It’s the ones you love that can hurt you the most.

On September 1, 2011, Halfbrick Studios released Jetpack Joyride on the iOS App Store. I was already a fan of Halfbrick thanks to games like Fruit Ninja, Monster Dash, and especially Age of Zombies. But Jetpack Joyride was on a whole other level, immediately becoming my favorite mobile game, my favorite one-button game, and my favorite auto-runner. It might, in some senses, still be all those things.

I bought Jetpack Joyride on iOS when it came out. I loved it so much that I then bought it again for my PlayStation Portable in 2012 and a third time for my PlayStation Vita in 2013. And now, I’m… pretty glad I did that. Because after revisiting the phone version in 2017 in order to finally review it, I found it had changed a lot. The game started as a paid purchase with some microtransactions, but now it was F2P with a lot more microtransactions and a daily reward system. It started adding even more engagement rewards in the form of limited-time events, and then Apple’s rules changed and in order to keep playing it I would have had to explicitly consent to Halfbrick harvesting my data. So I stopped playing it. But the PlayStation versions had been left behind by the updates and still had arguably the superior version of the game. Certainly the less-obnoxious, less-greedy version.

It’s one of the standout examples to me of the failures of the app store model. I bought Jetpack Joyride in 2011. I paid for it. Then it went free to play and made a bunch of changes and became a product I no longer wanted. And on my modern iDevices, I had no recourse. The old version of the app was no longer compatible. (I do still have a first-generation iPad laying around, which does play the old, better version of the game. It also has other quality iOS games that you can’t download anymore, like Mirror’s Edge and Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty.)

So I was - perhaps naively - quite excited when I saw that Jetpack Joyride+ was coming to Apple Arcade. It felt like a poetic example of what I’d hoped Apple Arcade could do for mobile gaming - change the incentives to reduce sleaze. Uncoupled from the need to push microtransactions and prevented from harvesting user data, Jetpack Joyride+ could be a much less obnoxious and more enjoyable experience again.

And, like… it is? Basically? But not how I expected it to be.

On Apple Arcade, a game makes money if people keep playing it - and the relationship is direct through getting a share of those players' subscriptions, not indirect through the IAP to which those players have increased exposure. There’s no way to apply concepts of “fun pain” and “whales,” so you aren’t putting content and quality-of-life improvements behind paywalls. Instead, those are now valuable as more things to earn through play over a longer period of time. They’re ways to keep people playing.

But that’s not the approach that Halfbrick have taken with Jetpack Joyride+. Instead, everything that was tied to IAP or the daily rewards or timed events in the non-Arcade version is just… missing. This is a stripped down version of the already-free game. It’s not Jetpack Joyride+. It’s Jetpack Joyride-.

That’s already sad, but what makes it rude is that it wasn’t even a clean cut. You can still do the daily reward task, and the first time you do it you clearly get the first-day reward, and then it tells you you’ve completed day one of five. The second time you do it… no reward, and you’ve completed day one of five. The third time… no reward, and you’ve completed day one of five. It’s just broken.

It’s still a very good auto-runner and I’m still playing it for now. It’s, what, the fifth time I’ve started the game from zero in the past ten years? But it’s disappointing, and I mourn the loss of the Halfbrick I once loved.

I used to be an actor.

Back in high school, I loved drama club. I tried out for plays and had a blast becoming Wolf Ames (the beatnik equivalent of George McFly from a Back to the Future riff called Time and Time Again) and Simon Gascoyne (from the better-known The Real Inspector Hound) on stage for friends and family. I was never a lead - those roles always went to the same small handful of very dedicated, very skilled folks - but there were plenty of other parts to go around and even a small one like Paramedic #2 in Fahrenheit 451 was a good time.

When I got to college, I tried out for a play and found that the experience was very different. It seemed like everyone I was auditioning with was one of those dedicated-and-skilled folks who’d consistently landed lead roles at their old schools. Now, even they had to fight for a chance. There was no room left for hobbyists like me.

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It’s been four months since I posted about not really playing games anymore and I thought it was time for an update.

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I might have found a pill that makes me not like video games anymore.

This is going to require some backstory.

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I hate how Alto’s Adventure won’t let you keep playing until it uploads your score to the leaderboards, even if the server is slow to respond.

At least, that’s what I assume is going on here. I don’t know what else it could be. I don’t have this problem on PC where I have my firewall set to block the game from connecting to the internet. On Switch, you can’t set that per-game so I have to put the Switch into airplane mode to prevent this.

I wouldn’t even notice this was happening if it didn’t block me from playing. Like how it’s easy to forget how commonplace day-one patches have become until one gets delayed, this problem in Alto’s Adventure makes me realize how bizarre it is that it’s become routine for games to connect to remote servers and upload information without any kind of permission. I never agreed to share my scores and there don’t appear to be any in-game settings to disable this behavior. I have absolutely zero interest in the leaderboards for this game, but it’s acting like there’s nothing the least bit rude, presumptuous, or problematic about it disrupting my play in order to go online and use my bandwidth to broadcast my scores without my consent.

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

1. Animal Crossing New Horizons
2. Lego City Undercover
3. One Piece: World Seeker
4. CrossCode
5. Mario Kart Tour
6. Murder by Numbers
7. Mana Spark
8. The Alto Collection (not yet reviewed)
9. Spyro Reignited Trilogy (not yet reviewed)
10. Stay?

Honorable mentions to games I’m happy about but that are difficult to quantify:

• Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning (a buggy-but-slowly-improving port of a game I loved)
• Super Mario 3D All-Stars (I’ve only played Super Mario 64 so far)
• Divinity: Original Sin 2 (had a blast playing this co-op with PartialCharge, but scheduling those sessions became difficult)
• The Jackbox Party Pack games, which I’ve enjoyed a couple of with Allie (we mostly like Fibbage)
• Sorting Therapy (more of a meditative tool than a game)
• Colors Live (an art tool, not a game)

The game that brought me the most frustration, rage, and aggravation:

1. CrossCode

Just once I’d like to see a game use patronizing labels for its difficulty levels, but flip the script from the usual. Instead of positioning easy mode as being for children (“Can I play, Daddy?") it would position it as being for adults with other things to do. Correspondingly, hard mode would be called “Too much free time.”

I’ve written before about the idea that game content can be divided into “structure” (core/main) and “texture” (side/optional). I argued that having texture greatly outlast structure is a Bad Thing, but I noticed that there’s a genre - one that I like - which regularly has texture far beyond structure: open world games.

I’ve been thinking about why this is and I think it comes down to one of the specific advantages of texture I called out before: “[i]t can provide an alternate, calmer way to occupy the game’s world”. Open world games are especially good at providing the experience of occupying a world. (It’s not unique in this - immersive sims, JRPGs, MMORPGs, etc. all also lean in this direction.) So it makes sense that these games would be well-positioned to make good use of texture, even to the point where significantly outlasting structure isn’t a problem if you love being in the game’s world.

I recently played One Piece: World Seeker which is kind of meh as an open world game but by far the best game yet made for letting the player occupy the world of One Piece - something I’ve wanted ever since being introduced to the setting by Pirate Warriors 3 and which was not really provided by Unlimited World Red. I fell in love with it and very much didn’t want it to end. I was glad for all the collectibles and side quests that helped me stretch my time as Luffy (no pun intended). There might not have been a lot of point to running around hunting down all the treasure chests for crafting materials I didn’t even need, but doing so gave me a reason to keep checking in with the Straw Hats and gum-gum rocketing my way around the island.

On the flip side, this means open world games are particularly poorly suited to the PS5’s activity cards, which strip content of the context which is vital for making you feel like you are occupying an actual world. As discussed by Patrick Klepek, using activity cards in Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales “turns in-game activities into a long list of checkboxes to work through. . . . One of the biggest joys of Insomniac’s Spidey games is aimlessly swinging around, and it’s clear the distribution of activities on the city map are meant to encourage this behavior. The cards, on the other hand, remove this from the equation entirely.”

It’s hard for me not to scoff at Sony’s claims that they “aren’t hearing” that the PS5’s storage is too limited (even before Masahiro Sakurai complained about it). I’m pretty sure “not listening” is a more accurate phrase.

It’s rare I can install a game on my PS4 without deleting something else first, and game sizes are only getting larger. (And it only makes things worse that so many games, even if you buy them on disc, still install 20 GB or more onto the hard drive.) And while I do applaud the PS5’s level of backward compatibility, the fact that it can immediately play existing PS4 libraries (not to mention the PlayStation Plus Collection) means a lot of players already can’t fit their library onto their console.

Not acknowledging that storage is quite limited feels like denial of customer reality - the time and cost of having to download and re-download huge games because you can’t have them all on your drive at once, as well as the fact that the store will eventually be taken down preventing any future re-downloads. If that happened right now with my PS3, I’d mostly be okay - it’s got all the games I really care about installed right now. If it that happened right now with my PS4, I’d lose a lot.

(By comparison, on my 3DS, Wii, Wii U, and Switch, I have never once needed to delete a game to free up space.)

I think it’s plausible that given SSD costs, launching the PS5 with relatively low storage makes sense - but claiming that the feedback isn’t happening just makes Sony look out of touch.

I’m always a bit baffled and disappointed when a brilliant game design idea isn’t immediately stolen by every similar game that follows. I previously mentioned that I don’t understand how City of Heroes’s simple and clever solutions weren’t copied by every MMORPG with tank/DPS/heals combat or character levels and individual quests.

Recently Kotaku ran an article complaining about brightness sliders in games and implying that no better solution has ever been found, and this reminded me that Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty had a representative gameplay screenshot on the brightness screen so you could see what the game would actually look like based on your adjustments. This game came out in 2008. Why are so many games still just asking the player to make an arbitrary symbol “barely visible” with no real indication what this will mean for the actual gameplay?