jimmyogames

[jimmyogames]

Katana ZERO and The Beauty of Stupid Premises

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*****

<Spoilers for Katana ZERO>

Katana ZERO is a game about a Vietnam War veteran former child soldier hopped up on MK Ultra time juice going around and cutting assholes down with a katana while wearing a bathrobe and sandals.

That sounds stupid, right? That is a stupid ass premise for anything, let alone a video game. Everything about that premise should reasonably clash against itself so hard that it collapses into a black hole.

And yet, Katana ZERO is one of my favorite games of all time. Didn't I just call it stupid, though? Yes, and I don't think it isn't stupid; but stupid does not mean dumb. Something can be stupid while still being clever, intelligent, and downright fucking gripping.

Because a premise is just that: a base idea upon which you build upward. You can make anything sound stupid when you strip it back to its foundation. Super Mario Bros. is a game about a fat, Italian plumber taking mushrooms to save a princess from a shitty Godzilla turtle. Disco Elysium is about an amnesiac cop who bumbles his way about a ghetto trying to piece together a murder mystery and not die of a heart attack in the process. Bloodborne is about some pinhead getting crunk off blood and, picking up a hacksaw, and going to war with a bunch of racist Londoners who turn into werewolves who turn into space aliens.

When you put things in such a manner, anything can seem utterly absurd — even the most grounded of fiction. As we all know, though, the reality is that these games are beloved. These games, which are built upon downright ridiculous concepts, are lauded as some of the most brilliant pieces of media ever conceived; and they work so well not in spite of their premises, but because of them.

No matter what idea you start with, it can always be made exceptional if it is well-thought out and carefully executed — which brings us back to Katana ZERO. Consider the premise I stated at the beginning of this post and ponder its individual elements. "Vietnam War veteran former child soldier hopped up on MK Ultra time juice"? How could anyone take that seriously? Well, the answer is that the game handles its characters and narrative in a way that presents them earnestly, without trying to lampshade or sidestep its innate absurdity. The main protagonist's past goes from appearing comedic on paper to being tragic when all the details actually unfold in the story. No part of "Vietnam War veteran former child soldier" is superfluous; they are each aspects of both the protagonist and the larger themes at play and are treated as if this was a retelling of an actual person's experiences.

The same is true for the rest of the premise. "MK Ultra time juice" is both a relevant story beat and one of the cruxes of the gameplay in Katana ZERO. As silly as it is to think about how the government shooting you up with hyper heroin can make your character slow down time, the way the game presents the issue turns it from nonsense to a striking commentary on drug use — and it does so while also weaving it into the gameplay without missing a beat!

This brings us to the last point in the premise: the fact that all of the aforementioned is true of a character who wields a katana instead of something more realistic, like a gun. Katanas have become a bit infamous over the years as the weapon of choice of people a little too invested in Japanese culture. It's to the point where when a lot of people hear mention of katanas, their minds go straight to scenes of sweaty neckbeards slicing up plastic bottles in their backyards. Thus, a game which revolves around a katana-user and his prolific master of dicing bodyguards like vegetables likely puts people off at first! Butchering hordes of enemies ninja-style is not only more fantastical than something akin to Call of Duty, but it's more comical too — at least in the eyes of many a modern person. How could something like this ever amount to more than Apple Store shovelware, let alone a masterpiece of narrative-gameplay marriage?

The answer, again, is sincerity — and confidence. Katana ZERO works not because it takes itself extremely seriously or attempts to play off the zaniness of its premise, but rather because it puts its foot forward without hesitation and without embarrassment. Katana ZERO dares to say "Yeah, you play as a junkie shinobi who uses time powers to turn bald dudes into confetti. You either accept that fact or fuck off." And it's because of that sincerity that it can wrap back around from being stupid to being captivating. When everyone stops trying to take games apart and boil them down to their ludicrous concepts, that's when you can become truly immersed in an experience — and Katana ZERO knows this. It knows this and invites you to leave your pretenses at the door. "Come on in," it says. "Let's cut some motherfuckers, shall we?"

Everything I've said applies universally, not just to Katana ZERO. Stupid premises stand out in the sea of realistic mediocrity that bubbles up from the dark depths of big business, whether it be in the movies industry, games industry, or what have you. The simple fact of the matter is that when you get stupid, you get creative. You leave behind the shackles of established norms and allow yourself to make something truly unfiltered. Something memorable. Something that, though it can be called ridiculous or absurd or whatever else, can hit you in the heart.

That's what makes Katana ZERO so good, and I invite all my fellow creatives to get stupid in turn.

[jimmyogames]

Six-Shooter: The Best Part of LISA: The Painful

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*****

<Spoilers for LISA: The Painful>

So,

I like LISA. Quite a lot. LISA: The Painful is not exactly but very close to my favorite game of all time (MOTHER 3 still the goat), and fan projects like LISA: The Pointless have enamored me for over half a decade at this point. To say that I "like" LISA would be an understatement so great that it wraps back around to being an overstatement. I. Love. LISA. (The Painful and Pointless the other stuff is like eehhhhh).

It was inevitable, then, that I'd end up talking about LISA here. In fact, I'll probably talk about LISA a lot, discussing aspects of both the official titles and the numerous fanworks — even the ones of middling quality.

To begin, though, I'd like to gush about a particular part of The Painful that I don't see nearly enough people talk about. I've seen praise for the game's masterful opening, how well the first few areas introduce the themes and mechanics, and much more... but no one gives this specific stretch of game its due applause. This post is dedicated to correcting that.

The part of the game I'm referring to is the gauntlet of agony that Brad must face in the interim between the first and second crossroads of the game. In six distinct events, which I will henceforth refer to as the "Six-Shooter", LISA: The Painful shows you what it's really made of. If you thought things up that point were brutal... sister, you're about to get a cold splash to the face.

I was hooked on The Painful since the intro, but the Six-Shooter section of the game is what really cemented this game as one of the most profound I've ever played... and one of the most soul-crushing, at that.

As previously mentioned, the Six-Shooter gauntlet is comprised of... well, six events. It's only natural, then, to cover each of them in order and examine the effect they have both individually and as part of the greater section.

Things start out small enough, but no less dramatic: immediately upon crossing the bridge that you spent all of Crossroads One trying to fix, you are hit by a car. Or, at least, I was. If your reaction time is sharp enough, it's possible to avoid the surprise by jumping down onto a nearby ledge, but the window is pretty tight even if you know what's coming. Already, the game has taken its gloves off. You're not given even a second to relax, to consider your adventure up to that point, or anything else. The wasteland only gets more hostile from here, and if you're not ready for it, you're gonna be roadkill. As if one obstacle barreling toward you wasn't enough, quickly following the car ambush is an attack from a luchador looking mfer who will royally wreck your shit if he gets you. This time, though, it's very easy to see him coming and get out of the way accordingly; but the fact that the game has the audacity to pull the same trick on you twice in a row I think speaks volumes about what you're getting yourself into. And for the cyanide-filled cherry on top, right next to the luchador, there's a cave where you can encounter another wonderful Lisa hallucination to feel awful about. It's a one-two mechanic-narrative gut punch, and things are just getting started.

This next bit isn't actually one of the six main events, but it's worth an honorable mention: after the previous screen, you come across a lone man resting his legs. You can talk to him, and he seems like a pleasant fellow! He asks you if you're well-stocked for the road and generally makes polite conversation. Take two steps to the right — boom, he's got a knife and is gunning for your throat. With this one little scene, the game is hammering in a nail that's been there since the beginning of your journey: you can't trust any of these d-bags.

But Cosmo Cassamassa (yes that's really the name of that guy) is nothing compared to your first actual roadblock, and the next of the big six agonies: Sweet Tea Rakeem, the man standing sentinel before your path forward. Rakeem is the first of the game's bosses — except for some of the mutant enemies, if you didn't prepare well — that will really saw your dick off and make you eat it. He has the highest health of any enemy up to that point; he hits like a train made of bricks; and to really put the squeeze on you, your choices for party members as of this part of the game are... let's just say limited. That's not to say that you aren't well-prepared for this. I think the game does a good job of giving you the tools to get through everything it throws at you, should you choose to explore and engage with it. It's just that Rakeem demands more of you than the enemies you've fought before. He wastes no turns, and he never pulls his punches. You have to get real — real quick — if you want to overcome this goliath man.

Though the mechanical challenges so far have been great, the game's upcoming emotional challenges are arguably even more intense to stomach. Case in point: as you continue past where Rakeem stood, you find Rick, one of Brad's childhood friends and adoptive uncle of Buddy. Rick has been missing since Buddy was taken at the start of the game, so seeing him again comes as a shock to both Brad and the player. What no doubt continues to shock the player is what happens next: Rick, evasive and aloof, is attacked and tied up by Brad. All of a sudden, it's as if Rick is a different person, claiming Brad is a lunatic and that Buddy is better off away from him. This, obviously, isn't what Brad wants to hear, and soon it becomes clear that something in him has snapped. When Rick refuses to answer his questions, Brad equips himself with a spiked club and... well, tenderizes Rick's face. Over and over again. By the time the metaphorical dust clears, Rick is done for, beaten beyond recognition by his own best friend; and when all is said and done, all you can do is continue ahead, leaving him to rot against a power pole. It's a brutal scene even among The Painful's cavalcade of gruesome scenes, and it's sure to stir pause in any reasonable person playing. After all, up to this point, you aren't aware of the full circumstances of Buddy's relationship with Brad and her kidnapping. You don't know anything; but Brad and Rick have history, history that you can only glimpse through their sparse dialogue with each other. Even still, watching him getting battered to a bloody pulp is hard, and though there's nothing challenging about it gameplay-wise... I can only speak for myself, but on my first run of the game, it was difficult for me to bring myself to keep pressing the action button. I desperately wanted things to play out differently, but The Painful emulates life in that sometimes, there is only one option.

That is, of course, until you are given a choice — and you wish you could go back to that scripted sequence beyond your control.

You could be forgiven for thinking that, after enduring the mechanical difficulty of Rakeem and the emotional turmoil of beating Rick to death, you'd have even some reprieve. Except, you actually couldn't be forgiven, because this is LISA: The Painful, and as you should know by now, this game will never let you get comfortable. If you haven't learned that by now, you will as soon as you walk into the next cave and have your first mandatory meeting with Buzzo, the sociopathic cross between a Mad Max warlord and the god damn Joker. So, Buzzo is here to give you that choice you were longing for earlier. Instead of being forced to do one thing with no other outcomes, you now have two different paths: you can either choose to permanently cripple Brad by chopping his arm off, or permanently lose one of your party members. A similar decision was presented to you near the start of the game, where the bully Columbo makes you pick between your "beloved" friend Terry Hintz, or all the random bullshit in your pockets. The thing about that choice, though, is that it's not too rough either way you go. If you elect to give Terry up, you're not much worse off, since he's still pretty useless at such a low level; and if you give away all your items... well, there's not too too much you can lose out on. Just a bit of money and some minor healing.

Buzzo's choice is awful either way, and there's nothing you can do to soften the blow. The best you can do is arrange your party in such a way that you sacrifice a team member you aren't using, but as you'll soon find out, even doing that isn't necessarily a good idea. This dire choice — this uncompromising fork in the road leading to two equally terrible destinations — is arguably the very crux of The Painful as a whole. Don't quote me on this, but I believe Austin Jorgenson said in an interview before the game came out that he wanted to create an experience that forces you into a corner at times. His vision was a brutal, stultifying world constantly had a knife against your hand — where there would be times when you had to select which finger it took off. I usually choose to offer up a party member to the chopping block, since I'm intimately familiar with how disposable they can be; but on my first playthrough? I froze up. I knew party members could die, but I didn't think the game would hold me at gunpoint and demand I either let one go or suffer a serious debuff to Brad, your only forever party member. It would be one thing if, as soon as you left Crossroads One, you were made to play this Saw trap as if it were a toll you needed to pay to leave the area. To buffer this situation until after all the aforementioned tribulations, though... I can only speak for myself, but I think that's fucking genius. The Painful is a game that knows how to grind a player down, to soften them up so that the biggest hits deliver the most... well, pain possible.

And we're still not done. Like all the prior events, you get no time to rest before you're thrust right into the next setpiece. The moment Buzzo unleashes you and you get to continue forward, you're plopped into the seat of a motorcycle — without a helmet, naturally — and sent off to the races. Now, I'd be lying if I said this sequence was anything other than pure badass. The music combined with the sunset backdrop makes this chopper ride something straight out of a vaporwave gif. Going fast, popping wheelies, tricking off ramps, and mowing dudes down without giving a single, infinitesimal fuck is all just... cool. A little tedious, especially if you have to redo a part over and over because of those damn rocks, but still cool as hell! Unlike the last four "bullets" of the Six-Shooter, this part is actually fun, and that's not a bad thing. If you think that a sequence like this defeats the purpose of that "never let up" attitude the game has taken insofar, don't worry; this joyride is short-lived and ends with a bang. As the enigmatic Rando saunters off and leaves you alone with some goons, you're right back into the thick of things. No more motorcycle, no more banger tunes, no more coolness. It's time for you to finally taste the blood in your mouth following the encounter with Buzzo. The battle against the Rando soldiers isn't anything ball-busting, but it reminds you to never get too attached to the little pleasures in this world; because just when you think everything is alright again, the rug is gonna be pulled right out from under you.

The game has saved the worst for last, though, and anyone who's played The Painful before will know exactly what's coming up. Before you get to Crossroads Two, there's one last hurdle you must vault — one last test of your will to overcome. Just as you exit out into the crossroads prelude, you're ambushed yet again, and the people who you meet will have you begging for Buzzo to come back. That's because your ambushers take you captive, and the only way to secure your freedom is to play Russian Roulette. This is perhaps The Painful's most infamous moment, even among such competition as the Rick scene and Buzzo's dastardly choices. The difference between the Roulette game and those scenes is that the latter are set in stone. Every time you play the game, you'll be forced to go through the same rigmarole. Whether or not you choose to cut off Brad's arm or kill a party member is irrelevant; those are always your options. You always have to beat Rick to shit. Now, you always have to play Russian Roulette, but how what ends up happening during is all up to luck.

This is The Painful at its most brilliant and subversive. It reads like a cruel joke: after everything you've endured, after dragging yourself through dismal moment after dismal moment, the fate of you and your party is left up to chance. You select a party member to spin the roulette, and they either live... or die. It's a one in six chance with every pull of the trigger. The only say you have in the matter is which of your gathered bozos will potentially have their brains dispensed onto the nearby wall. It'd be one thing if the game made you do this once, and regardless of whether you win or lose, you get to continue after; but you have to play thrice. Oh, did I say play? I meant win thrice. That means, depending on your luck, you can wipe out your entire fucking party... without even having completed the first round. On the flipside, you could breeze through the whole thing without even breaking a sweat, and that's the real beauty of it. For some people, this part will be a blink-and-you-miss-it type deal. For most, though? The Russian Roulette segment will live on in infamy as one of the sickest, most unfair things a game can sic on you; and the fact that you can choose to come back to gamble away more of your party members' lives only underlines the twisted punchline.

But the game forcing you to play Russian Roulette to continue only works as well as it does because it's the capstone to an entire saga of upsetting events. Had the Roulette minigame been something off to the side that you could participate in if you felt like, sure, it'd be fucked up conceptually, but you probably wouldn't think much of it. Having the minigame be not only mandatory, but also strike you after so much other misfortune is what makes it not just great, but a god damn diamond of game design.

The transition between Crossroads One and Crossroads Two of The Painful — the Six-Shooter — is a rollercoaster made of barbed wire, and if you think it's bad on the way up, you couldn't imagine what it's like on the way down. Every event sets up the next to be exponentially more torturous: it starts with a one-time event of getting hit by a car, then it cranks up the heat with a gameplay challenge, then it hits you in the heart with a disturbing and upsetting scene, and then... it just keeps going. It does not stop. You are not allowed a second to process just how bad things are getting. Just when you think it can't get any worse than being hosed with broken glass, the game turns on the razor blades. This sequence is gruesome; it's anti-player; it's anti-fun; it defies everything you expected about a game with cartoon nipple men; but above all, it. Is. Painful.

That's why LISA is my (second) favorite game — because it makes you hurt and doesn't apologize, doesn't help you up, and instead goes on to pour salt into that oozing wound. It's a truly draining experience that will make you want to put the game down and never touch it again.

But sometimes, that's life.

[jimmyogames]

Game Feel and How It Can Make or Break an Experience

What's up. I'm Jimmy, also known as JCJimmy, also known as "shitty Ridley", also known as yet another douchebag on the internet.

Things I hate about the essays I see online: meandering, summarizing, and barely-supported theses. It's my goal with this blog to avoid these pitfalls, or may God or Allah or whoever strike me down with a flaming, nuclear anvil like the proverbial Looney Tune I am.

With that out of the way, today I want to talk about "game feel", and particularly how it can strongly affect one's ability to enjoy games regardless of their other qualities.

Let's start from the top: what the fuck does "game feel" even mean? Video games are usually on screens, right? Is game feel the sensation of a cold, Dorito-smeared screen against your equally-smeared hands? No. Is it the Dorito-smeared controller in your hands? Partially, but also no. Believe it or not, what I call "game feel" has nothing to do with Doritos at all!

When I say "game feel", I'm actually talking about a few different things — all bunched together like three kids in a trench coat. The elements of game feel are "controls", "pacing", and "feedback". Let's explore each of these one at a time, starting with controls.

So obviously, what makes video games stand apart from movies is that you have the ability to play them — to control them, interact with them, influence the events within to produce various outcomes. A movie will always go through the same series of scenes at the exact same pace, every single time. Video games are the exact opposite: there are infinitely many ways that they can play out depending on the unique series of command any given player inputs. That's the core of games as a whole, even beyond the digital realm. What you do matters.

But games are as varied as the people who play them, and every game controls differently, has different ways for you to interface with them. In Pong, for instance, you can only move your paddle up and down, and that movement is instantaneous the millisecond you move your joystick. Then you have something like the original Super Mario Bros. Compared to the titles that came after it, the very first Mario is ludicrously simple; yet compared to Pong, it might as well be a leap into a new dimension. Pressing the arrows on the D-pad doesn't just move Mario any which way instantly. First of all, you can only move left and right; vertical movement is controlled by the jump button. Beyond that, unlike in Pong, Mario is governed by a set of physics. Just like in real life, he has to build up to his maximum speed and ramp down when he wants to stop. Jumping has a distinct arch and is affected by the speed at which you were travelling. Running and jumping are ostensibly Mario's only mechanics, but you can see just how complicated his control is versus what came before, yeah?

Well, as we all know, just as there was a leap from Pong to Super Mario Bros., video games would only become more and more complex with time. Third-person action games like Resident Evil 4 and Dark Souls make the NES look like a toy for infants with how many inputs there are to learn and master; and the less I say about DOOM: Eternal's trillions of inputs, the better.

What I'm trying to say, though, isn't that simple controls or complex controls are better or worse than the other. I simply want to emphasize just how varied games can be on the basest of levels, and why it's important to consider how a game controls before anything else — because the ease with which you can pick up a game and start playing is often what makes or breaks an experience altogether.

This is why I, personally, can't stand playing Super Mario 64. To me, the controls of that game just don't aren't fun to interface with. The physics of the original Super Mario Bros. are already rough enough to get used to, but put that same hefty gravity and momentum into the third-dimension, and it goes from being something to get accustomed to to a wet blanket weighing down the overall experience. I don't like making jumps in Mario 64; I don't like the wall-jump and how finnicky it is; and I really don't like it when the game expects precision performance with such clunky movements.

Super Mario Sunshine, on the other hand, controls like a dream to me. It's as if the iron ingots in Mario's underwear were extracted, giving him the freedom to fly through the air with agility that 64 Mario could only dream of. Couple that with FLUDD and the number of different techniques like the spin jump, and Sunshine is about as "fluid" as a 3D platformer can get, to my estimation. When I boot up Sunshine, I can hop right in and get to having fun in the various jungle gyms the game has constructed for me; when I boot up 64, I feel an exhaustion overtake me before I even get off the main menu, knowing that I'll have to take some time to reacclimate myself with Mario's gelatinous jumps and acrobatics. And don't even get me started on the actual Metal Mario you can play as.

Like I said earlier, however, control is only a third of what makes up "game feel"; another element of it is the game's pacing.

Pacing, put simply, is the flow of events from one to another. Think of how long movie scenes last before there's a camera cut to a different shot. The amount of time it takes for each cut is part of the pacing; the general progression of the narrative is the other big part of pacing. Both of these factors apply to games as well.

Just as every game controls differently, every game is paced differently, as well. There are fast games — Super Meat Boy, Ultrakill, and of course the likes of Sonic. There are slow games, too — puzzle games like Portal, text-heavy games like Disco Elysium, and even platformers that require more deliberation from the player, like Castlevania. The overall speed of a game can be either appealing or unappealing depending on what you like, or even how you feel at any given moment. No game is inherently flawed from its general pacing alone.

That said, games can be paced poorly, regardless of the speed at which they play. Let's pick on Sonic, as I am wont to do. Most of his games are blistering from start to finish, but there are a few outliers that really shit the bed. One of the most infamous examples is Sonic Unleashed, where half the game is spent running around like a coke fiend at a hundred miles an hour... and the other half is a half-baked God of War ripoff beat-'em-up that moves at a fraction of a snail's pace. That wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if the two gameplay styles were integrated more cohesively. Instead, most of the time, you get to play one super-fast level before being thrown headfirst into a series of brawler stages that each take upwards of twenty minutes to complete. That is poor pacing, and if it's poor enough, it can easily be a reason why someone would drop their controller and go off to do something like pay their taxes, because even that's more entertaining than another half an hour of Sonic x DMC stuck in a brick of molasses.

On the contrary, when a game is paced really well, it can be downright hypnotizing, and you can kiss many hours of your life goodbye before you even start playing. Ultrakill, for instance, is broken up into levels that can be cleared sometimes in under a minute. This makes it appealing to go through stages again and again, grinding your times down; and because the game is just so fucking fast, it never feels like you're stuck doing one thing for too long. An hour of playing Ultrakill barely feels like any time at all. Again, though, even games with lower speed can have intoxicating pacing. Disco Elysium gets sucked off every day between my friends and I, and I'm about to give it another round of sloppy dome for how well it's paced. While it's slow to go around, talking to people, wading through mountains of text, there's always something interesting for you to do in DE. You can help solve local mysteries, try and recover pieces of your missing identity, learn about the history of the slum you're stuck in, or even, if you truly must... try and deal with that pesky case that your partner keeps telling you is sooo important.

Good pacing makes it easy to slip into a "flow-state", a kind of zen where you and the game are like lovers, entwined in a waltz of fun and frolic that can only be broken by realizing that it's nine PM and you have work tomorrow and oh god I haven't eaten yet and-

Bad pacing is a dance where neither you nor your partner know the moves and so you kind of just bumble around until you end up falling on your face and wishing dearly that you were anywhere else, doing anything else.

Lastly, an often overlooked aspect of a game's feel is its "feedback". The exact definition of "feedback" as it pertains to video games can be a bit nebulous, but if I were to try and describe it the best I can, I would say that feedback is how a game responds to your actions.

Donkey Kong Country Returns is one of my all-time favorite games, and it masters game feel in many ways. One such way is how the game responds to what DK does in the world. When you jump on an enemy, for example, there's a loud, satisfying bop that plays both from the game and from your Wiimote, emphasizing just how well you gave that baddie a righteous smackdown. DKCR puts you in the shoes of your player character masterfully; every jump you make, every enemy you kill makes you feel like you're actually a five-hundred pound gorilla, mercilessly bulldozing your way to reclaim what's rightfully yours.

But when a game lacks feedback, it's just kind of... underwhelming. Imagine if you stomped on a Goomba in Mario and there wasn't a nice little ba-boop in response to the impact. Imagine if you didn't bounce up either, so you just kind of fell down on top of the Goomba, silently flattening it. That would be so fucking lame, right?

I wanted to try and keep my examples diverse here, but since he just has so much relevant material, I'll talk about Sonic again. Particularly Sonic 2006, that notorious stain on the franchise's record that I am honestly surprised it survived. 06 has enough problems to fill a book, but in relation to the topic at hand, one thing it did wrong was feedback. In most other Sonic titles, when you homing attack an enemy, there's a crunchy wham, accompanied by the enemy you just blasted going flying off or outright exploding. It's fast, it's satisfying, and it reinforces the power that you wield while playing as this character. In Sonic 06, when you attack an enemy, there's usually just a little metal... bonk. And that's about it. Most enemies in 06 have large health bars, so don't count on them going flying after only a single hit. Instead, you have to repeatedly hammer them like a bent nail, and when they finally go down, they do so literally, ragdolling as if you were playing Garry's Mod and not a Sonic game. Instead of making you feel strong and giving your actions tangible weight, it makes you feel weak — flaccid, even. You aren't a blue cannonball of death; you're a wet stick slapping around your enemies until they lie down in sheer pity. In any other game, this would be a glaring flaw, but as far as 06 goes, it's just another problem for the pile.

Sonic 06 actually encapsulates all three of the things I've talked about today: it controls like ass; the pacing of its gameplay and story are agonizing, especially if you're a fan of Sonic's usual speed; and it barely reacts to the things you do, making it seem more like you're clacking action figures together rather than controlling a real character in a real, physical world. It is pretty miserable.

As for games with great game feel, I can think of a few examples... DOOM: Eternal, mentioned briefly before, is a pretty stellar one. It controls well (despite the amount of inputs you need to keep track of at all times), it's paced so that any stage never overstays its welcome, and the way demons blow apart into meaty chunks when hit by a Super Shotgun blast says more about its feedback than I ever could. Other games with tremendous game feel (excluding those already discussed) include Pizza Tower, Darkest Dungeon (1 and 2), the Like a Dragon series, both Hotline Miamis, and Sonic Mania (had to throw the blue fuck a bone at least once).

Thus concludes today's discussion. If you got this far, thank you for reading. I want to make running this blog a consistent thing, but for that, I will need support. Feel free to suggest topics for me to talk about using the blog's submission feature, as well as to post your thoughts down below.

If you enjoy this content, please consider supporting me fiscally via Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/jcjimmy. One-time donations are appreciated; subscriptions are very appreciated, and will all but guarantee that this blog continues for the future. I may also consider opening a Patreon if enough support is gathered, but that's just a pipe dream at the moment.

That's all I have to say for now. Take care.