Sleepmode's 2021 Gaming Recap

So 2021 happened. I was originally going to introduce this piece with a brief overview of the political situation under COVID-19 as a way to contrast how awful the year was with some personal levity, but the idea of jumping from “the far right is growing out of an anti-vaccine movement while governments continue to glibly allow their citizens to die from a preventable disease and ordinary people try pick up the slack where their leaders and fascist/fascist-adjacent neighbours have failed” to talking about the video games I played this past year felt like a bit too strong of a tonal whiplash. This preamble has done nothing to avoid that whiplash, but at least I tried.

Anyway, I played some video games in 2021. Let’s talk about them.

GUILTY GEAR STRIVE, I GUESS

I’ve said my piece on this game. I won’t repeat myself too much here, but suffice to say – I do not like this game. It replaced everything I liked about Guilty Gear with subtly (or sometimes overtly) worse versions of those things, and made the things I didn’t like about Guilty Gear even worse – when it wasn’t replacing them with something that exchanged my frustration for boredom, anyway. But hey, the people playing it are enjoying themselves, so you don’t have to listen to me. I’m not really the target audience for this game, and shockingly, probably not any Guilty Gear game.

ACPR GOT ROLLBACK AND NOW I HATE IT

There’s a saying that gets brought up every now and then in the fighting game community – “picking a fighting game is about picking what bullshit you’re willing to deal with”. Over time, I’ve found that sentiment to be less and less convincing. Learning and improving at a fighting game will inevitably be frustrating sometimes, but I don’t think it’s a sign of healthy engagement when you simply learn to “deal” with the things that frustrate you – there should, I think, be some amount of motivation to learn how to get past these challenging, frustrating elements based on curiosity and intrigue, instead of just an obligation to do so because you’re gonna have to figure it out at some point anyway.

When Guilty Gear XX Accent Core +R got its miraculous rollback netcode update (with continuous QOL improvements up until the end of 2021), I very soon learned that the frustrating part of that game, for me, was the Australian Regional Meta. In places like Japan and the US, playing ACPR will get you a decent amount of character variety and a broad assortment of skill levels and playstyles. In Australia, you get an environment dominated by Justice, Order-Sol and A.B.A. doing Their One Thing over and over until they win, refusing to ever move past layer one. Every loss feels shameful, and every victory feels pyrrhic. Of course, I’m well past trying to blame my losses on anyone but myself, and while the knowledge that I could learn how to overcome these frustrations lingers in the back of my mind, a question remains: do I want to? And the answer is always a resounding “no”.

I dunno, maybe I’ve just hit my “fighting game oyaji” phase a decade early, but these days I just don’t have the time or the energy to try and motivate myself to learn what’s required of me when what I’d have to learn seems far more annoying than compelling. I don’t want to pick the bullshit I want to deal with – I want to pick the bullshit that I like.

FLYCAST GOT ROLLBACK AND NOW I AM LIVING MY BEST LIFE

When I found out that developer “flyinghead” had somehow implemented GGPO netplay into their Sega Dreamcast emulator Flycast, it was through me waking up to about five different people telling me about it on social media. I couldn’t believe it then, and I can’t believe it now, even though I’ve spent more time playing Project Justice, Virtua Fighter 3tb and SoulCalibur with people from all across Australia and the world than I ever expected to. Hell, I spent even more time than that playing Capcom vs SNK 2, so maybe I really have hit my “fighting game oyaji” phase. Games from this particular era, on this particular set of hardware – Dreamcast, NAOMI and Atomiswave – are probably among my favourite in the genre, and despite how easily I get distracted, I always find myself coming back to them eventually. These games are just magical for me – they’re always fun, and anything that’s frustrating is often equally funny.

It’s likely only a matter of time before I become the Hokuto no Ken player I was always meant to be. In the meantime, see me in SoulCalibur or The King of Fighters XI.

I TRIED SLIPPI ONE LAST TIME AND MELEE FINALLY MADE SENSE TO ME

The first time I tried getting into Super Smash Bros. Melee, back when Slippi first released its rollback netplay functionality for the game, the experience nearly made me quit fighting games. Having the army of netplay Falcos dance all over my flailing body while I could barely get the game to do anything I wanted it to do showed me a unique kind of helplessness that no amount of looping unblockable setplay could ever make me feel.
The second time I simply resolved that the game is cool, but not for me. Far too much effort involved in learning how to properly manipulate my character to make it worthwhile.
The third time, I finally got it. I still don’t actively play the game, mostly for the same reason as the second go around, but now it’s a game that could be for me – a younger me with more free time and brain cells to rub together. As the saying goes – Melee is sick.

…wait, what do you mean someone’s starting to get rollback working in Brawl?

I FINALLY INSTALLED OUTRUN 2 FXT AND I AM VIBING TO MAGICAL SOUND SHOWER RIGHT NOW

I don’t have much more to add to this. Control settings are finicky because it’s a port of an Xbox game from 2006, but the “OutRun 2 FXT” mod for Sega’s masterpiece, OutRun 2¹ adds a lot of compatibility options for modern displays and operating systems. I’m gonna have to get a racing wheel for this at some point.

That’s this section. OutRun 2 is one of the greatest video games ever made. It’s also technically abandonware, so you have no excuse not to download it² and play it right now.

I PLAYED A BUNCH OF SHMUPS AND HAVE NOT BECOME COMPETENT AT ANY OF THEM

My good friend Pichy bought me a copy of Deathsmiles a couple years ago, and this genre has been stuck in my peripheral vision ever since then. I have not completed a playthrough of the game more than once, and in the preceding years I bought myself Crimzon Clover WORLD IGNITION and ZeroRanger. I have not completed either.

Crimzon Clover is a game I have very little to say about, but only because I’ve played so little of it. It feels great and the game showering you with item pickups and massive score multiplier displays helps create a lot of the Happy Brain Chemical. I may very well get sucked into it more if I boot it up on a whim again, but I’m also on a search for the one shmup that just hooks me. I’m sure it’s out there.

ZeroRanger, on the other hand, is a game that I found pretty frustrating in the beginning – its colour palette made a lot of enemy ships and their bullets weirdly difficult for me to keep track of. And yet, at no point does the game’s challenge feel unfair, at least once I got past that first hurdle. I’m still somewhere in the second loop, and while I haven’t gone back to it in a while, I definitely understand why people recommended it to me. It manages to be very forgiving with its stage unlocks and continue system, while also desigining those systems in a way that makes them feel almost a bit unforgiving. I don’t know if this is a game I’d actually want to learn seriously, but it’s cool.

MY ARCADE GOT TAIKO NO TATSUJIN AND I AM THIS CLOSE TO GETTING MY OWN BACHI

I’m pretty fortunate to have a fairly active community of rhythm game players that like to head to the arcade at a pretty central shopping destination near my house. We all initially coalesced around Dance Rush Stardom, a BEMANI game where the entire gimmick is that you are quite literally using Melbourne Shuffle dance techniques to play it, but the growing presence of dedicated players alongside the general broad appeal that music games have to passers-by has led to a slight expansion of available rhythm games. It started with Dance Dance Revolution A (and later A20), then an old DrumMania cabinet, and soon after we were bombarded with Maimai DX, Pump It Up and a guitar-side Gitadora cabinet. The latest addition to that collection is Bandai Namco’s Taiko no Tatsujin, and it might be my new favourite rhythm game?

One of the strengths of rhythm games as a genre is that they’re usually pretty easy to learn, but nigh impossible to truly master. The curve doesn’t look the same between all games, however – a game like Beatmania IIDX has a pretty high skill floor and only gets more intense from there, while a game like Guitar Hero is pretty easy to pick up thanks to a simple control scheme and lack of variable timing windows, but caps out the skill ceiling at a strange level where most of the difficulty comes from figuring out how to most efficiently hit the increasingly dense note patterns that crop up as the game’s high-level meta continues to progress. Taiko no Tatsujin feels like it’s probably got the most balanced learning curve of just about any rhythm game I’ve played this side of DDR. With only two ways to hit the drum, the game gets you hooked by establishing a solid base that allows you to feel like you’re pretty damn good at the game – the road to improvement, then, comes from learning how to properly parse the beatmap and knowing the best way to guide your hands around the drum. It wouldn’t be the first time that an instrument-based rhythm game has been more demanding than actually playing the real instrument, but that just adds to the lasting appeal.

DELTARUNE CHAPTER 2 CAME OUT SO I PLAYED THROUGH THE WHOLE THING AGAIN

It’s been pretty cool seeing Toby Fox grow and evolve as an artist. Undertale is as famous as it is for a reason, and while it stuck with me much as it did everyone else, it’s not necessarily for the same reasons. I’ve always been more interested by the themes present in these games rather than their explicit lore or narrative, and while it was a bit hamfisted in some respects, it was pretty interesting seeing the things that Undertale had to say about the way people engage with violence in video games. Not like the hamfistedness is a bad thing – Yoko Taro has basically made a career out of it, and Fox’s first non-ROM hack effort tackles the subject with a lot more tact than Taro, in many regards. So when Fox released the second chapter in his new episodic work, Deltarune, I felt it pertinent to go through the first chapter again, if only because the last time I had played it was when it came out in 2018.

These games are charming like nothing else, and the entire Deltarune dev team has done a lot to improve and build on much of the core experience of Undertale while also leveraging new ideas and mechanics to make the game more compelling and fun as a game as well as a narrative and general thought exercise. Thematically, Deltarune seems to be very concerned with the idea of agency – when the player controls a character in a game world, are they the character, or the player? Are they both? Where does one end and the other begin? Who is the one making the decisions, and whose decisions are the ones that actually matter? This exploration of the relationship between player and player character is one that’s pretty novel, at least to me, and I was pretty impressed by the ways in which the two available chapters explore that question in different ways.

The writing is also fantastic in other areas, of course. The game’s irreverent, slightly bewildering sense of humour is not only intact from Undertale, but also much improved in quality, in a way that really understands what the Extremely Online people who play these games find funny – which, of course, includes cartoon splat noises and stock explosion effects that have been bundled with Game Maker since version 6. Special mention has to be given to Queen specifically in chapter 2 – that character is a fucking riot.

Both chapters are free if you haven’t played them already. I highly suggest you do. Now stop talking about Gaster.

BBCF GOT ROLLBACK AND NOW I HATE IT

There’s a saying that gets brought up every now and then in the fighting game community – “picking a fighting game is about picking what bullshit you’re willing to deal with”.

For the longest time, I thought BlazBlue Central Fiction was “the bullshit I was willing to deal with”. After all, alongside the usual suspects that were Street Fighter IV and Tekken 6, one of the first fighting games I tried to seriously learn as a competitor was BlazBlue Continuum Shift Extend. I’ve been with this series for a long time, and after finding a character I grew to love in Chronophantasma Extend’s Kagura Mutsuki, I thought I’d be with it for a good while longer now that the game has functional online play.

This is not the case. I cannot handle this game – not any more, anyway. I earnestly tried to learn about and understand each of the game’s characters, who are all designed like dense and inscrutable puzzle boxes, but when those characters aren’t filling the screen with nonsense and hitting me with moves that are overheads despite not looking meaningfully distinct from anything else they could be doing, they’re turning every hit into a 15-second combo whose knockdown creates a safejump that also invalidates most of the game’s unwieldy wakeup options.

I don’t have the energy or the patience for this shit any more. Part of me wonders if BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle will be a more positive experience for me, if only because the game respects my time enough to just fucking kill me if I get hit, but somehow, I doubt it.

KUSOGE ADVENT CALENDAR 2021

If you don’t already know, I’m part of the so-called “committee” of people who decide on games to be featured on the Kusoge Advent Calendar, a yearly marathon hosted on my friend AJ’s Twitch channel where they play approximately one bad/weird/occasionally good fighting game every day from the start of December until Christmas. I invite you to go through the playlist and see what happens, but some standouts from this year were:

• Garouden Breakblow: Fist or Twist, which is not so much a “fighting game” as much as it is a “game about fighting”. Each of the game’s hits feel weighty and impactful, and the way the camera zooms in during the early phases of a match where both players trade blows in a weird kind of damage race only sells the impact of those hits even more. Coupled with the game’s unique tug-of-war life bar and bodily damage systems, Garouden Breakblow delivers a keen sense of drama that I don’t think I’ve seen in any other fighting game, or that many games, full stop. It’s an absolute blast to play with friends, too – if you’ve got a PS2 (or a laptop), you should definitely take this to a local.
• WeaponLord, but only because playing it ended up being more of a historical discussion about the mindset of Western fighting game developers in the 90s, as well as a deep dive into “XBAND”, a service that allowed SNES and Sega Mega Drive owners to play games with others online, over a dial-up internet connection. Of particular note is that WeaponLord was the only XBAND-compatible game which advertised said compatibility on the box because it was built for XBAND from the ground-up – this is important because for every other game that was played over XBAND, the creators of the service had to reverse-engineer those games in order to get the damn thing to work. We talked about that instead of playing WeaponLord, because WeaponLord is not a very good game.
• Vs., a game whose reputation as “the weird localisation of Fighter’s Impact” absolutely does not do it justice. This game is absolutely wild, with insane guard break mechanics and some questionable moves that take advantage of those mechanics, but it’s a standout among 3D fighting games on the PSX solely for the fact that it actually controls well and runs at a good framerate – something usually only achieved by Namco’s offerings of the time.
• Spectral Vs. Generation, a game which stands as a testament to just how much Taiwanese developer IGS was able to learn about making fighting games in its roughly ten years of doing so.³ While it’s not without busted and highly exploitable jank, the game has a baseline good feel with some grime to get into even without jumping into the various infinites it allows, and the characters all feel fairly strong and functional. It’s a good time, and it’s on Fightcade!
• The Untouchable, because… look, just watch the VOD. I promise you won’t be disappointed.

These things are always a great time, and I’m always thankful for everyone else on the committee for being so courteous in the face of me inevitably screwing around their schedule because of the fake-ass timezone I live in. See you in December.

THE KING OF FIGHTERS XV X DNF DUEL: A TALE OF TWO BETAS

These two games are what gives me hope for the genre outside of Fightcade. KOFXV had a beta before the one it held in December – concurrently with DNF Duel – but I’ll just lump the experience of both betas in together.

KOFXV is basically what I expected it to be – a sequel to KOFXIV, which naturally means that it is really good. I had faith in SNK to create a satisfactory game to begin with, because they haven’t felt the need to drastically shake up what KOF fundamentally is⁴, and building on the systems and design philosophy of KOFXIV moving into the new entry was a great decision. Game felt good, online play was flawless (at least in the second beta, where it counts), and I’m excited to spend more time with it when it releases.

Now, DNF Duel. This was originally going to get its own whole write-up, but I’ve done enough screaming about it anyway so I’ll just commit a section here to it instead.
8ing, developers of all sorts of wacky and fun fighting games from the Naruto: Clash of Ninja series to Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3, are nothing short of legends in the FGC – known for just running with their ideas and throwing consequence to the wind, they could always be relied on to provide a game that was just good old-fashioned Fighting Game Absurdity when other games failed to meet expectations. But when we needed them most, they vanished – their last proper fighting game effort in a long while being Steel Combat, a 2016 release made exclusively for Oculus VR systems after they were bought by Colopl. But when Neople, developers of old-as-time action MMORPG Dungeon Fighter Online, announced that they were collaborating with Arc System works to create a fighting game based on their online game, one detail was pretty inconspicuously popped in at the end of the trailer.
8ing was back. And boy, are they back.

8ing has always had a few common threads between all of their fighting games – simple but flexible controls, massive hitboxes and wacky non-standard resource management.⁵ All of the above is here in full force, and it’s hard not to feel like this is a return to form for 8ing. ArcSys’s production helps reign in some of 8ing’s artistic excesses⁶ while also helping the game to look gorgeous and play exceptionally well online thanks to its rollback netcode. Each character feels powerful in unique and idiotic ways, from Berserker’s stationary Gore Cross projectile backing up his “my footsies nice” normal attacks, to Striker’s divekick that reverse beats into seven overheads, to Crusader’s righteous hammer comboing into itself like five times in the corner he just made for himself. This game is beautiful and hilarious in a way I thought the industry had left behind, and the game I played is basically the game I want – Grappler infinites and all. The only change I’d make is to tone down the methods each character can use to remove white life, since the prevalence of white life removal in even basic combos meant that people didn’t really get to play around with the game’s “Conversion” mechanic, a system which effectively acts like Tatsunoko vs Capcom’s “Baroque” mechanic, except it turns your recoverable life into meter instead of damage. This is a really cool mechanic with a lot of potential, and I think the game would hugely benefit from giving players more opportunities to actually use it.

When almost every new fighting game out there wants me to be smart, thoughtful or just to play in a certain way, 8ing has made DNF Duel, a game which asks only that I fuck around and find out. That’s the energy I need going into 2022.

I FINALLY STARTED .HACK//G.U. AND THIS IS WHY YOU DID NOT SEE ME FOR TWO MONTHS

The .hack games have always been on the sidelines for me, waiting for me to finally dive into them. I’ve been familiar with the series for a long time, having watched its two main anime seasons, .hack//SIGN and .hack//Roots back when I was in high school and thoroughly loving both of them. I’d attempted to play the original .hack quadrilogy once before, but found the first game, .hack//Infection, to be unreasonably punishing in many respects despite the fact that I absolutely adore the way it commits to the feel of being an MMORPG from the early 2000s. Of course, those games being PS2-exclusive (as of this writing) renders them fairly inaccessible as well, which fortunately cannot be said for its follow-ups, the .hack//G.U. games – Rebirth, Reminisce and Redemption – which are all available alongside a brand-new fourth episode, Reconnection, in the HD remaster bundle .hack//G.U. Last Recode. I have thoroughly loved the experience, and while I’m not quite done with the series just yet, I finished the first two episodes before the end of the year so I’m gonna say that counts.

While the G.U. games forego some of the feel of playing a janky MMORPG in favour of a more player-friendly action-RPG combat system, the general presentation remains, and it uses that presentation as its key asset as a means of diegetically expanding the game’s lore – from the player character’s PC desktop, you can log into “The World R:2”, the game within the game where most of the story takes place, you can read and reply to emails in order to explore and build relationships with other characters, or read the news and community forums to get a sense of what’s going on in the world outside of the game. There’s a lot to love about the .hack franchise, but this presentation style, for me, is chief among them.

It also helps that the story is quite compelling as well, with a lot of threads involving how online spaces affect the ways we perceive both ourselves and others, the ways in which corporate malice and/or incompetence can make these spaces actively harmful and dangerous, and what it means to truly connect with people you care about. There are also a lot of beating stuff up with giant swords and scythes and gunblades and summoning your digital stand so you can fight viruses that look like giant spiders made out of slime. It’s pretty rad.

Speaking of giant swords and what-have-you, the core gameplay is pretty fun as well, with the action-RPG combat system lending itself to a fair amount of fun and expressive ways to engage enemies, especially as you progress and unlock more weapon types to use, as well as figure out how to utilise the game’s pretty generous windows for cancelling attacks into skills or the recovery of those attacks into a guard. You can even bounce enemies of the wall for funky juggles, and while you’re not gonna be seeing a .hack//G.U. combo MAD any time soon, it still feels pretty sick pulling off a crazy extended wall bounce combo with repeated animation cancels. It’s all helped by a really flexible equipment customisation system, with slotted abilities on weapons, armour and accessories able to be added or removed on a whim, and all of those abilities being items that can be found in dungeons. The system allows you to really make how you play the game your own, while also allowing you to freely experiment with different builds at any given time without making you rely on getting specific equipment sets.

I can’t speak for what the experience would have been like back when these games were first releasing on the PS2, but .hack//G.U.’s episodic structure⁷ really helps sell the drama and tension of key elements of the game’s narrative, as well as helping to set clear points to measure the growth of the main character, Haseo – a classic “jerk with a heart of gold” archetype who only pushes people away for fear of losing them. No wonder this guy is voiced by Takahiro Sakurai. The entire main cast is all a lot of fun to spend time with, each with their own quirks, hang-ups and interesting motivations – especially Atoli, whose initial portrayal as innocent and optimistic to the point of naivety, sets her up to be an excellent foil to the jaded loner that Haseo is introduced as, giving both characters a jumping off point from which they can learn important lessons about themselves and become better people as a result. It also helps that Atoli is very very cute and I love her dearly.

If you’re interested, I would definitely recommend picking the game up. It’s on Steam, and is usually pretty cheap when it goes on sale.

So that was my 2021 in video games. It wasn’t all peachy, to be sure, and I learned some things about my taste in fighting games that I was maybe not prepared to learn, but I still had a good time overall. Here’s hoping 2022 is when we start to get out of this mess. In the meantime, stay safe, wear a mask, and be good to each other.

Here’s to a 2022 that is hopefully not just 2021 (Hard Mode).