Anubis II/Myth Makers: Trixie in Toyland/Ninjabread Man/Rock 'N' Roll Adventures

 

    Four games in one post! How could this be? Did I just play the games really fast? Did I get bored of them rather quickly? Are they all intensely low effort and thus not worthy of each being given their own blog post? The answer to all those questions is yes, absolutely. You see, all of these games are a special kind of low effort, in that all of them are the exact same game. I don't just mean that as hyperbole, I mean that they are literally the same game with the same mechanics with only a few models and levels occasionally changed between them. If you're wondering how exactly they got away with doing that, the game's development is weird enough to where it could serve as its own write-up.
    See, Data Design Interactive, the company behind these games, was already starting to become known for their quantity over quality approach to game design, highlighted by their flippant asset re-use and their games coming out within weeks or even days of each other. During that process, they created a private tech demo for a new 3D entry in the Zool series, originally a series of 2D platformers meant to promote the Commodore Amiga. Zool's rightholders saw the demo and rejected it based on its low quality, after which you'd think they'd just try to build off what they had. This is the point where I assume some executive applied the caffeine patches from Meet the Robinsons and said “hey, I know! How about we take this platformer with four worlds in it, and make each world its own game so people have to pay twenty bucks for each! We'll also change the player character model each time to make people think they're buying different games!”
    So yes, that means there's four games, with about three to four levels in each one, all of which play identically to each other and can all be beaten in about half an hour once you know what you're doing. That would be nutty enough, but even if they were released as one game, that wouldn't save it. For one, the controls are truly arcane: the fact that jumping is mapped to a flick of the Nunchuk is mystifying on its own. Thankfully, you can jump with just the Z button instead, although the game doesn't tell you that and it doesn't change the fact that your melee attacks in all these games rarely ever connect and your movement is atrocious. In almost any other 3D platformer I can think of, when you push an analog stick in a direction, your character immediately starts running in that direction. Here, there's a slight bit of wind-up with your character moving incredibly slowly before awkwardly switching to a sprint, and that combined with the weird motion control mapping means that there's a lot of aimless flailing to try and get your bearings.
    Each of the levels in these games requires that you find eight objects within them in order to activate a teleporter at the end of the level, and how difficult of a process that is depends on how well thought-out the level design is for each, which they usually aren't. A constant between all of them, though, is the sheer amount of enemies spammed everywhere. They aren't that much of a threat on their own, as they'll just stay still before suddenly bolting towards you when they see you, like middle-aged moms towards daytime medical dramas. However, often they'll be placed in groups of five or more, and with how unreliable your attacks are, your only reliable option will be to just sprint away as an entire conga line of enemies trail behind you. Good luck if they manage to corner you, because even though the five hit points you start with seems generous, it means nothing when you have almost no invincibility frames and your character decides to start clipping into a wall.
    What's the “best” between the four of them? If I squinted, I'd say Anubis II probably had a slight bit more effort put in; the level design is the most sensible out of the bunch, and there's a couple small mechanics unique to it, like using magic spires to manipulate objects in the environment. Make no mistake, though, these are all cash grabs and the very definition of shovelware. It's no surprise that even though this business strategy worked short-term, people weren't fooled for long and company ended up going defunct in 2012. These aren't even really the kind of games where their abhorrence is something you can laugh at with your friends, because there's so little even in these games that they may as well just be an empty void. Do not play any of these games, devote your brief time on this Earth to literally anything other than these soulless husks of discs.

MySims

 

    With how prevalent the “cozy game” genre is now, it might surprise you to know that it actually had something of an uphill struggle reaching that level of popularity. Series such as Harvest Moon, Animal Crossing and Boku no Natsuyasumi laid the ground work for what the genre would eventually become, but for a surprising amount of time, no one saw fit to iterate on it or even rip them off. It could be that most companies just didn't see the value in copying something that was mostly seen as an oddity at the time, much like casual games as a whole were. Of course, the Wii very swiftly opened the doors for casual games, and by extension cozy games, to develop, thus the existence of MySims.
    While it is a spin-off of The Sims, it barely has anything to do with the original series except some of the house building and social elements. It's very much meant to be in the style of something like Animal Crossing, and you can immediately tell right from seeing the intro to the game. You're the new face in your town, and you get tasked by the mayor of the town to slowly rebuild it and move as many people in as possible. You do this by collecting essences, floating emoticons of a sort that represent different objects, which are used to eventually build the houses and furniture. Thus the usual routine of a cozy game sets in; you go to Sims and ask them for tasks to complete, which always requires finding essences either by planting trees, catching fish, finding them with a metal detector or obtaining them from other Sims, and completing them lets more Sims with more tasks move in. Nothing you would be unfamiliar with if you've played a cozy game before, but it's the details that make it worth noting.
    When you do move Sims in, you have to build the houses yourself and build furniture for them, each with their own editor. Building the houses is cut down compared to how it is in the usual Sims games; you can make the houses any impractical shape you want and it'll still have the same interior. While that is fun on its own, the furniture building is the surprising highlight. It gives you an outline of the item you need to build with lots of pieces to choose from, but so long as you cover the glowing stars at certain points in the building process, it'll function as intended. This means you don't have to follow the instructions exactly, and letting your imagination run wild is where a lot of the fun comes in. I was able to make non-euclidean chairs, turntables shaped like fish, and a mirror with flowers growing out of it among other silly things, and the building process itself has an almost Lego-like satisfaction to it.
    It helps that the characters you're building this stuff for are genuinely, truly weird. While the voices are still in the trademark Simlish, MySims has actual dialogue boxes for all its characters showing what they're saying, and it manages to be entertaining enough to where I went out of my way to read as much of it as I could. Every character has dialogue unique to them and the things they say range from quirky facts about themselves to genuinely bizarre statements that don't even make sense in context. For some examples, one time I saw the man that runs the museum wandering around town at night, and going up to him led to him murmuring about his secret crush on the goth woman that lives down the street. Another time, I went up to the Sim that spends most of his time reading, and he suddenly goes completely off on one about how delicious meerkats are. It's moments like that that caught me so off-guard to the point it kept me playing for a while.
    However, getting to those moments can prove to be a bit of a chore. Granted, with this kind of game, you need that downtime doing bits of busywork while you're working towards the bigger goals, but the game can lay it on a bit thick. For example, to move other Sims in, you need to go to the hotel, talk to the Sim you're going to move in, walk all the way to the plot of land where they'll live, build the house, and then walk all the way back. You can't get multiple Sims to move in at once, so it makes the process that much longer. The sheer amount of essences you need for tasks later on also gets to be tiresome, and more often than not require waiting around the same area for minutes at a time to get them to respawn. Not helping things are that the game clearly isn't the most optimized; I noticed some stuttering during certain moments like when it switched from day to night, and the amount of loading screens is ridiculous. They aren't that long on their own, but the sheer frequency of them adds up over time.
    While that isn't great, I still had a fair bit of fun with MySims. It's fairly unpolished and doesn't quite have the same power to hook you in for weeks on end like Animal Crossing does, but it's got its own offbeat sense of humor and the level of player creativity on offer makes it stand out. I'd say if you wanna play it now, get it as part of MySims: Cozy Bundle, which reduces the load times significantly and comes packaged alongside the game's direct sequel, MySims Kingdom. If nothing else, it manages to reflect a unique moment in time where this type of game wasn't as well established, before you were able to say “I want my cozy game to have Sanrio characters in it” and have a game fit that oddly specific criteria.

Mario Strikers Charged

 

    Soccer never really interested me, I'll be up front. When I was a kid, my parents attempted to sign me up for soccer as I think is tradition for all parents, and I almost immediately became the one sitting down and picking at the grass. That disinterest bleeds into games as even now, even more more video game tuned variants like Rocket League don't particularly catch my eye, and you'll see me dead before you see me within the near vicinity of a FIFA game. Even with that, though, I think Mario Strikers Charged is worth talking about, because clearly Nintendo and Next Level Games thought that soccer was uninteresting on its own as well, and the way they set about giving it some spice is absolutely wild.
    Apparently in the Mario universe, soccer is the single most intense and deadly sport you could hope to play. The games are set in what I can only describe as battle arenas, with the ball being replaced with some kind of metallic energy sphere and the field being surrounded by an electric fence. Forget about traditional soccer rules; people are free to throw the battle with their hands, tackle and punch other people to get control of the ball, and the team captains have the ability to shoot up into the air in a burst of energy and kick multiple balls into the goal at once. Of course, there's power-ups too, which more often than not lead to you or your teammates being knocked back high into the air, with visible scars and damage marks as the match goes on.
    It is far and away the most abrasive depiction of these characters ever to exist, and I know that sounds like I'm overexaggerating, but you need only look at the cutscene animations to see what I mean. Almost every character has either been made incredibly sassy or extremely angry, and it's pushed to such an extreme where you can see things like Waluigi's entire team doing a crotch chop, or Wario pulling a Persona 3. It is downright bizarre and some would say clashes with Mario's established tone, but the sheer amount of effort that's gone into the animations is easily the best thing about the game. Characters that in other games only have one personality trait or unique animation to their name take on a new life with how well-realized they are here, and it's impressive how much of that is conveyed without a lot of dialogue. The fact there's so many of these one-off animations will make you want to keep playing, just to see what the characters will do next.
    Of course, for as much as this makes playing the game way more entertaining, it is still a soccer game, and I feel like you have to enjoy the sport at least a bit to get the most out of it. There isn't really a whole lot to do besides just play a bunch of matches, either in the free play versus mode or the single-player modes. The main campaign is a pretty typical “play a bunch of times to unlock stuff” sort of ordeal, which is pretty standard, but is hampered by the rather steep difficulty curve. As soon as you hit the second cup, the game stops being nice, and the AI will proceed to pummel you into the ground with how perfectly it plays, often leading to you ranking out and having to try the whole cup over again. There's also a challenge mode, which puts you in specific match-ups with certain stipulations to win, and has the same difficulty spike issue, though thankfully lets you retry as many times as you want.
    It's definitely not the most beginner-friendly of games, but it's clearly meant to be the kind of thing you play again and again with friends, or online if you can find a way to get that running in the modern day. In that sense, it goes above and beyond even what other Mario sports games offer, providing something uniquely over-the-top that manages to remain one-of-a-kind, even with the many Mario spin-offs before and after it. It is a loud game, both figuratively and literally, and if you want a soccer game with an extra bit of kick to it, then it's worth a look if you can find it for a good price. Now I just have to think about if that last bit was a good joke or not.

Resident Evil 4

 

    As you might've already read, I didn't like Red Steel much, but truth be told, I've never been that into shooters at any point. There have been exceptions, but I can never quite get used to how much around you that you need to keep track of, not to mention that very few of them keep my interest in terms of aesthetics either. Far more than that, though, I'm especially not into horror. The closest I've gotten to enjoying anything of the sort is if it has a comedic or parodic side to it, as pure horror is completely out of my usual wheelhouse. So when I say that Resident Evil 4, a third-person shooter and survival horror game, is one of the best games I've ever played, that's how you know there's something truly special going on here.
    Of course, I say that it's a horror game, when most of the time the game is moreso just horror-themed. You play as Leon S. Kennedy, a guy with one of the most 2000's haircuts I've ever seen, asked to locate Ashley Graham, the president's daughter, after she gets kidnapped. He stumbles into a small remote farmland somewhere in Europe, where he's immediately chased down by angry locals, all infected with a mind control parasite that makes them loyal to an evil cult. After that, the mission becomes simple: are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president's daughter? It's by no means a complex plot, but it makes it so things are easy to understand even for someone unfamiliar with the series like myself, and it's the presentation that really sells it, going for the deliberate feel of a campy B movie.
    See, there's something of an art to being deliberately camp, one that most attempting it fail to register. Most just go for the sarcastic and eye-rolling dialogue approach, which just ends up feeling incredibly patronizing and boring. Resident Evil 4, by contrast, shows the correct approach in leaning into its own silliness as hard as you possibly could. Everything from Ashley and her scream queen antics, to the merchant that seemingly exists everywhere and laughs at you for almost no reason, to a tiny Napoleon that rules over a fortress; no matter how crazy it gets, it's all held together with complete emotional sincerity. It actively revels in throwing you strange curveballs and quotable lines that make for something instantly memorable, and I guarantee you'll hear at least something you'll want to repeat to your friends to the point of their aggravation.
    What truly makes this game one of the best I've experienced, however, is how refined the core gameplay loop is, to the point it almost feels unreal. It takes on a level-by-level structure, each having you go through phases of either killing enemies, collecting and purchasing items, and eventually fighting bosses, with the occasional very light puzzle solving sprinkled in. The game utilizes an over-the-shoulder perspective, zooming in and locking you in place whenever you aim, thus letting you aim at specific body parts. Not being able to move while aiming sounds like a negative, but the game is very much designed around it, and the sheer depth of variety in combat options is insane. You can go for headshots that have a chance of killing them instantly, or you can kneecap enemies to stagger them, or you can go up and karate kick a group of enemies; I haven't even listed all the options just on a control level, and that combined with the sheer amount of weapon variety is utterly staggering. It makes it so you'll be able to find a combination of tactics that works for you, while still keeping the game's challenge level consistent.
    On that note, the level design in the game is absolutely fantastic. The environments remind me a lot of the first Quake game, with lots of winding caves, murky forests and giant castle interiors with impossible architecture. It manages to feel grand in scope while still keeping a tight linear structure, with just the right escalation of enemy difficulty and resource management. Almost every level has its own unique set piece to call its own, whether it be one of the many boss fights that almost all feel like they could have been the final boss, or something that changes up the gameplay entirely without ever losing its action focus. There's one fight early on where you're being dragged along on a boat by a sea monster and have to throw giant hooks at it, with the sea monster never being brought up before or after, and it somehow feels totally in line with everything else. Heck, even the inventory management is fun, having you play a miniature puzzle game to make sure everything fits within the case you carry around, with every item taking up a different amount of space.
    Of course, the game does have issues, but I have to emphasize that absolutely none of them are dealbreakers and don't take away from the game as a whole. It's mostly small annoyances, like the occasional quick-time event that jumps out from nowhere, Ashley's AI occasionally being lacking when it comes to getting out of harm's way, and some of the later enemies being on the health sponge side of things. They're troublesome in the moment, but are more often than not trivialized by the game's generous checkpoint system, so it's nothing that bad. Also, compared to the sheer creativity of the levels in most of the chapters, the final chapter mostly being set in a laboratory and military base does feel a bit lacking, and I think could have been trimmed down a tad.
    Overall, however, Resident Evil 4 is an exemplar in pure game design mastery, and I can easily see how it's gone down as an all-time classic. The fact that most seventh-gen games outside the Wii were dead set on copying this game's design choices, and that the over-the-shoulder camera perspective is still the standard for action games to this day, goes to show how far reaching this game's influence was. However, none of its copycats can quite capture the sheer polish of its mechanics, nor have the guts to mimic its overtly silly and campy vibe. Just go play it if you haven't already; it's been ported to seemingly everything by this point, so you really have no excuse not to give it a try by now if you haven't.

Boogie

 

    So fun fact: this is the first game for this blog I've had to emulate in order to play. I did try to play this game on my actual Wii, and in that regard, things started okay at first. It got through the opening cutscene just fine, and the title screen had no issues either. The moment it asked me to select a character, however, said character turned into a veritable vertex explosion, and my Wii Remote started to make a noise akin to a Gatling gun. My copy is probably just scratched or something, but either way, I didn't wanna risk breaking my actual console playing it further. In emulation, it ended up working fine, but it turns out, I really wasn't missing much.
    My best summation of Boogie is if you took something like Space Channel 5 and blasted away all of its personality and challenge with a pressurized hose. It's a dancing game where you have to shake the Wii Remote to the beat to earn points, and occasionally shake the Wii Remote in specific directions to do dance moves that earn you more points. There's an attempt at a combo system where you can't do the same move over and over or else your points will decrease, but all you have to do is change the direction of your Wii Remote swaying every other beat or so and it'll say that you're doing great. There's also sections where you sing a part of the song, but I've never, ever seen this game bundled with the microphone it supposedly included, so the game just has you tap a button to make your character sing.
    As you could probably guess, the game is extremely easy. I mostly played the story mode, which has you playing as characters that include a stereotype, a generic woman, another stereotype, a generic man, and bootleg Patrick Star on their uninteresting adventures. It's in this mode where I breezed through every single song in no time flat, as the point requirements for playing a stage are far lower than what I ended up getting. On some songs, I had point counts that crossed one million when the game's requirement was only around a hundred thousand. I understand that developers for the Wii wanted to ease off on difficulty for the sake of casual appeal, but this rewards you for doing almost nothing, and it's downright silly.
    There are a bit over thirty songs to dance to in this game, and fair's fair, they are all licensed songs people would probably know. They are all covers, which isn't immediately bad in and of itself; it was pretty common practice for rhythm games of this time to use cover versions, like with Elite Beat Agents or the early Guitar Hero entries. The problem is, the covers made for this game are incredibly weak in quality, often nowhere close to the original song in terms of instrumental palette. There's even a couple songs in here, notably the cover of Daft Punk's “One More Time”, that have notably off-key singing, which is doubly confusing considering it uses autotune.
    If it sounds like I'm having trouble writing about this game, it's because Boogie is one of the most nothing games I've ever played. Barring that mishap playing it on an actual console, which I doubt is the game itself's fault, it is at least more competently put together than the average shovelware title, but it can't really save a dull experience. It doesn't really work as a dancing game since there's no moves to dance along to, and it doesn't work as a traditional rhythm game either due to the utter lack of challenge. After I post this, I'll go back to my life of mostly forgetting this game's existence, and if we're being honest, you will forget this game as well.