Super Mario Sunshine

Mario Sunshine for the Nintendo Gamecube is the predecessor 3D platformer following in the footsteps of the incredibly successful Super Mario 64. The two games have a lot of similarities but also significant diversion and certainly their own identities. Mario’s moves are more or less the same although I’m pissed that long jump and backflip are gone. But in addition he now has the sentient water tank called FLUDD on his back which allows him to shoot things with water and also serves as a jet pack. Well nothing can’t be improved by adding a jet pack so that was a good move. It is still bizarre that even with a jetpack the fastest way to get around is to spam dive to make Mario skip across the ground on his stomach like a stone on water. That doesn’t make sense on so many levels.

I’ve played many Mario games before, (unless you’re counting as a percentage from overall Mario games,) but none of the more recent ones on consoles like the Galaxy games. This was the first time I’d heard many of these characters speak in full sentences. It was weird. So that’s what Bowser sounds like… I don’t know. I guess I was expecting to hear King Koopa from the shitty TV show.

The HUD is overly designed. I hate that text box… or boxes… or curved slots? For individual text lines? Seriously, I’ve never seen anyone exercise such flagrant disregard for graphic design in such a critical feature of a video game. It makes overbearing sounds as the text types out too. Oh, well while we’re at it, could we also have fireworks that go off every time it completes a new word and then a little trumpet fanfare sound every time it moves down a line too? Every time you stop for two seconds these stats comes up to suffocate your view. Look, if I want to see all that shit I’ll pause the game and look at it. Right now I’m trying to either figure something out or enjoy the scenery. In Delfino Plaza there’s this stupid message text crawl at the bottom which I have never read. A lot of stuff should have been simplified here.

I actually like the setting of the tropical island a lot and the fact that you can actually see the other levels off in the distance like you’re in a legitimate geographical location that has relevance to the other locations is really cool. But when I look closer, some of the set pieces and even some of the levels in general are really hit and miss. I liked the resort level just because the sun is perpetually setting there and the shadows are long. It’s just an odd time of the day that you rarely see highlighted in videogames. The splitting manta ray boss was a bit excessive though. And then I realize that every other chapter in the level takes place inside the hotel which just feels really confining for Mario. It is a different take on things which I appreciate to some degree but why so much of it?

I like Pinna Park I love the rollercoaster. But at the same time I hate how many of the rides don’t look real and useable. On the ferris wheel at the top of the hill, there’s no dock or ramp where the gondolas go through to indicate where people could board. No one ever rides it. The wheel doesn’t stop. You can’t get inside the gondolas. The only one that can use the fucking ferris wheel is Mario and that’s only if he executes a perfectly timed misty flip with a shitty camera angle onto the roof of a gondola. Amusement park patrons aren’t going to jump over a death defying gap to ride on the goddamn roof of the ferris wheel gondola. Same thing for the inverted ship rides. There are no seats. You can’t go inside of them. You can only stand on the deck until it swings so high, you fall off of it. What is even the point of this? Mario can’t even ride it. Everything feels like a facade or a decoration.

I did the minimum number of chapters on Ricco Harbor because just looking at it makes me angry. The platforming design is just so bad. It’s like they just tossed a bunch of mesh partitions together at random and said here, go apeshit. There doesn’t seem to be a clearly defined sensible path through it. They just saw that it was possible to get to the top of it and called it good. Oh and don’t forget to add a ton of shit to knock the player off so that they can have even more fun climbing up it again. A lot of stuff is like that. You stop and look at it for a long time and go, “Is this what I do?” I feel like most of the platforming sections that I solved, I solved because I found an exploit somehow with the jetpack, not because I mastered a well crafted puzzle.  

In SM64 probably 80% of the stars you could get without having to enter the specific chapter at the beginning of the level. You could select Boil the Bully going into Lethal Lava Land and end up going exploring instead and get the star for Red Hot Log Rolling or Hot Foot Into the Volcano. You didn’t have to commit to doing a single specific star which was good because It fostered a sense of adventure in the player and didn’t stifle them finding their own fun or objective. In Sunshine not only do you have to commit to a single scenario and a single achievable shine sprite but you have to do each one of them in order. If you get stuck on one, you can’t even access the ones after it until you beat it and there are ALWAYS going to be ones you don’t like and have no interest in doing. Why make us do them? It’s like if you went to Disneyland but had to adhere to a strict sequential regimen of a single attraction per hour and everything else was boarded up and inaccessible. Can’t do Space Mountain until you suffer through Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln.

Easily the worst part of this game is the isolated floating platform segments where they take away your FLUDD and stick you in some unincorporated bottomless pit room with a linear course that leads to a star. It often ends up being an extremely tedious gauntlet of trial and error that is entirely devoid of fun. The only reason I try to do them is so I can do something else which is an awful paradox to be trapped in. Why am I here? What does this have to do with anything? It doesn’t fit into the layout of the levels at all. They aren’t even in the levels. It’s like the designers had no more ideas on how to incorporate puzzles or games into the levels so they had to resort to just throwing in these arbitrary segments as filler. This looks like something someone made fucking around in Gary's Mod for half an hour. They feel like some kind of bonus stage or challenge mode which I would never bother with especially when they're all about as terrible as Rainbow Ride. Sometimes these segments are tied directly to the chapter select at the beginning of the level so you just go directly to them at the start without even entering the true level. Other times you find them in warp pipes or caves or whatever hole or doorway you come across and that is just the absolute fucking worst. Not only did you have to get to that spot which in itself can sometimes be a hassle but instead of being rewarded with a boss or cool sub area to explore, you get this nonsensical garbage.

Most of the time it’s not even a coherent platforming course. It’s just random shit that’s hard to jump on suspended in space. Do you remember where you went when you entered the pyramid in Shifting Sand Land in SM64? You went inside a MOTHERFUCKING PYRAMID, that’s where. The inside of a pyramid which had enemies, interesting, thematic, dynamic platforming and hazards. It even had a boss in there. You know where you didn’t go? Some lazy-ass abstract purgatory occupied primarily by levitating square watermelons and enormous sugarcubes. Every time I go in one of these places, I’m fooled into having a short burst of anticipation for new exploration, adventure, creativity and FUN. I expect it to be like the pyramid or the sunken ship or the volcano. Where will this hole lead? What will be in there? Oh, nevermind, it’s one of these… again. It’s like if you opened a buried treasure chest and inside was just a piece of shit. I can recall only one time where going in a hole gave a good payoff in Sunshine and it was the underwater cave with the ruins in Noki Bay.

So actually getting to the premise, there’s an evil Mario going around vandalizing the island and Mario who happens to stop by the island because… food, gets a community service court order to clean things up. Just plead guilty, Mario. We know it was you. You looked exactly like a satanic T-1000 and went around painting shit with a giant paintbrush. That was you, right? Well it turns out Shadow Mario is actually Bowser Jr. who has apparently mastered the art of shapeshifting somehow. Then the princess gets kidnapped. I’d complain about this story being played out but I like Castlevania so... Anyway, there’s a little simily I like to use to explain Bowser Jr’s role in the Mario universe. Bowser Jr. is like shit… That’s all. I don’t know why the Mario team feels demonically compelled to create a baby/kid version of every single Mario character. The games can be childlike but they don’t need to be made infantile by turning them into the fucking Muppet Babies. You know where I don’t want to see babies ever? In a video game that I’m playing. It’s like Nintendo’s target age demographic is aging inversely to the age of their actual fans.

There are puzzles that keep reappearing throughout the game like the eight red coins. I never minded that one because it was flexible enough that it could be integrated into any level in an interesting way and still feel fresh and fun. (e.g. the Red Coin Fish (but not the bird)) But how many times do I have to see that stupid giant squid with the cork in it’s mouth. You are also obligated to hunt down Shadow Mario once per level which is actually what progresses the story. This is simple in concept but annoying. You just chase him around the level, trying to hit him with enough water to stop him. This would have been a lot more fun if they actually designed some way to run, aim and shoot simultaneously. Instead you have to either stop to shoot which is only useful in the short moments that Shadow Mario stops when you fall behind which is lame or you shoot in short bursts while jumping which is lame and highly inaccurate. A couple of times I lost track of Shadow Mario and didn’t know where he was. Needless to say, I lost interest. Gee, it sure would be cool if there was some other objective I could work on right now instead. I guess I could collect a hundred coins for a star. Wonder which will take longer...

I’ve never been a fan of Mario’s vocalizations. They’re just stupid. No one sounds like that. I guess they weren't that annoying in SM64 save for the incessant hooting he does when he has low energy. Unfortunately they got worse in Sunshine. Not only does he hoot with low energy, he also does his yah wah hoo’s (etcetera) in a listless monotone like he’s Ben Stein which unfortunately is not as funny as it sounds. It’s like he’s contractually obligated to do it even when it’s exhausting or contrary to how he truly feels. It’s weird. Then there’s the gratuitous fast paced grunting when he carries anything and the constant Woowoowoowoowoowoowoo when he does hand over hand monkeybars like he’s Jabberjaw or Curly from the Three Stooges. Why?

In one chapter there’s a contest to find the largest watermelon on the beach and roll it to the competition official. On the way there is all manner of enemies and obstacles that can break the watermelon and make you have to start over. So I find a watermelon that’s bigger than everyone else’s and successfully bring it in and the guy says this.

Says the guy hiding his blind lazy eyes behind sunglasses. I assume his hand is clutching an invisible cane. Complete, bold faced, weapons grade horseshit. Just come out and say it. Say “I want the one way up on top of the hill because it’s the biggest pain in the ass to get.” You don’t need to be coy with me. I’ve played video games before. I’ve seen this trite phenomena many a time now.

Yoshi, (yoshies?) are in the game and rideable though I don’t really know why. Instances where they appear are so few and they don’t have much of a purpose. They basically only exist to remove undulating gelatin zig-zags, that block all of maybe five things in the whole game. Any time you have to use Yoshi to do something, the challenge is centered around the fact that Yoshi controls like complete ass compared to Mario with a jetpack. This whole thing has a similar feel to many of the characters and game mechanics in Banjo Tooie. It’s just one of those things that the developers clearly wanted in and were grasping for any excuses to include regardless of whether it made sense or added anything worthwhile. Each time you have to find a yoshi egg somewhere but you can only hatch it if you bring it the correct kind of fruit. And here is mostly the only reason to include fruits in the game. Instead of making and shooting eggs, the yoshi piss a stream of colorful juice out of their mouths to simulate FLUDD mechanics. In place of the water gauge you have a stomach full of juice. This is both the yoshi’s life and ammo gauge. It also drains slowly over time. if you don’t keep feeding your yoshi with fruit, they evaporate. They also evaporate if they touch water. They also have a three light years long tongue. This must be some different kind of yoshi breed because it pretty much flies in the face of everything I’ve learned as a yoshi biologist up to this point. Also why have they not died out from natural selection if they can’t go without eating every two minutes and can’t fucking touch water?

In closing here are some arbitrary gripes. It’s great how coins that pop out of something last all of half a millisecond before disappearing. What the hell? Did that bird just try to take a shit on me? That damn Delfino Plaza song sounds like a sped up version of the Motel Six song and is going to drive me insane if I hear it one more time. Who is this racing dumb fuck? Let’s all give him a round of applause for winning the Delfino Ugliest Stupid-Ass Motherfucker Competition out of a whole island of mutant goo monsters and a princess who looks like a sentient inflatable sex doll.

Halloween 2015

My jack-o-lantern creations for this year include Cheshire Cat from American McGee's Alice (on half craft pumpkin) and the Dead Hand miniboss from Zelda: Ocarina of Time (traditional pumpkin.)

Ju-On The Grudge: Haunted House Simulator

Ju-on on the Wii is as you would expect, a game based on the J-horror movie Ju-on, or better known in the US, “The Grudge.” Not sure why both the original Japanese title and its English translation made it into the game title. I guess they wanted to make sure everyone knew what it was. Anyway, it’s a first person “haunted house simulator” divided up into five short episodes making it a pretty damn short game. In each episode, you take on the role of a different person, (all in the same family being tormented by Ju-on,) who has to solve simple puzzles in an environment where the lights don’t work even though the elevator does. Meanwhile, creepy phenomena happen around you.

Sometimes you’ll have a face to face encounter with the grudge. Typically when this happens, it takes the form of a quick time event with arrows prompting you to wave the wiimote different directions. If you fail a single prompt, you die and have to start over from the begining of the episode. There’s also ones where you hide and have to keep the wiimote cursor within a shrinking/moving ring. The most difficult QTE’s are always toward the end of the episode which is just great in a one shot no checkpoints game when the complicated deadly thing is at the end. Oh boy, I know that the more times I have to go through a gauntlet of the same exact scripted events that I’ve already seen, the more scary and entertaining it gets.

When I first started this game, I automatically connected the nunchuck, expecting to be using the joystick for moving but no. The only thing you use is the wiimote, waving it around to steer, (aim the flashlight,) and the directional pad to move. Goody, directional pad in a 3D game. My fave. It works okay. Not great. Still doesn’t have shit on a conventional controller with dual sticks and you’ll still occasionally find yourself spinning around and looking at the floor for no apparent reason. The character walks excruciatingly slow. I guess this is to control the pacing of the episodes but it’s so annoying. Sometimes a noise will happen or something presumably appears out of my field of vision with a sting and I’ll just keep plodding along like nothing happened because it’s too much of a pain in the ass to turn around and look. It’ll probably be gone by then anyway.

At the end of a chapter, or when you die, you get a rating of how you did. There are two meters, the fear meter and the sissy meter. The completely optional objective is to keep them as low as possible. I don’t think you get anything for doing good but the game berates you if you do bad. This is an interesting idea. Too bad the way it’s implemented makes it completely dumbfuck inaccurate. The sissy meter as far as I can discern just measures time spent in the episode. I guess the idea is that a sissy goes through a haunted house slowly. But in practice in the game it mostly means that if you explore or get stuck for a while, it translates to you’re a sissy. That’s not even taking into account how incredibly slow your character moves to begin with. I like exploring. I want to be able to see all of the scares and find all of the secret items. Was that not more or less the point of it all? If that means a jaded horrorphile like me is a sissy, then fine. The scare meter has to do with your reactions to quick time events. I don’t panic during these. I’m always as accurate to the best of my ability, unaffected by anything happening on screen unless it’s visually interfering with the prompts. I do it quickly and precisely but with exaggerated gestures. I do this because there is a lot of prompts on screen and/or I don’t have faith in the functionality of the wiimote. If I appear panicky, it’s because I don’t want to do the level over again, you know, just like in every single other QTE that exists regardless of horror elements. So the game gives you a low score for taking too long when they made your character walk super slow and it gives you a low score when you flail around with a controller that is designed to be used by flailing around. Fucking brilliant, guys! The scientific community needs to be alerted of this new method of fear analysis! We’re on the cusp of a fucking paradigm shift here!

Oh and nice mirrored/reused textures too you lazy bastards.

I did get a good score once. It works like this: knowing exactly where to go and what to do essentially gives you a low sissy score. Being apathetic toward failure and death during QTE’s gives you a low scare score. If that sounds like the perfect storm of fun, this is the game for you.

Ironically this is actually one of the least scary "scary games" I've ever played. It has the potential but I think the mechanics and the presentation kind of kill it. It's very linear almost to the point of being on-rails, (if you could go back and forth on the rails. But I guess if you were really trying to simulate a haunted house, it would be linear.) The events are all scripted and you know which ones can kill you and which ones can't. Any deadly encounters are all settled on reactionary time instead of your combat or escape abilities. There is no sense of increased vulnerability like there is with a life gauge or dwindling supplies... unless you count batteries but that's much to simplistic.

Finding batteries around in the levels is necessary to progress. Think of it as life support. If you run out, you die. Typically the hardest thing is finding that second battery in the short time you get before your first one runs out. After that it’s usually not an issue if you keep your eyes open.

Episode four is the hardest. It has you play as a security guard at a mannequin research facility where scientists are making strides in the field of creepy mannequin placement in dark buildings. The power got shut off by something weird on the security monitor. You’re supposed to go to the breaker room and switch it back on but you can’t get in without the three number door code which you have to find in three pieces scattered around the building. Why the hell do I not just know the code? If one person in the building is going to know the code for the door, it’s the damn security guard. I was also disappointed that I wasn’t able to put in the code manually. If you have two out of three numbers and you know the order, you can easily guess the third by trial and error… if you can do it manually. The final QTE is just nuts and I failed it several times. Even after I passed it, I still wasn’t sure how I did it because it was not an effort of the conscious mind. Something else took over.

Everyone dies at the end of their episode but you are required to pass the final QTE just so you can live another five seconds and accomplish nothing further. Why do I have to start over if I die? What is the ultimate difference if I die now versus five seconds from now? Or hell, why not just die at the beginning of the stage? Then you should get a game over screen and the next episode is unlocked. Nothing matters. It makes no difference except maybe in the final episode.

In order to unlock episode five, (the final episode,) you must collect all of the torn pieces to all of the secret paper documents scattered throughout the levels. What did I say before? I want to collect all of the pieces? Well not now that I have to do it to finish the game. Now it’s tedious and boring.

I got stuck on episode five during the cat event. (Think Neo dodging bullets from agents but instead of shooting bullets, they’re throwing cats.) I couldn’t figure out the final gesture so I kept failing it. For the longest time, I thought it was just up but it’s actually thrust as in thrust the controller at the screen. Oh, sorry. I was confused because the arrow wasn’t three-dimensionally pointing through the screen. My first question is why is the arrow placed near the top of the screen where up always goes instead of in the middle where it could carve out it’s own niche? My second question is why don’t you establish what the gestures are before hand so that people can recognize them on screen? Up to this point in the game, I had gotten by with just the four movements on a two dimensional plane, up, down, left and right and those didn’t need explanations but when you pull this shit out of thin air, it’s confusing. It makes no sense to introduce two new gestures at the very end of the game.

Anyone else think Grudge Girl looks cute, like in some of the parts where she just grabs your arm? No? Okay…

It’s hard not to compare Ju-on to Calling since they have many similarities. I can say without a doubt though that Ju-on succeeds in being better than Calling. That’s not saying much since Calling holds the distinction of being the worst game I’ve ever played released on a major console. Ju-on can beat Calling simply by virtue of being a shorter game.

Shadow Man

Shadow Man is odd. It’s a 3D platformer that has a Voodoo motif so it at least gets originality points. Actually it’s based on the comic book series of the same name but it’s still different from anything you’ve played. The plot is that the antagonist, Legion is creating an enormous facility in hell called Asylum. In it he plans to house the most vile souls all in one place to feed off of their energy and use it to bring about the apocalypse. At the center of the whole thing is Legion and five serial killers including Jack the Ripper and someone called the Lizard King… not Jim Morrison.

The vast majority of the game takes place in Deadside which is basically hell. The landscape is barren and flowing with blood and lava. Everything is a shade of brown or grey. Some of the doors look like assholes. If you’re lucky, you’ll see something with an extremely muted monochromatic pallet. All and all, it looks pretty fucking boring, (especially the overworld,) but isn’t that pretty much representative of most Playstation games from that era, (even though this game was on all major platforms of the day.) Playstation had better sound and visual capabilities than the N64 but N64 games in general were more interesting to look at because Nintendo dared to use fucking colors. The lack of color is one thing but then there’s also the areas within Asylum that have all this machinery and just an incessant racket and droning of infernal mechanisms and hissing steam and pistons. This shit is making my brain go numb.

So you go around collecting dark souls which, at specific amounts, increase your voodoo power and allow you to open doors to new items and areas. There are 120 dark souls all together. So how many do you need to get to beat the game? I swear if you say 120, I will fucking cut you. There is nothing worse than a mandatory collectathon. Just ask Jet Force Gemini. Luckily no, you do not need to embark on a completionist’s journey to beat the game. You only need about 90 but there are still places in the game you can’t go until you get all 120 of them which leaves me to speculate if maybe you get to go up on top of Asylum and meet zombie Yoshi if you do it.

The gatekeeper at the entrance of hell is Jaunty, a snake with a human skull for a head that wears a hat and speaks with an Irish accent. The hell? Where did they come up with this idea? Is it a voodoo thing? I’m honestly so ignorant about voodoo, they could pull a lounge singing mantis made of Rice Krispies Treats out of their ass and I’d be like, huh… must be a voodoo thing. This was actually one of the largest obstacles for me getting into the game. While I value the novelty of the setting and lore and culture, I’m really at odds not knowing anything about it beforehand. You are dealing with a wide assortment of voodoo items and mythos all with… Creole names, I guess. Not any language I speak anyway. Nothing looks familiar either. You can’t just look at something and guess what it does. There are no in game tutorials but there is an in depth manual. However even the manual is questionable.

Gads are special tattoos that allow you to do things like swim in lava or touch hot things. One of the gads called the poinge gad allows you to climb up bloodfalls. In the manual, it just refers to it as the poigne and shows a picture of a claw-like glove saying that it’s a device used to climb bloodfalls. There is no such item in the game. The thing that allows you to climb the bloodfalls is not a physical tool but merely a magical tattoo which grants you that power. Obviously at some point in the game’s production it was planned to be a device because they made a render of it and described it as such but the developers must have changed it to a gad power late in the development and never conferred with the copywriters and print graphics people. Kind of funny.

There are items you can and can’t use in Liveside versus Deadside. In Deadside, your handgun turns into a soul gun that shoots shrieking wraiths and grows with your power. In Liveside, if you die, you go to Deadside. In Deadside if you die, you go to the entrance of the area you’re in. You’re essentially immortal. In Deadside, you can be under lava and blood without needing to breathe. If you’re in Liveside, you can’t hold your breath for longer than about five fucking seconds and then you die instantly. You’re basically just a normal guy while in Liveside. Not being able to use mystical voodoo shit in Liveside kind of makes sense but why in the hell can’t I go tearing ass through Deadside while dual wielding an Uzi and a shotgun? In fact if my handgun turns into a soulgun, why can't my other weapons do the same?

Personally, I never even use the voodoo items aside from the projectile shield. I don’t really know that they provide much of an advantage over the soul gun and with aiming and hit detection as iffy as they are, I might as well just mindlessly spam everything with the soul gun’s infinite ammo versus running down the voodoo meter until it’s empty when I need it for something.

For voodoo weapons You have the asson which shoots fire, the baton which shoots fire, the flambeau which shoots fire, the calabash which explodes and shoots fire and the marteau which is a jawbone… that shoots fire. Can you say redundant? Most of these things have an alternate purpose to interact with specific things in the environment. The asson, however, is completely pointless. It does nothing that the other things can’t do. One of the many barriers opened with specific items you’ll find around is the bloody sheet which you have to open by burning with the flambeau. Seriously? I have five fucking weapons that make fire and only one of them is acceptable to use to burn something? Not to mention that I could easily get through a sheet with a non voodoo operated pocket knife. Hell, maybe even a stiff breeze would be enough to do it in. The gads, except for the climbing one, all have to do with fire as well, touching hot things with your hands, walking on embers and even swimming in lava. You would think that once you have all of those abilities, fire hazards in general would be pretty much irrelevant but no. I can be submerged in molten rock but a flame the size of a campfire still hurts me. Dumb.

It could be that I’m playing the Playstation version of the game using the backwards compatibility of the PS3 but the engine and animations will shit the bed on a regular basis, leaving me frozen in place while in combat but that’s okay because it probably happens twice as often to enemies. Sometimes I’ll get frozen in a specific pose but will still be able to move or rather slide across the ground. My favorite is the mid stride freeze because it looks like you’re doing Gumby’s one-footed slide when you move.

Enemies without projectiles almost never hurt you. They may come flail at you but rarely do they actually manage to hit you. They pose nearly zero threat. They are basically just there to annoy you. Ninety-five percent of the time you die it’s because you fell in lava… and didn’t have gads.

Ignoring the hub, the levels are divided into three different types, temples, thematic places within Asylum and places in the living world. The temples all supposedly have themes like fire and life but those names would be equally relevant if they were assigned randomly. Hell, the fire temple has less fire in it than virtually any other temple. All of these places are formulaically designed to piss you off. Every one of them has a special spot with a particularly long and tedious platforming segment over instant death lava. If you make one mistake, (or the platforming is just shit,) you die and go back to the beginning of the temple. You will do every segment enough times to perform it flawlessly or quit the game. That’s the deal. There is actually one spot in the Blood Temple where in the middle of platforming, you have to jump and hang on a ledge which is iffy at any time but this particular ledge is the only curved one in the game and I guess was too much for them to figure out how to code because it’s glitched, making you let go or even float off to your death before getting in position to jump off. I figured this out in only two wasted trials but it could potentially ruin someone’s week if they don’t catch it. Luckily, the place you are supposed to jump to next is close enough to circumvent the ledge if you line it up perfectly despite the shitty camera.

The hub world and overall layout of the maps in the game is some of the most confusing I’ve ever seen. It all just seems to be one circuitous path fractally branching out into infinity. The doors which line your path require various amounts of voodoo power to open, (AKA certain amounts of dark souls,) so it’s like advancing in Mario 64 with more stars or Banjo Kazooie with more jiggies. The doors could lead to anything from a level to an important item to just more path. There are no maps at all which means you basically need to memorize all of it but you may not even discover all of it. The first time I went to the Temple of Life, I thought I had cleared it out to the best of my ability. It wasn’t until I went back and really scoured the area that I found a tiny obscure hole which lead to… the temple. Yeah, I hadn’t even been to the damn temple yet. That was just the surrounding area. All levels are like that. You’ll think you’ve explored nearly all of it and then you find a hole after looking for an hour and find out that was just the tip of the iceberg in a confusing labyrinth of a dungeon.        

There is a lot of backtracking to places which you couldn’t open or things that you couldn’t use before which is horrible. Hey, remember that one thing in that one spot in that one area you passed by eight hours ago? No. No, I don’t and you should feel ashamed for even suggesting that someone might. Still not as shitty as Banjo Tooie though. Is it too much to ask that I can just go into an area and do it and then forget about it and move on?

The pacing of the game kind of sucks. The first 80% of the game is just spent running around wherever, amassing dark souls and collecting the three objects for the eclipse ritual which makes the world dark so that you can use your powers in the living world. Then you do what is practically a boss rush of five serial killers before getting to fight Legion. I mentioned that one of these guys is Jack the Ripper but I don’t know any of these other guys who seem to be just contemporary murderers locked up in present day Gardelle Prison. I thought these were supposed to be like supreme dark souls or something. How is it that they all not only all occupy the same time period but the same country and prison? Seems like a huge cop out. You already used one historical figure. Why not use Pol Pot or Caligula or Vlad the Impaler or Dr. Mengele? The Zodiac Killer. He was also a serial killer that was never caught just like Jack. The list of dark souls in the world is not short. Give it more relevance like the boss fights in Clive Barker’s Jericho. That would be a lot more interesting.

Respectively Deadside and Liveside are also the parts where you collect voodoo weapons versus real world guns which only happens at the end of the game. Consolidating everything together in big chunks like this feels unnatural and really burns you out. Imagine playing a Zelda game and doing nothing but running around in between dungeons with no clear or immediate motivation until you reach the end of the game where you fight all the bosses. Also nearly all of the cut scenes of exposition and plot development are dialogue with Jaunty or Nettie which you have to go seek out to see. Some people don’t give a shit about cut scenes but I do, especially when I don’t know what the fuck is going on most of the time but I don’t want to have to continually go visiting characters, hoping they have something new to say. Now that I’m thinking about it, if this game was made today they would likely solve the lack of exposition and the gameplay cluelessness by having Jaunty hide in your pants to go with you or be a voice in your head to explain shit which would essentially make him Atlas from Bioshock. Slashers! Give ‘em the one two paunch! Shoot ‘em and… shoot ‘em some more.

Things that made this game stand out, aside from the setting, were having a black protagonist and his dialogues and monologues. Every time you enter a new area, Shadow Man gives you a personal account of his thoughts and fears whilst reacting to his wretched surroundings and what comes out is as hauntingly visceral as James Earl Jones reading excerpts from Dante’s Inferno. Then there is the flip side where Shadow Man talks shit to every boss he comes across which is equally entertaining.

The creepiest part in the game, (at least for me,) was the reanimated headless bodies of the prisoners in Gardelle. They remind me of the headcrab victims in Half-Life. My biggest gripe is the freezing, which might have everything to do with the PS3's virtual console, but the bland environments is a close second. I guess this game did well enough to spawn a sequel on the PS2. Maybe if it's cheap, I'll get it.

Nintendo's E3 Misadventures Part 2

Okay, so Mario Tennis: Ultimate Smash on the WeYou  got mixed reactions but the important thing is that many people expressed displeasure with it which is totally understandable to me. It’s another fucking Mario Tennis game. Even if you insert Mario characters, how much enjoyment can you derive from literally just hitting a ball back and forth? Not a full price stand alone title. Not something to announce on the big stage in E3.

Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival for the WeeOoo was announced and for a very brief moment: Animal Crossing fans were on cloud nine. Moment’s later, they crashed through the Earth’s crust and into the seventh circle of hell. The game is not a new proper AC game. It’s an AC multiplayer Mario Party like game with only a mind-numbing board game and no minigames to offer. It also requires the purchasing of amiibos to play.

So what are amiibos? You’ve undoubtedly already seen them shitting up real estate in Gamestop and the electronics section of your local big box store. They’re those little plastic figurines of popular Nintendo characters that came out shortly after Smash 4 that can also be scanned with you're tablet controller to unlock various compatible game content. Back then, I tried for the longest time to figure out what exactly they were for. They just seemed so ill conceived with no solid focus. When they came out, they were sold as an unlockable AI companion in Smash that you could train with and which learns from you. So like something extremely trivial that should have been included in the game. “No, no,” cry the Nintendo slaves, “It’s okay that it unlocks trivial shit because it’s mostly just a nice figurine of your favorite characters for your shelf.” But why have game content that's only unlockable by a stupid $13 Happy Meal toy? “It’s just a bonus that comes with the figurine because Nintendo loves us,” argues the Nintendo zealot. Again, why have game content that's only locked on disk by a stupid $13 Happy Meal toy? Why have it in video games at all? What does it add to the experience to chop up a game into pieces which are then sold separately for obscene markup when you add it all together? If I want a video game, I'll buy a video game. If I want a toy, I'll buy a toy. I don't want to buy a toy if I want a video game. They don't need to be arbitrarily paired.

Nintendo didn't even fucking know what amiibos did when they made them. They just kind of did this extremely esoteric thing but they were mostly just figurines. But it didn’t really matter what they did because Nintendo characters being a masturbatory fetish for thirty-something manchildren meant that they flew off of the shelves like guns before a second amendment repeal. They were a blown out of proportion massive hit for no other reason than NINTENDO CHARACTERS! The vast majority of Nintendo characters aren’t well written and have no personalities to speak of which means they are liked not because of who they are but merely because of which game they represent. Or maybe they just like how they look. Amiibos were so popular that scalpers started buying them up and reselling them to FUCKING IMBECILES for enormous markup. This combined with Nintendo’s artificial scarcity / limited runs made it extremely difficult for brainless Nintendo consumers to get their hands on them without spending a small fortune. This should honestly be considered as exploitation of the mentally ill.

This is like the Beanie Babies cancer epidemic 2.0. The scalping thing wouldn’t be so pervasive if A: the dumbass consumers refused to buy from scalpers, thereby not sustaining demand and making scalping not profitable and B: Nintendo stepped in and actually took action in order to get more amiibos to their fans. Since both the company and the end user are morons, nothing has changed and it just seems to be spiraling out of control with amiibos' ever-growing ubiquity.

Amiibos’ popularity helped them grow their demonic roots into more and more games, slowly becoming increasingly “important” with unlocking more content in each new title. Then E3 2015 comes. Please note the word “Amiibo” is actually in the title of this game. The game has actually become a showcase for plastic figurines. You absolutely need the physical amiibo characters in order to unlock them from the game disk and play the game. The game is useless without them. (From my perspective, it’s still a shitty, useless game no matter how you serve it up.) You buy the game and then you buy the ability to play it by purchasing stupid toys. AMIIBOS SHOULD BE MERCHANDISE AND NOT VIDEO GAMES. That slippery slope of more and more video game content getting locked behind amiibos that you Nintendo kool aid drinkers were so quick to dismiss as baseless naysaying has become manifest and reared its ugly head. I hope you’re fucking happy. You dug your grave. You people voted for Hubert Humphrey and you bought amiibos! You encouraged scalpers. You encouraged Nintendo to entertain this asinine and quite frankly irrelevant and highly detrimental practice for video games. If I still gave a shit about Nintendo, I would be so fucking pissed at you. Instead I'll just express my disgust and disappointment with you as a fellow human being.

The spurned hatred of this game by fans compacted with it only being on the WiiU and its requirement for purchasing amiibos that will be commercially unavailable from being scalped like a motherfucker, means this will be the lowest selling video game in recent memory.

The amiibo thing was an issue here but the biggest problem was that big AC fans that have been waiting patiently for a new real installment, only saw Nintendo giving them the finger while blowing raspberries. Oh, you want a new Animal Crossing game? Here, have the shittiest board game imaginable locked behind a $30+ paywall. Hahaha! To be fair though, I don’t think Nintendo did it on purpose. They are too fucking oblivious to make an informed decision based on anything physically happening outside of the walls of their headquarters that isn’t based on ROI feedback. They're basically just making games alone in a cave and then handing them out through a slot in a door.

The other event that proved to be severely inflammatory was the showing of Metroid Prime: Federation Force and some sort of blaster ball soccer drivel. They’re for the 3DS and feature little deformed chibi Federation guys who look like Playskool toys. From the outside looking in, it’s just the same innocuous shovelware spinoff stuff shit out by Nintendo on a monthly basis. Nothing of note here. But Prime fans who haven't seen a Prime game in eight years, because it's been finalized as a self-contained trilogy, and would be elated with a surprise new installment or just a Prime-like game, weren't emotionally prepared to see this. It’s actually been five years since the last Metroid title, period which I believe was the infamously despised Other M, so everyone was already bitter and starved to see a new kickass Metroid game. This was not what they were waiting for. This offering communicated to fans that Nintendo doesn’t give a fuck about what they want and instead of just making the tried and true real game they’ve been waiting for, spent time and many resources developing something they never asked for and then slapped the name Metroid Prime on it, similarly to the AC Amiibo garbage. There is actually a petition to get this game cancelled. The coldest reality is that there will be no real Metroid on the U either and the wait continues.

Watch this guy’s face the very second “Metroid Prime” flies up on screen in the E3 trailer. That’s the look of a man who has died inside.

Some might argue that these fans are whiny, entitled little bitches and Nintendo should have the freedom to piss their own money away on their infantile fantasy ventures but it’s been EIGHT YEARS or at least FIVE YEARS after a shitty game. You don't seem to have any issues creating a new DS iteration every couple of months. Is that where all of your manpower is being siphoned to? There is no excuse to not hear these people and throw them a fucking bone in that time. Like it or not, Nintendo, like all businesses, is in a position where they can’t just do whatever the hell they want with their IPs and have everyone be happy with it. If they want to survive as a business, they have to know what their fanatical consumers want and produce it for them instead of hanging them out to dry, or worse, taunting them purposefully or in a ludicrously unintentional manner. In the eyes of a fan, they just performed a silly ventriloquist act with Prime’s corpse. Leaving it alone in its casket would have been preferable. Imagine if Valve Announced Half-Life 3 and then added that it was going to be a Space Invaders clone where you shoot headcrabs only for Android and iOS. You don’t do that shit. Nintendo CAN continue with it’s own moronic, waste of time and resources, projects but only within franchises that receive adequate attention with proper games. You want to keep pulling that stupid shit, give them a substantial game to chew on first and they'll be a lot more receptive. Or just don't call it "Metroid" but ESPECIALLY not "Metroid Prime."

If you look up the E3 trailers for Federation Force and Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival, you’ll see that they both have about an 80% disapproval rating. Tennis is about 50/50. That’s incredible. It’s almost like people actually stopped for a minute and thought about it. Wait a minute. They’re not even trying. They’re just slapping established franchise names on minigames. They’re not going to give us anything substantial for the WiiU.

Apparently some big titles will be held until Nintendo’s next Console codenamed the “NX” which, knowing Nintendo, will likely end up being called something about as tactful as the “Nintendo Piipii Pu.” Kind of ominously, Zelda U was never mentioned which probably just means that it's out of the release time-frame scope which they were talking within but still, that would have been something meaningful to people. Intelligent people are questioning this apparent abandonment of the WiiU by Nintendo. Idiots are sucking their thumbs and rocking back and forth in the corner, chanting, “The NX is coming. The NX is coming. Everything is fine. The games are coming on the NX. I am fully prepared to invest in another Nintendo console.”

The backlash happening now is the result of a long buildup of silent suffering and waiting and hoping that Nintendo will momentarily cease jerking themselves off for two minutes and pull through this time and fans have finally snapped. Nintendo doesn’t know what time period they are in. They don’t know what the video game market is like. They don’t know what current trends are. They don’t know who their customers are. They don’t know why people like their games. They don’t know what their fans want. They don’t stand up to help them when they are victimized while trying to obtain their products... until very recently when they upped production. They’re at a crossroads now. They lost core gamers when they made the Wii. They lost the casual gamers from that when mobile games became big. They failed to establish relevance with the next generation of gamers and the next one after that. The people they have now in their console market, whether they know it or not, are mostly older die hard fans of their older franchises that linger mostly because of that mental photo of the joy that they experienced with those characters when they were young and here you are, denying them that. If you do anything to drive off those people, who do you have left, Nintendo? Not even scalpers.