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Game Ramblings #56 – A Hat in Time

More info from Gears for Breakfast

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: PC
  • Also Available On: MacOS, PS4, Xbox One

TL;DR

  • Great riff on the Super Mario Sunshine game loop with some clever mechanics to avoid feeling too samey
  • Solid core platforming mechanics held back a bit by some auto activated actions

Back in the Yooka-Laylee write up I wrote “I’ve seen a lot of people saying that this game proves that 3D platformers are dead, but I’m not convinced.”  A Hat in Time is proof of that.  While it’s far from a perfect game, it picked a great game to start with and moved in its own direction to give us a classically-inspired platformer that doesn’t fall prey to the nostalgia trap that others have.

The nods at Mario games aren’t hidden, even down to the last dungeon being a take on Bowser’s Castle.

It’s obvious right from the start that the team behind the game loved Super Mario Sunshine.  The core game loop is 100% there.  Each world has some common theme with a bunch of different missions, replacing shine collection with a time piece.  After finishing a bunch of the individual segments, you get a spectacular boss fight, then on to the next world.  Secret levels are scattered throughout to test your platforming skills and give more time pieces as you earn different abilities.  Rather than FLUDD, you get a bunch of hats and badges as helpers, but the helper effect in puzzle solving and combat is similar.  It’d be easy knock the game for being so close, but once you get past the basics the game starts bringing in some unique pieces to make the game feel unique on its own.

Each world has its own theme, whether it be the mafia-filled restaurant island or a haunted forest where you lose your soul.  More importantly though, each world plays different.  As an example, one world involves the travels through an active movie studio.  Rather than going with the open level pattern that Sunshine uses, you instead go through parallel movie sets actively helping in film some movies.  Another instance has a true open-world taking place in a set of sky islands, where you never drop out of the world after collecting a time piece.  In doing this, the gameplay feels familiar, but the actual pace of world completion changes enough to feel fresh throughout.

Boss fights are always colorful, always entertaining, and as usual a music theme only helps.

The breadth of powers available in hats and badges also opens up the gameplay a lot more than the Mario source.  In the badge department, some of these purely exist as helpers, whether it’s a collection magnet or a radar to find treasures in the world.  Some of them add practical moves, like a hookshot or the ability to quick-charge hat powers.  Still others are just there for fun, like the one that replaces voiceovers with mumbling.  Hats are more direct in their use, allowing for things like slowing time or creating platforms out of specially marked areas.  The important thing is that you’re limited in what can be equipped at a time to one hat and eventually up to three badges.  This lends an important strategic element as swapping out your gear in the middle of a fight can be a big hazard, so the planning element of figuring out what gear you want can be the difference between life and death.

That’s not to say that this game entirely avoided all the common pitfalls of 3D platformers.  When the camera is free to move, there’s still a lot of areas where the camera either gets in your way, or the need to move it causes havoc in tight platforming areas.  There’s also a number of auto-activated moves that like to cause chaos.  The wall run in particular had a habit of activating when I was just trying to platform near a wall, often causing me to catch over a gap and fall to my death.  Generally speaking though things worked as well as I expect out of the genre, and problems I had were minimal enough to not cause me to want to shelve the game out of lack of patience.

There’s also a bunch of secret levels which unsurprisingly take the form of similar levels out of Sunshine.

If there’s anything I’d really say here as a wrap up note, it’s that nostalgia-based platformers probably want to be careful of where they pull their source.  Yooka-Laylee took inspiration from slower Banjo-Kazooie collectathons and joke-focused writing, much to its detriment.  In going with something like Super Mario Sunshine, A Hat in Time was able to take a game loop that is much more immediately satisfying to the user, and write a light, but still solid story that didn’t need to lean on in-jokes to try to get laughs out of the audience.  By then adding its own spins to both the move set and world flow, it was able to do something unique to itself to avoid feeling like a carbon copy of the original.  With Super Mario Odyssey just a few days away, I’m pretty confident that we’ve yet to see the end of this genre.

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Game Ramblings #55 – Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga + Bowser’s Minions

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: 3DS
  • Originally Released on: GBA

TL;DR

  • Faithful remake with the right mix of visual polish without losing the soul of the original
  • Battle system still holds up, particularly against the newer entries that went more experimental
  • Bowser’s Minions portion of the game well made, but feels more suited towards mobile

I suppose the TL;DR really should have read – If you enjoyed the original, you’ll enjoy the remake – because that’s really all there is to it.  The fact that this game is enjoyable is not a mystery.  In its GBA form it was well received for funny dialogue, a great battle system, and a visual style that brought the world to life.  All of that moves itself to the 3DS perfectly well, with some enhancements to the visuals and audio that make this feel a lot more modern.  In addition, the new Minions mode does add a particularly nice tie in to what happened to the typical enemy cast of the game while the Mario Bros were out adventuring, even if the mode feels more suited to a mobile device.  All in all, this is a solid remake that folks holding onto their 3DS will find worth playing.

For anyone that hasn’t played these games before, like any JRPG the battle system is really the core of what made the gameplay so special, and it’s standard turn based with a twist.  Like Super Mario RPG on the SNES, button inputs at the right time can provide both offensive and defensive capabilties, in this case tied to A and B for Mario and Luigi respectively.  The combat in place here was probably as simple as the series had, but the simplicity was also its strength.  The core moves were easy to pull off and strong (jumps, hammer attacks, and fire/ice ball attacks).  Moving up in complexity and strength, the brothers can combine to do Bros Attacks, involving more intricate combo and timing segments to pull off large damage.  This pattern of A and B for each brother then goes into the entire game, whether it’s character-specific actions during combo attacks or actions taken in the overworld for traversal purposes.

Speaking of which, the overworld actions are still a lot of fun to use, and end up being the big puzzle push for the game.  Most puzzles tend to be fairly basic, and generally involve whatever the latest power the bros gained, but they provided a nice break in the action that wasn’t just straight battle grinding.  By the end of the game the brothers had a set of 10 traversal abilities, giving the inevitable Bowser’s Castle run a huge amount of flexibility in the use of different powers.

As far as changes go, there were some dialog changes, a few additional side quests, and the more obvious sound and visual upgrades.  However, the big addition was the Bowser’s Minions portion of the game.  Within the first couple hours, this mode is unlocked, and then runs as a separate independent mode with its own new (and entertaining story).  From a gameplay perspective, it’s a simple mode of assembling a squad of minions and having them faceoff against an enemy squad.  They can be one of three types, giving us an advantage triangle not too dissimilar to Fire Emblem.  The fight then automatically goes, with the player really only occasionally interfering, whether to block special attacks or do a timed input for a damage bonus.

In general, the mode is mechanically solid, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it would have worked out a lot better as a phone game, and that’s the biggest problem I had with it.  Each battle is a generally quick hitting segment, with maybe a few minutes of story the first time you play, then combat lasting maybe a minute or two per battle.  Given the size and number of units you can get, it then encourages you to keep replaying the battles to level up units.  Victory grants more units, as well as beans used as a type-specific XP boost, allowing for even more growth of the party.  In general, this feels perfect for a phone where you’d fire it up to play a couple levels then be done, and less perfect for the 3DS where it’s still just a sub mode to the much deeper main game.  And I’m being serious when I say I’d absolutely play this on my phone because it is a lot of fun.

There’s really not much to say here.  If you liked a previous Mario & Luigi or enjoyed the original release at all, this is still a great game.  The battle system is really solid, the writing is often times hilarious, and there’s a ton of content to be had here.  It also shows that the gameplay of the first couple games in the series is likely what I consider the pinnacle of the series, with a couple of the more experimental entries on the 3DS perhaps going a bit too far away from the core.  Hopefully this means Nintendo is considering a more traditional entry looking forward to the Switch, but if the worst we get is another remake then I suppose we’re still doing pretty good.

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Game Ramblings #54 – Golf Story

More Info from Sidebar Games

  • Genre: Golf / RPG
  • Platform: Switch

TL;DR

  • Charming RPG with gameplay reminiscent of Mario Golf on the GBC/GBA
  • Entertaining writing, good mix of quests, and a bunch of clever hints at games from the past.
  • Golf game is serviceable and fun, despite obviously not being the focus of the game.

Out of everything that surprises me about this game, it’s that I can’t figure out who the hell the development team is.  The game’s credits simply had their studio name, they have no website or Twitter beyond the game’s info, and I can’t find a damn thing on Google.  Yet despite it all, this is potentially the best of the so called Nindies to come out this year.  While the game owes a lot to Mario Golf before it, it leans heavily on the writing and questing RPG to make a game that ends up being one of the best non-combat RPGs I’ve played in a long time.

Sometimes you play golf, sometimes you have rap battles.

Given that this is RPG first, the writing was always going to be important.  While this definitely isn’t deep, and it definitely ends abruptly, the writing is lighthearted and entertaining throughout.  Each course has its overarching story that takes place through a couple main quests and a lot of optional side quests.  These run the gamut from a Caddyshack-inspired battle against (and with) moles to rap battles between an old country club and a rival invading course to a haunted course where you help create a zombie army.  While the main story line of rising into the pro tour provides the overall push to the end, the individual stories and the wide range of characters you meet throughout are easily the thing that kept me going back and digging into all the available quests.

Among others callbacks, you sometimes just end up playing Pac Man while invading a base Metal Gear style.

There’s also a very distinct sense of playing homage to games of the past.  The visuals are very clearly styled after SNES and Genesis era games, even if the quality is somewhat higher than would have been possible on those systems.  However, it’s the game references that really hit home.  The Pac Man example above is just one.  There were also side quests based on Micro Machines, NPC hints at the Mario

Tennis series, a built in recreation of NES Golf, and more.  There’s a lot of love shown in bringing in elements of the past in ways that really succeed in giving a lot of life to the RPG aspect of the game, elevating it significantly above the similar Mario Golf games in that regard.

Even playing golf itself, you get a lot of non-standard variety like this Par 1 only course.

Since this is a golf game that side also had to not suffer, and while it’s nothing deep it works pretty well.  It’s a pretty standard 3-click setup (start, set power, set aim) for shots.  It also has your standard mix of curving, spins, and wind effect on the ball flight path.  There’s a bunch of different clubs with various effects on shots as well, giving a bit of flexibility in the gear build out.  The RPG aspect also plays out here, with XP going into the golf stats.  Like Mario Golf, increasing power lowers the other stats, giving a balance between quickly increasing shot power vs. not throwing other stats out of whack.

However, there’s also a lot of depth at play here in the style of game available.  For the most part, there’s really no normal courses.  Even the first course with a standard layout has mole traps that can cause your ball to be carried all over the course.  From there you get courses with no greens, tar traps instead of sand, par 1 courses, turtles that bounce your ball down the course out of water, and more.  In general you basically have to be ready for anything and can’t settle into the typical pattern of a golf game where any course generally plays the same.  The only thing that really was consistent here is that I could aim smack at the flag and more often than not sink the shot, which admittedly is both highly satisfying and incredibly hilarious when hitting a 300 yard shot into the hole during a match play event.

If I made the rules, this would definitely be in there.

I think my big takeaway here is that Golf Story proves the value of making RPGs without combat, particularly in lieu of Nintendo abandoning the idea of the Camelot-developed mobile sports RPGs.  There’s enough golf here to still be considered a sports game, but the RPG aspects pulled in bring so much to the game that non-fans can also find a lot to enjoy here.