After a hard fought campaign against the forces of the Covenant, the Flood that our conflict had unwittingly unleashed, and the mechanical guardians created to genocide all organic life, we managed to escape alongside the Master Chief.

Now, our brief reprieve in the small, scenic town of Little Hope has come to end, and it’s time we returned to the frontlines of battle. Earth, and humanity, are once again under attack, and once again the Master Chief stands as a bulwark again the incoming threat.

Welcome to Halo 2.

Both in terms of Bungie’s original jump from Halo: Combat Evolved and in 343’s ability to remaster games, judging by the leap in quality from their remaster of that game, Halo 2 is a triumph. The sheer amount of work both teams must have put in during their respective dev cycles cannot be overstated.

Something that was sorely lacking in the original Halo: Combat Evolved, was anything resembling lore and world-building, to give players something to sink their teeth into. The plot was bare-bones, giving us just enough to justify gunning down a bunch of mooks. Here, we begin to learn a lot about the Covenant, their culture and what drives them. And for that reason, the role of the Arbiter is a crucial one.

The updated cut scenes provided by 343 also go a long way to improving the presentation of these details. I’m thankful that the ability to hotswap between the old and new graphics style extend to the cutscenes in Halo 2, because otherwise I would never be able to appreciate just the amount of work that must have gone into this complete recreation. Rather than just upscale the graphics and call it a day, they put in the extra effort to create all new, high resolution models and texture work, and restage everything with a more cinematic flare, incorporating shot composition and re-scripting entire scenes for improved legibility. I don’t say this to disparage Bungie’s work, because they did an excellent job with the resources they were given. Rather, this is intended to acknowledge and respect the extra effort put in by the mastering team.

And it’s equally impressive how much better the game plays compared to its contemporaries. The game may be more lethal, but that just makes duel-wielding SMGs or Needlers that much more gratifying. Sure, I can’t melee or grenade anybody unless I’m willing to ditch the weapon in my left hand, but that’s okay because more bullets is better for me. That’s all before we even get into the changes made to make driving vehicles in this game a lot more bearable than it was in Halo 1. We can even steal them from out enemies now.

On that subject: I promise you, I will jack the Wraith if it’s the last thing I do.

It is often lamented that the state of the game industry at large tends to crowd out the kind of low-budget, mid-tier platformers that were commonplace in the PlayStation 1 era. For every Crash Bandicoot or Spyro the Dragon, there was a Jersey Devil or some other such game that, while not the pinnacle of its genre, was entertaining enough to hold its own in the annals of gaming history.

As it so happens, I was in the mood for one such game when my good friend Chris, of the Marvelous/Dark Duo fame, gave me a copy of Pumpkin Jack. I was intrigued enough by it that I wanted to show it off for a bit on my Wednesday stream.

It’s exactly what I was hoping for. Not perfect, but good enough to satisfy the itching I had for a mid-tier platforming game.

From what I gather, Pumpkin Jack was mostly the pet project of a single man: Nicolas Meyssonnier, with some aid in the OST and UI departments. And as a product of a small team, I must say I’m impressed with what I’ve seen.

All of the bones of a solid platformer are here. Movement is fluid and the controller are smooth enough that I never feel like the game is fighting me. Even the gimmick sections have very responsive controls that do exactly what I want them to do. Part of that may be due to the simplicity of said controls, but I can hardly complain if the game doesn’t feel the need to bog itself down in overly complex mechanics.

The art style is charming and in way that harkens back to my beloved Medievil. It plays in the classic tropes of horror and Halloween while being delightfully approachable for players of all ages. And it’s back by an OST that doesn’t exactly what it needs to do in setting the tone without standing out. That might sound like a complaint, but sometimes the best soundtracks are the ones that fade in into the background to compliment the work that they’re being used in. There’s also enough personality in the characters that they get to play off of each other in lovably affable ways.

Most of the complaints I could level at Pumpkin Jack feel petty. The game feels easy, even for a platformer meant for kids. As you can see in the VOD, I came close to being defeated in combat a number of times, but that’s mostly because I wasn’t focusing on it and taking more hits than I realistically should have if I was more seriously playing it. Even the platforming feels like it could stand to be less forgiving than it is in order to impose more challenge. There’s some escalation later on, but I have died significantly less than I have in most other games in the genre.

Additionally, it feels like the different weapons are mostly cosmetic, not adding a whole lot of meaningful change to the gameplay structure. It would have been nice to see new mechanics added to the kit as our inventory expands. I am largely doing the same thing at the point of the game I’m playing now that I did when I was streaming this as of the time of writing, and while level design can certainly alleviate a lot of that (which it has in fairness), there could be a Metroid-esque accumulation of abilities.

But overall, this is a fun game that I’m hope gets a few more eyeballs on it as a result of I and other people spreading the word. There’s solid work put into this game that I would like to be rewarded.

Like moths to the flame, Acharky and I return to the horrors of Little Hope to unravel the mysteries at the heart of a town seeped in tragedy and sin. Are we doomed to forever live and relive the haunted past, or can we finally let the dearly departed rest in peace?

We all have our demons. And if we don’t confront them, we risk losing ourselves to them.

I’ll be honest. I did not expect that plot twist coming, even if I should have. It doesn’t come out of nowhere, and the seeds were all established in the story beforehand. If anything, knowing what I know now makes a repeat playthrough all the more appealing. It would interesting to see how scenes change with the added context, and what other possible endings there could be.

I also wonder if this signals a trend we can expect to see in the rest of The Dark Pictures Anthology. In both Man of Medan and Little Hope, the monsters and horrors our protagonists go up against all have rational, logical explanations for their existence. Part of both games is uncovering the truth and using that to dispel or otherwise neutralize them, conquering them in turn.

If that through line continues, then is it natural to suspect that even the Curator/Grim Reaper himself also has a logical explanation? As unlikely as it seems, he himself is the one who keeps insisting that “things are not always as they appear to be”.

Either way, I had a blast playing this, and I eagerly look forward to seeing what they do next year.

Though I don’t purchase, or even necessarily like, all of their games, I always have my eye on Klei Entertainment. They have a unique affinity for looking at a genre, taking the core aspects of it, and refining it to something that is both extremely approachable and mechanically deep. From the excellent stealth game Mark of the Ninja to the survival-based Don’t Starve (Together), and turn-based Invisible Inc, all of them are completely distinct from one another, but they all carved their niches out in their respective genres.

So when I heard they were making a deck-building roguelike… Well, I was intrigued.

What intrigues me most about Griftlands is that there appears to be two completely separate modes of combat, with their own separate resources and decks to wield in that aspect of the game. There is the obvious physical combat, and the negotiation game, trading barbs instead of blades. It’s a good solution to the problem many RPGs that play like this have, where speech checks can completely negate player engagement by letting them completely bypass a section of the game. Players have to choose their approach, weighing the consequences both short and long-term.

That aside, I like seeing the dev team take from other genre contemporaries to further refine their own mechanics. Most obviously, there’s a lot of DNA from Slay the Spire in Griftlands, from the intent system to the way each encounter gives players a card to add to their deck. Even the fact that it’s a card-based deck-building game where cards can be upgraded lends some credit to that game. And yet, the differences are significant here. For one, all it takes to upgrade a card is frequent use, so any pet cards that we use religiously are bound to be upgraded once after enough time passes. Additionally, the choice in how they grow stronger gives us yet another layer of customization and decision making.

I’m also curious as to what impact the roguelike elements will have for Griftlands. Most runs I have in typical roguelikes last about an hour or less, so if I die I don’t lose so much progress that it feels like I wasted my time. While I’ve not played more than what I did on stream as of the time of writing, the impression I have is that I was just getting started with Sal’s campaign. In the event I get 5 or more hours in and die to some random bandit, having to start all over from the very beginning is going to be brutal, to the point where it would be very discouraging. I can only hope Klei took that into account when designed the overall flow of the game.

It feels like they’re intention is to have an entire 8-10 hour campaign. If that’s the case, then I don’t know if this is a game I can stay with for the long haul, especially if the choices I make 3-4 hours ago are what do me in way later on. But I’m willing to give it a try, my curiosity demands that much.

Eventually, after so long without streaming any card games, the itch eventually needs to be scratched, at least for someone like me. And there’s no better time than now to return to the world of Runeterra, which the latest update providing new cards, champions, and strategies to experiment with.

On top of that, there appears to be a new event on offer with regards to a pop stars in the League of Legends lore that I have absolutely no familiarity with whatsoever. I’ve sure someone will explain it to me at some point.

As always, the deck lists I play with come courtesy of Mobalytics. The decklist import codes are:

• Warmother:
• CICACAYFAIBAGAICAYBQCBIBDUUAKAIBBQLSCJZJAEBQCBIPDE3ACAIBAE2A
• Lee Targon:
• CIBQEAICBEYQGAQCAMDASBQDBENSGKJTLRRAGAICAIEACAYCCQAQGCKVAEAQEAQF

Warmother’s Call has been around since I first started playing the game. While it’s a powerful effect, it’s very seen much use because it’s high cost means players would need to have at least 9 normal mana (and an additional 3 spell mana) to play it. Ramp never had the tools to succeed, which prevented it from seeing any major play. The card that finally solved that problem was, oddly enough, Trundle.

Since the two big ramp pieces, Wyrding Stones and Catalyst of Aeons, can both be played on turn three, it is common for this deck to have five mana available on turn four, allowing Trundle to sequence nicely after ramping. With both above average stats and regeneration, he can both a strong attacker and blocker to keep pressure on the opponent while we continue to expand our mana pool. And if that wasn’t enough, his signature spell is a strong board clear that can debilitate boards that have over-committed to the board in the meantime. He has everything that the archetype was missing, slotting nicely into the build.

The Lee Targon deck, on the other hand, involves setting up a combo that can quickly obliterate an opponent once it’s been established. First order of business is to draw into one of our copies of Lee Sin, and cast enough spells to level him up. This is why most of the spells in this deck draw a card once we’ve cast them, and most of the minions in our deck create cheap Gems that we can use to pad out our spell count and protect Lee Sin with the barriers he creates for himself.

Once we have achieved these conditions, we use Zenith Blade on him to grant him overwhelm. If leveled up, Lee Sin will use Dragon’s Rage on any unit he challenges. This will slam them into the enemy nexus to inflict damage and kill them. Normally, this would mean we don’t get to attack in because Lee Sin was blocked. However, because Zenith Blade gives him overwhelm, he can then swing in for full damage. To protect our combo, we have a couple of disruption spells in the form of Nopeify! and Deny to keep our enemy away from their removal.

It’s fun to come back and see a whole new meta working it’s magic. Thanks to Runeterra’s economy, it didn’t take long for me to catch up with everyone else since I already had enough shards and wildcards to construct the decks I wanted to try out.

If only more digital card games were so generous.

The spooky times are upon us once more, and there’s no better time for a big frighten than now. Supermassive Games, creators of both Until Dawn and last year’s The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan have taken it upon themselves to release a new chapter in their ongoing series. The Curator has returned with a new story that we are to conduct.

Welcome to Little Hope. Joining me as he did in our last outing at the Man of Medan is my old friend Acharky. The Dark Duo is back, and this time it appears that the mystery is not as cut and dry our seafaring adventure prior.

While Little Hope plays largely the same as Man of Medan did, they are definitely areas of improvement in the way the game presents itself. The one that immediately comes to mind for me is that prompts overtly signal when they lead to progress, so that players know what to avoid doing if they want to take the time to explore the area for secrets or extra dialogue, solving the problem where we would painstakingly try to guess with choice is the “right one” so we could put it off for last before missing out on something we wanted to see.

Another noticeable UI change is that there’s a visual indicator before we’re expected to perform a QTE like tossing a rock or navigating down a precarious path, or keeping quiet. It’s a nice touch to avoid blindsiding players who are otherwise engrossed in the story, buying them that extra second to scramble for the controls before they’re asked to use them. There is the odd side effect of me failing pretty much every “keep quiet” scene because I’m so used to immediately having to react, but this is an impulse that can be unlearned in time, after enough exposure.

There’s also the changes to character stats. In contrast to Man of Medan, where there was a single bar denoting how two character mutually feel about each other, each character’s opinion of the others are tracked separately in Little Hope. Just because John has a favorable opinion of Taylor does not mean that the reverse is true. And with certain personality traits being locked, the cast is more strongly defined on a mechanic level than that of Man of Medan, and even Until Dawn. While the writing has always been good, this allows the calculations under the hood to better keep up with it. All of these are small changes, but together they significantly refine the formula Supermassive has been working with for all of these games.

Perhaps the biggest compliment I can give Little Hope is that I barely even noticed the time ticking by as Chris and I played it together. And in the first two hours, it made us go from completely hating several of the character based on first impressions, to being solidly in their camp. And that, above all else, is the sign of a good video game.

What can I say? This game has been on my mind a lot lately, and my Wednesday stream seemed to be the perfect excuse to go for another run.

Prince Zagreus is ever eager to break out of his lord father’s domain, and I’m ever eager to aid with on the way.

(A warning: As I had beaten the game prior to playing this session, there may be spoilers.)

Watching so many people come into the game, playing for the first time now that it’s fully released, the thing I can’t help but notice is how approachable it is compared to contemporaries in it’s genre. People I know who ordinarily don’t get into roguelikes are having fun with Hades in a way they just haven’t before.

I’m hardly the first to remark upon this, and I doubt I will be the last, but there are many common pressure points that are inherent to the genre, and Supergiant intelligent worked to alleviate many, if not all, of them to make the experience less painful.

• Death is not something to be feared. Though players will lose all of their boons and be sent to the start, they’ll always gain something permanent from their trouble. Whether that’s some Darkness to upgrade Zagreus, knowledge of the enemy that killed them, they made some progress. Additionally, returning to the House means they have an opportunity to see what the rest of the cast has to say (and they always have something interesting on their minds).

• God Mode gives those who normally struggle to come to grips with roguelikes another tool to onboard themselves. It doesn’t make the game easier at first, but it grants them bonuses every time them die, a cushion that otherwise wouldn’t be there to help catch them when the fall.

• The game is not anywhere near as randomized as one may suspect at first glance. In truth, an expert player has the capability to control for their luck through the choices they make in a run. While it is certainly possible to have a poor seed, it’s unlikely given all of the following:

• The trinkets, companions, and the choice of weapon combine to give players a static load out upon which they build on and around, rather than starting purely from scratch each time they make an escape attempt. Even without getting any boons or hammers, they have that baseline ability to carve out a play style before entering Tartarus.

• There are many branching paths on the way to the surface, and while all of them eventually reach the top, Supergiant politely informs the player what rewards they will get if they go along a specific path. This allows them to make an informed choice about which path they take and which boons, upgrades, or benefits they want to go for in order to improve the odds that they’ll make it to the end.

• When they obtain a god’s blessing, players have a choice over which benefit they extract from it, giving them another method with which that can make choices over how they want Zagreus to play.

• No matter what, the very first area will always start players off with either a god’s boon or a Daedalus Hammer, so there is never a run that will be completely devoid of any power ups.
  

While many of these choices are hard to parse out at first, overtime most players, consciously or not, will start to pick up on what decisions lead to easier runs and naturally improve over their experience with Hades. This is especially true later on, when players unlock the ability to re-roll either chamber rewards or boon choices, given them an even finer degree of control over the preceding.

It’s a truly impressive feat that Supergiant performed in the development of Hades, making one of the most accessible games of its ilk. I can only hope more roguelikes start to learn from its example.

And then we get to escape scene in the Warthog, which is everything wrong with early 2000s vehicle sections distilled into a single stage. Terrible controls, combined with unwieldy terrain and floaty physics generate a breeding ground for frustration and contempt. Even worse, there isn’t a single checkpoint at any point in the section. I’ll take the blame for some of my deaths, but a lot of them were the result of physics-related mishaps I had next to no control over. To have the game invalidate six whole minutes of my time because their collision detection randomly decided to kill me is not a way to engender good feelings. I was surprised when stream chat called this an iconic moment, because I would never want this to be the thing people thought of when they think of a game I’m fond of.

I’m just glad the rest of the game more than makes up for it, because if this was my first impression I’m not sure I would’ve gone on to finish the Halo: Combat Evolved as I have.

We continue our fight against the Covenant alongside the Master Chief. As it turns out, Halo isn’t a superweapon that we can use to wipe them out. Rather, it appears to be the prison for a race of parasitic monsters known as The Flood.

Military Commanders… Always leaping before they look.

Now we’ve got to clean up their mess.

Thumbnail, as always, provided by Sam Callahan.

But perhaps it’s best to find a way to fix this whole situation without doing a genocide of world-ending proportions. Everyone please ignore the fact that I hit the “extinguish all life” button because it looked shiny.

While this game has a bare bones story, something I appreciate about it is that it avoids bogging itself down in unnecessarily complex jargon. The faction of fanatical aliens are simply called “the Covenant”, to emphasize the religious undertones of the organization. Parasitic swarms without end go by “The Flood,” to underscore their numerous and aggressive nature. Even out faceless protagonist is referred to as “The Master Chief,” their military rank being their most notable character trait. Using those types of Proper Nouns reduces the cognitive load on the player, allowing them to quickly and easily memorize the high level concepts they need to know to understand the overall plot.

On top of that, I like the choice to have the player walk back through the earlier levels and see how they’ve changed in response to the Flood. It shows us through gameplay how the Covenant and the world around us is dealing with the ongoing threat. There’s also the thematic aspect of going backwards, and losing the progress that we fought for in the beginning because we now need to deal with The Flood.

Next time, it appears that we’ll be wrapping up our campaign through the first Halo game. Hopefully, we can avoid ending all of existence along the way.

The plot thickens on our first mission with the Master Chief. Where we saw a simple weapon with the potential to terrify and/or eliminate the Covenant, the truth was so much more sinister. Our military leaders, such is their wont in their endless hubris, unleashed and awakened sinister forces that threaten all life.

Thankfully, we’re here to see if we can clean up the mess and stop The Flood from spiraling out of control.

And as always, thanks go to Sam Callahan for the thumbnail.

One of the things I can always appreciate in a game is a huge shakeup in the pacing and flow, and this is a pretty good example of that. At the end of the day, Halo is a power fantasy where the player inhabits the role of an unstoppable badass, so this section never really crosses over into true horror. Nonetheless, I did have moments of being unsettled when The Flood was first introduced, until I understood that I was supposed to fight, rather than flee.

And at the risk of repeating myself from the last time, it is honestly shocking how much the new lighting detracts from the experience. The original game conveyed a darker, both literally and metaphorically, atmosphere which helps sell the cosmic horror of The Flood all the more. Yet they translated this brooding palate into this bright, almost vibrant and varied color scheme that betrays the tone the old style establishes. It’s genuinely shocking to me.

My other real criticism stems from the game itself. Maybe it’s just me and the way I consume video games in 2020, but I cannot help but feel that several of the levels in this game overstay their welcome by about 15-20 minutes. By the time the introduction to The Flood was over, I had more had my fill of fighting them off, and I was ready to most onto the next set piece.

While that feeling was particularly noticeable here, I felt similarly in earlier stages as well. There’s an odd pacing to this game that didn’t survive the test of time the way the rest of it did, and that’s understandable since it’s almost 20 years old at this point. I must remember that this is the game that codified how one can make first-person shooters, and make them well, on controllers and game consoles. It is inevitable that it wouldn’t be perfect, as this was something of an experiment.

Minor gripes aside, the experiment was largely successful. I’m still having a mostly good time playing it, even all of these years later and without the benefit of nostalgia beyond my nostalgia for the genre as a whole. It’s impressive in its own right.