How good can a game that only costs three dollars realistically be? Well… as of the time of writing, I’ve played it for over 22 hours, and I’m still having as much fun as I did at the start.

This is Vampire Survivors, a game that is far better than it has any right to be.

It’s such a simple concept, but it’s one that has a ton of depth hidden within it. The fact that our weapons fire off automatically means that we can focus entirely on our character’s movements to make sure they stay out of danger for as long as possible, positioning so that when they do fire they do maximum damage.

And the more we play, the more characters, weapons, and passives we unlock to further diversify each run. The loop is damn near addicting.

If anything here was of interest to you, please spend the $3 and give it a try.

With our help, the sly raccoon and his friends have restored his family’s honor and legacy. That taken care of, it is now time to return to the galaxy’s greatest heroic duo for another incredible interplanetary adventure.

Welcome to Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando.

You can find Mike Stout and Tony Garcia’s Developer Commentary Let’s Play here.
And Golden Bolt’s retrospective on Going Commando here.

This is probably my personal favorite game in the whole franchise, as it introduced many of the concepts that would become core to its identity going forward. Aspects like experience for Ratchet and his guns, and the ability to strafe, dramatically improve the feel of combat while staying true to the general control scheme.

And that enables the series to pivot more in a combat-focused direction. While we’re still doing a lot of platforming, there are more and more varied fights scattered through the levels. At this point, we also have another series staple, the arena, which functions as an entire arena dedicated to pure gunplay. It’s a strong direction and identity for the series since its selling point was always a diversity of weaponry, which provided a unique identity to stand apart who its contemporaries.

I look forward to exploring more of this game, and I hope you join me for the adventure.

We’re almost ready to knock the Panda King off of his mountain and stop him from extorting any more mountain villages. And once he’s done, the true mastermind behind the Fiendish Five is next on the list: The enigmatic Clockwerk.

Tonight, we finish up with Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus.

Thanks to Resbit for their video of the Master Thief Sprints and the Behind the Scenes video unlocked by doing them all.

We’ve discussed it before, but one of the weaknesses of the original Sly Cooper, that gets worse as the game progresses, is the oversaturation of mini-games. It starts out innocently enough with the odd twin-stick shooter section in Raleigh’s hub. And yet, in Ms. Ruby’s and Panda King’s hub worlds, almost half the levels are mini-games.

Which is part of what makes the finale against Clockwerk so frustrating. Only two of the stages, out of the seven, are pure platforming challenges, one of which is pretty short. The vast majority of the time here is spent doing minigames in order to advance the story. And they’re usually some of the toughest minigames of their archetype.

It also points to how pointless the lives system is (and why it was ditched in the future) because there are no checkpoints in any of these levels. If we perish or fail, we will need to restart from the beginning anyway.

Fortunately, the climb to the top of the tower and the ensuing boss fight are both strong enough to make up for the rest, ending the game on a climactic high note. It was a pleasure to play this game again, and share it with you all.

Next time, we return to Ratchet and Clank in Going Commando!

This is the story of a streamer named Brandon. Brandon was a curious sort, streaming games to a limited audience consisting mostly of his close friends. And one day, when he had already decided to stream more Crystalline Conflict from Final Fantasy XIV, Brandon noticed that The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe had been released on the same day.

Though it concerned him that he had started writing about himself in the third person, Brandon knew that was just the effect that The Stanley Parable has on people who play it.

The Stanley Parable has been, and always will be, almost mandatory reading for anyone who dips their toes in the sphere of games criticism. Even today, nine years later, there are so few other games around that tackle the concept of choice and consequence so directly, interrogating the tension that exists between the player and the game itself.

It is often said that video games are, at their core, a conversation between the player and the designer, and Stanley Parable literalizes this concept to its most logical extreme, with a narrator taking the role of an overbearing designer who can’t stand that the player might not always agree with the direction he wants to take the story. And we can go along with him, or try to poke holes to see what we might be able to get away with.

And this premise lends itself very well to remakes and revisions, probably until the end of time. I played The Stanley Parable back when it was just a Half-Life 2 mod, a few years before it became its own game, and seeing how far it’s come since those days is something to behold. May it continue as one of the coolest living documents in video game history.

The clever raccoon had been busy, infiltrating the eye of the storm to take out Raleigh the frog at its source, swiping his section of the legendary Thievius Raccoonus. And with him dealt with, we’ve set our sights upon Mesa City and its musclehead master, Muggshot.

Let’s show him why you never skip leg day.

Since it was a topic of conversation in the stream, I went ahead a looked up how the vaults, and the powerups we unlock by opening them, work under the hood mechanically. According to the Sly fan wiki, I was correct in saying that the codes for each vault were fixed. Since Bentley’s VA has to record lines for each of them, and since they often take the context of the level into account, it only makes sense for them to be fixed.

However, the contents of each vault are not fixed, at least not by location. Instead, the abilities we get are allocated in a fixed order, checking for what we already have unlocked and giving us the next item on the list, and this check is performed when we load into a level. The exception is the third vault for every hub world, where we’re instead given the ability to scan for clues and breakables in that hub’s levels. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that since Ms. Ruby’s and the Panda King’s hub worlds each contain only four vaults, meaning that we can only reap that reward for a single level in each of them. That seems like a paltry reward, but then again we don’t really make much use of the powers anyway.

Something else that I mentioned was how awkward it can be to play through Ms. Ruby’s stage knowing what I know now, compared to what I knew way back in 2002. In particular, the fact that we as a western civilization misappropriated a lot from the “Vodou” belief system that originated in Haiti. It’s admittedly nothing new, and hardly the game’s fault since 2002 wasn’t an era where that type of cultural sensitivity was the norm. Even I made the mistake of calling it an organized religion in the stream when it’s more of a loose coalition of centuries-old traditions. Still, it’s worth pointing out and calling out so that we don’t repeat those mistakes.

Believe it not, since that first stream I did on Master Duel over two months ago, I’ve actually kept with it. In time, through daily quests and theme events, I finally secured enough currency to build a top-tier meta deck to climb through the ranks.

That’s right, we’re playing Zoodiac Tri-Brigade.

Not only is it a powerful deck, but its skeleton, minus the staples that belong in almost any deck, are mostly Normal and Rare (for MTG players, common and uncommon) rarity, making it a relatively cheap and easy deck to construct. And once one does, it does be easy to port those higher rarity cards into future decks. Now, there’s nothing stopping those decks from taking a lot of Super Rare and Ultra Rare card points to construct, but that’s a whole separate issue.

As for Yu-Gi-Oh itself, I sadly don’t have much more to add than I did back in that first stream. That said, I have gotten more comfortable with the state of the game as it exists now, mostly because I’ve been playing more rounds and consuming more content. Having just that much more of a grounding on the modern meta makes it easier to tell when I can afford to wait, or when I need to use disruption to end a combo prematurely.

It’s a lot easier now to see why people adore the game still, to this day.

Fresh off the debut game of one of the most legendary franchises of the PS2 generation, it’s time to exit the lofty heights of the Solana Galaxy and play something a little more down to Earth. Let’s play as one cunning, devious, Sly Cooper and the Thevius Raccoonus.

The first thing to notice with Sly Cooper is how snappy the opening is. It feels like the intro to a heist movie with the way it’s shot and edited, opening directly into the gameplay the moment we hit Start (which was uncommon at the time). We spent no more than 10 minutes from the time we hit start to the end of the introduction level, and in that time the game has already told us all we need to know about our protagonist, his supporting cast, our goal, and the world this game is set in. The brevity must be commended.

And as a turns out, a world ripe with thievery is also a world that enables a ton of diverse platforming challenges. Most of what a player would do in a typical platformer can integrate the flavor of pulling off a heist or sneaking into a securely guarded location almost effortlessly. The presentation goes a long way in that respect since Sly’s design looks like a typically masked burglar and his voice actor’s performance reminds one of something like George Clooney in Ocean’s 11. There’s also an environmental presentation, with the alarm systems that act as platforming obstacles and music that fades out when sneaking undetected and turns frantic when we’ve been caught.

It’s a shame that the series is in limbo right now because even today it still looks and plays unbelievably well.

Final Fantasy XIV just released Patch 6.1, and with it a whole host of new content. The most drastic addition to the game is the complete overhaul of PvP combat and the replacement of The Feast with a new 5v5 PvP mode called Crystalline Conflict.

Let my character, Rabrandt Razorclaw, and I take you through a few matches to get a feel for it.

For those of you who, like me, really enjoyed Overwatch for about 4-6 months before you dropped it like a lead weight, this setup might look familiar to you. There’s a crystal payload that needs to be delivered to the other side of the map, and our goal is to fight through the enemy team in order to guide it to their side of the map before they can do the same for us. The team that makes it farthest in 5 minutes is the winner, with some overtime allotment if the payload is still being contested when time is up.

The greatest strength of Crystalline Conflict is how short each individual match is. It doesn’t feel anywhere near as bad to lose a 5-minute game as it does to lose a 20-minute (like FF XIV’s own Frontlines) or, gods forbid, a 40-minute match (like you’d have in League of Legends). And because they’re so bite-sized, it’s reasonable to spend an hour or two jamming matches one after the other. I know in the past few days, I’ve spent far more time than I expected too trying to capture the crystal for my team.

Something also needs to be said about how successful the overhaul for PvP has been. A lot of my time playing Frontlines involved fumbling with my hotbar, getting killed before I could pop the ability that would have saved me. This new system simplifies every job into a kit that can be put succinctly into about 8 buttons or less while giving each of them a flavor and identity uniquely their own. The flavor is still contained in that tiny package.

Overall, the team responsible for this should feel very proud of themselves. PvP has always been a dicey aspect of FF XIV. While Frontlines still sucks, this new Crystalline Conflict is perfect for what I want out of the game’s PvP.

(PS: Rewatching this just prior to posting, it’s amusing watching my Dancer play since I’ve switched to playing Warrior since it has far better Crowd Control abilities.)

Now that we’ve discovered that Ultimate Supreme Executive Chairman Drek’s scheme personally affects our hero, Ratchet has finally decided to put a stop to it. We have the coordinates, and all that’s left is to travel back to our home planet, Veldin, and end this mess.

Though the game never pretends that Chairman Drek is anything but selfish and short-sighted, there’s still an impact when he doesn’t even bother pretending that he has any motivation aside from the capitalistic need to consume and profit off of whatever material he can take for himself. If he can make a quick buck by destroying everything around him, you better believe that he will.

In a way, he’s not all that different from Ratchet at the start of the game. They both did whatever felt right for them in the moment, regardless of the consequences. There’s a world in which Ratchet could have worked for Drek, since all he really wanted was to get off his home planet and have fun wrecking whatever we wanted.

And that’s why it’s important for Ratchet to start out as such a massive, egotistical jerkwad. When we get to the end of the game, he has learned to get over himself (even if one could argue that’s only because he has a personal stake in it now). Instead of abandoning his new friend, he takes Clank in and gives him a place to call home. The payoff from that final scene, as he walks away back to his garage, is all the stronger because it’s entirely believable that he would just leave Clank and move on with his life.

Rough as it was, this was the foundation for a franchise that still maintains a huge fanbase even to this day. We’ll continue with it in the future, but for now, we’ll pivot to another popular anthropomorphic protagonist. Next time, we start Sly Cooper and the Thievius Racconus.

At last, our heroes have reached an accord. With the fate of the galaxy at stake, they have an evil corporate executive (or, as I call them, regular corporate executives) to stop.

So let’s stop ‘im.

As the threat is made clear, and Ratchet’s own home planet gets caught up in the crossfire of Ultimate Supreme Executive Chairman Drek’s capitalist real estate venture, he finally sees what he’s been ignoring in the name of his own hedonistic impulses. And at last, he pushes them aside in order to do the right thing. I believe that’s the intended interpretation of the scene in which Ratchet flies into an indignant rage.

However, looking at this same scene from a 2022 lens, I can’t help but draw parallels to the people who don’t care about issues like gun violence, Covid-19, racism in the courts, and so on until they are personally affected by them. Sure, Drek’s been attacking and destroying countless planets in the galaxy for his new planet, but that’s someone else’s problem. Only now, once his own home and garage are under threat, does Ratchet decide that he needs to actually take action. It’s even worse because it’s consistent with his previous hedonistic and antagonist behavior towards anyone who ever slightly inconveniences him.

Needless to say, I understand why Insomniac went through so much effort rehabilitating him in the sequels.