Another Twin Stick Shooter: Miami Edition

Another solid top down shooter from the potato laptop pixel game era of my life is Hotline Miami. This one came to me a bit later in life and is noticeably more brutal and visceral then Enter the Gungeon, previously reviewed on the blog. I most definitely snuck this game by my parents.

Hotline Miami is fast gritty and exhilarating. The self described “high octane” shooter lives up to that descriptor. The game is brutally unforgiving with enemies that kill and are killed with a single shot. The story portrays a masked man on a murdering spree as he’s given orders from a mysterious caller on his phone and slowly descends into madness. Each level feels important and impactful to an overarching story that’s dynamic and satisfying. The mask system allows for gameplay to vary slightly between runs, slowly unlocking options for different specialized strategies and techniques. Every kill feels visceral and satisfying and the visual and auditory effects are simple and impactful. The wet crack and red flashes when you slam someone’s head into the ground repeatedly makes me shiver. The bright lights, fast music and combo counter steer you into a frenzied and manic killing spree that’s as exhilarating as it is violent. Combat is tight and consistent.

The music of Hotline Miami is a large part of what make Hotline Miami Hotline Miami and I couldn’t bring myself to replace it. This is one of those soundtracks that I bought and listened to outside of the game. EDM typically doesn’t do anything for me musically but something about these tracks makes me get it. Each song works well as a standalone track and even better in the context of the game, matching the pace and mood perfectly. Tracks are specifically chosen and curated for specific levels and fit them well. What’s almost better than the use of music is the intentional absence of music. At the end of every level, when the last shot is fired and the last man is killed, the music cuts instantaneously. The silence is deafening. The game chooses not to cut straight to the next level. When that music cuts your given time to calm down and let the adrenaline fade. The player is forced to walk back to their car, backtracking through the carnage and destruction they’ve caused. There’s no music, no combo counter, and no fun, only the cold silence of self reflection.

Ventura to Reno in 3.0

Reno Nevada is home to bitter winds, aggressive crackheads, excessive amounts of pawn shops, and one dang good jazz festival. The food was passable, the music was fantastic, and the overall town wasn’t too bad. At about 9 every night we ended up back at hotels, which were locked up like prison cells after last years shenanigans, with little entertainment but the switch. A couple late nights/early mornings and I came back with new friends and new music.

In the wake of update 3.0, Smash Ultimate has shifted. With rebalances and character changes the meta has shifted slightly, allowing for previously underused characters to have a shot at viability, on top of the general weakening of projectiles (thank god). Mewtwo is currently insane, getting massive buffs to almost every move. Sheik is back to being playable, but still lacks the damage output she had in sm4sh. On top of all of that we got our second DLC character, Joker from Persona 5, and he’s real good. He has up air strings that can combo for days and a recovery that is completely busted. He plays like melee Sheik, fast and combo heavy. His absorption can be used to tank just about anything and when his persona comes out he gets a new spike and his damage output is insane. His dash attack kills early and his back air is an easy ledge guard, especially with his recovery as good as it is. Drew (pictured right) is a melee god with very little experience in Ultimate and we’re fairly evenly matched. His game knowledge is lacking but his fundamentals are exceptionally solid. We were match for match until 2 am for about 3 nights in a row.

Drew also introduced me to some new music. From the lot of it, what really stuck was Anderson Paak’s Ventura, a pleasant blend of hip-hop, funk, and R&B. His voice and drumming are smooth on the ears and his backings feature real live bass that’s exceptionally funky. The envelope filter style bass tone is fat and silky and the rhythm section pocket is phenomenal. The soul style backing vocals on songs like Winner’s Circle provide a wonderful contrast and accentuation of his singing voice. The album structure is well done, the production is strong, and individual tracks slap. I highly recommend this album both as a backing for smash, or a good listen for an average person.

Simulated Surgery and Graced Land

Surgeon simulator is a game I have many fond memories of. I first played it with Harrison of
https://therecordshelf.home.blog/ in around 2015 and I can say with confidence that it’s a timeless classic that’s stood the test of time.

Surgeon Simulator is dumb fun. To start with the game sports an extremely logical and unique control. The usage of a w e r and spacebar each as individual fingers was an ingenious way of almost working towards virtual reality in an era when no real progress was being made. The hand positioning looks like that of the hand in the game, a typical relaxed hand, and each button you press responds quickly with that virtual finger being moved. The right hand use of the mouse to move your hand is easy to track. The game provides an interesting challenge unlike any other, with potential for incredibly dumb fun along the way, be it replacing kidneys using a hammer or splitting the controls between two people.

The soundtrack is comprised of high energy techno music which is cool and all but really isn’t my cup of tea. I swapped it with Paul Simon’s Graceland, a classic album and a favorite of my grandmother. Paul Simon creates a wonderful blend of American and South African folk music in this album for a fresh take on American folk. This vague and enigmatic album tells the story of a man on his way to Graceland, home of legendary American musician Elvis Presley. The album has phenomenal African choral backgrounds that really help to fill out the space in the tracks. The rhythm section is incredibly tight and features some of the greatest bass playing of all time. Bakithi Kumalo’s bass playing on this record has a unique sound, featuring his distinct fretless style and a juicer compressor pedal for a super funky sound. The timbre of the fretless bass is perfect and his fills are expertly harmonious. This album is somewhat nonsensical, but and overall good time for anybody interested in a new American folk, or excellent bass lines.

Gungeon Grips: Enter the Money Store

I’m a big fan of pixel based top down shooters. I have a great love for pixel based games and I think it transfers over from the broke boy laptop days when more graphically demanding games simply weren’t an option. I played low resolution low graphics games at minimal fps for years and it was mediocre, even if I did have fun at the time. When I first booted up Hotline Miami it was the fastest game I had ever played. Partially because the game is viscerally fast paced, partially because it ran max settings at a blazing 140 frames per second. With Hotline Miami I discovered my love for the genre and with Enter the Gungeon I solidified it. With it’s final update, A Farewell to Arms, releasing earlier this month, it’s a prime time for a review.

Enter the Gungeon is truly a phenomenal game. For the first month or two I couldn’t make it past the first floor. I’d be lucky to make it to the boss and I’d die in that fight if I even made it up, but it didn’t matter. Now I’m able to consistently clear runs and it’s charm hasn’t decreased a bit. The music is mesmerizing and the loot pool system allows you to be forced to restart every time, while still making progress. By slowly expanding the pool of available pool of findable, the complexity builds at a rate which allows players to ease into the less standard side of the game. In the beginning you have crossbows and aks, by the end you have guns that fire planets and guns that fire garbage. You have sunglasses that boost your coolness and a lamp that shoots genies. This game is exceptionally charming. The music is cheerful and exciting. Many items are references to anything from Blade Runner to metal gear solid. Many of the things in the game are dumb puns,he Ammoconda and Dragun coming to mind. To anyone looking for an endearing but challenging game, the Gungeon is the way to go.

This weeks music swap was an interesting one. I was in the mood for Gungeon’s speed but not the charm. I swapped it’s upbeat electronic backgrounding for Death Grip’s The Money Store. This album goes hard. MC Ride’s voice is gripping and violent and the beats are heavy. Producer Zach Hill samples everything from Saharan ringtones and Canadian trains to the grunting of professional tennis players. Somehow through seemingly endless layers of bass, grime, and samples he manages to pull together cohesive tracks that never seem to get old. I genuinely believe this album doesn’t have a single bad song. The combo with Gungeon works well too. the game easily allows you to swap out the music and choose to ignore the puns for a solid hihg intensity experience. By the time you hit bullet hell the game is brutally difficult and the music is perfect.

Stankiro: Andre 3000 dies 3000 times

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is the latest video game from Dark Souls creator Hidetaka Miyazaki, and it easily meets and surpasses the expectations I have for Miyazaki and his team at From Software. Miyazaki finally getting to abandon the Dark Souls franchise, in favor of a new creative direction, has made something that is truly one of a kind.

Sekiro is just Dark Souls but with ninjas, and that’s alright. Dark Souls is cool and ninjas are cool. The game is set in 16th century Japan environmentally, with many enemies coming from Japanese folklore and mythology. The combat is fast, streamlined, and incredibly difficult. The extreme range of combat experiences Dark Souls in the form of different weapons and leveling have been reduced to a single sword for the duration of the game. The story and environment are both much more linear then those of the Souls games. Sekiro has sacrificed this breadth in favor of extreme depth. Instead of making 100+ weapons broken into 19 different subcategories all function properly, they made one sword work extremely well. The posture system revolves around breaking your enemy down, either by blocking their hits optimally or getting them to fail to block yours. When an enemies posture has been broken they can be executed. Fromsoft’s technique of building simple and understandable objectives and then layering small nuances on top of that objective is a good one, creating combat that’s complex and engaging without being confusing or inaccessible.

Outkast’s Stankonia is a quintessential piece of early 2000s American hip-hop.

Ambitionz as a Dedede Main

Super Smash Brothers is a strong contender for my favorite video game franchise of all time. I first started my smash career way back in like 2011 playing Brawl for the Wii. It’s been a long time since then and things have come a long way. I never owned a Wii U or a 3ds so Smash 4 passed me by completely. For as much as I played Brawl my investment started to fade with the years. With the announcement of Ultimate in early 2018 I was filled with a childlike excitement in a way that no game had ever accomplished.

Smash is an enthralling fighting game experience unlike any other. The game plays fast. Not as fast as melee, but it’s fast. The roster on this game is unbelievably large with 76 characters at launch and 6 dlc character, one added, one announced, and 4 a mystery. I quickly found myself wanting to progress further then I had in the previous games. The meta was new and expanding and I got a fresh start with everyone else. One of the games greatest strengths is its accessibility. It lacks the intricate and obtuse button mashing combos of a traditional fighting game in favor of simple and semi universal moves. With the exception of special moves and a few characters, most standard attacks are universal. It’s visually simple to follow and the objective is basic, don’t get knocked off stage. As percent gets higher you get launched farther, and the higher percent even turns redder so you know it’s bad. With that established, the room for creativity within the game is astounding. Every fight is a rock paper scissors of matchups against other characters. You need to know your own character both as an individual, and in relation to everyone else on the roster. Sadly, besides the core experience there isn’t much. The story isn’t worth your time, especially compared to Subspace Emissary from Brawl, and the online mode online mode lacks features and the ranking system discourages improvement. If the 3.0 Update fleshes out the online, fixes the ranking system, and maybe removes buffering the game could easily be perfect. Until then it will sit at a solid 9.

Tupac Shakur’s All Eyez on Me is one

The Unauthorized Review of Dark Souls 3

It’s Dark Souls 3 time. Previously on this blog I reviewed Dark Souls Remastered and I think it’s about time I review another game of the series. Dark Souls 2 was my intro to the franchise personally, but it’s by far the worst one. Everything about that game is inferior. After losing my save files I couldn’t bring myself to replay it and opted instead for the superior third Souls.

Dark souls 3 is a potentially exceptional game held back by a few key things. Holding it up in comparison to the first provides an interesting and important contrast. In the 5 years between Dark Souls and it’s second sequel we jumped a console generation, moving from 30 frames on the xbox 360 to 60 on the xbox one and ps4. My computer isn’t anything phenomenal but it got a smooth 60+ with high settings. The original used to chug rendering certain areas to the point where the community modding scene ended up having to fix it for pc. 3 is superior graphically speaking. It’s combat is tighter with faster rolls, smoother movement, and tactile hits. A downside of this is that Dark Souls 3 crutches on its combat. The original felt like an exploratory experience. The world was open and fleshed out. There were puzzles and shortcuts. Locations weaved into each other expertly. Dark Souls 3 is almost linear, choosing frequent checkpoints over well placed shortcuts. The game gives you fast travel from the start, taking away the need for this connection. It doesn’t feel like a living world, but a series of trials. Every boss is either extremely gimmicky, excessively powerful swords found in the arena, breaking bracelets on a skeletons wrist, or they’re reflex tests. The reflex tests are repetitive fights usually against some guy in armor trying to see if you can remember not to blink for the whole fight. Overall the game’s good. I had a fun time playing it and the PvP has an insanely high skill ceiling.

The music is pretty much the same as Dark Souls 1. No music for all of the game outside of bossfights. I went a little jazzy this week putting on The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner. Ben Folds Five is a jazzy trio featuring Ben Folds, pianist and singer, backed by Robert Sledge on bass and Darren Jessee on drums. The album tells the story of fictional man Reinhold Messner, not to be confused with the guy who climbed Mt. Everest, as he struggles to figure out who he is as a person. Fold’s piano playing is able to effectively hit both soft and delicate or bold and aggressive depending on the track. Sledge’s bass playing is surprisingly active for music of this kind, really opening up into fast fills and intricate grooves. The track Regrets almost sounds like a Thundercat song. The album is moving and cohesive from start to finish. Songs flow nicely sonically and emotionally. While it doesn’t fit Dark Souls particularly well, the two don’t clash and you’re left with an experience that’s equal to the sum of its parts, pretty dang good.

Half-Lives, B-Sides, and Rarities

The original Half-Life dropped in 1998 and had an incredible impact on the video game industry. This game revolutionized PC gaming culture in an incredibly long lasting and pervasive way, essentially giving birth to the game modding scene. The engine Valve created for this game, the GoldSource engine, and it’s successor, the plain old Source engine, worked as the foundation for countless games. GoldSource brought us Team Fortress Classic, Counter Strike, and Day of Defeat, all as community mods. Source brought us Tf2, Global Offensive, Portal, Left 4 Dead, and Apex Legends. For as much as Half-Life innovated on the industry, and for as well as it holds up gameplay wise, man is it ugly. For this week instead of focusing on Half-Life I’m playing the fan made remake Black Mesa, an incredible overhaul of the original game with redone graphics, interfaces, and audio.

I played through (most of) the original Half-Life in it’s full unadulterated glory and thoroughly enjoyed it. Sadly through a mixture of me being a dumb child, this game being excessively hard, and a save state that trapped me in a death loop I never got around to finishing it. The use of platforming and physics puzzles in a first person shooter is not something we see often. The engine allows for physics puzzles that make logical sense and work how they should. Guns are given to you at a perfect rate. You get a chance to become familiar with each weapon’s unique feel and purpose before being blessed with a new one. The engine is solid, the ambiance is strong, and the game is fun to play.

The soundtrack is less of a soundtrack and more of a compilation of ambient drones, groans and creaks. They do a great job building tension but I’ve already played this game and my attention span is way too short for that. This time I threw on Cake’s B-Sides and Rarities. Cake is an odd band but a good one. Singer John McCrea has a monotone delivery that’s entirely unique and interesting. The bass has funk vibes and grooves nicely. The trumpet’s use ranges from explosive bursts to slow harmon-muted wails on slower songs. The album is an odd blend of covers ranging from Black Sabbath to the Muppets, finished off with 3 of their songs performed live.

Mellow G(old)

Gearbox Software began as a company in the late 90s made up of programmers that had recently left jobs at defunct companies. They joined together to start their first projects, creating mods for the original Half-Life. Its developers had key roles on blue shift and opposing forces and later went on to work on beloved franchises such as Halo, Left 4 Dead, and Duke Nukem (which is kinda irrelevant now). the game I’m choosing to focus on for this week is their second game of the Borderlands franchise and in my personal opinion the best of the three that exist as of now. With Borderlands 3 announced and around the corner it is a good time to reflect on the franchise. Borderlands 2 created something truly special with his outlandish sense of humor seemingly infinite replayability and masterful combination of RPG elements and high action gameplay. but it has managed to stay fresh over the years through the abundance of DLC variety of play between the characters, and online multiplayer that is a ton of fun you’re able to get some friends together.

Borderlands 2 is a game I’ve spent countless hours on. I’ve completed the main story on all 4 characters and all 3 difficulties. I distinctly remember playing with a friend of mine, author of https://therecordshelf.home.blog/ in the 6th grade only to have his entire save data wiped immediately before the final fight of the game. It was a sad day for all. I can genuinely say that without a doubt all of the hours were worth it. Combat is fun and diverse with ranges of enemies, weapons, and character abilities. The shooting feels good. The RPG elements give a fun incentive without feeling grindy and every skill point feels like it makes an actual impact on the way you play.

The original soundtrack for Borderlands 2 is a modernized take on classic american western music with an odd blend of electronic beats and acoustic guitar. While there is nothing inherently wrong with the soundtrack it starts to get a bit repetitive after a decent amount of hours. This week I decided to swap the soundtrack in exchange for Beck’s debut album mellow gold. The album was recorded originally on an 8 track and features a lot of the grime and societal dissatisfaction that the punk genre offers with a distinctively southwestern vibe to the tracks. The slide guitar on tracks like Loser has the perfect twang without being tinny. The bass is surprisingly active for an album of this nature and his sample/general noise usage is solid. For as good as the game and album are on their own, the album tends to get somber on a lot of the tracks which doesn’t pair all too well with the game.

Lethal League

The fighting game genre is dominated by zoomed in, combo heavy, side scrolling homogeneity. Industry standards like Injustice, Mortal Kombat, and Street Fighter all feel very similar. For as smooth and beautiful as FighterZ was, it played the same in most ways. Health bars, button combo lists, and high skill floors are commonly accepted traits of the modern fighting game. Every once in a while a game comes along that subverts these expectations and creates something new, with varying levels of commercial success. By far the biggest game to do this was Super Smash Bros, with it’s percentage knockback based system, lack of traditional button combos for moves, and extremely diverse roster with entirely unique characters it created a truly unique experience that has stood the test of time. Dive kick featured a system with only 2 buttons, a dive and a kick, and that game was in EVO. The game of focus this week is Lethal League.

Lethal league is a game I enjoy playing very much, and it lays like nothing else does.