Captain Morton's Notes

I may or may not have played a lot of Character Action Games the past week or so. Maybe. You can't prove anything. Devil May Cry and Bayonetta are forever entwined, both originally born from the directorial talents of the great Hideki Kamiya, and based around the core philosophy of Being Cool As Heck. They even exist in the same universe, like all Kamiya's games (ask him about it on Twitter! Go on! Do it!). But they also represent two very different approaches to the Character Action genre, enough I feel to be able to write about the two of them in tandem through the lens of the most recent entries in their respective series. And also the first Bayonetta, for reasons. Bayonetta 2 screenshots borrowed from Nintendolife. Cheers. So, lets start with DMC4. I never really understood the common complaint about DMC4, about how the second half of the game had you going backwards through altered versions of the levels you went through in the first half. In a genre that has earned the n...

Mechanically, No Man's Sky isn't the greatest thing. Examining it's workings like any other game will leave you wanting, it contradicts itself, is full of menial tasks feels underdeveloped in areas. But, nonetheless, No Man's Sky is beautiful despite itself, it's own flaws often working to it's favour in strange and delightful ways. No Man's Sky is a game where you make your own goals, but it's also one that has a glowing red ball at the start that can give you a goal, or at least the semblance of a path which you ASSUME will come to a conclusion. Everything is vague in No Man's Sky, so it stands to reason that your own goals should be vague too, lest you end up in a mind-set that will kill your enjoyment. Something like setting out to get a new ship. Nothing specific, each system only has a few designs you'll find anyway, just amass money while asking fellow space farers if they'd like to do swapsies. Those little self-imposed tasks will dri...

I picked up Kingdom: New Lands a few days before No Man's Sky unlocked on PC to tithe me over, and it managed to enthral me so much that I'd forget about the space game completely while playing it. And I haven't dropped it since the release of Hello Games' space epic either, it's beauty and simplicity hide engrossing depth, and while extended play wore me down a bit, the persistent upgrades and sheer loveliness of it all kept me coming back every time. Kingdom is about as simple as it gets. All you can do to interact with the world is move left and right and throw money at things. There's little in the way of instruction from that point on, after a seamless opening segment you come across a clearing in the forest and you're taught how to enlist the island's unusually abundant supply of homeless folk and supply them with bows or hammers, and from then on it's up to you to find out what throwing money at specific things does. Chances are that'll en...

Aarklash: Legacy is an underappreciated little thing. It's not perfect, held back by balancing issues and a bit of tedium towards the end, but nonetheless it provides some of the best combat in any RPG, some of my favourite ever characters and a fascinating world. The best way to describe Aarklash's combat would be "DotA, but you control 4 heroes at once", but that's not going to be very helpful if you don't know DotA, so I'll try harder. You control 4 heroes, each with 4 abilities, in the manner of a real-time-strategy, I.E. you select them and right-click for orders. But calling it an RTS wouldn't be fair, as the core of the combat is the ability to pause at any time to survey the battlefield and give orders. It's from that simple mechanic that Aarklash's brilliance stems, with a majority of skills in the game reliant on positioning, precise aiming, timing and synergy with other skills. Enemies will have you dodging incoming projectiles and a...

Lets say some for some reason Visual Novels became the next Big Thing™. They blow-up worldwide, in the same way Ubisoft Sandbox games did not too long ago. And of course, the AAA machine wants to make some mad bank on that. The Big Boys step-up with their takes on the genre. But what do those games look like? What does a massive, AAA powerhouse budget get you in the simplest genre ever conceived? Obviously a vast majority will get it wrong, or at least take different approaches to capitalising on the trend. Perhaps they'll be more open to long story sequences, and wont hassle writers to make ever scene end in a way that lets gameplay happen, letting the writers run on for as long as they need to tell the story they want. Overall, I feel that would be a positive change. Giving writers more breathing room is a great idea on paper, there are plenty of ways to tell a story in a videogame outside of the core mechanics. With more breathing room, we might end up with more interesting expo...

High level Street Fighter play is often compared to rock-paper-scissors by it's players. So much so, that tournaments will often have mini-tournaments of rock-paper-scissors on the side, the concept is so integral to professional level play. With that in mind, Planetary Annihilation is a billion different rock-paper-scissors matches played simultaneously. In space. With planets. And Death Stars. Planetary Annihilation is a toy box of weaponry to play with in Solar System Sandpit. It's all the mostly Star Wars related fantasies you've ever had, 500-strong armies of mooks storming an enemy encampment, launching a fleet of fighters supported by capital ships to rain death from above on a planet full of factories, or of course, firing a god damn Death Star. Compared to other games of it's ilk, the number of options available to you in Planetary Annihilation is astounding. It's a genre which rarely lives up to the "strategy" part of it's name, with only a f...

I'm a sucker for a good Visual Novel. A rare breed, when you discount games like Ace Attorney and Zero Escape, which supplement the formula with actual gameplay. I do love those games to bits, but I don't always want the book I'm reading to suddenly present me with a locked room to escape from before I can continue reading. Good visual novels of this type are hard to come by, so Highway Blossoms is a rare pleasure. Videogame narratives are, lets be honest, often a bit shite. It's a medium with a lot of potential, but for the most part, the constraints of every scene having to end in the same way so that gameplay can happen holds back a lot of genres, and writers still have a tendency to underestimate the intelligence of the player. Think of your favourite videogame characters and chances are you can remember the time when you were told  their motivations and character traits. Usually in a scene where they leave the room and another character monologues abou...