Nintendo Switch

Jan

2018

Solomon Rambles About Raving

Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle

A Break-Up Letter

Oh, Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle. Each week, I select my next review through a random number generator, and for the past three weeks, I have rolled you. I don’t want to review you. I’ve specifically rerolled in order to avoid you, but you come back like a boomerang with attachment issues. It’s not like I don’t like you. You’re good, great even! You’re just not my type, and this review is boring for me to write. It’s a “me, not you” thing. Really.

But here we are, and I’ve rolled into you again, so let’s just get this over with because you can’t seem to get the hint. Loads of people sing praises of you, and I’ll do the same, but I never looked forward to playing you. If I didn’t have a neurotic need to finish every game I own, I would’ve left you long ago. I’m not particularly fond of your brother, XCOM, either. You may be the more cheery, funnier version of him, but you still share a lot of his genes. I enjoyed my time with you, but I’m ready to move on.

Who you are:

You’re unique, I’ll give you that. You managed to combine the esteemed Mario franchise with the ear-bleeding antics of the Rabbids and create something coherent. It’s like if Mickey Mouse teamed up with Despicable Me’s minions and birthed something that didn’t drown humanity in a cesspool of shit. What’s more amazing is that your crossover wasn’t a platformer or minigame version of the Olympics. No, you created a competent strategy game that retained Mario’s spirit, added the Rabbids’ zaniness, and threw in guns to quench my bloodthirst.

Our dates together focused on saving the Mushroom Kingdom from the SupaMerge, a device that threatened to make everything a Mario/Rabbid fan fiction. When we played, I took control of Mario and two other characters (Peach, Yoshi, Luigi, or their Rabbid doppelgängers) and overcame legions of Rabbid abominations. The enemy and I took turns abusing each other, and on my turns, each of my characters could shoot, move, or use a special (be it a status buff or a chance to fire during the enemy’s turn). Your crazy, kinky side came through when you inserted jumps, dash attacks, and transportation pipes.

Those battles were your most attractive features, but you tried to look tempting in other ways. You sprinkled in some simple puzzles to appear more intelligent. You added collectible art and models to seem creative. After I beat a world, you enticed me to return through additional challenge missions which were fun albeit nothing like your golden years. You even offered a two-player cooperative mode (and later, a competitive mode) to pretend like you were interested in my friends.

Why you were great:

Despite being a strategist, you were always so energetic and spontaneous. It was rare for a turn to feel bland because my characters could do so much. Bliss is vamp dashing into a mini boss with Rabbid Luigi, then pushing said enemy with a critical shot, thus activating Mario’s Hero Sight and Luigi’s Steely Stare for up to five more attacks, which then propel the foe out of bounds to die, all while healing your entire team. People who don’t know you will think I’m spouting gibberish, but you and I can treasure these intimate moments.
You had a great sense of humor. You actually made Rabbids funny and endearing even though they’re just hyperactive Rayman rejects. Rabbid DK remains the pinnacle of all that is good and holy in the world.
You fashioned each playable character with love and care. The eight playable characters were distinct enough to change how I approached a battle. Peach and Rabbid Mario encouraged high-cost, high-reward blitzkriegs whereas Yoshi and Rabbid Luigi focused on status effects and critical shots. Admittedly, your obsession with keeping Mario on my team is a little off-putting, but at least he was strong enough to carry his weight.

When you stare at the Rabbid DK, he stares back.

Why you kinda sucked:

You kept repeating yourself. I heard you the first time and the second time and the umpteenth time after tens of hours of gameplay. Your stages provided some variety, but you kept throwing the same seven enemies at me. I’ll admit you had a few nuggets of novelty with your boss battles, but even your mini bosses followed patterns similar to the cannon-fodder creatures. When you wanted to be different or more difficult, you just copied-and-pasted more enemies onto the battlefield. Talking more doesn’t mean you’re doing more, and that goes for both of us.
Your sense of exploration is terrible. Your world was beautiful, yet you gave me a restricted path to follow. In your mind, “exploration” was either taking a minor detour to a dead end or wildly flinging the camera around to spot a chest behind a rock. To top it all, you robbed Mario of his ability to jump, a cardinal sin in some bible.
It’s obvious that you don’t like me playing with other people. I get it; you’re a jealous person. That’s fine; just don’t pretend like you care about my friends. Your co-op mode is less about cooperation and more about whoever is loud enough to make all of the decisions. Your competitive mode, meanwhile, made me question your sanity. Why not follow the same battle structure you use everywhere else in the game? Why did you think it was a good idea to add item blocks and limit our turns to only three actions? Do you really hate my friends that much?

It’s over.

We were just never the right people for each other. We can still be good friends, but I can’t commit to you the same way strategy fans will. It is remarkable that you even exist in the first place, and I do believe almost everyone should get to know you. You’re just not the one for me. Until your next DLC comes out and we share a regrettable, sweaty, three-day fling in a motel bedroom, this is goodbye, Mario + Rabbids.

Arbitrary Statistics:

Score: 8
Time Played: Over 35 hours
Number of Players: 1-2
Games Like It on Switch: Worms W.M.D., TINY METAL

Scoring Policy

Dec

2017

Solomon Rambling’s Blogitorial: Padding

Just a Ton of Empty Carbs

As the saying goes, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing us the entire bag was full of chips instead of air and crumbs. Despite our moaning, we still bought the bags, ever hoping they would be full of substance. Other businesses soon learned of the devil’s trickery, saw its success, and decided to replicate it in other products. Thus, the world came to know padding, the act of adding superfluous content to a product to make it appear larger than it actually is.

Padding is the busy work you get from your boss or teacher to make it seem like you have actual responsibilities. It is the flashbacks, summaries, and side arcs that TV shows use to stretch a series over an entire season. It is the literal padding in bras or jock straps to boost the wearer’s confidence and sex appeal. Padding is even the unnecessary lists Solomon Rambling employs to rack up a word count. In each instance, padding manipulates you into thinking you are receiving a robust experience. Upon uncovering and extracting the meaningless stuffing, you come to feel shame for being deceived and disappointment for finally recognizing the product is mainly fat and little muscle.

Video games have embraced padding as fervently as a cliché insane asylum, and gamers have gobbled it all up. Grinding, fetch quests, collect-a-thons, and forced back-tracking now represent accepted video game mechanics. It didn’t register that Mario Odyssey was reusing Broodal bosses until my partner pointed it out. It was unconsciously obvious to me that Mario games reuse bosses like a college kid reuses underwear after missing laundry day for the third week in a row. Padding has even been used as a method to justify micro-transactions; we need only look at the recent Star Wars Battlefront II debacle to see how confident developers/publishers are with packaging padding as solid content.

I could devote an entire rant to the various ugly incarnations of padding, but I would essentially be screaming at a dead dog to get up and move. Neither the dog nor padding are going anywhere, so we might as well work with what we have. There is still value to be had from these nuisances, and although I will certainly ramble about some criticisms in this article, if we do enough dissecting, we can salvage something special from all of this. And yes, people have already called animal services on me, so let me be.

So Much Fluff

But let’s start with the bad because we’re equal parts sadistic and whiny. When considering the evils of padding, remember to think of the four D’s: dilute, deter, devalue, and d-copy. Each of these represents a significant type of padding, but by no means is this an exhaustive list. Other forms of padding do exist. I just don’t want to write about them.

In gaming, diluting occurs when low-effort objectives are inserted into the game. This content can be mandatory or supplementary, but it all tastes like the watered-down chili they sell at Wendy’s right before closing. Super Mario Odyssey—despite its brilliance—has taken diluting to an extreme. In past 3D Mario games, acquiring a Power Star/Shrine Sprite usually involved completing some sort of platforming challenge. Although a large chunk of Super Mario Odyssey’s Power Moons do require platforming skills, a significant portion of the Power Moons can be gained by pounding on random spots, bribing shopkeepers, or looking behind an obstacle. These Power Moons don’t feel purposefully designed; instead, it seems the game developers took turns sneezing on the game’s maps to determine where to sprinkle Moons. Collect-a-thons, irrelevant minigames, and optional mission objectives all fit this category.

Padding acts as a deterrent when it places arbitrary obstacles that stop your progress. Roleplaying games are notorious for this issue, with grinding and random encounters being the serious crimes. Some bosses cannot be feasibly beaten unless your party has enough collective experience, an issue present in my much beloved Xenoblade Chronicles. The Pokémon franchise has implemented grinding so seamlessly that players willingly embrace wasting hours to EV train their team to a point where they can compete against other players who have wasted a similar amount of time on the game. Random encounters, meanwhile, are the equivalent of traffic lights in game design, except every light starts as red and won’t change unless you pump your brake a certain number of times. Fetch quests can also serve as deterrents based on how rare certain item drops are.

Whereas the previous two forms of padding directly impact gameplay, devaluing manipulates a game’s economy and consequently how meaningful your actions are. Many games reward you with in-game cash or prizes based on your performance. Ideally, by the time you finish a game, you should have acquired enough wealth to buy whatever features you could want. However, some games effectively pay you minimum wage for your efforts. Super Bomberman R is the Ebenezer Scrooge of this padding, featuring a store which requires upwards of 600,000 gems to buy everything. The current fastest method to net gems requires you to kill yourself using a specific character on a specific stage in three seconds for 150 gems. With this method, you can eventually buy everything after playing 200 hours of this singular strategy. If you aren’t already screaming in ecstasy at the sheer amount of gameplay Super Bomberman R offers, you’re probably a level-headed creature. I’m not even going to provide any other examples for this category of padding because my only goal for this section was to shit on Super Bomberman R.

With that out of the way, we make our way to copy padding. Copy padding involves reusing in-game assets (such as enemies, locations, or gimmicks), repackaging them slightly, and presenting them as new content. Fire Emblem Warriors (and the Dynasty Warriors franchise in general) churns out copies faster than a sweat shop churns out human rights issues. It features clone characters who have the exact same move sets but different stats (which don’t matter at the end of the day because this is a Dynasty Warriors game), maps which you will revisit more times than a drunk person will use the bathroom, and the same faceless enemies that fall to your all-powerful button-mashing. Spelunker Party utilizes a different form of copying by incentivizing replaying stages to acquire special items that are inaccessible unless you have a certain piece of gear. I count this as copying because you essentially have to replay a stage twice to fully complete it, and no amount of skill can change this.

Why Padding is (Probably) Necessary

The human body benefits from having some fat. Fat cushions your body, helps retain heat, and is vital in processing some nutrients and vitamins. However, we have grown to ignore the positives of fat because we have witnessed what an obesity epidemic can do to a nation. Video game padding has followed a similar path: some padding can be great for a game, but too many games are overweight with the amount of padding stuffed into them, and so we either grow complacent or develop a grudge toward the video game industry. We have forgotten that padding can be healthy.

Taking a historical look at video games, padding was necessary in overcoming a hardware’s limitations. I’m no historian, but I’ve read enough Wikipedia articles to know that there’s a reason why retro video games featured re-skinned enemies, redundant level designs, and minimal gimmicks. After reading up on the technical aspects of early consoles, I have learned that each system has its own magical gremlin living among the wires and microchips. Back in the day, these gremlins had very limited memory and processing capabilities, and the mere thought of rendering multiple enemies at once would make them explode gore-tastically. Thus, programmers had to utilize padding to produce a full game’s worth of content without killing the gremlins.

In the present, padding is still relevant because it makes developing games feasible. As gamers, we expect a certain amount of content to justify the price tag, a topic I have mentioned in my reviews already. Based on what I know from developer interviews, core content takes considerably more time to develop than padding does. The initial DLC for Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle and Breath of the Wild partly show this content issue. Both DLC packs essentially featured old assets combined in new configurations, and both packs were released shortly after each game landed on the system. The meatier content (a new map and hero for Kingdom Battle and the Champions’ Ballad in BOTW) has necessitated longer development periods and thus more wait time.

Consequently, the conundrum comes down to:

Delay the release of a product, spend more funds, and use your workforce to create hours and hours of extra core content.
Fill the game with some padding to complement the main gameplay in order to avoid the above issues.
Do the Splatoon way of things and release a bare-bones product and later add the stuffing.

If every game followed Option A, we would probably see an influx of top-quality experiences, but we would see maybe 10 games a year. That’s a rough estimate, as rough as sand paper on callouses, but you get the point. Delays would become the norm with all games, not just the next Zelda or Smash Bros. game. Thus, if games go with Option B and only use padding as connective tissue for the main content, we can still enjoy solid games without waiting years and years for the next release.

Ultimately, some gamers actually enjoy certain types of padding. The Dynasty Warriors franchise is successful for a reason. Although I personally abhor the collect-a-thon nature of Lego City: Undercover, others eagerly chase that 100% completion mark. I giddily finished every fetch quest in Xenoblade Chronicles, never once questioning why I had to enter and exit an area thirty times in order to acquire monster placentas that somehow could restore a city. We all enjoy achievements, even if most of the challenges were likely generated with a dart board of ideas and a substantial amount of alcohol. Padding can be great and can garnish main content, just like stuffing has its place in the turkey and Super Bowl commercials convince us we enjoy being force-fed marketing campaigns like the cute little sheeple we are.

The Cushioned Content

Padding contributes positively to a game when it is natural. I recognize this is a bit of a cop-out answer because most things are good when they are natural, be it food, conversation, or body hair (no one judges your fetish, Arnold). For padding, specifically, “natural” means the stuffing feels just as relevant as the main content. In my criticism of padding, I could easily identify games which had unappealing, needless fat. Each time I encountered padding in the game, I was partially removed from the experience, either because the game grew more tedious or I questioned why the game included this minigame or that mission or those forced replays. Good padding, meanwhile, is more difficult to pin down because you don’t notice it unless you go looking for it.

For example, both Breath of the Wild and Skyrim feature “natural padding.” For every distinct landmark or bustling city, these two games featured miles and miles of nondescript woods, plains, or mountains. Similarly, for every main quest, there is a quest for delivering certain goods or for taking a picture of this oddly shaped rock or for helping elderly Agnes take a bath, the saggy prune that she is. These copy-paste locations and side quests gets points for being optional and thus entirely ignorable, but they deserve more recognition for fostering the in-game world. Both Skyrim and Breath of the Wild take place on massive maps, and it’s only natural for landscapes to repeat (look at Wyoming for God’s sake) or for people to focus on mundane, everyday things instead of saving the world. Main content creates the world’s outline, and padding fills it in.

THERE’S NOTHING. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING IN WYOMING.

Natural progression is equally desirable. The Binding of Isaac offers examples of both natural and unnatural progress. For those who have not played the game, achievements drive repeated playthroughs, with each accomplishment unlocking a new item or feature that changes the main game. When you first start out, you will complete achievements unintentionally because you reached a certain level or discovered a certain enemy. Padding—in the form of greater variability in the randomly-generated stages—slowly bolsters the game without you having to do anything strange. However, other achievements task you with obscure or absurdly random objectives, such as avoiding all items in a run or collecting four copies of a single upgrade. These achievements require repeated playthroughs with very specific, luck-based conditions. After you have reset your playthrough for the 50^th time, you long for the days when you unlocked content by just playing the damn game as it is.

Finally, I echo that padding is best when you don’t notice it. Sonic Mania’s Blue Sphere stages are nothing more than nostalgia-infused trimmings, but that doesn’t matter because these sections are not only skippable, but they’re designed adequately enough to create some entertainment (barring those who get nauseated from the jagged movements). Similarly, we can ignore that half of Rocket League’s alternative modes are simply shoddy renditions of the core game because Rocket League does not call attention to them. There is no such thing as “Ranked Hoops,” and even the icons for “3 vs. 3,” “2 vs. 2,” and “4 vs. 4” are bigger than the “extras” like “Snow Day.” The developers know what people want, but they keep the padding for those who yearn for options or forget that the modes are bad.

Let’s Have a Soft Landing

By now, I have written enough that I’m in danger of being accused of padding, myself. Because I have used enough food analogies already, I’ll end this with a comparison to makeup. With enough artistic flair and restraint, makeup can accentuate a person’s appealing traits while covering up the acne and wrinkles. Padding can operate the exact same way, but too many developers have been using padding the same ways a pre-teen cakes on the makeup. At a certain point, you cover up all the individuality and substance you ever had, and instead, you’re left with a flaking mask that screams, “I’m trying to be more mature and cultured than I actually am.” Less is not necessarily more (as good padding has shown), but what starts out as superfluous will not simply ripen into something worthwhile.

_________

Do you share my thoughts? Are you confused why I’m picking apart this arbitrary topic? Did you mistake my website for a much better one and are now trying to work your way back? Leave a comment to express your struggles, and I will grace you will my fickle attention.

Dec

2017

Solomon Rambles About Bricks

Lego City: Undercover

Like Stepping on Mega Bloks

Sometimes you shouldn’t 100% complete a game. If you stick with just beating the game—doing only what you need to do to reach your happy ending—you walk away from the experience satisfied. For those who yearn for more, you look to finish all the side quests, collect all the doohickeys, and earn all the achievements. You get to intimately know the game, and for some games, their positive traits shine more brightly as your romance deepens. For other games, you’ll find the more you get to know them, the more you discover their ranker sides, their obsessive clinginess, their toenail hoarding tendencies, or their underground tickling torture rooms.

I should have kept my distance with Lego City Undercover (LCU). If I had just completed the main story missions, I could have set it aside believing it to be a quirky and fun (albeit shallow and repetitive) game. Instead, I chose to pursue 100% completion, tasking myself with combing over every inch of Lego City and replaying every damn stage. After 40+ hours, I achieved the coveted 100% completion, but in doing so, I was baptized in vitriol and hatred. May Lego City melt to the ground.

What is it?

LCU is Lego Island doing its best impression of Grand Theft Auto. From the start, you can tool around the entire city, which is riddled with collectibles, side challenges, and buildable structures the same way a hotel room is riddled with no-no yucky stuff. Because you play as the undercover cop, Chase, you are free to “borrow” anyone’s vehicle for as long as you need it. Just like police officers do in real life. And just like real life, almost everything is breakable, so you are free to rampage, reducing various Legos to smaller pieces of Lego.

If you feel more virtuous than that, you can follow the main story mode across 15 chapters to rid the city of crime. These chapters find Chase transported to self-contained levels which follow his pursuit to capture a convict, Rex, and discover the reason behind said convict’s recent crimes. Like the main open world, these levels contain sprinklings of platforming and combat along with a heaping dose of kleptomania.

As you progress through the game, Chase will find new disguises which unlock new abilities that cannot be executed by just any costume. A robber getup equips you with paint gun. A farmer’s outfit magically bestows you with a chicken to glide from one point to another. A construction worker’s clothes allows you to take coffee breaks. These abilities are necessary to complete tasks littered throughout the game, and if you strive to reach 100% completion, be prepared to revisit every single stage and location to finish all objectives that were previously inaccessible.

What’s good?

The acting is mostly solid, and the writing is entertaining. Pop culture references and absurd humor abound, but it’s endearing how ridiculously PG everything is. Some of the antics may induce eye-rolling, yet LCU earns its charm through its kiddie jokes and Chase’s overconfident yet clumsy nature.
Lego City offers some fun exploration opportunities. Each district feels distinct from the others, and unique landmarks (tunnels, camping grounds, farms, etc.) pepper the locales with enough frequency to incentivize straying from the beaten path.
Vehicles are worthy collectibles. Although the majority of automobiles you encounter handle similarly, you will come across quirky or stylish ones that offer a change of pace. Some will enjoy speeding around in a sports car while others will take pleasure in crossing Lego City on a Segway, moving slightly faster than you would have if you had just walked.

What’s bad?

LCU offers a shallow experience. Combat is little more than button-mashing or waiting to button-mash at the right time. Platforming rarely poses a challenge because Chase will often steer himself to the next platform automatically. Even unlocking new costumes changes very little because most costumes simply allow you to press A at a certain location where other outfits can’t. Lego games have never been paragons of complexity, and LCU doesn’t buck this trend.
Replaying levels and revisiting locations grows tiring. This isn’t an issue for those who just want to beat the main story, but as I stated before, completionists are forced to slog through everything again to find every McGuffin or take a dump on every porch or do whatever the game tells you to do because that’s how you add hours of gameplay to your barebones ditty. Save yourself a headache by not striving for completion, but if you’re that special kind of masochist, have fun visiting every grime-ridden corner of Lego City.
Co-op is a buggy mess. Frame rate drops significantly (just as it does in undocked mode); the game crashes almost every time you play; context-sensitive platforming or actions are unreliable or unresponsive; and car chase sequences are laughably easy because the game renders your pursuers long after you pass their spawn points. I won’t gripe that co-op mode offers nothing new to LCU because co-op struggles to even replicate the quality of single-player.

What’s the verdict?

Now that I’ve spat enough bile all over my keyboard, I can recognize my stance on Lego City: Undercover is comparatively harsh. Younger gamers should be able to ignore most of the game’s faults because they have yet to feel the apathetic, crushing weight of age. Hell, even older gamers can probably get a kick out of LCU if they overlook the cooperative mode and set the game aside after completing the final chapter. However, like an aged ass, I am too curmudgeonly and stubborn to budge from my opinion. On its surface, LCU is a sufficiently attractive person with a semi-large nose and some noticeable love handles. However, once you get to know each other a little better, you realize that this person is a god-dawn home-wrecking, soul-sucking bitch. I mean, holy hell, Cindy.

Arbitrary Statistics:

Score: 5.5
Time Played: Over 40 hours
Number of Players: 1-2
Games Like It on Switch: Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2, Lego Worlds

Scoring Policy

Dec

2017

Solomon Rambles About Celibacy

Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime

Well Past the Honeymoon Days

Conformity feels good. You get to be part of a group, and you know you’re among folks who share your thoughts. In the review world, sharing the popular opinion provides you a safety bubble. No one will question why I gave Breath of the Wild a 10 because countless others have already done so. If I gave it a 7, however, I face the potential wrath of fans who will question my judgment, label me an attention whore, or DDoS attack my website (all of which happened to the Jimquisition). Fortunately, most of my opinions have aligned with popular consensus, so I haven’t experienced angry readers attempting to claw my eyes out. I also don’t have readers in general, so there’s that, too.

Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime (LIADS) is my first foray out of conformity. Prior to the game being released on the Switch, I had heard people continually heap praise on it, proclaiming it to be one of the best co-op games along with Overcooked. Almost every single professional reviewer has given it least an 8. Accolades have followed this game, no matter where it appears. And for the life of me, I can’t find it anything but pretty okay.