Baud Attitude

Let’s be fair.  Comparing Modern Combat Blackout to any games in the Call of Duty series is a massive disservice to MCB.  This is a Switch port of a mobile game from 2014 that can be had for $7.99 regularly and is currently on sale for $1.99.  It doesn’t have the budget or the massive development resources that Activision throws at their flagship series, and it doesn’t cost seventy bucks or eat up 200GB of your console’s precious SSD space.

In addition, it can be played completely offline – I was in “Airplane mode” the entire time – and doesn’t make you set up Yet Another Online Account, which are two huge points in its favor.

However, the easy joke was there so I jumped on it for an article title, and while a direct comparison is decidedly unfair, I think it’s reasonable to look at MCB as at least trying to hit the same audience as CoD.  It’s a gritty first-person military shooter with a plot line that’s all about terrorism and corrupt private military contractors and saving the world with the power of friendship guns.

I only played the campaign, but I understand there’s a multiplayer element to it as well.  I won’t talk about that because I am the last person in the world to have an educated opinion of a game’s multiplayer features.  Going back to CoD, I buy it more-or-less faithfully every year, play through the campaign and then never touch it again.

So.  Campaign mode it is.  MCB has six main campaign chapters (Really, one tutorial stage and five chapters), each of which is broken up into a handful of snack-size missions.  I don’t think any of the individual missions are more than ten minutes long, which is handy considering there are no checkpoints – die once and you’re starting from scratch.

The mission lengths are decidedly welcome if you need to replay any.  Each mission has three goals, and you’re rewarded one to three stars on mission completion.  Unlocking subsequent chapters requires earning a certain number of stars, so I would occasionally run through one to improve my rankings.

In addition to the stars at the end of the level, you get experience points and your weapons level up and new weapon customizations unlock and it is just a delightful burst of bars filling and lights flashing and then you have new bars to fill.  Really, it’s the best sort of positive feedback.  5/5, would fill bars again.

I did have one small bar-related issue which was entirely my fault, and that’s that when possible I really enjoy playing these sorts of games with different weapons and I didn’t use my primary rifle QUITE as much as I should have… and then I hit the last chapter, which in addition to requiring a certain number of stars and a certain player level also required me to have a “tier 4” weapon.  I had a single tier 3 and a variety of tier 2 weapons, so I had to go back and grind a bit.

In addition to story missions, every chapter has a number of “Spec Ops” missions, which are even smaller in scale than the story missions and tend to have a little more of a puzzle element to them.

My favorite of these was the “Breach” mission, which had you throwing a flash grenade into a room of enemies and then needing to decide which needed to die in which order so none of them could shoot you first, or set off a bomb, or kill a hostage, etc.  The room layouts and enemy types are randomized whenever you start a Breach mission, so there’s no way to memorize what’s going to come at you.

I was less enamored of Spec Ops missions that had you defending your team from a sniper’s perch, because the people you were defending were entirely too prone to walking into bullets.

Only one of these was truly awful, however, and at least it comes in the final chapter when you no longer need any more stars to unlock anything.

There’s another sniper-style Spec Ops mission which I really enjoyed, which was the “Assassinate” missions.  These present you with a bird’s-eye view of a half-dozen-or-so dudes walking around and you have 45 seconds to figure out which one is your target.

This mode also has a frankly reality-bending-but-who-cares mechanic where you get to control your bullet in flight after it leaves the barrel, which was super cool and reminded me of the arrows in Heavenly Sword.

This is the only time in 16 years that I’ve been reminded of Heavenly Sword.  Anyone else remember when that was supposed to be the PS3’s big system selling game?  No? Just me?  Moving on, then.

One campaign issue that may be more or less forgivable depending on how much you care about story in your gritty military shooters: the Switch version of the game only has half the ending.  In the original mobile game, you have a dramatic final showdown with the Bad Guy, kill said Bad Guy, and then get a post killing-the-Bad-Guy wrap-up where you get to learn the final fates of, well, everything.

The Switch version omits the wrap-up.  I mean, it was pretty clear that the right people got what was coming to them, but I had to go to Wikipedia to look it up.

One place the campaign stands out is in the environments.  You spend most of the game running around modern urban Japan, which is exceedingly rare for an FPS, and the developers put a fair degree of effort into dressing up the world to look like fairly seedy Tokyo back alleys.  There’s even a low-polygon Super Cub!

It’s a tiny detail but I loved stuff like the weathering on the label of these trash/recycling bins.

I almost feel bad about pointing out that the characters on the trash bin on the right in this screenshot are written backwards.  The cigarette machine is good though!

Set dressing aside, graphics range from pretty impressive, like the lighting and texture work in this shot…

…or this cool corporate lobby:

…to less impressive, like this level that was mostly crates of various sizes…

…or this stack of cinderblocks.

Playing in handheld mode, it mostly all looked good in motion.  If I’d had it on a bigger screen I might have been more picky.

Anyway, with the exception of two entirely-optional levels and the bizarrely-truncated ending, I had a grand time with Modern Combat Blackout.  Would spend $1.99 to control bullets with my mind again.

Next I should probably find a game to play that involves cute anime girls that are also power tools, or something.  Wouldn’t want to get TOO enamored of normie games.

RemiLore is my fifth Switch game in a row, which is kind of an unusual streak.  Finishing Klonoa a few days ago led me to actually look at other games I own for the system, and it turned out I had quite a few and several of them were quite short and could be experienced in a few hours.

RemiLore continues that trend.  With occasional breaks to do things like eat lunch and feed the cat, I went from title screen to end credits in the space of, mmm, four hours?  five?  Not very long anyway.  That’s not a lot for a game with a $40 price tag, so hopefully I got it on sale.

Since I am super cheap, that’s almost certain.  I am very weak to cute girls with glasses, but not $40 weak.

Anyway, I’m not very well-versed in the ways of rogue and rogue-like games, so I’m not sure I’m qualified to say whether it’s a good one or a bad one, but it feels a little thin on content.  I think the appeal boils down to having a cute main character and some goofy humor, so let’s talk about that.

Like any good buddy comedy, you have a pair of characters who don’t necessarily LIKE each other but have to put up with each other because (reasons).  In this case, (reasons) are that Remi – the human of the duo – accidentally wakes up Lore – the book – and Lore panics and warps them both to another dimension.  I’ll let Remi sum up the plot from there:

Complicating her return home is the unfortunate presence of one pissed-off loli.

Choux – the girl on the right – has been stuck in this dimension for a very long time and sees Lore as her ride out and Remi as an unwelcome obstacle.  Fortunately they sit down and talk things out in a reasonable fashion and reach a compromise… oh, who am I kidding.  Choux has had a long time to build an army of murder robots and now they have someone to murder, so why let them go to waste?

The game is split into four worlds, with four acts each, each of which is further split into four combat rooms and some random side areas full of crates and bookshelves and all sorts of extremely breakable items.  When you break things or kill robots, desserts fly out which can be collected to buy character upgrades.

Oh, right, desserts.  More on that in a second.

At the end of every act, you’re scored on your performance, get between one and four chests to smash open for random loot, and then move on to the next act.

So, desserts.  RemiLore is not a terribly serious game, so rather than collecting gold or precious gems you are hovering up shortcakes and ice cream.  Many of the weapons you get are similarly silly and cute.

While you’re running around trying not to get murdered by robots and collecting desserts, Remi and Lore carry on a pretty constant stream of banter, mostly revolving around how much of an idiot the other is being at any given moment.

One of my two complaints with the game is that some of these exchanges repeat far too often.  My other complaint is that, since it’s a rogue-like game, dying comes with the penalty of (a) losing half your desserts and (b) being sent back to Act 1 of your current world.  Since I died twice fighting the boss of 1-4, I had to repeat the entirety of world 1 twice over.  I was giving myself permission to shelve the game if I died a third time, but fortunately I seemed to get gud, or at least get adequate, by my third time facing off with the guy.

Once I got over that hump, it was a pretty smooth run through the remainder of the game.  It popped up a nice summary screen and let me know that New Game+ was now available, followed by a cute ending credit scroll and some post-adventure musings from Remi.

Anyway, overall it wasn’t entirely my thing but I had a decent time with it.  Not enough to get me to jump into that NG+ right away, but knowing that it’s unlocked may bring me back when I have a couple of hours to kill.

What Comes After is a short, atmospheric Switch game that follows a young woman who falls asleep on the last train of the night and wakes up to discover that the train has a second role – it carries the souls of the dead to “What Comes After”.

After some initial shock, however, she seems pretty OK with this.  She’s pretty much already given up on life and there are heavy hints that she was planning to buy a ticket for this particular train soon anyway.

You know, unless she has a fantastic and supernatural experience that convinces her that life is worth living.  That would be super handy.

It does kind of sit in the same sort of “is this really a game?” category that visual novels hang out in.  You have control over the character, and you walk through the train and need to press a button to talk to the various spirits – human, animal, or even plant – who are on their way to the afterlife, but that’s about it.  Once you’ve talked to enough of them, you get to see the story end.

And, hey, if you’re down for that ride, it’s a pretty unique little experience – and from Indonesia, which isn’t a country I associate with gaming (honorable mention: Dreadout).  Some of the translation could have used a second pass by an editor, and I would have liked the text to be just a LITTLE larger, but the dreamy art style carries it a long way.

Seriously, this was eye-strain city on the Switch screen.

As mentioned, you talk to a bunch of different spirits, most of whom already know that they’re dead and are perfectly cool with it.  One or two are angry, and there are a few with lasting regrets.  As a general rule, though, they think you’re a bit dumb for not realizing how good you have it, still being alive and all that.

Eventually you sit down with a cat for a bit, realize that you have stuff you still want to do in the real world, and wake up to do it.

Definitely the sort of experience to play through when you don’t mind feeling a little depressed, and the ending is happy enough that the overall emotional curve winds up positive.  I’m not sure I’d pay the seven bucks it normally goes for on the eShop, but the reason I wound up buying it myself was that I kept seeing it in the Deals section and eventually decided that it was worth the sale price of like half that.

To be clear, it’s this guy:

And I’ll let one of his sidekicks sum up why:

…because it’s easier than actually putting my own thoughts into words, and honestly I could probably ask an AI to write up an article gushing about the Klonoa series and it would do ten times the job I’ll ever do.

But, to try: He’s just the most relentlessly positive and cheerful mascot in gaming, and his games are genuinely joyful to play.  Most of them – I’ll ignore the spin-off JRPG and beach volleyball games – are puzzle platformers where the enemies are also the prime way to navigate through the hazards.  Almost every move Klonoa makes involves getting pixels away from being hurt by something, grabbing it before it can actually hit him, and then using it to  jump higher or break an obstacle.

I am very, very, very bad at puzzle platformers, and this is why it’s taken me nearly two decades to play through the mere five games in the series.

The first Klonoa game was a PS1 game, and it was one of those that came out in a very limited print run, disappeared from store shelves, and then was only available for scalper prices – which was, ironically, better marketing for the game then anything the publisher did.  It at least made me aware of the game, even if I couldn’t afford to play it.

In mid 2004, I got a Game Boy Advance when Nintendo released their Peak Nostalgia NES-themed model.  It was only a few months before the release of the Nintendo DS, and GBA games were already pretty cheap so I owned quite a few, and the system itself was tiny and the perfect way to get some slacking in during the work day.  I should probably apologize to my employers of the era because frankly they subsidized hours of GBA playing while I was technically on the clock.

Anyway.  One of those games played on my employer’s time was Klonoa 2: Dream Champ Tournament, and it was the first Klonoa game I managed to finish.  Since it was actually the FIFTH game in the series, it was probably a bad place to start but, eh.

I eventually found a used copy of Klonoa: Empire of Dreams and played that as well, but much later.

After the GBA games were released, Namco actually published a Wii remake of the original Playstation game, and I snapped that up and had a blast with it.   That was 2009.

And then I tried Klonoa 2: Lunatea’s Veil.  And it did not go well.

See, my typical way of covering for my absolute lack of skill when it comes to platform games is simply to repeat earlier levels over and over again until I have stored up enough lives to brute force my way through the levels that are actually difficult.

You can’t do this in Klonoa 2.  It was released during the era when games had to be hard enough that they couldn’t be completed during a rental period.  You can pick up extra lives by gathering 100 gems floating around the levels, and there are occasional 1UP items you can pick up, but they don’t respawn when you replay a level.  If you go back to the Klonoa 2 equivalent of World 1-1 after clearing it, there are no new gems to collect.

There is a level, not very far into the game, where you have to navigate a series of platforming challenges while being chased by a murderous death robot.  If it catches you, you start over.  Once you run out of lives, you can continue, but you start over at the beginning of the level with three lives.

I bounced off this level VERY hard, and eventually gave up.  I don’t often give up on a game I’m really enjoying because of a single difficulty spike, but this one just broke me.

In 2017 (I did say “much later”) I played Klonoa: Empire of Dreams and then the Wonderswan-exclusive Klonoa: Moonlight Museum.  Neither of those were nearly as bad, though I remember I did have to resort to some save scumming on Empire of Dreams.

It was also my first and only exposure to the Wonderswan hardware, which was a neat piece of tech for its day even if it dearly needed a 3.5mm headphone jack.

So, at this point I’d played through 4 of the 5 “mainline” Klonoa games and was just kind of resigned to, but annoyed by, the idea that I’d never finish Lunatea’s Veil.  I even considered emulating it to take advantage of save states, but had to give up on this because it was one of the few games you couldn’t play on the PS2 emulators of the time.

Then Namco (now Bandai-Namco) released a remastered version of both Playstation games, and I thought about it again.   It had been years since rental periods were a concern for publishers, so maybe they’d made it a little easier?  But since I have moved completely over to digital purchases, I didn’t want to buy it and find out that it was just as frustrating and then have the icon permanently mocking me in my Switch library.

So I broke down, and bought a physical copy.  The idea was, if it was the same level of pain I could at least sell it.

(And, technically, I am a little lax on my no-physical-games rule when it comes to Switch.  I have about a dozen, mostly Japanese imports and of course Ring Fit Adventure.)

It turned out that, yes, the remake is VERY different from the unforgiving original:

And maybe even a little TOO easy.  The “Easy” mode not only gives you unlimited lives – which is good – but also makes it so you can take 15 hits before losing a life, compared to three hits in the Normal mode.  I played through the first couple of levels like this and was starting to feel a little sheepish about it, then tested it and found that it was a toggle.  You can swap difficulties after any level, meaning that I could restart in Normal mode, play up to the level that stymied me years before (Volkan Inferno), go back to Easy mode, brute force my way through it after many many deaths and then go back to Normal mode to keep going.

It turned out that, barring Volkan Inferno, the game really isn’t that bad!  I was able to get through the majority of levels after that point only losing 1 or 2 lives per level, though I did have one more difficulty spike waiting for me when I hit the Kingdom of Sorrow level.

This is pretty late in the level.  I’d started the level with something like 45 lives saved, and I still had 37 when I got to this point.  This single platforming challenge was the biggest contributor to losing a total of 17 lives clearing this level.

Fortunately, this is followed by a relatively easy level, and then the final boss.

At this point, I’ll quote the highest-rated Klonoa 2 guide on gamefaqs here:

“Well, this is it. The big end-boss. Kinda disappointing, wasn’t as tough as I hoped he was. However, I’m sure he’ll offer a challenge that hasn’t played a ton of games like myself. Good luck.”

In total, the “kinda disappointing” end boss ate 22 of those carefully-conserved lives.  I hesitate to consider what a less-disappointing boss would have done to me.  Also, my hat’s off to you, Mr. or Ms. Raging_DemonTEN.

Anyway, it’s done now and I feel a sense of deep satisfaction.  I’m glad this got the chance to live again through a remake, though apparently it sold about as well as any Klonoa game ever does so we are unlikely to see any future entries in the series ever.

A bittersweet ending for gaming’s Best Boy.