On this Easter Sunday, I can think of no better way to celebrate than we going to hunt for eggs…
Dragon Eggs, obviously. Spyro still needs our help to have the next generation of dragon kind. What did you think I was talking about?
Replaying Year of the Dragon on stream, after playing it so many times before, I can’t help but notice that the developers do a great job avoid the “Metroidvania” problem, where the protagonist is stripped of all the powers and abilities they learned in the previous game to justify having to reacquire them in the new one. I just never noticed until now because it’s done in such an unobtrusive manner.
Players actually have all of the abilities from the previous games unlocked at the very start. However, they’re careful about controlling the usage of these skills so that players who are new to the game don’t need to play the other ones. This is especially noticeable in Midday Gardens, where before we can access Enchanted Towers, a level the requires us to spit at flying monsters to defeat them, we need to use the skill to hit the target and open the portal, making sure we know how to do it. The same is true for Spooky Swamp and the climb move that we need to use just to reach the portal for the level.
Now, that’s not to say the game doesn’t have Metroidvania-esque gates. Rather than lock them behind skills Spyro has, they’re locked behind the new playable characters. It is impossible to 100% all of the levels in a given hub until after it’s boss has been defeated (aside from the final one), because there is always one challenge that cannot be undertaken until we unlock the character from the next home world. It accomplishes the same goal without taking away from Spyro’s base kit.
Of course, that’s exactly why Insomniac stopped making Spyro games after this. They realized that they were running out of ideas for what to do to add new content to future games beyond breath abilities, so they moved on to what would eventually become Ratchet and Clank.
Still, I can’t help but appreciate the skill and craftsmanship that led to so many excellent games from them, when timelines were tight back in those days.
Giving the sheer number of decks that I have piloted in Magic the Gathering: Arena, it was only a matter of time that I would eventually give a version of this deck a shot at some point. No matter the Standard, this archetype always exists.
That’s right, we’re playing Mono-Red/Red Deck Wins. Our goal is to play a bunch of cards and turn them sideways.
Of course, I’m being somewhat facetious when I say that all we do is “play a bunch of cards and turn them sideways”. The truth is that there is quite a bit of decision making that needs to be done on the fly with a deck like this.
Our goal is to finish off our opponent as fast as we possibly can. The longer a match goes on, the slimmer our chances become as our resources begin to run dry and the opponent, assuming they aren’t as aggressive as we are, starts to pick up steam through card advantage. If the opening hand doesn’t have enough of a strong start, we are more than willing to go down to five in the mulligan because we just don’t have time to dawdle.
That’s why we run the best aggressive, low-cost cards we can to get damage in early and often. To that end, Fervent Champion is one of the best cards we can field. For 1-mana, there’s not much more we could hope for in a card. And if we have multiple copies on the board, they can start to boost each other’s power for more powerful, safer swings (since first strike makes blocking difficult). Scorch Spitter may not be as strong, but it’s equally as useful as a way to get a bit of extra guaranteed damage out of each swing.
Runaway Steam-Kin serves multiple purposes. The first one being that it’s ability to pump itself allows us to accelerate our damage output, and increase the effectiveness of our instant speed spells in the middle of combat. And if we’re willing a let go of that power boost, we can use that mana to make as much out of the few turns we have as we possibly can, since we can’t afford to give our opponent a chance to get online.
And in the name of getting as much value out of our cards as we can, we include the two most effective red creatures from Eldraine with the Adventure mechanic: Rimrock Knight and Bonecrusher Giant. Both of them, but particularly the giant, are great creatures with high power that can again help to make the most of our early turns. Additionally, both of their Adventures are instant speed spells that make blocking our attacks as uncomfortable as possible while also punishing those who don’t block with even more damage. Shock serves a similar function in this case since it can be used an instant speed to turn the tides or just finish off an opponent.
Light Up The Stage has been one of the best cards to grace mono-red in a long time, because it manages to provide just a few valuable plays that we otherwise wouldn’t have access to. It’s low cost and flexibility has kept it in the deck type even when other similarcards are no longer in vogue.
Anax, Hardened in the Forge give us something that mono-red rarely ever managed: Protection from board clears. Even if an opponent manages to destroy all of our creatures, Anax can replace them with tokens we can hopefully use to swing in for that final bit of damage to win the game. Even though it is Legendary, running four copies isn’t the worst because we can still get tokens out of the one we sacrifice. Our other 3-drop, Phoenix of Ash, is another fast creature that we can resurrect when it dies.
Shadowspear is great for breaking the symmetry of a mirror matchup by giving us just a bit of extra life to survive our opponent. It’s additional stats combined with trample also give it the power we need to justify putting a copy in the main deck.
And as for cards to finish off a match, we have both Torbran, Thane of Red Fell and Embercleave. Either by giving all red sources extra damage, or by overcoming a bad block with instant speed double strike and trample, we can take an opponent by surprise and lock down a game when they thought they still had a turn to stop us. We need to already have the board in place to use either one of these, but if that doesn’t exist by the time we can use these pieces, we have already lost.
There’s a reason Mono-Red is always a popular deck in Arena. Win or lose, players can jam many more games quickly than they can with other deck types. It’s powerful, but it needs to be played effectively or risk fizzling out before they can take the win.
At long last, our Disney/Marvel overlords have seen fit to deliver new campaign content to Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 3 in the form of the game’s final planned update for the Expansion Pass. This time, instead of a series of challenges, we have an almost two hour long campaign that takes place after the events of the main story.
As always, my Marvelous Duo teammate Acharky joins me for one more adventure.
While we discussed this in the episode, it’s a big deal to see characters like Doctor Doom and the Fantastic Four make a return to Marvel video games, much like it was to see X-Men make their return. At the time, I find it difficult to celebrate that because the Disney copyright monopoly is both the reason they came back and the reason they all but disappeared in the first place.
Many of you know the story, but for those who don’t: Back when Marvel was still independent, they needed a quick injection of cash to avoid closing down completely, so they sold off the rights to a lot of their Intellectual Properties to any studio who was willing to buy. This kicked off the period of pre-MCU superhero movies my generation is most familiar with, featuring Sam Raimi/Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man from Sony Pictures and the X-Men movie series from 20th Century Fox.
After Disney purchased them for over $4 billion in 2009, and the first Iron Man film was released in 2008 to start off the MCU, all of the content Marvel published started to revolve around the Cinematic Universe they were concocting. Since characters like the Fantastic Four and the X-Men were owned by other studios, and thus couldn’t become part of the MCU, Marvel began to deemphasize them. Fighting game fans might mark this as the time when mainstay characters like Magneto, Storm, and Wolverine were suspiciously absent from Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite. They even went to the lengths of removing the Fantastic Four emblem from the Bombastic Bag-Man outfit from a Spider-man mobile game.
It is only now, that Disney has purchased 21st Century Fox for over $71 billion in 2019, and Marvel has the rights to use those characters again (presumably in whatever upcoming plans exist for the MCU), we’re starting to them crop up once more in places like Ultimate Alliance 3 and the comics (when they were absent from 2015-2018). After spending so much time trying to erase the Fantastic Four, we’re starting to see a resurgence.
Though I am annoyed and enraged at the Disney corporate machine continuing to acquire more and more of the cultural landscape so that no works may ever again reach the public domain, I must admit that there is a form of catharsis in seeing these characters finally get that much needed breathing room they deserve. Since Doctor Doom was also the big villain in the very first Ultimate Alliance game, it doubles as a nod to the prior entries and a bookend to the series, even if it very clearly sets up for a sequel.
It’s great to see everyone together again. I just wish it didn’t come at the expense of broadening Disney’s cultural control.
While it’s been nearly a month since the last time I talked about Legends of Runeterra, I’ve still been playing it regularly. And as my interest in Magic the Gathering: Arena’s current standard declines, it’s begun to take up the slack as my new “primary” digital card game.
That doesn’t mean Magic: Arena gameplay is going to stop, but it does mean that it’ll be slowing down for a time, until something shakes up the current meta.
With that said, I’m head over heels for Runeterra. It’s such a breath of fresh air.
The decks I play with are taking from the meta tier list at MobaLytics.
If you’re interested in running them yourself, the codes to import them are below:
It’s hard to overstate how generous the monetization model for this game has been. A large part of what keeps me coming back is being able to take a look at the top decks being played, and almost always having enough shards and/or wildcards stocked up to be able to build it and test it out to see if I want to play with it long term.
That’s not to say that I haven’t dropped money on cards, but that I’ve dropped far, far less than I have in other games (less than $20 total). I’ve definitely spent more on cosmetics than I have on actual cards.
And something I also noticed is that individual matches go by quickly in Legends of Runeterra, but not too quickly. This is something I’ve been having a problem with a lot lately in Magic: Arena due to the current Standard: Either matches end with the first three turns, or they devolve into a slow, halting grind as both players try to out value the other. This game manages to straddle the line between the two extremes quite comfortably.
On top of that, there’s a lot of decision-making going on in any given match. Because damage persists on units, and defending players can only place a single blocker between themselves and attacking foes, combat, and maneuvering around combat with tactical thinking and reactive spell-casting, becomes a much greater focus that in Magic. The result is a ton of interactivity between players a depth that I don’t see very often.
The Sorceress and her army of rhynocs are still out there, with all of the dragon eggs we have yet to rescue. We can’t afford to let them down, so our Egg Hunt continues here in the Forgotten Realms.
We’re making progress in Spyro 3: Year of the Dragon.
In the last post, I talked briefly about how this game relies a lot on gimmicks. Although we’re still in the early game, this tendency has begun to materialize in the what we’ve been doing. The actual segments of platforming don’t last very long, and once we’re gone we spend so much time in very cleanly sectioned off side areas completing challenges that often have their own unique control scheme associated with them. This will only continue to be a pattern as the adventure continues and we unlock more characters to play as.
For me, this is the biggest reason why Year of the Dragon is my least favorite Spyro game in the trilogy. The core platforming is why I keep replying these games over and over again, and for almost every gimmick section that’s fun, there’s almost always another one that I can’t stomach. While Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage had it’s own gimmicky side-content (“Trouble with the Trolley, eh?” is the most infamous quote for a reason.), they were rare and most of the game was still focused on the central mechanics.
Another large part of that is the sheer number of challenges the game needs to throw at players to fulfill it’s quota of 150 Eggs, almost double the 13 Talismans and 64 Orbs (for a total of 77) in Ripto’s Rage. It’s why some eggs are just located in pools or on random platformers that barely qualify as off the beaten path.
I don’t envy the position Insomniac was in when it developed this game, as they only had a year to develop this game and it was twice the scope of the last one. While playing it, that lack of time can be profoundly felt all throughout. It was a whole different time in game development, and seeing that generational gap made all the more plain, even with a fresh new HD coat of paint.
We find ourselves once more into the Dragon Realms, after our second stint in the Australian Outback. After our last adventure, the land was at peace, yet that can’t last forever. Lo and behold, a new plot begins to unfold.
A group of thugs from a far away land have spirited away this year’s brood of dragon eggs, and the holes they crawled in through aren’t big enough for the dragons of this land to burrow through. Fortunately, our young, intrepid Spyro is just the right size, and with enough experience under his belt to take on one more quest.
Off we are to the Forgotten Realms, on an Egg Hunt of grave import.
Since we’ve already obtained Shelia, I’d like to take this time to explain why I’m not fond of the new design. It has less to do with the design itself and more to do with how it doesn’t really convey the same spirit of the base design.
Here’s a side-by-side:
While the new design looks great, it’s also much more traditionally feminine coded than the original model. Something I liked about how Shelia was portrayed in the PS1 version is that she was clearly feminine in the way she spoke and acted, but the model itself was more androgynous in its appearance. The Crocodile Hunter-esque direction is nice, but I think I could without the “dolled up” hair that she was given. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just not what I wanted.
That’s something of a running theme with Spyro 3. We’ll see it more as we progress through the game, but Year of the Dragon is a game full of gimmicks. From the extra characters to the plethora of mini-games, there are tons of moments where the game introduces a brand-new control scheme wholly unlike any that came before for a single side-objective. They run the gambit of poor to great, but that’s not really the problem. The problem is that they come at the expense of the core platforming, which is the reason I play these games at all.
I don’t blame the development team for this, because they were doing what they could to add something different to the game. Members of the team have publicly said the reason they moved on to Ratchet and Clank is because they were out of ideas on how to expand Spyro’s moveset. It’s just something to make note of.
And just like that, our collaboration with Dr. Cortex has reached it’s conclusion. Despite the forces marshaled against us and our bandicoot friend, we have collected every last crystal and gem. And thanks to our friends and opposition, we can finally see through the good doctor’s plans for world domination.
Lucky us, we’re just in the right position to put an end to his plans.
While I am aware that talking about “the story” in a PS1-era platformer is kinda silly, I remember being extremely confused about what was going on during the Dr. N Gin boss fight when I was a young child. Eventually it clicked sometime in my many, many playthroughs. And yet, it took me a while to deduce that Crash had figured out what was going on and started the fight. I was taken off guard when N Gin threw the first punch and killed me, but fortunately after that I realized I was in a boss fight.
Of course, they could also be chalked up to my younger self’s naivete. However, there probably could have been something showing Crash’s implied agency in this scene more directly. This might have been a lot to ask in the old days, with a PS1 time crunch and budget. For the remake though, it would have been a nice touch.
The other way the limited resources was more obviously felt in that “final boss” with Cortex. Even my stream chat was surprised at how simple it was. There’s no denying that it was rushed, and they needed to make something before time ran out and it had to ship. They add the detail that he’s got the crystals and we can’t let him escape to at least give us a justification in the remake, but there’s only so much they could do with what they were given.
It feels great to wrap up Cortex Strikes Back, and I look forward to seeing you guys back in the Dragon Realms with Spyro 3.
This… has been a long time in the making. I haven’t played a Hitman game on stream since July, over half a year ago. Although I had my reasons then, I can’t deny that I’ve been wanting to play this level ever since it came out in September.
Nonetheless, I’m back and ready to improvise my way into another assassination.
(Apologies for the audio balancing/syncing issues. It will be fixed if/when I stream Hitman again.)
For those of you curious why this took so long, the simplest answer was raw file size. That’s not a joke, either. I wanted to install Hitman 2 and play this mission way back in September, but I didn’t have the over 150 GB required to install the complete package. It was something I often cited when discussions of bloated file sizes came up in my friend group, largely because it was such a big block that I couldn’t overcome.
Two things changed in the time since, which make this run possible.
A friend of mine told me about WinDirStat, a free program that allows users to see what is taking up space on their hard drives so they can clear up files they might not even realize they have on their system.
More importantly, I discovered that Hitman is a ingeniously modular game that lets players install only the maps they want to play, and leave the ones they don’t uninstalled.
That second was more important, because it represents a solution to a problem that I see cropping up again and again in the sphere of AAA gaming. File sizes are growing difficult to justify, and I am nottheonlyperson arriving at that conclusion. Little steps like this, which will allow the Hitman 2 Client to scale no matter how many maps and missions are added, dramatically reduce that problem.
Pivoting over to the mission itself, this is exactly the kind of experience that the Improvisation Run rules exist for. Despite making several huge mistakes and high profile moves, the run went remarkably smoothly and we were able to really test how resilient the underlying systems are. It was a blast to pull this off in this manner, for everyone to see.
Hopefully, there will be more chances to see the chaos unfold in future missions.
Once again we find ourselves back in the Warp Room, obtaining the crystals in order to help Dr. Cortex save the world(?)… while also obtaining the gems so that Dr. N Brio can top him.
But enough about that. All you need to know is that in this episode, we meet Tiny Tiger, my first furry crush. The hero we both need and deserve, protecting us from our own naivete in trusting an evil scientist.
In all seriousness, it’s important to remember that in the first half of the game, we’re technically the bad guys. Even if he’s just an unwitting pawn, gathering the crystals for Cortex is a genuine danger to the people of Earth.
So when Ripper Roo, the Komodo Brothers, and Tiny Tiger fight us to keep them out of his hands, they’re doing so in order to protect the world. In other words, they’re heroes. We’ll forget about all of that as the series goes on (and even Brio goes back to being a villain), but it’s a fun little factoid that’s worth keeping in mind.
As far as the game itself is concerned, the levels in this episode perfectly summarize what I was referring to in the last episode, where all of the game’s difficult is reserved for the optional gem challenges. How else would you describe having to run through a death route, then backwards through the regular level because both halves contain boxes that need to be broken for the box gem?
It also highlights the contrast between Crash and Spyro in terms of their design philosophies. There’s simply no way that a Spyro player will rack up anywhere near as many deaths as a Crash player. Not only is Crash more fragile than Spyro, but his platforming demands a higher degree of precision than his purple dragon peer. A Spyro game focuses more on the broad picture, and timing is rarely a factor. And yet, timing is everything for Crash.
So if someone told me they couldn’t stand these old Crash games, I couldn’t say I blamed them. They can be absolutely frustrating.
Sometimes, it’s not enough to just control the board and wait for a power creature to end the game. One might not want to just ramp all day while locking the opponent out of card draw and instant speed spells, but nor do they wish to be aggressive.
And in a situation like that, there’s really only one thing left to do: Generate an absolutely enormous amount of mana and bump it all into a gigantic spell to instantly finish off the enemy.
Obviously, with the word reclamation in the name of the deck, our goal is to abuse Wilderness Reclamation to generate large amounts of mana that we can either dump into our win cons to close out the game, or otherwise keep mana open so we can react to our opponent’s plays without sacrificing tempo.
Our two ways to transform all of that excess mana into a win are both Hydroid Krasis and, more importantly, Expansion//Explosion. While we can’t take advantage of the extra mana from Reclamation with the Krasis directly, we can dump all of our mana into it and untap all our lands before our opponent goes so we can respond with our instant speed answers.
Expansion//Explosion, specifically the Explosion half, and be abused with Wilderness Reclamation. When the turn comes to an end, each instance of Reclamation on the battlefield places a trigger on the stack. Before any one of them resolves, we can tap all untapped lands, then tap them again for even more mana. Doing this between resolutions allows us to dump all of that basically free mana into a huge Explosion, if not for game than for a second wind to keep us going.
But aside from that, most the deck is wired to either churn through our deck or address major threats as they arise. In terms of removal, we have Scorching Dragonfire to exile a problematic creature or planeswalker, and Brazen Borrower to bounce back key tempo pieces to disrupt our opponent’s plans, the latter being a useful body we can flash in as needed. And for board clear, we have Storm’s Wrath, which only allows us to take care of enemy planeswalkers if they become an annoyance.
And nearly every other card in this deck is some form of deck thinning, mostly at instant speed. Opt, Omen of the Sea and Growth Spiral all allow us to draw cards with the former two letting us scry and the latter giving us ramp. While Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath isn’t instant speed, he too allows us to draw cards while ramping, with an additional life gain. If we ever manage to pay the escape cost (which is likely), we can start using him to either close the distance or the game.
Lastly, just like in our Azorius Control deck, Thassa’s Intervention allows us to counter big plays our opponents make, or spend a bunch of mana at the end of our turn to dig deeply through our deck for any two cards we need.
Overall, this has been one of my favorite decks to play. There’s something inherently fun about creating a ton of excess mana and then dumping it into huge effects. If you’re bored with whatever you’re currently running, this one’s worth a shot.
