mobile, subscription models mean that price is no longer a barrier for individual games. Once the monetary cost of trying a game is literally zero, players are far more willing to try way more games. And it’s clear that the greatest beneficiaries of this are weird indie games that players wouldn’t otherwise be confident enough to spend money on.

I’ve complained a lot about CrossCode, so I thought I should talk about why I’m still playing it. What I love about it. And that’s the story and characters.

I’ve been holding off on talking about this aspect because I’m not done with the game yet - I’m about thirty hours in (and I’ve seen a couple people say it’s fifty hours long) and later surprises could certainly change what I have to say. But the story and characters have been so consistently excellent that I feel totally safe heaping on some praise.

A lot of what I could say is positive but generic. The writing is good. Characters have distinct and consistent personalities and quirks, and there seems to be a ton of incidental dialog reacting to various enemies and environmental features to make them feel more alive and organic. Characters are likable (except for Apollo, but we’ll discuss him another day). The storytelling is fantastic, giving out answers and asking more questions at possibly the perfect rate and making sure you have reasons to care about things and people before asking you to care about them.

But there’s some more specific praise deserved here as well. The following will have minor spoilers.

CrossCode’s aggressive combination of genres also results in a particularly brutal challenge profile.

I previously wrote an article defining four “phases of challenge” - in short, preparation is getting ready to deal with challenges (research, practice, grinding), strategy is defining a framework for handling challenges (making plans, choosing loadouts), tactics is making choices in response to specific situations (game state awareness, choosing what to do in the moment), and action is communicating the choice back into the game (hitting the right buttons at the right time).

Different players have different tolerance and interest levels for the different phases, which has implications for a game’s potential audience. Having high tactics challenge, for example, limits a game’s audience to people who enjoy that kind of challenge. Having high tactics challenge and high strategy challenge limits the audience to people who enjoy both, which is a smaller group.

CrossCode has high challenge in all four phases. Here’s the breakdown as I see it for the game’s main loops of exploration, combat, and puzzles:

I claimed that CrossCode’s skill tests can block off its story. It is worth noting that the developers did try to prevent this. Like Celeste, CrossCode has an Assist Mode. As the developers explained:

“We have created CrossCode with a certain idea in mind, as a certain experience, defined by us. However, if players do not enjoy this experience, the Assist Mode gives them the option to adjust the experience for them for whatever reason. We are not here to judge anyones skills or feelings and if someone wants a different experience, that is absolutely fine for us. We are not dictating a certain experience although we’d love everyone to play the game as we designed it. But love means that at some point to let go as well. And who are we to forbid players to enjoy certain parts just because they dislike (or can’t complete) other parts?”

I applaud this sentiment (as should not be surprising to anyone who’s read my posts) and want to encourage every game that blocks content with skill challenges to include Assist Modes. And frankly the one in CrossCode helps a lot and is the reason I’m still playing the game at all. I don’t want to come across as attacking it at all - but it’s clear that it was added after the fact and I’m confused by a few things about it.

After writing about how conflicted I am about CrossCode, I have decided to abandon the game. Multiple times. And I’m still playing it.

This isn’t a thing that I do! I’m a busy adult with a huge backlog of games (somehow I still have not gotten to Marvel’s Spider-Man, to name just one example sitting on my shelf). When a game loses me, it loses me and I am on to the next.

And CrossCode does so many things that would be instant deal-breakers in most other games. But it turns out I am willing to put up with a lot to spend time with the game’s characters and unravel the mysteries of its story.

So, what are those things I’m putting up with? Fundamentally, I think CrossCode suffers from being three different games crammed into one. If you happen to like all three of them, you’ll have a great time; but disliking any of them can go a long way to ruining the experience for you. CrossCode is:

1. A character-driven mystery story presented in SNES-like pixel art, a la To the Moon.
2. A systems-heavy action RPG with deep skill trees and fiddly gear choices, a la Torchlight or Grim Dawn or whatever.
3. A precision- and reflex-testing 3D puzzle platformer with complex timing and spatial reasoning puzzles a la Portal or The Talos Principle or something.

I already mentioned that some of these elements don’t blend well - in particular, the SNES-style pseudo-oblique camera often makes the 3D spatial puzzles harder than they should be. But the real problem is that these games block each other off and the story is the only part you can skip through.

This is most obvious in the temple dungeons, where you must defeat a puzzle gauntlet and a boss fight in order to be reunited with your party members and continue the story. But it comes up everywhere - sometimes you’ll find that a plot-relevant sidequest leads you to a jumping puzzle followed by a tough battle. Or you’ll do a sidequest that has you solving a sliding-block puzzle, your reward for which is a scene developing some side characters. No matter which of the three games you’re here for, you’re getting all of them, unavoidably and unpredictably.

Don’t care about the story? You can skip dialog and plot scenes. Don’t care for the combat or puzzles? Tough. Like Horace, Catherine, Wandersong, and countless other games, CrossCode might lure you in to its world and characters and then block you off from it with skill tests you find uninteresting or impossible.

On top of all the ethical problems with whale-hunting via loot boxes, there’s also a game design one: it’s allowing the design of games to be twisted by the habits of a small fraction of players.

From Ofcom: Less than 6% of UK children, 4% of adults have purchased loot boxes:

“[O]nly 4% of UK adults who play video games say they have ever bought loot boxes in free-to-play titles, and only 4% have bought them in premium games. Meanwhile, 6% of game-playing children – defined as aged five to 15 – have spent money on loot boxes in free-to-play games, while 3% say they have bought them in premium titles.”

In most cases, it’d be laughable to change a game’s design to significantly worsen it for 94%-97% of its players to accommodate the habits of the other 3%-6%. But when those habits are “spend more money than the 94%-97% put together”, that’s what happens.

I don’t think I’ve ever been as conflicted about a game as I am about CrossCode.

The aesthetic is right out of the golden age of mid-90’s SNES RPGs, highly reminiscent of titles like Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger. The music and sound effects are well-suited and the world is lush with little details (my favorite being the high-level players that run by ignoring you, or sit and have private conversations in hard-to-reach areas - this is exactly what happens in real MMOs) adding up to a cozy and satisfying atmosphere and a world that’s a joy to inhabit.

The characterization and storytelling are also deeply compelling. Again, there’s such an impressive level of detail here - I adore Emilie’s stories about wildlife that the enemies remind her of and her joyful reaction to laser bridges, for example. And the amount of characterization that comes across with Lea’s aggressively limited vocabulary is amazing.

But then so much about the game’s mechanical design feels horrible to me. Why in the world would you put so much emphasis on jumping puzzles in a 3D space that’s viewed as 2D pixel art, obscuring where surfaces are relative to each other (is that platform taller or just further north)? Why make them so long and complex that they sometimes require backtracking through multiple screens to get where you need to go when it’s so easy to misjudge a jump, fall off, and need to start all over?

Why is so much of this game a puzzle platformer where you need to think several steps ahead and apply precision positioning and aiming with split-second timing - when your aiming device is an analog stick and the 2D pixel art can (again) obscure the required angles? Why create situations where the player is virtually guaranteed to spend frustrating time trying to implement the puzzle solution after they’ve already done the interesting part of figuring out what they have to do?

Why is there so much to keep track of? Why lock the best equipment behind an unwieldy loot-trading system with intermediate levels of otherwise-worthless trade goods that make it harder to see what your actual options are, adding obscurity without adding depth? Why put chests the player can’t open yet in hard-to-reach places, punishing their exploration instead of rewarding it? Why have areas that are so complex and hard to navigate and require so much backtracking for those treasures or returning to spread-out quest givers and then give the player a terrible map that represents each zone as a featureless rectangle?

I spend a lot of time in CrossCode wishing I were done with the current bit (my god the first dungeon drags on and on) and just exploring the multi-level maze of the game’s second town made me want to rage-quit. And yet I can’t stop playing and when I’m not playing I can’t stop thinking about playing. I love being in this world that tickles my nostalgia both for RPGs and MMOs, I love spending time with these characters, and I want to find out what happens to them. I just hope the game doesn’t become completely intolerable along the way.

This is the difficulty select screen for SteamWorld Heist on PS4. Higher difficulties increase punishment (mission failure penalty) and challenge/strictness (enemy numbers, damage, and health) which is par for the course. However, they also provide an experience bonus.

I find this sort of thing super frustrating and a clear indication that the game doesn’t understand what difficulty settings are for. They’re for letting players opt in to an experience appropriate to their capabilities and interest. By having higher difficulties be more punishing but award more experience, SteamWorld Heist conflates this with a risk/reward trade-off that really should be handled separately. It’s now less clear what difficulty level to pick - a player wishing to reduce the amount of time and effort required by combat may now have to grind through more encounters, while a highly skilled player may find the higher difficulties actually easier.

Here’s the thing that really frustrates me about Animal Crossing: New Horizons and the reason I’m writing all these posts about how it effectively trolls certain types of players. The way the game is marketed and the way it gets talked about, it’s easy to think that if you don’t enjoy playing Animal Crossing the way it clearly wants to be played, you are playing the game wrong, when in fact it’s completely possible that the game’s highly-deliberate and opinionated design just doesn’t work for you. It looks like a game anybody ought to be able to pick up and enjoy, but it’s actually designed for a very specific type of play experience and thus a very specific type of player.

This is especially insidious given the game’s positioning as chill and casual. If you’re an anxious person and you try to unwind with Animal Crossing but find it impossible to relax with, you might conclude that you are bad at relaxing which will just make everything worse.

So please, keep this in mind: If you find Animal Crossing’s resistance to optimization, untrackable objectives with frequent interruptions, and artificial delays frustrating, it’s not your fault. You haven’t failed the game - the game has failed you.