Gaming in 2017: A Review

Given that the year is ending, many websites will be dishing out their awards ceremonies and naming their favourite games in any genre. There will be much debate about the ‘Game of the Year’ with shoe-in favourites such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Horizon: Zero Dawn and Call of Duty WW2 duking it out over critics’ favour.

I don’t want to do such an awards ceremony, but now is a great time to reflect on some of the lessons we’ve learned through the year. This was the year we saw controversies over loot-boxes, review scoring and the release of a new console. It is a very interesting time to be a gamer. 

2017’s gaming year truly got started with Resident Evil 7. Its survival gameplay was sublime and subtle, a much more understated affair than previous titles in the series and it all worked to the game’s benefit. As fans had been demanding, for the first time in many years we had authentic and atmospheric horror that brought Resident Evil back into the fold as one of the premier titles in its genre. It both pulled the series back and pushed it forward in the exact ways that it needed, critically turning around a franchise much in need of rejuvenation.

 It wasn’t long after this that we saw the release of the Nintendo Switch. As a concept, the console showed a lot of promise; the actual realisation of gaming-on-the-go as many gamers envisioned from the moment they picked up a Game Boy. This proved to be a major draw for customers as well, turning Nintendo into a name synonymous with success once again and putting an end to the dark days of the Wii U.

Of course, when the Switch came out, it was almost overshadowed by one of its own games: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was a masterwork of open world design, that brought the Zelda Promise to fruition. For the first time, gamers held in their hands a true adventure title worthy of the original’s ambition, and despite a few rainy cliffsides, many gamers fell in love with the title.

Controversy surrounded this game’s review scoring thanks to Jim Sterling of the Jimquisition. While I disagreed with his review on a few points, his take on Breath of the Wild, giving it a ‘mere’ 7/10 score resulted in a major backlash from die-hard Zelda fans. This backlash showed an uglier side to the gaming community. It was around this time that ‘meta-bombing’ became a word in gaming vocabulary, referring to the practice of overwhelming a game’s page on Metacritic with negative user reviews. These were just two of many strange, toxic gamer trends that occurred in 2017.

By the time summer had arrived, however, gaming was back in full swing. The release of Crash N’Sane Trilogy brought a sudden mainstream attention on early 3D mascot platformers. Crash was a game with a lot of nostalgic goodwill and this surely helped the PlayStation brand, practically sealing the deal for future HD re-releases. The game’s difficulty was also a popular talking point: who doesn’t remember the cringe-worthy ‘it’s just like Dark Souls!’ type reviews gamers were exposed to at that time? It was discussed how central difficulty was to a game’s overall experience, and the summer of 2017 certainly had gamers everywhere screaming ‘f*ck the High Road!’

As we drew into autumn and winter and big blockbuster releases came out, gaming started to show a little fatigue in the mainstream space. While fan-favourite indie titles such as Oxygen Not Included certainly entertained, lots of gamers were placing their attention on other, more nefarious industry trends. 

This was the time of the Loot Box. With the release of Middle-Earth: Shadow of War, we saw the beginnings of a coming tsunami of Loot Box controversy. Gamers bemoaned the end-game, with good reason; it was purely set up to be a slog to encourage gamers to buy microtransactions, in the form of Loot Boxes.

What came after this was a colossal breakdown in mainstream gaming. While Call of Duty: WW2 released to critical acclaim, attention turned to Star Wars Battlefront 2. The game itself was meant to be an apology for EA’s first crack at the series, which many gamers deemed to be a cynical cash-grab. However, thanks to terrible consumer practices, Battlefront 2 became the symbol of everything wrong in the industry.

There was a massive backlash to the Loot Box practice in Battlefront 2, such that EA’s stock drastically fell. Even the Disney corporation themselves had to step in to help pick up the pieces.

The Loot Box system, as seen in Shadow of War and Overwatch before now, was a gambling-based microtransaction economy where players paid not for items, but for a chance to receive an item they may want (most of the time they would get junk). This was totally exploitative, if not gambling. Indeed, a few courts even stepped in with their own rulings that yes, Loot Boxes were gambling and should be regulated as such. 

Many would see this as a bad time for gamers. On the other hand, this controversy represents the power of gamers as a consumer group. It is amazing that after years of exploitation by big players entering a now-mainstream industry, gamers still have power to change things for the better. EA were forced to swiftly backtrack and their stock was badly damaged for this mis-step. This proved that gamers don’t have to silently stand by and watch the gaming industry go downhill; they can instead step in and kick-ass. If anything, Lootgate represents that the gaming community can still change the course of where videogames are going.

2017 was a strange year with a lot of major news items. My review of the year isn’t exhaustive by any means; I can’t go through all the year’s events and cover it all in the detail it deserves. I left out the release of the Xbox One X and Cuphead, for example. 

But I think that as far as the lessons we have learned from this last year, I can say that 2017 has been most informative; franchises can be re-thought with success, gaming’s community still has major toxicity issues to work out, older series can be brought back to life with a triumphant bang, and gamers aren’t going to just sit down and take bad consumer practices.

2018 will be an interesting year. I’m looking forward to seeing announcements on some big franchises. It may be too soon, but I hope to see the beginnings of a new Halo, and hopefully an actual sequel to some game franchises that are stagnating (a new Elder Scrolls? Or even a new Grand Theft Auto announcement?). 

In more concrete terms, however, what I am most looking forward to next year is the full release of Subnautica. In its current state, the game is well worth playing and is an extremely interesting take on the survival genre, with some beautiful underwater scenery to boot. If it gets a proper performance boost and a full release, I will be very happy.

Thank you for reading my blog over this past year, and I hope you will have a wonderful rest of 2017 and an even better 2018!

-Stev3 L

Ty The Tasmanian Tiger Review

I went into the Steam edition of Ty the Tasmanian Tiger wanting to love it. I had fond memories of this game that I played as a teenage boy on the Gamecube. I loved the bright colours, the look of the character, the locations and the style of the game as a whole. Not to mention the fact that, as a 3D collect-a-thon platformer, it harkens back to a nostalgic time in gaming that I wish we could see more of today. With that in mind, it is a shame that I found the experience not nearly as enjoyable as I had hoped. While not a bad game, Ty the Tasmanian Tiger is disappointing considering its initial promise.

Cutscenes are made with high CGI production values, but they aren't up to scratch on PC resolution. Screenshot from in-game.

To start off with, the game’s presentation, at first glance, looks beautiful. Colours are bright and locations are inspired by the flora, fauna and geography of the land Down Under. Levels usually take the form of areas built based on the look and feel of Australia and Tasmania. The character design, at first, seems interesting. But on the second look you start to see the cracks; Ty himself looks like a strange rendition of a Sonic fan-character, and the character art can at times leave a lot to be desired. It seems there was some inspiration taken from Sonic in the design of Ty and his friends, but I feel in this case the developers would have been better off distancing themselves from that particular segment of internet infamy.

Most of the characters in this screenshot veer too close to looking like Sonic the Hedgehog fan-characters for my liking.

The graphics do, however, benefit from the crystal-clear resolution overhaul they were given for the PC edition; the game looks crisp and runs smoothly. The graphics themselves were designed for the PS2 era, and for the time I have to say they were just as excellent as I remember. The aesthetic design and colours, especially of the beautiful levels themselves, are spot-on. The cutscenes, however, are still rendered in their original resolution which leaves the image looking blurry and occasionally stuttering; a shame, considering how well the rest of the game has been remastered.

At times, the game looks legitimately great and uses some lovely colours.

Presentation-wise, I feel that this game could do with more polish. There are certain rough edges to be found here, from some occasionally-odd character designs to some strange animations and general wonkiness throughout. This was a game that could have done with some more in the way of editing. There’s even a Shadow the Hedgehog style nemesis character who feels bland and cliché the minute you see him, and his storyline is about as predictable as one would expect given the game’s plot.

"I'm your angsty dopple-ganger, Shadow-er-I mean Sly!"

The sound design lets the game down in a bad way; the voice acting is worthy of derision. Ty himself speaks in little other than mildly-annoying catchphrases and the music is so repetitive that it wastes the Australian inspiration that went into the tracks. Other sound effects vary from ‘good enough’ to being below average and sometimes weird.

The gameplay is an interesting case; as a collect-a-thon platformer, Ty is about what you’d expect from a genre that evolved from Banjo-Kazooie and Crash Bandicoot. In fact, this game plays like a fusion of the two; you have theming and controls similar to Crash, and the collection gameplay of Banjo, in that the game takes place in sandbox-style levels with a list of objectives to be completed. It is just a shame that Ty offers so little to improve upon the formula. While the camera is somewhat difficult to get under control, I found Ty fairly easy to manoeuvre, his jumps high and his movement speed well-balanced.

If the game were better designed on Ty’s abilities as a character, it would be a lot more enjoyable. However, many times I have been frustrated by annoying platforming where the designers of the game seem to have misjudged the level of forgiveness that a jumping puzzle should give the player. This happened on more than one occasion where I was frustrated by the strange way in which Ty’s gliding mechanic seems to work (often times I would hit the ground faster than I would have if I had just jumped and let myself fall).

Other sections don’t make enough use of the game’s plethora of interesting rangs that offer some cool ideas as to puzzle design. I didn’t use the ‘Zappyrang’ once in the game and never found myself wanting to use it, and many of the games ‘rangs’ didn’t have any real use at all. It is a sad disappointment to see this potential go to waste.

Given the interesting possibilities of the 'rangs, they seem under-utilised.

As far as collection goes, Ty is a middle-of-the-road experience; the game’s story has you simply collecting items to move onto the next set of levels. These items (called ‘Thunder Eggs’ in the game) are received from completing map objectives like Mario 64 or Banjo-Kazooie. I will say that the game did offer somewhat of a progression in giving Ty access to elemental ‘rangs’ with different abilities, such as a Flame-Rang that melts ice. As a result, it seems that Ty does progress along with the game.

The challenge is oddly set; for younger gamers I think that the challenge is set at just the level that it makes progression slow enough to be uninteresting, and it is set too low for most of the older crowd who grew up playing these kinds of games, so Ty offers a strange package that suits nobody in this respect.

Really, there is not much to be said about Ty that hasn’t been said about other 3D platformer games; players who enjoy the likes of Banjo-Kazooie, Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon will find some entertainment here. However, one thing I will say that I loved about this game is that the underwater controls are a lot better than other 3D platformers. Camera wonkiness aside, there just seems to be a smoothness of motion to Ty’s swimming abilities that I feel is a true improvement on what 3D platformers had previously achieved in their own obligatory swimming levels. It helps that the levels where this game’s swimming took place were some of the more well-designed ones, and were gorgeous to look at with the beautiful sandy beaches and crystal-clear Great Barrier Reef water.

While other games' water levels are their downfall, Ty's water levels are some of the high points of the game.

The storyline is where the game is really poor, in my opinion. Boss Cass, the game’s main villain, is a walking cliché and annoying in every respect, especially his voice acting. The same can be said of Sly, the obligatory nemesis/rival character that 3D platformers seemed to love at the time of Ty’s original release. 

Unusually, most of Boss Cass' cutscenes feature awkward close-ups of his face. Between his Dr. Evil laughter and mistreatment of minions, this is the least of his problems.

Thankfully, the latter isn’t as prominent, only appearing in a few cutscenes, but his inclusion makes me wonder whether or not he was just there to fill a slot as the rival. His presence seems to be an afterthought and is not well-followed-through, given his minimal status as a mini-boss in a single level, and a convenient, though unnecessary, Deus Ex Machina at the game’s climax.

The storyline as a whole is fairly inoffensive, though it is cliché and cringeworthy at times. Lacking in any originality, though not beyond what anyone would expect for a mid-2000s platformer. It feels as though the game’s unique premise and aesthetic goes largely to waste in a storyline that wouldn’t be out-of-place in a 90’s Saturday Morning cartoon. I wasn’t expecting Citizen Kane, but I was hoping for something better than Sonic Adventure 2.

There's even a platypus in a bikini. Cringy references to 'that internet thingy' are extra.

Ty is a story of lack of payoff from a good effort. While the game is good, and enjoyable at times, with a bit more polish, it could have earned a place next to some of 3D platforming’s greats. Sadly there was just lack of that special ‘spark’ that could have made the game special; a tiny bit of polishing, a bit more editing, and this would be a great game.

Erm...I'm not sure if this is a catch-phrase. But at least Ty says it enthusiastically enough!

As a 3D collect-a-thon, there is certainly nothing wrong with Ty the Tasmanian Tiger; for both kids and nostalgia fans there can be a lot of enjoyment here. But in a world where such pioneers as Crash Bandicoot and Banjo-Kazooie exist, this is a somewhat average title that is a case of sleeping, rather than crouching Tiger.