I just finished Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club, the new Nintendo Switch release that, as the name suggests, acts as an official sequel to the two classic Famicom Detective Club games that were first released on Famicom Disk System, and subsequently remade for Switch a couple of years back. You can read my thoughts on both of them here and here.
I’ll do a “proper” writeup on the game at some point in the next few days over on MoeGamer, but suffice to say for now that it was excellent, and acts as a wonderful successor to the already very good two predecessors.
For the unfamiliar, the Famicom Detective Club series unfolds as Japanese-style adventure games. That means you spend the majority of your time selecting actions from a menu, reading a lot of dialogue and searching for the next “trigger” to move the story along. Japanese adventures are more about the plot than solving puzzles; to put it another way, they are the modern equivalent of the narrative-centric “interactive fiction” versus the mechanics-centric “text adventures”.
The first two Famicom Detective Club titles occasionally lapsed into “click on every option multiple times until something happens”, which was mildly annoying, but this new third one makes the sensible decision of highlighting important words and phrases in the dialogue which generally gives you a solid idea of what you need to do next. You can actually turn this feature off if you prefer, but honestly just leaving it on is the best way to keep the story flowing.
The story this time around concerns a dead body that has been found. The corpse is a student named Eisuke, and he appears to have been strangled. Unusually, his corpse was found with a paper bag over his head, and a creepy smiley face scrawled crudely on the bag. What then follows is your attempts (as both the self-insert protagonist from the first two games and his long-suffering coworker Ayumi) to solve the case by interviewing suspects, examining important locations and gradually piecing everything together.
In the tradition of Japanese adventure games, you’re not really “doing” much beyond simply advancing the plot, but that’s fine. There’s no “moon logic” to worry about here; it’s just about enjoying the story unfold, and occasionally demonstrating that you’ve understood what you’ve witnessed through short “Review” sequences that quiz you on the most recent happenings. There aren’t really any consequences for getting these wrong other than Ayumi giving you the stink-eye, but that will be punishment enough for many players.
I’ll refrain from saying any more about the plot for the moment for the sake of spoilers, but I will say it’s refreshing and welcome to see Nintendo going unabashedly adult with this one. It’s PEGI 18 rated with good reason; it does not pull punches, and I mean that in several respects. The game is all the better for not holding back; it drives home the fact that the case you’re investigating is very serious for a number of different reasons, and the complex motivations of the many characters you’ll encounter over the course of the plot will keep you intrigued right up until the end.
I was also impressed by how comprehensively it wrapped things up by the conclusion. It pulls a little bit of a fast one on you in this regard, but I’ll leave exactly how for you to discover.
Anyway, yes; Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club is proof that the Switch very much still has plenty to offer in what most people are assuming is its twilight year. And it’s yet another reminder, if one were needed, that modern gaming isn’t actually all that bad, really — so long as you steer clear of the shit bits.
More on MoeGamer at some point this week.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
It’s very easy to be cynical about the state of modern gaming if all you pay attention to is triple-A. There are a bajillion YouTube videos on this very subject. I even made my own counterpoint, which you can enjoy here if you see fit:
Fact is, though, if you look outside all the identikit Live Service open-world player retention monetised-out-the-wazoo triple-A space (and the indie darlings who desperately wish they were part of that space), we’ve never had it so good.
We’re living in a world where, in 2024, there is a brand new Famicom Detective Club game out now, with an English version and a physical release. I bought it, because I really enjoyed the modernised versions of the first two. (You can read my thoughts on them here and here, and some more detailed thoughts on this new third entry will follow soon.)
We’re living in a world where preservation of retro games is not just taking place in the form of rereleases — and it’s great that that is happening in itself — but also in the form of fantastic “museum-style” pieces featuring interactive historical artifacts, video clips and all manner of other goodness.
We’re living in a world where Japanese games we once thought would never be localised are readily available in English — and with gorgeous big-box physical releases just like PC games from 25 years ago.
We’re living in a world where all the mainline Yakuza/Like A Dragon games are available in English, which I’m sure makes the guy who used to harass me on MoeGamer because he thought anime-style games were stopping Yakuza games from getting localised mad for some reason.
And, of course, we’re living in a world where thanks to emulation and related solutions, everyone has easy access to pretty much every game ever made, so if you ever claim you have “nothing to play” you really only have your own boring ass to blame.
There’s plenty that’s shit, of course. The aforementioned live service games. Perpetually unfinished releases with endless “roadmaps”. The scourge that is Game Pass. The death of traditional games journalism, particularly magazines. The general standard of “discourse” online (or lack thereof) surrounding video games. All of that sucks fat horse dick.
But a lot of it also doesn’t matter. Because you can shout and scream and yell about how shit you think “modern gaming” is… or you can actually engage with “modern gaming” until you figure out that it’s much, much more than just the incredibly shit bits. And the sooner you leave the incredibly shit bits behind — and yes, it absolutely is possible to do so, I have done since about 2010 and have been eating well games-wise ever since — you’ll find things better than ever.
So close that Twitter window where you’re complaining about Helldivers II or whatever, and boot up a copy of, say, Emio: The Smiling Man. And don’t look back.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
One of the nice things about being into retro gaming and computing these days is that there are a lot of very convenient things you can use that simply weren’t a thing Back In The Day for one reason or another. And while I’m not a huge fan of doing major modifications to classic hardware that effectively rips out the original “soul” of the machine, I do want to share a few things that just make life a little bit easier for various use cases.
SDrive-MAX (Atari 8-bit)
One of the most common points of failure on classic hardware is old media — both in terms of the media itself, and the hardware required to read it. I have several disk drives for my Atari 8-bit computers, and none of them quite work properly. One of the 1050s can be coaxed back into behaving itself by taking it apart, giving it a poke and putting it back together again, but that’s a bit of a pain and I’m always wary of doing so.
So what’s the alternative? Well, enter the SDrive-MAX, a little gizmo that plugs into the Atari 8-bit’s SIO port (precursor to USB, fact fans) and effectively acts as a virtual disk drive. Like most convenient add-on gizmos these days, it’s based around a little Arduino mini computer that basically pretends to be an Atari disk drive. Set it up with the default gubbins and it automatically boots to a convenient menu screen — using the Atari’s own OS, not anything you’ve “bolted on” to it — where you can choose from disk images and executable files you’ve put on an SD card. You can even create new disk images to save things — such as documents in productivity software and saved games in games — and mount multiple disk images simultaneously for easy swapping between.
It’s a lovely little thing, and has effectively removed most of the need I might have for a classic Atari disk drive. There are some old files and documents trapped on old Atari floppies that I’d like to find a solution to preserve at some point, but if I just want to play a game or something on real Atari 8-bit hardware, the SDrive-MAX is all I need.
UltraSatan (Atari ST)
A similar sort of thing for Atari ST is the UltraSatan. This, once again, is a little gizmo you plug into a port on the base spec micro without having to make any modifications, and it allows you to load things from SD card rather than having to rely on floppy disks. There are ways to make it boot floppy disk images, but by far the most convenient thing to do is set it up as a virtual hard drive and boot everything from there.
One of the most popular things to do in this regard is contact a slightly intimidating member of the Atari enthusiast community who has diligently worked to convert a massive selection of Atari ST games to run from hard drive. Not only that, but he’s set a lot of them up to support save states and quick quitting back to the desktop without having to reboot the machine — and he’s also put in the work to ensure that the vast majority of things work on all variants of the ST’s operating system, thereby completely eliminating one of my biggest bugbears with the ST: the fact that some games will only work on certain models of ST.
Like the SDrive-MAX, the UltraSatan fitted with the “PeraPutnik” driver and hard drive image turns the ST into a ready-to-go gaming battlestation, loaded up with every game you might possibly want to play (and some you’ll never want to touch). And because using it doesn’t involve faffing around with anything inside the ST — it plugs into the hard drive port that already exists on most STs — you can still use your old floppies, too.
MemCard Pro 2 (PlayStation/PlayStation 2)
One thing PlayStation enthusiasts have almost certainly run into at some point is the challenge of remembering which memory card has what saved games on it. If you have a large PlayStation and PlayStation 2 collection, it can be easy to lose track of what is saved where, unless you’re diligent about labelling and cataloguing your cards, which I’m willing to bet most people are not.
Enter the MemCard Pro 2, another little gizmo built on a tiny computer. This time, it’s not for booting game images; it’s for creating virtual memory cards on an SD card. This means you can easily organise and catalogue your saved games without having to constantly swap cards; changing memory cards is a matter of pressing a button on the device, or using the Web-based interface from your mobile phone to select a “card” directly.
It supports both PlayStation 2 and PlayStation memory cards, and the only limit to how many virtual cards you can have is the size of the SD card you put in it. And with PS2 memory cards being 8MB (and PS1 being 192KB!) you can fit a lot on even a small SD card.
Even better, if you’re just getting into PlayStation collecting and you start a game for the first time, the MemCard Pro 2 can automatically detect and create a memory card specifically for that game. If you use this feature, you basically never have to switch anything ever again — though if you have existing saves on old memory cards, you’ll probably want to spend some time copying them across to the MemCard Pro 2 at some point.
8bitdo Retro Receiver (PlayStation/PlayStation 2)
Finally, you can easily upgrade your PlayStation or PlayStation 2 to modern wireless controls with this lovely little thing. You can pair it with all manner of devices, including Sony’s own DualShock 4 controllers to keep the authentic PlayStation feel, and finally bin all those old DualShock 2s that have been making weird rattling noises for years. Lovely stuff.
I’m looking forward to adding the Dreamcast GDEMU (and I also ordered an EverDrive for the N64) to this mix. Modernised retro consoles ahoy!
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
I’ve bought an ODE for my Sega Dreamcast. For the unfamiliar, an ODE is an Optical Drive Emulator: a replacement for ageing optical disc drives that instead loads disc images directly from some sort of flash storage — usually an SD card of some description.
I’ve been meaning to do something like this for a while, but the seemingly prohibitive cost of doing so was putting me off a bit. But it turns out I was looking at the absolute most expensive possible way of doing it, known as a “MODE” device. This is apparently a nice bit of kit, but a much more affordable means of doing almost exactly the same thing is known as a GDEMU.
I’m generally hesitant to go for console modifications because I’m not at all confident with my own skills at taking things apart, putting things that weren’t originally supposed to be there inside, then putting it all back together again — and the instructions for doing so are usually put together by the sort of person who installs Linux for fun. But the Dreamcast GDEMU operation looks so simple I’m pretty sure even I can do it. You unscrew the case, unscrew the disc drive assembly, take the disc drive out and then plug the GDEMU directly into the same socket the disc drive was in. And that appears to be it — aside from a slightly scary-sounding suggestion that you stick some resistors in one of the bits of the power supply to help prevent overheating since the disc drive is no longer using that part of the power supply.
The way I see it is this: my Dreamcast is already a battered old thing that likes to reboot Sega Rally while I’m in the middle of playing it, and I’m pretty sure that the disc drive is to blame for all the woes I have with it. So if you take that out of the equation and replace it with something solid-state, then it will become much more enjoyable to use, and thus I will probably be more likely to use it on a more regular basis. If it all goes wrong, I’m left with a Dreamcast that didn’t work all that well in the first place, so no biggie. And if it does work, I have a revitalised machine that will hopefully be a lot of fun to use.
The reason I’m considering this at all in the first place is because although Dreamcast emulation is in quite a good place, it’s nowhere near as “near-perfect” as emulation for the classic cart-based systems and the PlayStation at this point. There are just enough little graphical glitches and considerations with Dreamcast emulation to make me want to take this approach with real hardware; I’m sure that will change with time, but for now, I think it’s going to be a more practical, enjoyable option.
The Dreamcast is a delightful system with a small but well-formed library filled with some great arcade-style games. It’s probably the last console where classic arcade-style games was a priority of the library — and while that probably contributed to its downfall as more ambitious, more hefty games took hold of the public’s imagination on other platforms, it makes the Dreamcast a very appealing prospect today. An ideal system for when you don’t want to get involved in anything too deep, but you still want to play a game.
So I’m looking forward to giving all this nonsense a go. It’ll be a while before all the parts I need arrive, but I’ll give a full report when they do.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
I decided to hop on board with a friend’s “high score” (well, “best time”, really) challenge over on his Discord today. The game? Sega Rally on the Saturn, a game (and console) I have precisely zero experience with outside of an occasional go on an arcade machine back in the ’90s.
Unsurprisingly, I am not yet at a standard where I can even enter the challenge, given that it requires participants to complete all three stages of the game and post a time on the game’s high score table. But I’m not mad about that. In fact, it brought something into focus that I’ve probably been aware of for a good long while, but which I hadn’t really thought about actively before.
A key difference between older, arcade-style games and the stuff we typically get today is that older games demand that you specialise — get really good at one very specific thing — while today’s games only demand that you reach a bare minimum acceptable standard in a wide variety of different activities.
Using racing games as an example, when you play Sega Rally, outside of stuff like the Time Attack and two-player modes, you’re always doing the same thing. You’re always racing the same three courses in the same order using one of the two same cars each time. Minimal variables. Minimal randomisation. Maximum scope for learning how to play the game well, and developing specific strategies that work for you.
Compare with a modern-day racing game. Leaving aside the fact that arcade-style racers barely exist any more outside of the indie space, today’s racing games are much more likely to give you hundreds of individual challenges to complete, and never really demand that you get good at one of them to a notable degree. Rather than specialising in one very specific thing, you are developing a standard of generalised mediocrity — enough to get by, but nothing more.
Of course, some players choose to take things a little further and want to top the online leaderboards or beat things on the hardest difficulty, obtain “S-Ranks” or whatever. But I’m willing to bet that a statistically significant portion of players of any given game featuring a wide swathe of content (ugh, I know, but bear with me) will play each thing the precise number of times they need to in order to mark it as “complete”, and then never touch it again.
I’m not saying either of these approaches is wrong per se — although I suspect a game as “content-light” as Sega Rally would be a hard sell as a full-price game today — but it is interesting how different those two types of game feel. My brief jaunt with Sega Rally this afternoon was genuinely exciting. I could see myself improving as my lap times got better with each attempt — and the successful completion of the challenge was within sight. Add the competitive element to that (once I’ve actually cleared the three races, of course) and you have even more exciting thrills.
This isn’t to say that games like this don’t exist in the modern day, either — although they’re less common. The last time I really feel like there was a highly competitive, specialised game that I spent a significant amount of time with was probably Geometry Wars 2 on Xbox 360, and that must be pushing 20 years old at this point. But it was the exact same sort of thing I was feeling today with Sega Rally: a specific, well-defined, non-randomised challenge, and the desire to do well at that one thing.
The other benefit of games like this is that they’re much more friendly to shorter sessions. This makes it ideal for those of you who have been browbeaten into believing you “don’t have time” to play games any more, or if you only have a half hour before your food arrives, or before you have to catch the bus, or log on to Teams and pretend that you’re working or something.
There’s something to be said for the “no strings” aspect of these games; the fact that they don’t demand your commitment over the long term, and they’re not trying to bribe you into making that one game your complete lifestyle with things like Battle Passes, microtransactions, progression systems and other such shenanigans. On top of that, it often just feels like games that have a small number of very specific challenges to complete are probably better designed; if you only have three tracks in your racing game, you better make sure they’re damn good ones, whereas if you have 100 tracks, who cares if one or two are a bit of a stinker?
If you haven’t played a “specialised” game like Sega Rally for a long time, I highly recommend the experience. Boot it up, spend some time with it, enjoy the experience, then set it aside and do something else. Far from being a “waste of time”, as certain quarters of modern gaming might like you to believe, I think you might be surprised what a pleasantly invigorating experience it is… and how likely you might be to come back and try again later.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
I’ve decided that to help me out when I want to write a longer, more substantial piece on MoeGamer about a particular game, I’m going to start using my daily posts here — when I don’t have anything “better” or more pressing to talk about, that is — to keep notes on my impressions about what I’m playing as I go along.
So, having finished Doom 2016 and not quite feeling in the mood to get back to Trails in the Sky: Second Chapter just yet — and very much feeling like I wanted something with a bit of colour and joy in it, given my general low mood — I decided to fire up Rance Quest Magnum for the first time.
For the unfamiliar, Rance Quest Magnum is the eighth title in the Rance series of 18+ role-playing games from Alicesoft. The Rance series, if you’re unfamiliar, is noteworthy for being almost as old as Final Fantasy, and an important part of Japanese gaming history. It was very late to get localised, however, as the fact many of the games feature a hefty amount of sexual assault in them (including incidents perpetrated by the protagonist) presumably meant a lot of companies thought it was too much of a risky prospect.
But MangaGamer, bless them, got over it, and have been steadily releasing Rance games for a while now. They started with Rance 5D and VI — with 5D being a soft reboot of the series, and thus a good starting point — and continuing on with the remakes of the first two games in the series, Rance 01 and Rance 02, the grand strategy game Sengoku Rance, then Rance Quest Magnum and most recently the penultimate installment Rance IX. I’ve written about a number of these in the past — see MoeGamer for my thoughts on Rance 5D, VIand Sengoku, and Rice Digital for my exploration of Rance 01 and 02.
You can find more (a lot more) about the history of this series at those links, so if you want to know more, go give them a click so I can get on with talking about what I actually want to talk about.
Rance Quest Magnum, like most entries in the Rance series, completely reinvents its core structure and mechanics. While Sengoku Rance was a grand strategy game with some RPG elements, Rance Quest Magnum is kind of-sort of a more conventional RPG. Except it’s a kind of-sort of conventional RPG in a different way to Rance VI: Collapse of Zeth, which was a first-person “blobber” dungeon crawler at heart.
Rance Quest Magnum instead adopts a heavily quest-based structure. There’s no “world map” to wander around, and quests are self-contained challenges, some of which have unique dungeons, others of which reuse maps used elsewhere. The main “RPG” action of the game primarily unfolds from a top-down perspective, with Rance represented as a polygonal “chibi” form of himself, similar to how stablemate Evenicle does things — and yes, I’ve covered that also. Although Evenicle had a world map so itself was a completely different sort of game to Rance Quest Magnum.
So each quest in Rance Quest Magnum unfolds across one or more top-down maps. On each map, you explore, find treasures, get into fights and attempt to complete your quest objectives. When you’ve completed your quest objective, that’s it — you leave the map. You can, however, repeat previously completed quests, which allows you to investigate the map more thoroughly, see events with choices unfold in different ways (which in turn can unlock new quests), acquire new treasures and, of course, grind for experience, money and items.
Rance Quest Magnum‘s core mechanics make use of an interesting skill system. Each character has a certain number of skill slots, and is usually able to increase these by purchasing a particular passive skill on level up. The skill slots can be used for either active skills, which are used in combat, or boost skills, which directly impact stats and overall effectiveness in battle. Characters can also have completely passive skills, which they just need to have learned in order to take advantage of; they don’t need to be slotted.
Active skills have a set number of uses per quest, and you can increase this count by spending the skill points acquired on level up. If you do this, it, of course, means that you can’t learn a new skill instead — but sometimes it’s more helpful to be able to perform a particular action more often than have a greater choice of actions available, particularly given that you can only equip so many of them at once anyway.
Among the passive skills, meanwhile, are skills that appear to have nothing to do with combat; the character Sachiko, for example, who is a student, has a skill that represents her putting some time in to study when Rance isn’t dragging her along to dungeons, and Rance himself, of course, has a “Sexual Prowess” skill.
The limited number of times each active skill can be used is sort of a callback to how Rance VI: Collapse of Zeth and Sengoku Rance did things, though a little different to both cases. In Rance VI, each character had a “stamina” rating, which represented how many battles they could participate in before becoming exhausted; aside from that, they could use any of their skills as you saw fit according to the situation. Sengoku Rance, meanwhile, gave each character a certain number of “action flags”, representing how many actions they could take in a single battle or dungeon delve. In the latter case, you could swap out characters from your complete squad if someone became exhausted or incapacitated.
You can do this in Rance Quest Magnum, too, though the number of times you can swap party members around is limited by Rance’s “Charisma” stat, which starts at zero to represent him bumming around being a violent nuisance at the outset of the game. For context, towards the end of Sengoku Rance, Rance’s longtime companion and slave Sill Plain became encased in enchanted ice that doesn’t melt naturally, and despite being firmly in denial, the beginning of Rance Quest Magnum indicates that he has not taken this all that well. His level has dropped massively, he’s reverted to his very worst extremes of brutish behaviour, and he’s generally having a negative impact on the world and people around him.
Rance is a thoroughly interesting character in that although he is indisputably an asshole, he has had a major impact on world events for the better across all his previous adventures. Indeed, if you look into the overall lore of the Rance series, his very existence is considered to be something of an anomaly, with the “gods” behind the running of the world keeping him around because he keeps things interesting. He’s not a “hero” by the definition of the “Planner Scenario”, which the world of Rance operates under, but he does have the interesting distinction of being born without a level cap, which means it’s possible for him to grow to extraordinary levels of power over the course of Rance Quest Magnum.
This is why it’s interesting to see him effectively starting again from almost zero in Rance Quest Magnum. His “loss” of Sill has clearly hit him hard, and it takes a fair bit of encouragement from the people around him to get him off his arse and pursuing some sort of cure for her. In the early hours of the game, he’s completing quests for pretty much selfish reasons, but I’m willing to bet that over the course of the game as a whole, his attitude will change — particularly if and when he manages to sort out Sill’s situation.
I’m really enjoying the game so far. Like most Rance games, it strikes a nice balance between interesting gameplay, well-written dialogue and cheeky, provocative humour. The mechanics and progression systems in particular look set to be very interesting indeed, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the quests progress as you continue through the game.
I’m sure I’ll have a lot more to say on the game after a few more hours with it, but suffice to say for now, I think I made the right choice deciding to make a start on it.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
A little while back, I felt the need to start something new and not RPG-shaped, so I thought I’d finally get around to giving the Doom reboot from 2016 a go. After several nights of playing it and being roughly halfway through the single-player game, I’m not 100% sure if I’m enjoying it or not.
This is not a slight against anyone who does think it’s good — I know how annoying it is when you love something and someone turns up to shit all over it. But I wanted to pop my thoughts that I’ve had about the game on paper so I can make better sense of them, and perhaps get a better idea of whether or not I actually like it.
The fact I’m asking this question at all can be looked at in one of two ways. Firstly, if you have to ask if you’re enjoying something, you’re probably not. Alternatively, secondly, if you’re not sure you’re enjoying something but you hesitate to say that you dislike it, you probably are enjoying at least something about it. So my opinion is somewhere between those two extremes, I guess.
First, let’s ponder the things I do like. I do like the way the weapons behave and the overall “feel” of the game. There’s a really nice fluid sense of movement to how you move around, defeat enemies, clamber up onto platforms and perform Glory Kills. The way enemies are highly reactive to how you shoot them and blast into bloody chunks feels entirely appropriate for a modern take on Doom, but also reminds me of older games such as Sega’s The House of the Dead. This is a good thing.
It’s nice to play a first-person shooter that moves at speed, has levels that aren’t linear corridors, and which doesn’t kill the pacing of its combat with constant reloading. Doom 2016 has all its weapons act like its classic counterparts, where direct analogues exist — that means no reloading ever, with the exception of the shotguns, but there it’s just part of the overall firing animation anyway, so no harm done. The chaingun is particularly great; the original Doom’s chaingun always felt rather weedy (at least partly because it just played the pistol sound effect in rapid succession) but Doom 2016’s is an absolute beast — as it should be.
Now, onto things that I am less crazy about. Chief among these is the game’s overall pacing. Whereas progressing through a classic Doom level feels like it always keeps you on your toes, in Doom 2016 it feels like you’re moving from “encounter” to “encounter”. It has that thing where you’ll be clambering through the environment and come to a wide open area, and immediately your brain will think “I’m about to get swarmed by enemies”. It’s inevitably right. It’s predictable, and it doesn’t quite feel right. It makes the levels feel like you’re jumping from “exploration mode” to “battle mode”, whereas classic Doom felt like it integrated the two aspects much more elegantly.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. The Shadow Warrior reboot from a few years back was also designed like this, and I think it worked rather well there. It just doesn’t feel quite right for Doom.
The one thing I don’t like at all is how it clearly thinks it’s being some sort of witty anti-corporate satire, but it’s so absurdly over-the-top about it I just find myself being pulled out of the experience. Any time you hear the UAC pep talks over the computer systems on the Mars base, the things being said are increasingly ridiculous, and it crosses the line between plausible satire and just being stupid for the sake of it. I don’t come to a Doom game for the plot in the first place, so this aspect of things feels incredibly ham-fisted and I do not like it at all.
The parts I can’t quite make my mind up about are all the bits where it’s not being a fast-action first-person shooter. The levels are all huge and quite interesting to explore, particularly with all the hidden collectibles around the place, but it also feels like it brings the “explore, battle, explore” cycle into even sharper focus than it already is — at the end of a level, you’ll typically find the exit door sitting there ready and waiting for you, and the rest of the level open for you to explore almost completely unopposed in most cases. Sometimes a few enemies are tucked away off the critical path, but more often than not the secrets are concealed behind traversal puzzles rather than combat encounters. This doesn’t feel very Doom.
I do, however, like the fact that every stage has a reasonably obvious terminal where you can download the full map data for the level and thereby see which areas you have already explored and which you haven’t. Collectibles are also marked on the map, so there’s no farting around pressing the “Use” button (why on Earth is it R3, by the way?) against every wall in the hope something might open up somewhere.
Parts I’m leaning towards disliking are the presence of an upgrade system and “Challenges”. There are times when Doom 2016 almost feels like it wishes it was Diablo or something of its ilk, whisking you away to a completely separate environment to complete a self-contained challenge and rewarding you with some sort of “loot” if you are successful. Some of these challenges are incredibly irritating to complete, such as one where you have 1 point of health and have to defeat 8 increasingly tough enemies using just the basic Shotgun weapon. They’re optional, yes, but once you’re in one if you’re anything like me you’ll likely feel like you have to complete it before you continue on your way.
The mods for the weapons have some quite interesting effects, but I think I’d rather just have an alt-fire mode for each weapon and not have to faff around with upgrading it. Because upgrading it involves acquiring “upgrade points”, which you get through killing enemies in a stage and finding secrets. I guess if one is being charitable, one can look on it as a modernisation of the “Kills / Items / Secrets” breakdown you get at the end of a classic Doom stage, only here it actually has a tangible benefit on your game. But still, unlocking abilities doesn’t feel very Doom.
Same for upgrading your health, armour and ammo maximums. The former two almost feel worthless given how quickly monsters batter down your entire health bar (and how quickly you can restore the whole thing with a Glory Kill or two) and the latter just makes the early game frustrating as you’re constantly running out of ammo in a game where that shouldn’t be an issue.
I understand there is an “Arcade Mode” available in the game and I’m now wondering if I should have just played that from the outset, because it’s all the extra bells and whistles that have been added atop an attempt to modernise the classic Doom formula that feel like they’re annoying me to varying degrees.
On the whole, I don’t hate the game. The bits that annoy me aren’t putting me off enough to not want to play it through to completion. But the game as a whole is reminding me what a beautifully polished, finely honed game the original Doom is — and how, without a doubt, I would probably still rather play that than this, particularly now its recent 576th rerelease, this time running on Night Dive’s excellent Kex Engine, has a bunch of new levels (again) in it.
I’m going to see Doom 2016 through to completion. But I don’t think I’m inclined in any way to want to “100%” it or spend any additional time with it beyond that required to beat the single-player campaign. And I guess that’s fine. I only paid about a fiver for it, after all, so I can’t really complain all that much.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
There’s a guy (I assume it’s a guy) in a Discord I’m in who is the most attention-deficit gamer I think I’ve ever seen, and I cannot imagine living life like he does. His entire contribution to the Discord in question is announcing what he has bought from a digital storefront today (and he buys a lot seemingly every week) and what he is reinstalling for presumably not the first time.
I get actual anxiety if I have more than one or two games on the go at once. I start feeling like I “should” finish one of the things I’m playing before I start something else. This is an entirely self-inflicted scenario that has come about at least in part from the habits I picked up while working in games journalism and running my own website, but I’m not particularly mad about it; the way I feel about things means that I’m much more likely to play things through to completion and get what I believe to be a full appreciation of them.
If there’s one thing that doing my “Cover Game” thing on MoeGamer for several years taught me, it’s that a significant proportion of games out there have considerable hidden depths that only truly reveal themselves to analysis when you’ve spent a protracted amount of time with the game. I like being able to talk about things in that much depth — even if, as I’ve bemoaned frequently over the last few years, it’s fucking impossible to get anyone to give a shit these days — and thus I don’t have any particular desire to change.
Being in those habits, though, just makes me confused as to what this person is getting out of their gaming time. By jumping back and forth between big games like Fate/stay night, Utawarerumono and numerous others, he’s surely dooming himself to never making any substantial progress in any of them. And when you’re talking story-centric games or visual novels like that, that seems like a… sub-optimal means of enjoying them.
Perhaps I’m the weird one. I know plenty of people who flit from Game Pass game to Game Pass game and think nothing of it. I just think it’s a bit sad that the norm these days seems to be to get a surface-level look at something and then move on to the next new shiny thing. One could say that some games could stand to be a bit shorter — and that’s certainly true — but that doesn’t mean the long ones have no value or aren’t worth sticking with over the long term. It just seems less and less likely that people will actually stick with those longer titles.
I hope that doesn’t mean that we end up with a gaming sector that eschews long-form experiences altogether. I don’t think that will happen — not least because the triple-A studios seem obsessed with “player retention” over the long term, even in single-player titles — but I would say, if you recognise yourself in what I’m describing here: take the time to focus on and complete one game. You might just be surprised what a rewarding experience it is.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
We had a work day out today. Despite us not being based in London and none of us living in London, we went to London.
I haven’t been to London for a very long time. For context, the last time I went to London they had not introduced the ability to “touch in” and “touch out” on the Underground with a credit or debit card.
My work colleagues went to The Crystal Maze Live Experience first of all, but I passed on that as I suspected I probably wasn’t physically fit enough to take part. A shame, because it sounds like it was fun, but I don’t mind too much. I’m knackered enough as it is!
Instead, I joined everyone for lunch at Covent Garden. We went to an “Asian fusion” place with touchscreen tables that didn’t work very well, and had a selection of Japanese-style tapas. Pretty tasty, though I have been left with foul smelling burps.
I suspect that may have been more to do with the cocktails we had at our next destination, an arcade bar just off Oxford street. This was a dingy basement with lots of blacklight and some great arcade machines, though a few clearly needed a bit of TLC on the displays.
There was a great mix of classic stuff, including oldies like Galaga, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, along with later large scale stuff like OutRun 2 and all three Time Crises. It wasn’t free play, sadly, you had to buy tokens (£9.50 for 15, and a lot of games took 2 tokens) but the CEO was kind enough to provide us a generous allowance. There were also plenty of consoles equipped with Everdrives and equivalents, and those were free for anyone to play.
It was an enjoyable hangout. A little loud for decent conversation — from the music rather than the machines — but there was a nice vibe, and it seemed to pick up and become quite lively as afternoon turned to evening. The gaming-themed cocktails were great, too, even if they were all at least £11 a pop.
I am, however, as previously noted, absolutely pooped, so now it is time to sleep. I suspect I will sleep well tonight!
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
I’ve been pondering my YouTube channel ever since I wrote this post. Indeed, I’m still firmly of the opinion that Not Everything Has To Be Content, but I also think I work best when I have some sort of “structure” to proceedings, to know what I’m doing when. So I’ve come up with something for myself.
This is not intended to be a completely rigid structure of [x] videos per week or anything like that, but more some guidelines for me to work within that allow me to cover my diverse interests, celebrate a variety of games and still focus on the things that I’m most passionate about.
So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to work on a four-week cycle, which will go as follows:
Week 1: Atari 8-bit. One or two videos on Atari 8-bit games. Now I’ve covered all the built-in games of The400 Mini, this will be pretty much anything.
Week 2: Atari ST. I love the ST, and there are sections of my audience who love it too, so I want to make sure I make some time for it. Like the Atari 8-bit week, this will be one or two videos on Atari ST games.
Week 3: Public Domain and Magazines. This is relatively “open” to interpretation each time it rolls around, but in this week I’d like to either take some time to read through a magazine on camera, or to cover some of the Page 6 Public Domain Library disks for Atari 8-bit and ST, as I enjoyed the few videos I made on those a while back.
Week 4: Wild Card. This can be absolutely anything I feel like doing. If I feel like playing some DOS games, I’ll do that. If I feel like playing some SNES games, I’ll do that. If I feel like playing some Amiga games, I’ll do that.
I feel good about this; it lets me cover the things that I definitely want to keep covering on the channel, as well as the flexibility to do other stuff. And at any point, I won’t feel guilt if I want to take a week off due to fatigue or the weather or anything like that… I’ll just pick up where I left off!
So that’s that. I’m going to start implementing this from this coming weekend and we’ll keep moving from there. I hope you enjoy!
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
