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...