It’s almost distressing to think that the Switch was released in 2017. It still feels brand new to me, but then, time has lost all meaning since I got old. But now we’re all waiting for the big reveal of Nintendo’s successor, and you can kind of feel that with the big releases this year.

Going to be real with you, this was a much slower year for the handheld, which feels like a weird thing to say when it saw the release of a new Zelda game. However, it was a subdued Zelda game, like it’s been a subdued year for the console. But regardless of that, we still got plenty to play on the little hybrid.

It’s time to name the best of those games. As with every year here at Destructoid, the window of eligibility for our nominees runs from the beginning of December 2023 to the end of December 2024 (sorry, Uncle Chop). We also have a rule that a game can only be included in one category, so if something seems missing from this list, you might find it in another category.

Here are the nominees for Destuctoid’s Best Switch Game of 2024.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

Yeah, one of the nominees this year is technically a GameCube game, but Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door was one of the best on the console, and all of that charm is retained for its glow-up. Largely, it’s just a remaster of an already great game, but also, it’s an already great game. Everything on top is just gravy.

Star Wars Hunters

Star Wars is no stranger to online games, and Star Wars Hunters grows its footprint with a hero-based Overwatch approach to PVP. Despite recent high-profile failures in the genre (such as Concord), Star Wars Hunters found its audience and is thriving.

Steamworld Heist II

It’s hard to believe Steamworld Heist II arrived eight years after the original, but the wait has been worth it. The sequel takes the 2D, turn-based tactical gameplay even further by taking it to the high seas. It’s incredible that any game could even top the satisfying feeling of Steamworld Heist. Or, as Jamie Moorcroft-Sharp put it, "SteamWorld Heist II is a phenomenal title that offers you the best when it comes to short, tactical encounters with thrilling turn-based gameplay."

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition

I’m never far from an NES (it’s a few feet away in my living room), but it’s well-trodden ground for me. I always love finding new ways to interact with my favorites in its library, and Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition does just that. A series of concise time trials give you the chance to compete on the world stage in miniature speed-running. It’s a celebration of the company’s roots.

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

A Zelda game actually starring its titular character has been on quite a few wishlists, and this year, it finally arrived. It may not have the grandeur of Tears of the Kingdom, but it makes up for it with inventive gameplay centered around summoning whatever you want. Lots of problems can be solved with beds, but it takes more than a mattress to save the kingdom.

Super Mario Party Jamboree

Mario Party games can be very hit-and-miss, but this year, we got a direct hit. There’s nothing insanely mindblowing about Super Mario Party Jamboree – it doesn’t completely change the recipe – but it combines the best parts of Super Mario Party with the classic formula and comes away with one of the best games the series has seen since its inception.

Athenian Rhapsody

It’s hard to describe Athenian Rhapsody, so I’m just going to quote the developer, “a souls-like platonic dating simulator with cooking-mama and WarioWare style battle mechanics... and by that, I mean it's a choose-your-own-adventure action RPG with the ability to trade ENTIRE PLAYTHROUGHS between friends!!” I’m sure that answered your question. What you really need to know, however, is that it’s offensively good. Hence being on this list.

The post Nominees for Destructoid’s Best Switch Game of 2024 appeared first on Destructoid.

It’s that time of year when we collectively look back at the flaming wreckage that we somehow managed to live through. It’s been a tough one, but at least the indie market has continued to flourish with the release of all kinds of experimental and artistic titles.

As with every year, the window for eligibility in our awards are December to December, so games released in December 2023 are valid, but not games in December 2024 (Sorry, The Thing: Remastered). We also have a rule that each game can only be nominated for one category, so if you don’t see something here, we may have stuck it in with a console-specific one if it feels like a better fit.

If you felt like you had nothing to play this year, you need to think smaller budget, my friend. Indie games kept me busy this year. Very busy. Too busy. Portions of my year are just blurs of unique art styles, narrative depths, and casual experiments. But there are some amazing standouts, and myself and the Destructoid team have been able to narrow them down to just a handful.

Here are the runners for Destructoid’s Best Indie Game of 2024.

Mullet Mad Jack

With only 10 seconds to live, you have to kill robot billionaires (robillionaires) on livestream to get the sweet, sweet endorphins that come with amassing likes on social media in order to add precious seconds onto the clock. After all, internet adulation is the only reason to keep living. Mullet Mad Jack is a never-stop-moving murder-sprint of a roguelite laced with a ridiculous but strangely believable depiction of the future as interpreted by the 1990s. Fast and furious in the back, thought-provoking in front.

Anthology of the Killer

Technically a compilation of short-form indie titles going back to 2020, Anthology of the Killer rolls up several tales, presents them in one complete package, and puts on a bow. Following the exploits of BB, a young woman trapped in a surreal city so packed with serial killers that they’ve just become a fact of life. Its dreamlike horror is so effective because it’s impossible to really get hold of anything resembling reality, with only its effective sense of humor keeping panic at bay.

Crow Country

It’s not uncommon for horror games in the indie sphere to invoke a PS1 aesthetic to take us back to the youthful days of survival horror. But despite the well-trodden territory, Crow Country presents something fresh. Featuring an effective art style that allows its environments to look pre-rendered while actually being real-time and a surprisingly unconventional and haunting narrative, Crow Country is among the best games the genre has seen in years.

1000xRESIST

Clearly, we here at Destructoid have an inappropriate level of affection for unconventional narratives, because that’s exactly what Steven “Cinderblock” Mills feverishly rants about in his review for 1000xRESIST, going as far as calling it a “narrative masterpiece.” Beyond that, it finds gameplay hooks beyond its adventure roots to keep you engaged, as if you needed more reason to lock in.

Animal Well

While Animal Well can be pinned as a metroidvania title, at every turn, it seems to try and subvert and surprise in a way that is rarely seen in the genre. Both minimalistic and detailed, Animal Well uses its focus on secrets and exploration to drive hooks into your innate curiosity to keep you fixated.

Balatro

Perhaps the only game on this list to reach indie-game escape velocity and find a mainstream audience. It’s easy to see why. Balatro boils down the deckbuilding roguelite genre into its base elements to provide an absorbing perversion of Poker. It could easily be a perfect snack game, but good luck just playing a few short rounds.

Buckshot Roulette

All the fun of the classic party game with less chance of removing your frontal lobe with a slug. Buckshot Roulette is a deceptively simple game of shooting yourself in the face with a shotgun. You face off with a creepy stranger, using whatever tricks you can to keep yourself from eating lead breakfast. Short, but disturbingly engrossing.

The post Nominees for Destructoid’s Best Indie Game of 2024 appeared first on Destructoid.

One of the worst things about the industry today is that there are just so damned many games coming out at any one time. One of the best things about it is that there’s no end to the variety between them. A game can be about basically anything, and developers are constantly exploring how far they can push “anything.”

I’m not sure Jake Clover's Cape Hideous is about anything. I’m not even sure it’s about something. It could be! Maybe I’m just too daft to see it. However, from what I can tell, it’s just one really strange slice of life told with an extremely ugly but captivating art style.

You’re dropped with little explanation on a ragged but massive ship on the ocean. You play as a woman who smokes three pipes simultaneously; an impressive feat, to be sure, but you’ll soon meet those who can juggle more. The ship is headed toward a nasty-looking storm, but whether they’re going toward it intentionally or not isn’t really revealed, even by the end. However, the ship is in extremely rough shape, so there’s work to be done if it’s going to weather it.

You aren’t told what you should be doing, but you can only move on a 2D axis. Pick a direction and see where it goes. You’ll eventually find a knife, and then you’ll find that you can climb the mast. Along the way, you’re treated to the sights and sounds of the other inhabitants of the ship as they work away. There’s not really any indication that you’re the ship’s captain or anyone important, or even if there is a captain at all. You’re just left to explore.

The most striking thing about Cape Hideous is that it’s, well, hideous. The whole production looks like it was created in MS Paint with a trackball mouse. The fill bucket has been worked hard. However, it doesn’t demonstrate a lack of artistic ability. On the contrary, the ship is alive with fine, elaborate detail. There are a lot of moments where it makes great use of perspective to give everything a surreal quality. Its lo-fi, almost childlike art style is no doubt deliberate.

The goal of the game, if you can call it that, is to simply explore. As you do, the protagonist will start pulling down flags from the mast. She’ll also meet characters, and while many of them are ignored, there are some exchanges, as well. There is no dialogue, however, and the surreality is often at its peak during character interactions.

You’re never directed where to go, at least not explicitly. There are only so many places you can go (you’re on a boat, after all), so if it’s not obvious what you’re supposed to do at that point, you’re never far from figuring it out. The fact that you’re never told what to do but never left wandering gives Cape Hideous a much more organic feeling than you’d probably expect from any 2D walking sim.

Which is perfect since Cape Hideous is entirely vibes. The quiet ambient sounds of work, wind, and the sea can be heard beneath an acoustic guitar-heavy soundtrack by magicdweedoo (of Dryft City Kyngs fame). The store page also suggests in all-caps, “BEST EXPERIENCED WITHOUT DISTRACTIONS, WITH NOISE-CANCELLING HEADPHONES.” I didn’t do that, but I can see where that would be beneficial.

But when I say that Cape Hideous is entirely vibes, I mean that it’s entirely vibes. If you haven’t picked up by now, it’s not a game aiming to provide a challenge or some unique gameplay hook. It’s a 2D walking sim without any sort of puzzle element. I hate that, and that’s something I need to warn about, but I understand that even among people who enjoy these sorts of games, there’s generally a mood for it.

It’s also a very weird and art-forward game. As much as it looks thrown together, there’s a substantial amount of depth to its aesthetic. Repeated playthroughs allow you to glean more information from the environments, and the sound design meshes with what’s going on so well that it might as well be a scripted cartoon.

Because it so deftly handles its presentation, it works as more than just an art project. You don’t have to fully grok any sort of message from it or even understand the story that is being told. You can simply immerse yourself in the gelatinous vibes of maybe pirates. There might be substance abuse involved. I’m not sure. I’m not entirely confident that I understand what the hell is going on in Cape Hideous.

Which is fine. It took me just North of a half-hour to get through it, and I have no regrets. It does what it needs to do, provides a unique and memorable experience, and then sets sail again. The best part about the state of game development right now is that games can be about anything. And Cape Hideous is certainly anything.

The post Cape Hideous betrays its name by being strangely captivating appeared first on Destructoid.

It's hard to believe it's been over a decade since the original Path of Exile entered Open Beta. The story behind the ARPG was simple enough: a small group of ARPG fans felt the genre had become stale and lacked new releases, and they aimed to fix that.

Over the next decade developer Grinding Gear Games would continue to update and add to Path of Exile, turning it into one of the staple ARPGs in the genre. With consistent quarterly updates, PoE ballooned into a massive game with a simply insane amount of content.

Today, Grinding Gear Games releases the sequel to its popular ARPG, Path of Exile 2. While PoE still has a massive fan base—and will continue to receive its frequent updates—PoE2 seeks to serve as an updated version of the game with more streamlined and modern systems, a more tactical approach to content, and of course, a fresh set of paint.

Path of Exile 2 (PC [Reviewed], PS5, Xbox Series X|S)
Developer: Grinding Gear Games
Publisher: Grinding Gear Games
Released: December 6, 2024 (Early Access Launch)
MSRP: $29.99

I had the opportunity to play Path of Exile for about ten days leading up to its release. As a longtime fan of Path of Exile, with nearly 2,000 hours of playtime, I was excited but also somewhat nervous about getting my hands on the sequel. Could a sequel in Early Access really build upon a game that I adore so much while also having enough content to make it worth playing over its predecessor, which had been receiving new content for over 10 years? Well thankfully, the answer is quite simply yes.

Grinding Gear Games has managed to create a sequel that not only builds upon the original but innovates in a way that makes me believe we can truly exist in a world where both are actively maintained and played. Similar in many ways, but different enough to make them each their very own game.

Don't let the Early Access moniker fool you. While PoE2 is launching into EA with only 6 of its 12 classes and 3 of its 6 playable acts, even in its current form the ARPG has more content than most $70 AAA games. And for those who get through the acts and are wanting more, GGG recently revealed a massive trove of end-game content awaiting players who reach it.

In Early Access, the six playable classes are Mercenary, Monk, Ranger, Sorceress, Warrior, and Witch. Each of the classes is unique in playstyle but also comes with two of their eventual three ascendancy classes, allowing you to further specialize your character to fit the playstyle you are going for. Most of my time was spent switching between the Mercenary and Monk, the two classes that, in my opinion, are the most unique additions.

The Mercenary specifically makes use of the all-new movement system available in PoE2. While the original only supports movement by clicking with your mouse, the sequel allows you to pick between the same style, or you can move using the WASD keys. With the Mercenary class, which wields a crossbow, being able to move with WASD and aim using your cursor feels like a completely different game. I thought for sure I'd prefer to stick with the system I had used for thousands of hours. But after trying the new WASD movement, I honestly had trouble going back. I found myself using it even while trying out the melee-oriented Monk class. They've nailed the new movement, and those worried about the change shouldn't be; it feels right. But even if it's not for you, you can still use the click-to-move style of the original.

For comparison, playing as a Mercenary feels like a tactical top-down shooter. You'll get access to varying types of ammunition that you can load into your crossbow, ranging from fast-firing bolts that feel like a machine gun to slow buckshot-spread ammo that feels like a shotgun. As you level and unlock more Support Skill Gems, you'll be able to create strategies that allow you to switch between ammo types.

For example, a powerful strategy I found is using ice-shots to freeze enemies, before switching to fragmentation shots that explode said frozen enemies, dealing massive amounts of damage and allowing me to weave in the two attack types based on if I was fighting groups of enemies or a single enemy like a boss.

It took me about 25 hours to get through all three acts available in the Early Access, having done most of the optional content along the way. Speaking of optional content, it works a little differently in PoE2. While some side quests still give you level-appropriate gear to try out, others grant permanent buffs to your character, like resistances. Everything can be tracked on a new and improved world map that shows the act you are in as well as all optional content and even bosses that you can encounter, as well as where to find them.

Bosses in Path of Exile 2 is where the biggest changes have been made. In the original, most bosses, except for a few stand-out ones and end-game pinnacle bosses, are relatively easy and are often able to be bursted down quickly. That's not the case in PoE2. Each boss encounter is a big deal, using multiple telegraphed attacks and a plethora of skills that can literally one-shot your character. You'll have to be a bit more tactical and learn the bosses and their mechanics as opposed to just zerging them down. And there are a ton of bosses as well, with many main storyline encounters as well as a plethora of side-bosses you can seek out to slay as well. There are over 100 unique bosses in the Early Access build, which is very impressive to say the least.

Most of the systems in Path of Exile 2 will be familiar to fans of the original. They haven't reinvented the wheel in terms of its core systems; the passive tree is still massive, loot explosions of loot without a proper loot filter still exist, etc. However, each of the systems has been streamlined and massively improved to be more accessible to both new and returning players. In many ways, PoE2 feels as though GGG took everything from the original ARPG they built over the last decade and said, alright, let's do it again, but with everything we've learned along the way.

Due to time constraints, I didn't get to try out the end game. In its Early Access state, you'll finish Acts 1-3 at around Level 45. Then, you'll play through them again on 'Cruel Difficulty,' which offers some subtle changes, increased difficulty, and increased rewards. After completing Acts 1-3 on Cruel, you'll be around Level 65, which is where the end-game begins.

Even the storyline in Path of Exile 2 is lightyears ahead of other games in the genre, except for maybe more story-driven ARPGs like Grim Dawn and Titan Quest. Of course, at the time of Early Access release, we're only getting half the story with Acts 1-3, which of course means that right as the story really starts to ramp up, we reach the current end. According to GGG, they've changed the current ending slightly so that it makes sense as you head into the end-game, but the true proper end will return once the future acts are added.

I get why Path of Exile 2 has the Early Access moniker since GGG plans to have double the classes and campaign acts, not to mention other types of content added before launch. But even in its current state, Path of Exile 2 has set a new bar for the ARPG genre. I'm ready to pour thousands of hours into it over the years to come, and I'm confident that GGG will only make it magnitudes better over the next year as they continue to grow the game towards its full release. See you on the shores, exile.

The post Path of Exile 2 Early Access Review appeared first on Destructoid.

While the embargo for this preview lifted today, I was provided access to Two Point Museum on my birthday. It’s really nice of Sega and Two Point Studios to have remembered, especially since it’s one of my most anticipated games. As, truly, any game in the Two Point series probably would be.

It’s not that I particularly love museums, either, though I do enjoy them, as should anyone who enjoys massaging their brain matter. I just really love the Two Point games. Two Point Hospital was a terrific modernization of/apology for 1997’s Theme Hospital. Two Point Campus was a deft continuation on a new subject matter. As far as management games go, Two Point Studios’ feel ripped from the golden age, which makes sense, since many of the developers there worked on some of the best ‘90s and ‘00s genre staples.

And having put nearly eight hours into Two Point Museum, I can readily say that it continues the level of quality that the studio is known for.

If you haven’t heard of the series, they’re management games set in a fictional county full of hapless people. Capitalism is ruinous to the poor sods, but as long as they get their fill of nutrient-deficient snack food and are able to watch the most mass-marketed movie filth, they don’t seem to mind. Not even when it results in their demise.

This entry continues the theme of institutions that money should have no factor in with museums. You’re the latest fool to be brought in to run the county’s museums. This not only means curating exhibits, but sending out even hapless-ier fools into the world to plunder treasures for you. You also need to balance the books by encouraging donations, hire staff, run a gift shop, and (much later on) prevent thieves from making off with your rightfully plundered assets.

There’s a lot of the DNA from Hospital and Campus here, but it also feels like it leans a lot further in a Tycoon-style direction. The gameplay loop is more about acquiring better and better attractions to bring in the crowds, whereas the previous games had a focus on efficiency. You send out your expedition crews, then place whatever they bring back around your museum, ensuring that they’re appropriately decorated and amid other related exhibits. For extra profit, you can also set up guided tours, which is surprisingly intuitive and easy to do.

The main complaint that I always had with the previous games is that their missions are very isolated. You’d build a hospital, complete the objectives, then move on to the next to start all over with different parameters. Campus was very similar in this regard. It made it so that there was no need to continue after you’d gotten three stars. There was no advantage to playing on and just building the best institution possible. You'd just moved on. It could get a bit repetitive.

Two Point Museum has a similar level structure, and certain elements are still isolated. You can’t, for example, collect artifacts in one museum and plant them in another. However, any place you unlock on the expedition map will be available elsewhere. Also, there are different types of exhibits, and you may need to have first played in another museum to be able to recruit experts for new ones. There is a lot more meta-progression overall.

More importantly, you can only progress so far in one museum until the game asks you to improve your reputation before it gives you any more tasks at that location. You can only get a single star on the first museum, and if you want to progress beyond that, you’ll need to go work on another museum for a while and complete objectives there. I’m not sure this leveling system was fully implemented in the build I played since the criteria to advance wasn’t quite clear.

However, I did get a taste for it. The preview gave me three museums to progress through, each with a different primary theme. Two of them only allowed progression to the first star, but the first museum allowed me to obtain two stars.

Even within the first museum, I got a lot of room to play. It introduced botany as a secondary exhibit type, showed off how you set up tours, and gave me the rundown on how to prevent theft. There’s a surprising amount of depth as you work to maximize the impressiveness of your collection. Celebrities will visit, school trips will invade, and people will be turned into clowns.

I found myself constantly reconfiguring my exhibits when new ones would come in or if I collected enough of a theme to create a guided tour of them. The build system is more freeform than it was in previous games. There’s still the block-based room tool for things like bathrooms and staff lounges, but you can also just set up walls in the negative space between them to create an aesthetic separation between groups of exhibits. It’s not even all aesthetic, either, since placing decorations increases the buzz of the exhibits in the area, so there’s plenty of reason to not just leave everything bare walls.

It’s simple. Even if you don’t really care about aesthetic or have an eye for it, getting the buzz on your exhibits to perfect is cake. There’s usually one particular decoration that gives an exhibit extra buzz, and it’s easily viewable in the information pane. Guests don’t seem to mind cramped spaces, so you can just load up.

There’s one place I’m iffy about, and that’s when it comes to studying artifacts. You eventually get the ability to research for a better understanding of the various exhibit types. You do this by just dragging a spare (preferably duplicate) exhibit into a big machine and having one of your experts work on it for a while. This destroys the exhibit but gives you experience in that field. But the reward for researching is new decorations.

New decorations are cool and everything, but each time you pass a milestone, you get one new thing. And you’re lucky if you get one milestone out of a research project. It can sometimes cost quite a bit of money to send out an expedition, but more importantly, it takes a chunk of time. So, you start off with an adequate but limited set of decorative objects, and then you need to work to get anything really cool. It’s just a little trickle of new stuff.

It’s not a bad use for your doubles whenever an expedition comes back with an artifact you already have. But selling extra displays is the best way to make up for any budgetary shortfalls. You can’t do that when you destroy them for research. The best solution is to grind out shorter, cheaper expeditions to feed the machine, and that kind of sucks. It’s mostly optional, but it’s still a nuisancesome distraction for not a lot of reward.

I’m happy to say that the DJs are back. Also, the Tannoy Voice, but I’m more interested in the DJs and ads. After all the straight hours I put in the demo, the segments have all kind of blurred together for me, but the original trio of Harrison Wolff, Sir Nigel Bickleworth, and Ricky Hawthorn all return (all voiced by Marc Silk). The student radio hosts didn't show up in the rotation, which makes sense with the change of settings. However, a new archeologically aligned host has been added.

All the humor of the previous games is intact. Children (the first time they’ve been represented in the Two Point Universe) are represented as creatures of chaos that you need to keep distracted. The botany exhibits seem to be especially hazardous to your patrons, as many are carnivorous. The first that I received would turn people into clowns, revealing the source of Two Point Hospital’s Jest Infection illness. Speaking of which, there are plenty of callbacks to previous games.

Another of my favorite facets that are returning is the pleading blurbs you receive when you attempt to fire employees. They’ll tell you how their life is dramatically falling apart and how this is an awful continuation of the pattern or, inversely, agree with your decision because they sucked anyway. When I spoke to the team the last time I previewed Two Point Museum, I asked if they were afraid that this would hit differently in a climate where we’re all out of work or scared of losing our jobs. The reply was essentially that they try to be ridiculous enough that these statements would never be taken seriously, which I’m personally grateful for since the core of the humor here is that these people are dumb and must suffer.

I don’t have any major concerns about Two Point Museum. At the same time, it hasn’t exceeded my expectations. It is exactly the kind of game I expected from the series. That’s not a bad thing; that’s how it should be. I mean, it would be great if it was also some sort of revolutionary experience, but also somewhat unrealistic when regarding a game about running a museum. Two Point Museum is a really good game about running a museum, and that’s pretty rad.

At the same time, I can see the loose threads that need to be tightened before release. The preview wasn’t an uncomfortable experience, but it does need some gentle balancing. Considering we’re still a few months from release, I have no doubt that Two Point Studios is more than capable. Unfortunately, that also means I have a few months left to wait. Ugh.

Two Point Museum is planned for release on March 4, 2025, for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.

The post Hands-on Preview: Monetizing history in Two Point Museum appeared first on Destructoid.

Another extraterrestrial being makes its debut in DAN DA DAN, and it has certainly made waves, literally. The Serpoians still haven't given up on taking Okarun's banana organ, and they've brought some help this time around. One is the mantis shrimp alien and the other is the Nessie.

Since everyone knows about the Nessie, let's talk about the mantis shrimp alien instead. Just like Turbo Granny or Acrobatic Silky, this alien follows a certain real-world lore, specifically that of the Dover Demon. Furthermore, it makes a number of pop culture references.

Warning: The following contains spoilers for Dandadan manga.

The mantis shrimp alien in DAN DA DAN

The mantis shrimp alien or the Dover Demon UMA, which will later be known as Mr. Mantis Shrimp, is a mercenary hired by the Serpoians. However, its service won't be a one-time thing. It will be one of the mainstay aliens in the series.

Much like most of us, the reason Mr. Mantis Shrimp works for the Serpo is money. He has a family from his home planet, but they suffered a tragedy. His wife met an untimely death, leaving him and his son. With his son needing a blood transfusion, Mr. Mantis Shrimp is forced to take on dangerous gigs — like working for the Serpo to take Okarun's schlong.

Mr. Mantis Shrimp has a muscular human-like body, while his head is that of a crab. Interestingly, his eyes alter from that of a crab to that of a human. He also has yellow skin and uses boxing gloves as a weapon. While his appearance is more crab-like, his fighting skills are more akin to a mantis shrimp. Even though his punches are already packed on land, the force increases ten times in water. The downside, however, is that he cannot breathe underwater. Because of this, he is forced to frequently surface during his battles.

Real-world lore of the Dover Demon

The Dover Demon gets its name from a series of sightings in Dover, Massachusetts, which happened over two nights in April 1977. The first sighting occurred on the evening of April 21, when 17-year-old William Bartlett claimed to have seen a strange creature while driving down a dark, rural road. Bartlett pictured it as a small humanoid figure. Furthermore, he described it as having a disproportionately large, egg-shaped head, glowing orange eyes, and spindly limbs.

Bartlett’s account was soon corroborated by two other teenagers, John Baxter and Abby Brabham, who reported similar encounters in the same area over the next day. But due to the brief sightings, only the off-looking appearance is known about the Dover Demon.

Mr. Mantis Shrimp's pop culture references

The lack of information behind the cryptid gives plenty of room for creative freedom, which is mostly used to make pop culture references. For one, Mr. Mantis Shrimp's transformation after being injected with Serpo's serum is heavily inspired by Ultraman's Alien Baltan. This isn't surprising as it's not the first time DAN DA DAN took inspiration from the franchise. As a matter of fact, the Serpo's original form is reminiscent of the series' Dada Race.

Other references are more music-inclined. The more obvious one is a reference to ABBA's "Chiquitita," which Mr. Mantis Shrimp was singing during his initial showdown with Okarun and Aira. Another clever homage draws from vintage Japanese energy drink commercials. These commercials became renowned in Japan for their catchphrase "Can you fight for 24 hours?". This reference cleverly underscores Mr. Mantis Shrimp's struggle as an overworked gig worker.

The post Real-world origins of the mantis shrimp alien in DAN DA DAN appeared first on Destructoid.

For its glorious 20th anniversary celebration, Half-Life 2 finally got baked-in mod support. Though the classic - and now refined - version of the classic remains an all-timer, there are some mods out there that improve or change the experience in unforeseen and amazing ways. Let's have a look at the best of them.

Entropy: Zero 2

Remember how the original Half-Life had expansions where you got to play with someone other than Gordon Freeman, and it still rocked? We got none of that with Half-Life 2, by the official means, that is. If you want to step into the shoes of a completely different character in that world, then consider giving Entropy: Zero 2 a shot. This time you play not as a the hero, but as an especially nasty member of the Combine.

Zero 2 is so good it has its very own mods.

Swelter

If you're looking for another mod that could play as one of the different POV expansions Half-Life 2 never got, Swelter is another great pick. This time you play not as Gordon Freeman, but as a regular resistance fighter. Swelter follows a movie's three-act formula, and is also as fun as a good Hollywood blockbuster should be. There's no shortage of fun combat and, best of all, it never overstays its welcome.

Research and Development

And if you're one of those who got into Half-Life because you liked the idea of finally getting to play as a scientist, only to learn that this scientist was also all about guns, then maybe this is the mod for you. Research and Development doesn't sell itself as something that it is not, and has players actually investigating the intricacies of the Half-Life 2 world. It's a completely different game from Half-Life 2, though an equally interesting take on its world. Creator mbortolino describes it as a "a point’n’click adventure in an FPS engine.", and that was more than enough to get me hyped.

Silent Hill: Alchemilla

If you've read pretty much anything I've ever written, you'll likely understand that I love Silent Hill. If you're into Half-Life 2 and Silent Hill, I assure you Alchemilla is quite the hidden gem to add to your collection.

It's just unbelievable to see how the closest thing we got to an amazing modern-looking Silent Hill Remake was made by a bunch of fans, but you can go check for yourself.

While it doesn't feature the highs of the greatest games in the series, it's better than any non-Team Silent title in the franchise, and makes great use of the FPS POV that helped make P.T. the unforgettable experience that it is.

Jabroni Brawl: Episode 3

While I love Team Fortress 2, and Counter-Strike 2 I can't help but feel sad that Half-Life 2: Deathmatch didn't catch the love I believe it deserved. To solve that, Team Jabroni came up with a mod that combines all the fun present in the original Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, adds more, and gives you hundreds of fantastic maps to mess around in. Jabroni Brawl shows just how fun HL2 can be.

And, well, if you fail to find the fun in any of it, at least enjoy having something even tangentially connected to Half-Life featuring a "3" in its name.

Minerva

If you're one of those who, like me, somehow finds the environments of Half-Life 2 to be surprisingly soothing, then Minerva might prove a great experience for you.

Though it was released way back in '07, Minerva's great attention to detail and big emphasis on ambiance and environmental storytelling makes its original campaign one of the most immersive experiences in the Half-Life extended family.

Nightmare House 2

Half-Life 2 lends itself really well to the horror genre, who would have known. Nightmare House 2 tells an original story that sounds a lot like the plot of the original Silent Hill, but, unlike Alchemilla, is its very own thing.

Though it uses Half-Life 2 and Silent Hill as its most likely inspirations, Nightmare House 2 has a very unique, almost mesmerizing, look. There's something about this one that just feels very nostalgic to me, even though it was made at a time long before games were chasing that high.

Black Mesa

This one is a no-brainer. After the release of Half-Life 2, Valve released Half-Life: Source, a remake of the original game in the source engine. Though it had a few cool elements, the whole thing proved the very rare letdown in Valve's catalog. To make things right, a bunch of fans got together to create Black Mesa, a full conversion of the original game in Half-Life. The result is so unfathomably good that even Valve proudly displays Black Mesa as part of the Half-Life family in its series sales. If you've never played Half-Life and want to have your first go at the series through a modernized environment, then you should seriously consider Black Mesa.

The Stanley Parable

Yes, though you likely know it as a hugely unlikely hit nowadays, The Stanley Parable began its life as a Half-Life 2 mod. The final game is definitely better, but we'd be doing the community a disservice if we were to snub this one.

In a world full of ambitious mods, The Stanley Parable dared to just tell the story of an office worker who decides to — or doesn't — go out of his way. The result is a beautiful homage to Valve's out of the box way of thinking, as well as one of the funniest open-ended games ever made.

Garry's Mod

Garry's Mod is, in essence, a mod that opens the floodgates of Half-Life 2 content and invites you to create whatever you can with the many pieces.

On top of providing a fantastic sandbox, Garry's Mod also hosts a myriad of free games created in its sandbox, and many of them are just as fun as any really fun trending game that you'd have to pay full price for.

There's a case to be made about Garry's Mod being not just the best Half-Life mod, but the best mod, period. Oh, yeah, it's also the main reason why we got Skibidi Toilet, whether that counts as good or bad.

The post The 10 best Half-Life 2 mods you need to try right now appeared first on Destructoid.

Well, I can't believe that I'm saying this, but Destiny: Rising is actually pretty fun. It's not perfect by any means, but it's remarkable how much it feels like I'm playing Destiny on my phone. Now, I gravitate toward Destiny: Rising during idle time and sneaking 10-15 minutes during breaks. It's not in any position to take me away from Destiny 2 proper, but it provides a quick Destiny fix and plays well enough that I'm willing to overlook some of the more annoying aspects of mobile games.

Destiny: Rising presents a respectable slice of Destiny 2's spirit on mobile, even making a few surprising improvements in some areas. That said, there's no getting around the fact that this is a true mobile-made experience, complete with predatory microtransactions and most of the other warts that haunt phone games. NetEase nailed the control and gameplay front, but under that, there's a sea of rare currencies, single-digit percentage reward chances, and even what appears to be several subscriptions, all aimed at getting players to fork over some dough. Even with all that, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't having fun with Destiny: Rising.

Alpha test perks

Before I get into my time with Destiny: Rising, I think it's important to know that the alpha test experience isn't wholly representative of the final product. And that's for better and for worse. There weren't any major barriers preventing progression through the game's narrative or systems, but there were features that were intentionally absent, like microtransactions (which conveniently hide what resources and premium features actually cost).

Inversely, alpha testers also had the opportunity to receive a slew of daily login and overall participation rewards. These were often extra handfuls of resources, ensuring there was never a drought of materials or currency for testers. Additionally, some milestones provided free access to in-game subscriptions that further increased rewards. No doubt these freebies will be absent from the release version of Destiny: Rising, and who knows how much those subscriptions cost and how grindy the game is without them.

The game is legitimately fun

All that said, I've been having a blast with Destiny: Rising. The game even served admirably as my main Destiny outlet during a week-long vacation to Disney World. I wasn't skipping Pirates of the Caribbean to play, but it went a long way in winding lines and while relaxing back at the hotel.

Everything a Destiny player might expect is on show and available in Destiny: Rising, from Strikes to PvP and even Raid-like challenges. Aside from the content you can launch into through a menu, Destiny: Rising doesn't skimp on the other familiar trappings of Destiny games, like open destinations, hub zones, public events, and discoverable secrets. The mobile game also isn't afraid to experiment, like a quest that ends in a high-speed Sparrow chase and an on-rails shooting segment.

There's no shortage of content to pursue in Destiny: Rising, but that only matters if the game is fun to play. Thankfully, I can say that if you enjoy the general gameplay and progression found in Destiny 2, then Destiny's first mobile outing is pretty similar. Players will still build their armory of weapons, manage the mods and power of said weapons, and then use those weapons to shoot aliens, hopefully resulting in the acquisition of a new gun. Destiny: Rising adds the twist of managing and growing a roster of existing Guardians, each with unique abilities and weapon preferences.

Mobile Destiny can feel this solid?

If you play Destiny 2, you'll feel right at home with Destiny: Rising. While there are some notable differences between the two games, like no option to crouch and semi-limited loadouts, Destiny: Rising really works some magic to make gameplay feel natural. That even goes for the touchscreen controls. While I initially spent some time using a Backbone controller on my iPhone to play, I quickly got used to using touch controls when I didn't feel like lugging around another accessory.

The most important parts of gameplay, moving, shooting, and ability use, all feel great, though it's much easier to gracefully combine these actions on a controller. Some niceties are built into the game for touchscreen players, though, like an auto-sprint option that can be toggled on and off easily while exploring larger destinations. Using the touchscreen is totally functional, more so than many other mobile games I've played, but using a controller makes Destiny: Rising play almost identically to Destiny 2, and I find that remarkable.

Sparrow Racing League, anyone?

Impressively, Destiny: Rising features an entire campaign alongside a wide assortment of activities that can be started anywhere via the menu. I have some bones to pick with the campaign, which I'll get to, but those are primarily about performances, presentation, and lore accuracy. The mobile game surprised me with a lengthy campaign offering memorable and fun moments to play through. It's just that the narrative surrounding these moments needed to be stronger.

The diversity of available activities, on the other hand, is strong. Are you one of those Destiny players who miss the days of the Sparrow Racing League? Well, Sparrow Racing is an Event in Destiny: Rising. The same goes for Clan challenges called Pack Ops and a Gwent-like card game called Shadowshaper Duels. There are also several variations of more conventional Destiny gameplay, including multiple Strikes and other varied activities that reward various materials.

My favorite activities thus far have been the variations of Singularity. The enigmatic Nine and Xûr host a series of forays into the roguelite genre. Each activity has multiple difficulty options, and as players progress through an attempt, they can choose from an assortment of randomized buffs after each successful round. The activities typically last for seven to ten rounds, featuring a boss at the end. In addition to completion rewards, players also earn currency to put toward a long-term skill tree for the mode.

The UI looks great on the surface

Learning the systems and discovering what's available in a mobile gacha game can be overwhelming, and Destiny: Rising's UI does some things exceedingly well while others fall short. A small UI window shows players their current objectives, and you can use your Ghost to access a more comprehensive menu system (a lot like Destiny 2). Under the icon for your Ghost, there's another that takes you to an activity hub. This hub works a lot like the way I imagine Bungie wants the upcoming Portal feature to work in Destiny 2, featuring recommended activities on a front tab and offering access to all available activities on various other tabs in the interface.

Between these two icons and the minimap itself, which can be tapped on to reveal a larger map and POIs, there's also an icon on the left side of the minimap that takes players to the Draw menu to pull for characters or gear. I like how the interface looks on the screen; there aren't too many options, and everything looks clean enough that it never feels like the screen is too busy with UI elements. That said, the Ghost icon has way too much stuff crammed into it, and the layout doesn't always make sense. 

For example, there are options in the Ghost menu for activities, Draws, and the map. The icons near the minimap are just shortcuts, but they function better as out-of-the-way, direct ways to access this content. It makes less sense to jump through the Ghost menu, yet the options are still there, crammed with everything else. Events like Sparrow Racing and Shadowshaper Duels make even less sense, as they're in the same place as login rewards and other gifts. This location, again, is accessed through the expanded Ghost menu.

Destiny: Rising's story needs some work

While I can argue that the UI is mostly fine and that only some of its placement doesn't make sense, I can't look past the painfully dull and poorly presented story. While the solid gameplay and a well-put-together opening tutorial mission help overlook some of the awkward writing and delivery, by the time players get a full loadout of weapons and start meeting some supporting characters in the central hub zone, it starts to wear thin. 

Unfortunately, voice acting and the evolving narrative never get much better, and it gets more egregious the more you realize how much of the voiced content was AI-generated. NetEase has stated that the AI voice work is simply a placeholder until the game is finished, and I will note that if that's true, Destiny: Rising may have just as much, if not more, voiced content at launch as Destiny 2 has currently. Of course, as I mentioned before, a lot of that content just isn't that interesting.

Generally, the story is about Wolf, the newest Guardian to awaken, finding his bearing amongst his fellows. Though Wolf is technically the main character, as new characters are introduced (and become earnable through the gacha system), a few quests or a dedicated adventure serve as an introduction and sometimes allow players to try out the new Fireteam member. However, the story mostly revolves around the interactions between the human defenders of Jiangshi Metro and the mixed community of Haven, a settlement with Guardians flocking to its Tree of Light.

This setup could offer some interesting stories, especially considering some of the Jiangshi Metro citizens don't harbor the best feelings towards Guardians. However, things never develop further than characters speaking their emotions and sending you off towards the next firefight.

The lore is a whole other issue

NetEase noted from the start that Destiny: Rising would be set in an alternate universe of the franchise, after the collapse but before the City age. While describing the game as an alternate universe works like a lore get-out-of-jail-free card, there are still some glaring lore and consistency issues within the game.

Probably one of the biggest gripes I have in this corner is the Fallen NPC that hangs around Haven. Even if this is an alternate universe where nothing I know about Destiny matters, the game sets up the Fallen as this arch-rival race of space pirates that are set on looting and pillaging a weakened humanity. If there are Fallen working with humanity in Haven, then the leaders in charge are grossly incompetent and far too trusting. As for the Fallen themselves, from their perspective, humanity is wounded and on the back foot; humanity "took" the Traveler. What do Fallen have to gain by joining their enemy, and is it worth the inevitable risk?

Another thing that bugs me is tying powers of Light to relics instead of a Guardians Ghost. In Destiny games, Guardians typically channel the Light through their Ghosts to manifest abilities. In Destiny: Rising, Ghosts still choose from among the dead to create immortal Guardians, but they seemingly can only channel the Light if they're lucky enough to stumble upon a relic. This, of course, happens to Wolf during the tutorial, but this creates a world where countless Guardians are awoken by a Ghost who didn't find a relic. What does that look like? They're just functionally immortal and that's it? 

At least if there will be Fallen ex-patriots or new rules for Light, explain it, please. The Fallen character in Haven simply notes it's following the "Great Machine," but that's just a thin excuse to justify an existence to ensure players can quickly identify Fallen technology throughout the story. Similarly, if Destiny: Rising is set during an era when the Light was weaker, and abilities had to be channeled through specific powered relics, okay, but tell me about it. This is a game working within an existing franchise; if something is different from that existing, preceding franchise, then please tell me why.

The grind might be rough

As I mentioned earlier, the alpha test had some benefits, including several tracks of login rewards and similar tracks for participating in select activities and events throughout the testing period. While this constant flow of materials ensured pretty much all of my earned characters could fully develop abilities and gear, things certainly won't be the same when the game finally releases.

The grind will likely be real, not only for desired materials but also for specific characters or weapons. In Destiny 2, a much-maligned modifier exists called Match Game. Match Game ensures that elemental shields are vastly empowered against anything that isn't a matching element. In Destiny: Rising, it seems like a version of Match Game is always on. This is exponentially worse if weapons are below level for the foes you're fighting. I found myself in a story mission against enemies with Void shields but only had access to Solar and Arc damage on my Guardian. It took several clips of auto rifle ammo before I broke the shield and could damage the enemy normally.

This annoyance also applies to Destiny: Rising's version of Champions, Shinka. These enemies also have shields and specific effects that are painful to play around without the desired weapon types to counter. For example, a Spread Shinka is best countered by a Guardian wielding a weapon with an explosion radius, like a rocket launcher. As Guardians are limited to the type of gear they can equip, you may not have anyone capable of wielding one, and that Shinka fight will be long and arduous, if not downright impossible.

Progression is also limited by resources, which should be familiar to mobile players. Here, that means Guardians can't unlock their full potential until you've earned multiple copies of the same one. Similarly, weapon level, mods, and a generic character level also contribute to overall power and naturally require resources to advance. That means players might reach a point where they need to be level 50 to participate in an activity needed to progress the story, but they've run out of the materials required to push them from level 40 to 50. In that case, players would either run whatever activity provides the desired resource or break down and get some via a microtransaction.

Better than expected, worried about monetization

Altogether, I still admit that I've been having fun with Destiny: Rising. I'm not blind to the probable inevitability of it blindsiding me with a flood of microtransactions and progression gates when it finally releases. Still, I can't deny that it's been a joy to play. 

I know it's a fool's longing, but I do genuinely hope NetEase leans back on what appears to be a whole lot of hidden microtransactions (or disabled annoyances that will push players toward microtransactions upon final release). Even if they incorporated a system much like the one alpha testers received, where players were substantially rewarded for ongoing participation in the game, that would be huge. Beyond that, I think in-game subscriptions that provide additional loot are a bit too far unless it too was incorporated into some loyalty reward system. 

I'm anxious to see where Destiny: Rising goes from here; it is now entirely on my radar. It will be interesting to see how NetEase responds to alpha testers, as several extensive surveys have been issued in-game, each rewarding a juicy stash of rewards. Monetization and microtransactions were among the first things players were curious about, so no doubt many noticed the same things I did and voiced their opinions also as I did. 

Most recently, NetEase announced a beta test for Destiny: Rising, allowing even more people to experience and trial the game. For me, it's proved itself a competent entry into the franchise; it just has to stick the landing.

The post Destiny: Rising is shaping up better than I expected appeared first on Destructoid.

After ruling the home console roost for almost a decade, the mid-nineties were a turning point for Nintendo, and not in a “they finally quit cocaine and got their act together” kind of way. After creating their own worst enemy by screwing Sony in an effort to make a CD expansion for the Super Nintendo, they were struggling with getting their own next-generation console to the market. A lot of other companies were touting their fancy 32-bit monstrosities, and Nintendo needed something to convince people that they were still on the cutting edge. Otherwise, they might turn to Phillips, Atari, or 3DO to satiate their need for extra bits.

So, they turned to the inventor of the Game Boy, Gunpei Yokoi, had him put a bow around that virtual reality thing he was tinkering with, and shoved it out to market. The hardware wasn’t ready. Developers weren’t ready. The public wasn’t ready. Nintendo wasn’t ready. So, the Virtual Boy was swept under the rug in less than a year, and we were all politely asked to forget it ever happened.

But then, there are jerks like me who won’t let undetonated warheads lie. We have to just keep poking them, waiting for the safety mechanism to fail. We pull it apart, trying to see what makes it tick and if we can make it tick again. It’s in the name of science or something, I don’t care, let’s just light this candle.

And now I've updated the list to include every (North American) release on the Virtual Boy instead of just 10. You may be asking, “there were more than ten games?” Yes, but only barely. I, personally, own all fourteen games. Why? Well, for one thing, they were cheaper when I started gathering them. Gosh, I'm glad I shelled out for Jack Bros. while it was just stupidly expensive and not ludicrously expensive like it is now. So, I have intimate familiarity with these games. You can normally trust me with these rankings, but for this one, you can super-trust me.

Here is the entire (North American) Virtual Boy library ranked in order of "quality." Note that this doesn't include Japan-only releases. Maybe if I return to this list in the future I'll slot them in.

14. Waterworld

Waterworld may be at the bottom of the list, but even it’s not terrible. One theme you’ll see on this list is that the games are often some shade of acceptable, but they’re also insubstantial. We never got out of the tech demo stage of the console. And that’s totally Waterworld. You essentially sail around in your boat, blowing up other boats to allegedly protect people. It’s round-based, like an arcade game, so it doesn’t really have an ending. You just aim to set a high score. And that’s it.

Personally, I’ve never seen the movie. I mostly know it based on its reputation as a tremendous flop. The funniest thing about the game is the fact that you don’t pull survivors into your boat, you just have to make sure the bad boaters don’t get them. So, the whole time, these people are just flailing in the water while you cruise around all nice and dry in your boat. For all I know, this is a really accurate translation of the film’s premise to a video game. If that’s the case, good job.

13. Virtual League Baseball

Here’s Virtual League Baseball. It’s baseball! And it doesn’t have a career or league mode. There’s a pennant race, which is kind of like a career mode, but not really. If the Virtual Boy was a handheld platform rather than one that is just an allegedly portable console, then this would maybe be passable. But since it’s a largely home-locked console, it needs to compete with established series on the Genesis and SNES. And PlayStation, for that matter.

It’s perhaps most similar to Major League Baseball on the NES where all the fielders move in unison. That’s it. That comparison is the nicest thing I can say about Virtual League Baseball. I have nothing else.

12. Golf

Golf is golf. It’s golf. Just golf. Driving. Putting. It’s the whole 9. Well, 18. It’s not a particularly bad version of golf. It’s not a very exceptional version of golf, either. I’m not really sure what I’d add to the game to make it better. Mario, maybe? A career mode? A golf cart to ride around in? It just doesn’t seem like a good sport to play while sticking your face into a pair of goggles.

To be fair, it has a somewhat unconventional shot power/direction mini-game that I’ve never really been able to get the hang of. I get the jist of it, I just can’t seem to figure out how to really optimize my shot. So, in that sense, there’s at least a satisfying learning curve.

11. Galactic Pinball

What a choice of subject matter for Intelligent Systems’ only contribution to the Virtual Boy’s line-up. Galactic Pinball isn’t a bad game, but it's not exactly the most exciting take on pinball. In fact, it's not even a ball; it's a puck. It functions decently, but the tables are incredibly sparse and unimpressive. It's not even trying to emulate real pinball tables, so it doesn't even really do much with the fantasy angle.

Like, look at it this way: In 1988, Rare did a decent port of the classic table, Pin-Bot, on the NES. In 1993, Hal Laboratories found a hit with Kirby’s Pinball Land on Game Boy. These are much less powerful consoles running more impressive games of pinball than Galactic Pinball, and they don’t require you to hurt your neck and your eyes playing them. They also have actual balls.

10. 3-D Tetris

3-D Tetris belongs to the category of Virtual Boy games that were novel ideas that didn’t work out but no one had the heart to cancel it. Tetris is fun, cubes are great; on paper, everything should be pastries and gravy. 3-D Tetris almost works, and it even has a great aesthetic with some ‘tuded up tetrominoes watching you from the sideline.

The main idea is that rather than just building solid Tetris walls, you’re filling in a cube. This is a fine idea, but it fails in a few key areas. First, the controls take a lot of practice. Tetris succeeded in its easy-to-learn, difficult-to-master gameplay, so telling someone to manipulate blocks on three-axis is a big ask. Second, while the added depth helps with figuring out where your blocks are going to land, the fact that the tetrominoes fill as you set them down means you’ll never be given a full view of the gaps in your structure. Well, unless you learn to read the 2D diagram on the side of the screen, but that seems to miss the point. This slows things down substantially and makes it very difficult to course correct after making a mistake.

I’m not sure the formula ever had a chance to work, but it was a reasonable experiment. It's just not one that really yielded results. I’ll stick to Tetrisphere.

9. Mario Clash

We, unfortunately, never got a true Mario platformer on the Virtual Boy. Instead, there was Mario Clash, which was sort of like the original Mario Bros. arcade game (before they were super) if it was single-player and had the obligation to have an X-axis. You ascend a tower, floor by floor, eliminating baddies to proceed. The enemies are all impervious to Mario’s boots, so you need to first jam some koopas back in their shells, then fling them at their more resilient comrades. Some can only be knocked out by hurling the hapless lackeys into the foreground or background, making use of the 3D depth.

Mario Clash isn’t a bad game, but it suffers from a problem that I've already mentioned you’re going to see a lot on this list: it’s insubstantial. There are 99 levels, but they all play out essentially the same. When you clear them, you’re sent back to level 1, but the enemies are faster. I can’t imagine having the attention span to burn through the entire tower, let alone replaying it. While it’s fun for a while, it wears thin long before you get to the penthouse.

8. Vertical Force

Another category of Virtual Boy is the “why is this even on the console” game. Vertical Force is a fine example of that. It’s sort of like Star Soldier, another of Hudson’s shoot-’em-ups. And, that’s it. It’s like Star Soldier. The end.

Okay, what I mean by that is that it’s a vertical shoot-’em-up. It’s extremely basic, aside from the fact that you can move into the foreground and background. It’s not even a particularly exciting shoot-’em-up, nor is it a good showcase for the Virtual Boy. 1995 saw the release of Capcom’s 19XX: The War Against Destiny in the arcade, and you want to tell me that this is the best the Virtual Boy can do?

Just to top off the disappointment, like custard instead of whipped cream, Vertical Force is extremely short at five levels. Okay, that makes it sound similar to most vertical shooters, but they're short levels.

7. Red Alarm

Speaking of “not bad, but insubstantial,” Red Alarm is one of the games on this list that actually feel like a complete concept. But, like 3-D Tetris, it should have become obvious during development that it wasn't working out quite right. You fly your ship through wireframe corridors, shooting down enemy wireframes. The fact that objects aren’t filled in by solid textures can make it difficult to figure out what is a hole and what is a wall, but overall, it generally works fine. The problem is that there are 6 levels, and they all take about 5 minutes to complete. Math was never a strong subject for me, but I imagine if you put those numbers together, they don’t make a very big one.

6. Nester’s Funky Bowling

Bowling is a fun sport since you can usually do pretty well without being in shape. Athletes shouldn’t have all the fun. Nester’s Funky Bowling is a decent-ish representation of the sport, but there’s not much to it. While there’s a 2-player mode where you hand the crimson goggles back and forth, there’s no progression, career, or even a tournament mode to keep you hooked. I'm not sure what it was about Virtual Boy sports games and not having any sort of progression. The bowling pin physics are also rather underwhelming, and the bowling itself is pretty basic. It’s not the worst bowling game I’ve played, but far from the best. At least it has Nintendo Power's Nester in a title role.

5. Mario’s Tennis

A Mario Kart game would have been a good fit for the Virtual Boy, but we never made it that far. Instead, Mario’s Tennis would add a new sport to Mario’s proficiencies. Like Nester’s Funky Bowling, this isn’t a bad approach to the sport. Using a sprite-scaling Tennis court, Mario’s Tennis gives you a behind-the-back view of all the ball smacking, which makes good use of the Virtual Boy’s stereoscopic depth.

However, tournament mode is your only feeling of progression. They're just typical eliminatio-style competitions, and they’re incredibly basic. Once again, there is no career mode. There aren’t even various cups you can win across different terrains. It’s another game that just doesn’t have enough content to make it look like anything other than a tech demo. It does have the excuse that it was packed in with the console, which is something these other games can’t hide behind.

4. Panic Bomber

Originally released in arcades in 1994, this is technically the only time Panic Bomber was released in the West. That’s unfortunate, but at least it isn’t the only way to play the game. Importing the PC-Engine version would be a better option. Panic Bomber is a rather solid match-3 puzzle game with a Bomberman twist. That’s about it. I enjoy it for what it is, and Hudson did try to use the 3D effects to jazz up the graphics a bit. Still, it really doesn’t benefit from added depth. However, in terms of puzzle games, this one rules the roost on the Virtual Boy.

3. Jack Bros.

It’s said that Jack Bros. is the first game of the Megami Tensei series to be released outside of Japan. Before you get too excited, it’s a pretty unrelated spin-off. You can play as Jack Frost, Jack Lantern, or Jack Skelton, and their goal is to go through a series of mazes collecting keys. It’s nice to have a more adventurous game appear on the list, but Jack Bros. isn’t very compelling. The only use the depth has here is displaying the next level below the one you’re on. It’s better than nothing, but it’s not something you couldn’t find on Game Boy.

2. Teleroboxer

Now we get to the first game on the list that I’d actually recommend. Teleroboxer is, as the name implies, a boxing game. However, it stars giant robots. Of any game released, it’s the one that makes the best use of the hardware. The graphics keep the headset in mind, giving you a first-person perspective on the combat. Meanwhile, the movement makes use of the Virtual Boy’s unique controller, having you manipulate your fists with the symmetrical d-pads.

It’s actually a great little title, packed full of personality. Something of a mix of Punch-Out!! And Battle Clash. The only problem is that it’s very difficult. To date, I think I’ve only barely cleared the third fight. Maybe that’s for the best since there are only seven battles. On the other hand, there are only seven battles. Still, it’s worth checking out for the unique control scheme and fun personality.

1. Virtual Boy Wario Land

The fact that Nintendo has never re-released Virtual Boy Wario Land is criminal in the most uncool sense of the word. The Wario Land has never really stuck to one particular convention of gameplay since its start as the third Mario Land title on Game Boy. This is the nearest continuation of that introductory title. However, it’s more focused, expanded, and while it could be done without the 3D effects, it does make the effort of utilizing the Virtual Boy’s unique features.

It’s also as tight as a pair of leather pants and as solid as a Christmas cake. It’s perhaps not the most unique platformer on the plantation, but it’s polished to a mirror sheen. Plumbing the levels for treasures feels great, and Wario’s unique mannerisms shine through. It’s one that shouldn’t be missed, which makes its exclusivity to the Virtual Boy nothing short of frustrating.

However – and maybe you can predict this shortcoming – it’s very short. It still feels like the most feature-complete and well-rounded product in the Virtual Boy’s limited library, but at 2-3 hours, it’s the shortest in the Wario Land series.

The post Every Virtual Boy game, ranked appeared first on Destructoid.

I'm deeply conflicted on STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl. From one point of view, it's a phenomenal celebration of everything I've ever loved about the franchise. On the flip side, its single most important feature is either broken or deliberately left out, and it's unclear what might happen next.

Squaring off with STALKER 2 is a complicated thing for me, and I suspect many franchise veterans feel something similar about it. There's absolutely no question about two of its launch-day features:

• There's a love for the source material present here, and it is handled with appropriate fervor by GSC Game World.
• The game is broken beyond belief, and it falls apart at the seams in the later stages of the main story.

Ever since STALKER 2's been re-announced, I've been very skeptical of what GSC Game World may or may not be able to do with the IP. Especially one that's been so ridiculously elevated by its community via mods. For the fact that the ridiculously customizable X-Ray Engine would be replaced by the sheer sloppiness of Unreal Engine 5, I had no love. In fact, even though the modding scene is already picking up, I still have my doubts about it reaching the heights of the old, classic STALKER titles in this respect.

Yet, at the same time, STALKER 2 feels right. It's a genuinely compelling homecoming in some barely quantifiable ways, and here, I aim to discuss this for a little bit. Perhaps even help someone make sense of the bits that have gone right, and the bobs that have gone left.

STALKER 2, such as it is, is a broken mess of a game. I will sing it praise in this article, but I'd like to ask you to keep this statement in mind throughout. It's important for the crux of my argument.

Upon starting my first playthrough of STALKER 2 (because I've got no doubt many more will follow), I was greeted by an oddly cinematic cutscene that felt more like Crysis or Far Cry than anything else. It was tightly scripted, well executed and acted, and it set the stage for what was to come.

Skif, as a protagonist, is appropriately eclectic and Weird. More so than any of its predecessors, STALKER 2 is a thoroughbred New Weird story where you simply have to go with the flow and accept that some things will not make sense no matter how you flip them. The vibe is king, instead, and it is downright immaculate.

In classic video game fashion, the prologue equips Skif with powerful full-length rifles and a face-off against the legendary Bloodsucker in the middle of the night. The powerful goodies are subsequently yanked away, and Skif is soon enough left alone and under-equipped for the horrors of the Zone, a trust Makarov at his side.

For the next five-odd hours, I enjoyed one of the best gaming experiences I've had in years. The story unravels slowly and at a fairly brisk pace, and there's really not much chance to go off and explore. Crucially, this works in STALKER 2's favor, because you don't get to see the "simulation" fall apart until you're already reasonably well invested.

When it does fall apart, though, it's like someone pulls the rug from under your feet. I've written at length about the importance of A-Life in STALKER right here at Destructoid, and though newcomers won't really understand how crucial the system is, veterans will. A-Life was the bit that made STALKER's rendition of the Exclusion Zone such a big deal.

Sure, the mainline STALKER games only really had a severely stunted and gimped version of A-Life in place, but it gave players a sense of persistence and progression that you simply will not get out of this game. It's not happening.

A-Life, as it currently stands, does not exist in STALKER 2. I can speculate as to why that is the case until the Fleshes come home, but it's irrelevant. The relevant bit is this: STALKER 2 only ever spawns NPCs within a meager 100-meter radius around the player character. More frustratingly, this does mean clearing out large bases is effectively impossible, while it's conversely entirely possible for that Bloodsucker nest to replenish its inhabitants literally minutes after you've cleared it out.

This does not make for a good playing experience. In fact, once you figure out how the game's NPCs work in action, you may well be hard-pressed to drop STALKER 2 for the time being. And, honestly, the thought crossed my mind as well.

Why did I stick with this broken game, then?

STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl was one of the first proper FPS titles I played on PC back in the day. I started my gaming career on the PlayStation, as it were, and it took just under a decade for me to think of booting something on the underpowered office PC my parents had back then.

Boy, was my mind blown.

A-Life, as such, was barely present in Shadow of Chernobyl. It wasn't the thing that drew me in, but rather something I'd grow to appreciate in subsequent Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat releases, as well as the mods. No, the bit that drew me in was the atmosphere and the vibe. These are the two things that STALKER 2, coincidentally, pulls off phenomenally well.

Add a zest of nostalgia to the mix, then, and you've got a game that's just magical enough (when it works) to keep me glued to the screen.

GSC Game World genuinely has delivered something incredible as far as the Exclusion Zone itself goes. I've seen some complain that the world is empty and lifeless, but my experience has been anything but that. A general sense of dread and emptiness is absolutely necessary for the core exploration loop in STALKER, make no mistake. The absolute horror show that is STALKER 2's "A-Life 2.0" very nearly ruins the whole bloody thing, for sure, but the more manually curated bits help elevate the experience.

STALKER 2 is full of memorable vignettes. Against the foreboding yet beautiful backdrop of the Zone, just seeing Stalkers line up for fresh bread in Rostok feels compelling. Hearing Stalkers crack stupid jokes around a firepit in the middle of nowhere, in the Swamps? Re-visiting iconic locations to see GSC peppering out easter eggs and nods to veteran players? Talking with the prior games' protagonists and other familiar NPCs? Just walking through the immaculate ruins of the Zone? Folks, there's something special here, I promise.

The problem is that this "specialness" is overshadowed by the current state of the game. I have absolutely no doubt that many have already dropped STALKER 2, as if it were rad-hot. This, I feel, is warranted. This is not only because A-Life 2.0 is a ridiculously unfun take on one of the franchise's most important features but also because we shouldn't accept broken games in general. I'm definitely not excusing STALKER 2 in any way here.

GSC Game World claims that A-Life is currently not behaving the way it's supposed to, and I think it's a given that things will improve as STALKER 2 finally receives the polishing phase it's obviously currently missing. Frankly, I doubt A-Life 2.0 will be as potent as A-Life on X-Ray was. I also don't think modders will be able to take things as far as they did, back in the day.

At the same time, I find myself drawn back into STALKER 2's rendition of the Zone. It's such a shame that GSC wasn't willing or able to pull this off right pre-release because the content of this game deserves it. As for whether you'll be able to push through the game's problems in the same way I have, I wouldn't know. If you're a veteran of the series and nostalgic to get back into it, though, maybe give it a shot. Maybe visit Sidorovich, for old times' sake.

The post Playing STALKER 2 feels like coming home, despite all the (many) problems appeared first on Destructoid.

The Disney Dreamlight Valley: Storybook Vale DLC is a delightful adventure in the worlds of Hercules and Sleeping Beauty, but it has one major flaw that has plagued the game since its release. The inventory system has to change.

An annoying mechanic that is compounded further in The Storybook Vale

The Disney Dreamlight Valley Storybook Vale DLC has been fun over the past week or so as we meet new friends like Flynn Rider and create statues for the mighty Hades. However, the inventory system is starting to spoil the magic of this game.

From day one, we have been stretched with limited inventory space that is used for everything we collect: food, quest items, ingredients, etc. It's always frustrating when you're farming, and you can't pick anything new up because of the inventory space once again being limited. This is exacerbated by the fact that your character constantly picks up soil from the ground, which is practically worthless.

You can craft chests and other storage solutions to place your items in, but after years of playing Disney Dreamlight Valley, they have become an eyesore. It's also confusing to distinguish where your resources are, and it's especially frustrating to find quest items. It's a right pain.

The inventory system has become a sore topic, especially with The Storybook Vale expansion because of the addition of the Snippets. These are creatures throughout the Vale that can be collected to redeem storybook puzzles which you can complete with the Lorekeeper. In return, you'll get rewards like chairs and other objects. The Snippets, unfortunately, go straight to your inventory system, taking precious space in your already full bag, and there are many different varieties of them.

What is the solution?

It would be great if Gameloft could finally give players more space in their inventory system. It's a constant annoyance to always go back to Goofy. At some points, I've had to sell resources to finish quests just so I can have room. It would also help if the number of vegetables and fruits you can gather goes up to 100 instead of 50 per slot. Hopefully, the inventory system issue will get resolved soon because it's one of the most annoying factors of an otherwise relaxing and rewarding experience in Disney Dreamlight Valley and its DLC The Storybook Vale.

The post Disney Dreamlight Valley: The Storybook Vale is a lovely DLC, but has one major flaw appeared first on Destructoid.

Naughty Dog is currently one of the most famous companies in the gaming sphere due to the smashing success of the Last Of Us and the Uncharted series. It's not, however, a new company. Naughty Dog has existed since the '80s, and it has been creating games as varied in genre as in quality.

Let's look at the history of the company and categorize all of its games in a way that's sure to please everyone on the Internet, shall we?

F Tier Naughty Dog games

Naughty Dog doesn't make F Tier games.

? Tier Naughty Dog games

Math Jam (1985)

The sheer obscurity of this title might give you the impression that I'm making it up, but I assure you it's real and interesting in its own right.

Math Jam was the very first game by Naughty Dog founders Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin. They released it before the company even got its awesome name! It was less of a game in the traditional sense, and more of a software intended to get kids interested in learning math. Or at least that's what they want you to think. I honestly don't know because I haven't played it, and you likely haven't either.

Since it was made back when the developers were only 14, the code ended up lost and the only thing that remains about Math Jam are pictures of its cool opening screen. If you happen to find a lost copy, make sure to try it out in any of the many readily available Apple II computers and get to the comments section to tell us all about it!

D Tier Naughty Dog games

Rings of Power (1992)

First things first, the only thing in comment Naughty Dog's Rings Of Power and Apple's The Rings Of Power is not being very good. It's an isometric RPG that drew a lot of inspiration from The Lord Of The Rings and Dungeons And Dragons, but which features its own lore and gameplay systems.

The story was decent, the music was great for its time, and the art was pretty good at times. Still, it was possibly too hard in comparison with the more fun RPGs of its time. Rings Of Power got mixed reviews even at the time of release, meaning it definitely doesn't hold up today.

Still, it remains a cool artifact of a time when Naughty Dog wasn't afraid to try out different genres — as well as a display of Naughty Dog in its naughtiest form. Yes, Rings Of Power for the Genesis was so naughty it featured an Easter egg that saw Naughty Dog's logo replaced by a pixelated-but-uncensored topless model.

Ski Crazed (1986)

Ski Crazed was the duo's follow up to Math Jam. This time, they created a downhill 2d side scroller where you went skiing down a mountain while trying to avoid a bunch of obstacles. It's not particularly fun, but it's one hell of a lot better than anything I did when I was 16.

C Tier Naughty Dog games

JAK X: Combat Racing (2005)

Jak X is a good game, but it suffers from two big problems. One, it loses too much of its original identity to become too narrowed-down. The thing that rocked about the original Jak and Daxter was the amazing jump from Crash Bandicoot's linear levels to an immersive 3d world. Making it a racing game severely hampered its aura. Two, It's not as fun as Crash Team Racing.

Way Of The Warrior (1994)

Way Of The Warrior looked gorgeous, quenched the thirst we all had for violent games in the '90s, but it had a huge problem you're likely to have guessed just by looking at the image above. Yes, it looked just a bit too much like Mortal Kombat, and, worse, it didn't play as well. Lack of originality could kill a game in the eyes of gamers, especially at a time when games still had so many original paths to travel. Still, Way Of The Warrior was one of the best things you could play on the 3DO.

Keef The Thief (1989)

Keef is an old-school first person RPG featuring some great music. I doubt anyone could keep up with its outdated gameplay nowadays, but the game features a really cool design choice that came up entirely by accident.

When publisher EA first looked at the game, Keef was filled with sarcastic text meant as a placeholder for the real writing that would come up later. EA, however, found the writing so funny they had it stay like that. If any EA exec is reading this, know this is the energy we need from you.

Dream Zone (1988)

Dream Zone was Naughty Dog's first foray into the realm of classic RPGs. It was a visually extravagant, voyage that truly did the concept of dreaming justice, but it was not for everyone.

Much like LSD: Dream Emulator , Dream Zone feels more like a cool experiment than a game made for immense critical and commercial success, and that's completely fine.

B Tier Naughty Dog games

Crash Bandicoot (1996)

I love Crash Bandicoot for introducing me to the world of 3d platformers. It remains great fun — especially if you play the remastered version. Still, some segments proved too hard for the kids they were made for, and the game pales in comparison to its sequels.

Jak 2 and Jak 3

Naughty Dog has been transparent on the effect the success of Rockstar's GTA 3 had in the game industry, and especially in the Jak games. Yes, Jak didn't go from a whimsical protagonist to a gun-slinging badass just because he grew up, but because he was chasing the tail of the biggest game in town.

Both Jak and Daxter sequels play great, but not without doing away with large part of what made the original special.

The Last Of Us Part 2

TLOU Part 2 got great reviews upon release, but also drew a lot of criticism from gamers. Some of it — like all the anti Abby discourse — is hogwash. Ironically — aside from all the money it made grifters — the torrent of hate did little more than drown the actual complaints to be had in a sea of dumb tweets.

TLOU Part 2 plays great and looks amazing, so calling it a bad game would be dumb. Saying it's a mean game, however, wouldn't be too out of pocket. Whereas the original earned love for its narrative and characters, TLOU 2's narrative thrives in chastising players for partaking in violence, all the while providing no alternative to violent behavior. You can pet the dog here, yes, but you'll also have to kill it.

You could make the case that TLOU II is evil by way of actual cruelty, even when ignoring the truly dangerous politics it harbors.

Divisive works might end up getting a deserved positive cultural reappraisal in the decades that follow, but I suspect TLOU Part 2 will only go further down as we grow to realize all there is to it.

A Tier Naughty Dog games

Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception (2011)

Uncharted 3 was a step down from its predecessor, albeit an interesting one. It features the series' biggest set pieces, but that's both a positive and a negative. At the end of pretty much every segment, Nathan Drake would face off against an event perilous enough to kill a demigod, only to walk away miraculously unscathed.

We all loved seeing just how far the PS3 hardware would go in showing us Naughty Dog's incredible Hollywood-level blockbuster vision, but many of these removed any semblance of a stake for the plot.

Also, a few gameplay elements, such as aiming and enemy AI, felt worse than they did in the previous entry. Baffling result, especially for such an otherwise so technically proficient studio.

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (2007)

While most were hypnotized by the original Assassin's Creed, Naughty Dog launched what would become a much more interesting series down the line. Many accused the original Uncharted of being just Dude Raider, and yeah, the game definitely did feature way-too-many gunfights, but you could immediately see something magical brewing.

The newly-released PS3 allowed for Uncharted to be the best-looking Indiana Jones-style game up until then, and the game's slick albeit way-too-easy climbing and platforming sections did a great job of making players feel like a Hollywood action hero like few games before or after.

Jak and Daxter

Jak and Daxter was the perfect spiritual successor to the Crash Bandicoot series. It introduced likable new characters in a fresh new setting, and expanded upon the platforming action we all loved by making it open world. Jak and Daxter was a bunch of fun,

This one could have done for the PlayStation what Super Mario 64 did for Nintendo, but it sadly came out at a time when our love for platformers was dying out.

Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back

While it doesn't change the formula, Crash Bandicoot 2 not only improves upon the original in every conceivable way, it also introduces a bunch of new concepts that prevent things from going stale.

Crash Bandicoot 2 has some of the most memorable levels and bosses in the series, and many argue it's actually the highest point in the series.

The Last Of Us

Time to address the other elephant in the room. The Last Of Us is a good game, not a fantastic one.

Even upon release, the stealth segments — which amounted for a large part of the game — felt inferior to a lot of what we'd previously seen in Metal Gear Solid. The AI, enemy and friendly alike, was never all that great, either. Even the shooting segments, which Naughty Dog had previously nailed so well, now felt unnecessarily cumbersome. I get that you're trying to make us embody a survivor in a desolate land and not a Hollywood hero, but the game still needs to be fun. And you want to know the least fun of all? Spending such a large portion of the game grabbing and carrying ladders around just so Ellie can go from one side of the map to another.

Gaming fans fell in love with The Last Of Us because of its heartwarming, sometimes heart-wrenching, narrative. While I completely get why people love it, and use that love to carry the ranking it's getting, I can't deny how lackluster its gameplay feels.

Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

If we allow ourselves to be blinded by its spectacle, Uncharted 4 is easily the best game in the series. The gameplay has never been this rich and polished, and the levels have never looked so good. Still, one of the defining elements of the best Naughty Dog games is the balance between gameplay and heart, and that's where Uncharted 4 begins to falter.

The game had a rough start of development, which saw The Last Of Us' Neil Druckmann replacing series' creator Amy Henning at the helm. Though the game's plot isn't bad, it's filled with bonkers retcons that make no sense for the game at hand and that even — accidentally or not — try to take value away from the previous games in the series.

S Tier Naughty Dog games

Uncharted: The Lost Legacy

The Lost Legacy looks and plays just like Uncharted 4, but is an even better game in many ways. It does away with the beautiful-but-linear set pieces of the bigger game, but replaces them with magnificent open-world environments that I'd really love to see featured in a possible next game in the series.

Crash Team Racing

If you want to turn your platformer into a racing game, this is how you go about it. Sure, Crash Team Racing owes a lot to Mario Kart, but this is arguably the most fun you could have with three other friends on the original PlayStation, and that's a very hard bar to clear.

This is Naughty Dog at its most fun, meaning it came from a time when the studio was in a place diametrically opposed to where it is now. While you need an original PlayStation to play Naughty Dog's iteration of the game, you can have one hell of a lot of fun playing the excellent remaster.

Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped

Crash Bandicoot is the rare trilogy where every new entry improves upon the previous one. Whereas most sequels fall for the possible mistake of just going bigger, the Crash series just went weirder.

The game added a bunch more abilities for Crash to use, a way more varied selection of levels, and did all that without ever messing with the game's beloved scope.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

With the gift of hindsight, I can wisely say Uncharted 2 is the crowning achievement of Naughty Dog. A sequel that goes bigger while avoiding unnecessary bloat — and also solves all the problems of the original game.

While it doesn't feature the visual flair of The Last Of Us Part II, it still looks, and more than makes up for the (only barely) graphics by way of heart and fun gameplay.

And, because everyone loves these things, here's the tier list, as it currently stands:

Would you have chosen differently? Post your version in the comments!

The post The Best Naughty Dog Games Of All Time (Ultimate Tier List) appeared first on Destructoid.

There are many great companies working to keep old PC games going. Some, like Nightdive Studios, work to remaster them for modern audiences. Others, like Ziggurat and SNEG, keep older games updated and functional on newer operating systems. Good Old Games has always done that to an extent, but now they’re making a greater commitment with the GOG Preservation Program.

In essence, the program simply means that GOG’s staff has checked into a game and ensured that it runs fine. As they put it, they are essentially taking over ongoing support from the original developer. For some games, such as the Resident Evil series, untangling some of the bugs in the original Windows version can take a lot of effort. In fact, truly, if there’s one thing I want to see from this effort, it’s that more Windows games from the late ‘90s to early ‘00s are touched up, as they tend to have the worst pains when it comes to getting them running again.

Truthfully, I found the launch of the program to be somewhat underwhelming. Going through the changelogs of a lot of games in the list shows that the most recent update was simply for staff validation and the addition of cloud saves in some instances. I was hoping for more ambitious adjustments and patching. I maybe just had too high of expectations for the launch.

Nonetheless, the program is heartening as someone who plays old games just as much as new ones. GOG was founded as Good Old Games with the intent of making classic games digitally available. However, the company later shifted focus to creating a marketplace for all games in a way to rival steam. So, to see them announce that they’re going to make an effort to go back is, at the very least, a step in the right direction.

But I have a lot of lingering questions about the program. Thankfully, Marcin Paczyński, Senior Business Development Manager at GOG, was willing to answer some of them. This interview hasn’t been modified in any way. The trademark symbols are all him.

Zoey: A lot of DOS games on GOG still seem to use DOSBox as a backend. That’s a trusted and reliable solution, but it often requires a lot of fine-tuning for different system environments (resolutions, mouse acceleration, game controllers). Is GOG tweaking it in any way to make it more one-size-fits-all?

DOSBox is, indeed, an amazing open-source solution that we’ve been using since GOG's inception in 2008. All DOS games are fine-tuned with a bespoke configuration, so it is rarely one-size-fits-all. Even more, we have a custom version of DOSBox that allows us to support cloud saves in DOS games. This feature is exclusive to our platform.

Marcin Paczyński, Senior Business Development Manager at GOG

Zoey: From what I understand, some publishers do not allow GOG to modify a game’s build to address bugs or alter it for modern environments. Is that still a barrier? Is GOG planning to renegotiate agreements for certain games?

In the case of classic GOG releases, we are allowed to modify the game’s build to ensure compatibility with modern systems. Additionally, we often collaborate with the publisher’s technical and QA teams to achieve this goal. There may be some edge cases, but we’ll do our best to include those games in the Program as well. It might take a bit longer for some titles, but we’re confident that, in time, we’ll be able to add every game to the Program.

Marcin Paczyński, Senior Business Development Manager at GOG

Zoey: Are there any games that GOG decided not to put on their storefront that might have another chance under this program?

Truth be told, some games in our pipeline have been waiting in the queue for a long time, because there are always more impactful classic titles that we need to be focusing on. With our new focus on game preservation, we hope to be able to release classics as soon as they are signed. More importantly, we really hope that with the Preservation Program’s success, we’ll be able to bring more amazing classic games (and not only) from the GOG Community Wishlist — titles we’ve been working to resurrect for years.

Marcin Paczyński, Senior Business Development Manager at GOG

Zoey: Is GOG planning to work with fans who may have already created a solution or patch for a game’s modern problems?

Yes, we already had a chance to work with the communities on many great releases on GOG, and will continue to do so. That being said, the GOG Preservation Program aims to preserve the original game and make it playable on modern machines. This means being very careful with any modification that might alter the original experience. We also want to avoid passing the responsibility of maintaining the game’s quality on to the community, as it wouldn’t be fair to them. We do have plans for 2025 to work even closer with the communities and build upon the GOG Preservation Program by adding a feature that would allow gamers to enjoy all of those amazing community updates in an easy and secure way. It would be optional, of course.

Marcin Paczyński, Senior Business Development Manager at GOG

Zoey: If players are reporting additional bugs, concerns, or inconveniences with updated builds for games under this umbrella, will GOG offer support, workarounds, or updates?

We’re going to actively listen to the gaming community – their feedback is the most valuable for us. If we missed something that they notice, you can be sure we’ll take it into account and provide fixes as fast as possible.

Marcin Paczyński, Senior Business Development Manager at GOG

Zoey: Will GOG be working to restore multiplayer functionality to games that have lost it? For example, games that use Gamespy (such as Medal of Honor: Allied Assault) as a backend can no longer browse for servers and require fan workarounds. Is GOG able to address this?

This is a complicated topic but the short answer is: yes – we’ll be trying to. Just not yet; currently, we’re focusing on adding new games to the program as fast as we can. We’ve already done something similar in STAR WARS™ Battlefront (Classic, 2004) and STAR WARS™ Battlefront II (Classic, 2005) but it’s a complicated process that will take time. However, some of the games have communities that have worked around this issue and maintain a great multiplayer experience. So right now, I see us addressing this issue by connecting with those communities and trying to find a way for us to work together on this. I was part of a few such online communities and the quality of the experience was amazing.

Marcin Paczyński, Senior Business Development Manager at GOG

It sounds like 2025 will be an exciting time for retro PC gamers. I know that I have a wishlist of many classic games that I’d like to see hit the platform. SimGolf, for example. Battlefield 1942 as another example. I could keep going. Extreme Paintbrawl. See? Want me to stop? William Shatner’s Tekwar.

And while I’m not looking for modified experiences – not everything needs to be remastered in the way Nightdive does it – I would like to be able to start a game up with minimum fuss. I don’t want to have to look for fan fixes myself since that can be a nightmare. So, I look forward to seeing the games that start landing under its umbrella. Their FAQ says that the team wants to add hundreds of games by the end of 2025. Let’s hit the gas.

The post Interview: Digging into GOG’s Preservation Program with Marcin Paczyński appeared first on Destructoid.

After the Early Access reveal for Path of Exile 2, I had the opportunity to sit down with Jonathan Rogers, Path of Exile 2 Game Director. We dove a little deeper into the newly announced content coming to the ARPG including the revealed endgame, classes, as well as what to expect in the future.

DESTRUCTOID: It's awesome to see so many popular league mechanics return in POE2 but as a Blight enjoyer I have to ask: any chance we'll see Blight come to POE2?

JONATHAN: Yeah, we have a big list of leagues we want to redo. One of the main bottlenecks at this point is getting a huge amount of art commissioned and a lot of that stuff is still coming through the pipeline. When you already know the outline of what you're making, it's easy to do sort of a sequel to it, so a lot of that stuff we should be able to do very quickly in Early Access. We're not going to do every league but we're going to do ones that players enjoy, especially the ones that offer gameplay you don't really get anywhere else. So while I don't want to announce anything, Blight is certainly on our list of ones we're pretty interested in.

DESTRUCTOID: As far as the Atlas Trees go with them now being specific to each mechanic, can you dabble in them all instead of focusing on a specific few now?

JONATHAN: One of the problems we had in POE1 was that you felt you had to all-in on one mechanic and not do any others. We put a bandaid on that by allowing multiple Atlas Trees, but it wasn't really the perfect solution. So in POE2 each mechanic when you play it, you get points just for that, and you can only spend those points on that league. Then there's no FOMO, you can do one mechanic and get some points for it, then jump to another and get some points for it. You can progress them all independently, and can get all points for all the trees, or in a certain league you may only want to do a few. But you don't have to choose to specialize and then lock you out of other options like in POE1.

DESTRUCTOID: I know you said Act 1-3 should take about 25 hours for first-time players. Any sort of timeframe for going through the acts on Cruel to get to Level 65 and unlock the endgame?

JONATHAN: I don't have an exact timeframe, but I am certain as people play through the content again and again they will get it down to a super short time. Most of our playtest in closed betas have been for the earlier acts and haven't been including Cruel. Someone like Mark Rogers (Game Director on POE2) can get through the first three acts in like eight hours and then Cruel in like four, but he's an entirely different universe speed-wise compared to me who can't do it anywhere near that fast.

DESTRUCTOID: Compared to POE1, how crazy can some of the builds get in POE2 in terms of map clear speed? It looks like in POE2 combat is a little more tactical or methodical, but can you still get to the point where your build is a "Push one button and clear the screen" sort of thing or will that stay reserved to POE1?

JONATHAN: It isn't going to be as ridiculous as POE1, but we still need you to feel like you sort of become a god toward the endgame. You can definitely can get pretty crazy with certain builds, but we still want there to be meaningful combat. That's something we can do a lot better now with how bosses work in POE2. In POE1, every map had a boss at the end, so in order to keep the time a map might take you reasonable, we couldn't really push the difficulty of map bosses that far. But in POE2, map bosses are only one in every four maps and you can see where they are on the Atlas. So you get to decide if you're in boss-hunting mode or map-clearing mode. This allows us to make bosses harder and much more rewarding so they can be longer and a more involved fight that allow us to have more tactical combat for them while still allowing you to clear maps as well. The balance is something I feel we're doing a much better job of here compared to POE1.

DESTRUCTOID: With the skill gem system being a lot different than POE1, is there still the possibility for super unique builds to exist? For example, Ward Loop in POE1 was fun every league to see players in the community try to figure out if there was a way to make it work that league, and sometimes it would and sometimes it wouldn't. Are there still going to be sort of 'out there' builds like that?

JONATHAN: I certainly hope so. To me, one of the great signs of a good system in game design is when players can utilize it to do things that designers didn't anticipate. That means there's enough generalization of mechanics that things can emerge from the chaos of all the different things going on. On example of one of the builds we had, that we actually had to nerf because it was too ridiculous, is that we have a mechanic called Armor Break where you break an enemy's armor by dealing damage. The armor ticks down and once it breaks other mechanics can trigger. We have a support called Corrosion, and if you put it on a poison skill, that skill will start breaking your enemy's armor. We also have a support gem that makes it so when you break something's armor, an explosion deals fire damage to nearby enemies as well. We also have a support gem called Exploit Weakness that says when you deal damage to something, if the enemy armor is broken, it will deal extra damage and then remove the armor break. The combination of a ticking poison gas cloud skill with all of these mechanics happening resulted in a situation where the armor was getting broken, the explosion would trigger, and then Exploit Weakness would remove the armor break, and it would create a loops of monsters just constantly exploding from a single attack. That's the kind of thing that can happen naturally with so many support gems, and we have hundreds of support gems in POE2. We want players to be able to find interesting combinations of mechanics that can lead to cool stuff.

DESTRUCTOID: For new players who might not have played POE1 coming into POE2, and classes you recomomend for beginners? On the flip side, any tougher classes you recommend for those more experienced?

JONATHAN: The Mercenary is very new player friendly because you can hang back and it plays similar to a shooter, it plays very different compared to the other classes. I've noticed new players enjoy it quite a lot. But honestly you will be fine playing any class. One that I would say that is very fun and new players do enjoy it but you're definitely going to die more often if you're new is the Monk. It's to technical and fast, but is a glass cannon type of character. In order to play a Monk successfully you have to use abilities to sort of dash in and dash out quickly. If you aren't good at the more action type combat it can be a bit harder. According to our data we found that the Monk died the most in our betas, but also the people who played the Monk had the highest rating for the game which is a very interesting combination.

DESTRUCTOID: With the epic opening cinematic you revealed today, I have two questions about the storytelling in POE2. I assume that the story won't be wrapped up over the first three acts that are immediately available in Early Access?

JONATHAN: Correct, the story isn't wrapped up how we intended, but we've done a bit of work to make sure the bridge into endgame isn't random and like 'Oh story ends, here is the endgame.' There are some storyline beats and some fun stuff with the bosses we've done that we've made specific to where the story ends in Act 3. However, over time, yes, the story will effectively end in Act 6. We've put a lot more effort into the storyline than we did in POE1 so hopefully players get invested into it and look forward to finishing it as we add more acts.

DESTRUCTOID: Are there more cinematics in POE2 outside of the intro one?

JONATHAN: Between the Acts we have motion graphics type things that explain what's going on between the acts, but they aren't cinematics in the same sense as this one. We do have some more interesting things that we can't really talk about until Acts 5 and 6 are in the game. There's a lot more storyling cinematic-style events that happen from the in-game perspective throughout the campaign which we didn't do in POE1, but in POE2 we have a lot more of that going on which I think makes the experience a lot more immersive.

DESTRUCTOID: As for content after release, I know you have a quarterly cadence for POE1 leagues. Do you plan to do a similar league-style cadence with POE2 or is the focus going to be to get the other acts out?

JONATHAN: This is a tricky one for us because our main thing is that we have to get the rest of the actual game content in. We don't want to distract ourself from that, especially because we have a lot of 80% complete stuff ready to be finished and put into the game that we really need to finish. But at the same time if you're going to play a new patch, it's important to add something that enhances the endgame experience too. We're planning on adding more POE1 league sequels throughout Early Access. This may change but I have a feeling during Early Access we're gonna add more POE2 campaign content and classes and at the same time as that also extend end-game with stuff that comes from that campaign content like the end-game versions of the bosses. Then at the same time we'll probably want to add one or two POE league sequels at the same time to keep things fresh and add more systems. That's how I see things going but we'll have to respond based on the situation we'll find ourselves in with Early Access based on player feedback. Then there's other elements like Christmas coming up and the studio has been going hard to get Early Access ready so we may have a period between now and Christmas where we recover and have a bit of time off. We're not sure when the first league will come out but we're a studio that releases things frequently so we know how to do that.

DESTRUCTOID: Once things are more steady, do you still plan to do both POE1 and POE2 leagues?

JONATHAN: That is absolutely the plan. I'm not sure what cadence we're going to go with, but we may do three-month expansions for both games at all times. But I suspect it will depend on what players want. If lots of people play both, we may do two months of POE2, then a POE1 league releases so you have a month of that before POE2 releases it's new league. So it will still be every three months for both, but they are offeset by that one month so you can play both. It will all depend on what feels right, but we'll have to see what people are playing. I imagine there will still be a large audience for POE1 and they need content as well. Our decision to make microtransactions carry across both games was driven by the idea of making sure our studio has a reason to continue to support POE1. From a business sense if we're still making money from POE1 why would we ever stop making content for it?

DESTRUCTOID: I'm admittedly looking forward to a time where I can just always be playing some form of POE, haha. A more technical question: Delirium. The effects of Delirium when it originally launched in POE1 were quite hardware-intensive. With Delirium returning in POE2, do I need to prepare to upgrade my GPU?

JONATHAN: I hope not. Delirium was pretty heavy when it released, but if you play it today it's much better. Those kind of post-effects stuff we know how to do much better now, and the engine itself is much better than it was in POE1, so you shouldn't have any problems.

DESTRUCTOID: Alright time for a few fun questions. I know there's been a hidden meaning to the Fishing Rod from POE1 this whole time. When do we get a fishing league in POE2?

JONATHAN: Well, you'll have to play through the Atlas and find out, I suspect.

DESTRUCTOID: Hidden fishing Atlas tree, I know it! I'm sure you've played a ton of crazy builds whiloe testing; what's the most fun build you've made that I can try to spin up when I play?

JONATHAN: It's really hard to pick one, so I'll go with the most recent one that I'm really enjoying. Right now I'm playing Mercenary and having a fun time with the various ice skills. Mercenaries have fragmentation rounds that blow apart ice. If you freeze a monster you can blow the monsters apart, but you can also create ice wall segments or anything frozen. You can then blow those apart as well. You've got a sniper rifle as well that can create ice projectiles between monsters that you shoot, which you can then blow up as well. So with all the ice skills you can constantly be blowing up things all over the screen which has been very fun to do.

DESTRUCTOID: One last question. I'm a huge fan of the content creator Pohx and his RF(Righteous Fire) build. Will Pohx be ok because there's some chance of RF in POE2?

JONATHAN: RF is not in Early Access but it does exist. Also, there is an Ascendancy class that has a similar mechanic. The demonform Ascendancy has a similar mechanic where the longer you stay in demonform the more life you burn, but the more your cast speed and spell damage goes up as it happens. It's a similar playstyle to RF but not quite the same because it doesn't have the burning around you component. Unfortunately, RF is part of the skillset of one of the classes we're not launching in Early Access initially, but it will definitely be there eventually.

DESTRUCTOID: Thank you very much for your time Jonathan, very much looking forward to POE2 and I know a lot of others are as well. Best of luck with the Early Access launch!

Path of Exile 2 releases into Early Access on PC, PlayStation 5, and XBox Series X|S on December 6, 2024.

The post Interview: Path of Exile 2 Game Director Details End-Game and more appeared first on Destructoid.

Not to make you feel old but the original Dynasty Warriors was released over 25 years ago back in 1997. Since then the series has seen nine main 'numbered' entries and a handful of spin-offs. It's been almost seven years since the last entry in the franchise, Dynasty Warriors 9, which I think most fans of the series would agree was quite average at best. At the time, our very own Chris Carter felt it was 'clunky and unwieldy'.

I've always been a fan of 'musou games' like Dynasty Warriors. There's something about mindlessly hack n' slashing your way through hordes of enemies that almost feels tranquil in a way. But over the years, the many releases of Dynasty Warriors—and similar style games—admittedly started to weigh on me. As Omega Force and Koei Tecmo started to diversify the catalog of musou-style games with other themes and even IP's with amazing releases like Warriors Orochi 4, Hyrule Warriors, One Piece: Pirate Warriors, Dragon Quest Heroes, Fire Emblem Warriors, Berserker and the Band of the Hawk and more. The standard Dynasty Warrior formula started to become stale for me.

Fast forward a few years, and I had the opportunity to play the first three chapters of Dynasty Warriors: Origins. While I typically prefer to play these styles of games on console, I previewed Origins on PC. I started with a controller, but out of curiosity switched to a keyboard and mouse just to see how it felt. In that regard, let me start by saying it actually felt way better than I expected. Button smashing just comes easier on a controller, but the keyboard controls felt just as smooth once I reworked some the key binds on things like the special attacks. Thankfully, the controls aren't the only things I felt were greatly improved in Dynasty Warrior: Origins. In fact, it feels improved in most aspects.

A real Origins story

Without knowing too much about Dynasty Warriors: Origins beforehand, let me first share with you what I quickly discovered; the Origins moniker serves a double meaning: a return to the origin of the Dynasty Warrior franchise, as well as the game's intent to tell the story of the Three Kingdoms period when the Cao Wei, Shu Han, and Eastern Wu dynasties reigned over China. For those not familiar, it's known as one of the bloodiest periods in Chinese history, so quite fitting for a game where you are tasked with fighting massive armies.

Storytelling in previous entries in the franchise has been a bit lackluster, to put it mildly. It's never been a strong point of the series, but to be fair, it never presented itself as such. With Dynasty Warrior: Origins, the storytelling is much more prominent, right from the start. There are cutscenes, fully voiced characters, and more that all work together to tell the story of the Three Kingdoms. As someone who's very interested in the period, I'm excited to see how the story is told over the full game.

While Dynasty Warriors is known for letting you select from a ton of staple historical characters from the period, Origins puts the player in the role of their own character. As you play you'll level up, getting various stat boosts, skills, and other abilities as you progress. As you get deeper into the game, you get access to those fabled heroes and can choose to take them with you and even control them in battle for a period of time. I know not everyone is going to like this change, but I'm actually enjoying being my own hero and forging my own legacy this time around.

After the first battle, Origins opens up a bit into a semi-open world setting. You're able to traverse a 'World Map' of sorts and choose which regions to battle in. Each region has its own sets of battles and missions you can do to increase the peace level of that region, rewarding you with stat buffs and boosts along the way. Progressing will unlock more regions, allowing you to progress and essentially alter the story of the Three Kingdoms based on your decisions.

Battlefields as big as ever

The major "Wow Factor" of Dynasty Warriors has always been its massive scale. You versus entire massive armies on the battlefield. I'm happy to say the scale is bigger than ever in Origins, with more enemy and army counts on the battlefield than I'm pretty sure, well, ever. In fact, with a somewhat more direct approach to combat compared to other entries in the series, you can actually find yourself quickly overwhelmed by how many enemies are actually on the battlefield.

Well-timed special attacks and the use of powerful abilities can really turn the tide of battle in Origins, especially in the 1-on-1 encounters with more challenging enemies. You can eventually choose to surround yourself with your own micro-army of guards and can even issue orders to them such as to defend you, charge an area, or even focus attacks on an area. This too can really change the tide of battle.

Overall, battles themselves feel a bit more tactical, or maybe even technical, compared to previous entries. Button smashing isn't quite the option as it used to be, as I said, you can find yourself quickly overrun by even basic infantry units on the battlefield. It's not super tactical like a Soulslike game or anything like that, but you'll have to make use of your special attacks and combos to effectively carve routes through the battlefield. It's a change for the series for sure, but a good one I feel.

After playing through the first three chapters of Dynasty Warriors: Origins, I have to applaud Omega Force for the direction they've chosen to take the series in. It would have been easy to just release a prettied-up button-mashing Dynasty Warrior game with the same playable characters and endless grind potential. I know there are certainly some people out there who may prefer that.

But for me, the innovative changes to the series provide a unique—and honestly just outright more fun—experience to the formula. Omega Force and Koei Tecmo have taken a lot of the staples from the franchise like massive-scale battles and expanded them while also improving the overall game through better storytelling, more interesting combat, and a player character-driven focus. I think this will put the series in a great spot to be appealing to both newcomers and long-time fans, and opens up for the potential to really continue to innovate in the future. Dynasty Warriors is so back, and I'm here for it.

Dynasty Warriors: Origins is set to release on January 17, 2025 on PC via Steam, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.

The post Hands-on Preview: Dynasty Warriors: Origins innovates the classic musou genre appeared first on Destructoid.

Black Friday is looming on the horizon and all you can do right now is get as prepared as possible for when it hits. We'll try helping you by listing some of the sweetest PS5 deals you can buy ahead of the dark day when we celebrate St. Spending.

1. Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown

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Things are looking bleak for Ubisoft right now, but that doesn't mean the company hasn't been putting out bangers - you just need to look away from that treacherous AAA space. Prince Of Persia's latest outing is both a tribute to the series' early days and one of the most modern and addictive games of recent times. It's an excellent title and, at a ridiculously high discount of 70%, you just shouldn't ignore it's fantastic price tag of $14.97. There are a lot of good early deals right now, but this one is the one to beat.

2. Final Fantasy XVI

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FFXVI is known to have underperformed sales-wise, which might have to do with its low price, but don't let the incredibly low price tag of $24.97 for 50% off fool you into thinking Square is just trying to get rid of it. It's not every day that you get a stellar game at a lower price, let alone this low. Final Fantasy XVI is the latest addition to the main line of Final Fantasy, and it's the best it has played in over a decade.

3. Armored Core VI Fires of Rubicon

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Do you happen to be tired of FromSoft's Souls series, or do you want more of it but with a different taste? Great, because Fires Of Rubicon will quench either kind of thirst. Though it got great reviews and sold decently, Fires Of Rubicon didn't quite capture the attention of gamers for as long a Elden Ring, but it's highly deserving of your time. You can get this spectacular high-octane-ified take on the FromSoft formula at 33% off for the awesome price of $39.99.

4. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora

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If you'd like to visit the world of Avatar for yourself, this is the cheapest way to do so. Frontiers of Pandora is a better game than the original Avatar, and definitely the best way to remain in the imagination of James Cameron until the release of one of the many planned sequels. At 71% off for just $19.99, this is currently the biggest discount on a big game out there.

5. Hot Wheels Unleashed

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If you're looking into extreme fun that'll also come packed with a hefty dose of nostalgia, Hot Wheels Unleashed is one of the best-possible picks for you. It came out in 2021, so the 64% off for $17.97 isn't exactly a surprising sale for a fresh-new title, but it's certainly a solid discount for a game that'll certainly prove a positive surprise.

6. Madden NFL 25

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It's no secret that the Madden series has consistently been one of the best-selling gaming franchises in the world, so it's possible you already own it. Still, there are always those of us who patiently wait for the right time to get a game, so I'm pretty confident in saying that 50% off for $34.97 is that time.

7. F1 24

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Whether or not you're a fan of Formula 1, it's hard to deny the appeal of F1 24 at a mere $34.99. Yes, that's still the latest entry in a popular sports series so yeah, you're looking at quite the deal. Not for you? Consider getting it for an F1 aficionado ahead of Christmas!

8. WD_BLACK 1TB SN850X

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One of the sad realities of the current console generation — even when we're talking about the incredibly powerful new PS5 Pro — is the lack of a Hard Drive capable of holding all the content you'd want it to. The WD_BLACK 1TB isn't an infinite disk, but, at 15% off for $79.99, 1TB of high speed storage is a pretty good deal.

9. Logitech G Pro X Wireless Lightspeed Gaming Headset

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While this is not an official Sony product, it was already one of the best gaming headsets you could get for a console. Logitech's stuff has been legendary in and outside the PC sphere, and this is no exception. Now, for 40% off at $137.90, it might just be the very best wireless headset deal you can get for your PS5.

10. OIVO PS5 Controller Charger

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I'm yet to find a non-official controller that replaces the Dual Sense, but the same doesn't apply to controller chargers. The OIVO charger will get the job of charging up two controllers in two hours, and is a really cool alternative to the official Sony charger for its current price and the cool frontal LED panel. You can currently get the OIVO charger at 33% off for just $19.99.

The post 10 Best Early Black Friday PS5 Deals (2024) appeared first on Destructoid.

I really wish Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake was released in a different month (absolutely any other would do). If I hadn’t already pushed through multiple 20-50 hour games in the past few weeks, I probably would have been prepared for it, but I’m out of push. There’s no way I could burn the midnight oil to get a review ready in any reasonable timeframe.

I settled on playing as much as I could and giving my impressions instead. I played through the four NES titles in the Dragon Quest series (Dragon Warrior as they were at the time here in North America) a few years ago, and Dragon Quest 3 was my least favorite of the bunch. I recognize its immense reputation in Japan, and even over here, but it wasn’t the one for me.

So, I was sort of lukewarm about the prospect of Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake, but also somewhat excited to see if another lap around might make it click with me. Imagine my surprise when I put in well over a dozen hours during a busy weekend.

The first thing you should probably note about Dragon Quest III is that it was before the series got more of a focus on narrative. There’s little introduction before your mom tells you to go make friends and kicks you out the door. Your party members aren’t really characterized beyond their profession and whatever backstory your imagination might come up with for them. They’re just drones that will make up the muscle or support of your party.

It’s somewhat refreshing in a world bloated with exposition. The JRPG format generally favors a storyteller’s touch, but just being able to explore and loot the world without getting interrupted by other people’s problems at every turn can be a welcomed change.

That’s not to say there isn’t a story. You’re the child of a legendary hero named Ortega, who set out to defeat the Archfiend and never came back. People you meet will tell you what an awe-inspiring dude he was, so you’ve got a lot to live up to. And that’s exactly what the game is about; finishing what your father started. Like most JRPGs, this is done by traveling from town to town and righting wrong.

This isn’t the first time that Dragon Quest 3 has received a remake. A lot of the systems from prior remakes (Game Boy Color, SNES, and if you count it, mobile) have been held over, such as the personality systems that affect stat growth. Also, the Thief class, which is important for reasons I’ll get to.

But this is the first full remake since the ‘90s, and it’s a lot more lavish than what you could pull off on those platforms. Another new class (Monster Wrangler) has been added, which gains abilities based on which of the (also new) friendly monsters you locate. I think the monster locating/battling system of Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remaster is kind of poor, consider me underwhelmed, but if you’ve played the game a million times before with every class configuration possible, a new one will probably be welcomed.

The graphics got the most prominent overhaul. I do enjoy Square Enix’s HD-2D style and the way it tends to respect a game’s retro roots while giving something more visually splendiferous to chew on. It does look pretty great here, except the sprites are a bit more detailed than I would have expected.

Considering the simplicity of Dragon Quest 3’s original art style, a lot had to be reimagined. Buildings now look like buildings, environments are a lot busier, and the world map feels a lot larger. It looks good, but it’s give and take with how it affects the actual game. It forces a reliance on your mini-map much of the time to know which building has what function, and that can dissuade exploration. It’s also harder to tell what’s interactive in the environment, which can lead to humping everything in search of the interact prompt.

The enemies all look familiar and still follow the palette swap system, but they’re nicely animated. However, that’s the best thing I can say about the battles themselves. I don’t know what’s going on, but the default speed for battles is ridiculously slow. Between the animations, the dialogue crawls, and strange bits of hesitation between, I can feel the frustration creeping in. Who has time for this? I cranked the battle speed up (it can be done on the fly, thankfully) and still found it to be a bit too slow.

You can set your party to use “tactics,” which essentially hands control over to the AI. I found this very useful, since exploring the overworld in the original Dragon Quest 3 usually just boiled down to me mashing the confirm button to make each member of my party use “attack.” Now I can just set the whole party to "Fight wisely," press a button, and doze off until the next turn. I kind of feel like I’m skipping a major part of the game, but I was technically doing that originally, just with more button mashing.

One downside to the bigger world, however, is that it makes the encounter rate feel extremely high. Whether or not the frequency of random battles is actually higher than the original, I can't tell for sure. However, they certainly feel more common, and that's bad enough. At least if you have a thief in your party, you can use one of their abilities to bypass enemy encounters for a time, but then you're not gaining experience, which will just bite you later on.

As I said, the whole package is a bit give and take, but personally, I feel that the modernizations really help Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake taste a little more palatable. I like the early Dragon Quest games because they feel very streamlined, keeping the action simple so the spotlight can be put on exploration. A lot of that is carried over, even if some concessions have been made that feel more like a waste of time than a worthwhile addition.

The most insulting part for me is that there’s an option to turn on objective markers. I’m sure that there’s a subset of players who find this to be a necessary feature, I’m not trying to invalidate anyone’s preference. However, I feel like if you extract the wandering and exploration from Dragon Quest 3, you’re not left with a whole lot.

And really, I find that the updated graphics make exploring the world more worthwhile, heightening that all-important layer of gameplay. It’s that part that drew me in and kept me playing for as long as I have (so far). Beyond just wanting to see areas I recognize from the 8-bit original reimagined, the visual variety of the art style just makes it feel more like an adventure. I’m looking forward to hitting the seas in Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake. More than that, however, I’m excited to see how the extra shine enhances the first two games sometime next year.

The post Impressions: Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake enhances where it really matters: the wandering appeared first on Destructoid.

UFO 50 is a wild little package bursting to the seams with bite-size discoveries. It has the potential to inspire different types of nostalgia depending on the player, and it also helped me totally reconsider how I approach my ever-growing backlog of games.

If you haven't played UFO 50 yet, the elevator pitch is simple. It's a collection of 50 games from a fictional '80s developer, and you can tackle it any way you see fit. You could play everything chronologically, essentially living in the meta-narrative to see how each game built upon the proposed tech of the time. You could also treat UFO 50 as the grab bag it is, dipping in and out of games like an all-you-can-eat buffet. 

This is going to hit differently depending on the timeline of your nascent years of gaming. For some, UFO 50 will drum up memories of early 8-bit consoles and arcade cabinets, discovering gems hidden among the crowd and highlighting favorites you'll revisit time and time again. Others may recall some dusty old Hong Kong bootleg carts, which somehow squeezed a ton of titles of dubious origins into one modest circuitboard. 

For those who came up later, UFO 50 might be more akin to old flash game sites like Newgrounds, or even a more modern digital storefront stuffed to the gills with indie delights. No matter what angle you approach from, the work of UFO Soft — from the very real folks at Mossmouth, including Spelunky creator Derek Yu and more — might have you looking at the rest of your collection in a new light. 

I can't speak for everyone, but I've always had a contentious relationship with my backlog of unfinished or unplayed games. Buying new games is just something that comes with the territory of loving this stuff so much, especially when it's also your job. But there's always that nagging sensation that you're doing your existing games dirty in the process. Should I really be playing Sonic x Shadow Generations when I never even got a third of the way through Star Wars Jedi: Survivor? Why am I even playing UFO 50 in the first place when I need to finish Silent Hill 2? 

Despite those nagging thoughts, I continued to prioritize UFO 50 above most everything else, and I'm glad I did. While dealing with decision paralysis in an isolated 50-game collection is far from the same as staring straight at 50 separate games in your Steam library, it's really just a microcosm of game libraries writ large.

But in the halls of fictional UFO Soft history, I never had the same hesitations. I never once thought, "should I really move on to Bug Hunter when I haven't even solved the exploratory conundrum that is Barbuta?" Of course I should! There's a lot more fun to be had in this collection, and the very nature of it encourages dipping in and out to see what really grabs you the most. You're not going to like everything. It might not sound like it, but life would be hell if you did.

As it turned out, there was a lot that grabbed me. I might not have had the same experience if I hadn't been playing along on a game-by-game basis while listening to the Eggplant: The Secret Lives of Games podcast. They've been going through UFO 50 in a book-club-style format, tackling each game in the fictionally chronological order they were "released" from the early to late '80s. That means playing a different game each week, starting with Barbuta and running through Bug Hunter, Ninpek, and on and on.

In that process, which is ongoing, I've discovered a few notable gems, including a couple I probably would have bounced off of sooner if it weren't for the book club format. Focusing on a game at a time has allowed me to tackle them on their own terms, exploring some genres I might otherwise not be that into in the process. 

This approach has had a profound impact on how I think about my backlog, too. By "taking my medicine" and extensively playing games I wouldn't normally spend more than a few minutes on, I realized I don't need to do that in the greater context of video games as a whole. If something feels like a chore, it's no longer fun, and delaying joy shouldn't come into the equation when you're trying to escape. 

So, do I need to finish some of my older games before I start the new ones? Only if doing so is the most fun thing I can be doing at any given moment. I don't want to feel the need to slog through something just to tick it off a list so I can move on to something else. There will always be time for that later, if we're lucky. And if there isn't, then at least I got the fun out of the way first. 

The post UFO 50 changed the way I think about my backlog appeared first on Destructoid.

Yes, 2004, one of the best years in gaming history is nearly legally old enough to drink. That means we're even older, yes, but it's also cause for celebration.

Let's use this opportunity not to count our gray hairs, but to celebrate so many games that most players don't even realize came out in such a short span of time, so long ago.

11. Burnout 3: Takedown

If you miss the Burnout series, that's likely because of its highest point: Burnout 3: Takedown. Gone are the realistic physics of Gran Turismo, in are the most ridiculously fun car crashing mechanics ever put into a game.

No game before or since has made simply driving as fast as you can, and toppling your opponents in the most spectacular ways as fun as Takedown. I cannot, for the life of me, understand how such a seemingly simple yet multifaceted party series has been dormant for so long.

10. Fable

The original Fable remains one of the best answers to the turn-based RPGs that dominated the gaming landscape back then, as well as the best game in the franchise. There's just no beating Fable when it comes to embarking on a journey to become a hero — or a villain.

There's no denying that, in true Peter Molyneux fashion, Fable underdelivered regarding its original promise, but what we ended up getting was good enough to birth a classic. Also, Molyneux can totally defend himself by claiming it wouldn't be much of a fable if all of his promises were based on hard facts.

9. Ninja Gaiden

This was the original "hard game with good graphics" before Dark Souls claimed that distinction.

You could even argue Ninja Gaiden was harder than Dark Souls because it didn't curse you with limited stamina and was still difficult as all hell. And it was much more than that. Ninja Gaiden remains one of the most thrilling and overall best action games ever made. It's sad to see the series lose its mojo with Ninja Gaiden 3 and see Team Ninja pivoting to difficult games that straight-up mirrored the Souls series.

I love Nioh, but I miss Ninja Gaiden's high-octane type of challenge.

8. Doom 3

Upon release, many were let down by DOOM 3. It wasn't as fun as classic Doom, and it just didn't feature anywhere near the variety of fresh gameplay options available in its contemporary shooters. The people who didn't like it back then now even have the hindsight of saying it paled in comparison with the newer Doom titles, but I think they're just looking at it wrong.

If you're into slow-burn horror, Doom 3 is actually one hell of a game, capable of scaring the crap out of modern players even today.

7. Far Cry

I usually accuse the Far Cry series of being all downhill after the first game, but that's not me being mean. Far Cry 2, Far Cry 3, and Far Cry Instincts are all good games, but the original was just better. Remember the awful "Ubisoft tower" mechanic that plagues all Far Cry titles post-3? Remember the incredibly low enemy variety in most of these games? Well, you can forget all of that here.

The original Far Cry might not feature the open world game design you see in the other entries, but it's such a finely crafted (albeit more linear) gameplay experience that you likely won't even notice you're not as free as in other games. If you have never tried it because it's "old", give it a shot. It's totally worth it.

6. Sid Meier’s Pirates

Do you love Sea Of Thieves, Assassin's Creed Black Flag's best moments, and/or were you hyped by the reveal of Skull and Bones? They all exist because of Sid Meier's Pirates, the first — and still best — pirate life simulator.

If you want to have a lot of fun conquering the high seas, this somewhat underplayed masterpiece is something you should try out, because it feels like it hasn't aged a day.

5. World Of Warcraft

Accuse me of cheating all you want because yeah, World Of Warcraft has never really stopped coming out, but '04 was its first year on this land.

It remains the most successful MMO ever since its release and more than earns it this spot on this list. The fact that it will likely remain that way for the foreseeable future more than earns you the right to complain about me not ranking it even higher.

4. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater

Yes, it's no surprise that Konami is releasing Metal Gear Solid Delta by early 2025. They know MGS3 is likely the most beloved entry in the franchise, and that big 20-year-old mark is the perfect time to cash in on a masterpiece.

The original MGS pretty much turned the entire video game industry on its head when it came out. MGS3 could've easily surfed on the tsunami it had created and still managed to sell millions and get high critical praise, but that was not enough. MGS3 dared to change the setting completely to tell a new story, and it worked beautifully.

While I'd argue the Subsistence version that came out a short while later is the definitive version of the game because of the superior camera, Snake Eater remains one of the most epic and gut-wrenchingly awesome prequels of all time.

3. Halo 2

We knew Halo 2 was special as soon as '03s E3 showed one of the best gameplay demos of all time.

We knew Halo 2 was special as soon as we began playing it, even though we quickly learned the E3 demo wasn't part of it — because it was never meant to be more than a cool tech demo.

Courtesy of having to follow up on one of the best debuts of all time, Halo 2's devs at Bungie had to go through hell to clear the high bar set by Halo: Combat Evolved, in record time. Still, the result was not just one of the most memorable (even if disjointed) campaigns of all time, but also what was by far the console generation's best online experience.

2. Grand Theft Auto San Andreas

Grand Theft Auto San Andreas was the best-selling game of the best-selling console of all time, and it was no fluke.

It came out after GTA 3 and Vice City, two titles that would've deserved that spot had SA not materialized, but San Andreas was the rare sequel to go even bigger than its already humungous predecessors, and still not feel bloated because of it. Getting to wreak havoc not in one, but three different GTA-fied spoofs of real america, the countryside, and finally even getting to swim made SA feel less like a game, and more like an entire saga in one box.

1. Half-Life 2

Naturally, picking the best game out of such an eclectic list will always come down to personal taste — but not this time. I kid, but I honestly do think Half-Life 2 was and, at least until the arrival of Dark Souls, remained the most serious contender for the game of the century.

Half-Life 2 not only amped all the stakes introduced by its stellar predecessor, but it also introduced a wide array of mechanics that feel fresh even so many years later. One of the reasons Half-Life 3 might never materialize is Valve's possible inability to come up with anything even better, and that's ok.

The post Best games that turned 20 in 2024, ranked appeared first on Destructoid.

Back in ‘03, Valve hit the unsuspecting E3 audience with what I believe remains the greatest presentation in the history of video games. Yes, the '03 E3 also featured the magnificent Halo 2 presentation, but I am talking about the gameplay and tech reveal of Half-Life 2.

If you know what I’m talking about, you’re likely getting goosebumps right now. If you don’t, that’s fine — you’re still in time to get blown away by this marvel.

And, if you don't have the 20 minutes needed to witness some of the most revolutionary
gameplay reveals ever, then I only ask you to focus on the very first seconds of the presentation above.

It begins by showing the G-Man’s model from the original Half-Life, which gets someone in the audience to blurt, “he looks like hell.” The poor fool fell to one of the classic blunders, as the video swaps the G-Man’s original model for the one that would be used in Half-Life 2.

At that time, the G-Man wasn’t the spookiest entity in gaming just because his model featured the most lifelike looks in the biz, but also because of what made him work. Behind those alienating blue eyes, there was the most complex facial animation system ever put into a game.

Though the model’s graphics don’t remain as visually impressive in this day, the facial expressions of the characters in Half-Life 2 do remain a thing of beauty. That would be the highlight of any presentation, but the remaining 19 minutes of the presentation is a crescendo of never-before-seen gameplay topping never-before-seen gameplay. Even those fake E3 presentations of the PS3 era that tried to pass incredible pre-rendered cutscenes as actual gameplay had little on this.

With what had been shown alone, you could already expect Half-Life 2 to immediately earn a barrage of Game Of The Year awards by the time of its intended release date. But, the history of Half-Life 2's development ended up proving as eventful as the game itself.

In a completely unexpected turn of events — by early '00s standards, at least — a hacker got his hands on Half-Life 2's source code and laid the still unfinished game bare for everyone to see. Valve went dark on the game for a year to come back with something even cooler than the coolest thing in the world they'd previously shown to us.

It was one hell of a tall order, but they more than cleared the task when they finally released Half-Life 2 on November 16, 2024. The final product was even better than everyone had anticipated, much better than it needed to be to make everyone forget about the delay.

I mean it wholeheartedly when I recommend you go play Half-Life 2 today, whether you're a fan or a newcomer, as it still features one of the best single-player campaigns in the history of gaming. Half-Life 2: Deathmatch is pretty damn fun as well.

Half-Life 2 expands far beyond the game itself, as with it, we got the Source engine. It graced us with beloved titles such as Portal 2, Team Fortress 2, Garry's Mod, and Counter-Strike: Source. If none of that means anything to you, that's probably because you're too young to remember, so I'll just point out that Half-Life 2 is also responsible for Skibidi Toilet.

What's next for Half-Life 2?

The future of this classic looks bright, as Valve has just announced a bunch of awesome updates to preserve the game and commemorate it's anniversary.

From today on, you'll be able to experience the original Half-Life 2 campaign with improved graphics, fixes for very resilient bugs, developer commentary, in-game Steam workshop support, and in-game recording.

And, if you're a true fan, you can finally watch the first pre-beta test footage of what Half-Life 2 would come to be.

Absolutely worth waiting over 20 years for, right?

You can now play Half-Life 2 in its original and still glorious format through Steam, and if that's somehow not good enough, you'll soon be able to experience it in RTX mode as well.

The post Half-Life 2 is now 20 years old appeared first on Destructoid.

The first season of Stranger Things was released back in 2018, and it quickly became something of a phenomenon. You could barely move without encountering some kind of Stranger Things merchandise, book, or even a musical that’s still being performed now. 

It’s hard to believe that it’s been nearly nine years since we were first introduced to Mike, Dustin, Will, Lucas, Eleven, and the rest of the now iconic characters that are the center of the Stranger Things universe. But it has, and we haven’t yet had the final fifth season, so has Netflix dropped the ball and left it too long? 

Now hear me out, I’m not saying that the final season is going to flop, and I’m also not saying this out of a dislike of the show. I’ve got merchandise and books dotted around the house, I’ve binged every season on release day, and I even went to the Stranger Things Experience while visiting Las Vegas in 2023. 

But thanks to COVID paused production of season four and delayed release, and the WGA Writers Strikes in 2023 that effectively did the same thing to season five, by the time the final season comes out, there will have been two seasons in six years. With a year confirmed canonically between each season, this causes an issue for the characters and their actors. 

When the first season came out, the main cast was all approximately the same age as the characters they portrayed. Take Finn Wolfhard, who plays Mike. During filming for season one, he was 12 years old and playing an equally 12-year-old character. While filming season five, he’s 21 years old and playing a 16-year-old. 

Maybe we need a better example. It happens all the time in Hollywood, with older actors playing characters much younger than themselves. Hell, in Bridgerton, Penelope is played by an actress a whopping 20 years older than the character. But it gets more questionable when you take characters like Steve or Erica. 

Where Stranger Things left off in season four, with the Upside Down seeping into Hawkins, Steve was 19 and Erica was 11. Even taking into account the now confirmed one-year jump between seasons four and five, Joe Keery (who plays Steve) will be 32 playing a 20-year-old, while Priah Ferguson (who plays Erica) will be 19 and playing a 12-year-old. 

The actors have aged by three years for each of the last two one-year time jumps, leaving them wildly ahead in terms of age compared to their characters in the show. What makes this so noticeable is the fact that we aren’t being introduced to them at this stage, we were introduced to their much younger faces and are now expected to believe that they have somehow come out of the other side of puberty while still in the midst of their teen years. 

Perhaps I’m looking too much into the details, but with a show that reportedly has a budget of around $30 million per episode, the details deserve to be looked into. 

Any show that has been ongoing for almost a decade will have built up an absolutely rabid community of die-hard fans, and despite what I’ve already said, I count myself among those fans when it comes to Stranger Things. We’ve all been waiting for the conclusion of the gang's story since season four ended on such a cliffhanger back in 2022, and even if we’ve grown tired of the wait, we’ll still sit down on release day and cement Stranger Things as the most watched show on Netflix for a time. 

On the plus side, we do have a window for when to expect Stranger Things season five, if you can call it that. On November 6, as part of “Stranger Things Day”, Netflix released a teaser trailer which provided all eight episode names, which also confirmed that season five will be coming at some point in 2025:

Previous seasons have been released at any point between May and October, so there’s really no telling when season five will finally be available to watch on Netflix. Whenever Netflix posts about Stranger Things on Twitter or other social media, there is an ever-growing number of people venting their frustration at the delay. While it’s not the fault of the show's writers or producers, it is getting tiresome. 

There’s going to need to be some serious story-telling in season five to explain why this group of troubled sixteen-year-olds have five o’clock shadows, or why Jonathan suddenly looks more like Will’s father than his brother. Or perhaps we’ll just be expected to overlook these small details, and appreciate the fact that we finally get to see how it ends. 

I guess you could put the character’s rapid aging down to the stress they’ve been through over the last five years of their lives, and explain it away that way. I’m sure any of us would have more than our fair share of wrinkles if we’d encountered the horrors that these guys have seen. If that’s the lore I have to tell myself in order to get through the final season and see how everything ends, then that’s precisely what I’ll do. 

Regardless, I’ll still be watching with everyone else when Stranger Things season five comes to Netflix in 2025, probably completely forgetting my current concerns. Stranger Things is like that, I suppose. Disbelief and immersion breaking details go out of the window when you’re embedded in the story of teenagers destined to save the world from the demon spawn of the Upside Down.

The post Has Netflix left it too long for the final season of Stranger Things? appeared first on Destructoid.

Via a new Metal Gear Solid Delta promotional video, Konami just laid bare one of Metal Gear Solid's greatest mysteries for all fans to see. After two decades of speculation, Metal Gear Solid fans all around the world recently received confirmation that the actress who played Eva in Metal Gear Solid 3 wasn't really the actress Suzetta Miñet. Why? Well, because that person doesn't even exist and was likely made up by the patriots (citation needed).

The real credit actually Jodi Benson, the same actress who'd voiced Ariel in Disney's The Little Mermaid over 35 years ago. The explanation is rather simple. Benson built most of her career around family-friendly properties, so playing a highly sexualized role in a very violent game could jeopardize that.

That’s cool, especially as this piece of news comes just a little after we learned the identity of the actress who'd played Jill Valentine in the original Resident Evil — an even longer-standing mystery for fans. Still, there’s another really cool mystery few people even know about.

If you enjoy the series but don't consider yourself a true fan, it's possible you've witnessed the spectacular performances of James Flinders, Carren Learning, Mae Zadler, and wondered why they never did anything else after that game.

Well, that's because even though the original Metal Gear Solid completely changed what voice acting meant for games, its actors originally forfeited real credit.

The original Metal Gear Solid was really cool for showing the voice actor’s name when introducing a character on screen, too bad those names were fake. Aside from David Hayter — who was mainly a screenwriter and not a voice actor before the game — few (if any) voice actor is given credit for their work in the game. That's because all the real actors such as Cam Clarke and Debbie Mae West are union actors who feared the dangers of entering the then still-legally grey area of video game voice acting. Things had already changed by the time Metal Gear Solid 2 came out, and all of its actors are properly credited. Good, but I like to reminisce of a time when actors in a spy thriller went method to the point of even using silly-sounding fake identities.

Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater will release on February 27th, 2025, for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.

The post Explaining the bonkers mystery of Metal Gear Solid voice acting appeared first on Destructoid.

Even if recent history might fool you into disagreeing, BioWare is one of the greatest RPG-makers in the video game scene. For a very long time, nobody did better than BioWare, and only time will tell whether the company is currently in the process of regaining its mojo.

Let's look at the studio's best games, best attempts, and biggest missed opportunities, and find out where the recently-released Dragon Age: The Veilguard lands in the midst of it all, shall we?

17. Mass Effect: Andromeda

We all know this couldn't be anywhere else. While I don't doubt Andromeda looked good on paper, at some point, at least, the end result felt no better than an actual paper cut. Bland plot, unmemorable characters, sometimes downright terrible writing, and that's when you weren't prevented from experiencing those things by some wacky game-breaking bug.

Executive meddling made Andromeda the poster boy of mismanagement in games.

If there's one thing Andromeda really had going for it, it was the looks. Andromeda really did produce alien vistas capable of absolutely taking your breath away — so long as your character didn't clip through the ground and fall into an endless void.

16. Mass Effect 3

I'm going to start off by saying something nice as to avoid too harsh of a reaction from fans: Mass Effect 3 has great gameplay and ran fantastically well even on my old Xbox 360.

With that out of the way, I was always bummed at how people complained so much about the ending of Mass Effect 3 - because they should've complained about the whole game. Sure, the gameplay was good, but we're talking about BioWare, a company known for proving games can be so much more than cool pew-pew action.

The plot is just rubbish, likely courtesy of having one of the co-main writers leaving as a response to the studio becoming "too corporate" to fulfill the original vision. The dialogue, the missions, and the entire culmination of the fantastic setup done by the stellar two previous games in the series all went out of the window for inexplicable reasons. You'll never play the game Mass Effect 3 as it should have been, but you might always learn what it could've played out like.

15. Anthem

After the massive failure of Andromeda, Anthem's reveal re-ignited the hopes of a comeback for BioWare. The studio had previously wowed everyone with Mass Effect, so they could totally come up with yet another incredible Sci-Fi IP. The first previews got everyone hyped as Anthem looked gorgeous, but it was all downhill from there. Anthem turned out to be very repetitive, not all that much fun, and surprisingly empty and light on story — a deadly sin when it comes to a BioWare game.

Anthem wasn't as bad as Andromeda, and it wasn't as much of a let down because it was the first game in its series, but we all wanted it to be so much more than it turned out to be.

14. Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood

Yes, feel free to confirm for yourself, BioWare did make a Sonic game for the Nintendo DS. It's an RPG, a type of game where you naturally can't make great use of Sonic's ability to go fast. That, by itself, feels like a hindrance, but I know damn well the good people at BioWare had the capacity to come up with alternative mechanics to make this work, but Sonic Chronicles is no more than a bland RPG wearing the face of a popular character.

The most memorable aspect of Sonic Chronicles is Central City, the incredibly awful song you can hurt yourself with above.

13. Dragon Age 2

The most divisive title in the Dragon Age series, or at least the one most deserving of that distinction. After the massive commercial and critical success of Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2 disappointed players by introducing repetitive combat, removing customization options, reusing the same areas again and again, and limiting the scope of the adventure to a very small patch of land. Everything about Dragon Age 2 felt inexplicably rushed.

Dragon Age 2 isn't terrible, but it's one of the most disappointing sequels in relatively recent history.

12. Shattered Steel

Few are aware of it, but BioWare began life with a badass mech game. Shattered Steel's action-oriented robot gameplay is the opposite of what you'd expect from a company famous for its talkative and lore-heavy RPGs, but Shattered Steel wasn't bad at all.

Unfortunately, Shattered Steel didn't age all that well, and, without an HD remaster in sight, it's hard to recommend right now. Still, Shattered Steel remains a very curious artifact.

11. Star Wars: The Old Republic

You ought to commend BioWare for challenging World Of Warcraft during the later years of its prime, but The Old Republic proved little more than a courageous attempt.

While it didn't feature any terrible glitches — besides the dance emote that made you invincible, of course — the gameplay amounted to a grindier version of Knights Of The Old Republic. The story didn't fare much better, as it went down such an uninspired route that the game at some point opted for a soft lore reboot — that also didn't result in anything particularly memorable.

10. MDK2

Though the MDK series (short for Murder Death Kill, some say) didn't begin its life via the hands of BioWare, they certainly improved it.

Shiny's peculiar and very original '90s shooter got even better on the PS2, and felt even more complete with the addition of a few more equally-quirky characters to our team. This series has been dead for too long, so maybe it's time BioWare picks it back up for a well-deserved refresher.

9. Dragon Age Inquisition

If you ignore the massive tone-deafness of naming the hero's job after one of the vilest institutions in the history of humankind, Inquisition is a pretty good game.

Inquisition fixed the most annoying and disappointing elements of Dragon Age 2's maps, and provided a great early showcase for the power of the 8th generation of consoles. Inquisition was a step in the right direction for the series, and it's also responsible for one of the most hilarious ripoff-related blunders in Hollywood's recent history

8. Dragon Age: The Veilguard

A lot has been said about Dragon Age:The Veilguard, and I'm pretty sure a lot is still to be said. It's one of those games to get caught in the vortex of the grifter sphere, meaning that all matter of relevant criticism will likely be drowned in a sea of complaints about vapid crap that YouTubers have carefully engineered to generate outrage-fueled clips.

The truth about Veilguard is that it plays great, features awesome new combat mechanics, and a cool new cast of characters. I definitely don't like the weird mid-series shift into a more cutesy art style, but, even then, I must admit that it doesn't look all that bad. The only thing that really bummed me about this one is the dialogue, which as a whole, is among the most uninspired in the history of BioWare games. Then again, it's going up against some of the all-time greats, so there's that.

7. Jade Empire

BioWare's attempt at a more action-y RPG was a huge success. The seldom-explored Chinese Mythology setting, the gameplay, and the engaging tale of revenge make this one of BioWare's best games to date.

Sadly, Jade Empire gets overlooked among BioWare's greats, likely because it spent too long as an original Xbox exclusive. That time is past, though, so you have no excuse not to give it a shot, especially if you're into Dragon Age: The Veilguard's modernized combat style.

6. Baldur’s Gate and Baldur's Gate 2

Many of the people comparing The Veilguard negatively to Larian's Baldur's Gate 3 might be unaware that Baldur's Gate only even exists because BioWare brought it to life.

Yes, both Baldur's Gate 1 and Baldur's Gate 2 were BioWare titles, and also the games that put the studio on the map. If you're into Baldur's Gate 3, you'll still find a lot to love about BioWare's first big classic. Some of its gameplay elements are dated, sure, though not any more dated than a nice D&D session, and you can totally get the more modernized Enhanced Editions of both BG1 and BG2, so consider giving it a shot!

5. Neverwinter Nights

For the longest time, BioWare made great use of the D&D gameplay mechanics to create fantastic video game experiences. Still, most of BioWare's best games don't take place in the actual D&D setting.

If you're looking for a game in the style of Baldur's Gate, a game filled with the modernity seen in later titles like Knights Of The Old Republic, but still in the D&D setting, then you should absolutely give the original Neverwinter Nights a try, as it's the game you can easily blame for unleashing BioWare's golden age.

4. Dragon Age: Origins

Though it's titled as if it were the tired prequel a studio would make after the main plot of a once-successful series goes too far off the rails, Dragon Age: Origins remains the best and the most endearing Dragon Age game to date.

You'd think that just making Knights Of The Old Republic in a medieval setting with dragons wouldn't be enough to make one of the most beloved games of all time, but you'd be wrong. That's because solid gameplay, good art direction, and interesting characters are more than enough to create something special when you already have a great foundation.

3. Mass Effect 2

The first Mass Effect sequel brought in a more interesting cast and did a great job of telling a more emotional tale via some of, if not the best, writing in BioWare history. It also came out in a very playable state, which is only true for 50% of the games with Mass Effect in their title.

Mass Effect 2 proved a step up over its predecessor in all the ways you'd expect out of a BioWare sequel. Still, in a possibly unpopular opinion, I believe it failed to reach the heights of the original by featuring a less epic plot. I believe it also suffers from having gone with a more streamlined mission-based structure that hurts the immersion and the feeling of freedom we got from the original. Still, these should be seen as no more than nitpicks aimed at an all-time classic.

2. Knights Of The Old Republic

You'd be hard-pressed to find three games based on a popular movie IP that don't suck, let alone three spectacular ones. KOTOR counts as those three, as it perfectly merges BioWare's excellent D&D combat with one of the best cast of characters and plot ever seen in the Star Wars universe.

If you've grown tired of Star Wars and of modern Star Wars discourse, then you should probably kick back and give Knights of The Old Republic a shot. It's over 20 years old now, but, true to the original trilogy, remains as engrossing as ever.

1. Mass Effect

Ok, this one comes with a very important disclaimer. I do not, in any way, believe the original Xbox 360 exclusive version of Mass Effect to be BioWare's greatest game. I loved all the promise on display, but the original Mass Effect was a very rough diamond due to its interminable load times and poor performance issues. The honor of being BioWare's best title belongs to the much improved-upon version that came out on PC.

Mass Effect, though heavily inspired by other great works of Sci-Fi, never failed to feel like its own thing. It also features the quality characters, plot, and writing you'd expect from a BioWare endeavor. And, after finally being optimized, felt fantastic to play, courtesy of all the new and inspired gameplay mechanics worthy of a groundbreaking work of Science Fiction. Mass Effect isn't just an RPG, a shooter, a spicy alien dating sim, or even a fun driving and exploration game. It's an experience way cooler than actual space exploration can ever hope to be.

The post BioWare games ranked from worst to best appeared first on Destructoid.

Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered recently launched on PC and consoles, which let players experience (or re-experience) this bizarre third-person shooter made by Suda51 (The creator of No More Heroes, Lollipop Chainsaw and more) and Shinji Mikami (The "father" of the Resident Evil franchise).

Players who may have already beaten this remaster may already want more, so where's the sequel to Shadows of the Damned, exactly? The thing is, it already exists inside another Suda51 game, as a parody of Shadows of the Damned's troubled development history which, of course, has something to do with its original publisher: Electronic Arts.

Shadows of the Damned fans can try out its sequel in Travis Strikes Again

In case you forgot, Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes is a 2019 video game by Suda51 that served as a stepping point between No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle and No More Heroes 3, which he eventually released in 2021. In his first adventure in over 9 years, series' protagonist Travis Touchdown forcefully teams up with Badman and gets inside the digital world of the Death Drive MK-II, a mysterious video game console that will grant them a wish if they complete every single one of its games.

So, Travis has to acquire different spherical cartridges called "Death Balls" that hold a different fictional video game inside, and the same character actually developed all of them: Dr. Juvenile. At one point, Travis is looking for the only copy of Serious Moonlight, an ambitious RPG that Juvenile never released. He eventually locates the Death Ball that one of Juvenile's former colleagues, Damon Riccitiello, took many years in the past.

Travis beats Damon up, gets the Death Ball and when he pops up Serious Moonlight on the Death Drive MK-II both he and the player encounter a huge surprise: an HD cutscene that shows Garcia Hotspur, the protagonist of Shadows of the Damned, escaping from demons and an unknown character, who eventually captures and manages to kill him. In his last moments, he gives all his power to his comedic gun sidekick, Johnson, who transforms into a bizarre superhero figure named Eight Hearts.

Introducing: Damned: Dark Knight!

In one of the most unexpected yet brilliant moments ever put in a No More Heroes game, players find out that Dr. Juvenile completely scrapped Serious Moonlight because the technology of the time couldn't realize a game of such a big scope. Instead, she decided to make an unofficial sequel to one of her favorite games, Shadows of the Damned, simply titled Damned: Dark Knight.

Travis and Badman have to complete it in order to continue their adventure through the Death Drive MK-II's catalog. Needless to say, Suda51 and his team filled the entire level with references to the original Shadows of the Damned, as the characters have to explore and fight enemies in locations from the game, while the player reads dialogue that references its many bosses and events. This is an absolute treat for fans of this third-person shooter, and it proves that Suda51 still has some appreciation for the project.

Naturally, Eight Hearts is the final boss of the Damned: Dark Knight, and Travis immediately recognizes him because he's a self-proclaimed big Shadows of the Damned fan who even played through the original game more than 3 times. After he kills Eight Hearts, Johnson talks with Garcia again, goes through a circled portal to the "4th Dimension" and promises to save his friend from that Hell.

Travis even concludes this exciting level with the phrase, "So, Garcia Hotspur is coming back. One more thing to look for...", which seems to have foreshadowed Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered, years before Grasshopper Manufacture announced it.

So, why did Suda51 did all of this?

For more context, it's important that we remember the messy development history that Shadows of the Damned went through. This was a joint venture between Suda51 and Shinji Mikami (Both had previously worked together on 2005's Killer7) and their original concept was simply titled Kurayami. This was going to be a psychological horror game with little-to-no combat and no guns at all, and with art inspired by The Castle, by Franz Kafka.

All this sounded very different from what Shadows of the Damned is and this is because everything changed when Electronic Arts entered the frame. At one point, Suda51 and Mikami managed to get in touch with EA in order to get funding for their new project, since it was much more ambitious than anything they had done before. They pitched the idea to EA and, according to Mikami in an interview with the YouTube channel Archipel, the executives "lied" when they said they liked it and the project began slowly "fading away".

Electronic Arts' frustrating changes to Suda and Mikami's vision

It didn't take long for the upper management at EA to begin interfering with the production of Kurayami and forced Suda51 and Mikami to change things. In the book The Art of Grasshopper Manufacture, Suda51 revealed that EA insisted on including guns in the game because "Westerners are about guns”, which forced them to turn it into a third-person shooter. He also shared another story in the same book, detailing how Garcia was originally going to have a small fairy named Paula that came out of his gun, but EA didn't like his concept and preferred a classic "damsel in distress" love story, so Suda51 turned her in the main love interest in the final game.

According to Mikami, EA twisted their original concept around several times, and it resulted in a completely different game that what they originally thought of, since they had to write the script over and over until the company green light it. Not even their main character was safe, as Suda51 revealed in an interview with Gamespot that he came up with 3 or 4 different ideas for a protagonist until he finally landed on Garcia Hotspur, who EA apparently liked.

Something that most fans miss is that neither Suda51 nor Mikami directed Shadows of the Damned, as its main director was actually Massimo Guarini, a western developer who had years of experience working with Ubisoft, so he could more efficiently comply with EA's demands. When the company completely overhauled the project, it was immediately evident that Suda51 was not enjoying its development anymore. He became hesitant to disclose details of the game on interviews and events, as IGN noted in not one but two different interviews with him.

Shadows of the Damned broke Suda51's heart

When EA and Grasshopper Manufacture finally released Shadows of the Damned on June 21, 2011, it received generally positive reviews, but it unfortunately didn't sell very well in neither North America nor Japan. As for Suda51 and Shinji Mikami, they both have come out and stated how disappointed they were by EA's interference on multiple occasions.

In an interview with PSX Extreme, Mikami stated, "I think Suda was unable to create the scenario he'd originally had in his head, and he rewrote the scenario several times. I think his heart was broken. He's such a unique creator, so it seems to me that he was not quite comfortable making this game". As for Suda himself, in the aforementioned Gamespot video he said: "If I ever happen to work with EA again, I'd really appreciate it if they just... okay'd the first version of the script next time".

But Suda got his revenge... in an unconventional form

Let's go back to Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes for a moment. This odd title is not just another entry in the No More Heroes series, but it's also a deep look at Suda51's career as game development, with references to both his highest highs and his lowest lows. At many points during the game, it's quite obvious that he created Dr. Juvenile as a stand-in for himself, and the same is true for her longtime rival, Damon Riccitiello.

Damon developed Serious Moonlight alongside Juvenile, and he later beat her up in order to steal the Death Ball that had Damned: Dark Knight inside, that's why Travis eventually had to hunt him down. But that's not all, because Damon would later appear in No More Heroes 3 as the main antagonist of the game. In the final battle, Travis finally kills Damon in a bizarre yet amusing parody of the Super Smash Bros series.

In case you didn't know, John Riccitiello was the CEO of Electronic Arts between 2007 and 2013, meaning that he was most likely around the time Shadows of the Damned entered development. Now, Suda never explicitly stated that Damon is based off of him, but the unique last name of Riccitiello, coupled with the villain's status as a former game developer who became CEO of a gigantic corrupt company clearly indicates that Damon is a parody of John Riccitiello and that Suda51 was trying to get even with the CEO that interfered with the development of one his beloved projects.

Despite everything, Suda51 clearly appreciates Shadows of the Damned

At one point, Suda also revealed that No More Heroes 3 was originally going to have an entire sequence that would feature Shadows of the Damned characters, which would have made the reference to its tumultuous development even more obvious.

At the end of the day, Suda51 has clearly made his peace with Shadows of the Damned, and he likely holds some level of appreciation for this tragic project. This is evident not only in the references he included in Travis Strikes Again and No More Heroes 3 but, also in his active participation in the marketing for Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered.

Considering that Electronic Arts has nothing to do with the remaster and that Grasshopper Manufacture is currently listed as it's sole publisher, it seems that EA finally sold the rights back to Suda and his company. Fun fact: Grasshoper included Eight Hearts as an alternate costume for Garcia in Hella Remastered, which is a fun nod to one of the most bizarre yet clever things Suda51 ever did in one of his games. Maybe this means that soon we'll finally get to see a full fledged version of Damned: Dark Knight, but only time will tell...

The post Shadows of the Damned already got a sequel, and it’s not what you think appeared first on Destructoid.

I wouldn’t have predicted that Nintendo would release a music streaming service, but more surprisingly is that it’s actually good. Their pre-configured playlists, the ability to extend music to allow it to loop repeatedly for an hour, and the ease of the experience is… Well, look at the eShop. Nintendo has not always been the best at this sort of UX.

I listen to video game music quite a bit, and Nintendo has worked with some of the best composers in the industry. Most importantly, however, Nintendo hasn’t fallen into the trap of having all their game music sound like movie scoring. Big-budget games these days almost invariably fall to the orchestral side of things with their stings and swells, but Nintendo music still sounds distinctly video game-y.

If there’s one big downside, it’s that I can only play it off of my phone. But there’s another big downside, and that’s the fact that the music choices are extremely limited right now. It’s also a bit of a weird collection. How is it that we have Metroid Prime, the original Metroid, and the Famicom Disk System version of Metroid, but no Super Metroid? In fact, where are lots of other games? More specifically, where are the following games?

As a note, this list will only include games that Nintendo could conceivably host on their service. That is to say, game properties that they own. It would be great to see music from Nintendo-adjacent properties on here from other publishers, and that could happen, but let's stick with the easy stuff. Hopefully, Nintendo will add these games soon.

Super Mario Bros. 2

I was nearly going to say Dr. Mario, but the Game Boy version of the music is already on that. And, okay, while not completely ideal, I can listen to 60 minutes of extended Chill. It’s good enough for science. So, okay, failing that, how about Super Mario Bros. 2?

Of course, I’m talking about the North American version of Mario 2, and not what we know as The Lost Levels.  I feel the soundtrack of what was originally Yume Kōjō DokiDoki Panic is appreciated but underrated. It’s easily one of Kōji Kondō’s best works, especially on the NES. It has a bouncy, jazzy quality, but for some reason (possibly because its original association wasn’t Mario), it doesn’t get remixed into modern Mario soundtracks as often as tracks from Mario 1 and Mario 3 do.

I would imagine that we won’t have to wait too long for this one. Since Super Mario Bros. is Nintendo’s bread and butter and the music is so iconic, I expect getting all the soundtracks up will be a priority for them.

Pilotwings

Speaking of appreciated but underrated, here’s a soundtrack by Soyo Oka. I mean, all of her soundtracks should be on here: SimCity, Super Mario Kart, Famicom Grand Prix II: 3D Hot Rally. Jump Soyo knows how to spin a track. In the early days of the SNES, she created these songs that are paradoxically both haunting and intense. They often include a buzzy brass sound that just feels so emblematic of the console itself.

But while all her work belongs on the service, Pilotwings should be a priority. There’s something relaxing about the mix of slap bass and sweeping synth. It feels like calmly plummeting to Earth from 10,000 feet. A good match for so many moods.

Star Fox

Star Fox 64 is already on here, and that’s a reasonable pick. However, as good as it is, the soundtrack attached to its predecessor is much more memorable. Star Fox 64 was aiming for space opera and managed to hit it with pretty decent accuracy. I don’t know what Hajime Hirasawa was going for. Uncomfortable arousal in space?

The original Star Fox has an incredibly varied mix of songs ranging from mysterious to exciting to weirdly dancy. I’m not sure I even know of another video game soundtrack as loudly expressive as this one. The depth of tracks like Fortuna and Titania are just completely uncalled for, and it’s easy to get Corneria’s theme burned into your brain. I’m afraid that it might take a while for Nintendo to get around to adding this one, which is practically criminal. There oughta be a law.

F-Zero

It feels like Nintendo is just rediscovering the F-Zero series themselves, working to add all the games to their NSO services and releasing the well-received F-Zero 99. Now, if only they’d get around to re-releasing F-Zero GX or, y’know, giving us a new one.

Until then, it would sure be nice to get some of the series’ music on the service. Well, wait, remixes of Mute City and Big Blue – arguably the most well-known of the series – are available through the Mario Kart 8 soundtrack, so that’s something. However, those tracks, in all their modern glory, don’t hold a candle to how well the first game nailed its tunes out of the gate. After all, it’s where we got Mute City and Big Blue in the first place.

I’m not sure how to even describe F-Zero’s music. Excessive? If you play it while driving in your car, I can almost guarantee you’re going to find yourself unexpectedly speeding. I bet if you took your pulse before and after listening to a few of F-Zero’s tracks, you’d find a marked increase in your heart rate. It’s borderline offensive how high-energy this music is.

The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker

The Zelda series has a history of great soundtracks, so it’s hard to mark one for priority. Personally, I could listen to the Song of Healing from Majora’s Mask on loop all day and just get super depressed. But instead of doing that, maybe Wind Waker would be a better choice.

Wind Waker is a stark departure from the tunes featured previously in the series. While it still plays off some of the themes, it mixes in a nautical theme that gives each of the major islands a very distinct feel. Not only that, but the Great Sea traversal music is relaxing in a way that you don’t really find outside of, say, Breath of the Wild. It still feels very adventuresome, but at the same time, kind of peaceful.

The downside is that a lot of the individual tracks are reserved for boss battles, which are fine if you’re in the mood, but I don’t find them to be as interesting. On the other hand, I think Farewell Hyrule Kingdom, which is a melancholy remix of the Hyrule Castle theme from Link to the Past, is just too good. It can almost bring a tear to my eye.

Splatoon 2

Splatoon 3 is already on Nintendo Music, which seems appropriate since it’s the most recent. However, the playlist is pretty much just the songs that appear on the game itself rather than ones that were brought over from previous games (aside from remixes). That’s still pretty cool.

The problem I have is that I don’t really like the central band in Splatoon 3, Deep Cuts. I don’t hate them, either, but they don’t hit me the same way that Splatoon’s Squid Sisters, or especially Splatoon 2’s Off the Hook, does. Some of their songs are available in the song. So, an itch is being scratched, but just not as thoroughly as I would hope.

It’s a good bet that Splatoon and Splatoon 2’s soundtracks will make it to the service, I just hope it’s sooner rather than later. I love the series’ OST’s and being able to filter and sort by the in-game bands will be so rad.

Golden Sun

Back when Golden Sun first came out, every time I started up the game, I’d sit on the opening screen to soak in the overture. There’s a stunning amount of grandeur in every bit of the game’s music. By JRPG standards, the game itself isn’t terribly special (though it was impressive for a handheld game at the time), but the soundtrack itself feels huge. By itself, it made it feel like you were playing something important.

It’s a very unified soundtrack, so while you’ll get everything from relaxing villages to fights against powerful foes, it all feels thematically linked. You won’t suddenly get power rock out of nowhere like a lot of other games of its genre. Not that variation is a problem (it’s often preferred), but consistency can make it easier to listen through an entire soundtrack.

Super Mario RPG

I’m a bit surprised this soundtrack isn’t already included since the remake is still pretty fresh in memory, having been released just last year. However, by the choices made on the service, it’s obvious that recency isn’t really an indicator of whether or not a game’s soundtrack will be available. So, I hope they get Super Mario RPG’s soundtrack on there soon.

Kōji Kondō is a tough act to follow, and it was probably very tempting to play off of his iconic themes, but Yoko Shimomura went completely off in her own direction. The soundtrack is rather bizarre but incredibly appealing. A lot of it is a bouncy, brass-heavy, percussive sound. Sometimes, it aims for whimsy, while other times, it’s just exciting and fun. Every so often, it gets surprisingly emotional. I’m not crying. I was just cutting onions. I’m making a lasagna.

It would be great to see the remake’s OST on Nintendo Music, especially since the game also included the original score. When it was first released, I kept the game on my desk, listening to its songs while writing guides about balls.

Advance Wars

Speaking of recent remakes, Advance Wars recently got a gloss-up by Wayforward. If you weren’t familiar with the soundtrack of the classic GBA title, hopefully you are now. Advance Wars is a game that makes war uncomfortably cheerful. Like, cities are being occupied and fought over, bombs are being dropped, military hardware is being wrecked, and people are (assumedly) dying, but it’s treated more like a sport. It’s no more serious than if the COs were going out to play frisbee golf in the park.

And the soundtrack just completely underscores that. It’s largely just a collection of infectious pop-rock tunes with buzzy, distorted guitars and jaunty basslines. But what makes it stand out is the fact that so many hooks and riffs in the songs are as unique as they are catchy. A lot of these songs play on loop for half-hour-or-more long missions, so it’s probably important that they don’t get old very quickly.

There are also a lot of songs on the soundtrack. Every CO has its own theme, so even if you exclude the variations of tunes that play under different situations, you still have a long runtime. But there’s also a lot of variation in there. Beyond the pop-rock songs, there are more traditional marches mixed in alongside even heavier sounds. It’s a joy to listen to.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

This one feels kind of like cheating, since Super Smash Bros. Ultimate doesn’t strictly have much of an OST, rather it takes in songs from all the different series that get represented in the game and more beyond that. Sometimes, the songs are presented as they were in other games, and other times, the songs are completely remixed in interesting ways.

It’s maybe the least likely soundtrack on this list to make its way to the service. If it does, I’d expect it to arrive after a lot of other games are added to make overlapping tracks a lot simpler. But beyond that, SSBU contains a lot of songs that don’t belong to Nintendo. They would probably have to get permission from publishers like Capcom and Konami to put the whole soundtrack up. Otherwise, I guess they could exclude those songs. I guess what I’m saying is that it’s possible. I’m just not counting on it being anytime soon. I can’t predict the future, though, so who knows?

The post 10 Game soundtracks that need to be added to Nintendo Music appeared first on Destructoid.

Paradox Arc has published some absolute bangers as of late including Nexus 5X, Mechabellum, and Space Trash Scavenger. It has now entered the isometric city-builder genre with developers Bellwood Studios and Perspective Games' ancient Aztec-themed colony sim Tlatoani: Aztec Cities which has been released in Early Access.

Tlatoani: Aztec Cities (PC)
Developer: Bellwood Studios and Perspective Games
Publisher: Paradox Arc
Released: October 31, 2024
MSRP: $19.99, $15.99 with launch discount through November 10

I have fond memories of playing Egyptian-themed isometric city-builder Pharaoh and its expansion Cleopatra as well as the Roman-themed isometric city-builder Caesar III. Both of the games were released when I was about ten years old, and while I didn't understand all the intricacies of properly managing and overseeing the cities I built, simply building them and watching them grow was enough to keep me engaged for many hours in striving to build up my city.

Tlatoani aims to rekindle that nostalgic feeling by tasking players with building an entire ancient Aztec empire one city at a time. You'll still focus on one city at a time, building it into a thriving metropolis in Mesoamerica, but you can eventually expand to have multiple city-states that trade and continue to grow your empire as a whole. It's a very unique addition to this old-school style of city-building that fixes one of the major problems in the genre. In Early Access, the foundation for this is laid but that's about it. Most of the focus is still on building a single city which can be done via the Campaign or through six different Scenario missions.

In most entries into the genre, including the classics like Caesar III and Pharaoh, you build up your city, complete your tasks for that mission, and then move onto the next where you're once again building your city from scratch. In Tlatoani, you'll instead start a new city perhaps with a separate production focus, before intertwining it into your entire Aztec civilization.

The gameplay itself when it comes to building your city in Tlatoani is for the most part similar to other entries in the genre. You build up your city by adding housing for your citizens while also setting up production lines for goods they require such as access to food, water, and entertainment. As your city grows, your inhabitants will require more—and better-quality—goods.

A huge staple of Ancient Aztec life was religion and so that's understandably a big part of the needs of your citizens as their ruler in Tlatoani. When building religious buildings you have the freedom to choose which gods to dedicate them to, each with their own unique buffs as well as traditions that must be satisfied to appease them. You can throw festivals and engage in other historic Aztec traditions like animal and human sacrifice.

The best change up to the classic city-builder formula in Tlatoani in my opinion is the symmetry system. In Ancient Aztec history, symmetrical building layouts were a huge part of the tradition. As Tlatoani, it's up to you to put your architectural prowess to good use and attempt to mirror and maintain symmetry in the layout of your city. This will not only make it easier to satisfy the needs of your citizens but it will also appease the gods and your citizens simply for being better to look at. It's a fun element when planning out your cities to keep in mind the symmetry of everything.

In its Early Access state, Tlatoani: Aztec Cities is pretty much exactly what I hoped it would be: a spiritual successor to Pharaoh and Caesar III with its city-building elements. What will really make Tlatoani stand out in my opinion is how much they continue to flesh out and build upon the system of building an entire Aztec civilization comprised of many city-states working together. If the developers can figure out how to eliminate the normal burnout of having to start a city from scratch with no real benefit for creating the previous city other than reaching a milestone to unlock the next mission, I think Tlatoani could be a standout title in the genre. But even in its current form, Tlatoani still scratches that classic city-builder itch.

The post Tlatoani: Aztec Empires scratches that classic city builder itch appeared first on Destructoid.

It’s been a real “Will they, won’t they?” dynamic between Vampire Survivors and Castlevania. It’s the crossover that makes the most sense, but it’s because it makes the most sense that I believed it wouldn’t happen. Time makes fools of us all.

Ode to Castlevania is funny because Vampire Survivors is already an ode to Castlevania. Nowhere is this more evident than with the new weapons that don’t have a lot to do with Castlevania. That’s because all the weapons most associated with the game were already in it originally, from throwing crosses to holy water.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. By default, a Castlevania crossover is going to be the best expansion for the game because I love Castlevania. However, it’s also the best expansion so far for other reasons.

Ode to Castlevania can be summed up as a lot of whips, a lot of music, a lot of Belmonts, and one big map. Unlike the previous two expansions, there is no new Adventure mode here; that one big map is the central focus. And it is big. It’s dominantly Dracula’s castle, filled with bosses and broken into sections via locked doors. It’s not exactly Vampire Survivors metroidvania, but that sounds like it would be a hassle anyway.

The castle is laid out in a more-or-less linear fashion. You kick down the door and march your way up to Dracula’s bedroom to put him back to sleep. Is he actually there? Does Vampire Survivors actually have a vampire in it now? I’m not telling because that would be lame.

Much like the last two crossover expansions, this is still Vampire Survivors, but it’s wearing Castlevania’s clothes. But unlike those games, Castlevania fits Vampire Survivors a lot better. The enemies, all torn from various games in the series, look as though they belong here, and the castle could easily be compiled from various stages already in the game. Unsurprisingly, it isn’t much of a stretch.

The one big level is easily the best that the game has seen. It’s large enough that it’s extremely difficult to make your way through it, from start to finish, in a single round. Instead, after beating specific bosses, a nearby teleporter will be activated that you can transport yourself to from the start. This allows you to essentially continue from close to where you left off without having to wade through everything again.

There are a tonne of bosses torn from the series’ history, and while many of them are just the sort that you keep your distance from while bashing on them, a few have some unique attacks that make them interesting. There are also moments within the castle where things turn into a sidescroller, which can be disorienting but feels appropriate.

If there’s one place that the Castlevania conformity actually hurts the game, it’s with the whips. Most of the Belmonts come packing one, and while they’re all different, most of them kind of suck. They’re often short-range and only attack in specific directions. The whips that were already in the game are far better; it’s just sort of a drag that you can spend time turning yourself into a whip machine for less reward than you’d usually find from holding a whip.

Sonia Belmont has the Sonic Whip, however, which absolutely wrecks house. It’s not all bad, but when you’re shoveling more junk weapons on an already threatening pile of them, it can become difficult to effectively create your desired build. There are other much more useful weapons that were added, fortunately. Although, as I mentioned before, some of them don't have much to do with Castlevania and feel like they were added because they needed to add something aside from whips and spellbooks.

This is all backed by an extremely impressive list of songs and remixes from the Castlevania series. The composers working with Poncle did a great job with Contra in Operation Guns, and the same is true here with tracks torn from all over the series. There are even some tunes that I wouldn’t have thought to include that are made irresistible through their loving remixes. Easily, one of the best parts of this expansion is the soundtrack.

Overall, It’s a loving tribute from a developer who is a clear fan of the Castlevania series. So much of a fan that there isn’t a Gabriel Belmont in sight, but there is a Sonia. That’s how you really know.

It’s also only $3.99, which is a buck-and-a-half more expensive than something like Operation Guns, but I think the remix soundtrack is worth the value alone. In a world with horse armor, it’s a great value.

As a fan myself, this is easily the most fun I’ve had with the game since diving into the base version. The big map adds a lot more playtime than you might expect, and being able to unleash hell on various foes from the series while a frantic remix of Bloody Tears plays is, as one would expect, rather arousing. The way that Vampire Survivors has matured over the years almost feels like it was preparing to wear the Castlevania dress. And it fits so well. It’s almost like it was made for it. 

The post Vampire Survivors is better value than a street hot dog appeared first on Destructoid.

Sony’s inaugural console had a pretty deep library, so it’s no wonder the list of standout titles is so long. It's also a well-loved console, so the PS1 is well-trodden territory now. What would go on a "best of" list is generally well-solidified for most people.

So, this isn't a ranked list, and it isn't a list of the best, but rather games you might have overlooked. I don't particularly like ranked list, since I don't think they're that useful. I say this as someone who's written a few. There's no accounting for taste and comparing something like Metal Gear Solid to Twisted Metal 2 isn't very insightful. Also, I don't really like Metal Gear Solid, and you probably already know how you feel about it. Me throwing it at a low rank isn't going to change your mind.

I prefer to just talk about games and make recommendations. So, rather than being insincere, I’m just going to list X games you should play on your PS1 if you haven’t already. Maybe you haven't heard of them, maybe you have. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but let’s start with these, and then you can get back to me.

Um Jammer Lammy

Parappa the Rapper is a staple of the PS1 library. When I think of its most prominent titles, it sticks out. We eventually got a direct sequel in 2001's Parappa the Rapper 2 on PS2, but before that, the formula was revisited in Um Jammer Lammy Instead of following the lyric-spewing dog(?), you play as Lammy, the riff-rocking lamb. That is to say, she plays a guitar rather than rap.

It’s quirkier than the original, and while there’s nothing quite as good as Cheep Cheap’s rap, the soundtrack is overall a bit better. Parappa also focused and pretty normal teenager problems like taking a drivers test and having to poop really bad. The only problem here is that the North American version of Um Jammer Lammy changed the part where Lammy is sent to Hell. Rock & Roll is the devil’s music, after all.

Bloody Roar

Or Bloody Roar 2, honestly. I like fighting games, but it's hard for me to get invested these days without a rival. Also, when I play them online, I get really jittery from nervous adrenaline that it makes me physically uncomfortable and I need to stop. However, I still try them out when I can. Bloody Roar is the first 3D fighting game in a long time to really get its hooks into me.

Bloody Roar sort of follows the Virtua Fighter formula, but has walls around the ring like Fighting Vipers. That's the only real distinction. Oh, no, wait, the characters can also transform into furries. That is to say, anthropomorphic animals. You have a bar that fills up over time, and whenever you've got it full, you can transform in a blastwave of energy and immediately be given a whole new repertoire of dangerous moves. It's a surprisingly effective twist that adds an unexpected layer of strategy to the fighting.

Rogue Trip Vacation 2012

After a confusing series of contracts and acquisitions, Singletrac, the original creators of Twisted Metal were unceremoniously ripped away from the series following Twisted Metal 2. They went to make a range of games before they were closed down. One of these was a similar vehicular combat game titled Rogue Trip: Vacation 2012.

While the premise still involves cars flinging missiles at each other, it also includes a monetary system that allows you to trade cash earned from shuttling around tourists for upgrades. Was it better than Twisted Metal 2? No. Vigilante 8? Not really. But is it a better option than Twisted Metal 3? Most definitely.

Incredible Crisis

I have a personal grudge against Titus. Most of the games the publisher released are terrible, such as Carmageddon 64 and Superman (also N64, but that's not actually in the title). I always say, "Ain't no fun if there's a fox on the box" when picking up one of those game. But one of the best things they ever did as a publisher was localizing Incredible Crisis.

Incredible Crisis is actually a bakage (stupid/weird game) from Japanese arcades. It follows a family of four as they try to make it home to celebrate their wrathful matriarch's birthday. Unfortunately, nothing goes as planned as they get involved in explosions, bank robberies, and an alien invasion. Gameplay is actually just a series of mini-games, which may give you whiplash as you try to figure out new styles of play on the fly.

Germs: Nerawareta Machi

I was originally going to keep this list specifically focused on North American releases, but I don't want to. There's some bizarre stuff that never made it out of its home country. Take Germs: Nerawareta Machi for example, which plays like the basis of Deadly Premonition. You're let loose on a desolate but fully explorable city that is having trouble with a strange virus. This virus is possibly being spread by aliens. I don't know, you're the reporter, you figure it out.

It's an ambitious game. There's a full day/night cycle. To find your way forward you often need to return to your office to take calls from people and check your email for where to go next. You can get there by driving (or walking, if you're determined) or you can catch a ride on the subway. When you get to certain scenes, you need to pull out a gun and engage in some very Morrowind-esque real-time RPG combat.

But what makes Germs so memorable is its strange atmosphere. The city is pretty empty aside from some key people. There is no color to most of the buildings, just slight splashes every so often. You're given very little information to work off of a lot of the time, which leaves you free to just exist in this world sometimes. As I mentioned, it never made it out of Japan. However, a preliminary fan translation can help you figure things out.

Mad Panic Coaster

Speaking of bakage, I'm not even sure where to begin with introducing Mad Panic Coaster. Do you remember when 3D clones of Roller Coaster Tycoon started happening? One of the big selling points was often that you could ride on the roller coaster. Okay, now make the entire game that.

That's sort of Mad Panic Coaster. You ride on a roller coaster, but rather than being strapped into your seat and sent down the rails, you have to do laps around the track while avoiding various hazards and not falling off the track. It's not as easy as it sounds, especially since your cart moves at Mach 10. It can be difficult to the point of frustration, and it's by no means a short game.

But what really makes it worth recommending is its outstanding soundtrack and expressive art style. It was created by a development studio not really known for making games, and by people who seemingly weren't in the industry for long. Yet, despite that, it carries an immense amount of personality. There's not much like it. It's just unfortunate that it was never released outside of Japan and, even there, is extremely rare.

Parasite Eve

This one is a bit more high-profile, but I feel like a lot of people still missed it. It’s a Squaresoft title, but while they would normally lean into fantasy, Parasite Eve is more contemporary. It’s still an RPG, but while it uses an active-time system, it allows you to move in real time. It’s also stylish as hell, full of melty people and flesh monsters. The audience at an opera is set on fire, helicopters explode, and a dude jumps from a helicopter and is set on fire. Doesn't get much better than that.

It goes in a few batshit directions when it comes to narrative, but works as a disaster plot. It absolutely hammers on the word mitochondria. A lot of what it spouts is accurate, but the whole plot hinges on your ability to believe a portion of your cells are able to gain sentience. Absolute batshit. It gets a little Kojima-esque with its exposition at times, and I don’t mean that as a compliment.

Unfortunately, the sequel drops the unique combat system and becomes a lot more like Resident Evil. But that just makes the original Parasite Eve a lot more unique.

Road Rash

I really don’t know why EA chose to just call this one Road Rash, as it’s not a remake of the original, and it came out on the 3DO before Road Rash 3 hit the Genesis. There's also a sort-of downport on the Sega CD which isn't the same as either the original or this version. It's confusing, so a lot of the time, this one is called Road Rash 32-Bit.

Regardless, it’s probably one of the best titles in the series if you don’t find Road Rash 64 side-splittingly hilarious. While the gameplay follows the same formula of motorcycle racing mixed with bashing your rivals with crowbars, it plays a bit smoother on 32-bit consoles and features much more detailed 3D graphics rather than the old raster trick of the original. It feels pretty great and has a lot more personality. It also had some really tacky cutscenes, which is a good taste of how tasteless that era of gaming was.

Army Men Air Attack 2

I talk about the Army Men series often, and whenever I do, someone usually says, “Oh yeah, I liked the helicopter one.” There wasn’t a single helicopter one. If you only count original titles and exclude some markedly different ports, there were three of them: Air Tactics, Air Attack, and most importantly, Air Attack 2. Yes, a lot of (some) people talk about Air Attack and don’t even realize there was a direct sequel.

There was, and it's fine. The gameplay is the same action-heavy helicopter action lifted from the Strike series (Desert Strike, Jungle Strike, etc.), and it still works. It doesn't come close to the inventiveness of the first game and, to be honest, there are a lot of cut corners here, probably owing to 3DO's very tight development deadlines. The series was already speeding downhill fast when Air Attack 2 came out. But, in general, Air Attack 2 still contains a lot of the same shooty winchy action. Plus, there's co-op if you have someone in your presence. If you liked “the helicopter one” you may consider checking this out.

On second thought, I'm not sure why this is here. I guess because I wanted to include an Army Men game given my history with the series. PS1 was where it was most prolific. There were 10 Army Men games released on the console, and Air Attack was easily the best. Although, I do have a soft spot for the World War games (not Land, Sea, Air).

Moon

Okay, so we didn’t exactly get Moon over here in North America until 2020, but it’s one of the first examples of Love-de-Lic’s formula of helping people for the good feels. It’s technically a parody of the typical RPG, containing no real combat and the simple goal of spreading altruism about. You wander a strange world, talking to strange people, and helping them with their strange problems.

Moon just feels meaningful. While the gameplay is simple, it feels deep and profound. You get insight into the lives of the game's inhabitants and experience a new perspective on things. It helps that there is a fantastic soundtrack (largely by one of my favorite composers, the legendary Hirofumi Taniguchi) that you actually have to collect and compile in a playlist and an art style that continues to influence developers to this day.

While Love-de-Lic would only release three games (none of which were released in the West) before disbanding, the feel-good formula would be carried on by its star players who broke off into their own studios and made games like Chibi-Robo and Chulip. Unfortunately, for a long while, the genre was doomed to frequently overlook a North American release with later games like Endonesia and Giftpia staying exclusively in Japan.

Medal of Honor Underground

If there’s one area that the N64 trounced the PS1, it is in first-person shooters. While Goldeneye 007 and Turok: Dinosaur Hunter haven’t aged the greatest, what did the Playstation have? Not none, but while I can list off quite a few decent N64 games in the genre, with the PS1 it’s a bit more difficult without adding the caveat “I guess.” Medal of Honor, however, is easy to appreciate since it helped launch the WWII shooter sub-category that dominated the shooter space after.

Medal of Honor: Underground is one you might have missed, however. A big score for me was its female protagonist, Manon Baptiste, but it also added enemy tanks and friendly soldiers to the mix. It isn’t necessarily better than the original, but it is more of the same that you might not have already experienced.

Vagrant Story

Another one of Squaresoft’s often-overlooked PS1 titles, Vagrant Story is a ridiculously deep RPG with a number of intricate systems all mashed together. It’s something that shouldn’t work, almost doesn’t, but somehow does. At the very least, it requires you to develop a great deal of familiarity in its systems to truly make the most of it. You play as Ashley Riot, with the task of investigating a cult in the city of Leá Monde and the ruins beneath it.

Like Parasite Eve, Vagrant Story stands out because of its unique style. It actually won a bunch of awards from various publications, but unfortunately released alongside games like Final Fantasy IX and Chrono Cross. Because of that, Vagrant Story is often left out of many discussions of Squaresoft’s glory days. We’re long overdue for a remaster.

King’s Field

In the wake of Dark Souls’ success, the often-overlooked King’s Field series has been re-examined. That's because Hidetaka Miyazaki has stated that Demon's Souls is something of a spiritual successor to that series. Don't go in expecting too many similarities, however. Both games are distinct from one another, essentially just sharing their dark fantasy leanings. It shares more with early PC dungeon crawlers than it does with later FromSoftware titles.

The localized King’s Field for PS1 is technically the Japanese King’s Field 2. It’s a shame we never got the first one, but the second title presents the same dungeon-crawling goodness. Beyond just being a nicely stiff and enjoyable action adventure, it also feels distinctly PS1 in its level geometry and texture work. It's a look that defined the console.

Tecmo's Deception

Speaking of looking distinctly PS1, Tecmo's Deception was the progenitor to the long-running series (last seen in 2014 with Deception IV). Despite that, this plays almost nothing like later games. Oh, sure, the gameplay based around setting traps for your enemies is still there, but it's very rudimentary compared to what would come back. While later games would have you set up Rube Goldberg-style combinations of traps, that wasn't even possible in this game. Instead, traps work more like RPG spells; you lead an enemy into them, then trigger it at the right moment.

However, it had charm that later games lacked. You could customize your evil mansion in a lot of ways. This was largely a useless feature, but there's something satisfying about creating the backdrop to your murders. It also has a pretty unusual plot where you more or less play as the villain in the story. It's packed full of bad design choices to the fact to the point where I'd have a tough time describing it as a quantifiably good game, but, at the very least, it is one worth seeing.

Ghost in the Shell

I've never actually watched the Ghost in the Shell movie, which is maybe okay since this game is based more on the manga. But, like, I'm not familiar enough to know what the difference is. Anyway, you play as a member of Public Security Section 9, and the action takes place with you firmly planted inside of a spider-like tank. It's maybe not what you'd really expect from the license. Yet, despite that, it's actually a really great tie-in.

It has extremely interesting combat with your tank being able to climb on walls. However, it's most fondly remembered for it's era-defyingly terrific controls and strikingly well-executed art style. It has its flaws and can be a bit frustrating, but it's so strong that it counts the most that it's practically timeless. It's apparently even better if you're already a fan of Ghost in the Shell, but I wouldn't know anything about that.

Brave Fencer Musashi

Not my favorite game on this list, but I do think it's an extremely memorable one. Brave Fencer Musashi is an often-overlooked game from Square that falls outside the JRPG format that the company was renowned for at the time. It's a strange game where you play as a diminutive samurai who is sucked into another world to fix its problems. And he's not happy about it.

While the gameplay maybe didn't click with me entirely, it's hard to forget its attitude. Musashi was roped into this adventure against his will, and he's not shy about telling people that. His catchphrase is practically "Not my problem, pal." In a way, it feels like a parody of the usual action-adventure game where the protagonist will allow themselves to get wrapped into petty sidequests that don't really concern them. With a day/night cycle and plenty of exploration to do, Brave Fencer Musashi is incredibly memorable, if nothing else.

Tail Concerto

The progenitor to the “Little Tail Bronx” series by Cyberconnect, Tail Concerto technically shares the same floating universe as Solatorobo: Hunter the Red and Fuga: Melodies of Steel. Each game is a little labor of love which makes it all the more confusing that you can only really download Fuga these days. The second-hand market has Tail Concerto, in particular, pegged at a ridiculous price.

Is it worth it? I’d probably argue that no game is worth as much as a North American copy of Tail Concerto, but it’s still one you should check out if you can. The story involves, erm, the oppression of cats. Dogs and cats are living together on islands that float in the sky, but the dogs are the majority and use that position to oppress the cats. It's a bit like the leadup to World War 2, which is a bit distressing. You play as a dog, just to make sure you feel more uncomfortable.

Despite that allegory, Tail Concerto has bright, charming graphics, a simple but unique narrative, and inventive gameplay that harkens back to a simpler time. It's easy to forget that it's about an underclass trying to get out from beneath the boots of their oppressors. Or rather, you might not notice at all. It’s just unfortunate that it’s so short.

Street Fighter Alpha 3

This might seem like a strange inclusion because Street Fighter Alpha 3 is an arcade game, and that version is available in at least three collections on digital storefronts right now. But the reason it's here is because there are a lot of added features that make it more at home on consoles. Specifically, I'm talking about World Tour mode.

World Tour mode has you traveling the world with your chosen character and gradually making them more powerful along the way. Not only that, you unlock characters as you progress, with more fighters on the roster in this version than there was in arcade. The added bit of progression makes the game more fun to play when you're on your own without a rival to take on. Or you could just grab one of the online-enabled ports available today and play against others all over the world if you prefer, but there's still value in World Tour if you think you've seen it all.

Colony Wars

The space combat genre (or 6DOF, there's no name for this genre I'm happy with) has been stagnant for quite some time now, but it really shone during the early 3D era because of the fact that it was easy to render large environments when most of it is an empty vacuum. During that time, we got some cherished games like Star Wars: X-Wing and Wing Commander, but some excellent titles were lost in the cracks, such as Colony Wars.

Colony Wars isn't too far removed from other games in the genre, but it impressively features a branching storyline and multiple endings. For the time, the graphics were impressive to see on PS1. Its depictions of large space battles was more spectacular than most at the time, helped by a rather striking lighting system.

Colony Wars was very well received at the time of its release, garnering awards from publications at the time. It spawned two sequels on the console. So, it's kind of weird that it fell into obscurity. After the PS1 trilogy, it tumbled off the face of the planet, which is kind of ironic, since it takes place in space.

I.Q.: Intelligent Qube

If I had to choose a favorite on this list of outside-the-norm games, it would be this one, I.Q.: Intelligent Qube. If you were alive and gaming during the PS1's lifespan, there's a decent chance that you played it on a demo disc, but did you ever actually own it? I'm not sure if I had seen one in person until far later in life. It was hard to get attention in those days unless something was exploding, gushing blood, or getting wrecked.

I.Q. is just such a game. It's almost like a puzzle game; that's probably the closest genre you can relate it to. You play as a simple dude on top of a very cube-centric playing field while cubes roll toward you, threatening to chase you over the edge or crush you. Or both. Your job is to set bombs on the ground and wait for the right moment to detonate them to remove some of the enemy cubes. Some of them cause bigger explosions, others you need to avoid taking out at all. It's hard to describe, really, but it takes a lot of concentration and can be almost zen to play.

What adds to the experience is a soundtrack that sounds like an orchestra scoring a bar fight and a reverb-soaked announcer who will give you a verbal pat on the back every time you flawlessly clear a set of cubes with a satisfying "Perrrrrrfect!" There's a sequel, but unfortunately, the announcer isn't as amazing, so that's a shame.

The post Try These 20 PS1 Games – A Few Of The Best Playstation 1 Games Of All Time appeared first on Destructoid.

The nearly decade-long Dragon Age drought has officially come to an end with the release of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. In the time since Dragon Age: Inquisition's release, developer BioWare has released Mass Effect: Andromeda and most recently, Anthem. Depending on who you ask, both of these titles are typically seen as alright at best, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who feels as though either lived up to the typical high-quality standards that BioWare had been known for in the past.

For a quick comparison, The Veilguard gives me serious Dragon Age II vibes, mostly in terms of its combat and gameplay. I'm just over 30 hours into The Veilguard and while I feel confident that I've got a firm grasp on what the RPG is all about, we have to keep in mind that like most BioWare games, The Veilguard is very story-driven. As such, I feel it's important to point out that my impressions in this review in progress are based on having not reached the finale of this story-driven RPG.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard (PC, PS5 [reviewed], Xbox Series X|S)
Developer: BioWare
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Released: October 31, 2024
MSRP: $59.99 on PC, $69.99 on Consoles

The Veilguard drops you into the action quickly. The story takes place ten years after the events in Dragon Age: Inquisition. One of the optional companions in Inquisition, the elven mage Solas, has seemingly gone rogue and is carrying out a ritual to tear down The Veil, a barrier that exists between the physical world of Thedas and The Fade, also known as the Beyond. After some interference at the behest of the player and his group of companions put together by none other than charismatic series regular Varric, the ritual is stopped but at a cost. Two ancient Elven Gods, Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain have pierced the The Veil and are now free in the physical world.

Tasked with creating a team to hunt down the Elven Gods and prevent the full destruction of The Veil—hence the name Veilguard—the player is thrust into the role of Rook, the protagonist. Despite being in the final act of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about Rook as a whole. The character has grown on me over the course of the Veilguard's journey, especially more recently. But I've had a really tough time feeling Rook actually belongs.

It's a tough task to navigate for BioWare, for sure. Rook is a brand-new character in Dragon Age who is essentially tasked with saving the world. For all intents and purposes, it makes complete sense, this is the best way to in the end create a meaningful connection to the main character for both new and returning players to the series. But it resulted in much of the game trying to tell me that Rook is important and the right person for the job, even though it never feels like they really are.

Important characters from the series' entire timeline – all the way from 2009's Dragon Age: Origins through the most recent Dragon Age: Inquisition – make an appearance in Veilguard, including franchise favorites like Morrigan and Varric. Even Inquisition's protagonist that you play as, The Inquisitor, makes an appearance in Veilguard. But the whole time the characters are constantly trying to sell you on the importance of Rook. "Oh you're Rook, I've heard of your mighty important deeds, you're perfect for this!"

By extension, I have found most of the new companions in Veilguard to be very solid additions to the evergrowing list of important characters in Dragon Age lore. I've grown fond of Neve, an early companion who is a part-time private detective, a member of the rebellious Shadow Dragons faction, and a badass ice mage. As you progress through Veilguard you'll learn more about all of the new companions as you continue to grow and expand the Veilguard.

In terms of actual combat companions though, I wish there was a little more substance to them. They essentially serve to give you access to additional skills that you can call upon in combat as opposed to opting to use your own character's (Rook's) skills. While you can choose where to put points in their respective skill trees and even equip them with gear, it feels quite meaningless as they don't actually do much in combat outside of you choosing to use their skills. They have no health bars, and the damage they do on their own is minuscule. In a single standard attack, you do multitudes more damage to enemies than the basic attacks of your companions that only shave off a sliver from the health bar with each hit.

It's a real shame because the actual core gameplay of Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a rather satisfying feeling. It's reminiscent of Dragon Age II opting for fast-paced Action RPG-style combat as opposed to the more tactical and strategic combat of Dragon Age: Origins and even Inquisition. You choose from three starting classes: warrior, rogue, and mage. Each class eventually branches into one of three specializations, allowing you to further cater the playstyle around exactly what you enjoy. I opted to go Warrior eventually specializing in Slayer, which focuses on wielding massive two-handed weapons.

I enjoy the combat of the Slayer, charging directly into combat and dealing insane amounts of damage while dodge-rolling around to avoid attacks. The combat also reminds me of one of my favorite action RPGs, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. The fast-paced combat makes boss fights particularly fun, although a bit difficult at times. Despite my gripes on how limited the companions actually are in combat, the core combat for you as the protagonist feels extremely polished and could very well be the best in the series.

Ultimately, I think the final act of Dragon Age: The Veilguard will be a major factor for me in ranking how Veilguard holds up to the rest of the series. There are constant choices to be made throughout Veilguard, with the game constantly telling me that the choices matter. But outside of one major choice in the early game, most of the choices haven't actually changed much. However, it wouldn't be out of character for a BioWare game to be keeping track of all my choices throughout my journey to dictate which ending I receive, or which endings I have access to.

If you're looking for a solid RPG in a beautifully built world, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is certainly that. The combat is fluid and satisfying, and the world of Thedas is well-designed and fun to explore. The story has its drawbacks, but overall it's still better than most. Whether it will live up to the prestigious storytelling of the previous Dragon Age games will very much depend on the RPG's curtain call.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review in Progress: Dragon Age: The Veilguard appeared first on Destructoid.

While the first console I technically had in my household was an NES, the Super Nintendo came around when I was finally old enough to really appreciate them. So, the console is a familiar and dear friend. However, I’m more passionate about exploring places that I haven’t been before.

Thankfully, the SNES has a large enough library that I’m still coming across worthwhile titles that I’ve missed. There are over 700 games in the SNES library, and that’s just in North America and excluding Super Famicom exclusives. It’s hard to play all of them, and sometimes you kick over a rock and find something worth eating. I’ve kicked over a lot of rocks, so I’m here to point you at some of the juiciest grubs.

This list is not ranked. I’m just giving recommendations. I’m also only pulling from the North American library, so we’re excluding Super Famicom and PAL-only games. It’s also difficult to define what, exactly, is overlooked. Zombies Ate My Neighbors might be a staple to me, but others may say otherwise. So, take it for what it is. If you haven’t played these games before, consider checking them out.

Demon’s Crest

Demon’s Crest is one of my favorite games on the SNES, but I only found out about it a few years ago while following the Gargoyle’s Quest trail. But while Demon’s Crest retains quite a bit from the previous Gargoyle’s Quest games, it’s in a league of its own.

The Gargoyle’s Quest series is a spin-off of Ghost n’ Ghouls starring one of the most vexing enemies in those games, Red Arremer (or Firebrand). It started out on Game Boy with its sequel on NES, but those games had more of an adorable cartoon style laced with horror. Demon’s Crest is all horror. It looks more similar to Super Castlevania IV than anything else in its own series.

You also get to play as a certifiable badass. You start with most of the skills from the previous games and then build upon that foundation. That doesn’t make the game easy, but it does make the character feel incredibly powerful. It helps that other demons you run into react with either respect or straight-up fear.

S.O.S.

The absolute opposite of a power fantasy, you’d think S.O.S. (Septentrion in Japan) came out in the wake of the film Titanic rather than four years before it. You play as one of a few characters who are on board the luxury liner “Lady Crithania” when it gets caught in a storm and capsized. Your goal is to make it off the ship while saving as many people as possible.

The problem is, the characters you play aren’t action heroes. They’re regular people, so the game controls a lot closer to Prince of Persia than a standard platformer. The characters are slow and cumbersome, and If you fall too far, you might lose consciousness or outright die. The game proceeds on a progressive clock, and as the minutes tick by, the ship begins to roll and tilt, completely changing how you navigate the ship. 

It’s not something you’ll complete on your first try; it’s going to take many failures before you figure out the best way to get around. Even then, your next challenge is getting as many of the daft passengers to the exit with you, and they are hardly reliable on their own. This can make S.O.S. very uncomfortable to play. Frustrating even. Especially since the music is like the soundtrack to a panic attack. However, you won’t find anything quite like it, either on the SNES or beyond.

Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen

While Tactics Ogre still loves on through occasional remasters, the classic Ogre Battle style of strategy games hasn’t seen much action in a long time. It all started here on the SNES with Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen.

These games are a strange mix of strategy and RPG. Essentially, you build your party, then send them out to various strategic locations to either attack or defend against the enemies. You work to recruit new, more powerful units into your army while building and upgrading the ones you have. All this is presented against vibrant Mode-7 landscapes with a terrific soundtrack.

The main downside is that it’s extremely easy to cheese your way through most levels. There’s also an extremely obtuse alignment system for characters that is very poorly explained but has a massive impact on what ending you get.

Uniracers

Aside from, say, Super Mario Kart, the SNES isn’t exactly known for its racing games. Uniracers took a pretty distinct direction by being a completely sidescrolling racer. But holding a direction until you reach the finish line would be pretty boring, so it throws in half-loops and half-pipes that force you to adjust your one-wheeled mode of transportation for a safe landing. On top of that, stunts are how you gain speed, so you need to be always flipping and twisting if you want to win.

It’s an intense game, featuring crazy-fast abstract graphics and a pretty kicking soundtrack. There’s two-player split-screen if you want to see who’s better at keeping their wheel under them. I just want to know how my mother set such a record time on the first course. That shouldn’t be possible.

Metal Warriors

I feel like Cybernator/Assault Suits Valken deserves a mention in this list, so there it is. I’ve talked so much about it at this point that I need a breather. Instead, I’ll give it to Metal Warriors, which isn’t a sequel to Cybernator and isn’t even by the same developer, but you’d swear it was. It features the same stompy robot action and careful aiming. It’s a real “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” situation. Only this time, the robots are hot rod red, and you can get out of them.

Metal Warriors comes from many of the devs who worked on Zombies Ate My Neighbors. The two games are in completely different ballparks, but they both feature interesting and detailed art design. There’s also no HUD, which is a unique thing to see in an SNES game.

Unfortunately, this one either didn’t sell well, or just wasn’t marketed very hard by Konami. Cartridges are pretty scarce to come by and command a ridiculously high price. I have high hopes that a port comes to modern consoles.

Shadowrun

Based on the tabletop RPG of the same name, there are actually two versions of Shadowrun: One on the SNES and another on Genesis/Mega Drive. They’re completely different, with the Genesis version sticking closer to the rules of the TTRPG and the SNES taking a page from the novel Never Deal with a Dragon.

You play as Jake Armitage, who kicks out of his own morgue slab to figure out what’s going down in the cyberpunk future of Seattle. Shadowrun’s big hook is that it’s essentially Bladerunner mixed with The Lord of the Rings. So, it’s a grim, corporate-dominated future, but there are also elves, dwarves, magic, and dragons.

What I absolutely love about the SNES Shadowrun is its atmosphere. It doesn’t entirely get the cyberpunk feel across, but it does capture the isolated feeling of walking the streets on a summer night. This is helped through the terrific use of its color palette and an incredible soundtrack by Marshall Parker. It’s worth checking out, even if its mouse interface is pretty cumbersome.

Batman Returns

Batman Returns got a game on many different platforms, and most of them are different. The SNES version is a pretty incredible beat-’em-up by Konami. It’s (mostly) a conveyor belt brawler where you walk the festive streets of Gotham, beating the cotton candy out of clowns. You can pick them up and smash them against the scenery or even each other.

It does a great job of capturing the feel of the movie. It even features the score by Dan Elfman. But it’s the amazing physicality of Batman Returns that makes it worth playing.

Nosferatu

I often forget that Nosferatu was even released in North America. Forget that the name makes it sound like a clone of Castlevania, Nosferatu plays more like a cross between Prince of Persia and a brawler. You play as a guy trying to rescue his girlfriend from a vampire. To do so, he doesn’t come equipped with crosses, stakes, or garlic. His only tools in the fight against evil are his two friends: Left fist and right fist. That joke would be funnier if I could just say “left and right” while raising my fists to illustrate, but since this is text, I had to make do.

Anyway, Nosferatu will really test you. Not just your ability to throw hands but also your reflexes and puzzle-solving skills. Like Prince of Persia, there’s a whole lot of instant death around, so if you want to make it to the big bad guy and feed him his teeth, you’ll need some skills to pay the bills.

Pocky & Rocky

Technically, Pocky & Rocky is a sequel to Taito’s 1986 arcade game, Kiki Kaikai, but Natsume took the core idea of it and went its own way. It’s a top-down run-and-gun, not unlike Ikari Warriors. Here, however, you play as a Shinto shrine maiden, Pocky, and her tanuki (not actually a raccoon) friend, Rocky. Pocky slings ofuda cards while Rocky throws leaves at terrifying velocity. 

Beyond just dealing death with projectiles, both characters can do a sweep in front of them that deflects projectiles and can also dive to get out of the way of danger. The art style is cute, with squat characters, amazing bosses, and detailed environments. But while the graphics are cute – and even occasionally serene – the action can get very intense. It is extremely fast-paced and gets pretty difficult toward the end.

A sequel by Natsume came out not long after. However, while a lot of the strengths of the first game are retained, slight changes – especially to the co-op multiplayer – make it a bit weaker overall. Still worth checking out if you get the chance.

Wild Guns

Speaking of Natsume, another one of their absolute bangers on the SNES is Wild Guns. It’s also a shooter, but this time, it’s a Cabal-styled gallery shooter. You move your character in the foreground to dodge incoming shots while shooting into the background. However, Natsume hit on an incredible concept for its take on the sub-genre: Cowboys in space.

Yeah, you choose from a pair of rootin’, tootin’, and also shootin’ cowfolk and unleash death on various hired thugs and robots. There’s some sort of True Grit-style revenge plot mixed in there, but it’s not important. You just have to keep blasting.

Like Pocky & Rocky, this sugar-powered gameplay is captured with vibrant, detailed art. The backgrounds get wrecked by every shot that you miss, and the animations are packed with personality. Also, like Pocky & Rocky, you can take it on with a friend, which just adds to the fun.

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