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Game Ramblings #109 – Dark Cloud 2

More Info from Level 5

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS2 (via emulation)

Admittedly the main reason I picked this one up was to test some backup and emulation options for PS2 games. I’ve been starting to notice a bit of disc rot on a couple of my older games, so I’ve been making a pass on backing all those up so I at least have some ability to play them in the future. Out of the pass I did, this was one of the games that I’d been putting off playing for a long time. This gave me an opportunity to test the emulator PCSX2 alongside some high resolution support, as well as clear the sequel to a game I really enjoyed when I played it nearly 20 years ago.

The main thing that popped out to me is how good the gameplay has really held up. Going back to a lot of older games can be tough as the gameplay is often fairly dated. This one really held up strong though. The melee combo system is basic at face value, but with modifiers in various directions and a backflip dodge on the same main attack button, there’s a lot that can be done without really moving your hand around on the controller. Ranged weapons also come in to play, with each character having their own to use.

There’s also a lot of benefit out of the character swapping, which ends up being the core of keeping combat going quick. Each character has some amount of their own core strength, and that grows in different directions as you build out their weapons. Max in particular can also pull out a giant mech, which gives some fun options around taking out larger enemies more effectively.

The way they handle the power curve also aged really well. There is no level on the characters. Defensively they gain stats by applying special items found during natural progression, so their shield and health values have a sort of built-in natural growth to them. The real core of the power curve is all around weapon building.

Kills grant XP that go straight into the weapon that dealt the killing blow. Over time this gives you weapon levels, which add to both a raw damage stat, as well as to a synthesis points stat. This stat is used to apply elemental upgrades to the weapon, which over time opens up new upgrade paths to boost a weapon to a new higher tier.

What is less documented but equally important is that these elemental upgrades play right back into the core combat. Enemies all have some amount of built-in weaknesses to specific elements, and applying upgrades to your weapons exploits that. Up against a fire elemental? Use a weapon with a heavy ice stat. Want to build out a weapon that is equal against all? Go ahead and do so. However, it was often more valuable to split the stats and let each character specialize a bit more than that.

In practice this ends up in a lot of potential variety in how you choose to build your weapon out. This sort of active building to establish a power curve instead of the more standard passive level gains of RPGs is a huge change that I really wish more RPGs adopted. While a lot of RPGs give some small crafting and upgrade options, having the entire weapon power based on your own decisions and ideas is a really powerful setup that still feels extremely modern.

The rest of the core loop around town building is still there, and is still somewhat interesting and important to the player. While the exact layout and style of the towns isn’t that important, it was enjoyable to try and craft the perfect town as I built away. As you progress through each zone’s dungeon, you grab items that provide hints in how to build out a zone’s town to progress the story. This tight loop of doing a dungeon floor, going back to your town and building a thing or two, and diving back in is really solid. Occasionally this process will hit some story points that unlock your defensive upgrade items, which becomes a driving force to really do the building process well.

Now of course, I was also using this to test out emulation, and that was a big success. It had been a while since I really tried PS2 emulation, and while performance was good the last time I tried, features generally weren’t. Luckily a lot of that has changed. The XInput emulation supported the full DualShock rumble set. The emulator had really solid support for memory cards and save states, both of which were handy for jumping in for a few minutes as I had free time. However, the visuals are the biggest benefactor. The PCSX2 emulator supported both resolution enhancements AND widescreen patching, so I was able to play this at 2560×1440 native resolution. It’s easy to brush off how important that change alone was to making this easier on the eyes, but it was huge for me and I hope the screenshots I posted really show that off.

Overall this was a big success. I was able to back up all but a couple of my PS1 and PS2 collection. I was able to test out the modern emulation tools suite. Finally, I was able to finally get around to playing this game years too late. The original Dark Cloud was a really special game that was one of the first RPGs I played on the PS2 since it came out a few weeks before Final Fantasy X. The sequel had always been in the back of my mind, but for whatever reason it kept on slipping. Luckily it really has held up well. The gameplay is still a lot of fun, and is doing things with the player stat progression that I wish more games would play with. Getting those resolution enhancements via emulation helps make it a little bit more modern to my eyes, and that really helped more than I can describe.

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Game Ramblings #108 – Control

More Info from Remedy Entertainment

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Windows, Xbox One

So, this is a really fun game. Admittedly, I was a big fan of Max Payne and Alan Wake, so it’s not overly surprising that I also enjoy this entry from the team. Admittedly I’m also forgiving some warts in the experience, particularly in the gun play that is generally not that good. However, it’s got such a great setting, such great use of telekinesis, and such fun puzzle solving that I really didn’t care about the smaller problems at play.

Ultimately, this is a game of powers. There’s a bunch that you gain throughout the game, but there’s really two that I want to focus on – launch and seize. These two were the core of how I really built out my personal combat focus in the game.

Seize is simply the ability to take control of an enemy, and have them fight for you. You drop them down to low health and take over, and suddenly you’ve got some helper NPCs at play. This was the first part of my combat plans – distraction. Taking a few weak enemies, having them turn on their allies, and even get in some damage here and there was a good way to take the heat off of me. It provided opportunities for me to move and flank, and find better locations to take out the rest of the group. If I wanted to be aggressive, it provided ways for me to remove some damage and really go in for the kill.

Launch on the other hand does exactly what it sounds like, it launches shit at targets. You can basically pull chunks out of every floor, ceiling, and wall, and use them as built-in ammunition. Later on you can also start launching enemy missiles back at them. Because of this, there’s an endless amount of ammunition in the world, as long as you have energy remaining to use your powers.

Together, these two powers were the core of my encounter focus. I would start an encounter by finding a weak enemy or two, and take them out with either my gun or the Launch power. Once they were able to be Seized, I would do so. With that distraction in place, I could then reposition myself or move in for quick kills with subsequent launches. This all felt extremely good. Launch in particular has really wide aim assists, but also pretty inaccurate throwing, so in general it just causes hilarious chaos with pretty fair average damage.

The powers working well was great, because ultimately I didn’t find the gunplay all that good. It basically felt functional to me, but not overwhelming in quality. The guns had enough variety – you have your pistol, shotgun, rifle, etc. However, they don’t really feel that impactful in either their damage output or in their visual feedback. From a controller standpoint, their aim assists don’t really feel up to the modern expectations of something like Halo or Destiny. They kind of exist, and I made use of them, but I far preferred using powers as my main damage source, unless absolutely necessary.

End of the day, it was the setting that really kept me going. This is very much a story in the vein of Alan Wake, and some of the lore ties into it. The tl;dr is that you’re playing the head of what is basically a paranormal FBI, and are tasked with clearing out an extradimensional invasion that has warped the entire department. Some of the key points are presented in cutscenes, but a lot of it is presented in really well done passive content.

Some of that is things like audio recordings or projected videos that you can’t help seeing. However, a lot of it is stuff that as a player you have to actually search for, and that kind of thing is always a huge plus for me. I can really dig into games that have hidden lore, and this has literally hundreds of files to find. You’ll find folders and crates and tape decks all over the game filled with lore entries. Some of it is essential to expanding your knowledge of the game setting. Some of it is department bickering via memos. Some of it is history books telling of past paranormal events throughout the world, including the one from Alan Wake itself. It’s this kind of scattering of information that really drives me to explore, and it was all written in an extremely high quality fashion to really get me wanting more.

That pace change between combat sections and exploring is so typical of the genre, but it feels so much better crafted here. The entire setting being in a warped building caused by a paranormal event allows so much flexibility in building environments that are simply built to be fun to play in. Where turning corners in Uncharted leads to obvious combat rooms, this feels extremely organic, partly because weird shaped rooms are the norm but also because the rooms can warp back to a normal shape once combat is complete. Where Gears of War hides their dog tags around in corners just to give a reason to explore, this game has lore entries scattered around on desks and cabinets because this is an office building and of course they would be there. Where Halo has to keep inventing bigger baddies to elevate the sense of danger, this can simply throw a refrigerator at you with some demonic presence and not care that it’s ludicrous. It’s not that they’re doing anything particularly new here, but their setting being slightly off kilter allows so much flexibility for them to take the genre norms and get rid of that little bit that makes them feel so unnatural in other games, but completely expected here.

This game was a real surprise to me, and I guess in hindsight I’m surprised that it was a surprise. I’ve always liked Remedy’s work, and while I tend to gravitate towards RPGs, I’ve always been a huge fan of this kind of 3rd person adventure. I think more than anything, it was kind of a game that just fell off my radar. I’d heard a few friends and a few coworkers continue to recommend it to me, so I kind of just bit the bullet and picked it up, and I couldn’t be happier. This is the type of game that I ended playing wanting more, and after a few bigger releases get cleared off my plate, I suspect the DLC for Control is now not too far off in my future plans.

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Shelved It #8 – Ori and the Will of the Wisps

More Info from Moon Studios

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: Xbox One
  • Also Available On: Windows

I really liked Ori and the Blind Forest. It’s still as good of an example of a modern Metroidvania as I’ve played in the last ten years. The gameplay of Will of the Wisps is just as good, and when it’s smooth this is an absolutely wonderful game. However, it just isn’t smooth very consistently, and it has periods where it outright freezes for 5-10 seconds at a time, including in the middle of boss fights. Simply put – this game should not have shipped.

This is 100% a game that I expected to love, and for the most part it did what I expected. It’s still a really mechanically tight Metroidvania with a ton of great traversal. Wall jumps, air dashes, slingshots, water dashes – it’s all there and it all feels really good. Combat is similarly tight, with a nice set of melee attacks and ranged helpers to give you great capabilities to fight a wide range of enemies.

In a vacuum, this would have been an easy recommendation, but the performance of the game just could not hold up.

From a general game performance standpoint, things aren’t typically all that great. I get it – I’m playing on a base Xbox One and that’s not going to be the optimal experience. However, I’ve also shipped games on the base Xbox One, so I’m at least familiar with the machine’s capabilities, and Wisps is not doing a good job of keeping up. There’s a lot of sections of the game that run at a stable framerate, but I’d wager that probably 20% of what I played isn’t hitting 30 FPS. If it was close, that wouldn’t be a problem, but it was noticeably not 30 fps. I wouldn’t be all that surprised if some of the sections were more around 15-20 fps. In normal traversal this was just annoying, but it was especially bad happening during the game’s signature escape sequences. In those you absolutely need performance, and having to redo sections because a framerate drop caused me to miss a jump were infuriating.

However, the worse problem was the flat out freezing that happened every few minutes. I’m not talking about hitches – I’m talking straight up 5-10 second freezes. Looking around at the Steam forums, it looks like this is similarly bad on PC if you aren’t installed on an SSD. Given that, and given the laptop drives in all models of the Xbox, I’m assuming they’re getting slammed trying to load content. It’s bad enough when it happens in just running through a level or playing a cutscene, where it’s simply annoying. However, I had it happen multiple times during a boss, where it can often guarantee a death and reset.

This was capped by a handful of crashes that were periodically setting me back, which just kinda burned any patience I had left with the game in its current state.

Being quite frank, I’m surprised the game shipped in the state it did. It would be one thing to have some spots where a patch could smooth out some lower framerate spots. It’s even more unfortunate, because the gameplay is great when it works. However, having obvious long period freezes that happen every few minutes is unforgivable. Stuff like that is what certification is supposed to suss out and prevent games from shipping with. This being a first-party Microsoft title, I’m tempted to put some of the blame on them for it. However, the developers have as much responsibility as anyone to make sure they’ve got their shit locked up. And ya, I’ve been there – sometimes you just need to get something to cert and start working on a day 0 – but things like this should also be in your day 0.

More often than not, I shelf games because I simply am not finding something in the gameplay worth moving forward on. This one is the complete opposite. The gameplay is fantastic, but the performance and stability absolutely killed my patience with this game. If they sort it out in a patch, maybe I’ll come back to this, but for now it’s just kind of a disappointment.