@nessisonett My sister, for her part, loves gore films and stuff like bloody surgical footage, but she can't play Monster Hunter because the pained sounds when you wound creatures in that game, and especially the limping behavior when they're grievously injured, just does her in.
@RogerRoger Everyone's different, and has their own triggers and limitations. With that said, I'm not TOO worried about being desensitized as someone who has, on at least one occasion, seen brutal real life violence first-hand, because it's so different than the cartoon excesses of a game like DOOM. If I worry about the effects of any video game violence more broadly, it's the far less intimate 'depersonalized' violence of games like Call of Duty, which organizations like the US Army are using to 'game-ify' war and death by de-personalizing it. Granted, I suppose DOOM does as well, but it's very upfront about what you're doing. You always see the full and immediate consequences of what you're doing.
With all that being said, I've noticed that seeing some level of suffering first hand and the natural process of aging has had a softening effect on me over the years in terms of where I'm willing to draw the line with my entertainment. When I was a teenager, I could have played something like TLOU Part II just fine, but it approximates horrible and needless human suffering enough that it would just hurt me these days. Of course, this is all just me: as I said, we all have our triggers and limitations, and I think it's perfectly valid to drift away from even obviously outlandish gore if you feel like it's going to move you in an emotional direction that's unhealthy for you.
Your pieces flow great and are well-written, so I'm rather impressed that even the longer ones are essentially written in one go. I wish I could do that. There are two or three shorter reviews where I was able to do that, but, in general, anything longer or more elaborately constructed takes time, planning, and a lot of effort from me. I do appreciate your "ripping the band-aid off" philosophy as well. It's so easy to allow self-doubt to win, say: "this is embarrassingly poor work that nobody else should be forced to read," and lose out on hours of what might have been decent writing.
On the forums, I have that issue as well, but posting is no real solution for me, since I can endlessly edit my posts. I'm ALWAYS tempted to go back and tinker with what I've written. I succumb to the temptation quite often, unfortunately. Kudos to your approach of posting something and then leaving it to the world.
A few other sites to watch, if I haven't linked to them before:
www.cheapassgamer.com (this is a useful resources for sales across ALL platforms)
www.greenmangaming.com (some really impressive deals on newer games at times)
www.reddit.com/r/GameDeals/
@Ralizah It’s been said but I’ll add my adulation for the fabulous DOOM review. It was fun to re-experience the game in my head through reading your thoughts. And I pretty much agree across the board with most of your praise. I’m coming from a different perspective with it being my first DOOM game, but it was no less enjoyable without the history to compare it to. Anyways, outstanding writing and spot on critique.
It’s interesting discussion as well generated by @RogerRoger@nessisonett and others, in particularly the ultra violence and where each of us draw our own line in the sand with content. I’m more squeamish than most, but found DOOM to be easy to digest after the first couple hours, and I think the “cartoony” nature of it is responsible for that. Most of my disdain for violence in media occurs when the violence accompanies some sort of emotional hook, and directors of games and film play into that purposefully at times (like the aforementioned tugging at the heart strings when a creature limps away in Monster Hunter World). In playing God of War currently, the irony is not lost on me of how there is a moment when an animal is killed (and I hope I’m not spoiling anything, I’ll try to be vague) when the music ramps up, the camera pans to characters faces to show regret and grief and I, as the player, can’t help but feel remorse and guilt, all the while I’ve brutally slaughtered countless demons and demigods prior and afterwards.
The ultra violence is the single most reason for hesitation to playing TLoU2 because of the cited realism and intentional weightiness.
Another example — I recently have been on a DC kick and watched the movie Joker and then immediately moved on to Birds of Prey: Harley Quinn and it’s an example of two very violent movies, but in the former you feel legitimate emotional impact and cringe at some of the powerful violence and in the latter it’s all comical and ridiculous. (Come to think of it, Birds of Prey’s violence probably seems comical because the movie is so atrocious that its very existence seems like a practical joke to the fandom... but I digress 😜)
Anyways, as time goes on (and whether it’s society and culture’s evolution or my own aging perspective of life) I am not as put off by violence per se as I used to be. I’ve found it a powerful story-telling tool. So for me it’s all about context.
@Th3solution I'm pretty sure I know the moment you're talking about. As someone who looks up movies beforehand to see whether that specific animal is going to be killed off for cheap dramatic effect early on, as they often are, you can understand why I noped out of TLOU Part II pretty hard.
I'm not into emotional torture porn either, so establishing guilt over behaviors that the player is forced to engage in seems similarly cheap to me. Like, yep, I sure feel bad about doing that thing you made me do.
I think you're currently playing Undertale for the Game Club, right? The element of player guilt figures prominently in that as well, but I've always loved how the game never actually forces you to engage in any of the behaviors you might end up feeling guilty about. Undertale satirizes the standardized and unthinking reliance on violence in RPG story progression, and so its effective use of guilt is a means to an end of making the player question their own unthinking obedience to its structure and mechanics. Your experience with the creature in question in TLOU Part II would have been far more meaningful if you had the choice of actually trying to avoid killing it.
I'm all about humanizing enemies in video games if there's a point to it, but the bit you're referencing, and probably the game in general, is just intended to inflict suffering on the player using its characters as a proxy.
@mookysam I never got on with the Wii's IR tech, personally. I like how gyro is just slight fluctuations in hand movements, whereas IR games require you to point at specific points in space relative to the censor. It's exhausting, and unlike a lot of people, I found RE4 almost impossible to play that way.
As for the juicy scale, maybe 0 could be like a lone grape that fell down the side of the fridge and turned into a shrivelled, forgotten raisin, shrouded in dust and mould. It's only company a dead spider with three legs missing.
That sounds awfully specific. Bad childhood memory?
@RogerRoger Yeah, we all have to carry our own crosses, in terms of what we've endured and inflicted on others in the past. I try always to never make assumptions about the lives and experiences of the people I talk to, and, as much as possible, temper the severity of my reactions to the often frankly baffling perspectives of other people with that inherent epistemic limitation in mind.
In terms of age and growing more empathic, I don't think it's actually anything inherent to the process. The cruelest and kindest people I've known have mostly been older individuals. Rather, I think, barring life-shaking events that fundamentally change how we think about the world, people tend to grow less spiritually pliable as they grow older. Maturity, as you allude to, also factors in, and seems to be connected to empathy in some manner. My father is not what I would describe as a "bad" man, but he is someone fundamentally lacking in empathy and maturity, and, as a result, I find it almost impossible to talk to him for any length of time without an argument brewing.
I'm glad the review index has been so well-received! Now I just have to hope I'm years away from a hard limit on how many characters that first post of mine can contain.
@Ralizah Yes, I am doing my best to play Undertale along with the club, although I’m not quite enjoying it as much as I’d hoped. This is my second attempt at the game, and I am liking it a little better this time. Part of the problem I have is honestly the paradigm shift in playstyle that you refer to and the first go around I didn’t really understand the game and how the aggressive response is optional. It’s a really fascinating design choice and I can see the power of the statement being made by the developer. But so far the message isn’t strong enough to make the strange gameplay enjoyable though. Perhaps it will if I can stick it out to the end.
Some of the best game messages or lessons that I’ve experienced have occurred at a game’s conclusion.
Dead or Alive 5: Last Round (PS4) - Don't have too much time to play PS4 these days, so I finally bit for this since I casually enjoyed the past DOA games as something to quickly drop in & out of, so I've goofed around with it enough the past few weekends to have some thoughts on it.
This title looks totally serious.
Gameplay:
It's a 3D fighter with a generally fast paced combat flow centering on a rock, paper, scissors mechanic (strikes beat grapples, grapples beat blocks, and blocks beat strikes) and combo juggling your opponent into oblivion (while it is possible to counter strikes at the right moment, which is useful in higher calibur play if you can get to grips with it, in general if someone gets locked into a combo prepare for around half of their total health to take a hit before really getting a chance to retaliate).
Otherwise the stages are highly interactive and will either have electrified boundaries (or even floors!) or have the ability for combatants to be knocked off a ledge or through a wall (and even through a weak floor!) into a different area accuring damage during impacts on the way down (some stages have a set number of drops, while a few actually infinitely loop between 2 or 3 areas). Maybe not the best for competitive play (though I'm sure there are options to shut it off), but as someone who just plays for casual fun I never tire of the spectacle (one of my favorites is a stage that starts off on the top of a skyscraper with some steel beams on one of the corners, and the first time someone gets knocked into the corner the beams fall down, and the second time the fighter falls off into a traffic accident caused by the beams, bouncing off of an exploding semi). There are usually some other interactive elements as well, such as objects (like glaciers, tables, etc.) that are breakable, certain grapples will be different up against a wall, and getting into water will temporarily wet the combatants' clothes.
In terms of content on offer it has a Story mode (a couple hours long campaign that puts you in the shoes of most characters, each usually has 3 fights, interspersed with cutscenes), Arcade (with 7 difficulty options, you'll face a set number of randomized foes), Survival (kind of an endless mode I suppose), and of course the standard Free Play & Training modes (including a mode where you can practice going through each character's combo pool). Most modes have Tag Team variants (which is pretty self explanatory) & online play. It even has a Spectator mode where you can view fights you've saved or watch endless CPU bouts with a (pretty barebones) photo mode so you can capture that special moment.
It has a pretty full roster that features nearly every character that has appeared in the series thus far, newcomers Rig, Mila, Phase 4 (a Kasumi clone), Nyotengu, Honoka, & Marie Rose, further Ninja Garden crossover with Rachael & Momiji joining the fray, Virtua Fighter guests Akira, Jacky, Sarah, & Pai, and even King of Fighter's Mai Shiranui (although a pretty natural fit, she's one of only two DLC characters not part of the core game).
Of course alt costumes have long been a core part of DOA's appeal, and the game doesn't short change on that front. Each character starts out with 2 costumes unlocked, and have anywhere from around 5 - 12 to unlock, with a couple usually being pallet swaps (the female fighters tend to have more costumes). They are unlocked in consecutive order each time you clear arcade mode with a fighter (as far as I can tell this can all be done so on the easiest difficulty, though I can't say definitively as I'm most definitely not going clear it a dozen times with each character). Outside of that it has an absolutely obscene amount of DLC costumes (some of the female fighters have dozens, & I mean costume counts that get into the 50's when combined with what they have in the base game). They are usually sold for $2-$3 a pop, or bundled together in $20-$30 groupings (the game itself at this point is $40, so even two bundles at this point will likely cost more than the game itself, and again it has over a dozen different bundles, so you do the math). Of course this is all purely cosmetic, so if you feel the need to buy absolutely everything rather than the occasional outfit for your favorite few characters maybe that's more on you (some people absolutely lambasted KT for the total cost of all the DLC). Full disclosure, I caved and bought a couple of bundles of crossover licensed costumes (including the Senran Kagura set), as the licenses are starting to run out and are being delisted from the store (the game came out in 2015, and a few sets were delisted earlier this year, while one of the sets I bought was delisted just a few days after the fact). The vast majority are original though (or from other KT owned franchises like Dynasty Warriors) so shouldn't be going anywhere any time soon. Another thing to note is that some of the DLC costumes get battle damage & break apart (they are noted by a red star on the selection screen).
I should also mention about the DLC costumes is that when you buy the game you'll be prompted to download a few dozen free "costume catalogs" as well. You don't have to download them, but they contain the data for the DLC costumes so you'll need them installed to see them online (if your opponent is using one) or buy the DLC yourself. Also, I forgot to mention before that each character usually has 2 or 3 random DLC costumes unlocked from the getgo along with their default 2 base game costumes (I guess as a taste of what you'd get with the full set), so that's another reason to download these. I figured I should mention it though as I've seen some confusion online from those who've purchased DLC that isn't showing up (it's because they forgot to DL the corresponding catalog beforehand).
Visual/Audio:
It was originally a PS360 title, so nothing cutting edge, but it looks really clean & performs really well on PS4. The fighter models themselves still look really appealing if I say so myself. Stages look crisp and range from futuristic labs/military instillations, colorful natural venues & tropical resorts, neon infused metropolises, dingy urban back lots & more.
Didn't really get a good overall shot of a stage, so here's Ninja Gaiden's Ryu Hayabusa doing a bit of self promotion while fighting Virtua Fighter's Akira.
DOA has always been known for specific "details" of it's character models, and DOA5: Last Round goes all out on options in that regard. To get the elephant out of the room first, yes, there are 4 different options in regards to the series' staple jiggle physics. It's set to "Natural" by default (with minimal movement), however they can also be set to "DOA" (classic eggagerated physics), "LR" (I'm assuming exclusive to Last Round, gives the female fighters completely bonkers DOA Extreme levels of mobility), or you can even turn them off completely. "DOA" & "LR" modes even include bonus jiggle mapped to the DS4's gyro function. Outside of that, there are options to turn on sweat & dirty appearances if fights last awhile or a character gets knocked to the ground.
I wouldn't say it has standout music, but what it has fits the theme of the game. Has kind of a rockish sound in the menus, and a soft ballad type number that plays during the story mode credits.
Story:
Believe it or not the DOA series does have an overarching narrative, though historically it's hit the same beats as typical fighter fare, with the mysterious organization known as DOATEC trying to learn the secrets of the Mugen Tenshin ninja clan in an effort to create super soldiers, and naturally they throw regular martial arts tournaments as part of their plans. Historically the story outcome was determined by which character you cleared arcade mode with (with only a few being considered canon ends, I assume), however that changes here...
You see, DOA5 is the first numbered entry in the series to feature a dedicated story mode with cutscenes and a set path (the first was Dimensions on 3DS, which cumulated the intended narratives of DOA 1 - 4 into one). At the end of DOA 4 Helena Douglas (the heiress of DOATEC's founder) destroyed the company from within (with the help of a certain ninja clan) after finding out the plans of the shadowy forces within, and here in 5, while building a newly reformed DOATEC she discovers the previous shadow forces have simply moved elsewhere continuing their work & she recruits the help of the Mugen Tenshin clan to shut them down once & for all (naturally throwing a martial arts tournament to cover her tracks in bringing them together). It's nothing fancy, but it gets the job done (though the end boss is a b**** as it can shapeshift into different characters at will, changing it's moveset). Ninja Gaiden's Ryu Hayabusa is (a playable fighter) heavily involved in the story as an ally of the Mugen Tenshin fighters (Kasumi, Ayane, & Hayate), and in fact the entirety DOA series (including the volleyball games) is canon with the modern Ninja Gaiden trilogy.
It should also be noted that DOA5 takes place after a 2 year time skip since 4, as a means of aging up Ayane, Kasumi and a few other female fighters to avoid criticism from western circles in regards to the sexualization angle (the two heroines were 16 & 17 previously, so now 18 & 19).
Conclusion:
It's not some GotY juggernaut, or even a fighter I plan on playing seriously, but I find it to be very fun comfort food when I want to jump in & out of something.
Currently Playing:
Switch - Blade Strangers
PS4 - Kingdom Hearts III, Tetris Effect (VR)
@RR529 Nice impressions on Dead or Alive 5: Last Round!
The only game I've played semi-seriously was the 3DS entry, which was a lot of fun, but man, that story mode was pure, unadulterated nonsense. Also, cranking up the 3D slider tanked the framerate. Still, it's easily my favorite fighting game on that system, and, from what I've played of it, I'd say there's a strong argument to be made for Dead or Alive 5 Plus being one of the better fighting games on the Vita. Pity the series seems to have bypassed the Switch entirely.
"DOA" & "LR" modes even include bonus jiggle mapped to the DS4's gyro function.
lmao
It's too bad Sony went full puritan a couple of years back. It'd be hilarious to see what fanservice game devs would have done with the Dualsense controller.
Currently Playing: Resident Evil Village: Gold Edition
@RR529 I put quite a bit of time into DOA5 when the free version hit PS3. I don't play it competitively, but DOA has always been a fun pick up n' play fighting game for me.
Since I'm a fighting game freak, I should probably write a review for one here if I decide which one to tackle.
"We don't get to choose how we start in this life. Real 'greatness' is what you do with the hand you're dealt." -Victor Sullivan "Building the future and keeping the past alive are one and the same thing." -Solid Snake
Just playing through the Game Of Thrones Telltale game (PS3!) on my PS5. It's an easy plat and I never got the chance to play it... it is one of the most boring experiences I've ever had. I keep zoning out and having to restart scenes. I'm never going to get through this!
@TheIdleCritic Funny. I could use almost those exact words to describe my reaction to the A Game of Thrones novel. Never ended up getting more than 150 pages in. Life is too short.
Currently Playing: Resident Evil Village: Gold Edition
@RogerRoger Yes... and no! I've only ever seen 2 episodes of GoT. The first was muted as my friend was watching it with headphones on, and I was next to him doing something else. The second was the one with the White Walkers. And at the end the main one held his arms up and all the dead people got up. That was cool. I actually really enjoyed it... but not enough to make me want to watch the rest of the show.
The game sounds interesting. Probably something I'd wait for VR tech before playing, because I think I'd be constantly distracted by the sense that I was 'missed out on' an integral part of the experience (even if that feeling is irrational), but it's good to hear the game works out well on a TV setup as well.
Also cool to hear about the nuanced characterization, split-perspective gameplay (playing as the baddies has never bothered me, really; I'm of the belief that, even in morally clear-cut scenarios, there's some value to seeing both sides of a story), lack of microtransactions (it really seems like EA has strived to make mostly non-exploitative Star Wars games, based on what I've heard about them), and strong campaign in general.
You mention simulation-y aspects to it... how complex are the controls? I assume it's more Star Fox than Microsoft Flight Simulator, at the end of the day?
Good work as always. The socratic format particularly works well with your more conversational style of writing.
Currently Playing: Resident Evil Village: Gold Edition
@RogerRoger I played through every season of The Walking Dead, dabbled in The Wolf Among Us, played the first episode of Tales From The Borderlands but it didn't do it for me at all. I want to play the Batman one, but whenever I try to download it, it ends in an error.
I've also played games like Syberia, so I've liked them in the past. I just found the pacing and writing in the Telltale GoT to be boring. Didn't grip me at all. Oh well, you win some, you lose some.
@RogerRoger Great review. And don’t worry — the people who say they don’t talk to themselves are actually the crazy ones. 😉
As for SW Squadrons, I think it sounds really good. I could never get myself into flight simulators though. This despite one of my historical fascinations being airplanes and airborne combat. I tried one of the Star Wars airship games back on PS2 or PS3 (I forget the exact title) and struggled to enjoy it, despite being a SW fanboy.
Glad you got along well with it though! Do you think this will motivate you to play games like Ace Combat?
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
@RogerRoger I played through every season of The Walking Dead, dabbled in The Wolf Among Us, played the first episode of Tales From The Borderlands but it didn't do it for me at all. I want to play the Batman one, but whenever I try to download it, it ends in an error.
I've also played games like Syberia, so I've liked them in the past. I just found the pacing and writing in the Telltale GoT to be boring. Didn't grip me at all. Oh well, you win some, you lose some.
I love TTG games, played all of them several times, I think the stories and characters are great. The best are the Batman ones, classic adventure games. Can’t recommend them highly enough.
The PSVR is the best VR system on the market today.
Completion Status: 8 hours; achieved the true ending
When people think about the classic "bouncing balls off a paddle to destroy bricks" genre, their minds often pretty quickly jump to Atari arcade classic Breakout, but my go-to game in this genre has always been the more elaborate NES version of the game, called Arkanoid. Arkanoid greatly improved on the original Breakout with a rudimentary story, basic enemies, alternative brick types (generally, some bricks were harder to destroy than others, which led to differing strategies when it came to clearing them off the screen), and power-ups for your paddle and/or ball (most of these power-ups had a risk/reward factor to them: the multiball, for example, put three balls on the screen at once, which was devastatingly powerful if you were quick enough to keep juggling all three, although there was often the risk of losing all three balls because your attention was split between three fast moving objects). I'd not seen much in the way of notable elaborations of the concept until Wizorb, which apparently originally released on Xbox Live Arcade in 2011. Descriptions of the game online promise a crossover between Breakout-style gameplay and role-playing elements, which is enticing: anyone who has ever played the NDS/PSP classic Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, for example, knows how that game utilized rudimentary RPG mechanics and progression structures to radically evolve the match-3 gameplay of casual puzzle games like Bejeweled. Did it succeed at refreshing and evolving the genre for a newer, savvier generation of gamers?
...kinda.
In Wizorb, you play as Cyrus, a wizard who has arrived in the Kingdom of Gorudo to help stop the onslaught of the Demon King's forces of evil. You do this by... erm... bouncing a ball and destroying blocks. OK, so it's not the most story-driven experience in the world. Your case of operations, as it were, is Tarot Village, which has been decimated by the war. The player will venture out from this town to various lengthy chapters, which are 12 stages long and always capped off by a boss battle at the end. When you complete a given chapter, you can return to Tarot Village and use the funds you've accumulated through the various levels (gold drops from many of the blocks you destroy in the chapters, and you gain bonus gold at the end of levels when you play well) to help the devastated townsfolk rebuild their village. All of the villagers you help will reward you with an item of some sort as thanks, and certain villagers will re-open shops that you can use to buy items to help you in the game's often challenging levels.
The chapters themselves might be a bit too long. I love the gameplay, but spending 40+ minutes on twelve levels can be a bit taxing on anyone's patience, given the simplicity of the gameplay. If you struggle to keep your eye on the ball, you'll also frequently see yourself staring at a game over screen of sorts once you run out of lives in the middle of a chapter (particularly in the brutal final chapters). It is, at least, the most involved game of its type. In addition to the usual ball-bouncing gameplay, you can use MP to cast fireballs that help you destroy blocks faster, and even summon gusts of wind the alter the direction of the ball. Levels themselves can have secret exits, which you'll need to find when revisiting chapters if you want to get the best ending. Multiple levels also have switches that, when activated, allow access to secret rooms that house shops, bonus stages, etc.
Unfortunately, there's a dearth of content after you beat the game, as Wizorb doesn't appear to have any unlockable gameplay modes, and even the town-building aspect is shallow as hell. The plot itself is so rudimentary that I didn't get any real sense of satisfaction out of seeing it to the end, either. Wizorb is fun, but it also feels a bit half-baked in ways that inspired some level of disappointment in me.
Control-wise, on PC, you can opt to use keys on your keyboard or your mouse to control the paddle. And, here's the thing: the mouse is wildly faster, to the point where it's often too fast. While it's much easier to keep up with a wildly fast ball, it's also easier to get carried away and overshoot your mark most of the time. Nevertheless, it's the way I chose to play, as it added a fun skill component to the moment-to-moment gameplay.
Presentation-wise, Wizorb is a bit of a slouch on the musical side, but the pixel art is vibrant and detailed enough to be easy on the eyes.
Wizorb is a fun variation on the Arkanoid concept, with more elaborate enemies, power-ups to collect, decent bosses, and, most importantly, a fairly lengthy campaign with replayable levels and rudimentary town-building elements. In terms of how it shakes up and/or evolves the existing game design of its genre, however, it's more Pokemon Pinball than it is Puzzle Quest: the fundamental approach to how the game is played is still almost identical. As someone who played countless hours of Arkanoid on the NES as a child, I relished the opportunity to re-experience this style of gameplay, but it does nothing to reinvent the wheel, and would benefit dramatically from post-game challenges or even a randomized play mode, as there's precious little reason to return to it once the game is over with.
I've decided I'm going to start rating modern and semi-modern games. Wizorb scores a solid 6/10 in my book.
I'd never heard of Descent, but it looks pretty cool. Kinda like a standard corridor-heavy FPS from the mid-90s, but in a gunship of sorts. Interesting approach! I've added it to my steam wishlist.
@RogerRoger I'm hoping for more than 30, but I've learned before that setting my sights too high is a fine recipe for disappointment! Playing through some of these random Steam games will help make that more achieveable, though. I'm trying to veer away a bit from the 80-hour epics I tend to gravitate toward.
RE: Wizorb - It's too long in some ways (I don't really want to just sit around and play 12 levels + a boss fight in a single go), and not big enough. If they'd added more story to it (it really is rudimentary), spiced up the town-building element a bit, split the chapters in half (so, double the number of chapters at half the length), and then added some sort of 'arcade/endless/whatever' mode, or even post-game content, it would have been really good. As is, it feels like a shell of a full experience. Which sounds scathing, I'm aware, but what's there really is fun. But it needs more.
Now that I'm onto it, they should have added unlockable magic spells as well. Skill trees would have been cool, too, to personalize your playstyle over the course of the game.
With that said, it gets away with its averageness because there just aren't a ton of games like it out there. Most indie developers would rather design the millionth Metroidvania or rougelike dungeon-crawler, by the look of it.
RE: Scores - You're right. My first review or two in this thread was scored, and I think I adopted it more explicitly before I created this thread. I guess at some point, I decided that assigning numerical values to complex experiences was stupid and abandoned the practice, but now I'm back where I started. I'm going by the NL/PS scoring policy now, since they describe what each value 'means' in a fairly satisfying manner.
I'm going to go edit in scores to my older reviews now, because the lack of consistency is going to drive me nuts.
Completion Status: Adventure Mode only; completed game and then also completed all available time trials
Crash Team Racing originally launched on the PS1 in 1999 as a Playstation-exclusive answer to Nintendo's hit Mario Kart franchise. Despite mechanically being a clone of Mario Kart, it benefited, like Diddy Kong Racing on the N64 before it, from a robust story mode, a feature Mario Kart games have generally lacked. Naughty Dog's racer has been fondly remembered by older Playstation fans for almost two decades, so it's probably not too surprising that a remaster was eventually released last year on modern-gen platforms. I initially didn't plan on playing it, but Nintendo recently made the full game available for free to NSO subscribers for the period of a week. I jumped in 2 - 3 days into the trial period, so I figured I'd spend four days or so thoroughly experiencing the game's Adventure Mode to get a feel for it. As a result, my review/impressions are incomplete, as I'm talking exclusively about the game's story mode.
Crash Team Racing begins when an alien named Nitros Oxide shows up and threatens to destroy the Earth unless a suitably skilled representative from the planet defeats him in a race. Not the most engaging plot on Earth, but it's a decent set-up for a racing game, and, hey, if that sort of plot worked for Urusei Yatsura, why not this? Anyway, in the Adventure Mode, you'll pick a character from the series and a vehicle and drive around a number of hub worlds finding races to engage in. The game is structured so that you have to come in first place in a set number of races in each world before you unlock a boss encounter. Clear the boss, and you'll gain access to the next hub.
Normal races play like Mario Kart: manipulate items and shortcuts to try and sabotage the competition so that you can pull ahead of them. I was surprised to find that, even on the normal difficulty, the game doesn't make this easy. Other racers are savvy and rarely screw up, so even a single mistake can lose you the race if it slows you down sufficiently (like flying off the side of a course). Thankfully, most stages here are fairly reasonable in terms of the way they're designed, with the only stage hazards I found to be particularly annoying being the piranha plants that littered one particular stage, which spend their sweet time attacking you and have an enormous attack radius. Cruelly, the game oftentimes placed items near them. I also noticed that, at some points, they were placed so that you couldn't seem them until you went down a ramp and were blindsided. But, in general, it's not the norm.
Stage design itself is... OK. Impressive considering they're fairly faithful to the source material, and are solidly more impressive than what Nintendo was doing years before in Mario Kart 64. Of course, the stages are a bit bland compared to the polished, rollercoaster-like extravaganzas of Mario Kart 8, but that's hardly a fair comparison.
In addition to normal kart racing modes, each stage also has two alternate gameplay modes. In Relic Races, you speed through a course as quickly as possible, collecting crates that will freeze the timer for different numbers of seconds. Rather than focusing on improving core skill, though, these races incentivize hitting as many of the time crates as possible, which makes for a rather interesting spin on speedrunning that made this mode a lot of fun. In the CTR challenge mode, the letters "C," "T," and "R" will be hidden throughout a stage, and you have to find them to complete the challenge. So they're like the racing game equivalent of the KONG letters from the Donkey Kong Country series. Unfortunately, I found this mode to be rather tedious, as I wasn't fond of completing levels over and over, poking through every nook and cranny and hitting every possible object to find these letters. I completed every course in the game in normal and relic race modes, but after completing one CTR challenge, I didn't bother playing any others.
Boss stages in this game are probably my second least favorite after the CTR challenges. After a brief voiced cutscene, you'll have a one-off race against villains who somehow manage to drive way faster than you are able to by default and constantly spew items out the back of their kart, meaning you spend almost the entire race trying to avoid hazards to catch up to them. I appreciate the attempt by the developers to give the game a satisfying structure, but I don't think boss encounters work well with this style of game, as they generally end up just feeling annoying. Interestingly, the difficulty of these encounters is all over the place, and at least a couple of the normal bosses are more difficult than the final encounter with Nitrous Oxide himself.
Throughout the Adventure Mode, a sentient tribal mask called Aku-Aku pops up to interrupt your gameplay experience and explain Really Obvious Things to the player, like one of those annoying sidekick characters that'll keep popping up in Legend of Zelda games. The thing interrupted the flow of gameplay enough that even my character became annoyed, and started glaring at him whenever one of his explanatory cutscenes was triggered.
Annoyed Coco
The game has a reasonably large cast of racers to choose from, although it's hampered by only being limited to Crash Bandicoot characters (with the notable exception of Spyro the Dragon as a downloadable character, although his availability seems to be sparse if you didn't compete in the event that unlocked him in the first place). Crash, Coco, and Neo Cortex are iconic, of course, but aside from them, you're stuck with a random assortment of animals and minor villains that I barely even recognize. Maybe the character selection is better for big fans of the franchise, but I found it a bit underwhelming. As with Mario Kart games, there are also baby versions of certain characters to unlock. I just stuck Coco Bandicoot, since her older brother Crash has always seemed a bit... high-strung for my liking.
Control-wise, the game holds up fairly well, although I really didn't like how drifting was handled in this game. Not only did it make me feel like my kart was out of control, but, when navigating tight curves and twists in the game's various courses, I had a hard time keeping an eye on the visual indicator at the bottom right of the screen to see when the exact window for activating a drift boost was. Supposedly if you're using a kart, there's a feature that makes it where your tires will glow when a drift boost is available, but playing a hovering, UFO-esque vehicle, I didn't have that luxury. And, in general, when I'm playing, my fingers are already glued to the buttons they're on, and it's difficult to think to move them to click a button to activate a boost. I won't count this as a flaw, but I really prefer Mario Kart's system of drift boosting, where you release a drift in order to activate a boost.
Performance-wise, the game is lacking across all console platforms. Like on PS4, the game is capped at 30fps, which is simply not ideal for racing games, which benefit tremendously from smoother performance. On Switch, it remains mostly stable, although small dips to sub-30fps happen here and there. The bigger 'sacrifice' in the Switch version is image quality: texture quality is worse, some visual effects are missing, and the game is notably lower res, topping out at 480p in handheld mode and 720p when docked. Despite these low-ish numbers, I actually felt like this version of the game looked better when undocked. The image is notably 'soft,' but aggressive use of motion blur and the heavily cartoonish art-style masks much of the dip in image quality (in motion, at least; screenshots look horrendous with the blur effects). In isolation, the idea of playing an undocked Switch racing game at 480p/30 makes me cringe, but, in practice, it worked out well. The game's vibrant art style still makes it one of the better looking handheld kart racers I've ever played.
Musically, Crash Team Racing is a massive disappointment, unfortunately. There's nothing aggressively bad about the OST, but the entire game is filled with very generic, samey kart racer tunes that sound almost like the same track, with only slight variations distinguishing them.
There's also a classic music option in this game that allows you to switch to the music from the PS1 version, but somehow those tracks are even worse than the remastered ones. Halfway through, I just decided to mute the game and put on my own music. It also meant I wouldn't have to hear the same canned trash talk lines over and over. If I had to hear Coco yell "get in the slow lane, buddy!" one more time, I might have gone nuts.
It's difficult to overstate how much the variety of modes, boss battles, overworld progression, cutscenes, etc. available in this adventure mode boost this game as a single-player experience. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe unquestionably shines in the multiplayer department, with smoother performance, better level design, gorgeous music, and so on, but that game is unquestionably disappointing as a single-player experience because of the lack of a sense of narrative or progression to it. It feels like a collection of (really great) levels and little else. Crash Team Racing's Adventure Mode, on the other hand, feels like a proper game, even putting aside the apparent wealth of content available outside of the Adventure Mode that I didn't engage with. CTR ended up being pretty decent, even if the music, several design choices, the roster, and a specific gameplay mode ended up rubbing me the wrong way. CTR's Adventure Mode gets a 6.5/10 from me.
@Ralizah Appreciate seeing a review of CTR. Admittedly my opinion of CTR kinda sunk a little while after the game came out, mostly due to most of the new stuff being locked behind the in game currency that wasn't easy to get a good amount of. I still enjoy the game myself, but if the game doesn't grab you with what's already there, playing the game alot just for the content probably isn't worth it.
That said, I swear I feel like the only Crash fan here and it hurts
"We don't get to choose how we start in this life. Real 'greatness' is what you do with the hand you're dealt." -Victor Sullivan "Building the future and keeping the past alive are one and the same thing." -Solid Snake
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