Aug 12
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from China
seen from Armenia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from Yemen
seen from United Kingdom
seen from France
seen from China
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from China
Sakura illustration, for Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo.
All About Series Vol. 15 - Super Puzzle Fighter II X (Aug. 30, '96), pg. 108
Ryu stage sketch, for Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo.
All About Series Vol. 15 - Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo (Aug. 30, '96), pg. 148
Have you played Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo (1996, AKA Super Puzzle Fighter II X)?
Yes
No
I watched someone play it
I've never heard of it
Requested by anon
Various animation concepts, for Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo.
All About Series Vol. 15 - Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo (Aug. 30, '96), pg. 140
[Old] 2017 in Games, Part One
NOTICE: This is an old blog I posted on Giant Bomb in 2018 that's being archived here.
Satellaview Game of the Year: Special Tee Shot
One of the games I crossed off of my to-do list this year was Kirby's Dream Course, something I thought I was surely going to love. As it turns out, Dream Course is less of a Kirby-themed arcade golf game and more of a puzzle game. You still have your standard golf mechanics and requisite gimmicks, but the centerpiece of the game is Kirby's trademark ability to absorb his enemies' powers. It's a great idea, but the game is so focused on this mechanic that you end up constantly being pigeon-holed by courses typically designed with only one viable "answer." This, coupled with the questionable implementation of a traditional lives/health system, made Dream Course a disappointing golf experience.
Fortunately for me, the game I had wanted out of Kirby's Dream Course existed all along in its prototype.
It happens all the time: Nintendo sees a promising game in development, saddles it with one of their existing IPs, and we're given the Star Fox Adventures, Diddy Kong Racings, and Tetris Attacks of the world. Kirby himself is no stranger to this; Epic Yarn was developed as an original game starring Prince Fluff. What separates Dream Course from these games, however, is the fact that its original incarnation, Special Tee Shot, actually went on to see (an admittedly limited) release for the Satellaview add-on for the Super Famicom in 1996.
I don't know what happened during the Kirbification process, but Special Tee Shot ends up being a much more enjoyable game. Instead of leaning too much on a single mechanic, STS excels thanks to a greater degree of control compared to Dream Course, which in turn lets the hole design flourish. Courses are generally larger and more dynamic (many even feature multiple holes, with a different one being open each time you play), letting the player devise their own path through and capitalize on the bevy of obstacles and power-ups to take risky shortcuts. It all feels like a middle ground between the circus antics of mini-golf and the more methodical tendencies of grown-ass man golf: you have both the tension of setting up a perfect shot as well as the frenzied elation of shooting a laser beam ball that climbs up a wall and drops itself right into the hole.
Video game golf fucking rules, and Special Tee Shot is one of the absolute best versions of it. It takes a bit more work to play than your typical SNES or Super Famicom game, but it's well worth it. Seriously, check it out. There's a reason this game is first on a list of games I wanted to talk about.
Old Series of the Year: Ys
It'd be an understatement to say that I'm not a big fan of JRPGs. They're too long, take an eternity to get started, focus way too much on their stories for as bad as they almost always end up being, and just simply aren't much fun to play. Based on this description of the genre, the Ys games may as well have been designed on Opposite Day in Bizarro World. Well, the double-negative ruins that, but you get my point.
Ys is the tale of this redhead dude named Adol Christin, but you may as well be Jesse motherfucking Owens, scourge of the Nazi race. In Ys I & II (or at least, the most recent remakes), you run so God damn fast that you almost feel like you're cheating, and it's the greatest thing to ever happen to a JRPG. Combat consists of just running up on poor bastards as you automatically slice them up by simply bumping into them, turning the few times where you need to grind into an oddly entertaining, murderous game of Supermarket Sweep. Boss fights often resemble a top-down run-and-gun, especially in Ys II, where they're felled almost exclusively by magic projectiles. It's all so active for RPGs that were originally from 1987 and 1988, and even the music has an energy uncharacteristic of its JRPG contemporaries, courtesy of a fledgling Yuzo Koshiro doing what he does best: FM synth bangers.
The rest of the series doesn't fuck around, either. More traditional Zelda-style combat is introduced after the fourth entry, but the speed remains: you can complete many of the games in one or two sittings, and this brevity is one of Ys' biggest assets. Rather than get bogged down in empty side-quests and hours of grinding, Falcom respects the player's time, cutting the fat while still providing much of what you would expect from a typical JRPG. Within the span of a month, I made it through seven different games in the series (with Ys Origin being the clear standout, but that's a story for another time), and I plan to keep plugging away at them. I hear the series loses the plot a little as it goes on, with later entries becoming lengthier and introducing party systems that take away from the sweet simplicity of the combat, but Ys' days as the cure for the common JRPG may have made a lifer out of me.
The Randy Pitchford Award for Game I Felt Most Bad About Playing: Puzzle Fighter
Whatever the opposite of "whale" is, I'm that guy. The last freemium mobile game I got inexplicably deep into was Sonic Runners, and SEGA probably now has a "do not serve" poster somewhere in their offices with a picture of my face on it. I was in the top 100 in that game and got all the good shit without ever spending any money or even too much time on it. I didn't have Cheat Engine for Android or anything nefarious like that; all it took for me to game the system was the NVIDIA Shield Portable's native input mapping, which allowed me to press a button instead of tapping the screen to jump. That was all I needed to be one of the best in the world at that game, and that's less a testament to my skill than it is the importance of having some damn buttons available when playing a platformer. Sonic Runners wasn't this incredible endless runner or anything like that, but the "advantage" I had improved the gameplay and granted me easy access to a lot of the primo equipment, which kept me around a lot longer than it ever should have.
A similar thing happened to me when I downloaded Capcom Vancouver's mobile free-to-play take on Puzzle Fighter, a game that is about as good as my description that you just read would lead you to believe. It's a heartbreaking disaster that fails to understand (and deliberately ignores) many of the series' concepts on a basic level, but guess what? It has some limited gamepad support, so I was able to rise up above the game's dreadful gameplay design, balance, progression system, art design, and voice acting entirely because I had something that made me better than a significant amount of players. I'd be lying if I said my experience with the game wasn't demoralizing in the context of my love for the original arcade game, but there was a perverse thrill in just working people twice my level (a likely death sentence in most cases for those swiping screens instead of linking gems together with a controller) and making progress in spite of what these monsters have done to yet another one of my favorite games. Like with Sonic Runners, I felt as though I was getting away with something by merely using a controller, but it was different this time.
I was compelled to continue playing, but it wasn't because of the cynical, exploitative Skinner box philosophy that makes up the foundation of the game. It was because I was doing well in direct competition, progressing in the online league, and maybe even enjoying myself at times all without ever really interacting with the upgrade system, let alone putting money into the thing. In other words, I was the last person anybody at Capcom wanted to be playing Puzzle Fighter.
Don't download this game. We all deserve better than this.
The Ones That Didn't Make It
Unfortunately, a whole lot more than ten games came out this year, so there were a handful that weren't lucky (or, well, good) enough to make the cut. They shouldn't feel too bad, though: there's probably a bunch of way better 2017 games I didn't even play.
I got my Nintendo Switch pretty late in the year, so there's several games on the console that I started but haven't gotten around to finishing. Mighty Gunvolt Burst is the one I've spent the least amount of time with so far, but even so, it's hard not to see the potential in the ideas it brings to the table. It's basically Mega Man, so I doubt it'll throw too many surprises my way, but I can see myself spending far too much time dicking around with the game's customizable weapon mechanic and repeating stages to search for loot and get S-ranks. Mega Man-ass Mega Man is well worn territory at this point, so any wrinkles to the formula are more than welcome in 2017.Small tweaks like diagonal aiming make this a much smoother-playing game than the NES original.
Blaster Master Zero was never really on my radar, but like many others I fell victim to Switch launch window hunger pangs and decided to give it a shot. Zero is an Inti Creates throwback much like Mighty Gunvolt Burst, but this is a remake instead of an original title. As someone with no real reverence for or experience with the original Blaster Master, I'm left curious about the fan reception to the game. It's a fun little mixture of action-platformer, Metroidvania, and top-down shooter just like SUNSOFT's 1988 classic, but I have to imagine that out there somewhere is a fragment of Blaster Master diehards irate over just how easy the game is. I definitely wish it challenged me more often (the game ends strong with an inventive and difficult final stage that left me wanting more), but there's still a lot of fun to be had in maxing out your weapon and just demolishing everything in sight, bosses included. Hopefully, this is a springboard for a full-on revitalization of the series, but if this ends up as a one-off, at least we got the minor miracle of seeing the SUNSOFT logo at the start of a game again.
I really wish I liked Golf Story more. The core mechanics are solid (although putting could use some work), its RPG elements are smartly implemented, and there's a lot of genuine charm in much of the writing. It has all the makings of a classic golf game, but it just never comes together the way I want it to. In fact, the more time I spend with it, the more I begin to resent it. As you progress, challenges become both longer and more difficult, slowly becoming an exercise in frustration as the baffling lack of a restart function begins to take its toll. Having to play through an entire challenge to start it over gets to be absolutely obnoxious, making one wonder how the team at Sidebar Games made it through life without ever touching a Tony Hawk or Trials game and seeing how it's supposed to be done. Some of the RPG-style "puzzles" inevitably lead to some Googling, as well.
The often-clever writing isn't spared from these doldrums, either. Many times throughout Golf Story, you'll be treated to something that'll be worthy of a chuckle or a "hah, that's cute." For example, the haughty country club is host to a murder mystery, and a sequence where you infiltrate a hedge maze to recover stolen golf balls from a pack of bandits bears more than a little resemblance to another famous maze-based circle-getting video game. The problem here, though, is that said murder mystery is like a half-hour long and the game expects you to collect 600 of those stolen golf balls. You find yourself getting burned out and going "alright, I get it" almost as often as you laugh, and it's disappointing to see after such a great start. I don't know that I'll see Golf Story through to the end, but I can't be too down on the game as a whole. There is loads of potential here, just dying to be realized in a follow-up.
After the brilliant Yakuza 0, Yakuza Kiwami was a bittersweet introduction to the series as it originally began. A lot of what I loved in 0 was there, sure, but getting to the madcap yet often engrossing core routinely felt like work. Combat is much more tedious, and most of the powerful equipment that would allow you to "opt out" of fights in 0 are locked behind the even more challenging coliseum fights, making the headaches that come with challenging battles unavoidable. Many of the story's objectives often feel like filler or busywork, with an early game mission set at a Tojo HQ funeral asking the question: "What if that awesome Tojo HQ sequence in Yakuza 0 was bad?"
There was a real sense of whiplash going from gorging on everything there was to do in 0 to wanting to mainline the story in Kiwami, and it has me worried that the series' best moments are already behind me after only two games in. Part of me wants to forgive the game's issues since it's only the first entry, but then I realize that the whole point of a remake is to smooth out rough edges. Predating Yakuza Zero is no excuse on its own: Kiwami is simply an underwhelming return to Kamurocho.
Finally, I received Knack II for free and played it for three minutes. We could've had a new Jumping Flash or something if you idiots didn't have to be so God damn ironic about everything.
Early Chun-Li concept sketches, for Puzzle Fighter. At this point in development, the character proportions had not yet been decided.
All About Series Vol. 15 - Super Puzzle Fighter II X (Aug. 30, '96), pg. 150