Category: Switch

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Game Ramblings #220 – Retro City Rampage DX

More Info from Vblank Entertainment

  • 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.

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Game Ramblings #207 – Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon

More Info from PlatinumGames

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: Switch

This game surprised me in a lot of ways. Unlike Bayonetta, it’s a low slower paced. Unlike many action/adventure games, it’s focused more on puzzle solving. Unlike most Nintendo titles, it has what initially feels like a complicated and confounding control scheme but trusts that its players will put the pieces together. It drops the series’ relatively realistic visuals for a storybook painter feel while also dropping as much of the over the top bombastic elements as a game about witches, demons, and fairies realistically could. If anything could be an anti-Bayonetta yet still exist in the IP, I suppose it makes sense that this is what it would come out being.

The control scheme is going to be the thing that makes most people pause when they look at this and go did Nintendo really allow this? It’s not bad, but it’s decidedly weird. The left analog stick and shoulders control Cereza. The right analog stick and shoulders control her demon. This is active at all times and a camera restriction forces them to be within a reasonable distance of each other. The thing that is unusual about this is that in an action game, splitting focus is typically wildly dangerous. I’m not going to say that I didn’t get into situations where I totally lost a character on screen, because it happened. However, I was often moving the two as a unit because of the mechanics that were chosen.

Cereza’s not really a combat unit in this case. What her powers are focused around is crowd control. She increasingly becomes able to stun lock one to multiple units throughout combat via her magic. This then lets her demon deal out extra damage, or in a lot of cases for my play style allowed me to focus damage on units that were not crowd controlled. The demon also has elemental powers to help specific situations – rock to break shields, water to kill fire, etc – so most of my time in combat was really a minimal portion of my brain dedicated to using my crowd control, then most of my brain focusing on demon attacks.

It surprised me how often this just worked pretty well. The game generally didn’t toss a ton of units at you at one time so losing focus on one of your characters wasn’t generally a huge issue. High danger situations for attacks typically involved boss fights, and in those cases there are lots of tools to deal with them as well. You can re-summon the demon to Cereza at any time and with later upgrades allow Cereza to move quicker when they’re together. This is really what made boss fights click. In those cases, the focus was always just the boss and playing around with their tells to stay out of danger vs using the right elements to open opportunities for Cereza to stun them and get damage in.

Ultimately it feels like combat was crafted for the control scheme rather than around it, and I get that feels like a vague distinction. In this case though, the combat is very clearly tuned toward a situation in which the player doesn’t have as good of focus as usual, so all the tools in play are to reduce the speed of needing to think. CC gives the player more safety and time. Damage buffs reinforce the use of CC. Limited enemy counts allow you to focus both characters on one spot with independent movement. Element requirements give you something specific to action upon that doesn’t involve a change in focus. It is all crafted to enhance the experience rather than a 2.5D combat experience being grafted into a weird control scheme.

The rest of the experience surrounding this is just kind of the cherry on top. There’s a decent upgrade system here to grant the player some feeling of a power curve that they can choose the direction of. There’s some light Metroidvania elements in the environment to make retraversal both beneficial and fun. There’s some light time attack elements to optional dungeons to give some side content to hit. There’s a good mix and rhythm to changes between puzzle sections and combat sections to keep the player engaged throughout. It all just kind of works well. Is it anything mind blowing? Not really. It’s all just kind of done at a high enough standard to not be a detriment, and that’s perfect for what it is.

However, this does bring up a thought that I had the entire time. Why does this game not have couch co-op? All of the entirely practical development reasons for couch co-op to not exist – screen real estate and performance with split viewports, game balance, mechanical oddities, etc – have been dealt with here. You always have two characters, they always exist independently, their UI elements are always present on screen, and there are mechanical reasons for the camera to be forcefully restricted to keep them nearby. Couch co-op is literally a drop in for this design. There are a tiny handful of spots that don’t have both characters playable for story reasons, but even then the mechanics of one or the other player having a short solo experience are fine in context for people playing together. Co-op simply just does not exist, and it’s a shame. This is a theoretically great title for people to co-op since you have two characters with two wildly different mechanic sets to allow players to choose the play style – offensive or defensive – that they prefer.

I played this on a whim and came away happily surprised. I’m generally a fan of the Bayonetta series but this was obviously something very different. Where Bayonetta is thematically as anti-Nintendo as they come, this game is for gameplay reasons as anti-Nintendo as they come. However, despite that it all works very well which leads me to believe that this was more carefully considered than I’m imagining. The controls are relatively complex but the gameplay feels tailored toward them. It ends up being an experience that feels like a well thought out package, rather than a game grafted onto a weird control scheme. It ends up just being a really pleasant surprise.

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Game Ramblings #203 – Garden Story

More Info from Rose City Games

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Steam, Xbox

There’s some games that I finish and I’m really not sure why. This is one of those. It’s totally a small indie experience where it pulls a lot of things from existing titles at a smaller scope so a lot of the systems don’t feel quite up to scratch. However, it’s got a certain charm that just kept me in the game and it has such low user friction that nothing is ever really stopping me from moving forward. As a result, I just hammered straight through and before I knew it I was done.

Given the similarities to 2D Zelda games combat will obviously be a big focus. If I look at this from a purely combat perspective it really isn’t doing much special. It has a bunch of weapons but in a lot of cases I found them to all be a little off. The first weapon you get is a sword analogue, but if I put it up against a Link’s Awakening sword the hit boxes feel inconsistent, causing a lot of misses. Later in the game you get a sickle that hits twice, but the speed of attacks with it always felt slow enough to not be valuable over other choices. The weapon I ended up using a lot was a parasol due to its rapid attack speed, but it had such a narrow hit box that I was constantly missing smaller enemies by literal pixels.

It was always little things like that that made it feel off compared to the more traditionally AAA titles in this style of game. It wasn’t helped by the lack of secondary items in combat, so for the most part combat was attack spam and dodge. That said, it being a compact indie meant that this was over before it became a problem for me. I was simply finished.

This also extended to the metagame systems in place. There’s a day-night cycle that allows you to do daily missions, but the daily missions are so simple that I was often finishing them before the morning segment of the day. That let me just move the plot forward regularly. There’s a building/crafting system, but it so infrequently required me to build something story-related that I simply skipped it under most circumstances. There are weapon upgrades that require you to farm items, but they often require so few resources and the resources are so easy to get that I never really felt held back in progress. There are side quests that exist and give rewards, but again they are so easy to complete that they might as well just get done but the rewards are so low impact that skipping them is irrelevant.

Again, this is typical of small indie. The systems are there and not damaging to the experience but if they weren’t there they also would not hurt the experience.

So then why do I play indie games like this? Because they’re charming as all hell. The entire premise of the game is that you play as a young grape working as a guardian of a realm of other fruits and vegetables by killing living rot. It’s such a complete theming package from the level of characters all the way up to the world and it all just feels right. You’re helping heal towns so they can get cleaner water or grow plants and ultimately so new plant people can be born on the literal vine. This is the charm that you get from small budget indies. Yes the games may be shorter, but in doing so they are limiting their content scope and allowing themselves to do unique things with theming that you just won’t see at higher budgets.

I suppose ultimately this isn’t really a rambling about much. The game itself could have been any indie game. It probably feels like I’m picking on this specific one but it just happened to be what I pulled at the time. I don’t know that I’ll ever be in a position to make indie games because frankly I enjoy working on larger things. I just love that these things exist in general. I can pull good indies off the shelf and just play them and just finish them. There’s rough edges, there’s missing content, but they’re charming and fun. They’re finishable, and that’s huge.