Shovel Knight

So I binged on the Game Time Show, Bro this weekend (great stuff guys!) and it really got me motivated to start polishing off some game titles that are already precariously close to being finished. (Yet, for whatever reason, I'm setting myself up to abandon them.) First on the list: Shovel Knight.

Recommended to me by B-Town over the holidays when I was struggling to find something to entertain myself while crashing at my parents’ house, this is a fresh take at an old school, 16-bit platformer. Simple controls, simple story, shit-tons of fun. The premise is there's an evil Enchantress threatening to takeover or destroy your world; a world full of knights and apparent human-like animals... 

...like a horse wearing a dress!

You are Shovel Knight (a knight who fights with a shovel) and on the pursuit to stop the Enchantress who has captured your love, Shield Knight (a girl-knight who fights with her shield… shocker!). While en route to save Shield Knight, you must fight the Enchantress’ Order of No Quarter – basically a bunch of knights determined to stop Shovel Knight at all costs.

The gameplay is great. Fluid controls that basically just depend on jumping hazards and swiping your shovel like a sword. You also become heavily dependent on using your shovel as a pogo-stick (a la that NES Scrooge McDuck game) where you can consecutively keep bouncing on enemies which is sometimes necessary to navigate various obstacles or pitfalls. You also can’t expect to wield a shovel without digging up the occasional dirt pile for jewels. Solid gameplay!

The art direction and sound design are well developed as well. The game has a really nice look with its polished, colorful 16-bit graphics that are utilized to give some fantastic atmospheric vibes. Not to mention a great range of themes and designs that keep things fresh and interesting as you progress through the different levels. Maybe you’re running through arctic terrain or seen as a silhouette atop a castle’s rooftop in a lightning storm or floating around in the obligatory underwater level (at least you don’t have to worry about your character drowning like in those damn Sonic games). And the music is classy as fuck. Check it out:

As I read some of the reviews for this indie-success of a game, a lot of people praise it for its story design. I’m not quite sure I agree with this praise. While it’s certainly not a bad story, it’s nothing I would write home about. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention, but all I got from it was a simple tale of your love being captured by some evil force and you have to go a save her. There is a bit of attention paid to the two towns you can visit, talking with the townsfolk while possibly exposing some hidden secrets. Still, while it’s nothing bad, it’s also nothing great, novel, or new.

What this game is, is an old-school platformer, perfected. Borrowing gameplay and layouts from some iconic classics like a map layout like Super Mario 3 or an item list resembling a Zelda game, it really pulls together many aspects I loved in gaming as child and assembled them together under one roof. 

Unfortunately, like most platforms, the game requires diligence in replaying levels several times (or more) in order to successfully conquer its obstacles. And this is where I fail as a gamer. My patience runs thin as I die again and again trying to beat some boss or dodge some tricky spike pits. Where the game almost had me was the second to last level. After playing through the whole game and beating every knight (each a boss to their own level), you stumble onto the Order of No Quarter having a nice potluck dinner together and then must defeat them all in one go. Needless to say, I died… a lot. Pretty much to the point where I figured this game was just not going to be beaten. Then, GTSB came and saved me. Miraculously, I found the motivation to revisit the level this past weekend and beat it on my first try. Go figure?

So, this post is less about a game and more about the bros that saved my gaming experience. Thank you Game Time Show, Bros! You are clearly gods among men… er, children. 

Fast & Furious 6

Man... I've got nothing. Great movie, dumb as hell, awesome, ridiculous... the list goes on and on. If anyone out there ever reads this, and would like to hear some great Fast & Furious 6 takes, please, just check out the How Did This Get Made podcast. I've got no more for now.

Game of Thrones: Season 4

I fear that it's all downhill from here for Game of Thrones. This was a fantastic season, and I always knew that it would be, since it more or less covering the final third of the best and most action-packed book in the series, A Storm of Swords. But nothing gold can stay, and a number of issues suggest that the show will be compromised to a certain extent from here on out until it ends in a few years.

First and foremost, it's already caught up to its source material on a number of fronts. In one glaring example, Bran and Hodor won't even be in the fifth season of Game of Thrones since the show has already caught up to where their storyline stands at the end of the fifth book. Sansa and Littlefinger are also maybe a scene away from that point at most. Meanwhile, Jon Snow's arc hasn't even quite caught up to the end of the third book yet. It's inevitable that the show will need to pad certain stories and expedite others in order to get all its major players back on the same (literal) page. In the best case, this means minor filler for some characters and heavy cuts for others. At worst, it could mean drastically altering the story in ways that won't ultimately mesh with the yet-to-be-published written works.

Of course, the showrunners are headed down that road anyway. Apparently an entire Iron Islands arc from the fourth book will be skipped next season, which sort of inadvertently suggests that the arc will have no long term repercussions in the written series. A number of compelling characters from the books have been cut, and while that's understandable given the scope and sprawl of the series so far, it's also somewhat disappointing. But it's not all bad news. A number of minor characters from the books have been given plenty more to do in the show, becoming far more interesting characters in their own right. Chief among these is Margaery Tyrell, little more than a bride-pawn in the books, who's been fleshed out into a full-fledged three-dimensional character with clear motivations and vices of her own. The same can be said of Yara (Asha in the books), Theon's older sister and princess of the Iron Islands. She doesn't really become a memorable person in the books until the aforementioned Iron Islands arc that the show will slash entirely. That said, she's already turned into an interesting character in the show, chiefly through a series of scenes that were never in the books at all. So it's difficult to imagine Yara not playing into the events of the show going forward. Time will tell.

Come to think of it, nearly every character addition or personality expansion on the show's part has involved a girl or a woman. By the same token, it seems like every mildly interesting character who's been cut out altogether - Strong Belwas, Coldhands, Euron and Victarion Greyjoy, Quentyn Martell, Young Griff, Jon Conington, et al. - has been a man. Perhaps the show is doing its best to provide a more gender-balanced Westeros. This would make sense; it's much easier to see a glaring gender disparity than it is to pick up on one in a written work. Of course, by no means does this make Game of Thrones a shining example of feminist adaptation. By far the most problematic scene in the show's four year run came in this very season, when Jaime Lannister outright raped his own sister. In an attempt to diffuse some of the backlash, the scene's writer claimed that he didn't interpret the scene as a rape, which only created a second wave of negative reactions. (For what it's worth, I just watched the episode in question, and what occurs is so plainly and unequivocally a rape. Cersei repeatedly says some variations of "no," and "not here," and "not now," and "stop," while Jaime forces himself on her, and then the scene ends.) It's a shame, really, as it jarringly interrupted Jaime's ongoing redemption arc; he began the series as arguably the most reprehensible character on screen, and had become one of the show's most endearing characters after being maimed and humbled throughout the third season.

At any rate, this is still one of my favorite shows on TV, and I'm strangely excited about seeing the show surpass the books. I'll be genuinely shocked by plenty of what comes next season, I'm sure, and that's something I haven't been able to say in years. I just worry that, without George R.R. Martin's overt source material to guide them, the showrunners may end up tarnishing certain characters or story arcs in unintended ways. Here's hoping for the best. And also, of course, for a short wait for The Winds of Winter.

Super Bowl XLIX Champions

Yeah, I still buy these. Don't judge me. The Patriots just won the goddamn Super Bowl! It felt simultaneously like it was long overdue - look at the devastating playoff losses in the ten years prior! - and also like it was the finishing touch on a fifteen-year-long masterpiece. But that's sports for you, I guess. Fans will always cherish the memories, but fans will also exaggerate the degree to which they've suffered any time a season doesn't end with a championship.

It's weird. I want to get all poignant here in this post, but already, just over a month after the team won the Super Bowl, it feels like we're all just ramping up for next season. Because of its recency, losing Revis already kind of takes the wind out of the win. Not in terms of the win's legacy or the all time legendary status of the 2014 New England Patriots - but just because, hey, one month later, and "we're on to 2015."

And then there's the ridiculously spoiled Boston fan in me, who had barely taken in this win before thinking, "This is great, but you know what Brady needs? That fifth ring, man. That fifth one will just close the door on any lingering doubters..." Fuck that attitude, man.

This has been wildly rambling and incoherent. I'm sorry, everyone. I guess I just don't know what to say about a DVD celebrating something so recent yet, paradoxically, also so clearly in the rear view mirror already. Gah!

Game & Wario

So, in case you haven't heard, Club Nintendo is shutting down. ("Awwww...") But that's okay! The end of the program is actually forcing me to use all those sweet sweet coins I've compiled over the years, which is a good thing. For instance, I was able to download Game & Wario, a game still selling for $30 on Amazon, for no charge at all - and I've still got half my coins left!

Game & Wario was initially conceived as a Wii U GamePad demo to be bundled with every Wii U. (Granted that's essentially what Nintendo Land became.) At some point, there were just too many minigames or something, and the game turned into a full blown retail release. Let's step through it, one minigame at a time. First, the one-player experiences.

Arrow

A "stationary rail shooter" in which you've got to defend a strawberry patch from an advancing army of robots. Hold the GamePad sideways and drag and release on the touchscreen in order to fire an arrow. A plain concept with decent execution, but really wonky aiming controls.

Shutter

One of my favorites. You're a detective doing some surveillance and snapping pictures of suspects in a crowded and changing scene. The TV has the entire view to peruse, but the GamePad is your camera lens, all zoomed in and shaky. Use both to find (and photograph) the suspects before time runs out.

Ski

No replay value at all. Hold the GamePad vertically and "steer" it left and right to guide a skiier down a mountain.

Patchwork

A series of tiny puzzles where you need to piece together different cuts of fabric in order to create simple low-definition pixel images. I did lots of these, but they grew monotonous.

Kung Fu

The name's a misnomer and the game was really dumb. You hop around from platform to platform using the GamePad for a top-down view. You steer in midair by tilting the GamePad around.

Gamer

Easily the most memorable game in the package. The concept here is that you're a kid playing his DS-like system in his bedroom after Mom calls for lights out. The GamePad represents the DS-like system, loaded with typical WarioWare micro-games like "dodge the foot" and "up up down." Meanwhile, on the TV, you need to be on the lookout for Mom, who could pop the door open at any time (or look through the window, or come from a few other unexpected places) and bust you. It's a hell of a balancing act with a legitimately startling and unsettling atmosphere and all kinds of inherent hilarious absurdity.

Design

You just get told to do things like "draw a 3.5 inch line" and then you get evaluated based on how well you did. The visually-oriented engineer inside me appreciated the concept, but it was boring and simple and quickly grew stale.

Ashley

One of the lesser games. Witch on a broomstick is flying through a level, tilt the GamePad left or right to make her go up or down. Boring.

Taxi

Another highlight. Think Crazy Taxi, with farm animals as your passengers, but with an added alien abduction component... and there's a cannon for shooting UFOs out of the sky. Delightfully absurd!

Pirate

Couldn't really get the hang of this one. There are four pirate ships around you firing volleys off and you've got to rotate around and use your GamePad as a shield in order to block their shots. The whole thing is set to a rhythm. I... got hit a lot.

Bowling

Credits roll after you've beaten "Pirate," so this seems like a tacked on gravy game. And it is. It's bowling. With the GamePad.

Bird

I never even unlocked this one. Stupid bowling, tying me up. Oh well! Game beaten, all the same.

I also had a chance to play all four multiplayer games with Keith and Corey. They were fun. They were:

Disco

A rhythm tapping game played between two people exclusively with the GamePad. My least favorite of the four.

Fruit

In this one, one player controls a thief who walks around a crowded scene stealing four pieces of fruit. The other players try to ID the thief in a lineup at the end. I'm sure it has some replay value, but not as much as the next two games.

Islands

Kind of a slingshot-based curling game. Launch your little dudes at a target and get points based on where they land - but know that other players can knock your little dudes off the targets entirely with well-placed shots. Fun with three players, chaotic with four. Apparently five is an option. Oh boy!

Sketch

It's Pictionary with the GamePad.

And that's Game & Wario. Probably not worth thirty bucks, but if you've got Club Nintendo coins to burn, what else are you gonna get?

Fatal Labyrinth

I've been saving this one. Nearly every game on my Chinese knock-off Sega Genesis has been a side-scrolling "start at A, get to B" experience. Platformers, shooters, beat-em-ups - I've played them all and I'm sick to death of the experience. Here, instead, we have an actual dungeon crawler. It's a really primitive one - this ain't Diablo - but it was different enough from everything else I've played at this point that its novelty alone was refreshing. Maybe I've just got Stockholm Syndrome at this point, but I actually kind of liked this game. It can't even charitably be called an RPG, but it did contain a dash of "RPG elements" like hit points and equipment upgrades. Now, the gameplay was kind of confusing and generally shitty, so I won't get carried away and say that I enjoyed my time with Fatal Labyrinth, but, fuck, at least it was something different from everything else I've seen on the Genesis to date.

Ecco: The Tides of Time

Ecco the Dolphin

Arrow Flash

Golden Axe

Alien Storm

Virtua Fighter 2

Fatal Labyrinth

Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master

Streets of Rage 3

Gain Ground

Streets of Rage 2

Golden Axe II

Kid Chameleon

DecapAttack

Comix Zone

Vectorman 2

Vectorman

ESWAT: City Under Siege

Streets of Rage

Chakan: The Forever Man

Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle

Eternal Champions

The Ooze

Jewel Master

Shadow Dancer

Columns III

Columns

Crack Down

Golden Axe III

Altered Beast

Bonanza Brothers

Eternal Champions

Fighting game. Not great. Three left.

Ecco: The Tides of Time
Ecco the Dolphin
Arrow Flash
Golden Axe
Alien Storm
Virtua Fighter 2
Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master
Streets of Rage 3
Gain Ground
Streets of Rage 2
Golden Axe II
Kid Chameleon
DecapAttack
Comix Zone
Vectorman 2
Vectorman
ESWAT: City Under Siege
Streets of Rage
Chakan: The Forever Man
Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle
Eternal Champions
The Ooze
Jewel Master
Shadow Dancer
Columns III
Columns
Crack Down
Golden Axe III
Altered Beast
Bonanza Brothers

Shadow Dancer

This one was just hard. I needed to pull all kinds of cheap tricks in order to have a prayer here. Frustrating. Tedious. I'm tired, guys. I'm so close at this point. I really am. But I'm absolutely done giving a rat's ass when it comes to remembering and differentiating and adequately assessing these games.

This, as I understand it, is the prequel to the prequel to Shinobi III, one of the earliest games I tackled on the Genesis. This game was significantly less enjoyable than that game was.

Ecco: The Tides of Time

Ecco the Dolphin

Arrow Flash

Golden Axe

Alien Storm

Virtua Fighter 2

Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master

Streets of Rage 3

Gain Ground

Streets of Rage 2

Golden Axe II

Kid Chameleon

DecapAttack

Comix Zone

Vectorman 2

Vectorman

ESWAT: City Under Siege

Streets of Rage

Chakan: The Forever Man

Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle

The Ooze

Jewel Master

Shadow Dancer

Columns III

Columns

Crack Down

Golden Axe III

Altered Beast

Bonanza Brothers

ESWAT: City Under Siege

With EarthBound out of the way and spring quickly approaching (right?), it seems like now's as good a time as any for me to dig deep and shovel some of the least appealing games straight out of my backlog. And no set of games begs for timely death more than the few remnants left from last year's great Sega Genesis endeavor. I've been saving some of these games intentionally, but others are only still here because they were less eye-catching and appealing to me than thirty-odd other Genesis games.

Here's one such game. ESWAT: City Under Siege. What's the plot? I don't know. I don't even care anymore to look these up. My guess is that I was playing as a futuristic SWAT team member. Was I laying siege to a city? Was I rescuing a besieged city? Where were all the other SWAT guys?

This game was neither ridiculously difficult nor offensively clunky, which made it a decent enough Genesis game.

Ecco: The Tides of Time

Ecco the Dolphin

Arrow Flash

Golden Axe

Alien Storm

Virtua Fighter 2

Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master

Streets of Rage 3

Gain Ground

Streets of Rage 2

Golden Axe II

Kid Chameleon

DecapAttack

Comix Zone

Vectorman 2

Vectorman

ESWAT: City Under Siege

Streets of Rage

Chakan: The Forever Man

Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle

The Ooze

Jewel Master

Columns III

Columns

Crack Down

Golden Axe III

Altered Beast

Bonanza Brothers

Chibi-Robo! Photo Finder

Five years ago (wow!), I reviewed a quirky little GameCube game called Chibi-Robo, in which you play a pint-sized robotic domestic servant with horrible battery life. Here's a half-assed downloadable spin-off title that takes the same robot and asks him, "hey, how would you like to perform a bunch of arbitrary tasks and take a lot of arbitrary pictures?" The concept here is cute enough; it's the far off future, perhaps, and Chibi-Robo has been asked by a museum curator to go collect some "nostaljunk." How does Chibi-Robo do this? By taking pictures of the world around him with his shitty 3DS camera, of course! Or at least that's what the player does. The game essentially boils down to taking photographs of specific things - soda cans, books, electrical outlets, and more - at various angles. Line it up just right and you'll score a passing grade on the picture and be allowed to, shit, I dunno, get more opportunities to take pictures? Making things less monotonous but far more tedious, you engage in little mini-games between photo sessions in order to procure enough "happy points" to buy more film to take more pictures. These mini-games consist of tasks like "guess the distance!" and "grab some pork from the refrigerator, would ya?" Snoozers all around, folks! I spent no real money (thanks Club Nintendo) and maybe an hour and a half (thanks, games with murky "beaten" requirements) on this turd, and still it felt like way too much. Oh, have I mentioned yet that the pictures you take with the 3DS camera come out grainy and horrible even under good lighting conditions? Well, now I have. And there's really nothing left to say about this one. Good night!

EarthBound

So, EarthBound is the 1994 sequel to a 1989 JRPG called Mother - a game released only in Japan that still hasn't seen an American or European port after more than 25 years. A third game, Mother 3, came out on the GameBoy Advance in Japan in 2006 only after a hotly anticipated Nintendo 64 version stalled somewhere in the development process and died on the vine. The Mother trilogy is a huge hit in Japan, and as such, American gamers have clamored for English translations for years on end. But Nintendo is Nintendo, and since EarthBound didn't sell as well in America as it should have, all the way back in 1995, to this day Nintendo doesn't think either its prequel or its sequel would do well here. In fact, they stopped manufacturing the EarthBound SNES cartridges after a run of some 400,000 and never bothered to port the game onto newer consoles for the longest time. This resulted in the ironic situation where, right up until 2013, American gamers were shelling out hundreds of dollars for copies of the fairly rare game - a game only made rare in the first place because Nintendo pulled the plug so quickly after lackluster sales. Wow! Anyway, in the summer of 2013, with no announcement or fanfare made whatsoever, the game appeared in the eShop, available to purchase and play on the Wii U Virtual Console. Forget the lack of marketing - that's just such a Nintendo move, releasing the game on the Wii U - three million of which had sold in the U.S. at the time - as opposed to the standard Wii, which had something like 47 million units in America by 2013.

Anyway, my point is, right up until 2013, EarthBound was sort of like this holy grail of JRPGs. Everyone who had played it had loved it, it seemed, but very few people had ever played it over here. When EarthBound was available to me through Club Nintendo last year, I pounced on the opportunity to acquire and play such a fabled classic.

It was good, and I enjoyed my time with it a great deal. But it wasn't amazing, I guess.

In many ways, it was a pretty standard JRPG. It took me close to 30 hours to finish, and that was with a walkthrough. It was fairly difficult, especially early on. Battles were turn-based and took place from first-person viewpoints using fairly simple menus. Its world was imaginative and memorable, but none of its boss fights really were - save for the final boss, which deserves its own whole review - for a number of reasons. (Maybe some other time.) Maybe I'm hardened or jaded or cynical, but I just didn't feel like I was playing something substantially important, nor like the lack of Mother or Mother 3 in America seem like real gaming tragedies.

All the same, this was a damn good game. Here are some personal highlights and odd shortcomings worth singling out:

• Good: There are no random encounters, and battles are initiated when you run into enemies within the environment. A lot of JRPGs have this feature, but what made EarthBound really shine was that if your party was significantly more powerful than the enemy, you wouldn't even enter the battle screen; you'd just get an instant win and all the requisite experience points - which, granted, weren't many, since you're so damn OP compared to the enemy in the first place. Still, this made grinding and one particular item-drop hunting segment a lot more palatable.
• Bad: Frankly, the game looks way older and shittier than it should. For a comparison point, Square released three all time classic JRPGs on the SNES in the early-to-mid-'90s - Final Fantasy IV (1991), Final Fantasy VI (1994), and Chrono Trigger (1995). All of these games look better than EarthBound (1994) and its two contemporary releases simply blow it out of the water. Graphics aren't everything, particularly when it comes to differentiating between games that look 20 years old and games that look 25 years old, but this is still worth mentioning.
• Good: Whenever you take damage, rather than getting nicked for one lump sum, your HP gauge would sort of slowly roll its way down. This added an interesting time-sensitive component to a turn-based battle system; an enemy could give a lethal amount of damage to all four of my characters, but as long as I got a "life up" move in before someone's HP hit zero, I was fine. Same thing would apply if the battles ended before someone died. Alternatively, if Ness has 500 HP, and the enemy keeps using a move that whacks him for 500 HP, I can probably get three or four turns in with Ness attacking before I need to worry about healing Ness.
• Bad: Like so many older RPGs, EarthBound has a really limited inventory. Each character can carry, in addition to four pieces of currently-in-use equipment, a maximum of ten items. One character doesn't use any PSI (magic, basically) and therefore needs his inventory space allocated primarily for battle items and other tools. That leaves you with thirty spots to store every relevant item you need along with any and all restorative items. By the time you get to four party members, it's not so bad, but any time you're stuck using one or even two party members for any amount of time, yeesh. I suppose a limited inventory is a realistic issue - no backpack is bottomless - but these types of limitations always end up forcing me to throw away  items I'd spent money on or gone out of my way to find in chests, only to end up wanting them later. Worse still, there's no shared inventory where everyone can dump their things. If Ness has a hamburger, and Jeff needs to eat it, but Ness should be using an attack, then guess what, Jeff, you're shit out luck. Should have stocked up on your own hamburgers! Also, whenever you find a treasure chest, the item inside goes straight tot he first character with an opening for it, which is how Ness always ends up with all kinds of crap in his inventory even though he's the one character you'll use solo a decent amount. Gah!
• Good: When you die in EarthBound, you don't revert to the last save point. I mean, you do, but all your experience and all of your new items are retained. I think your money is cut in half or something, which, fine. Beats throwing an hour of your life away on a failed attempt to make it through a dungeon. I always appreciate when games do this. "Yeah, you died, but that doesn't mean everything you did since your last save has gone to waste." Classy move, game! Granted, I was using save states on my Wii U Virtual Console for most of the game anyway.

Archer: Season 5

Oof. Rough month for the blog, guys. It's understandable, what with all the snow removal we had to do, and what with some of us being real damn busy at work and at school and at life, and what with some exciting new opportunities popping up elsewhere on the Internet. Still, we made just 11 posts, an all time low. And I personally contributed just five of those - an all time low as well. I can't ask the rest of you to pick up the pace - do what you want and do it when you can. I, however, absolutely need to get going if I ever intend to finish off my backlog.

That being said, March is here. A new month, and a new opportunity to make a big old dent in the backlog. Here's the first post. And with this, I'm on pace for 31!

The fifth season of Archer was the show reboot itself. After spending the first four years of its life as a workplace sitcom about a bunch of spies and special agents, Archer took a year off to become one long serialized arc about those same spies and special agents trying to sell off a metric ton of cocaine. Hijinks ensued, and the show's tone was the same as ever before. The abrupt shift in plot seemed like it was born from the show runners just tossing ideas around more than anything else; already in its sixth season, Archer is back to business as usual.

I think that this season sort of ran out of steam somewhere down the stretch, but I applaud the creative effort all the same. Fifty episodes into a low budget animated show, why not take these kinds of risks?