Topic: User Impressions/Reviews Thread

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Mirror's Edge: Catalyst (PS4)

First, a little bit of background on this review. At the start of lockdown this year, I bought a few PS3 titles online at a rather cheap price and had one of those was Mirror's Edge, a game that I had always wanted to play last gen but never quite got round to it. I didn't do full impressions but did put a few brief thoughts on another thread when I finished it. Overall, I enjoyed the game for what it was - it had aged, but it was a little different, had an interesting world/environment. It made me interested to play Catalyst but someone recommended I wait for a sale. Long story short - thanks to whoever it was that recommended that because it spent under £8 on it.

Mirror's Edge was a linear narrative story where you went from essentially level to level with story and exposition that explained your objectives. You used your parkour abilities to run through these levels with some combat mixed in (though was very much an aspect that was ignored). The replayability came from bettering times and redoing levels with challenges - this game is a staple amongst speed runners for obvious reasons and I can see the appeal.

Catalyst, on the other hand is that old adage - bigger is not always better. In fact, in this case, it is way worse. This game is open world, which on paper DOES sound like a natural evolution for this game. If the first game was about replaying it and finding your own quicker routes etc., why not have an open world where you are free to explore? Sounds great right?

The answer. Not so much. The world looks nice and at first, I was really liking the game. You could do missions, side missions, deliveries, timed races etc. There is lots to do. The problem though is that it gets old very quickly. Yes, the open world looks nice and opens up as you develop new abilities. However it isn't really open world - there are points where you HAVE to follow certain routes. Just through playing the campaign stories, you'll find yourself running the same routes over and over again. Now in theory, you could try and find new ways around where you are allowed to but ultimately, you are more than likely to just use the map assistant that directs you where to go. The main hub area that connects areas of the maps meant you are continuosly running through the same locales.

There is fast travel, but it comes part way through the game and you need to revisit your safe houses (which allow you to smart travel) manually before you can use it as a fast travel point. I quickly became bored of doing timed runs or even extra deliveries. Yes, these get you XP to upgrade abilities but these upgrades didn't make things seem much different so I just stopped doing them and focused on big side missions and the story missions. Even with just doing the story missions, you'll be retracing your steps over and over again. The problem is that the world is so similar to itself, you can't memorise the routes as they all look the same.

The campaign itself is probably about 8 ish hours and when playing the story missions the game is pretty good - it's ALMOST like playing the original. There are some good set pieces and the missions give focus. The story is OK but for some inexplicable reason, completely retcons almost every element of the first game for... well I don't know? They reworked several characters from the first game which makes this a reboot I suppose? I have no idea why. It's not like the original had some complicated lore or something that needed retconning.

A plus is that the character animations are really good, voice acting is pretty standard but it looks and sounds good overall. I had real issues with the combat and difficulty. The combat was my least favourite part of the original but this seemingly gives you less options but makes the enemies harder. One particular enemy set is so powerful that if they punch and connect, you go on your back and roll over (a very long animation) by which time the enemy has time to swing another punch. In the climax you fight two of these and twice i got caught in a loop of being punched between them and could not recover. In the end I defeated them by running around in circles for ten minutes and kicking one in the bottom any time I could sneak a swift foot in.

Apart from that, sometimes the traversal isn't perfect - again, this is most likely my skill but I just didn't have the interest to get better. I fell to my death a lot and if you want to get good scores in time trials you need to learn multiple routes that are not the one the map gives you and get every move perfect. I just didn't have the interest to do so. A lot of deaths feel unfair. However when it does work, it feels good and the movement is fast and performance is good on the whole.

The game ends with the expectation of a sequel - something I add, not as a spoiler, but a warning. I doubt EA will pay for another game given this one's reception (I believe it did not sell well).

If you liked the original then this might be worth a play but I'd recommend you focus on story missions and try to pretend it works like the original.

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[Part One of Two]

Super Mario 64 (via the Super Mario 3D All-Stars Collection)
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Completion Status: 100%; all 120 stars collected, and I even found the brief post-game Easter Egg

Super Mario 64 is a game I have a bit of a rough history with. I've, of course, heard people talk rapturously about it for ages, but didn't really have the opportunity to play it until it released on the Nintendo Wii's Virtual Console. What I encountered was a game that controlled poorly and looked like a nightmare thanks to the mix of incredibly low-poly character models and a vibrant color scheme that brought out every aspect of the game's deficient visuals. I quit after playing for a few hours and gave my opinion online, but... it kept nagging at me. This game is SO highly praised. So beloved. And I just could not get into it. I've tried continuously, over various platforms to get into this game over the years, and, every time, I ducked out after a point. I let the game get the better of me.

Well, with the 3D All-Stars collection and the game's official re-release as an HD remaster on Switch, I decided I was going to finally complete this game. I had to prove to myself both that I wasn't wrong about this game and also that it couldn't conquer me in the end. It's sort of like Stephen King's It, when the protagonists all reconvene years later to visit the town of Derry to confront the demons of their younger years. In this case, N64-era Mario — all eight polygons of him — was my Pennywise.

So, after a fascinatingly weird start screen where players can use a hand to interact with a shockingly high-poly model of Mario's face, Super Mario 64 starts out with Mario reading a letter Princess Peach has sent him, inviting him over for... cake. It's a children's game, so we'll accept that at face value. Anyway, Mario arrives to find the princess gone. We discover, via the toads in the castle, that the princess has been locked away by Bowser using stars, or something, and it's up to Mario to collect the stars and save the day.

So, to be clear, this is all expressed in, like, five lines of dialogue. There's pretty much no narrative context to what happens in this game, and virtually nothing in the way of an overarching goal beyond collecting power stars.

Power stars are accessed via a number of magical portraits situated throughout the castle, and Mario will need to complete various activities in order to gain the stars within each portrait. When the player collects a certain number of stars, they can confront Bowser across three boss stages - one early game, one mid game, and one at the end - and subsequently unlock other parts of the castle to access more portraits. The game's structure is extremely open-ended and allows for the player to collect stars in any order they wish.

I figure I'll discuss the game in the context of a handful of its worlds.

World 1 - Bob-Omb Battlefield

Although you do get to run around the front of Peach's castle when you start up the game, Super Mario 64 doesn't feel like it really begins until you jump into your first portrait. This is when the music kicks up and you're presented with a wide open field filled with bob-ombs and goombas. Running around this very rudimentary environment (there's a minimum of platforming beyond some basic jumps and sliding to be had in this world), the game does seem to communicate an infectious joy at the prospect of movement through three-dimensional space. This becomes apparent early on with the game's fixation on flying through the air via both the wing cap and via loading oneself into a cannon. One really does get the impression that one has stepped back in time and is seeing something that must have seemed truly groundbreaking and revolutionary at the time.

The first thing everyone will do in Super Mario 64 is run to the top of this world and have the King Bob-omb challenge them to a fight. And... boss fights in Super Mario 64 are incredibly lame. They mostly involve running around behind an enemy and then throwing them. In the case of King Bob-omb, there's no challenge whatsoever as he slowly and pathetically waddles around trying to face you other than the challenge of getting the game's controls to work like they should.

The player will likely encounter their first red coin challenge here, where they're tasked with collected six red coins throughout the level, usually in hard-to-reach or dangerous locations. In Bob-omb Battlefield, there's this one particular red coin on a slope that is just the damndest to try to collect whenever I play this game. Somehow, I always slide AROUND it. I eventually took advantage of this game's broken physics system (more on that later) and jumped uphill in a sliding position to collect the damned thing.

The player will also likely get their first taste of being fired out of a cannon here, and, boy, is it another massive irritation. When you enter a cannon (after unlocking it via talking to a red bob-omb NPC in the area, which is something you have to do in pretty much all of the worlds), you can aim where you want Mario to fly to, but, crucially, Mario never actually goes where you're aiming the cannon. He, instead, goes under this mark by several feet, so you have to try and mentally correct for this and then aim way ABOVE the target you're trying to hit with the cannon. This would be annoying in the best of instances, but two additional factors serve to drive me up a wall on this matter. First, you're often trying to hit a thin or small target when you're firing yourself out of a cannon, like a tree or a particular location on an otherwise inaccessible ledge, and this bizarre method of targeting makes it incredibly hard to hit your target. What truly infuriates me, though, is how, if you miss your mark with a cannon shot, it's usually going to send you FLYING OUT OF THE LEVEL. So not only does that mean you exit the level, have to jump back into the portrait, and then trudge all the way back to where the cannon is, but you also lose a life in the process. For missing a target you're not allowed to actually aim at anyway!

World 2 - Whomp's Fortress

This is the first would that involves much actual platforming. Unlike the rather cohesive previous world, Whomp's Fortress looks and feels like a lot of platforms, razor thin bridges, and moving parts slapped together haphazardly in order to harass and kill the player. If you don't end up getting on with the game, THIS is likely the first place you'll notice your irritation begin to flair up.

Mario's platforming toolset in this game is complex and acrobatic compared to his movement options in the 2D games of yore, and even, frankly, compared to certain more recent 3D entries. These motions are mostly well-thought-out, although Nintendo also included a punch/kick command, which has... always struck me as odd. Mario isn't a melee fighter outside of Smash Bros., and trying to punch goombas, koopas, etc. in this game just feels wrong when it's so much easier to jump on enemies. It's sort of like the opposite of A Hat in Time: that game had a very limited moveset, but it required you to combine movements in multiple ways to master its platforming challenges. Mario 64 gives you access to a ton of movements, several of which feel like they barely belong in the game at all. Again, this is another way in which Mario 64 betrays its age: it's clear that some of these movements were included in the game just because 3D was new, and they wanted to allow the player to try out a lot of different actions with their fancy new 3D Mario model.

Unfortunately, the rather decent 3D moveset is hampered by how terrible it feels to actually do anything in this game. Super Mario Sunshine, Super Mario Galaxy 1 and 2, Super Mario Odyssey... hell, even Super Mario 3D Land and Super Mario 3D World, all have an immaculate sense of presence to them in terms of how the games control. Movement is intuitive and satisfying. When you mess up in those games, generally, you feel that it's because YOU made a mistake in terms of how well you were controlling the character. Not so in Super Mario 64. Never have I played a game where just the sheer act of moving from one spot to another felt so... fraught, so anxiety-inducing. Mario feels like he's covered in a slick gel that makes him feel slippery at all times, and, as a result, I never felt like I was fully in control of him, no matter what surface he was on. Simply put, there's no sense of traction when it comes to Mario's movements in the game, and the game treats any level of unevenness in the geometry around you as an incline, which means that running too close to a slanted wall, or, god forbid, stepping on a low elevation of grass will send you flying across the level like someone out-of-control in an ice rink. There's also a heavy reliance on momentum when performing jumps, which become downright aggravating when combined with the game's tendency to push the player onto thin platforms and surfaces surrounded by bottomless pits, which are ALL over the place in this world.

Making this issue infinitely worse is the game's frankly obscene camera. The first major issue crops up immediately, when you realize the camera can only be rotated around Mario in a variety of preset angles, which often makes it impossible to focus on what you need to look at in this game. I understand that it's Lakitu controlling the third person camera in this game, but you'd think a turtle in a clowd could allow for slightly smoother movements of the camera.

But sure, fine, the camera can't be freely rotated. Not a problem if the camera is situated in such a way that it gives the ability to see where you're going. Something like Super Mario Galaxy, for example, gives the player almost no control over the in-game camera at all. But the difference between this game and that one is that the camera in SMG was pretty much always perfectly positioned to give the player a satisfying experience while platforming. I don't ever recall feeling frustrated about the lack of camera control in that game. But the camera in SM64 is almost never well-positioned. Lakitu, frankly, sucks at his job, and it happens more often than I can count that the camera gets 'stuck' on scenery, or isn't positioned in such a way that I can easily gauge where I'm supposed to be jumping, and sometimes can't even be adjusted to allow me to see clearly around obstacles.

In the context of this world, imagine trying to cross an incredibly thin, moving bridge when the camera is fixated on on one of the bricks in the wall behind you. You fall off, of course, both because of this, but also because the way Mario moves was, in the N64 original, intimately tied to slight fluctuations of the tall, stiff analog stick on that console's controller. Nintendo hasn't found a way to adequately emulate the feel of the N64 controller in subsequent consoles, so it can be difficult to make precise movements with Mario. He ALWAYS feels like his movement is out of control.

World 3 - Jolly Roger Bay

This is the first 'water world' in the game, and it's... alright? Weirdly enough, considering how rough around the edges everything else is, I thought Nintendo's first attempt at 3D swimming was perfectly competent. He actually controls much more nicely in H2O than he does on land. It's also sort of thematically interesting insofar as you interact with a sunken (and, in later missions, mysteriously fixed) treasure ship and come face-to-face with a terrifying, kaiju-sized eel underwater.

Mario has a sort of breath meter in this game, although not really: as he stays underwater, his HP slowly drops over time, and then refills once he surfaces for air. There's no dedicated breath meter in this game. The interesting thing about this is that, in other levels that have some water in them, you can actually game the system by diving into water and then resurfacing to fully heal Mario if he takes damage from other sources.

There's another water-themed world in this game, but it sucks (the game ACTUALLY makes you swim through rings at one point like you're playing Superman 64 or something) and feels like a worse version of this. Mario 64 has a mid-to-late-game issue with filler content.

World 4 - Cool, Cool Mountain

This is the first 'snow/ice'-themed world in the game, and it also houses some of my least favorite missions. I hated having to hunt around everywhere to find a baby penguin to bring back to his mother. There's nothing to it other than the irritation of finding the correct baby penguin (the more obviously situated one belongs to another penguin mother, apparently), and then the irritation of dealing with the awful controls and level design as you bring the thing down.

The truly awful aspect of this level, though, is this long, twisting slide you have to go down (first just by yourself, and then, in a crueler twist, racing against a penguin). There's a similar slide in the castle that you'll likely discover earlier in the game, but it has rails on the side and isn't quite as long (although there is a supremely annoying speedrunning star associated with that slide). There are no rails on this slide, though, and LOTS of twisting, which means LOTS of opportunities for Mario to go flying off and plummet to his death if you dare to gain even a bit of speed (which you need for the turns and constantly when you're racing the penguin). Words fail to even convey how annoying this slide is. The music that accompanies the slide feels like it's designed to be rage-inducing as well, especially considering how many dozens of times I had to listen to it over and over, all in a state of near-panic the entire time. This is pure anxiety in musical form, so I suppose, in some sense, it's a good fit.

It's hard not to feel like Nintendo is trolling you when most of its worst, most sadistic worlds and challenges are accompanied by this demented carnival music that makes every missed jump or slightly mistimed turn on a slide, which inevitably sends the player plummeting to their doom, feel that much worse. That also reminds me: there is a massive lack of musical variety in this game, so you'll here the same tunes repeated quite a bit. It's as horrible as it sounds.

So, yeah, I hate penguins now. Thanks Nintendo.

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[Part Two of Two]

World 5 - Big Boo's Haunt

It has often been held by fans of the 3D Mario games that Super Mario 64 has the best hub world in the series, and while I'm not inclined to be kind to this game, I do have to admit that Peach's Castle, despite its initially shallow presentation, IS rather impressively dense overall. Through the course of the game, you'll unlock the upper portions of the castle, the courtyard, and the dungeons, which all feature portraits to jump into. There are environmental puzzles to solve if you even want to find some of the worlds, rabbits to catch, secret exits that lead to alternate stars, etc. One of the most interesting choices was making the method of entering Big Boo's Haunt different from how you enter every other world in the game. In this case, you will notice a Boo drifting out through the castle courtyard doors at some point. You'll walk out to be greeted by a number of ghosts drifting around. It takes a while to figure out, but the largest Boo, if you attack it, drops a birdcage that becomes the portal by which Mario is able to access the 'ghost house' world of this game, Big Boo's Haunt.

Thankfully, Big Boo's Haunt stands as one of the least irritating worlds in the game. The frustrating misdirection of Super Mario World's ghost houses is replaced with something more conventional and atmospheric. Instead of platforming, the player will primarily be exploring a haunted mansion, filled with setpieces like a small library where a poltergeist flings books at Mario and a famous jumpscare in the form of a haunted piano that tries to eat Mario.

I do also want to briefly mention that, despite the accusation of laziness on Nintendo's part when it comes to how this package was assembled, that they did take some care to improve the presentation a bit. While this really would have fared better with a full on remake ala Super Mario 64 3D, a variety of texture work has been updated throughout, and the effort is most noticeable, IMO, in this world. The UI is sharp. Linework on the coins you find, portraits/designs on the walls stand out. The effect isn't overwhelming, but it does help to avoid the razor sharp HD polygons of the characters clashing with lower-res environments ala lazy efforts such as Final Fantasy VII's HD remaster on PS4. The game is still incredibly primitive looking, but it's, at least, a clean, sharp sort of primitive.

It's worth mentioning that the game only runs at 720p in both handheld and docked modes, though. I have no idea why, but I felt like it was probably worth mentioning. This isn't great for a remaster, but it's still obviously a big upgrade over the original resolution the game ran at on the N64.

World 6 - Hazy Maze Cave

Hazy Maze Cave is, per the name, dark and labyrinth-like in spots. It's a mostly unremarkable world, but I do want to use it to kickstart a discussion about the 100 coin challenges in this game.

The interesting thing about doing a completionist run of Super Mario 64 is that it becomes evident how oriented the structure of Mario 64 is around building the player's sense of mastery over their environment. This is primarily due to the 100 coin challenges. Each level has six listed star challenges (five that involves completing various tasks and then, always, a red coin challenge), and then a seventh unlisted 100 coin challenge. Each star throughout a level will introduce you to, usually, a small aspect of that level's design. In this way, the game's locations are offered up piecemeal to the player. 100 coin challenges, though, require the player to master completing various areas of the level one after another, because collecting that many coins usually means engaging in multiple activities that each reward the player with a star. And considering most enemies in a level typically need to be killed to reach the required coin threshold as well, it makes a lot of sense to think of 100 coin runs as master runs of a level. Your master run will task you will completing the entire level in such a way that you can quickly and expertly dispatch most enemies and complete most tasks because you've spent so much time previously engaging with the level design in order to collect the other stars individually.

Some worlds are overflowing with coins, and this is a piece of cake. But in other worlds, there are so few coins that literally one wrong move or missed enemy will cause the player to be unable to finish the challenge. I found this to be particularly true of Hazy Maze Cave, where I felt like I was constantly looking for new ways to bleed coins out of the sparse, poorly-lit environment. I suppose these levels with tighter coin restrictions force a greater level of mastery from the player, but, like so many of this game's other challenges, it feels like padding to cover up how uneventful the world itself truly is.

This is also one of the worlds that features one of Super Mario 64's two signature transformations: the metal cap. The metal cap turns Mario into... metal, which makes him stomp around and slowly sink in the water. It's as lame as it sounds, although, in the Hazy Maze Cave, it allows Mario to traverse environments filled with a toxic vapor without taking damage.

World 8 - Shifting Sand Land

One of the more interesting worlds in this game, despite the kind of generic desert theme it goes for. A large portion of the world is filled with quicksand, and the level itself is structured around a large pyramid in the center. This is the first world that really requires some level of mastery of the wing cap, the game's other primary transformation, which is... well, it allows Mario to fly, sort of. What is actually does is send Mario careening through the air uncertainly, and every flight with the hat is a terrifying ordeal where Mario feels like he's out of control and seconds away from crashing into something. This is primarily due to the deeply weird method of maintaining altitude and speed with the wing cap, which requires Mario to fly toward the ground and then violently pull back up, which sends him see-sawing through the air in a nauseating fashion. Flight should and could have been liberating in this game, but instead, like so many other aspect of Mario 64, it's just frustrating.

There are a number of interesting setpieces and gimmicks in this level. For one thing, a giant bird flies around the outside of the pyramid and will grab at Mario if it gets too close. For another, the pyramid itself can actually be entered, and is a large structure filled with platforming challenges, and even the only halfway decent boss encounter in the game! There are also large pillars that Mario will have to stand on top of to finish one of the world's missions: I initially flew to them because I was still thinking of it as a game with a semblance of consistency to its physics or environmental interactions, but, as it turns out, Mario can run vertically up these pillars without a care in the world, even as the slightest bit of unevenness in a bit of grass will see him flying across the level and, usually, to his doom.

A weird, one-off inclusion in this game that never seemed to return for future entries was Mario being able to lose his hat. In specific levels, environmental interactions can lead to Mario losing his hat. In most levels, this isn't a big deal, as, if the hat is blown off his head, it can easily be recovered. In Shifting Sand Land, however, the large bird that terrorizes the entire level can swoop down and snag Mario's cap with its claws. Interestingly, even if Mario dies, his hat will still be missing: Mario has to navigate his way deep into the level and make a point of snatching the hat back from the bird. The loss of his hat makes him take way more damage from enemy attacks, so, as you can imagine, it was a wonderful move on Nintendo's part to force the player to trudge through a level filled with uneven terrain and infuriating instadeath traps to recover it.

That's the bulk of what I wanted to discuss. I mean, I could discuss the horrible, cruel lategame levels, like the one where you're inside a giant grandfather clock, and every missed jump sends you back to the bottom of the clock, and the way the platforms move differently depending on what in-game time it was when you jumped into the clockface (sometimes the platforms will move sporadically and with no clear pattern, which, as you can guess, is a real joy); or the one where you're standing on a magic carpet in the air the entire time and have to precisely jump over obstacles to avoid falling into the bottomless void which takes up roughly 95% of the world around you; or the hidden wing cap level where, every time you fail to get all the coins in the allotted time frame, you go back to the very beginning area of the game, and have to spend several minutes climbing the castle to get back to the stupid level; I could discuss all of that in detail, and innumerate the ways in which this game irritated the hell out of me, but I think I'm largely done complaining about it now. There's an odd sort of pride and peace that comes with fully completing a game like this, though. Hell, I'm even at the point now where, like older fans, I've largely adjusted to its eccentricities and can now clear the majority of its challenges with a minimum of trouble. I even, having moved on to Super Mario Sunshine, kind of miss its acrobatic long jumping.

There are also two interesting worlds I didn't mention, but which are unique enough to merit mention. In Tiny-Huge Island, you're either tiny or huge compared to everything around you, and the perspective change dramatically changes how you approach the level. It's really quite neat, because you can enter the world in either form via two separate portraits, one normal one for the tiny perspective, and one portrait that's HUGE in comparison to the player. The game uses some weird perspective trickery to pull this off, because the portrait looks like it grows in size as you approach it. It's very neat. There's also Wet-Dry World, in which you have to interact with objects to change the water level of the world, which impacts what stars and challenges you have access to. It recalls Ocarina of Time's famously annoying Water Temple, except, here, it's actually executed fairly well.

With that said, I'm... done. I'm done. It's over. I can't really imagine myself ever revisiting this game again. It's a relic of an earlier time that I'll happily leave in the past from now on. I may or may not check out the revamped NDS version eventually, but otherwise, that's it.

Burn in hell God rest your weary soul, Super Mario 64, because it's time to go on to much better games.