#the game clearly has a lot of problems and a lot of jank but it has so much PERSONALITY

[itsmewahoo]

im going through the dlc rn but i genuinely think the base scarlet and violet game has sky rocketed as one of my favorite pokemon games now

[conchelle]

Okay it's time to talk about my thoughts on Dekapari (bootleg machine translation edition)

I'm gonna be honest I'm not quite sure where to even start with this one. But it is certainly the something of all time

So to start things off. I do genuinely enjoy this game. It still has some of the classic Towelket jank, but as always it's nothing game breaking. The music choices are great. The first scene in particular really does a great job at setting the tone.

In general the game just looks good. This game has brand new sprites for almost about everything. If you're familiar with the Towelket series you'll know the creator often likes to recycle their own sprites which isn't a bad thing at all. But it's definitely a breath of fresh air to see brand new sprites for just about everything this time around.

The characters all have unique sprites as well. I like the detailed shading and they're all pretty cute and nice to look at.

This game definitely feels a bit like a return to form for the Towelket series. It definitely does feel like ever since Nekoashi Otome the games have gotten more fantastical and wacky with its setting. Not to say the other games weren't extremely silly was well but they definitely took place in a world that was meant to more or less meant to reflect our own until the whole plot that changes that sense of normalcy happens.

Not to mention this game features some of the more classic and iconic Towelkets as important characters like Conchelle, Lasagna, Moochasu and Paripariume. PPU being what the game is named after and having probably her biggest role since Towelket 2. Yeah she's appeared in a lot of other games, but it's almost been a running gag that she inevitably fades into the background.

This game's Lasagna is definitely one of my most favorite Towelket characters of all time. Like, she is such a genuinely fun character to have around and easily steals every scene she's apart of.

The writing for this game is pretty engaging for what it is. It definitely follows some of the classic Towelket story beats like the whole midpoint where they gotta go to the TV station for whatever reason but it's all done in a way where it doesn't feel painfully repetitive.

Part 2 of this game kiiiiind of loses focus of the plot- just a little bit but it's all entertaining regardless. It has probably some of the funniest and most charming parts of the game which is fun. Part 3 gets us right back on track to the main conflict which is perfect and gives the story plenty time to progress before the big finale.

If you've played any other Towelket game you would definitely be aware of how the story has a habit of kind of swerving off the road with its story progression and by the time it gets back to the main plot there game kind of just...ends. Thankfully! This game didn't have that problem at all.

However I do have a few issues with the story. There's a certain plot point in part 1 that's brought up and it's just never properly developed despite being built up as something important.

I was a bit confused on why it was even included in the first place if the creator decided they were ultimately going to do nothing with it and after digging in the files a bit and reading back on some of the development logs...yeaaah it's pretty much a scrapped plot point that was left in anyway.

For some context, this game was released in three parts. So of course, once something was written in and released the creator couldn't really go back and change it. The issue lies in just the fact that according to the creator themselves, they did end up changing where they wanted the story to go half-way while they were working on part 3.

admittedly, the story never felt like it took a sharp turn from what was already being built up and its overall themes. Everything felt pretty consistent except the inclusion of that particular plot point that was clearly meant to be something pretty significant to the story- so much so that I went back and tried to see if I just missed an alternate ending or something. But unfortunately that really didn't seem to be the case.

It's such a shame too since it does just feel like a big hole in the story that's left unsolved. My only hope is maybe we get some kind of write up or even update that expands on this...? Not likely but who knows, the Towelket creator is kind of unpredictable.

Another criticism is that even after 14 years the battles are still just kind of lackluster. In past games there has been some experimentation and some interesting ideas that could have been really been fun if executed properly but it seems that at this point battles are just one of those things the creator isn't all too enthusiastic about experimenting with. It's a shame but eh, what can you do?

Despite those issues I did still overall really enjoy this game. I hope it gets a proper translation someday though it's pretty far off on the list of games that need to be translated.

I'm not gonna put this game on my Towelket rating for now since I feel it's pretty unfair to put it against the games that came out a whole decade ago

My only hope for the future is that we get more Lasagna like this one. She's a very good Lasagna

[luxnebula]

Starting my Sara retrospective with Narupatsaat (2000). The first thing that immediately sticks out to me that the singer's, Joa Korhonen, singing style is very differently from what it is say, He Kutsuivat Luokseen (2006) onwards. The singing style in Narupatsaat is much more lowkey with more slurred enunciation, while in He Kutsuivat Luokseen, Korhonen enunciates the lyrics very clearly and the overall vibe of his vocals is more... regal? Serious? Solemn? Like it gives the impression that he's standing with his back straight and that every note and syllable has this important weight to it. Every note and syllable counts. I'll have to remember to talk about that more when we get to it, but I like it a lot.

The pianos and the melodic vibe is impeccable on this album. I've talked about Early Years Jank(TM) before on this blog, which is what I call the thing when bands (and other media like video games and TV shows) are still looking for their tone, vibe, etc, which results to early productions often sounding and feeling a lot different from the later years productions. Sara isn't immune to Early Years Jank(TM), but it's less noticeable. Their melodic vibe has clearly been with them since day one, with how the pianos come in the song Missä Olemme. It's very nice.

However, Sara also has the same problem as Voyager did. Their early music is kind of generic heavy metal, even if they did have a strong melodic element to them. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though, due to Early Years Jank(TM). I'm willing to forgive a generic sound while a band is figuring their niche out.

Overall, Narupatsaat is largely a miss for me personally (only four songs of the 12 are in my Sara faves playlist). It's not a bad album, though, it's just not to my tastes. I prefer my metal with some kind of unique twist, which Narupatsaat doesn't have yet. However, the seeds of the unique Sara sounds are definitely present here already. The album is worth hearing at least once if you're interested in hearing how Sara's sounds evolves and develops, if for nothing else.

[gamesception]

@retphienix​ said:

I gotta thank ya for the @ because I struggle to keep tabs on tumblr with all the updates bricking my addons etc x.x Not that I was particularly on top of things before that lol.

god, same, yeah.  no problem.

Also thank you for reminding me that Hollow exists, downloading now because I’m more or less juggling games to see which I intend to sit down and marathon a lot of and that’s a good idea for a title!

I really cannot recommend it enough.  Easily the game I’ve played the most over the last couple years, and probably the game I’ve enjoyed the most since Undertale.  That includes Dark Souls, which I first played during that period, and I *really* liked Dark Souls.

I would love to hear your take on it, when and if you end up getting around to it.  It’s also nice to recommend a game to you that isn’t, like, bad in more ways than it’s good, with the great aspects that do peek out at you through the jank only serving to taunt you with the actually great game that might have been.

I do maintain that a game that’s bad in interesting ways can be a more compelling experience, and make for more interesting analysis, than a game that’s just good, but Hollow Knight isn’t *just* good.  It’s fantastic, in a dizzying myriad of compelling ways that are all interesting to discuss, from the way it builds its tone and atmosphere to the way it highlights the best of what the classic 2d metroidvania has to offer while also sidestepping a lot of the genre’s pitfalls.

I don’t know what it is lately with various games I enjoy or try to keep tabs on suddenly and arbitrarily making difficulty spikes that don’t fit the game?  I mean, it’s hollowknight, it’s a souls like and all that jazz, but you’d know better than me in this scenario since YOU PLAYED IT

It’s not all that bad, since it really is quite overtly segregated from the rest of the main game, and isn’t necessary to get what otherwise feels very much like the actual canon ending.  Honestly, though, I think there was maybe an over reaction on Team Cherry’s part to what seemed to be a relatively common complaint about the base game, one that I would have shared honestly, in that it didn’t feel like there were enough difficult late game bosses to take advantage of the knights full move set.

This is something of a natural consequence of the open design of the game.  It starts out pretty linear, but once you get a couple movement abilities virtually the entire map opens up and you can go almost anywhere, finding meaningful progression pretty much wherever you go.  As a result, though, the devs are almost never sure of what upgrades you already have when you reach a boss, so they couldn’t really include any in the main game progression that required you to have particular upgrades to effectively fight them.

I think the trade off in favor of exploration is worth it, but it does leave a bit of a gap in difficulty for those who are old hats at 2d platformy action games.

But it seems like what the devs heard was “Hollow Knight is a baby game for little children”, and their response was basically

The first three content pack updates added several new and much harder endgame bosses, most of which are a ton of fun and have fantastic presentations.  They even went back and ramped up the difficulty of some of the lackluster bosses in the base game, in particular one boss in one of the few late game areas that does need more of the knight’s move set to reach now calls on the use of those abilities in the fight itself.

And people loved it!  All these expansions went over great.  People loved the Grimm Troupe in particular, in part because of the legendary difficulty of its final boss.  So it’s perhaps not surprising that the devs pushed even further in that direction for the final DLC, one that revolved entirely around bosses, and it’s not surprising that they ended up overshooting the mark for a fair portion of the audience.  And given that there are many players super invested in the lore of the game that found themselves gated out of new endings by an absolutely brutal slog of an overlong boss rush capped off by a much more difficult version of the one boss in the main game that most players already thought was impressively hard?

I really do think the Godmaster DLC is worth trying even for those who go in content that they’ll never beat it.  Some of the fights that can be accessed much earlier in the DLC are really cool and worth experiencing in their own right, but I have nothing against anyone who takes one look at it and just nopes the heck out, and I can’t disagree with those who point to it as one of the few noticeable flaws in what is otherwise a truly majestic game overall.

Some of it probably comes down to that “souls like” moniker.  Hollow Knight really isn’t a souls like.  Its a classic 2d metroidvania action-platformer, that just happens to have a similar tone, story structure, and method of lore delivery that are all heavily inspired by Dark Souls specifically.  And the game really benefits from that influence.  But where the game tries to parrot souls-like mechanics, whether in super hard bosses that the player is meant to throw themselves at repeatedly until they ‘click’, or in the corpse run mechanic, which is overly punishing in the early game when money is hard to come by and some progression paths are gated behind expensive purchases, but means nothing at all in the late game since HK doesn’t have a leveling system like DS does, so once you’ve purchased the stuff you want there really isn’t any cost to losing your cash on hand any more?  That doesn’t work so well.

Worse, it’s actively detrimental to the idea of exploring wherever you like, by pointing the player back in the same direction every time they die, when players in the early mid game might be better served by taking death as an indication that maybe they stumbled into an area that’s a bit much for them right now and they might be better served by trying another path first.

There’s one clear example early on of a particularly tough optional boss fight against multiple opponents.  If the player dies to this boss, the game even puts a friendly npc on the path back who heavily implies that the boss is maybe too tough for them, and the player should look for a way to upgrade their weapon before coming back.  But that npc shows up /before/ the player reaches their corpse, which happens much closer to the boss itself, and by the time you get there to get your money back - again, this is still relatively early game so loss of your money really stings - and by the time you reach your corpse you’re right outside the boss door, and taking another crack at it can feel less daunting than climbing all the way back out of the area.

If you do beat the boss, ... actually, no I wrote a fair bit but no, cut that.  I've got more to chatter on about that but I don’t want to spoil more than I already have.  The point is, while it’s really cool you can beat this boss and the area behind it “early”, and I love that the game lets you do that, the corpse run mechanic pushes players who are less comfortable with the game mechanics to keep throwing themselves at the fight when they might be better served by trying another progression path.

monhun

I haven’t played the the new Taroth or however that’s spelled.   Heck, I haven’t fought master rank jiva either.  The most recent thing I’ve tried is the raging brachy.  I actually found that fight pretty fun.  Reminded me why I like Monster Hunter.  But after seven runs in a row without getting a single reactor drop it also reminded me why I don’t like Monster Hunter nearly as much as you & Bard do.

Still, we should do a few runs together again at some point.

Man, what a thing to type when discussing a souls like, asking to martyr myself mentioning difficulty spikes or difficulty modes/options heh.

Honestly, I kind of share the criticism some people have made of the souls-like genre overemphasizing difficulty.  Mechanical challenge is a key aspect of the games, but Dark Souls 1 in particular is really Not That Hard.  It’s obtuse more than anything else, but once you know what the stats mean, know how to upgrade your weapons, and have a feel for the mechanics, it’s not that bad.  Especially if you take advantage of the summoning / multiplayer mechanics. I know purists can get uppity about getting help, but those mechanics are part of the game for a reason.  Dark Souls is probably the easiest of the souls-like games I’ve played so far once you know how it works.  I’d also say it’s probably my favorite, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

The over-emphasis on difficulty alone when people discuss souls games can get in the way of enjoying them.  For instance, it leads to situations like new players trying dark souls for the first time bumping into the skeletons at the start of the game and thinking “wow, dark souls really IS as hard as they say” instead of “these guys are clearly too tough, I must be going the wrong way”.  It can also lead to developers focusing too much on challenge, and on a particular /kind/ of challenge, and missing out on the other compelling aspects of Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls, including the way Demon’s Souls in particular emphasized delivering a variety of game play scenarios, or how it understood that a well placed deliberate anti-climax of a boss can sometimes be more engaging than yet another straight forward test of reaction time and pattern recognition.

>final achievement BIG CONGRATS, THAT’S SICK! I know what going over the edge on a game renown for challenging gameplay can do to ya, and that’s quite the darn accomplishment!

Thanks!  I’m quite proud of myself, even if there are harder things that I still haven’t done in the game yet, and probably won’t ever.  Stuff not tied to explicit achievements, but that still have little in game rewards or markers that you’ve done them.  I certainly wouldn’t say I’ve mastered the game.  But I’ve probably gone as far as I’m going to go, and I’m quite content with how far that turned out to be.

Not that I’m done with the game.  I’ve played it all the way through three times already, and I can already tell it’s a game I’ll be coming back to replay fairly regularly.

>no thanks, I think I’m good I’m probably projecting since I’ve said the same thing 100 times (or thought to) on this very blog, but I ‘assume and apologize if I’m wrong in doing so’ you say this because you feel some sense of guilt like you didn’t ACTUALLY do all you could and you must put on airs for the blog and let me say, screw that noise.

Oh, no, not at all.  Yes, there’s stuff left that I’m not able to do, and there’s people WAY better at the game than I am, but going by steam achievement records less than 3% of the people who beat the first boss go on to beat the final pantheon, so by that metric I’m in the top 97% of rattatas Hollow Knight players.

So yeah, I feel pretty chuffed with myself.

>Can’t promise it’ll suddenly be my next game, and even if it was it wouldn’t sadly get much showing I suspect because my pc is more or less down. I DID get replacement equipment so MAYBE? But I haven’t sat down and attempted to get my old setup running again.

So it goes.  Again, if and when you do play it, I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.  Even if I can’t, like, watch you stream it or whatever.  Honestly, I’d like to be able to just blather on about it to you at more length without feeling like I’m spoiling stuff.

[sazorak]

What I Thought Of Every Single Game I Played In 2017

2017 was a weird year for me. In terms of my personal life, it's been something of a holding pattern; I'm a year older, but I've not accomplished nearly as much as I'd liked to. I've had a lot of good times, and I've done my best, but I probably haven't made an entirely meaningful use of my lingering youth.

But on the other hand: I got to play a whole bunch of video games! 2017 was a good year for video games. It had to be a good year for something, I suppose, and if the rest of the world was going to be getting it nasty this year, video games might as well be the thing that gets its due.

This write-up is an overview of what I thought about every single game I played this year. Only games that released this year qualified for a numbered “place”, as interpreted through my own rules. Here we go!

[2015] | [2016]

19. Fire Emblem Heroes – Android – ★★ – 2017

As a latecomer to the Fire Emblem games, this did nothing for me. I don't have a great amount of affection for the characters in the abstract, three lines of dialog and a couple cut-ins of them stabbing a guy don't even qualify as “fanservice”, and the narrative that is there is just plain bad. It's admirable that they managed to reduce their permadeath-driven tactical RPG to an experience that works on phones, but I have zero interest in throwing myself into gachapon hell in the hopes of a “dream team.” Besides, the second orb I cracked open had a five-star Camilla in it, so my experience was guaranteed to be a down-hill one.

18. Pictopix – Steam – ★★ – 2017

Pictopix is a fascinating lesson that not all Picross games are alike. It's not just a matter of creating puzzles that are secretly pixelized art: there is a flow to good nonogram design that is apparently quite hard to achieve. Where I get a lot of enjoyment from the Picross E- and Picross S- titles, I didn't care for this one, despite being on a platform well suited for a picross-a-like experience. I'm not sure I can even articulate just what rubbed me wrong about it (though the shoddy controls didn't help); the puzzles just felt clunky in a way that other takes on this style of puzzle did not.

Shantae: Half-Genie Hero – Steam – ★★ – 2016

I accidentally backed this game on Kickstarter a few years ago. I thought an artist I was a fan of was attached to this project, when they just did some contracted promotional material for the Kickstarter. It's on me for reading into that, I suppose. In any case, I backed this game, it came out last year, and I couldn't honestly be bothered to actually play it until this year.

After having finally done so: I'm not sure why people like these games? They feel like baby's first platformer; it's well-produced, but threadbare in terms of mechanical complexity. There's a vague Metroidvania-aspect to re-exploring levels you've already completed, but it lacks the simple mechanical joy that the best of those have. The characters don't really do anything for me either; I presume if you've been following these since the mid-90s you get something from their interactions, because personally I just find it kind of lame? The art is fantastic, and the game looks good in motion, but overall, it's just not for me.

17. For Honor – Steam – ★★★ – 2017

Until I started making this list, I had completely forgot that For Honor even existed. Remember this game? It's the one where you play as an assortment of medieval warriors assembled from across the globe to stab each other in 4-vs-4 3 rd person capture-the-point combat. It was OK, but the experience overall fell flat— largely because of an abundance of flaws peripheral to the core gameplay.

The basic combat and mechanics felt and worked well; the simple axis-based block-or-attack combat system enabled some truly awesome duels that really felt like you were in a melee. But while the combat worked quite well, there wasn't a whole lot going on around it to justify the overall experience. The campaign was functional, but it was clearly an afterthought, bereft of even characters. The multiplayer was fun, but severely hampered by a poor progression / unlock system, as well as bad matchmaking and server issues.

In another year, perhaps For Honor would have stood out more. If the game had received post-release support in the way Ubisoft's more Clancyesque titles, perhaps it'd have had longer legs. As is, I spent enough time with it to know that it was maybe worth coming back to once they had hammered out their online issues— something that never really happened. And then the rest of 2017 happened and put it in its proper place. Oops!

16. Picross S – Switch – ★★★ – 2017

Where Pictopix disappointed, Picross S is functional, acceptable Picross. It's far from the best Picross offering in this line (I think I had the most fun with Picross E3, and not just because of its dumb name), but it is Picross on the Nintendo Switch, which is basically all I was really wanting out of it. The loss of touch screen interactions from the 3DS release is bizarre (the Switch has a touch-screen my dudes!), but I can live with it.

15. Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment – Switch – ★★★ – 2017

It's been interesting to watch Yacht Club take the baseline premise of Shovel Knight— a retro-styled platformer shouting its Mega Man inspirations via megaphone to anyone who'll listen— and alter their execution with these different DLCs. Where the original Shovel Knight was a relatively straight-forward platformer (with Ducktales-inspired down-stab action), and Plague of Shadows was something of an odd build-your-own-shooter, Specter of Torment focuses instead on aerial combo-attacks. These changes really alter the gameplay; where the others could be a bit mindless at times (particularly Plague of Shadows, which was fairly easy given the number of projectiles you could throw across the whole screen), Specter of Torment is considerably more demanding of one's attention; you have to be more deliberate with your actions relying than relying on flow to get you through.

The design of the levels doesn't feel entirely there; while they certainly have been more redesigned than Plague of Shadows' were to fit the different style of movement, it just wasn't that fun to play through. Rooms were either too easy or too frustrating, with little in the way of a middle ground. The boss fights were trivially easy (which is dire in a game aping a series that largely relied on the quality of its emblematic show-downs). The plot was… fine? It certainly was a Shovel Knight prequel alright, that's for sure. At this point, I must imagine Yacht Club and I are both on the page on wanting see them work on something else at this point. They've proven themselves to be extremely competent developers, but it's time to put Shovel Knight to rest; they've gotten about as much blood as they can out of that particular stone.

14. Mario Kart 8 DX – Switch – ★★★★ – 2017-ish

OK, seriously Nintendo— when are you going to make a new F-Zero? Don't you give me this bullshit about “Why would you want a new F-Zero when we've already done it before!” when you keep making new Mario Karts with little different beyond the platform you put it on. All Mario Kart 8 DX did was pack-in all the DLC and add a true battle mode— which is great and all, don't get me wrong. It's just a sign that your excuses suck and you need to fund a new Captain Falcon vehicle-vehicle ASAP.

13. Player Unknown's Battlegrounds – Steam – ★★★★ –– 2017

I want to like Plunkbat more than I do, but I don't. What's there that's good is great; the open-world mix of random-luck and skill-based shooting (especially with friends!) is a real hoot, particularly when one is either taking it entirely too seriously or entirely not seriously at all.

But something about the game just feels… incomplete? Despite leaving early access, it really has a lot of work that it should be still getting. The physics is jank (the vehicles annoy me to no end), there's still absolutely 0 tutorializing for new players, and the problem with persistent hacking and aimbotting has been dire as of late. There's also something to the notion that a lot of the skill in the game comes down less to polished learning of the mechanics and their interactions and more a sort of base memorization of Plunkbat Best Practices. That's not innately a bad thing, but I personally find these sorts of experiences better when they're focused more towards tactical mastery than strategic mastery. Both are important in Plunkbat, but I prefer mastering the former over the latter. The game seems to disagree. I feel like the quality of my gear should be less important than how good I am at using what I find. That is not the case. Oh well.

I'm looking forward to putting more time into this with buds in the future, but I've fallen off the wagon as far as general enthusiasm goes. Eh!

Prison Architect – Steam – ★★★★ – 2015

Prison Architect is sort of a highly-specialized, more accessible Dwarf Fortress. Much of the appeal of Dwarf Fortress is the immersive unpredictability of managing emergent personalities trying to go about their tasks, and ultimately, it's so complex that an ASCII-based rendering is the only way to handle it all. Prison Architect constrains the variability by its very nature (the things people do in a prison are typically well-regulated, and there's not a lot of agency within those bounds), resulting in an experience that is nowhere as impenetrable as Dwarf Fortress— but also nowhere as appealing.

There's just not as much going on when you get down to it; while there's certainly variability in prisoner personality and actions, there are just so fewer variables in terms of what someone can do and interact with. Plus, given your funding regimen and in-take are totally under your control, the actual form your prison takes doesn't need to vary; you're not incentivized to innovate beyond a desire to keep things interesting. You can just your layouts entirely towards efficiency and nothing else, and even then, there's no real end-game to it beyond making numbers get bigger.

Mini Metro – Android – ★★★★– 2015

Mini Metro is a slight mobile puzzle experience, but it is quite engrossing while it lasts. The pairing of simple mechanics and style works very well on the phone. You make subway lines connecting points. It looks like a subway map. It's pretty good.

Total War: Warhammer – Steam – ★★★★ – 2016

I've always been vaguely interested in the Total War games— just never enough to go out of my way to actually, y'know, play them. Warhammer Fantasy has never been my thing, but I like fantasy things in general, and the idea of applying battle tactics to lines of zombies was appealing enough for me to give this a look. Overall, it turns out I enjoy the tactical depth of Total War!

I'm not sure how I feel about the strategic-layer in the few factions I played—it's a bit micromanage-y, and any faction managing to sneak its way to the back-end of your empire becomes a real chore-- but the tactical level is very good. The interplay of artillery, cavalry, and troops-of-the-line is realistic enough to where you can apply real-world know-how and be rewarded for it. The types of troops are massively varied, both inside and outside of the factions. I was mostly drawn to this game by the monster-y factions, so those were the ones I played most.

I'm looking forward to checking out Total War: Warhammer II... eventually?

12. Sonic Mania – Switch – ★★★★ – 2017

Sonic is bad. If you add up the total of what Sonic has been over the last two decades and average it out over the amount of games he has had the misfortune to appear in, the average Sonic is hardly deserving of the fawning devotion he receives. Those first few mainline Sonics were good, no question—but that was over two decades ago. SEGA has never succeeded in recreating the feel of those games—even when they have ostensibly tried.

Thankfully for them (and us), there are those that can succeed. Sonic Mania, created by long-time Sonic fans and hackers, perfectly captures the feel of those first three games almost too well. It's basically Sonic 1-3+K+CD, warts and all. The Sonic CD-based stages in particular carry on Sonic CD's design of being too long and really fucking annoying, which is rather indicative of the ethos of Whitehead towards recreating the feel of the older titles. I'm very curious to see if they'll be given permission to do a Sonic Mania II, where they'll perhaps have a chance to innovate more and burn off those warts. I'm not sure if they would, but I certainly hope they do. Sonic deserves better than, well, Sonic.

Stellaris: Utopia & Stellaris: Synthetic Dawn – Steam – ★★★★– 2017

This is technically a 2017 release, but it's so miniscule an addition to the existing Stellaris that it's not worthy of a numbered ranking. Stellaris in 2017 is a lot like Stellaris in 2016, but better. The addition of end-game specializations, new government-types, and the ability to play as both hive minds and robots are extremely good, but there's still a lot of room for improvement. That's the Paradox model, I suppose; they'll continue iterating and adding onto Stellaris over the next half decade until it finally achieves some near-ideal state—or the engine buckles under all they're trying to do with it. One of the two.

My favorite Stellaris moment this year must be the creation of "The Borth Problem". The Borth are a race of space Hyper-Platypuses, whose traits were specially selected by their creator (me) to be absolutely trash. They're short-lived, xenophobic pacifists who hate being around each other almost as much as they hate being around everyone else. I force them to spawn as one of the empires in every game I play-- not because they're particularly threatening, but because watching them repeatedly balkanize every two months under the strain of their own ineptitude and malfeasance is extremely good. Occasionally some fool attempts to annex Borth planets, which is a tragedy in and of itself.

11. Tekken 7 – Steam – ★★★★ – 2017

God am I terrible at fighting games. I've just never put in the time to get any good, and I'm way too prone to mashing out moves I think are cool than learning combos or hit-strings. God do I love fighting games though— and Tekken 7 is a good one. It is a Tekken game through-and-through, but the additions they've made to the cast have been good, and the limb-specific combat system continues to hold up after all these years.

To be completely honest? I've been playing mostly as Eliza—whose special strings are just Street Fighter entry strings. She's basically Ryu if he was in a bustier (and a sleepy Dracula). It's allowed me to get past the hump of learning how to pull-off her specials, though it's done little to actually get me good at stringing combos together. It's still a lot of fun though.

10. Puyo-Puyo Tetris – Switch – ★★★★ – 2017

IT'S PUYO PUYO AND TETRIS, WHAT ELSE DO YOU WANT FROM ME?

Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions – PSP – ★★★★ – 2007

Coming to Final Fantasy Tactics two decades on from its initial release on the PlayStation, one can still understand the appeal. The tactical RPG system has phenomenal mechanical depth, supporting wide-ranging customization and gameplay specialization. There's lots of weird systems to learn and exploit. The setting is austere and grounded in a way that few RPGs are; the story it tells is ultimately yet another Japanese tale of man-killing-god, but the way that it's presented is more about fighting back again the abuse of systems by society, and the futility of one man trying to change the world.

At the same time, two decades have passed since Final Fantastic Tactics came out, and it honestly has not aged superbly well. The controls are bizarre, its job system is rather annoying in practice, it suffers from the usual problem games with permadeath carry where the second a character joins the party and becomes non-essential, their relevance to the story ends. The story which was apparently once so astounding seems almost quaint now; “Organized religion… may be bad!” is far from a hot take in these days, and there have since been hundreds of other games (JRPGs, even) playing in the same sandbox.

As someone introduced to the Ivalice setting of Final Fantasy through Final Fantasy XII, it's also somewhat strange looking back at this series and trying to conceive of them as some connected timeline. A lot of what I liked about Final Fantasy XII was its diverse races and their cosmopolitan associations and interactions. Tactics has even less than none of that. It goes out of its way say with a ringing finality “AND EVERYTHING NOT HUMAN OR DEMON WENT EXTINCT, THE END.” Pour one out for my Ban'gaa homies, I guess??

I had fun with Final Fantasy Tactics, but I suspect I may have had a miserable time if I didn't have a friend warning me of points-of-no-return and making sure I didn't build myself into an unwinnable state. Also: exposing me to the utterly broken arithmetic / mathematics magic system, good lord.

9. Splatoon 2 – Switch – ★★★★ – 2017

Splatoon was a good game; Splatoon 2 is that same game, on a different platform.

The additions made to Splatoon 2 are really quite minor; there's some slightly different weapons, and the campaign is denser, but all in all it's just the same good game. The only meaningful addition to Splatoon 2 is Salmon Run, Nintendo's take on the cooperative Horde mode. And you know what? Salmon Run fucking rules. My best multiplayer experiences this year were playing Salmon Run with my boys on Discord. If it were more reliably available, I'd probably have played it more!

8. What Remains of Edith Finch – Steam – ★★★★ – 2017

The latest in the Walking Simulator genre, What Remains of Edith Finch is low on the interactivity, but high on the graphical fidelity, atmosphere, and emotional heft. Sometimes that emotional heft veers into the realm to over-sentimental schmaltz (the ending engendered some real roll-eye), but it doesn't diminish the overall experience. What interactivity that is there is quite good, and it all-in-all made for a great evening experience. I like these sorts of evening-games where you can plop down for 4 hours and just have a nice, self-contained emotional experience.

7. Metroid: Samus Returns – 3DS – ★★★★ – 2017

Maaan, it's good to see Samus in a properly ass good video game again. Other M was bullshit that I wasn't down with at all; this is some proper Metroid-ass Metroid. While there's perhaps still a bit too much Metroid 2 in there (the game is remarkably linear for a “Metroidvania” and the area design is a bit one-note – befitting its Gameboy origins), Metroid: Samus Returns is a very excellent proof of concept that yes, you can make a good Metroid in 2017.

It's also proof that even if we can no longer trust the franchise to Sakamoto's hands without him ruining everything and throwing a tantrum about Prime, others are capable of doing what's necessary to ensure that Samus remains a galactic badass and not Sakamoto's weaponized nadeshiko. Uugh.

As an aside: The references back to the Prime Trilogy, as well as the REALLY WELL-HIDDEN sequel-hook, are extremely good and appreciated. I am pumped to see what Mercury Stream (or someone else!) does with Metroid moving forward. Is that sequel hook actually a Metroid Prime 4 hook? That'd be cool as hell.

6. SteamWorld Dig 2 – Switch – ★★★★ – 2017

SteamWorld Dig was a relaxing, though ultimately rather forgettable take of what would happen if you crossed Metroidvania with Mr. Driller. SteamWorld Dig 2 would be the same, if it wasn't for the fact that it's just so god damned well-polished. Everything about it from the core gameplay feel, the movement, the digging speed, the music— they're just so damn well executed. The game world is just a delight to be in.

The story and ending are disappointing (as legally required of every SteamWorld game) but that's not really the point; this is absolutely a game where it's absolutely about the journey rather than the destination. When your journey revolves around such a fundamentally satisfying gameplay loop, the greatest sin it has is ending in the first place.

HITMAN – Steam – ★★★★★ – 2016

HITMAN is good! IO Interactive has created the ultimate encapsulation of the Hitman formula. The game is built to encourage replay and iteration on the game's limited number of maps. This is great, because replaying missions to achieve the perfect murder is a real joy. HITMAN is a game about perfecting the art of playing it: learning the systems, the maps, and the routines of people to the point where you see the clockwork that everyone else is beholden to— so that you can slide between the cogs like a bald, sardonic time-ghost. The game is grimly hilarious and cool in equal measures. I can't wait to see what they do with Season 2.

Stardew Valley – Steam – ★★★★★ – 2016

Stardew Valley is a celebration of the routine. While so many games are about providing novel experiences and spectacles to keep our interest, Stardew Valley enables you to a build a routine, iterating and adapting as the world twists and turns around it. It's about riding a slowly swelling wave while maintaining flow; your farm and experience gets more and more complicated as the seasons go on, but it's always at your own pace; there's no real stakes beyond a desire to prosper and discover. It's charming and addicting in equal measures.

I'm glad they stopped development on it to focus on porting it to new platforms, because I'm pretty sure they'd have honest to god killed people with it. It turns out the cup-and-ball game from that Next Generation episode is actually a game about pleasing your peepaws' ghost by growing corn and hooking up with the goth chick down the lane. You're welcome, peepaw.

Valkyria Chronicles – Steam – ★★★★★ – 2016

Man, SEGA used to make brilliant RPGs back in the day, huh? I really liked Skies of Arcadia, and this is another RPG in that vein from that era. You wouldn't think “fantasy World War II European Front through the lens of Japanese RPG developers” would work, but… it does! They manage to evoke some genuine ethos, and their depiction of the brutality and horror of war, the in-grained senselessness of inherited discriminatory beliefs, are actually pretty OK. You'd think “We're going to depict ANIME FANTASY HOLOCAUST” would be the Worst Thing Ever, but they manage to thread that line enough to make it work… mostly.

Perhaps the craziest thing about Valkyria Chronicles though is that they somehow managed to make a tactical JRPG about trench / tank warfare not only work, but work well. While it's kind of breakable in areas and has balance issues, it managed to hold my interest through the dozens of hours without getting bored. I wasn't invested enough to do much in the way of the extra / repeatable missions, but I thoroughly enjoyed the combat for what I played.

That all said, Valkyria Chronicles could have done with less anime all around. If you turned that anime dial down a good 20%, this would have been a vastly superior work— perhaps even an all-time great. Unfortunately, its tendency towards Anime-ass composition and design, and some frankly juvenile characterization means it will forever carry that stigma of “it is very anime” that prevents it from penetrating into less anime-immune audiences. Still, for those willing to give it a shot and endure some really ham-fisted anime-as-all-hell ruminations on peace, Valkyria Chronicles is a real gem.

5. Super Mario Odyssey – Switch – ★★★★★ – 2017

The single thing that has defined Mario since the halcyon ape-threatening days to his hat-tossing present has been his movement. Over the years, the movements available to “Jump Man” have become more varied and complex, but they still harken back to what set him apart in the beginning: it's all about the jump. Mario Odyssey, while ostensibly about his more obvious hat-trick, is in reality just another stage of the gradual, ever-evolving repertoire of Mario's jump. He just… jumps so damn good y'all. It feels real damn good to run around and jump on shit as Mario. The hat even makes it so he can basically jump in the air, it's ridiculous.

Mario's new ups are made even better Mario Odyssey's excellent collections of worlds for him to mark with his kicks. The sheer variety and volume of unique platforming experiences is great, and it's ultimately up to you how deep you're willing to take it. Mario is something of a casual completionist's nightmare, given just how many stars there are to find. But for those willing to take a step back, the game allows you to engage it just as much you'd want. You could work on polishing your platforming skills to where you easily master the Darker Side of the Moon, you could just play enough of the game after “beating” it to get your fill, or you could just play what's needed to get to the credits. If you're a complete mad-person, you could try even collecting all those stars. All are valid end-points, and no matter what the experience is a complete and quality one.

Some one-off thoughts:

The new enemy designs in the game are so good. A particular shout-out to the Oni Thwomp!

THERE IS A BOSS WHOSE NAME IS “Brigadier Mollosque-Lanceur III, Dauphin of Bubblaine”, FUCK

Steam Garden's God Hand surf rock theme music is so good

The entire end-game sequence leading into the post-game zone was one of the most surreal things ever

NEW DONK CITY

4. Cuphead – Steam – ★★★★★ – 2017

Cuphead is a magic trick. At first glance, it seems impossible, like an actual sorcerer has walked in and done something impossible. “There's no way anyone could recreate the style of Fleischer-era cartoons and make a genuinely good video game!” Like any magic trick, once you look at it long enough the magic goes away, and you see it for what it is. You see the sleight of hand, the smoke and mirrors required to resurrect a nearly century-old style and make it work in what should be a wholly incompatible medium. But the skills required to pull that trick off, and that such a small studio accomplished it, is itself a feat worthy of a wizard with a sizeable beard. It's not perfect, but it's as damn close as any person could ever expect to see, really. The game looks, sounds, and plays damn good.

It's been funny following the discourse around Cuphead's gameplay, particularly the reaction to its difficulty. It's nowhere near as hard as people make it out to be; it's got a lot in common with bullet-hell shooters like the Touhou games, to be sure, but the difficulty about those games, like Cuphead, are more about learning how to play them right than anything particular crazy about most of the challenges they put in front of you. Once you learn how to precisely move the character, you can basically relinquish yourself to the flow state and soldier through pretty much everything (within reason). Cuphead's real trick in this regard is that the types of things going on screen look so fucking cool that it can pull you out of the flow through sheer wow-factor. It's a game that is harder because it looks so good. Unreal.

3. Pyre – Steam – ★★★★★ – 2017

The cruel hands of mother nature have evolved Supergiant Games into the perfect predator of my species. Their approach to writing characters, stories, and music is such that whenever they release one of their games, they burrow a tendril into my brain and maneuver my zombified body into a hole so they can lay eggs in my chest cavity. I'd feel more broken up about how they play me like an acoustic guitar if they weren't so, y'know, good at playing acoustic guitars.

Ostensibly, Pyre is NBA Jam meets Oregon Trail meets a Visual Novel, but it's so much more than that. It's the archeology of uncovering the history of a world through half-heard conversations and vaguely-written reminiscences. It's the trepidation of holding the fate of friends in your hands and knowing that you can't save them all in the end, and still having to choose. It's the struggle for glorious revolution, even though the odds of a bloodless one is low. It's all these things. You plot the end of an empire with a pipe-smoking treeman in between games of mystic slamball with a mustachioed dog. Everything about how it carries itself and presents its world resonated deeply with me and held me enraptured to the very end.

2. NieR: Automata – Steam – ★★★★★ – 2017

I've spent a lot of the last year thinking about Nier: Automata. At this point, I'm not even sure what to say about it. Do I talk about the questions it raises about humanity and what we may leave behind? Do I talk about its astounding visual and audio design? Do I go on a long aside on Yoko Taro's writing and directorial style? They're all valid things to talk about, but they're also all meaningless. They're only important in how they made me feel over the course of my journey with Nier. Intrigued, lost, depressed, uplifted. Nier: Automata invoked all these emotions in me in turn.

In the end, I'm left somewhat in awe of the experience. Not because Nier is a perfect game; it's a very flawed one. But it's a game that's really made me feel and think. Yoko Taro weaves the threads of narrative, emotion, and atmosphere with the deftest of hands. So what if the loom he was forced to work with wasn't a particularly good one? Nier: Automata is one of the most complete explorations of the nature of humanity and how impossible it is to grasp. I imagine I will carry thoughts of it with me forever.

1. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – Switch – ★★★★★★ – 2017

Breath of the Wild is my favorite video game of all time. Thanks, Nintendo.

[vjdarkworld]

The Witcher 3 Review (NO SPOILERS)

Score: Recommended, for people that enjoy Storytelling

Best:

Storytelling

Adult content

Difficult Choices

Embodiment of Polish folklore

Quests

Good:

VisualsOnce you have a lot of good tools to use, gameplay is funExploration and Open World

Observations:

Lots of tools but all singular use, instead of few tools with dynamic usage.

Bad:

“Slavic jank”

Requires playing of Witcher 1&2 OR read the books

Performance

Best:

Storytelling

This not only includes how the stories unfold, but as well the characters and world they inhabit.

One word to describe it would be believability. Of course, it’s fantasy but the way standard fantasy things would be handled is done well due to the characters.

A plot is a series of character interactions, so ultimately a story is only as good as the characters it has. Truly what sells the world is how the characters interpret it, and they all have differing viewpoints. Some take the Dark Fantasy world seriously, others find it a chance for a Fun Adventure, and most attempt to drink their sorrows away. But my personal favorite interacts in the series is between Geralt and his friends.

This is where it becomes real for me, relationships. Throughout Geralt’s adventures he meets many people. He doesn’t get along with most, but there are some he actually befriends. And even though nearly all his friends are eccentric which contrast the stoic white wolf, he still has long and ongoing friendships with em. As the director of the game said, “friends are the backbone of your life” (he was talking about life not the witcher but oddly enough it connects to the witcher for me) and that is exemplified by Geralt.

All in all, the relationships between the characters make the storytelling real.

Adult content

While other games have sex in it, The Witcher series has been able to portray sex for what it is…. Sex. Bioware has the lovely dovey sex after you Romance them, but in the Witcher it’s different and more Realistic. Adults have sex for various reasons and it’s not always romantic. Most of the time it’s just for the act itself, having a single fling cus sex is Fun.

Since witchers shoot blanks they have the stereotype of being promiscuous. It’s up to the player (no pun intended) if they will let Geralt succumb to Hook Up Culture, or actually stay in a dedicated monogamous relationship.

Something like this just isn’t address in any other mainstream RPG.

Other serious topics are brought up as well related to sexual violence and racism. They are all handled well due to one simple theme present with each situation. That is the fact that you can’t be neutral, you have to pick a side.

 Difficult Choices

It’s funny cus the white wolf almost embodies the “grey area” of neutrality that generally serious RPG fans walk the line of. That the player will be understanding for all Characters and trying to figure out a solution. But most situations aren’t like this realistically. Theoretically sure you can be critical of Both Sides, but in practice you HAVE to pick a side. Or maybe you don’t pick a side and “stay neutral” which can be the worst option cus you could be letting bad stuff happen that you could of prevented. This is why when choices pop up for Geralt, it’s pretty serious. Especially cus the effects of them happen way later in the game before you realized what you did wrong.

These choices impact the fates of certain characters, among other things. Choose wisely, or you may not be happy with what you did.

 Embodiment of Polish folklore

I’m no expert in Polish culture, or of ye’ old slavic and pagan mythology, but the entire game reeks of something being different. It just doesn’t seem like your typical Tolkien fantasy. There’s a unique twist that is clearly the result of the entire game being developed in Poland, thus polish culture shining bright within it.

Some people joke that the Witcher series is Poland’s main export, but atleast for entertainment it seems quite true. It seems like a major group effort from creative minds of Poland, banding together to present their folklore to world. Major props and respect to the CD PROJEKT RED team!

 Quests

Quests are designed like episodic content. For side quests and hunter contracts, they all tell a good standalone story from start to finish of the quest. Sometimes quests interconnect too, reference each other, presenting how much the world is connected. It makes doing the quests quite addicting cus you want to see what’s going to happen next in the quest, and then when you finish it you want another good story so you start another one. It’s almost like bingewatching a tv show. Having good stories for the quests makes even the most mundane tasks more appealing too. Trying to tell a story… WHAT A CONCEPT!

 Good:

Visuals

They are pretty nice looking if you got the Specs for it. Sometimes regular real lofe animals like cats and dogs look weird but overall its good. Landscapes pretty, monsters spooky, humans all raggedy. The aesthetic sells the world quite nicely.

 Once you have a lot of good tools to use, combat is fun

When starting out the game, you have limited options for combat. But through the course of the game, gaining abilities, new gear, etc etc, gives Geralt more tools to play around with. This is when the game opens up and you can mess around a bit. The white wolf can get pretty OP too if you play your cards right. To which if you think the game is too easy, you can always play on higher difficulties.

 Observations:

Lots of tools but all singular use, instead of few tools with dynamic usage.

Due to how alchemy and signs work, signs, oils, potions and decoctions generally have only a Specific situation use. Some are more versatile, but most times you will be looking up the Bestiary to figure out what tools to use.

On one hand this kinda makes the combat seem flat, cus of the limited options you can do, BUT thematically it makes sense why. It makes sense why it’s like this for a hunter of monsters, there’s a lot of monsters and they all have different weaknesses so it makes sense as to why the design is like this.

On top of that, it’s kind of deceptive cus you CAN experiment but only when you have a LOT of the tools and you know what all their purposes are. It’s a barrier, but you can get over it.

But still, in the end the gameplay still isn’t as dynamic as other combat systems which is a shame in my opinion.

 Exploration and Open World

Points of interest are labeled on the map. You get good loot and fight monsters at these points most of the time. It doesn’t truly make the game world feel Alive necessarily, it just seems more like extra stuff to do. I appreciate the effort of given the player stuff to do if they completed quests and are bored, and you get neat goodies from going these places but it’s really just There.

 Bad:

“Slavic jank”

There’s a bit of a joke about games made in slavic related areas. They are often associated with janky games, but games with so much dedication behind them that even though they are janky it’s so unique that it’s fun. Something like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. for example. This phenomena is due to how the gamers in these territories are completely out of the typical western Triple A bubble. And generally dedicate their time to old CRPGs, which causes them to grow a fondness for more Detailed and Dense design instead of Simple and Elegant. This isn’t a bad thing, and this type of thing can be seen in The Witcher series, where it’s both Triple A BUT has that old school CRPG style to it.

All that is good in my opinion…. But I have to be honest and say that the gameplay can be too janky at times. Movement in general feels weird with its velocity and acceleration. Roach controls awkwardly and doesn’t feel like a horse, more like you’re on something sliding around. When you run into other animals or enemies on Roach you just push them away and not run them over.

Also, for some reason the controls completely change when in combat mode and you can’t control at all when combat mode happens. This causes awkwardness where you are not moving the same way as before, as in… an enemy triggers you to go into combat mode but they are too far away for you to hurt so you are stuck moving around weird. It’s just an odd system, which I prefer to have a full range of movement and attacks, not being arbitrarily pushed into combat mode.

Also, the inventory is a bit confusing to navigate especially if you are trying to find a specific item hidden in the Other tab.

The whole character upgrade screen too is not clear cus there’s clearly abilities that are better than others WHEN you actually know their potential, but unless you’re looking up guides and the wiki you won’t really know which are the good ones to actually invest in.

All these little things that kind of ruin the “game feel” make people not want to play it past a couple hours cus they think the game is “janky” anddd the game is actually kinda janky. I have to admit it, can’t lie. There’s other open world games that have better movement overall, and I wish that this game did.

 Requires playing of Witcher 1&2 OR read the books

Now you may wonder, what’s so bad about that? Well, I was being critical about this games jankiness, but really it’s not in the slightest as janky as Witcher 1. Witcher 2 isn’t as much janky, but Witcher 3 improved on a lot of Witcher 2’s problems so Witcher 3 is in fact the least janky.

Now it would be a hard sell to say “you need to go through 50+ hours of the previous installments to play this?” BUT if the other installments were as polished as this than it wouldn’t be as much of a problem… But it’s like I can’t tell someone “Oh you have to play through these janky games to play this game, don’t worry it’s worth it bro” cus that’s disrespecting their intelligence AND worst of all their time. Not everyone has time to look play through decent games to get to an Amazing game just so they can understand the story… which is sad.

Cus don’t get me wrong, I adore Witcher 1 more than most, but I can’t lie and say it’s worth “slogging” through the awkward gameplay to see the amazing story unfold down the road.

Why? Even if it’s a unique OK… there are better games to play that are more than just OK.

And to the book point, you shouldn’t need to read a book series before playing a videogame, the entertainment should be as singular as possible. The witcher videogames too have a different storyline than the books anyways, so it’s a moot point of them being in the same continuity and being “required”… even though they technically can help if you didn’t play the other games. Still not fair though, so nah, just nah.

 Performance

You need to make sure you have a midrange build atleast so you can run the game. But man do the frames drop in cities. Back on my old-midrange build I could play at around 50-60fps outside of Novigrad… but IN Novigrad I had 10-20fps due to NPCs and who knows what else. Also just some areas would lag on that build regardless if something was at low or medium. Very finnicky. I think by now with all the patches and optimization it’s probably better buuut I can’t say the game is well optimized. It’s serviceable with a good build… but ya get kinda screwed if you don’t and that’s a shame.

[dapperkobold]

Hypotheticals of the Storm: Tosh

So, recently it was revealed that the next hero in Heroes of the Storm will be a firebat! I’m excited, because I like firebats! Also, because a while back I told a friend I wanted a firebat hero (hellbat, technically, but that’s a minor detail) and now there’s one coming to the game!

So I figure that I should wish for more heroes! Hypotheticals of the Storm: how I would put a given character into HotS.

I have a few I really want, but we’ll start with something topical given the recent stealth re-work: the head spectre and a very dangerous man, Gabriel Tosh.

Who is this?

Tosh is head of the spectres, a kind of secret sister organization to the Ghosts, which are already a secret organization. The spectres could not be controlled like Mengsk wanted, and so he locked them away until Tosh worked with Raynor to free them and other political prisoners.

Unless Raynor worked with Nova to wipe them out. That’s kind of a funny continuity note. However, to my knowledge the canon is that he helped Tosh, but it is true that in some strains of the story he is very dead.

Well, Tychus still managed to get into HotS, I don’t see why Tosh should get left out because of schrodinger’s assassination.

Basic Ideas

Tosh would clearly be a ranged stealth assassin. Yeah, I think that it might be nice to have a stealth support or something, too, but we work with what we have. However, unlike Nova I figure that Tosh should be a sustained damage assassin, focused more on solid damage over time than Nova’s ranged combo burst damage playstyle. Based out of the abilities of Tosh and the spectre unit from Starcraft 2, I think I’ve thought of a good combination of powers.

Core Mechanic Ideas

Trait: Permanent Cloak a lot like Nova’s. Increased move speed while cloaked (for what it’s worth, given that I’m not sure if the cloak move speed boost stacks with being mounted and a lot of the time spent cloaked you also spend mounted). A nice twist on it might be to give bonus damage if you use a basic attack to break the cloak.

Health will likely be higher than most of the other stealth heroes, but not by too much. The core damage of the basic attack should be pretty good. The basic attack will likely be the basis of his damage, with abilities acting as some bonus damage, control, and survivability.

Tosh’s main limiting factor should be Mana, as even without being a burst assassin he’ll be using his abilities fairly commonly. Fine details will need to be refined, of course, but this is the basic idea.

Basic Ability Ideas

Here’s where I pulled pretty strongly from the Tosh hero unit. There’s some solid abilities there and in the spectre unit, and I think I’ve put them together into a nice kit.

Ability 1: Mind Blast A circular AoE skillshot that does some damage (about the same as a basic attack) and stuns enemies in the area. Ideally the AoE size will be about the right size to catch about half a minion wave (the caster and the ranged or melee line), maybe a little smaller. Perhaps the stun would be shorter on Heroes? That would really seal the ability as a waveclear ability, but even a short stun on a enemy hero (or heroes) can be very good if used well.

Ability 2: Shredding Round A click ability, similar to Nova’s Pinning Shot but with a different goal. It does about the same damage as a basic attack (remember, this is not a burst assassin, this is a sustained assassin). More importantly, it decreases armor on impact. -30% or -40% or something fitting. This isn’t a power from Tosh or the spectre, but it is related: while Ghosts in Starcraft 2 gained bonus damage against light units (infantry, fleshy zerg, vehicles plated with tin foil) spectres has bonus damage against armoed units (vehicles, chitinous zerg, buildings, infantry in particularly large amounts of armor). From that point of view, giving Tosh an anti-armor power makes a lot of sense to me.

Ability 3: Psychic Shield A power from Tosh in the campaign, by pressing the button a sizable shield appears around Tosh for a brief time. This would be a fine option to have to avoid burst damage and horrible death. As a shield effect it would be prone to various shield-breaking powers, but that’s the cost. The goal isn’t for this to be a solid stay-in-the-fight power or a solid escape power: It’s flexible. Maybe throw it up to avoid burst damage so Tosh can counter with his own sustained damage, maybe throw it up to buy some survival when fleeing for your life. Of course, if you’re still in a bind when that shield vanishes, or if you’re in a big enough bind that your shield melts, you’re still basically dead. Likely also on a fair-sized cooldown and/or an expensive mana cost to drive home knowing WHEN to use it over just using it.

Heroic Ability Ideas

Heroic 1: Psionic Lash An unlocked power for the spectre in Starcraft 2, an actual burst damage power! I figure I’ll give him one, there’s no need to limit him to only sustained damage. In Starcraft, it’s a simple click power that does straight up damage. I figure it should be a little more interesting for HotS.

What if it is an accurate click power, but it has a kind of homing projectile that moves at a regular rate? This gives the enemy a chance to react and possibly use a protection power. In addition, what if that projectile does the damage to the first enemy hero (and only enemy heroes!) hit? This opens the option for brave tanks to dive in and rescue the target, or humorous accidental collateral damage. It’s a bit more complex than it arguably needs to be, but it would open opportunities for interesting plays while giving Tosh a fairly reliable burst damage option if the need arises.

Heroic 2: Consume Consume is a moderately common power in Starcraft 2, found on a few different psionic units with a dark bent including Tosh. I took it out of his core kit to give him a bit of solid gameplay, but it would by no means be a bad power in HotS.

Suppose that Consume gives Tosh a lot of mana back, but he must target an allied minion, taking half of the minion’s maximum life. It becomes a choice: mana management is always tempting (and often important!), but weakening a minion wave might be the wrong choice. In addition, this wouldn’t be a bad option for a power that he can use and keep stealth, given that every stealth hero seems to have one of them.

Playstyle Ideas

It doesn’t seem all that complicated here: You stealth up to the enemy, appear and start pop pop popping away with your gun. Mind blast is for waveclear, stopping a fleeing enemy, or just to give you some breathing room. Shredding Round will decrease armor on warriors and other high priority targets so you can pop pop pop  more efficiently. Psychic Shield then is a pretty typical survival power, used when things get a little too hot to handle.

The biggest question for his playstyle is ‘why stealth’? Sure, it lines up with the character’s canon, but what does it do to his playstyle? I think it’s still a notable addition, but instead of burst damage appearing out of nowhere it’s a complete alteration of the current fight: sustained damage assassins don’t have that same kind of “Surprise!” element to them, but they instead force the enemy to rapidly re-evaluate the situation. While a burst Assassin can change the flow of the game in a single amazing play, sustained assassins change the flow of the game by supplying steady pressure. A stealth sustained assassin would then get more advantage from stealth hiding the player’s presence on the minimap, as the enemy would know where to expect pressure and the player would have some time before the enemy team can appropriately react to the change in situation.

Talents can include various basic attack Talents (Executioner in particular springs to mind) and Talents to improve Mind Blast’s control effects and Shredding Round’s damage output. There will likely be one level that’s just three Psychic Shield talents, too. I could feasibly build a full tree if people really wanted it, but for this level of pondering I don’t feel a need. Ideally, Auto attack, Mind Blast, and Shredding Round would all be potential focuses for builds (with Psychic Shield talents scattered around fairly modestly). Also possibly viable are talents that improve Stealth’s map usage, such as requiring a certain threshold of health to be lost to lose stealth. As a result, if an enemy uses a fast AoE to try and reveal a passing Tosh and doesn’t score a solid hit, the Tosh isn’t revealed and therefore the greater team doesn’t know his whereabouts or destination. However, that might be flying too close to the sun.

Problems

First of all, both the attack powers proposed are pretty solid powers that are straightforward to use without a lot of actual interaction. In addition, they’re both fairly reliable. While simple, that is boring. Boring will not do. See: Raynor, a perfectly usable hero but not at all fun because he’s just boring to use. Now, the Tosh plan I’ve set up here is certainly more complex than Raynor, but it could still use a wobble to it to add a little challenge.

On a related note, while I do think that a stealthy sustained assassin is possible, I also acknowledge that all the Assassins currently in the game have some way to capitalize on stealth, either with their huge scary high damage combo or some other kind of sudden edge. In short, if you’re playing Nova you come out of stealth and go into pinning shot and snipe, or use Holo Decoy if you want to play mind games. If you’re Valeera you have a whole set of stealth abilities. My Tosh idea doesn’t really have a setup other than “enter combat from stealth! Surprise!”

And while I do feel that the surprise would have an impact, it simply doesn’t have the same impact as “You take a bunch of damage and can’t use abilities! Surprise!”

Possible ways, therefore, to jank up Tosh’s abilities include:

1. Adding a casting time and obvious area warning to Mind Blast. Give enemies a chance to avoid or escape the area, meaning that the Tosh player needs to be intelligent about where it’s placed and who it targets. However, several other caster characters already use this gimmick. Plus, those mobile heroes are who Tosh wants to hit the most.

2. Making the range of Mind Blast very short. Not melee range short but still short enough that it’d be risky to get close enough to use. Unless, of course, you use stealth to get that close.

3. Make Shredding Round into Shredding Ammo, which causes Tosh’s attacks to apply an armor penalty for a short time. If this is usable without breaking stealth it also works with the idea of using a basic attack to break stealth for bonus damage. However, this undermines the idea of using Shredding Round against a single strong target.

4. Make it so that Shredding Round applies a damage boost and anti-armor penalty to only the next basic attack made, similar to Artanis’ Twin Blades or Arthas’ Frostmourne Hungers. The problem with those example abilities, though, is that there’s no reason to avoid casting them off cooldown, they may as well apply their effect automatically. Shredding Round would need a cooldown and mana cost that makes it clear that it is not meant to be spammed: it is meant to be used wisely to apply a steep armor penalty to a single hard target. This would also mesh with the ‘bonus damage from basic attacking from stealth’ idea.

Clearly, any of the complications presented above would need the raw numbers re-balanced from the basic types I first proposed. My bias is to apply the second idea to Mind Blast and the fourth to shredding round: Tosh then has the option to exit stealth while applying a normally tricky to land AoE stun or exit stealth with a sharp damage spike (bonus from Shredding Round and bonus from leaving stealth) and armor penalty. Both are good options that would be used in different situations.

As far as overlap with other heroes goes, there aren’t any big ones that leap to mind. Psionic Lash is similar to a few other heroics (Triple Tap from Nova or Pyroblast from Kael’thas), but I think I’ve well voiced how it would be different. At the same time while there’s a few self protection effects they aren’t the kind of thing which you really lean hard on in terms of redundancy. However, I’m by no means a HotS expert and there’s likely some other hero that does something similar (AoE stun effects in particular are seen on occasion in Heroic abilities, part of why I proposed that Mind Blast have a reduced effect on heroes) but I don’t think there’s as of now any hero that works like this.