Nintendo Switch

08
Apr
2018
Solomon Rambles About a Game Behind Bars

Solomon Rambles About a Game Behind Bars

The Escapists 2

In Need of Redemption

A strong relationship sometimes takes sacrifices.   Maybe you give up hanging out with your friends in order to watch trite romantic comedies with your loved one.  Maybe you relinquish your loyal dog because you have nothing else for the blood ritual.  Maybe you have to suddenly move for your spouse’s new job.  In my relationship, my partner sacrificed free will and our future second-born child to make me happy.  In turn, I agreed to purchase and play a game with her which looked utterly boring.

The Escapists 2 (E2) is not my genre of game, nor is it good enough to entice me to give the genre a second glance (unlike Mario + Rabbids).  When I purchased E2, I recognized that it would go on my docket for potential reviews in the future, and a small part of me worried that my low expectations would ultimately result in a biased score.  Fortunately for me, by the time Player Two and I had completed the first prison, we were both tired of the formula.  If a game based on tedious resource management and routine can’t appeal to two neurotic, monotony-loving gamers, it deserves whatever paltry score I spit out.

What is it?

Your goal is simple:  escape by any means possible.  As a prisoner, you begin with nothing:  no weapons, no clear plan, and no voting rights.  Prisons, however, are known for their endless opportunities, and only your imagination and the game’s design can limit how you get to freedom.  Dig under the barbed wire fence, cut through it, mail your friend and yourself to another place, construct a plane, start a riot, hire lawyers and sue the place for cruel and unusual punishment.  Whatever your plan is, you will spend your first few days of imprisonment scoping out your cage.

The actual steps to escaping take a little more work.  Every day, you have to follow the prison’s routines.  You check in for meals, work, showers, roll call, and other activities in order to placate the guards.  Miss one or get caught breaking the rules, and the security level increases, bringing more prison staff, guard dogs, or a full-scale lockdown.  Once you get the schedule down, you can freely move about the prisons, raiding fellow prisoners’ belongings for resources or doing favors for them in exchange for money and improved relationships.  Using the materials you buy or steal, you can build shovels, key cards, weapons, and other implements to make your escape possible.

The prisons, themselves, range from your typical cement fortresses to P.O.W. camps to oil rigs.  If you’re looking for something a little more fast-paced, transport missions give you a set time limit, forcing you to escape from some sort of moving vehicle before you reach your privately-owned criminal hell.  As we all know, serving time can get pretty lonely, so you can rope in a fellow convict in local split-screen play or start a gang of up to four people online.  Need a little competition?  Fight against your friends in Versus Mode to see who can escape first and live life on the lam, filled with paranoia and a constant sense of unease.

What’s good?

  1. If you can get behind the basic concept, you could be kept busy for a life sentence, especially if you’re close to dying. You get ten different maps, each more complex than the last.  Add multiple ways to escape and a speed-running component, and you have reason to become a repeat offender.
  2. The transport missions offer a much-needed dose of adrenaline. Gone are the tedious routines and tiresome resource harvesting, allowing you to focus on the best part of E2:  creating a plan and executing it.
  3. You can name all the guards and prisoners however you like. Do you find your family insufferable?  Name all the guards after them and symbolize your constrained life in video-game form.  Have you been keeping a hit list of all your enemies?   Take out your passive aggression by making them prisoners.  Have the maturity of a five-year-old?  Just name everyone after curse words and toilet humor like I did and enjoy hours of entertainment.

What’s bad?

  1. Prison is boring. A large chunk of the game is spent rummaging through other prisoners’ belongings to find the right materials needed to support your escape attempt.  The other chunk of E2 is hurrying from point A to point B, whether it is to follow the prison’s routine, accomplish a fetch quest, or complete a job (AKA minigame).  Your actual escape attempt takes maybe ten minutes, and if you fail, it’s back to square one in most cases.
  2. Much like the US prison system, E2 is filled with issues. Combat feels sloppy and inaccurate despite its simplicity.  Interacting with context-sensitive objects is imprecise and infuriating (especially when in the middle of an escape).  Split-screen multiplayer stutters whenever a player opens a menu, and your field of vision is drastically reduced.  Add E2’s tendency to outright crash, and you’ll lose all motivation to escape your cage.
  3. The NPCs are dull creatures. All guards and inmates theoretically have a positive or negative opinion of you, but the consequences of either are negligible.  Unless you’re bullying a single individual repeatedly, you won’t need to worry about winning any popularity contests.  Even if you do anger a guard, as soon as you shove money down his gullet, you become the best of buds.

What’s the verdict?

In my egocentric world, boring me is a capital offense, and the Escapists 2 is guilty on all counts.  As I played through it, I stopped worrying about giving it an unfairly low score.  Instead, I began to worry if I could muster enough willpower to play it long enough to justify a review.  Admittedly, the dull and unintuitive gameplay drove me off before I could experiment with the final few maps, and I had no desire to try out alternate escapes.  Call me a lazy slug, but I can’t recommend this to anyone outside of those who have already bought the game and came here just to argue with my score.  Don’t do crimes, kids.  It’s better to be scared straight than deal with the Escapists 2.

Arbitrary Statistics:

  • Score:  5.5
  • Time Played:  Over 15 hours
  • Number of Players:  1-2 (local); 1-4 (online)
  • Games Like It on Switch:  Minecraft, Payday 2

Scoring Policy

Posted by Solomon Rambling in Review, 0 comments
31
Mar
2018
Solomon Rambling Plays the Binding of Isaac:  Afterbirth+

Solomon Rambling Plays the Binding of Isaac:  Afterbirth+

Computer Troubleshooting

My current laptop was a desperate purchase.  My previous laptop, a Dell, had crapped out earlier that day, deciding it no longer had any energy to power the screen.  Because Murphy’s law is a callous, calculated bitch, my device up and died at the beginning of my workday, leaving me white-knuckling my desk and staring into the black abyss that was my blank monitor.  The mountains of paperwork I needed to finish would inevitably avalanche into the rest of my week unless I addressed the problem immediately.

The Dell had supported me all through college and into my second year of work.  I probably could have salvaged it, but after seven years, Old Yeller needed to go.  Besides, fixing a computer would be much more time-consuming than outright buying a new one.  The only fatality would be my next paycheck, but that was a problem for Future Solomon.  The Present Solomon needed to relieve his nervous breakdown and get on over the Best Buy.

I bought my current HP laptop because the screen was big, it had a disk drive, and the price was exorbitant enough for me to believe I was getting a fancy product.  I didn’t ask an employee for help, partly due to my distrust of salespeople and partly due to an intense fear of store employees.  I could’ve done research, but that entailed work and did not satiate my need for instant gratification.  As such, I walked out with my HP laptop 20 minutes after having entered Best Buy.

My laptop was intended for YouTube, iTunes, and Microsoft Word.  Websites and video recording software were not even dreams at the time, but here we are.  To its credit, my HP accomplishes most of my computer needs; it just also happens to need half an hour to fully boot.  Skip that 30-minute warm-up, and the result is a stuttering video.  What I had intended to be a simple video ended up being a two-week long affair as I waited for Editor One to throw together something to make-up for my computer’s faults.

His additions have certainly helped the video feel presentable, but the glitchy sections remain.  It wouldn’t sting as much if I didn’t think the video was one of my stronger works, but hell, that’s life.  Continue to direct all feedback and questions my way, and feel free to send any viruses to my HP to make it hobble more than it already does.

Posted by Solomon Rambling in Video, 0 comments
18
Mar
2018
Solomon Rambles About Curiosity and the Cat

Solomon Rambles About Curiosity and the Cat

Night in the Woods

Richard’s Scary Busytown

Some games are best played having no prior knowledge.  Be it Doki Doki Literature Club, Gorogoa, or Genital Jousting¸ the less you know, the more intense your surprise and delight (and perhaps horror).  Night in the Woods is one of those games.  I heartily recommend it.  If you enjoy expansive stories driven by their characters, stop reading and buy the game.  For those of you expecting a traditional game, read on, but those who get a kick out of light novels or point-and-click adventures, Night in the Woods is worth your time.

Be ignorant.  Spend your money.  Have fun.

Now that I’ve scared off none of you, let’s get to rambling.  I don’t intend to throw out spoilers left and right, but I truly believe some things are best enjoyed with virtually no context.  Night in the Woods offers a refreshingly deep narrative often not seen in video games, so much so it feels like a mutant hybrid between a game and literature.  Admittedly, this beast is a little ugly in places and does not quite move as quickly as purebred books or games, but it still is one of the most exotic creatures you will find on the Nintendo Switch.

What is it?

Your protagonist is Mae Borowski, and the story takes off just as she returns to her derelict mining hometown, Possum Springs, after suddenly dropping out of college.  In her two-year absence, the town has not so much changed as it has stagnated and decayed.  Businesses are failing; most of the young adults are leaving for better places; and the remaining residents deal with low-paying jobs and the humdrums of everyday life.  If this isn’t horrifying to you yet, treasure your innocence, my sweet summer child.

Gameplay revolves around the daily routine of your typical 20-year-old anthropomorphic dropout.  As Mae, you will adventure around the town, interacting with locals by engaging in small talk or learning about their lives.  Every day ends with you hanging out with your friends—Bea, Gregg, and Angus—who take you out to go party, visit the mall, or smash up cars with baseball bats.  All this may sound quaint and homey, but something’s afoot.  Mae and her friends find a severed arm outside a local diner; she begins experiencing increasingly strange dreams; and people become more insistent to understand exactly why Mae dropped out.

For the majority of the game, you’re going to be walking and talking.  There are some minor platforming elements for the purpose of finding new residents and dialogue opportunities. Occasionally, you’ll encounter a minigame like the Guitar Hero-esque band sessions with her friends.  Your interactions with others are fairly linear, albeit with some dialogue options with minor impact on the narrative.  There are no complex puzzles, intricate fighting mechanics, or game over screens.  Night in the Woods is a story through and through, and when you’re done with the main adventure, there are two extra stories which explore some of the lore in Possum Springs.

What’s good?

  1. Mae Borowski is endearingly unlikeable. Many of the characters in Night in the Woods stand out as relatable and interesting, such as Bea, Mae’s parents, and Pastor Karen.  However, none of them compare to the fucked-up mess that is Mae.  She is moody, self-centered, and impulsive.  In high school, she bludgeoned another kid with a baseball bat.  As a young adult, she gets a kick out of shoplifting.  Despite this, she cares deeply about her friends, even if she never says the right things.  Depression, dissociation, and anger have made soup out of her brains, and she tries to get by as best as she can.  You may hate her; you may not relate to her, but she is one of the most human characters who is also a cat.
  2. The art and soundtrack are phenomenal. The visuals pop with color, and the town is ever-changing as the weather cycles and the townsfolk prepare for various events.  The bright exterior of the town serves as a solid foil to the trippy dream sequences bathed in purples and blues.  The music complements everything like a tasteful ascot, complete with pleasant bloops, soothing cadences, and moody beats.  That’s my best effort to sound like I know how to critique music, so just listen to it.  Buy the soundtrack.  Hyperlink.
  3. Several parts of the story hit hard and leave a lasting impact, much like student loans. Night in the Woods tackles some pretty intense themes like loneliness, mental illness, and absolute failure and regret.  The horror aspects of the game will certainly unsettle you, but the true strength of the narrative is its ability to unnerve you by revealing the uncomfortable parts of normal life.

What’s bad?

  1. There’s enough snark to feed a gaggle of hipsters for life. Mae and her gang’s witty banter feels appropriate and helps to engage you in the game’s oceans of dialogue, but when every resident of Possum Springs speaks in wisecracks, you begin to wonder if the town’s water supply has been infected with sarcasm, vinegar, and indie movies.  Dialogue blurs and can grate your eyeballs.
  2. Patience, you must have. The story is a slow burn, with many of the horror elements appearing in the final third of the game.  If you run through the game—ignoring all of the residents except your friends—you could potentially finish the story in eight hours.  Much of this time is you walking from location to location, and load times further impede your progress.  A single load screen takes only a few seconds, but because each building and part of town requires loading, those seconds will add up.  Night in the Woods accurately captures many of the experiences of everyday life; tedium is unfortunately just one of them.
  3. As dumb as it sounds, the supernatural elements don’t feel as natural as the rest of the story. Without going into too much detail, Night in the Woods dabbles in eldritch horror and the occult.  In a vacuum, I enjoyed the eeriness, but I also felt like the developers added this fantastical element because they needed a “hook” for a game to tempt people to buy something actually about modern life and mental illness.

What’s the verdict?

Night in the Woods thrives on fan theories and analysis.  The English major in me wants to gush for pages about the hidden meanings and symbolism, but the gamer in me knows when to shut up.  As more developers experiment with video games as an artistic medium, we are offered the experience to tinker with our emotions and beliefs just as much as we do with a character.  Night in the Woods is one such offering, and if you’re looking for a different kind of immersion, Possum Springs welcomes you.

Arbitrary Statistics:

  • Score: 8
  • Time Played: Over 10 hours
  • Number of Players: 1
  • Games Like It on Switch: Oxenfree, Thimbleweed Park

Scoring Policy

Posted by Solomon Rambling in Review, 0 comments
11
Mar
2018
Solomon Rambles About Hindsight

Solomon Rambles About Hindsight

Namco Museum (2017)

Slightly More Entertaining than the National Postal Museum

I’ve always been a sucker for compilation games.  For the price of one game, you get four, six, fifteen, or one hundred smaller ones bundled into a single package.  It’s like getting triplets when you were only expecting one kid, except you don’t have to worry about raising children, crippling debt, and sleep deprivation.  For me, quantity matters so much more than quality, at least until I play through all the games and remember I’m stupid.  Compilation games have ranged from the sublime (the Orange Box/Nintendoland/Wii Sports Resort) to the excrement (any no-name plug-and-play console), so I give myself slack for hoping for a good batch of games on one disc.

Retro collections—a specific breed of compilation games—have been more hit-and-miss for me.  These games inherently prey on our nostalgia glands, sucking our monetary life force in exchange for a highlight reel of our childhood.  Sometimes, these nostalgia leeches can create a symbiotic relationship with us, like with the Sonic Mega Collection or Rare Replay.  In the case of Namco Museum, the relationship feels slightly parasitic, like the bond between an overweight man and a tape worm too lazy to do actual harm.

What is it?

The Namco Museum franchise has been around for over two decades now in an effort to reproduce Pac-Man more times than Nintendo re-releases Super Mario Bros. (with Skyrim being a close third in this race).  This rendition of the museum offers 11 “arcade classics” for you to feed unlimited virtual currency and vie for a high score, either locally or online.  Every game (except Pac-Man Vs.) features a “normal” and a “challenge” mode.  The former is self-explanatory whereas the latter creates a unique scenario in-game for you to master.  Apart from this, you’re given a slew of customization options, similar to those you would find in the ACA releases.

In this batch, you have Pac-Man, which is a lot like Pac-Man Championship Edition if it was made in 1980.  There’s the gory beat-‘em-up, Splatterhouse, in which you fights ghouls, possessed furniture, and stiff controls.  Galaga and Galaga ‘88 give you your vertical shooter action while Sky Kid crashes and burns trying to do the same thing from a horizontal perspective.  Rolling Thunder 1 and 2 offer enough run-and-gun gameplay to make you want to play better renditions like Contra or Gunstar Heroes.  The Tower of Druaga provides you with a walking simulator; Tank Force allows you to shoot things from an overhead perspective; and Dig Dug rounds out the package just to make sure you can recognize at least one more game by name.

Pac-Man Vs. stands as the single-most defining trait that separates this “Switch Museum” from past Namco Museums.  Oh wait, never mind; it was also in the DS version.  Well, this one is a fancy HD version of the original Gamecube game which made use of the GBA link cable.  Offering asymmetric gaming before the Wii U could bomb on arrival, Pac-Man Vs. tasks one player to gobble up pellets as Pac-Man while up to three other players pursue him as ghosts.  The Pac-Man player sees the whole maze (using one Switch system) while the ghosts have limited fields of view (using another Switch system).  Whoever devours Pac-Man takes control of the yellow bugger for the next round, and rounds continue until someone hits a score cap.

Note:  Two Switch consoles are needed to play the full-version of Pac-Man Vs.  You can play the game on one console, but with this setup, everyone is a ghost, and you all compete to catch Pac-Man more times than your friends to reach the score cap first.  Fortunately, you do not have to buy another copy of Namco Museum to play this game; a free download on the eShop allows the second Switch to join other local Pac-Man Vs. games.

What’s good?

  1. Pac-Man Vs. is awesome, provided you have two Switch consoles. I purchased Namco Museum solely for this game, which was a foolish idea, but hey, I’m able to play Pac-Man Vs.  It’s not quite the rambunctious romp I remember it to be, but it still is the Mona Lisa of this Louvre.
  2. For high score junkies, you have multiple arenas to throw up your name. It may take you tens or hundreds of hours, and you may lose your job and house, but at least people will know xComet69x is the very best at Tank Force.
  3. If you eat, breathe, and shit nostalgia, Namco Museum has 11 games of pure retro goodness. Sure, nothing is remarkable about this collection, but you don’t care.  You still live in the 80s, and anything that doesn’t have scan lines or pixelated graphics isn’t worth your rose-colored attention.

What’s bad?

  1. For those of you without nostalgia, there isn’t much here to enjoy. None of these games have aged particularly well, and their simple concepts are quick to grow repetitive and boring.  Being that these are arcade games, expect cheap deaths and infrequent checkpoints.  I’ll admit that I may be overly critical of these games, but when I’m given a game like Tower of Druaga (where the timer runs out faster than your character moves), I struggle to see how anyone but diehard fans can enjoy the classics.
  2. This museum is rather bare-bones. Older iterations of this series have included more games and more tweaks to the gameplay.  Pac-Man Vs. is great, but when this is the major selling point of this rendition, I can’t help but feel Namco phoned it in with this entry.  We’ll ignore that the series in general is just a bunch of phone calls.
  3. A Joy-Con/Pro Controller can’t replace an arcade cabinet’s joystick and button set-up. I’m not an arcade purist, but even I can tell these games are best played like they were in the arcade.  Nothing recreates the old-school glory of Galaga like hunching over a cabinet, both hands resting on the controls, with the stench of sweat and teenage angst wafting through a darkly-lit room.

What’s the verdict?

Just like every shopping center has a Starbucks, every console needs its Namco Museum, and this Switch version is just about as indistinguishable from its cousins as the downtown Starbucks is from the mall Starbucks.  Unless you fondly remember six or seven games from this compilation’s library, this entry need not be on your wish list.  Eleven games for $30 is not bad, but you could also use that money to buy two or three games with more depth and content than all the Namco classics combined.  The classics should certainly be remembered for their impact on the gaming industry; playing them is not as necessary.

Arbitrary Statistics:

  • Score:  5
  • Time Played:  Over 5 hours
  • Number of Players:  1-4
  • Games Like It on Switch:  Party Planet, Pac-Man Championship Edition 2

Scoring Policy

Posted by Solomon Rambling in Review, 0 comments
10
Feb
2018
Solomon Rambling Talks About Writing Good Reviews

Solomon Rambling Talks About Writing Good Reviews

Being Yourself

 

According to countless elderly women, I’ve got a voice for radio.  Something about a deep voice that drones on like a congested furnace just makes people want to listen to it.  Unfortunately, the target audience for my videos isn’t exactly composed of old folks or radio listeners, but I’ll take what I can get.  I’ve also been told I sound like some YouTuber no one seems to remember, and I guess that’s a compliment.

With this video, I’ve begun experimenting with what I can do with this low voice of mine.  Mainly, I try to sound just like I do in everyday conversation.  In my day-to-day life pretending to be human, I rarely stick to my low octave and bop between different tones and lilts and other synonyms for vocal things.  My current “YouTube voice” is most like how I sound when I’m teaching something to others.  It carries that pedantic air to it that’s trying desperately to not sound pedantic.

I don’t quite sound like myself yet, but I’m getting there.  My sarcasm, self-deprecation, and pessimism have done well to ease me into being myself, yet so far, these traits have also shown that I’m little more than piss and vinegar.  Part of my struggle comes from talking to myself and only myself.  When I’m with others, I become more animated.  I mimic people; I can play off of their comments; and I can shut up when I’m not funny.  In the desolating silence that is a YouTube video, I have no one to work with but me.  I have my partner who occasionally grimaces and shudders when I make bad jokes, but she doesn’t like me referencing her, so I’ll have to stop using her as a crutch eventually.

At the very least, this video came out without audio or video issues.  Be it a fluke or some magic I happened to make, I’ll just appreciate that I got a solid video out of it all.  The audio overall is quiet, so I can certainly bump that up in the future as long as don’t scream into the microphone.  I don’t quite trust my impulses to make any promises yet.

Anyway, screw the introspection. If you have any thoughts, hit me.

 

Posted by Solomon Rambling in Video, 0 comments