Lurker > Paratroopa1

Avatar: The Last Airbender

Batman: The Animated Series

Probably BOTW2 but I'm also really looking forward to Mina the Hollower

LeonhartFour posted...

Metroid Other M

Yeah I was thinking Super Metroid but that's close enough

Chrono

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/9/8/AAA-H0AADiSy.jpg

The thing is, after a while, you kind of stop treating this like a mafia game and you start treating it like a puzzle game. It's not a game to be won - it's a game to be solved, and with enough time, the game gives you the tools to solve it. One of the most interesting mechanics in this game is that you character has actual stats - Charisma, Intuition, Logic, Performance, Charm, and Stealth. Charisma makes your arguments more influential, Intuition gives you a random chance to spot people who are lying, Charm makes people less likely to vote for you, etc. Each stat also gradually unlocks new actions - having a high intuition allows you to have everyone "Say they're human" for example, which can let you get random checks to tell who's lying. There's a lot of ambiguity about which stats are actually the best to have, since they're all pretty useful in different ways, but eventually you can level them all up and become a mafia god.

Eventually you just start running through these games as fast as possible and that's when the game gets weirdly fun - characters start using more of their advanced actions against you, too, and each of the game's 14 characters have their own stats and playstyle, so you kind of learn what their quirks are and how to manage them over time. This game CAN be kind of logicked out, just by looking at voting patterns, seeing who's defending who, watching for who's making sort of odd moves, etc, but it's not immediately obvious that this is all possible. A lot of this game is way too opaque - there's a surprising amount of depth behind this mafia simulator that the game never tells you about and that you can beat the entire game without ever noticing. But who even needs to logic things out? With high enough stats, you can catch all the liars, strongarm the group into doing what you want, and then afterwards the Gnosia won't even kill you. It's sort of a fun power fantasy, especially for someone who's played a lot of mafia over the years.

The real draw to this game is actually the story and characters, though. The actual VN portions. This game IS still a VN, despite having a much heavier gameplay portion than most. As you loop through 100+ mafia games, each time you gradually start to piece together more about 'what's going on', as well as seeing random events that give you more details about each character's backstory, which you need to learn in order to complete the game. Where this game really shines are in its characters; they're goofy looking at first but they all turn out to be really fun and interesting in their own ways, as well as being very easy to differentiate during the mafia games themselves, which is important. I was really surprised that by the end of the game, I actually really gave a shit about these characters, and I was really interested in the broader plot of the story, which actually has some pretty interesting twists.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/9/9/AAA-H0AADiSz.jpg

I actually wish there was MORE talking in this game, which is wild. Like, all of the story-related interactions between the characters are a ton of fun, and surprisingly well written, and the game actually kind of leaves you wanting more because they're so few and far between. You have to play a LOT of somewhat-dull mafia games to get there, and I surprised myself with how much I actually WANTED to trudge through the mafia games to get to them. I almost dropped this game 20% of the way in or so, but by the time I was 50% in or so I was HOOKED. I HAD to see the rest of it, and I'm glad I did.

Gnosia is a really hard game to recommend, because it's grindy, and kind of a slog, especially if you're kind of already familiar with mafia and not newly enchanted by the concept. But I slowly grew kind of fascinated by the mafia simulator aspect, and the plot and characters are Zero Escape-y enough in their qualities to keep me invested. I'm actually really glad I played this one at the end of the day, even if I will also pretty freely talk shit about how much it sucks. I think that if you like mafia and weird mystery VNs you're sort of contractually obligated to see this one through - there's nothing really quite like it.

Next up: Oh no! I'm caught in a time loop where I have to talk about time loop games!

#19: Gnosia

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/9/6/AAA-H0AADiSw.jpg

If you haven't played Gnosia yet, then I need you understand that when I say Gnosia is a Mafia simulator, I mean that excruciatingly literally.

VNs that have vaguely Mafia-like aesthetics are in vogue lately, I guess. I mean, there's Danganronpa, which people often describe as being like Mafia. This is obviously wrong, of course. Sure, there's debate and an uninformed majority trying to capture an informed minority, but it's really just one person trying to kill someone and getting away with it; it's not Mafia. I've heard that Raging Loop has a more literal Mafia-like (well, Werewolf-like I suppose) setup, but it's still just part of the plot; the game is a VN, you don't have to literally play mafia.

You do have to literally play Mafia in Gnosia. There are VN vignettes sprinkled throughout, but basically the whole game is playing randomized Mafia games against the AI. That's the game.

If you think playing mafia against the AI sounds like a really terrible idea... well okay, it pretty much is, but you have to hear me out on this one. Give me a chance to build up Gnosia as a good game.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/9/7/AAA-H0AADiSx.jpg

Gnosia is a game that takes place on a spaceship with a cast of 15 people, including your faceless player character. The "Gnosia" are some kind of alien species that infect other players and make them try to murder everyone else. (Luckily, I already discussed Among Us, so I can just point out the obvious parallels and move on.) You are also stuck in a time loop, for story reasons. In order to defeat the Gnosia, you play mafia; voting on people to put into cold sleep, having people die one by one at night, and eventually trying to vote all of the Gnosia off. There's 'engineer' and 'guardian angel' roles that work like cop/doctor (or whatever werewolf equivalent you're more familiar with) as well as (confusingly) a 'doctor' role that can view alignments of dead players (game is flipless) and some other stuff like lost wolves (or whatever they're called in mafia) and third-party survivors. Of course, sometimes you're the Gnosia, and you need to avoid getting voted off. You're reading this on Board 8, so chances are I don't really need to re-explain Mafia to you. The rules are nearly identical.

There's rounds of debating where everyone decides who to vote for, but instead of, you know, talking it out like two actual humans, you instead have a list of actions you can perform that will influence the outcome of the voting in various ways. You gain more actions as the game progresses but you can really only start out with saying someone is suspicious, or saying someone is not suspicious. Which leads to fascinating conversations like:

"You said that A was suspicious."
B: "Hmmm... yeah, A seems pretty suspicious."
C: "I agree! A is suspicious!"
A: "What? Everyone thinks I'm suspicious?"
D: "I don't think there's anything suspicious about A."

Get used to this; this game is like 20 hours long and half of it is just this. I know, it sounds great.

Alanna82 posted...

Parasite Eve?

Wasn't what I was thinking of

Anagram posted...

Punch-Out!! (Wii): This is the best possible translation of Punch-Out!! into Wii graphics, I'll give it that. All of the characters' personalities are still clear. However, they removed all of the absurd racism of the original games, and is it really Punch-Out without it? In all seriousness, this is the best possible cartoon-y boxing game aesthetic you could have.

They got rid of the absurd racism? This is news to me

(to be clear, I think it's pretty benign, but the ethnic stereotypes are still in full force in this game)

FAITH: Chapter III

Uh, okay. I think I remember seeing the speedrun of chapter II and here's chapter III. I mean, the game is kinda cool and interesting looking, but I get absolutely nothing out of this speedrun at all. It just kind of seems like walking for 10 minutes. I don't know why you'd speedrun this. At least it was short, unlike the Pathless, but I'm putting this at the bottom just on principle - I don't know what the point of this run was. It was boring. I got nothing out of it as a viewer.

- "We have managed to sequence break the hell out of this game, but the problem is, it's a terribly boring run because nothing happens because everything's so broken." I can't tell if she's talking about this run, or an even more boring version of the run she didn't do.

- I do like the camera mechanic, though, where you take pictures and you can see the room for a brief second (and sometimes it's spooky). But uh, not a great viewing experience, since I REALLY can't tell what's happening.

- Oh noooooo they're still doing limericks during the downtime

Sly 2: Band of Thieves

Sure, it's a speedrun! That's fine. I haven't played this series and didn't get a ton out of watching it, personally, but I'm sure you would if you like this series. The runner is good and the commentary was good, but I had very little to say about this run, it was just kind of there.

- The fastest language in this game is Korean. That's new! Don't see that too often.

- This runner is running on a very loud keyboard, which confuses me. How do you play this game on a keyboard? I don't think there's a PC port. So either you plugged a keyboard into your PS3, or you're running this on an emulator? Or you have an exceptionally noisy PS3 controller? I'm perplexed by this. I don't think they ever brought it up in the run unless I'm just tired and missed it.

- I'm also confused by the fact that this is just a run of episode 1. So... not the full game? Doing one 'episode' of a game isn't that unusual but this doesn't seem like an episodic game, so I'm kinda confused by it not being the full game. I mean, that's fine, I think I would have been bored by like a 3 hour run or whatever, I'm just curious why it's one episode.

- This run is giving me Ty the Tasmanian Tiger vibes where the runner and commentary are great but the run doesn't leave a lasting impression.

- "So we have these strats called Nave strats, for some reason." (Nave is the runner)

Max Fleischer's Superman

Return of the Obra Dinn

Anagram posted...

Wario Land: Shake It: Wario has always been an unappealing design to me, but the actual visual style is pretty good. It's simplistic, but everything is very distinctive, so I'll accept it. I don't really understand how Ashley has such a huge following for Smash, she's such a non-character.

Ashley isn't even in Wario Land: Shake It so I feel like you just went with the WarioWare franchise?

Pokemon

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/1/4/AAA-H0AADiIG.png

Well, that's... concerning. I wonder what happened to -

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/1/5/AAA-H0AADiIH.png

Oh goddamnit.

Lest you think this was just an acquisition to broaden a portfolio, the developers came out after this and said that due to the FTX acquisition, they'd be looking into introducing blockchain-related technology into the game, including NFTs. The community went properly apeshit and everything was on fire. It's all been burnt down and not much is left now, as you can see by the lack of reviews since, although the game does remain active.

I voiced my opposition to this as well, because putting a bunch of blockchain shit in a game that has no use for it did not sit well with me, either. To be clear, I don't actually think they'll ever *succeed* in introducing NFTs into this game, because they'd need to have some kind of actual plausible use case, and they simply don't have one, so any plans to try to do this are eventually going to get scuttled because they literally can't implement them. As of today, they still haven't come up with any bad ideas, let alone good ones.

But that doesn't really matter to me too much; I just don't want to be involved in a game that's voicing its active support for some crypto scam shit. The moment after this announcement came down on March 22, 2022, the SBB Discord became immediately overrun with cryptobros just looking for the next big crypto grift to hitch a ride on, hoping that this game will be the big thing that finally launches their cherished web3 gaming utopia, with not really much care for the actual game itself except for the fact that they've convinced themselves that it must be cool now because it's part of the cryptosphere. Well, great. Can't say that's a community I want to be a part of, so I left some feedback on the whole situation and noped out. I know that they need the money to continue work developing the game, so I don't wish them ill, but that really sours me on the game and it did for a lot of other players as well which is only going to make the game worse to play.

I earnestly do hope that this kind of blows over at some point - I don't truly want SBB to selfdestruct over this, because it's a really good game, and it was a lot of fun for a while. I haven't completely written off the idea of coming back to it someday, and while I know I'm trying to make a pretty compelling case for being turned off from the game right now, I'd still recommend it nontheless (since I don't think playing it for free is going to do much to promote a collapsing crypto market at this point). For now, though, I guess this is kind of where I'm at with the game. It's still getting updated; maybe I'll play it again in a few months and see what they've changed, or maybe I won't. Cutting myself free from the game did feel kind of freeing; I was probably playing it a little bit too much (at 267 hours, this is my second-most played game on the list) and having more time to focus on other games was probably healthier, anyway.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/1/6/AAA-H0AADiII.jpg

So RIP Storybook Brawl, a game that is not at all dead, but it is at least a little bit dead to me. It had a good run and crash and burned in the most March 2022 way possible. I'm hopeful that in the future I won't have to deal with any more of my GOTY candidates getting bought by crypto firms.

Next up: Hey remember how I talked about there actually being four time loop games on this list? This was the one I categorized wrong for no reason. It's definitely a time loop game, and it's my third-favorite time loop game of 2021! Go on, guess!

#20: Storybook Brawl

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/0/9/AAA-H0AADiIB.jpg

It's amazing how some pretty good games can exist and have thousands of active players, and yet I'll just never have heard of them, because I haven't discovered it and nobody in any of my circles ever mentions it. How did everyone else stumble upon it, then? Were they all parts of other communities that did discover this game, or are they just better at finding new games to play than I am? Or is it just random chance and they stumbled upon it in a Steam queue or something? This is a problem that plagues me even now - people keep mentioning games in this topic I haven't heard of and it's like, how did I not know about this game before?

Storybook Brawl is one such game - I didn't pick it up until it became popular for a few months on one of my smaller discord servers. To be fair, I probably wouldn't have given it much of a chance if it wasn't recommended to me, because the people who played it said they were also pretty surprised by how good it was. It's got that whiff of "online free-to-play fantasy-strategy game that's trying to be the next Hearthstone or League of Legends or whatever" stench coming off of it, which kinda makes me nope out right away. Feels desperate, and I'm not really into that kind of scene - too likely to be toxic. Not my vibe.

But it IS free to play, and it WAS recommended despite it kind of looking like some boring autobattler junk, so I gave it a try, and it became my new addiction for three months.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/1/0/AAA-H0AADiIC.jpg

Storybook Brawl is one of those games where I have trouble categorizing the genre. It's an autobattler. Not quite a card game, since there aren't really cards; you're buying characters to put on your team, powering them up, and then they fight another person's team of characters. A game consists of 8 players, each of whom plays a main 'hero' who gives you special abilities that affect your team, and you get matched up 1v1 with other players, fighting each other, losing health if you lose a battle, getting bigger and better characters on your roster, until there's one winner.

First thing I noticed was that I wasn't giving this game's theming enough credit because it's actually pretty great. This game has a fairy-tale theme, all of its characters being drawn from old folktales or mythology in the public domain that have mostly been popularized by Disney, but the art in this game is great and gives all of the characters fun, clever twists, which make them fun to play. This game has an impressive roster of hero characters to play - again, League of Legends vibes here - but all their art is really fun and cute.

This game does have a free-to-play model, which I was highly skeptical of at first, but it's not a very scummy one, so it works out. Every game, you get four hero choices: one of the eight 'starting' heroes that everyone has, one hero from any of the other 25+ selections, and then two other heroes also from the other 25+, but you can only pick them if you own them by purchasing them with in-game currency. So even if you don't buy any heroes, you still get choices, and even if you do own a hero it doesn't mean it'll get offered in any given game, so you can't use it all the time - you'll still have to play some different heroes now and then. You can use money to get the currency you need to buy them, but you can also build it up by just playing, so there isn't really much of a need to spend money. There's actually very little reason to spend money, which might be part of the problem with their business model.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/1/1/AAA-H0AADiID.jpg

Anyway, despite the idea of an autobattler making it sound very un-tactical and just kind of luck-based, the strategy in this game is actually really well made. Every character has interesting and potentially very powerful abilities while still being very well balanced and team composition matters a lot. There is still a fair bit of luck of the draw involved, especially in upgrading your characters (having 3 of the same character upgrades them, powering them up and giving you an item), so that aspect can be pretty frustrating and I've gotten mad at this game for being bullshit quite a lot, but putting together good team compositions is a lot of fun. The fact that this is a competitive game really makes drafting a good team feel rewarding, because then you get to beat the crap out of some rube who didn't put together a team as good as yours (or maybe just got unluckier than you). There's enough randomness here for every game to feel different, too; there's quite a few potentially winning comps out there, although the game gets patched every month and last I played, trees were way overpowered and needed to be taken down a notch.

So I got really hooked on it. Every game takes like, I don't know, 15 minutes or so, and I just get a big dopamine hit from trying to win games and watch my (stupid, completely pointless) rating go up. All the heroes play super differently so every game is new and fun and I can never resist playing just one more. I actually played so much that I managed to make the top 200 of a monthly leaderboard in rating once; I think that was mostly just luck and convenient timing, but I'm still gonna brag about it. I did the monthly tournaments for a while and never qualified in the first day, but I came pretty close at least; my abilities in this game are competitive. It's fine, I'm sure that one day, after I continue to play this game for a while and develop my skills, I'll make it out of qualifiers. I expect to enjoy this game for a nice, long while -

After the birth of her first child, a career woman must now balance taking care of her family with seeking new opportunities at her old job.

RaidenGarai posted...

That's a very frequent conversation we have in the NES speedrunning community, and it really varies by game as far as the impact emulation vs. original hardware has. With most games they just ban certain emulators like Retroarch, and there are a lot of differing opinions on MESEN. I prefer to play on original hardware myself, but as long as people can show they're playing legitimately on an emulator I couldn't care less if they use one, as long as it's within the rules of the specific game and they aren't using features of the emulator that aren't available on original hardware.

For Friday the 13th, we didn't allow emulators up until recently because of how they could manipulate the games RNG due to how resets work. With that run there are 256 RNG seeds the game can give you, and the seed depends on the exact frame you press start on to begin the game (I want to say it was frame 110). When you reset on a console it hops to a random point in those tables and you can't really predict anything, but on emulators it always resets to the same state, so people were able to get the right seed around 40% of the time, where console players would be hitting reset for hours just to get a few attempts, and couldn't properly replicate that even with a full power off each time. Thankfully we have a romhack now that always gives the good starting seed, but prior to that it sucked.

Sorry for the long winded explanation there, but I feel like I might be in a pretty unique situation to be able to explain some of the emulator vs. original hardware thing from a speedrunner/moderator perspective.

This is a cool explanation. I do think it's still best, as much as possible, to try to make emulation a legitimate alternative for real speedrunning, since having original hardware and a good setup to stream it on is still a major undertaking for many people and can gatekeep people out, and it's only going to get more and more difficult to maintain the hardware that runs these old games, whereas emulation is forever. But, it'll require making sure that emulation and hardware are as close as possible. Obviously on some consoles it's really not there yet, and occasionally weird issues like this crop up.

Super Castlevania IV

A favorite speedgame of mine, I like that it's just really straightforward and technical. A few glitches here and there, but just a nice display of precise execution for 40 minutes. Makes for a good race, because it's slow paced enough to follow what's going on, there's no route divergence, and both players are close for the entire race. This is just a solid race, nothing much more to say about it. The commentary is informative and VERY chill, so this has a low-energy-but-in-a-good-way feel to it, like watching golf. The commentary is a few seconds behind, which does negatively impact the race a bit.

I don't really have any bullet points for this one - nothing especially funny or interesting happened, it's just a good race. There were a couple of deaths and lead changes here and there and the race was pretty close, occasionally synced. This run is basically what it says on the tin. Watch this if you want to see two people play Super Castlevania IV for 40 minutes. It's good, but it falls short of my 'recommendations' list because I don't think it stands out.

There was a prize segment here, with Sent and Mr Game and Shout. I like the Link's Awakening perler and the Mario pipe planter. Nothing notable or funny about this prize segment, it was straightforward.

Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance

This run was an unexpected hit for me. Any Castlevania speedrun is always a really solid time, but I didn't know what to expect out of Harmony of Dissonance - what I got was not just a game with super interesting routing and technical execution, but one of my favorite runners so far. The runner for this one, JupiterClimb, does all of his own commentary WHILE he's running the game, and somehow manages to perfectly keep up - he's funny and insightful and explains EVERYTHING he does with perfection, while his execution never once suffers for it. I don't know if I've ever seen a runner juggle these two tasks so well before without having a couch commentator to bounce off of. This made this run a highlight for me, personally - definitely a run to watch.

- How the fuck do you pronounce Juste's name? Because the runner pronounces it as "Juiced," and I can't get over the idea of him being named Juiced Belmont.

- "I understand this game, over the years, earned a mixed reputation." I have to admit that I actually haven't given HoD much of a chance, and I think that maybe I'd like to go back and give it another shot.

- The combat in this speedrun is super interesting - you can get huge damage stacks by having multiple hitboxes overlapping an enemy at once, and the runner uses this to excellent effect. It's really fun to watch.

- There is ONE major problem with this run, which isn't anyone's fault - there were major internet issues in the first few minutes, which renders it unwatchable for a bit, and they had to cut away and get things under control. Fortunately, when the run comes back, there are very few hiccups afterwards and the rest of the run proceeds smoothly, but I was really worried there for a second. Keep this in mind when you watch.

- Oh god, they're doing a gimmick of LIMERICK donations during the downtime. This started at some point in between the last run and this run. Call me no fun, but I don't like the limericks.

- "Can we give it up for online block?" Only the donation reader applauds. Yeah, probably not gonna get a very warm reaction when it's causing a huge logistical problem at that very moment (though I do think having a hybrid event is a great idea).

- An animator for Netflix's Castlevania donated which is cool.

- Just a cool little technical thing I'm noticing - for most runs, especially SCIV just before this, I've had to full screen the window to really be able to see the game well and follow along with it closely, as opposed to having it in the corner of my screen while I do something else. But this game? Well, HoD is DESIGNED to be looked at on a small screen, so everything pops out really well even if I have a small window open. This is especially true after the saturation levels in this game were turned up to 11 as a response to how difficult CotM was to see.

- Goddamn the Gradius shield is so broken, it rules. It's fun that you can break the game enough that being super underleveled doesn't matter. It takes like over a minute of going to a side room and doing a long puzzle to get it, and it still saves tons of time.

- "How many people here love box puzzles? Oh, nobody? Well, bad news." (Fortunately, the internet troubles pop up around this point again.)

- Extremely cool final boss. This run was a really good run - nearly all of the execution is nailed.

---Highlights---
Kirby and the Forgotten Land
Mass Effect
Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back
Ninja Gaiden
Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance
---Recommended---
Shadow of the Colossus
Rolled Out!
Spyro the Dragon
Super Bonk
Blaster Master
Warden: Melody of the Undergrowth
McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure
Pokemon Snap
Ty The Tasmanian Tiger
---Decent---
Super Castlevania IV
Bubble Bobble Part 2
Perspective
Perfect Dark
Alien Cabal
Altered Beast
NiGHTS into dreams...
WarioWare: Touched!
---Skippable---
Super Dream Dasher
Sonic Generations
Bulk Slash
The Pathless

First of all, this game has great characters, somehow, which is amazing because the entire game it feels like the writers are fighting back against the higher-ups' demands to not make any original characters. It almost feels like a running joke that the game is leaning on, and it's better for it. In addition to making better use of the unique members of the Mario cast, like Kamek and Bowser Jr, the game is intent on even the generic Mario baddies having a lot of personality here, and it shows. "Bob-omb" was eventually given the name "Bobby" in localization, and despite being a generic Bob-omb, he's great! They make the most of him. But the best character is the obligatory partner character, Olivia. The obligatory partner characters in the past couple of games were kind of bland, in my opinion, but Olivia's fucking adorable and I love her. The game is great every time she gets to talk, and that's most of the game, so the game is great. She's probably one of my favorite characters in anything ever.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/4/9/AAA-H0AADh8J.jpg

Origami King FINALLY ditches the stage-based world design that they've been using since Super Paper Mario, and I think this really makes the game feel more like an adventure, rather than a series of tasks. Sticker Star and Color Splash both had this terrible idea of having a Super Mario-style stage select screen, which artificially breaks up the world into chunks, and the feeling of playing 'levels' isn't something I want out of the series. This is one way in which Origami King DOES harken back to the days of PM/TTYD, instead opting for their style of having a hub town that organically connects to a bunch of different areas, with no world map. It's a subtle difference, but it matters! This makes the world a lot more interesting to traverse and explore. This contributes a lot to the plot being more interesting and the scenario-writing being a lot more entertaining as well, I think, as well as making the game's obligatory Toad-hunting a lot more fun.

The regular combat in this game is boring, but the boss fights are surprisingly fun! They're not really hard, but instead of lining up enemies, you instead have to rearrange a path of arrows for Mario to follow where he collects powerups a lot the way, and there's a lot more room for fun tactical choices here, as well as generally giving a much more open-ended puzzle to solve. The boss fights each have a lot of personality; all of the bosses being a bunch of office supplies sounds like a shitpost, and it is, but they're also somehow the funniest and most original part of the game. Go figure.

All of this adds up to a game that I... actually gave a shit about! Huh. That's an interesting feeling. I've been spinning my damn wheels with this franchise for so long that it kinda came out of left field that I enjoyed a Paper Mario game again. I don't know what it is about this one; it just has some actual animating essence behind it. The writing and characters are all hilarious, the scenarios are fun, the world's fun to explore and has a lot of really clever areas, the boss fights are actually rewarding to get to, and at the end, I felt like it was an adventure worth my time! Imagine that!

Honestly, this game's great. Sure, if it was a return to form like PM64/TTYD, it'd be like, in my top 3. But this list is really competitive and my top 20 is pretty much only games I absolutely loved. Anyway, bring on Bug Fables 2, that's gonna be the real shit if it's anything like TTYD somehow.

Oh fuck I forgot to talk about Origami King's soundtrack. It's FUCKING INSANE, in a good way. Probably my favorite soundtrack of any game on this list. Okay that's it.

Next up: This game is my only negative review on Steam!

#21: Paper Mario: The Origami King

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/4/6/AAA-H0AADh8G.jpg

This is not an admission I was wrong.

After all, I like to think I'm a pretty good judge of character when it comes to games. Since I made a top 50 list and all, it might look like I must have played a ton of games, but the reality is that I probably only played 80 games or so, and I'm just really good at picking out the good ones ahead of time, based on trailers, reviews, gameplay footage, recommendations, etc. I don't know if it's because my tastes have calcified with age, or if it's because I've grown wiser and more in tune with my own preferences, but I know what I like and I know how to find it. Sometimes I can be wrong!

Paper Mario: The Origami King is not one of those times where I was wrong. It just happened that the game was the best possible version of what it could have been. These things happen.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/4/7/AAA-H0AADh8H.jpg

The trailer for Origami King came out in early 2020, and I believe rumors about the upcoming game were floating around since before the pandemic, possibly as early as late 2019. At the time, the rumors were making some pretty big claims - partners are back! This one's more like TTYD! It's a return to form for the series! I was skeptical, to say the least, in that I was pretty sure this was all nonsense and I was going to be let down.

I had pretty good reason to feel that way - the series has only ever been on a downward trajectory. Quite literally, in fact; my ranking of the previous PM entries is 1 > 2 > 3 > 4 > 5. PM and TTYD are both legendary, and are really more of a 1a and 1b; Super Paper Mario was a weird experiment that succeeded in some ways, but was sort of an awkward sidestep for the franchise as a whole; Sticker Star and Color Splash were, to put it lightly, a letdown. Sticker Star's pointless combat, dull level design, and nearly completely missing charm would have been bad enough, but Color Splash was more of the same and showed a commitment to this "New Paper Mario" style; few original characters, no RPG combat, no party members, no interconnected world, no real plot to speak of, just a boring series of chores that you have to do.

For whatever reason, it seems to have been successful, and I knew that despite fan backlash, they weren't gonna change up this formula in any major way anytime soon. I don't really like to be excessively negative, and I'm too old at this point to spend a lot of time complaining about this, so whatever; I know Nintendo's not gonna make anything as off-the-wall insane as TTYD ever again, and Bug Fables exists to fill the old-Paper Mario gap in my life, so it's fine. Zombie series, these things happen, it's whatever. At least the soundtrack will be good (incredibly, I'd rank the soundtracks 5 > 4 > 3 > 2 > 1. this is an anomaly I cannot explain).

Trailer came out, and I was well rewarded for my skepticism with that little burst of dopamine that comes from knowing that I'm right. I pretty much knew what we were gonna get here. The combat system was new, but it appeared to me as though it was going to have the same problems as the Neo Paper Marios; scant rewards for combat and a lack of RPG mechanics that make every fight feel the same. No partners. There's a Bob-omb character who follows you around, but aha, he introduces himself as... Bob-omb. So no original characters, once again; all the Mario characters have to be perfectly on-model and you can't have fun with them. There's some interesting little tidbits in the trailer; the origami theme is neat, and the plot of this game looks like it might be properly off the rails. But it's not enough to interest me. I'm gonna pass on this game. Not interested. I've been through this twice. Fool me twice, shame on me and all that.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/4/8/AAA-H0AADh8I.jpg

I wouldn't have bought the game, so I didn't. But I do live with a family who buys pretty much every tentpole Nintendo game, so I had access regardless. And I mean, as negative as I've been, I'll obviously give it a chance if it's free. My mom said I should give it a chance - she didn't dislike Sticker Star or Color Splash, but she indicated that this one was a lot different and had some interesting moments, so... okay! Why not. Surely it can't be that bad. Maybe they've learned a few things!

First, the bad. Origami King's random battles aren't very interesting, and this was a bit of a hangup for me at first. This game has a mechanic where you have to spin a board around to line up enemies for a full-power attack, and while the puzzle mechanics of it are at least a little bit fun, most normal battles are very easy and don't require much thought, there aren't really many tactical choices to make aside from just solving the puzzle, and there isn't much reason to fight. I avoided as many battles as I could because getting into a fight was just sort of a boring waste of time. Not a threat, but not really a reward, either. So that part - well, it's an improvement over stickers (although limited-use attacks still make a return here anyway, for no reason), but it's not very compelling.

But I ranked it #21 for a reason, right? Well, it turns out that everything else about this game is actually really good, against all odds and indications otherwise. All of the magic from the original games that was lost in the last two entries; it's back. I don't know how it came back, but it's back.

It's "a new standalone rhythm game in the Necrodancer universe", whatever that means.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MX9JlggiCHo

Zelda

MZero posted...

I feel like Mickey is being grossly underestimated here

I think people are sort of conflating recognizability with popularity without really meaning to. It's not that Mickey is the most popular character, or the most frequently appearing, or the one that people spend the most time thinking about. But his sheer degree of penetration, as the brand icon for the largest entertainment company in the world for many, many decades, is just unmatched. I don't think it's going to remain like this forever, but the generations haven't changed over enough yet for that to be true. Way too many 70+ year olds out there who will have no trouble recognizing Mickey but won't know whatever the hell else we're talking about, not to mention cross-culturally he's just fuckin everywhere. It won't be everyone, of course, but the number of characters who match his global penetration isn't many. I don't think he's a clear #1, because I do think some characters like Mario and Superman are still well within the conversation, and because I truly do not know the media landscape of too many countries to make a truly educated guess, but downplaying Mickey would be an error.

Jakyl25 posted...

How did that happen? Some oversight?

The copyrights just weren't renewed, so they fell into the public domain on their own. Crazy, I know! It's the Max Fleischer cartoons from the early 1940's, and if you've never seen them before they warrant a look:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Asc6329mx70

These cartoons are one of my favorite "ahead of their time" things; they just look so vibrant, so well-animated and with such bold cinematography that they don't look like they could be from WWII. These were the primary influence of Batman: The Animated Series a whole 50 years later! I just really love the 'art deco' vibe these films have.

These are public domain so anyone can just put 'em up anywhere. But there are other rights related to even specifically these films that are still owned, like merchandising rights. And the rights to Superman are still owned, of course.

There's a bunch of Superman cartoons that are public domain but that doesn't mean Superman is public domain

Gusty Garden Galaxy
Two Planets Approach the Roche Limit
Prophecy

I tried playing this game and I bounced off of it

I really doubt even 50% of random people polled on the street would recognize Goku. In a younger crowd, sure, but you really have to get in the mindset of like 60 year olds here

Pokemon

Ah yes, probably one of the least well-known Mega Man games

Paratroopa1 posted...

Goku doesn't belong in the same category as any of these things; I could easily find random people on the street who don't know who Goku is.

(Addendum: Presuming that we are considering Goku to be distinct from Son Goku/Sun Wukong in general, which might be a more interesting conversation, but probably still a no-go because of his unrecognizability in the west)

Goku doesn't belong in the same category as any of these things; I could easily find random people on the street who don't know who Goku is.

HasteDeux posted...

I'm quite sure Mario is more well-known than Mickey Mouse. Wouldn't be surprised if Pikachu was also more known than MM.

The crazy thing is, I do think Mario and Pikachu might be the other two in the top 3 which is wild to think about

-hotdogturtle-- posted...

I don't think that there's any shadow of a doubt that Snoopy beats Garfield on this. You're most likely falling for the recent (5-10 years) trend of the modern internet generation turning Garfield into a meme, because I can't think of any other reason why you'd be overrating him so much.

I would take Snoopy over Garfield but I think that YOU might be underestimating the absolutely bizarre phenomenon of Garfield slowly creeping into every facet of popular culture for like three decades, it's not as new as you think

I really don't know. I'm basically 100% certain that I don't personally know anyone in real life who wouldn't recognize either of them, so it would really come down to "people who know snoopy but not garfield" vs "people who know garfield but not snoopy" and I'd have to travel to like some remote eastern europe village and do research there to have any kind of a clue because they're just too ubiquitous in american culture to find anyone who's not familiar with both and is older than 6

I just don't really have a knowledge of other countries satisfactory enough to guess what's popular there

I think Mickey is a safe #1 here though. Pikachu and Mario are too new and Sherlock Holmes lacks an easily identifiable appearance, everything else is out for one reason or another

A shame that that probably won't move the needle on IN-02, it's pretty solid R

New law: turning any failed project into a tax writeoff means you have to submit it to the public domain

I don't even care about anything that was canceled and this fucking sucks. it's just fucking garbage

Chrono

AriaOfBolo posted...

I haven't looked into it but the sense I'm getting is that the actual people of Taiwan see the visit as aggravating things more than actually helping

Yeah this is my question: "Did Taiwan want this?"

Of course, I'm sure that's just as much of a divisive question there, there is likely nothing even remotely approaching consensus on this

Why wouldn't you just throw it onto a streaming service or something at minimum

I'd say #10 is where my actual top 100 material starts and #11-#17 is borderline top 100 material (it's all pretty close together. a lot of good games came out in 2021)

There was an interview with a MSF spokesperson after the Pathless run and he just seemed super chill and cool (and also disarmingly handsome). He just talked a lot about what MSF does, the usual, but he was just personable and engaging - sometimes these people can be awkward (but still important!) interviews but he wasn't at all. His top 5 games: Mass Effect 2, Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament, Team Fortress 2, Ultima Online. Cool to have a spokesperson who's really into gaming.

Ty The Tasmanian Tiger

Not a ton to say about this run except that it had really good commentary, which helps the fact that it's a kind of whatever speed game. It seems like the runner has a lot of tech to show off though and a lot of tight execution, even though the result on the screen isn't really all that interesting to look at - but it's a fast paced run with really good rapport among the commentators so I'm still going to consider it a recommendation. This seems like a shockingly active speedrun community which does help the run seem more interesting, in a way.

- This is the first run that's off-site, by the way. Cool to see a hybrid event, I think, even though it might have caused some logistical issues. I dunno where the runner is from (I'm almost sure he mentioned it, I just wasn't paying attention) but I don't think it's the US.

- This game's from 2002 but I could have easily mandela effected myself into believing it was from the late 90's PS1 era. It's charming to think about the time when 3D mascot platformers were still a huge thing.

- Playing platformers, especially 3D platformers, on a keyboard seems completely insane, but what the hell do I know? He's the one who's absolutely killing this run. I mean, hey, the WR for Super Mario Bros is on a keyboard, so maybe keyboards are just the way to go once you really learn how to use them. Very precise, I suppose.

- "Perfect setup. Bad player though unfortunately."

- Gotta love a game where the hardest skip comes 3 minutes into the run.

- He has to use a controller at one point because for some reason he does a trick that locks him being unable to move with keyboard, but still able to move with a controller. Fascinating.

- "Moral of the story: don't name the hardest trick after yourself."

- There's an emu called RNG-mu and that's my favorite pun so far.

- The end of this run has quite a lot of out of bounds shenanigans, which are always fun to see in a 3d platformer. At the end of the game we end up throwing a boomerang out of bounds and I guess it hits the final boss and kills him or something. Yeah, that makes sense.

- Fast run! He's one second off of second place. This run was well executed.

#22: WarioWare: Get It Together!

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/6/3/AAA-H0AADhKX.jpg

WarioWare is a series that has been around for nearly 20 years now, and it's always kind of just consistently good. As of writing, there are no WarioWare games in my top 100 games all time, but if you go to my next 100 after that there's like... five, including this one. It's just always a really fun time. I have like, undiagnosed ADHD, or something, and WarioWare is kind of perfect for that - always changing, giving you something completely new to look at and do. Its frenetic pace means it's never quite complex enough to be truly engrossing, but it's a really great format just for the sheer creativity of its hundreds of microgames and it's fast pace makes it fun to pick up and play for little chunks at a time.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/6/4/AAA-H0AADhKY.jpg

WarioWare is also a series that I basically thought was dead for a while. There was an explosion of WarioWare games in the early 00's, capping off with Smooth Moves in 2007 and the criminally underappreciated DIY in 2010 (we don't talk about Snapped). And then the series went... dormant, for a bit. Game & Wario came out for the Wii U in 2013, a highly underrated game in my opinion but questionable if it's even a 'true' WarioWare game, since it's a minigame collection and not microgames. And then... again, nothing for a bit. It probably didn't help that Snapped was a failure, DIY came too late in the DS's lifespan to really get noticed, and Game & Wario was on the Wii U, but hardly the series' fault. I actually didn't even really notice when WarioWare Gold came out in 2018, figuring that it was little more than a remake of games I'd already played, so it didn't get a chance to show up on my decade list (DIY and Game & Wario both did), but I played it recently and it's actually really worthwhile.

Get It Together is a pretty emphatic statement: WarioWare is very much an active series. The first 'true' new WarioWare game in a while, really since DIY, and really the first 'big' one since Smooth Moves. It's been about 15 years! But at the same time, the series was never really dormant to begin with - it never went more than 5 years without a quality new release. Just long enough to make me forget the series exists before delivering another quality banger.

There isn't much to say about Get It Together except that it's really, really good. In fact, I'd say it's my favorite 'pure' WarioWare experience since Twisted. I found Smooth Moves' Wii controls a little cumbersome, DIY is fun mostly for its creation engine, G&W isn't really a WarioWare game, and WarioWare Gold is a remake-of-sorts, albeit a good one. Get It Together has no annoying gimmicks, it's not a remake, it's just pure WarioWare fun.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/6/5/AAA-H0AADhKZ.jpg

This game's two schticks are; it's co-op, and you play the games by controlling a WarioWare character inside the games. The first innovation, co-op, is a revelation. Now that WarioWare has co-op, I'm immediately aware that WarioWare has always NEEDED co-op. Mega Party Games was a fun WarioWare party game for GC, but it was mostly taking turns playing microgames - even when there was simultaneously play it was head to head. And that's a lot of fun - the hectic mania of WarioWare is really well suited to having a group of players all get into it at once. But having it be co-op is better; having two people have to coordinate on the same series of 5-second tasks introduces so much more chaos. Two people playing this together for the first time is an absolute blast - it's great to have to react to every game with another person.

But the other gimmick, controlling WarioWare characters, is also a surprisingly good addition to the formula. At first I thought it was mostly just an awkward concession to the co-op formula; normally in a WarioWare game the controls differ from game to game, but here your controls just move your character around, and your character interacts with the game. It seemed weird at first, but it does change the way the game's played quite a bit; instead of needing to learn the controls you need to learn how your character interacts with the game, which is different. The fact that there are a bunch of different characters and they all have completely different control schemes is super interesting; it completely transforms the way some games are played, making some super easy and others very challenging, and expands the design space of the game by changing it up depending on who you're playing. It is also an important concession for co-op play, of course, since it allows two people to be controlling the game at once.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/6/6/AAA-H0AADhKa.jpg

This really brought me back to the first time I played WarioWare, that thrill of being thrown into all these different games and panicking (in a fun way) as I try to figure them out. They never seem to run out of new ideas for games, and the visuals and sound design in every game here are more snort-laughter inducing than ever. It's got a fair bit of content, though I still beat it in a few hours; but it's got a lot of replayability and it's great to play with a friend. It's just a great followup to the series; Nintendo has been killing it in revitalizing their slightly-sidelined series and getting back to basics, making these once inert series fully active again - not the last time on this list I'll be saying that, by the way (still RIP F-Zero though).

Of course, now that they've made an excellent WarioWare game, the WarioWare team can get back to what they really should be making... a new Rhythm Heaven game! There's a bunch of references to Rhythm Heaven in this game, so I'm hopeful!

Next up: I loudly declared that this game would be bad. Whoops!

TMNT2 NES is just a huge nostalgic favorite for me, even if it's not qualitatively better than TMNT4

Metroid

Having thought about it I have to change my mind to Elden Ring > Goldeneye - people tend to vote for 'all-time greats' but I think Elden Ring passes that eye test for most people and it's just insanely popular while Goldeneye's time is sort of past

I said Goldeneye > Elden Ring but I could very easily believe Elden Ring > Goldeneye