DWGames

2026-02-172026-02-17

Game Ramblings #220 – Retro City Rampage DX

Genre: Action/Adventure
Platform: Switch
Also Available On: Steam, MS-DOS, PS3, PS4, PSP, Vita, Xbox 360, Wii, 3DS, iOS, Android

This game is an absolute guilty pleasure. I’ve played this game a number of times on a number of different platforms and every time I play it it’s a great time. I don’t think I really need to cover what the game is that much here, but I was instead surprised by how much the Switch really brought the game into an interesting new place for me. Each platform has its own set of quirks – the Wii had NES-style controls, the PSP had its small screen experience, the PlayStation consoles had the big screen. I think the Switch might be the best of all worlds.

If you haven’t played this game before, the best way I can describe it is pre-3 Grand Theft Auto through a modern lens, fed through retro nostalgia. It’s top-down action largely involving over the top set pieces, stealing and driving cars around the city, and a bunch of missions you can play in generally a linear order. If you’ve played GTA 1 or 2, you know basically what you’re getting into.

So, why did it work so well on the Switch? Changing modes. I pulled this out to be my work day waiting on a build and can’t touch my computer which meant the Switch was sitting on my desk with a controller and being played in short segments. I then brought it up after work to play while other things were going on. After the kids went to sleep it then got docked and played in a long session on the TV. All three modes worked equally well for different reasons, but importantly they were all fun and they worked seamlessly. This game’s ability to context switch between short and long forms of game is really its biggest strength. If I had two minutes waiting for a build to deploy, I could turn it on and run through a couple of weapon challenges completely separate from the story. At night I could instead run through the entire chain of story missions without stopping. Both types of play were fun and just worked.

Importantly though, all modes of play also controlled well. The game is fun on some of the other platforms I played it on, but frankly this game works best as a twin stick shooter and that wasn’t always available. The Wii Remote doesn’t have any analog sticks. The PSP had the small screen, but only one stick. On the other hand, the PS3/PS4 have the good controls, but not the easy pick up and play short segments. The Switch simply turns on and is in-game in seconds in all variants. Some other platforms like the 3DS could do that but suffered on controls. The Switch is like picking the best parts of each and running with it.

It’s probably an easy conclusion to draw that the Switch works so well here, but I don’t really have that many points of comparison like this. There aren’t many games that are widely available on so many platforms that fit into a performance envelope where the Switch port isn’t obviously being hurt by the lack of hardware strength. Even with the Switch 2, it is often obviously sacrificing image and gameplay quality to choose it as your lead platform over a PC or current generation console. This game is a perfect storm where it just fits the platform perfectly.

2026-01-222026-02-05

Game Ramblings #219 – Yooka-Replaylee

More Info from Playtonic Games

Genre: Platformer
Platform: PS5
Also Available On: Windows, Xbox Series, Switch 2

There’s a quote often misattributed to Shigeru Miyamoto that goes something along the lines of a delayed game is eventually good, a rushed game is bad forever. This game is an example of why that quote exists in the first place. I didn’t particularly like the original Yooka-Laylee release, but this one was easy for me to sit down and just play. It was a huge transformation.

If I’m being perfectly honest, I couldn’t really point at many specific things that were improved. If I’m looking at the things in my other ramblings, I can definitely get a sense of where iteration occurred. I didn’t noticeably have problems with the camera this go around – it largely just worked and didn’t get in the way. I didn’t have problems with the writing, and frankly it felt minimally present compared to my recollection of the original. I didn’t have problems with odd mechanics in boss fights – they generally felt obvious and appropriately challenging, but without some of the oddities I saw in the original game.

I didn’t really have problems with how many pages were supposed to be collected or it feeling overboard. The pages that were there generally felt attached to some objective or getting to the end of a specific puzzle/platforming segment instead of simply being there. This one alone was surprising because there are double the page count from before, making this more in tune with how Mario Odyssey was handled. If I were to guess at what actually changed here for me is that the total sum of improvements elsewhere just made the experience of existing in the world more fun, so collecting more stuff happened naturally while I was having fun.

I suppose what I’m getting at here is that all of these things are signs of iteration done right. Every part of the original game has clearly seen some amount of work done to it to improve it from the original launch. Going back to the original quote, these were all things that felt bad and rushed that now are simply good, and when things are simply good they are out of the way of my interaction with them. What I was left with then is a game that was simply easy to play.

That said, there are two very specific things that I can point at that I know improved things. World expansion is gone and all platforming moves are unlocked from the start. These changes allow for open exploration from the start, removing what was a hugely frustrating progression blocker in the original. The original game was very obviously not meant to be a Metroidvania, so running into progression blockers was never a fun thing. Seeing a grapple point in the original without having the grapple power was a signal that I was going to have to come back later. Having to choose whether to expand the current world you are in or unlock another world was a sign that I was just going to have to do both anyway.

A lot of what ended up happening with these two changes is that the game just got rid of friction. I could certainly see arguments about games needing some friction to push players forward, and I largely agree. However, I also absolutely hate manufactured friction. In a 3D exploration platformer, both of those felt like manufactured friction. They both restricted the player from exploring in a way that felt negative in the genre. Not having explosives to take out specific doors feels appropriate in a Metroidvania where you’re starting from nothing and slowly building up your arsenal. Not having a grapple in a game where you play as a lizard with a very clearly extendable tongue that will be used for grapple felt out of place. Retraversing an area with new abilities to find more stuff feels appropriate in a Metroidvania. Unlocking an entire section of the world via magic pagies to find more stuff felt out of place.

This is probably as close to the game they intended to make as possible. Sure, it’s very clearly the culmination of a lot of effort on their part. However, it’s also the culmination of a lot of feedback. The changes made here are obviously targeted at things that reviewers and players of the original did not enjoy. They are changes clearly targeted at making the game better to play, easier to get through, and reduce negative friction for the player. This is now a game that should be celebrated for what it is, rather than a game that is negatively compared against the past. This is an example of the delayed game will eventually be good, even if there’s a slightly asterisk of it having been released once before.

2026-01-082026-01-08

Game Ramblings #218 – Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter

More Info from Falcom

Genre: JRPG
Platform: PS5
Also Available On: Switch, Switch 2, Steam

I played the original release of this game on PSP but admittedly it’s been long enough that I don’t really have much of a consistent memory of the experience. I do know I enjoyed my time with it, but I feel vaguely not enjoying the grind of leveling. Going into this I was a bit suspicious of whether that would happen again. Luckily what I found was a game that felt like a heavily modernized JRPG in terms of how it respects the player time, but this is definitely not a game without problems.

The thing that increasingly makes JRPGs live and die for me is combat, but not necessarily how good it is. It’s more often than not how much I need to engage in combat at this point. In particular, how much I need to engage in useless combat. I hate combat for the sake of combat because it feels like wasted time to me. The remake of Trails 1st really does a lot of good things to reduce that.

Similar to PSP, enemies are visible in the overworld, which on its own does a lot to reduce my need to engage in combat. However, there’s a number of things that reduce my need to be in combat. For one, there’s XP scaling based on level. At a surface level this allowed me to simply avoid combat with enemies that are lower level than me by knowing that the rewards are no longer relevant. On the opposite side though, this meant that I could effectively power level by engaging in combat with things higher level than me. What this really meant is that I was always in a level band that was relevant to the gameplay of the story around me. As a balance point it reduced my need to be in combat to just when it was important or worthwhile.

This is combined with the fact that you can do some basic real-time combat in the overworld, allowing me to mow through weak enemies simply to get rewards without being in the slower turn-based combat. If I needed specific items for cooking or Sepith, I could quickly dispatch a bunch of weak enemies and get them. This change also meant that running past enemies allowed me to simply run past them because the game no longer has the JRPG mechanic of battle starting immediately on first contact. It’s a small mechanical change with huge implications to the flow of the game.

Once in combat, there’s then a highly enjoyable system in place. It’s the same type of combat on PSP where the player has a mix of skills and magic. However, it leans into two things that I don’t think are seen as much as I would prefer – positioning and turn order.

The player has a wide variety of shapes of attacks from AOE circles to lines to cones, as well as bonuses for some attacks from the side or back. All of this allows the player to enforce positioning as a benefit. There were many times where I would knowingly drag some of my own units into different areas in an attempt to pull mobs into the line of fire and increase total damage output. The flip side of this is that defensively it’s also important to pay attention to where magic attacks from enemies will be so that you don’t leave your own party in range of attacks.

The reason this is important is that turn order is not static and magic attacks are not always immediate. Under normal circumstances magic attacks require a turn to start and a turn to execute. While that is happening, it’s obvious where the attack will go due to targeters on the ground. This gets into turn order manipulation. Some attacks can delay turns or reduce player “speed” that leads to determining turn order. Attacks can be cancelled by executing some moves that impede the target. Stuns can cancel a target’s turn if timed correctly. Basically, combat becomes a balance of getting damage out while also attempting to delay or cancel the enemy’s turn as much as possible, allowing the player to get through any battle with as little damage taken as possible.

Generally speaking, this all works great – right up until it doesn’t. That gets into my one big problem with the game. The boss fights in the game are just not tuned well, and it all comes down to the rage mechanic. Pretty much every boss in the game has some rage trigger where they gain a ton of basically every stat in the game. They gain speed to attack more often, typically several turns in a row. They gain attack and defense to be tankier and hit harder. They gain healing buffs to get their HP back up. It’s a good idea to make boss fights more dynamic. The issue comes in with the fact that the rage mechanics are universally able to send the player’s party from 100% to dead without the player even getting a turn to mitigate the situation.

It’s incredibly frustrating to be 5+ minutes into the fight, feeling like you’re in control, then having a rage turn kick in and send the party to its death. If it was generally avoidable that would be one thing, but a lot of them simply happen because of health drop. What ended up being my go-to was to just save all of my big attacks up until I had nearly stunned the boss, then dump them all at once. In a typical boss fight, I could get the boss to around 50% health, let it have a turn, then just absolutely nuke it with every attack I had – full 200 combat point attacks, party combo attack, etc – and get it to 0. That would generally avoid the rage mechanic, whether it was health based or due to killing off one of the enemy’s party members. However it was slow to grind out to the point where I felt comfortable doing that attack dump and when it didn’t work and I would be sent from 100 to 0 with no ability to do anything to prevent it, it was infuriating.

The nice thing is that unlike the original release, I could immediately retry the fight with lowered enemy strength. Boy did I take advantage of that option to just get through fights without the time spent on it again.

So I suppose at the end of the day this is a really good and generally fun JRPG that feels tuned to inherently screw over the player specifically during boss fights. I don’t remember that of the original, but I suspect that’s just a consequence of time since I played it. It’s so close to being a great game if a little more care was put into the tuning of boss fights. They can be difficult normally and still allow the player to actively avoid being nuked. It’s a thing I hope they look at before 2nd chapter comes out because it felt like the one thing heavily holding this game back.