 EA was dominating the football space a decade ago. Not only did they have Madden, but they also had the NCAA Football series. In simple terms, this translates to having two games a year that could be built using a single engine. If you want to be super reductive, that's like just updating rosters and printing money. Of course it wasn't that simple. But they definitely were shifting a lot of units and both EA and football fans were happy.
Back in 2013, the NCAA was wrapped up in legal red-tape regarding college athletes profiting off their likeness. As such, that year's NCAA Football 14 was the last game in the series for a very long time. But in recent years some things got ironed out. I don't know the details exactly, but I do know that college athletes are now able to make money. I've seen Livy Dunne in commercials. Just saying. And so now, for the first time in over a decade there's a new game in the series. Although because licensing is weird, it's now called College Football 25. Fans were elated. Me? I'd never played any of those NCAA games. I never watched college football in real life, either. But having played College Football 25, I'm now thinking maybe I should. Labor Day weekend meant that it was time for pumpkin spice and football. I had big time fall fever. Our summer was rough. But fall was a new leaf. We had moved into our new house. My daughter was starting kindergarten. I just wanted football. So I downloaded College Football 25. First up was the character creator for Road To Glory. I made a dude way more muscular than me. He goes to Boston College. In hindsight, I wish I had chosen UMASS, as I'm a fan of the band The Minutemen. But oh well. Straight away, this game makes me want to re-watch We Are Marshall. Totally underrated movie, by the way. And also, this game looks incredibly good. The players, the field, the stadiums, the weather. It's all incredible. PS5 at its finest. The music is also great. Instead of a bunch of licensed stuff, it's got marching bands. Maybe this is lame, but I like it a lot. Marching bands pump you up. It is what it is. There's something almost primal there. It turns out that college football is way different than the NFL. College is all about the running game. As such, games have a totally different flow to them. There's less crazy passes. Less holding your breath. More aggression and immovable objects up against unstoppable forces. Possessions end more often with no points. It's nail-biting in a different way than NFL games. And as a rookie starter quarterback who has spent so many years playing Madden, I got destroyed a lot. I dug into the player progression, the leveling up, the perks, the almost visual novel aspect of the choices made between games. And I got humbled. College Football 25 is a much harder game than any Madden in recent memory. There were so many sacks and so many interceptions. I never totally trusted that my defensive line had things under control so I was always under pressure. Passing was always horrifying. But when I did make an amazing pass, I felt like a golden god. I cannot tell you how many possessions ended with me marching methodically down to the other team's 30, 20, 10 only to throw an interception and blow the whole thing up. In my worst moment, I was sacked in my own end-zone. The majority of my season was legitimately embarrassing. But I loved every minute. That's the mark of a good game. You're losing, and you're losing really bad. And it's still fun. College Football 25 crystalizes the drama of college football. I managed to eek out six wins, and then the season just sort of ended. I thought hard and long and ultimately re-upped for another school year. But more importantly, I'm looking forward to exporting my saved player into Madden 25, which is an option that was a great move on EA's part. For the first time in over a decade they have a reason to sell us two football games in a single year. Bravo.
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 My commute is about forty minutes. That means that I'm in the car for around eighty minutes a day. Which means I'm driving alone four hundred minutes a week. So maybe it's not shocking to say that I end up listening to a lot of podcasts. And spoiler, they're pretty much all video game related. And because of this, I can't help when I start to hear trends. And I also can't help when those trends make me curious about a game. If I listen to five podcasts in a week and all of them are talking positively about the same game, then it kind of sounds like a consensus, right? Even if that experiment is using a generally small sample pool, the repetition can really start to pique my interest.
Often that curiosity pays off. Balatro may have flown under my radar, but as I write this I've got around 140 hours into it. So that was obviously a good recommendation. But other times I'm left a bit let down. Which brings us to Animal Well. Trying to think back, I'm quite sure that I heard many podcasts speaking lovingly about Animal Well. The Game Informer Show? MinnMax? IGN's Game Scoop or Beyond? Some or all of these shows really praised Animal Well. And when I looked it up, it turned out that it was included with Playstation Plus, so why not give it a go, right? Now some of the praise should have scared me off right away. The term metroidvania can go with one of two ways for me. While I myself do love Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night, that doesn't mean I love the myriad games that have aped the blueprint over the decades since. And then there was talk of how this was a metroidvania with no combat, but rather effectively puzzles in every room. Again, this could go either way. Are the puzzles intuitive or am I going to be expected to poke around endlessly? It turns out it was the latter. But let me rewind. Animal Well is a metroidvania with some very old school sensibilities. It doesn't look like a PS1 game or a SNES game, but rather more like an MSX2 game that couldn't have actually existed because of the insane level of detail or the granular physics. But still, it feels very dated right down to the scanlines. Which is fine. It's an obvious aesthetic choice, and I can even find it visually pleasing. You play as a little... ball thing. It kind of looks like a walking potato. Or maybe a bastardized Dizzy. Remember Dizzy? The little egg guy from European computers? Anyway, your potato guy can't really do anything other than walk around and jump. Sometimes he finds firecrackers which he can use to scare away animals. Animals are the main enemies here. Some are more passive than others. And some are very ghostly and aggressive. The whole point of the game is just to open up the map and progress. I guess. But I didn't make it very far. I mean, I opened up plenty of parts of the map, but I was often met with dead ends. These were probably spots where I was intended to figure out some trick to advance, but I just got really bored and frustrated attempting to proceed. I can't help but think that Animal Well is the sort of game best played with friends. Not friends sitting next to you exactly. But I think this is the kind of game that works best if you're chatting with friends about what you've done, what you've seen and how you solved a puzzle. It harkens back to the old 8-bit era of figuring out games via pieces together sections with help from friends on the playground or finding little hints in magazines. In other words, Animal Well feels best suited for a pre-internet world. At least to me. I'm sure I could easily look up a walkthrough by this point and breeze through the game handily. But where's the fun in that? In some ways, this is my own personal catch-22. Playing Animal Well completely on my own blindly is just annoyingly opaque. And yet at this point in my life (I just turned 43, ugh) I just don't have time anymore for hanging out on video game message boards or making plans to game with friends. There's no happy medium for me. It's either go at it alone, or resort to a walkthrough. In that sense, Animal Well makes me think of another beloved indie from recent years - Tunic. Where that game played like a modernized Link's Awakening or something, this one just happens to be a metroidvania. But both are adored for their decision to tell you practically nothing. They are confusing games that invite you to experiment and just spend time picking a direction to walk in and slowly chip away at the game's challenges. I didn't have the patience for Tunic, and I certainly don't have the patience for Animal Well. I'm sure this is a fine game, just not for someone like the 43 year old version of me. Oh well.  I don't even know where to begin talking about Balatro. It has kind of a weirdly forgettable name. But it's an example of why I love video games. I had never heard of it until the day I bought it. I was perusing Metacritic's list of best games of the year and this one caught my eye. The description was basically that it was a roguelike poker. I wasn't convinced, but I downloaded the one hour demo. Almost instantly I was warned that my hour was almost up, so I plunked down my cash.
I've never been a poker guy. But Balatro is truly something else. I say this as I'm nearing 80 hours in the game with no sign of slowing down. Balatro is the game that has dethroned Slay The Spire as my constant go-to between other games. And that's saying a lot, because I've been playing Slay The Spire at least weekly for the past five years. It's the game I play when I don't know what else to play. It's the game I play when I have just a little bit of time to kill before bed. It's one of the most perfectly executed games I've played in a long time. So how do I explain a roguelike poker? It should be simple, right? And it is. It's simple to pick up. But it's oh so deep to master. Alright, so you've got your basic poker hands: straight flush, four of a kind, flush, straight, three of a kind, etc. And each of those has a multiplier. Makes sense, right? So a given hand is the value of each card (chips) times the multiplier. And from there, things get more complex. Much more complex, actually. It all starts with Jokers. You can buy Jokers, of which you can have five of them under normal circumstances. Jokers can do all kinds of crazy global effects. One Joker might add a +4 multiplier to any Heart card you play. Another might add 50 chips to any even numbered card. Another might add X3 multiplier to the final hand of every round. There's even Jokers that allow you to make flushes and straights with only four cards and another lets you skip a sequential number in a straight. And so on. The more you play, the more Jokers you'll unlock and the crazier they get. The key is obviously to know what kind of run you're aiming for and to find and add Jokers that augment accordingly. Then there's Celestial cards, which can actually upgrade your hands. So let's say you want to run a Flush deck. You'll be looking for Jupiter cards which will upgrade Flushes. Now each flush adds extra chips and multiplier to your hands. Then you can get Tarot cards and Spectral cards which do all kinds of crazy global effects. Maybe you can add effects to specific cards. Maybe your King of Hearts has an extra 50 chips when played. Maybe your 2 of Clubs gives you $3 if you're holding it at the end of a round. You can also buy specific cards to add to your deck. Maybe you just want more Clubs. Or maybe you want to collect odd numbered cards. Or maybe you want face cards. Or maybe you want wild cards that have no specific suit so that you can up your chances of a straight flush. The world is your oyster. And then there's the decks. There's a bunch to unlock. Early decks give you simple obvious perks like an extra hand, or an extra discard. Later you'll get into crazy things like decks that only contain two suits. And after you beat the game with one deck, you can keep going deeper with harder versions of it. Now you've got less hands, less discards, less interest earned on winning, harder enemies, more expensive shops... I guess the real beauty of this game is that while it's built upon poker, that's just the bones. It's the roguelike nature of it - the crazy stuff that happens and all the RNG - that makes Balatro worth playing. As I write this I'm closing in on a hundred hours played. And that's over a few short months. And I see no sign of slowing down. It's hard to imagine I'll find a game that I connect with so deeply in 2024. And honestly, I can see myself sticking with this one for years to come. I'm sorry, Slay The Spire. You were a legend for the past five years. But now I think you've become dethroned  Four years ago, there was an epidemic that shut nearly everything down. It was one of those once-in-a-hundred years kind of things. It was easily the weirdest year of everyone's life that lived through it. And strangely, sitting here now it seems like a distant memory. Like a fever dream that happened decades ago. Maybe we choose to just not remember unpleasant things. Maybe I do, anyway.
I was deemed an essential worker, and so I'd drive into work each day and shut myself in an office where I could get my work done in semi-solitude, conducting most functions via phone and email. At the time, my daughter was barely a year old and so we had to keep family and friends at a very long arm's length. My hair grew way too long because nobody would get close enough to me to cut it. And my wife didn't trust herself enough to give it a try. I can vividly remember longing to do something so simple and normal as to just browse Target with a cup of coffee in my hand. I bring all this up because back in 2020 I was mostly playing games on a Switch. It was a cheap and easy way to play new games at the time. But by the end of 2021, the new consoles were finally becoming easier to find. I think September of that year was the last time I even touched my Switch. And eventually, I sold it off because we were going to moving into a small apartment while we looked for a new house and I needed to declutter. But I can tell you that I played a lot of Splatoon during quarantine days. It was competitive, sure but it was also pretty breezy. It had bright colors and low stakes. It was pure fun. And in a weird way, playing online games like that made me feel like I was connecting with other gamers enjoying the hobby and making our way through the weirdness together. Having said all that, when Foamstars was announced I was excited. I can tell you from perusing various gaming sites that I was in the stark minority. Foamsters was Square asking, "what if Splatoon, but on Playstation?" The gaming world at large just shrugged. But me? I was all in. Since that announcement, Square has gone out of their way to shake off the obvious comparison, and insist that Foamstars is totally not Splatoon. Sure, it's a bright and breezy game where two teams shoot colorful stuff at each other and nobody dies, so it's not about kills. But Square insisted they were very different. In Splatoon you shoot ink, while Foamstars has foam. In Splatoon you swim through the ink to get around quickly, but Foamstars has surfboards. It's absolutely definitely and without doubt not the same thing. But look, who are we kidding? Foamstars is certainly Splatoon for Playstation. Let's just all be okay with that. Splatoon is a fun game, and why shouldn't Playstation gamers have access to something similar? That being said, just mimicking a fun game does not make you a fun game. Foamstars is built upon a sound concept, but I can't say that it actually pulls off the execution. Although it approaches the blueprint by using heroes (think Overwatch) rather than just classes, the problem is that the game forces you to level up and outfit each hero with specific perks. In this way it sort of meshes the Overwatch and Splatoon system. Which would be fine, but basically to get anywhere at the beginning of the game means playing hours upon hours of single player missions or PVE missions online. And these missions are absolutely tedious. Maybe the online ones would be more fun if you were playing with friends, but I don't have time to schedule game nights with friends these days (long work hours, being a husband and a day, looking for a new house, etc) so I'm just grinding through the tedium with strangers and my mic shut off. I suppose that the unlockable cosmetics, upgrades and perks would all be fun to nerd out on if I could muster up the strength the care. But Fomstars doesn't give me much reason to do so. The single player stuff is really boring and yet pretty much necessary. Even months after launch, there's no wiki I can find that outlines desirable upgrade paths. This isn't a good sign for an ongoing game. And neither are the long queues I've sat through just trying to get into a proper match. Which makes me think that very few people are playing Foamsters even three months after launch. I'm kind of bummed to say that the future looks bleak for Foamstars. It came and went without much fanfare. Nobody seems to be playing it. And ultimately, it was a decent idea, but pales in comparison with its obvious inspirations. I'm not a betting man, but if I were I'd say that by this time next year Foamstars probably won't even be a thing anymore.  I think that when it comes to survival horror in the 90s there were two kinds of gamers. You were either camp Resident Evil or camp Silent Hill. And while I always like an appreciated the Silent Hill games, Resident Evil was just a huge deal to me. The original Resident Evil felt genre-defining for me, whereas the original Silent Hill was just a cool game.
Of course, the 80s and 90s felt like a very Capcom vs Konami period. And while it's easy to lump those two series together, they are vastly different in execution and in tone. Resident Evil was built on the blueprint of Dawn Of The Dead. It was a zombie renaissance, and it owed more than a little bit to the hoaky dialogues, stupid storylines and over-the-top gore of cult-classic VHS b-movies. In short, I loved Resident Evil because it spoke to a very specific audience - one that grew up watching USA Up All Night. Silent Hill was never like that. Its horror was deeper, darker and more existential. In a Silent Hill game the self was often more terrifying than any specific lurking fear. George Romero wasn't even on the radar. Instead, Silent Hill drew inspiration from more mind-effing cinema along the lines of Don't Look Now, or the early (pre-Twin Peaks) work of David Lynch. Silent Hill was a series built on absurd nightmares. The original Silent Hill (1999) was an absolute classic on PS1. It introduced us to the basic framework of the series: an outsider visiting this town to find something or someone, and finding themselves trapped in an abandoned nightmare world where nothing makes sense. Any youngin's reading this might point themselves to Stranger Things as a thematic point of reference, I suppose. To really bring home the themes of nightmare/subconscious, you might take not of the fact that the school in the original game was modeled after the set of the movie Kindergarten Cop, while all of the teachers were named after members of the band Sonic Youth. The whole thing is absolutely surreal right down to the hidden UFO endings. But it was the sequel, Silent Hill 2 (2001) on PS2 that tends to be remembered as the high water mark. That game's influences included everything from Dostoevsky, David Lynch, Jacob's Ladder and explores themes of grief and mental illness while incorporating bits and pieces of both real life events and pop culture, again weaving in odd snatches of reality to give the whole thing a dream-like feel. After that, things started to go a bit off the rails. Silent Hill 3 (2003) and Silent Hill 4: The Room (2004) were actually developed in tandem. The fourth game in particular was an odd duck as it doesn't even take place in the titular town, and instead the whole thing is basically in a single apartment complex. Silent Hill Origins (2007) was a prequel to the original game. Silent Hill Homecoming (2008) was accused of westernization. Shattered Memories (2009) ended up being a kinda sorta remake of the original game. Silent Hill Downpour (2012) was deemed a bit of a return to the roots of the series, but also a kind of mediocre game overall. So to recap, the first two games in the series are oft considered classics, but after that Konami seemed to spit out sequels as fast as they could with a sort of throw-things-at-the-wall sort of approach. Sure, the series has its diehards - much like any series, really. But most would probably agree that Silent Hill was never the most consistent as far as quality was concerned. While a full on remake of Silent Hill 2 has been in the works for what seems like forever, it was a total shock when I turned on Sony's State Of Play on in early 2024 and saw a new Silent Hill game announced. A game that was out now. A game that was free. I mean, what? Given a decade of apathy from Konami, it was certainly exciting to find out that they had a new Silent Hill game that nobody knew about it and it was available now. But it was a free game. Could that really be a good sign? Either way, I downloaded it immediately. Upon booting up Silent Hill: A Short Message I was a bit confused to find that this game was a first person walking sim. At least at its core. Sure there's some sections where you must evade a single unkillable enemy stalker. But the majority of the experience is walking around and reading stuff to get the gist of the story. In short, it's not much like any Silent Hill game that's ever come before it. At least not exactly. Of course it's near impossible to talk about A Short Message without bringing up PT (2014). I'd have to assume that anybody talking the time to read this already knows about PT. I'd also have to assume that anybody taking the time to read this is me. But, just in case, PT was a free demo (Playable Teaser) on PS4 that was made by Hideo Kojima and Guilermo Del Toro. Those two names together should be exciting but more importantly, the experience was made as kind of teaser for Silent Hills, the game that they were supposed to put out but that was ultimately canceled. It was also a short, first person game that I guess you could call a walking simulator except that it was extremely scary and crammed full of weird secrets. After the cancelation of Silent Hills, PT only gained notoriety - especially after Konami pulled the demo from the PS4 and forced the whole thing into a cult-classic status that has actually made PS4 consoles that have it installed go for a pretty penny on ebay. So in some ways was A Short Message made as a kind of mea culpa? I don't know, maybe? But if so then Konami is even more tone deaf than we thought. Fans of both Silent Hill and Kojima were frothing at the mouth for Silent Hills and that's what made PT so appealing. It's hard to imagine that anyone playing A Short Message is feeling like it's a proper replacement for Silent Hills, especially given that the game was created by a currently Kojima-less Konami. The best thing I can say about A Short Message is that its existence is interesting. The game itself isn't really, but it's at least interesting to ponder why it even is a thing. It certainly doesn't work as a consolation for the cancelation of Silent Hills. It has nothing to do with Silent Hill 2, so you can't really view it as a tie-in or promotion for the upcoming remake. On all counts, it's a mediocre and baffling game that I struggle to find a reason for its release, or even an audience that it should be aimed at. I mean obviously diehard Silent Hill fans will play it. But will any of them actually like it? Probably not. And yet it's a free game. One that I downloaded and played (albeit briefly) before deciding it wasn't really worth my time. But here I am rambling on and waxing semi-poetic about what the point of it even is. Again, not the point of the game. Because I'm just not invested enough to care. But rather the point that Konami was trying to make by letting it loose on the world. Why on earth is A Short Story available but PT no longer is? There are many great mysteries in gaming history and this... this is a new one.  Sea Of Stars is one of those indie darling RPGs that I figured I'd love. Instead, I just kind of liked it. At least what I played of it. But more on that later. I think it's safe to say that Sea Of Stars draws heavily from 16-bit RPGs. Namely, the SNES era. You know the big hitters - Chrono Trigger and Secret Of Mana and so on? If you like those games, then Sea Of Stars is probably for you.
Personally, I like both games but also think they're slightly overrated. Chrono Trigger has a great story and great time-travel mechanic, but... well, I guess I don't really have a thought to finish that sentence up. Chrono Trigger is pretty great. Yeah. But I still don't love it as much as say Final Fantasy IV - another SNES defining RPG. Secret Of Mana is also pretty great and gorgeous and had a unique multiplayer mechanic. I guess I can't really disparage Secret Of Mana, either. Though I do prefer the simplicity of its predecessor, Adventure Of Mana (or Sword Of Mana, or Final Fantasy Adventure or whatever you want to call it) as far as action RPGs go. But what the heck even is Sea Of Stars? It's somehow a prequel to The Messenger, which I don't really get but I haven't played The Messenger yet so probably it makes more sense if you had. I just thought that The Messenger was kind of a Ninja Gaiden or Shadow Of The Ninja sort of knock-off. Maybe I'm wrong. I'm too tired to google. I guess the neat thing about Sea Of Stars is its multiple characters. Again, drawing from those SNES era RPGs, there's a full cast to play as. You start with two, and eventually get six. The visual aesthetic is solid with its 16-bit throwback and anime cutscenes. Meanwhile, the storytelling is dense. Probably the biggest bit of forward-thinking here is the battle system. It's got kind of a rhythm game component to it. There's also a mechanic of gaining MP via normal attacks, which is a pretty great touch as it adds a risk/reward thing to mashing attacks versus throwing powerful spells and gets you to think and conserve turns thoughtfully. But none of this really matters to me because of happenstance. I really only jumped into Sea Of Stars because it was "free" on Playstation Plus. I played a few hours and thought it was pretty charming and was liking it (not loving it, but liking it) for a while and then some other game caught my eye. I figured I'd get back to Sea Of Stars eventually. So right there I'm like, yeah it's good. But not good enough to suck me in. But good enough that I want to get back to it when something more gripping isn't in front of me. In December, I decided to go back and try to play as many 2023 games as I could to kind of binge for the end of the year. So I fired Sea Of Stars back up and guess what? My save was gone. I have no idea what happened. But I lost hours of gameplay and that just completely bummed me out. Basically, if I want to play the game now I'm going to have to go back and replay all the opening stuff. And I really have a hard time doing that. You know how some demos don't let you carry progression over? I hate those demos and won't play them. Who wants to redo all the slow opening parts of a game over again in quick succession? Not me. So I guess that's where I stand. Sea Of Stars is a good game. It's possibly a great game but I won't know because of a glitch and my aversion to restarting a game over again so quickly. Maybe like five years from now I'll have forgotten the opening hours and it won't be so painful to try again. Maybe.  Who doesn't like a chill game? Though I don't get into them all that often, I've definitely fallen for some over the years. I don't have an exact definition of the chill game that I'm referring to. But I guess I just know it when I see it. Probably the first game I played that I'd apply such a tag to would be Animal Crossing (2001), which I received as a Christmas gift and got deeply obsessed with. I was in college at the time, and living in a small studio apartment out in the country. I had no cable TV, and the internet back then was dial-up. I was in school all day, working until around ten, hanging out with friends until way too late, and then unwinding with Animal Crossing.
Over the years, I've gotten into a fair few games that I'd apply this label to. Minecraft is really obvious. And to a degree, I guess I'd say that Cities Skylines is one as well. It's also a total masterpiece. But today I'm playing Dave The Diver, which is blowing up review scores and has landed on Playstation Plus so it's like, why not? It's free to me, right? So let's give it a go. Although they are very different in execution, I think Dave The Diver most reminds me of Stardew Valley. Whereas that game was an overhead game about farming and bonding with towns folk, and borrowed liberally (and proudly) from Harvest Moon, Dave The Diver is its own thing. It's a side-scrolling game that incorporates elements of roguelikes, fishing games, and restaurant management sims. It's an odd combo that does actually work. More importantly, it focuses on two things I actually love in real life - the ocean and sushi. The art style is probably what reminds me most of Stardew Valley. It's kind of a 16-bit homage. Or more probably, a 2D 32-bit homage. Again, harkening back to the PS1 days of Harvest Moon. But it also goes hardcore on character and charm. There's cut scenes and some pretty fantastic music. There's some really impressively rendered 2D aquatic life. The story is simple. Or at least I think it is. I'll be honest, I skip a lot of the dialogue. But you're Dave, who is a diver. You're called by some guy called Cobra to come out and dive for exotic fish and then work in a sushi restaurant. It's a pretty simple set up, but it makes the gameplay loop make sense. So let's talk about the gameplay: 1. The first half of the gameplay loop is the morning/afternoon where you will go for dives. You can think of these sections as roguelike dungeons. You'll dive in and your primary goal is collecting fish or other sea life to prepare as sushi in the evening. You'll start off with a basic knife and harpoon to catch the fish. But you'll also find new gear to collect and upgrade so that you can catch bigger fish. As the story progresses, you'll also be doled out other secondary objectives like collecting so many shells for research, or investigating new areas to open up the map, or finding rare fish for new recipes. 2. The second half of the gameplay loop is the restaurant. Here you'll start off each night by managing things economically. You'll prepare a menu based on what you've caught for the day. You'll be responsible for placing ads to attract new employees that you'll need to train. You'll run the restaurant's social media profile and try to bring in new patrons. Then you'll open the restaurant for the night and be tasked with pouring green tea and getting the correct orders to the correct diners. Ultimately it's all pretty simple, but there's a lot of variety and tinkering and there's just always something else to do. There's some other menu to go into and explore. There's something else to upgrade or cross off a list. To put it bluntly, this is the sort of game made for anyone with a compulsive personality. The kind of person who never feels content knowing that there's just one more thing they could accomplish for the night. And as such, I can understand the chill nature and the compelling nature of this game. But it's not just the relaxation that gets you. It's the loop. It's the "one more thing" to check off your list. That's the stuff that keeps you going. And soon enough you'll find yourself up against the sheer weight of economics. It's a story as old as time. The better your company does, the harder it is to maintain. Good sushi means good word of mouth and more customers. More customers means you need to hire more wait staff and chefs. More staff means you need more expensive sushi and more customers. And so the whole thing becomes a gigantic house of cards. Watching your sushi shop fill up with customers only to run out of fish is gutting. As is having so many guests that you can't possibly get them their meals or tea fast enough to keep them happy. Likewise, each dive becomes a risk/reward calculation. Do you fill up your pack with an abundance of small and easy to catch fish that will sell for little, or do you risk your neck trying to hunt something more deadly that will go for a premium? Or do you ignore the fish and try to knock out some of the more exploratory missions in your list in the hopes of getting extra money or unlocks or perks? There's a lot of decisions to be made moment to moment, and I suppose that's the beauty of the game. Over the past seven hours, a bunch of stuff happened. A celebrity chef came to film an episode of his show. He ranked my sushi restaurant an eight out of ten, and suggested that I serve beer. There was a jellyfish festival on the island, so I stockpiled as much jellyfish as I could and that seemed to get us some good attention. I've helped dolphins escape nets. I've done battle with poachers. I've been harassed by activists. I've found mermaids. I've followed an octopus. I've trapped tuna in nets. It just seems like there's always something to be doing in this game, and because of that, always a way to lose more time to it. Perhaps the weirdest part of all of this is that I'm not even certain that I like the game. Not by any traditional sense. There's no one thing that I find particularly riveting. It's not a game that I'd go out of my way to suggest that anyone else play. I can't even exactly put my finger on why I keep playing it other than that I find it kind of relaxing. It's like, there's lots of things to think about and lots of menus to muck around in. But when you're out there diving it's almost mindless zen garden relaxation. So I guess I do like Dave The Diver, but not because I think it's some incredible game. Instead, it's just a kind of incredible time-killer that kind of soothes me. I like the ocean. I like sea life. I like sushi.I like economics. I like fiddling around in menus. So I guess it makes sense that this game speaks to me on some level.  Y'know that that thing when you wake up and you're a dog and your job is to guide literally thousands of people into a light so that they can fly away? Well, Humanity is a game about that.
Humanity was something of a critical darling in 2023, and yet I never really heard anyone talking about it all year. Not that I have time to talk to anyone about games. But I do listen to many gaming podcasts and read lots of gaming press. So I think I have at least a decent handle on what's being buzzed about. As I write this in mid-December, 2023, it's odd that Humanity would have such a high Metacritic score and yet I've heard no year-end talk about it. All the podcasts I listen to with their year end wrap ups have left this one out. I don't even think it was nominated at The Game Awards. I could be wrong, as I sat through the whole show and yet don't really remember much. And I'm too tired to look it up right now. If you missed it, Humanity is a 3D game that takes many cues from the 2D classic, Lemmings. At least that's what most reviews will reference. And it's not wrong. But I'd say it probably is closer to a mash-up of Lemmings and Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, to be more specific. The goal is much like Lemmings (guide something to an end point while avoiding death of those that you're guiding), while the level layout is more akin to Captain Toad's 3D worlds. But yeah, you take the shape of a dog. Thousands of people pour through doors and walk in a straight line. You have the ability to guide them by placing icons. So they can turn in whatever direction you want, or they can jump. Things like that. Actually, y'know what? Scratch all the above. It's actually way closer to Chu Chu Rocket than any other game I can think of. Forget Lemmings. This is totally Chu Chu Rocket for the modern gaming era. Humanity is a super chill game, though. You can let hundreds upon hundreds of nameless, faceless folks die while you figure out a puzzle. It's fine. There's pretty ambient music playing. There's pretty visuals. It's all chill. The puzzles ramp up nicely, by the way. It's got that classic puzzle vibe where levels start to get devious and you don't think you'll figure it out. Then you do and you feel like a genius. It's solid. Here's what holds me back on loving Humanity, though. There's secondary goals. And that's fine. Each level has X amount of "goldies" to save. These are big people who are literally gold. If you get each of them to the exit, you gain extra perks. And that's great. But what happens is after so many levels you hit a wall that says, "obtain X goldies to unlock the next set of stages." And I hate that kind of crap. In my mind, the game should be like two scenarios. You should be able to play through every level with the goal of just figuring out each level. Think of it as casual mode. And you should be able to go back and find the goldies IF YOU WANT. Some of us want more challenge. Some of us enjoy replaying levels and perfecting them. But I personally don't like being forced to replay levels in an attempt to complete them flawlessly. To me, this grind is sort of at odds with the chill nature of the game. Which is a bummer, because I really like the gameplay of the levels themselves, but just not the way that progression is laid out. Humanity is a good game. Almost great, but not quite.  I got spring fever at the start of May this year. The weather warmed up. We're living in an apartment temporarily until we find a house. And after a long and weird winter, we opened up the windows in the apartment. We never really did that in our old house. We lived on a busy and loud street. But now that we're in a quiet town, it just felt good. Sleeping with a window open on a cool night is awesome for my sinuses. And so spring fever kicked in and I longed for the sounds of baseball.
I've never been a huge baseball fan. I mean not exactly. I appreciate the game. But I don't follow throughout the year. I don't keep track of the schedule. I don't know all the players. But I love the sound of baseball. I always have. As a kid, my dad would listen to baseball games when we were running errands on the weekend. And because of that, I associate the sounds - the quiet hum of a crowd, the deliberate chatter of a commentator, the crack of the bat, the ineffable sound of a ball hitting a glove - with the weather warming up. It's funny. I associate a lot of baseball memories with my dad, though I can't remember ever actually sitting and watching a full game with him. When I was a kid, my grandfather or uncle would come over and watch baseball games with my dad. They'd curse loudly. When I was in sixth grade I tried out for a baseball team that was sponsored by the bank my mom worked at. I remember during tryouts I got hit in the mouth with the ball during a drill. I got a huge fat lip. But I toughed it out. I made the team, and then promptly quit before the first game because I was way too anxious at the thought of crowds of people watching me play. I wanted to play. I really did. But I was too nervous. But I do remember my dad practicing with me. I really wanted to play outfield because there was something really satisfying about catching a flyball. So he'd throw the ball as high as he could in the front yard while I practiced catching them. The other baseball memory I have of my dad is more pertinent to this blog. My dad never had any interest in video games. Looking back, that kind of bugged me. Our one common ground was watching TV together when I was a kid. We'd watch The Simpsons, Seinfeld, Friends, In Living Color and so on. But outside of that, he was into sports and I was into video games. He'd want to play sports outside with me - which obviously isn't a bad thing. But I just wanted him to bond with me over video games which never happened. Except once. There was one Sunday in the late 80s when the weather was just too good to be inside. My uncle was over and had the idea that we could bring a 13" TV outside on the back porch. This was of course wo we could all watch baseball while food was on the grill. When the game was over I got the idea that I could bring my NES outside and play a video game... outside. Which was truly mind blowing at the time. And so I brought out the NES and Major League Baseball, which was an LJN game that was way better than you'd think. Me, my dad and my uncle played that game for hours. On the back porch. On a 13" TV. It might sound silly, but this is a really fond memory for me that I've never forgotten. This is a lot of backstory to say that when spring fever hit me this year, I knew I had to play a baseball game. But it's also sort of monumental, because the last baseball game I've played was MLB 2K5: World Series Edition on the PS2. It's been a while, and there's been a lot of improvements to the genre. I knew that MLB The Show was the standard these days, and a quick search of the PS5 store showed that MLB The Show 23 was on sale for sort of cheap. So I went with that one instead of the newest hotness. Also, I went with the PS4 version because it was even cheaper. If it isn't obvious, I don't really care about the newest bells and whistles or highest graphical fidelity. I just want to play a decent game of baseball. And let's be honest, jumping in from a PS2 game from around a decade ago, any of these newer PS4 games are going to be a huge improvement. And so I loaded up Road To The Show mode and started to create a player. Right away I was greeted with the option to scan my own face using a phone app. So I did, and the results were horrifying. First of all the dude looked nothing like me. Second, apparently if you scan your face with glasses on you get something that looks like either a really weird birthmark, or maybe an atrocious and unfinished face tattoo of glasses. But I left it as is because it's ugly and funny. The story of MLB The Show 23 as I'm playing it is this: there's this guy who just turned 43. He decides one day to quit his job and take a crack at baseball. He decides to give it one year. He either makes it to the majors or he doesn't, but at least he's trying. Somehow, this 43 year old with no prior experience and a desk job lands a position on the Portland Sea Dogs. The Sea Dogs were a motley crew. I got to know some random dudes who I've never heard of. To be honest, I had to google Tyler Dearden to see if he was a real guy, or a made up name for the game. It turns out he's a real guy. I honestly thought maybe he was a Fight Club riff. Weird. About ten hours into the game, I figured out how to actually open all the card packs I'd earned. This was a big deal, since that's how you equip all your perks. So yeah, I guess I'm an idiot. But right after that I was thrown into the All-Stars game, and then drafted to the triple-A Worcester Red Sox team. It's funny, I was never really aware of the minor leagues - not since I'd seen the now defunct Paw Sox play when I was a kid. But my daughter and I recently went to a pizza restaurant and Worcester was playing a game on the TVs there. It was kind of funny. Anyway, it wasn't until August (16 hours in) that I was finally called up to the bigs. I have to admit, it did feel good. It felt like I'd earned it. Again, my character is this middle-aged dude who really has no place even trying, but god bless him. Meanwhile, I'm a middle-aged dude who hasn't played a baseball game in like a decade. So yeah, it was hard-fought. On the first pitch of my first game as a Red Sox player, I launched a home run over the green monster. That was a proud gaming moment. I flashed back to Good Will Hunting. "I'll probably never hit a home run at Fenway..." It felt good. My brief season as a major league player went well. In a few short months, I managed to knock out sixteen homeruns. Right around the time that the season was coming to an end, real life hit pretty hard. My daughter broke her arm. This happened while she was celebrating her fifth birthday. She was running around playing tag with her cousins and she took a fall right on to her elbow. This kicked off a horrible chain of events. We spent Sunday night in urgent care. We were in the hospital in Boston on Monday. And then she was having surgery on Wednesday. It was a brutal whirlwind of worry, stress and anxiety. As a dad, I never want to see my little one in any kind of pain or fera. So watching it for for days straight is really hard. I bring this up for no real reason but to put a personal journal entry on what I was doing at the time. I guess that's how my brain works. I can't help but connect games to what was going on in my life while I was playing them. In some ways, MLB The Show 23 is really fitting. It's not the deepest game. But it's certainly relaxing. Like I said way up there at the top, the sounds of baseball are soothing to me. And at the end of the day (literally), gaming is how I unwind and disconnect from the stress of real life. "NOTICE: The Red Sox have finished the season at 73-89 (.451). Unfortunately, this wasn't good enough to make the Postseason. Better luck next season." And just like that, my MLB career came to an end. But it's not a true defeat. Sure, the Red Sox didn't make into the playoffs. Sure, I didn't have a chance at a World Series. But at the same time, my attempt to play ball as a 43-year old rookie landed me on a major league team. At least I can say I tried. And honestly, I had a lot of fun doing so.  I followed the making of Midnight Suns very closely. To say that it was highly anticipated by me would be a vast understatement. In fact, it was one of those rare games that seemed entirely tailored just to my tastes. Let's walk through the boxes it checked off, shall we? First of all, it was made by the developer of XCOM, and featured a similar gameplay. But it also added a collectable card mechanic. It used the Marvel license, but instead of cashing in on the new hotness in the MCU, it focused on a darker lore and featured vampires and witches. Oh, and it takes place mainly in Salem, Massachusetts. I mean.
I was a tech-kid since I can remember. I had a Commodore 64 at the age of six. I'm pretty sure we got America Online in our house around 1993. The following year, I bought a 286 computer off of a friend just so I could have my own computer in my room. I tried to get it to run Doom and Wolfenstein 3D to no avail. I finally got my own Pentium II PC around 1996, and it came bundled with a bunch of random games. One of them was X-COM: Terror From The Deep and I was hooked. I've been intrigued by turn based strategy games ever since. When XCOM: Enemy Unknown was released years later it was an instant buy for me. And I became deeply enamored. I played through that game so many times that when XCOM 2 was released, my wife said half-jokingly, "see you in a few months." Digital card games are also a pretty big deal to me. Admittedly, I didn't get into them until Hearthstone turned me on to the genre. But over the years, I've gotten pretty deep into so many ranging from classics like Pokemon TCG and SNK Vs Capcom: Card Fighters Clash to modern oddities like Lightseekers and Marvel Snap. That said, I'll say with total conviction that Slay The Spire is one of the greatest games of the current generation and at this point I can't even fathom how many hundreds of hours I've put into that game. Marvel is a longer story. I was a comic book geek as a kid. It pretty much started with the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles run, but as I branched out it was Marvel that grabbed me. DC stuff was okay. But Marvel was next level. I was a total X-Men fanboy back then. Then of course, I denounced comic books in high school because I wanted girls to think I was cool. But when the pre-MCU Marvel began cranking out movies in the early 2000s (namely, the X-Men movies and the Spider-Man trilogy), I was down. Then there was another lull when the MCU first launched because it was really popular and I was kind of a hipster. But eventually my wife and I fell into the trap and followed the MCU all the way until our daughter was born. That pretty much coincided with the release of Avengers Endgame, which seemed like a fitting time to dip out of such a vast story when our time was so limited. And of course I have an affinity for any games that take place in New England. Not that the whole game does. The main base is in Salem, but much of the battles takes place elsewhere. But still, by going down the path of witchery and vampires, Salem is a perfect little hub for the mansion. And I like that. Not to mention that I like horror stuff, so focusing on the more horror side of Marvel comics lore is a win in my book. Speaking of the hub, that's where you'll spend a lot of time upgrading cards and making friends. That latter point is like the sort of relationship bonding conversations you'd see in a game like Fire Emblem or whatever. It's fine enough, but can be a little tedious when you're itching to get back to a mission. Really, the same could be said for the mansion itself. I'm sure some gamers like running around between missions and going room to room to do all of this stuff. Maybe it builds a certain immersion. I don't know. Personally, I wish it was all just menu based like in the XCOM games. But you can't win them all. My other complaint is about the insanely long cut scenes. Between all the running around the mansion you'll do and all the talking to other characters, the cut scenes just feel like they go on forever. Don't get me wrong, they're well done. They feel like a comic book. There's even some fun little jokes like Captain Marvel's "XCOM" computer system, or the little club with a long name that's an acronym for "emo kids." But honestly, it feels like there is so much downtime between each mission and that can really slow down the momentum of the game loop. The battle system is pretty great, though. All attacks and skills are played via cards. You can play three cards per turn. And obviously, everything is turn based. But this is also added to the usual XCOM style game maps. The big difference is that there's no grid movement. Instead, things feel more open and real. Positioning does throw me off when I'm so used to the classic grid based movement of such games. But Firaxis pulls off this system really nicely. And honestly, combining a turn based tactics game with a deck building card game is really the exact sort of niche game that is right up my alley. One of the more interesting things here is that the main character is not a Marvel superhero at all. Instead, it's a random user made character called The Hunter. There's a small character creator, but ultimately this is along the lines of Shepard in Mass Effect. Which is to say, mostly generic male or female. The crazy thing is that among a huge cast of Marvel favorites, I've stuck with The Hunter even in non-required missions. My Hunter has been of great use as I've leveled up her cards. She's pretty badass, really. Leveling up is indeed the main draw here. Drafting duplicate cards allows you to level them up into stronger versions of those cards. In that sense, it's not unlike Marvel Snap, the free to play card game that came out the same year. As a side note, I feel like Marvel Snap could really work on consoles, but alas it's been mobile and PC only thus far. Ugh. At any rate, the one thing that this game really has going for it is that it's weird. I personally love when Marvel games get weird. I mean, there's been recent hits with Spider-Man and The Avengers and all, and that's great. But I've always been a fan of oddball stuff like Telltale's take on The Guardians Of The Galaxy. This one's weird like that. It doesn't follow any MCU storyline. Instead, it's a big pastiche of comic book lore. I like seeing characters like Magik and Wolverine and Blade all rubbing elbows. I like them talking about witchcraft and stuff. It's strangely dark and also silly with its use of social media and young folk slang. But sometimes I can't help but think that the story and base stuff is all just a lot of padding. There's way too much talking. Way too many waypoints pointing me to plan a birthday party or to bond with another hero over a movie. Ultimately, this game is solid as far as its bones go, but my god, it's just so long and dragged out. I can't help but think there's a solid 30 hour game here that's just stretched way beyond that because of a whole lot of fat. I commend what Firaxis attempted here. It's a lofty license to take a crack at. But part of me thinks it would have been more successful had they just crammed Marvel into the XCOM engine and called it a day after reskinning. Instead, they attempted a whole lot more and the end result is somewhat bloated. Don't get me wrong, Midnight Suns is a very good game. It's an addictive game. But as I play it I can't help but think that it's just not XCOM 3. And for everything I like about Midnight Suns, I'd much rather have XCOM 3. |
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