Category: Platformer

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How’d It Age #5 – Blinx: The Time Sweeper

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Xbox

When I play older games, I like to think of them with respect to their contemporaries. Sure, part of it is just in seeing how they age generally, but also to see how they were compared to what came out at the time. The problem for Blinx is that it’s entirely outclassed by its contemporaries. While the game tried to do some interesting things, it really shows its age compared to other things that came out at the same time that I still continue to occasionally play today.

Blinx came out in October 2002, presumably to be both a mascot for Microsoft’s new console and a way to enter the Japanese market with something more familiar than Halo. The problem is that it was a very busy year for platformers. Looking at the list of big entries we’ve got:

  • Rayman Revolution in January 2001
  • Jak and Daxter in December 2001
  • Ape Escape 2 in July 2002 for Japan
  • Super Mario Sunshine in August 2002
  • Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus in September 2002
  • Ratchet and Clank in November 2002

Each of those games has something I can point at that simply did things better than Blinx, and that’s ultimately the problem with playing this game now. It’s obvious that even at the time it wasn’t doing anything well so much as doing things simply adequately.

For pure platforming, you could easily pick Jak and Daxter or Sly Cooper as the obviously better targets. In both cases, it simply comes down to speed. Movement in Blinx is excruciatingly slow in a way that really surprises me. It often feels like I’m moving at about half the speed I want to. It basically results in jumps being only for vertical purposes. They often play into that with the time control powers (ex: a bridge falls, you can’t double jump the gap – you have to rewind to rebuild the bridge), but that gets into another core problem with the game.

The collection aspect of time powers is a weird thing where you have to build combos of symbols from items dropped in the world. If you match 3 or 4, then you gain some time powers. However, if you don’t match that many before you’ve collected 4 total items, you lose them all. It’s a needlessly complicated system that simply serves to do two things – makes me go slower to avoid picking things up by accident, and makes me backtrack when I figure out the core conceit of the level and what specific time power I require. It serves to loop back to my point that the platforming feels slow, because the mechanics are simply reinforcing that.

The other core mechanic in place is a vacuum to suck up and eject trash at enemies. This is where Ratchet and perhaps Luigi’s Mansion come into play a bit. Sucking up trash is another thing that is excruciatingly slow. It requires you to stand still, suck up a thing for a while then move on. However, you can also suck up the time power items from above, which again reinforces going super slow to be careful to not screw up your combo. This would have been so much better served being a move that lets you passively pull things in that are weaponry and ignore the time powers, as well as not requiring you to stop moving to do so.

Ratchet and Clank is definitely the comparison for the shooting end of things, though perhaps it’s more the second or third game in that series that are better comparisons. In this game, it’s extremely easy to just miss your shots entirely. This game would have been better served with aim assist that later Ratchet titles had to make shots more reliable, but even against the first entry this just doesn’t feel like it spent enough time letting the shooting mechanics cook. It feels hard to aim and doesn’t really feel powerful. Enemies have pretty weird immunity frames – particularly for long periods after they’re hit – that just break the pace of whatever combat was being attempted. Overall this is just a case where it feels like the weaponry aspect is just unnecessary against a more traditional stompy platformer setup.

The final game in that list then is Super Mario Sunshine, and in this case I think the comparison is in the friction of taking damage. Blinx suffers from two problems in this case. The first is that taking damage simply breaks the flow of action in a negative manner. When you take damage, the action pauses, you rewind 5 or so seconds into the past, and lose ALL progress that had happened during that time, even if it was killing some other enemies. In large combat scenarios, it’s pretty frustrating to lose that progress to a hit. You also have a pretty limited set of hits that you can take (start at 3, expandable with in-game currency purchases) that can only be recharged via the time power matching system above or via a shop between levels. It’s slow to regain the retries and frustrating to run out of them.

Compare this against Mario Sunshine’s damage mechanics, where you can take a bunch of hits before losing a life, can easily recharge that with coins scattered all over the place, and time doesn’t stop if you take damage. This results in another case where the mechanics reinforce the game feeling slow, since it felt like I was being pushed to fundamentally avoid damage, rather than just minimize it.

It’s one thing to be frustrated by a game that simply feels old. Billy Hatcher from a couple posts back is a good example of that. However, this game is frustrating because it landed in the middle of a 3D platformer golden age and simply couldn’t keep up. Other games for other platforms were simply doing its core set of mechanics better. All that said, it’s available on Game Pass and you could do worse than free.

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How’d It Age #4 – Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Gamecube via Dolphin

This is such a Sonic team game. It’s a strange concept that could seemingly only come out in the early 00s. It’s a 3D platformer that completely skips the lessons that Nintendo was giving out with their own games. It has every single problem that the Sonic Adventure games have. But despite that, it’s still surprisingly fun.

The one thing that really stood out to me was how fun the egg mechanic was. Besides eggs giving you core abilities (faster movement, jumping, attacks, etc), it was just fun to see what would come out of them. Sometimes it’s little helper dudes with elemental powers that can help traverse levels (ex: a water-based seal that can put out fires). Sometimes it’s hats that can provide additional benefits to your eggs (Ex: iron egg that increases attack power). Sometimes it’s useful items (ex: TNT that you can toss at enemies). You can learn over time what the eggs are, but because they are sort of scattered around the levels haphazardly, you’re encouraged to rapidly grow and hatch the eggs and move onto the next one so you can build your arsenal up throughout a single mission. By the end of the level, you’ll typically have some partner animal, some hat, some item, and be able to use them to achieve whatever the specific goal of the mission is.

More often than not I was kind of ignoring where I was trying to go and just looking around to find eggs for the sake of finding new things to hatch, which is an interesting change from what is otherwise a pretty standard platformer setup. Each world has a set of missions that you do one at a time, where you kind of traverse different sections of the area during a specific mission. Disconnected from the egg stuff, it’s not really all that different from a Mario 64 pattern. However, the eggs provide a distraction and thing to go after that Mario or even Sonic Adventure really didn’t have.

However, it’s pretty obvious that this is a Sonic Team game because it has all of the hallmark problems of the rest of their 3D titles of that era. The game starts out pretty manageable, with simple flowing level designs that really encourage the higher pace egg rolling, but it starts to slowly go off the rails. Levels start concentrating more on platforming, which works fine but isn’t really a strong point. In a lot of cases, it just feels like there isn’t much flex room in the platformer timing. Gaps aren’t quite forgiving enough or platforms are a little too tall for the jump height to where it doesn’t necessarily feel hard but feels unnecessarily frustrating.

In particular, you start running into wonky physics issues as things get more complicated. Sometimes it’ll be that your egg gets on top of a platform but you don’t, causing you to fall to your doom. Sometimes it’s a slightly unpredictable way that your character’s speed works that causes you to roll off the edge of a platform instead of stopping. Sometimes it’s a set of rails that you’re trying to roll onto that you instead clip through. This is all distinctly not aided by a typical Sonic Team camera. It has a habit of turning when you don’t want it to. It has a habit of not ever being focused on the boss that is attacking you. It has a habit of clipping through the environment and completely blocking your view.

However, those were all things that I was expecting. I know it sounds weird to go into a game expecting some subset of bad things to be there, but with Sonic Team that’s just kind of the experience I know I’m getting into, for better or worse. Nights had these problems. Sonic Adventure had these problems. Post-Sega games like Balan Wonderworld still had these problems. It’s just one of those things that I go in expecting, so I was annoyed but not unhappy about it. The thing that kept me playing was the rest of the stuff around the known garbage, and that was fun. The core egg stuff was all just kind of fun enough for this to still be good 20 years later. It’s a weird little 00s with all those problems, but it’s still a totally fun experience despite the issues.

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Game Ramblings #166 – Sonic Frontiers

More Info from Sega

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Switch, Steam

This is such a strange game. It’s undeniably Sonic, but at the same time it’s not. It’s got little pieces of things like Sonic Adventure or Generations, but those are just hints. They trigger a bit of nostalgia but don’t lean into it. It’s got the speed of the series, but uses it in new ways. It’s still maybe not the best example of a 3D platformer, but it does a lot interesting, and importantly it stays fun.

A lot of the early discourse I saw on this one was that it was a Sonic game through the lens of Breath of the Wild. I don’t necessarily think that’s true. Ya it’s open world, and ya it has the overworld red moon reset mechanic, but I don’t really get the Breath vibe from it. What I do get is entirely Mario Odyssey. It has the same feeling that there’s something to do around every corner, and you’ll always be rewarded. It also has the same pace. Where Breath tolled out rewards infrequently through the shrines, Odyssey set moons down everywhere, to the point where you were getting moons sometimes at the pace of a few per minute. That is the feeling that I hit here.

The individual little actions are never that complex. It’s always some jump pad that gets you onto a rail, but they’re always fun. It’s almost always some little 15 second quick hit platforming segment, but it hits the manic Sonic pace and ends with some reward. Usually it’s something to collect to eventually push the story forward, but you end up hitting so many of these little things that you’re hardly ever prevented from moving the story forward if you want to. What generally ends up happening instead is that you start going towards the next story beat, find about 40 things to accidentally do along the way, forget where you were trying to go, and end up completely in the wrong direction while having fun the entire time. That’s the Odyssey feel to me, and it’s what made both games work so well for me.

How it all ends up tied together also works inexplicably well. The overworld has a bunch of little combat segments against minibosses that end up working well to show some combat variety. Some of them end up being dash target-focused, and feel more like traditional action bosses fights. Some of them are more focused on taking advantage of the more typical fixed Sonic camera and feel like more traditional gameplay for the series. There’s also a whole bunch of Generations-style Sonic levels that offer more of what the series was used to offer. I suppose in hindsight, these are a pretty good analogue for the Breath shrines, but they serve a different purpose. Rather than being puzzle segments, these feel like pace breakers. The rest of the game is short segments of fairly specific platforming elements. These end up being longer sections that are typically speed and spectacle with a reward at the end, allowing the player to have a high excitement break in the middle of smaller actions.

All of this is bookended by some extreme boss fights. These are all spectacle and basically involve you turning into a super saiyan and beating the hell out of a kaiju. Does it make sense? No. Is it challenging? No. Is it hilariously fun? Absolutely. There is nothing to these fights that actually ends up expanding the mechanics of the game. You’ve got a bunch of auto targeted weakpoints to hit while you have effectively close to infinite health, so long as you beat a soft timer in place. It’s all button spam and visual chaos and it’s incredible.

That said, the entire game is of a B-movie jank level that makes it simultaneously hilarious. The pinball minigame? Absolutely unplayable. The physics in less restricted movement sections? Shooting off in the wrong direction on a jump is not unusual. The story and voice acting and overall presentation? It’s there, but only to serve some minimum needed for the game to ship. Targeting reliability during large combat segments? As reliable as my internet was when I still used Comcast. The game often succeeds despite itself, which is something pretty normal for the series over the past couple of decades.

It’s frustrating that they continue to be unable to tie together a full package, but when the game ends up being so fun anyway I guess I’m not really too annoyed to care. The Sonic series has had so many ups and downs that when I get an entry that ends up being fun, I just roll with it. This is up there with Mania or Generations for me as games that prove the series still has some life in it. I also fully expect that for the next entry everything learned here will be thrown out and ignored, but I sure hope I’m wrong and we see more iteration on this idea. It’s got a lot of potential that has only started to show.