Tag: howditage

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How’d It Age #3 – Metroid Prime

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: FPS
  • Platform: Switch
  • Originally Available On: Gamecube, Wii

Under normal circumstances, this would be a very short ramblings. Yes, this aged well. Yes it’s still an incredibly good and fun game. Yes you should buy it. The end.

But I have some thoughts here on the various versions, with a bit of a wild card. I’ve played all the versions of this that have come out, whether it’s the original release, the Wii update for Trilogy, or what is now the remastered version on Switch. If I look at the versions side by side, I don’t think there’s a real clear winner in terms of which one is the best. There’s things that the last two do that I think are interesting and better, so the real question is, which one should you play?

The Switch version is a pretty easy recommendation, especially if you’re a typical console FPS player. The dual-stick controls drastically modernize the game, making general traversal much better than other versions. It allows the game to just flow better, which is a bit of a surprise to me. It also drastically reduces the benefit of aim lock, which is something that surprisingly makes the game quite a lot easier. It’s also easy to recommend it because of the updated visuals, which really do a surprising amount to modernize the experience.

However, I don’t think that’s the best control scheme. I actually think it’s pointer controls, and unfortunately I don’t think that the Switch pointer controls feel as good as they do on the Wii. I noticed that they were occasionally getting out of sync which is something that I’ve seen on other pointer-style Wii ports, as well as with motion-assisted games like Splatoon. This is where the Wii version via Metroid Prime Trilogy really shines. The pointer input scheme on that version is as close to mouse-focused aiming as I’ve ever seen on a console game, and it shines in this experience. It makes boss fights in particular incredibly precise to fight, and again is something that reduces the need to really use aim lock. Combined with a heavier reliance on strafing compared to the original, this is as PC-styled as the series gets.

That said, I do have a wildcard and that comes in the form of PrimeHack. This is a fork of the fantastic Dolphin emulator that adds in support for traditional PC keyboard/mouse controls to Metroid Prime Trilogy, assuming you have a legal way to rip your discs down or feel like sailing the high seas. This can be combined with things like the Dolphin supported for HD texture packs to transform the PC experience into something closer to the remaster’s visual styles with an even better control scheme. The first time I played Prime in this way was a revelation. It transforms into a PC game so easily that I can’t believe more shooters aren’t trying to fill the adventure game niche that this series did. At high framerate and resolution combined with keyboard/mouse controls, this just feels like a modern PC game, despite being 20 years old.

I suppose I never really answered the question of which version you should play, and I think my answer really comes down to any of them. Play the Switch if it’s the easiest to get at. Play the Wii version if you want consistent shooting input. Rip your disc and play it on PC with a texture pack if you really want a surprising experience. However you play this game, you won’t be disappointed. It really does still hold up.

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How’d It Age #2 – Star Ocean: First Departure

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PSP
  • Also Available On: PS4, Switch
  • Originally On: Super Famicom

This is definitely one of those games that kind of got away. It didn’t come out in the US until the PSP, and I completely missed the boat on that. It coming out again a couple years ago on modern consoles reminded me of its gap in my library, but it still took until now for me to finally get around to picking it up.

It’s been almost 6 years since the last Star Ocean in my playlist, and the benefit of hindsight shows so much of how that game ended up where it was. My likes playing that one basically read like a laundry list of my likes here.

This is a relatively short game, clocking in at under 15 hours. Because I finished around level 75, you can get a good guess about how quickly I was leveling up. The other benefit is that this allowed me to power through the skill list extremely fast. That in particular is one of my favorite things about leveling in this game. Ya, you get your leveling stats, but the skills are key. Want to load all in to offense with random armor breaks and offensive boosts? Go nuts, load into those skills. Want your healer to just spam heals to support your glass cannon shenanigans? Go ahead and load into skills that reduce cast and cooldown times. Take all of that and load into skills that reduce your point usage and increase your EXP gain and you’re just flying through the game. The customization possibilities there are a lot of fun and really end up being the focal point of a core metagame that still really works well 25 years later.

The combat also still manages to be fun, despite its relative simplicity. There’s definitely been games that have done it better in the years since, not the least of which are newer SO titles let alone series like Tales Of. However, this works well enough to allow me to just forget about how modern action-focused JRPGs have gone. The simplicity of having movement, an attack button with a fixed chain, and a couple of skill hotkeys is such an easy thing to fall into. I’m not remembering combos and weaknesses and anything extraneous. I’m just watching out for attacks, dodging them when I can, then spamming the hell outta my attack button to kill things. It combines with some of the skill stuff above (hell ya random dodge chance!) and the short length of the game to really just be enough to keep me going.

The things I do end up missing though are some of the little modern features that just aren’t here. The first of these is really just a lack of direction, and I don’t mean that quite so literally. Every story cutscene ends with a point where you’ve kind of got a random chance that they actually tell you something useful about where to go. More often than not I was just aimlessly wandering. Sure, people will complain about being handheld, but having a blip of like just generally go around here goes a long way to letting me explore and check things out while still eventually knowing the right way to head. I also just severely miss autosaves. Again, I think a lot of people will go “well, they make the game too easy” but I would argue just the opposite. Autosaves allow games to be much harder without wasting the players time. Save often, make individual combat situations difficult, and let players die without time loss. Modern JRPGs have started leaning into this a lot and I much prefer having a quick retry / reset to just before the fight to regroup option because a lot of the general fights in this game were just needlessly easy.

This is stupid, but I also just hate the town layouts. Why are the shops and inn so far apart from each other in pretty much every town? Why are the layouts all mazes without central squares? This was made more frustrating by the fact that you run faster in straight lines than diagonals, so navigating towns was just a slow process.

So then the question is less of a did it age well, because it did. It becomes more of a is it worth playing now? I think it’s a yes, perhaps with a bit of hesitation. If you’re kind of on the edge for the genre, I’d perhaps steer you to something modern likes Tales of Arise. If you’re a heavy JRPG fan, absolutely. There’s enough here to be fun, it’s short so it won’t waste a bunch of time, and it’s still entirely modern enough in combat feel to not be distracting. I may recommend waiting a bit for a sale, but even at its current price of $21 on PSN/Nintendo eShop, that’s not too bad of a deal for a pretty solid piece of gaming history.

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How’d It Age #1 – Need for Speed Carbon

More Info from EA

  • Genre: Racing
  • Platform: PS3 (via rpcs3)

I have a certain affinity for this era of Need for Speed games. They aren’t necessarily great games. The driving certainly isn’t the best. Their stories are campy as all hell. The AI is pretty frustratingly rubberbandy. However, they have an inexplicable level of fun that I can’t quite put my finger on. That fun is something that was lost for me in newer entries like Heat, where the driving was similarly intended to be arcadey but just never clicked with me. Carbon on the other hand has a few specific things that I can point at that really feed that feeling well.

The AI in these games could generously be described as unfair. You can be 10 seconds in the lead, then the AI magically gains enough speed to catch up and pass you. However, Carbon breaks that up in a way that still works well against modern games. Having an AI partner in the races just causes all sorts of wonderful chaos. Their core feature is that they can be a few different specs (blockers, drafters, and scouts), which all have their own version of wonderful chaos. Want to just clear your opponents and run free? Use a blocker to knock them all out of the race. Want to really push speed as a main motivation? Use a drafter and chain speed boost your way to victory.

These things even pretty specifically come into play in some event types. One of the most chaotic event types in the speed camera event, where you win by having the highest total MPH captured on a set of cameras. Normally this should generally just go to the first place car anyway, but with rubberbanding that isn’t exactly the case…..which is why you exploit your AI helper. I can’t tell you how many of these I won by purposefully knocking my ally into a wall at the start of the race, causing them to fall seconds behind. They would then go into a MASSIVE rubberband and easily win the events by 50-100mph. Exploit? Sure. Fun and funny as hell? Yep.

The same general idea could be used in normal races. Let your ally fall a bit behind, let them inevitably slingshot forward, then let THEM win the race. Ultimately the metagame at play here is for your crew to take over a city, so it doesn’t really matter if it’s you or the AI winning, as long as it’s your crew. It’s a great way to reinforce the whole overarching story in a way that continues to feel fresh. Seeing this kind of use of rubberbanding AI is just something I don’t think I’ve ever seen. Rubberbanding alone is something that I don’t generally see to this level of chaos in modern games, but being able to exploitatively use it to your advantage is something that I’m finding completely unique to this title.

The other thing that still works is that the driving is just really smooth. This is where I had my biggest problem with NFS: Heat. That game felt like it was forcing you to drift, and it made the driving feel really clumsy. This game just feels extremely tighter at high speeds than is realistic. It’s a very specific style of arcade game, but it means that once I get up to speed the game feels more about timing my turning flow, and less about trying to use mechanics to keep my speed up. It’s a driving style more akin to the Burnout games than later NFS titles, which tended to lean into a heavier floaty style that pushed drifting to the max. In terms of the two, I much prefer the way this or Burnout feel.

That said, hoooooo boy the story. It was campy at release. It’s just bad now. I’m not going to sit here and say that the NFS series has ever really had a good story, but oh boy is this such a specific style of camp that just doesn’t age well. In a lot of ways it feels kind of like your typical Syfy movie, where things are a really weird mix of camp and over seriousness that just doesn’t mesh well. It’s worth zoning them out. You aren’t missing anything.

This era of NFS is such a specific type of game, and it’s surprising to me how well it still works. If you go older than this into the PS1 era, those games just feel aged – even with greats like the original Hot Pursuit. If you go newer than this, they just feel like different games – whether it’s the clear Burnout Paradise sequels that worked well or some of the more experimental titles that….just didn’t. These sorta open world tuner titles though? These are my thing. I can drop into games like Underground and have fun, and Carbon really does a decent job of still holding up that style of gameplay. They may not have ever been great but it’s hard to not just have fun with them.