Category: Platformer

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Game Ramblings #126 – Replaying Ori and the Will of the Wisps

More Info from Moon Studios

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: Xbox Series X
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, Switch, Windows

I guess this is going to be a bit of a weird ramblings in that I don’t really plan to talk about the game, at least not directly. It’s been out for long enough that it’s been done to death. What I will talk about is the fact that playing this on the Series X redeemed the game for me. The first time I tried playing this I was incredibly disappointed. The gameplay was definitely there, and when it worked well it was really solid. But that was the problem, it generally wasn’t working that well. Framerate problems, load hitches, and crashes were all over, and it made getting through the game incredibly frustrating. Luckily we’re now back with faster hardware, not to mention a patch or two along the way. Now that the game’s unimpeded, it was exactly what I wanted – a Metroidvania with great flow, fun puzzles, and a lot of good reasons to re-traverse things as you gained new abilities. Simply put, this is now what I expected the first time around, and I couldn’t be happier about that.

I start here not because the screenshots are important to gameplay, but because I took damn near the same screenshot on the Xbox One and Series X, so it’s as good a visual comparison as I have. This level of change is indicative of the difference between the initial release and the one I played this second go around. It’s not just that things are clearer, but that certainly helps. Instead of running at 30ish, it now runs at flat 60 (or higher if your TV supports it). Instead of having load hitches all the time, there’s none. Where I was seeing crashes maybe every 30-40 minutes before, I didn’t see a single one this entire play through. It was such a completely different experience to play it without technical issues this go around.

The thing about me shelving the original one is that while it really came down to technical issues, it was ultimately a boss that did me in. The boss is against a large frog enemy in a sort of swampy area, and about half way through the fight you get sent underwater for good, which eliminates your ability to spend time healing in a pinch, adding a certain level of tension to the fight. Mechanically I knew the fight, but frustration absolutely got to me on it. The underwater phase just would not perform in a way that made the fight fun. In about a dozen deaths, I’d seen about a half dozen load hitches that would last for upwards of 3-5 seconds. The underwater phase itself basically guaranteed a framerate tank, which made fast movement difficult. At one point I’d gotten down to about 20% health remaining, and the game crashed.

Ultimately, frustration begets frustration. I get to a point when playing games where frustration at things just causes a landslide. Missing a jump can be frustrating in isolation, but is controllable. Dying to a boss is controllable when it feels fair. However, you start stacking these things up and I start losing those gaps where I have time to breathe and decompress. That causes impatience, which causes mistakes, which causes more frustration. When a game is crashing or having load hitches, all that’s happening is annoyances start to pile up that are not in my control, which just accelerates the problem. That is why I ultimately shelved it. It just wasn’t worth the cascade of frustration causing me to play worse.

This go around? I beat the boss on the third try, with the first two tries largely being me remembering the mechanics. No out of control frustrations, less annoyance, more patience, fewer mistakes. Now that I’ve beat the game completely, it turns out that for me that was by a long shot the most difficult fight anyway so doing it in the progression order I did the first go around was probably a recipe for disaster, but I did roughly the same progression this time and got through it. Not really because the game was different, but because it was now running great and I wasn’t pissed off about technical problems.

Cyberpunk was the big one this year that launched and had major obvious issues on console, but for me this one was my Cyberpunk months earlier. Metroidvanias are probably the one genre that comes close to JRPGs for me in terms of games that I will absolutely play above all else. Ori and the Blind Forest was such a spectacularly good game that shelving the sequel was something so unexpected that it blindsided me. Luckily, the current state of the game – especially on better hardware – has completely redeemed it for me. This is now the game I wanted to play, and not the game that crashed and burned. It’s now the mechanically fantastic game with incredible platforming flow. It’s now one of the flag bearers for the genre, instead of a game that wasn’t ready for launch.

It’s now a game that I recommend without question.

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Game Ramblings #121 – Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time

More Info from Activision

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Xbox One

I mucked around in the N-Sane Trilogy recently, and frankly it hadn’t aged well. The Crash series has always been on the far harder end in terms of difficulty, but that wasn’t really the issue I had going back to those games. There was just a lot of little things that caused a great deal of friction to the user in ways that no longer really fit in modern games. Crash 4 in that sense is a top example of a few little things going a long way. This game really isn’t that different from the original trilogy, but it’s such a drastically better experience anway.

If you haven’t played a Crash game before, there’s not that much to really explain. It’s a pretty standard platformer, but because it came out before the PlayStation had analog sticks, there’s a whole lot of side scrolling or running into/out of the screen, rather than an openness more typical of 3D platformers.. Where the Crash series really stood out was more in visuals and characters, and not so much in gameplay. Crash 4 is still basically that, but adds in a bit more of a loose sense of 3D space, as well as some masks that mess with the mechanics a bit. These aren’t usually big changes – a bit of gravity manipulation, maybe some time dilation – but they mix up the gameplay in fun ways.

Where this game also really hasn’t changed is that it’s still really fucking difficult. Some of that comes down to the camera – for example depth is often very not obvious and it feels like this is done on purpose. Some of that is in view restriction – for example traps like to be just off screen for you to fall into. Some of that is down to the timing window being really tight – for example if you don’t get on a wall run at the right height and don’t jump off just when you get the right sound effects you’ll fall to your death. Some of that is just physics being wonky – I died a number of times just to the jumps not really performing in a consistent manner, particularly on moving platforms. None of this is really new to the series. In the past this would be infuriating, and result in me shelving the games. However, this is where Crash 4 really shines.

That user friction from the original trilogy? It all came down to the lives mechanic. You had a small amount of lives, and when you ran out, it was game over. You lose progress in the level and have to start it over again. In a lot of cases, a game over would be followed by a game over where you didn’t even get back to the original point you were at. It was frankly a tired mechanic 25 years ago, and it’s even worse now.

Luckily, the real big change for this game was getting rid of lives. Ya, there’s technically a mode you can play where it uses the original lives system, but frankly I don’t see a reason to play it. However, they handle removal of lives in a way that works for all levels of users. Want to be that hardcore 100% run player that wants to finish levels without dying? Well, there’s rewards for that. But if not, you can die away and get through the level a checkpoint at a time until you reach the end. The challenge is now in simply iteratively progressing to the end of the level, not in being super careful to avoid losing lives. It reduces overall user friction and in many cases simply serves to improve the overall gameplay pace.

Speaking of checkpoints, those have seen some nice touches. Since lives are now removed, you can be dying a whole bunch of times and not making forward progress. The checkpoints that were there in the past are still there, and even more important now that you can die a lot. However, in a lot of cases you may get stuck in one area where maybe you have a long stretch between checkpoints or a specific obstacle blocking you. Part of the improvements here is that after a few deaths in a segment, you gain an Aku Aku at spawn. If you die a few more times, but have progressed far enough between checkpoints, you may gain a new dynamic checkpoint that replaces a crate. Again, it’s an improvement to reduce friction and allow you to perhaps take things a little less carefully, improving the overall pace.

The checkpoint work also extends to boss fights. In general I found these to be surprisingly easy in relation to the normal levels. That said, the checkpoints in place were well appreciated. The way those work in bosses is to put a hard checkpoint after each damage event, which typically would come as a result of some stretch of obstacle avoidance gameplay. It meant that seeing and losing out to a new mechanic in a new phase of the fight wasn’t a huge loss in time; it was just a reset to the beginning of the phase, and a chance to use what you learned to get through it. Again, another case of reducing friction.

Ultimately it’s that reduction in user friction that makes this one feel like a modern videogame. They didn’t have to fundamentally change the gameplay to be like Mario or Ratchet or A Hat in Time. They didn’t have to artifically make the game easier and leave their nostalgia blast behind. They didn’t have to change genres to appeal to a modern audience. They simply had to take friction points and get rid of them. I know that sounds easy to say, and I guess to some extent it is, but it’s not a choice without some level of care behind it. The points of friction that got removed are all things that have a very specific purpose – they allow people who are masters at the game to still earn rewards and have a sense of accomplishment for completing levels in a “perfect” manner, but allow the game to gracefully adapt to skill levels down the chain. It’s a shedding of tired things like lives and regression in progress in order to favor a less careful and higher pace of gameplay. It’s keeping simply what worked the best, and getting rid of things that worked the worst. In doing these things, what pops out is a game that is simultaneously retro and modern, and much better than the core trilogy that precedes it, despite largely being the same.

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Game Ramblings #119 – Super Mario 3D All-Stars

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Switch
  • Originally Available On: N64, Gamecube, and Wii

Replaying these three all at once is an interesting experience. They’ve each got their quirks, and to some extent some have aged better than others, but there’s still a lot to like here 15-25 years later. There’s a common mechanical thread that you can see through each of them and you can see the lessons learned in how the next game has improved. That process of iteration gave us three great games, and ultimately led to Super Mario Odyssey, which is arguably the best of the 3D series.

Of the three, Super Mario 64 has aged the worst. That’s not to say it’s a bad game, but it definitely feels like a 25 year old game. Mechanically it ends up just feeling kind of stiff. All of the new 3D moves are there – your triple jump, side somersaults, wall jumps, ground pound – but they aren’t quite there yet. Jump distance is still a little too dependent on your speed, the threshold for side somersault is still a little too tight, the difference between diving forward and doing a jump kick is still a little too vague, but the thread is there to future games.

The biggest problem at this point for Mario 64 is the camera though. It’s just not good. It wasn’t particularly good when it came out, and compared to modern 3d platformers it’s pretty rough. The mix of some camera control for the player and some forced rotation from the level just feels really bizarre. The games that do it best today are ones that either go full player control or full level control and stick to making those feel smooth. To some extent though, I think it’s hurt by playing on a modern gamepad. Playing on the N64, the different levels of camera depth and direction at least felt correct in that you press a button and a single action occurs. On a stick, there’s a large mental hurdle to get over when holding the stick off to the side doesn’t just smoothly rotate the camera. I don’t particularly care that they didn’t go actual remake on this one from an aesthetic level, but having the camera redone as a modern camera would go a long way to improving on the game as it exists.

Sunshine is where things start to really age better. The mechanics are just that little bit tighter across the board to where actions do what you want consistently without being either too loose or too tight on their requirements. The level goals are a little bit more clear, with a nice introductory cutscene before you start off giving you some clue as to where to head. The levels themselves also have a lot more variety, since each goal is tailored to the specific star, rather than having a sandbox level to get any star at any time.

On the other hand, there are definitely some things where it hadn’t quite reached modern smoothness. Kicking the player out of a level into the hub when they die instead of resetting the star is a weird point of friction to the experience that carried over from 64. The lack of checkpoints is similarly unfortunate, especially given they have checkpoints at the start of the handful of areas where they take away your water pack. This one is especially weird because giving more checkpoints would have allowed them to increase difficulty throughout instead of having sort of low difficulty with longer segments. As a whole though, Sunshine is still a really fun and really playable game.

Galaxy is where it all comes together. If this game came out today instead of 10 years ago, it would still be an instant classic. Mechanically, it’s extremely tight, having reached the peak of iteration on the core 3D mechanics at that point. Lives became so abundant that the stale mechanic of game over became near impossible to hit, which ultimately led to lives going away in Odyssey. There’s checkpoints all over, letting each segment of a goal be more interesting on its own, rather than having to be smooth enough for the player to marathon through the entire thing. The gravity manipulation added on top of it is still engrossing, and it’s something I wish we’d have seen used more often in the years since. Playing through this is one of the few times in recent memory that I’ve played a remaster or emulated port that I simply fell into, rather than seeing the warts.

It was also surprising to me how easily the Wii pointer controls moved over to the Switch Joycon. The pointing isn’t 1:1, but it still feels extremely natural. Given they also have a reset button, it’s also comfortable, which is a huge change. You find a comfortable resting point, hit the pointer reset button, and you’re good to go. The sort of flicking motions you do to grab stars is extremely natural, and now that the spin jump is on a button, you don’t accidentally do that all the time either. It’s a minor change to the overall gameplay, but it goes such a long way to improving the experience over the original.

When playing these, it’s easy to see how much Super Mario 64 influenced the future for the Mario series. The move set alone is in everything Mario related at this point. Triple jump, wall jump, and side somersault are instinct moves in Mario games, and not just in 3D. The New Super Mario Bros games inherited just as much of the bloodline of Mario 64 as it did Super Mario Bros 3. These games were hugely influential on release, and are just as worth playing now.

Would I have liked to see Nintendo do something more than an emulated port for these? Sure. Am I disappointed that we got these anyway? Not at all. Playing through these games is still a treat, even with some of the age spots that are showing on them. There’s been a lot of 3D platformers in the 25 years since Super Mario 64 came out, and the three in this package are still right up at the top of the list in terms of their pure playability. Having them in one spot, and more importantly, having them easily on the go is a great package to have out there, regardless of how little things have changed.