There’s an almost paradoxical game development
saying I’ve heard a couple times that’s just “You make the first level last.” What are the reasons for this? Well, development
is a learning experience. Making a game takes years, and it stands to reason that you’ll
be getting more talented at developing, working with your engine and your team the whole time.
Designing each part of the game will teach you more tricks of the trade, more workarounds
and flourishes, and so then, when you’re almost done, you can turn around and put ALL
of that into the very first level. Because, of course, this is the one part that you know
every player will play. The first time I heard about this strategy
was with the original God of War series. At the time, God of War II had one of the absolute
most bonkers openings I’d ever played (honestly, it’s still up there). Kratos as a god fighting
the literal Colossus of Rhodes, a giant sculpture that you tear apart piece-by-piece while it
kicks its dumpster-sized feet through walls at you. The Colossus of Rhodes is buck wild,
a 17-phase boss fight that ends with you jumping out of its big metal skull. God of War II
felt like it was pushing the PS2 hardware to its absolute limits, and nowhere in the
game is that more evident than that first level. Because, of course, they designed it
last. The implicit second part to that saying though,
is you put your best foot forward because lots of players won’t make it to the end
of your game. This isn’t a judgement on gamers (although they will face judgement),
nor is it a failing of a developer. Games are long, and people have lots to do, and
to be honest it’s just hard to finish them sometimes. What this means is that hiding
a big gameplay upheaval or special event far into your game is a real risk, because it’s
spending time and development resources on something that you can’t be sure many people
will see. And it’s because of that that I have this
weird fascination with games that do it anyway. Games that keep an ace up their sleeve until
the last possible second. Games that, despite all the logic to the contrary, don’t show
what they’re capable of until just before the end Okay, time for the disclaimers, and there
will be several. First off, THIS VIDEO WILL HAVE SPOILERS. A LOT. They are almost all
gameplay spoilers, I won’t be doing a beat-for-beat of the story, but I know that people still
care about these things so: listen for me to say the name of the game, and if you don’t
want it to be spoiled, skip that part! They’re also timestamped! No complaining about this. Secondly, as I mentioned, the surprises I’m
talkin about here are based on gameplay, not story. While it was absolutely crazy when
we found out that the source of the Old Blood was Monster Energy Red, since it was delivered
in the same kind of cutscene as the rest of the game, it doesn’t belong on this list. Third, I haven’t played everything! Or even
most stuff! So channel your fury at me not including a great example of this into telling
me about it in the comments of this video, because I do read them and I love this sorta
thing. Obviously. Alright, game on. THUMPER is a game that I imagine a lot of
people started, played the first couple levels, thought “ya know what, this is really cool,
and I see what it’s doing,” and put it down. And they would be right! They did see
what it was doing! Almost. Thumper’s developers refer to it by perhaps
the coolest genre title of all time: “rhythm violence.” You play as this lil metallic
beetle, rocketing along a roller coaster track, and the entire game uses only one stick and
one button. All you’ve gotta do is hit these buttons and curves as they pop up, and they
pop up with a rhythm consistent with the extremely dark and heavy tracks that are playing in
the background. So that’s the rhythm part- what’s the
violence? Well. For one, Thumper is fast. Really fast. Like, alarmingly fast. As you
scream down these tracks, hitting the buttons and curves as the beetle feels less like intentional
control inputs and more like ricocheting. You ever play Mario Kart and think “well,
I don’t need to hit the breaks if I just smash into this wall to turn”? That’s
a lot of Thumper, sparks flying and drums booming. When you mess up and run straight
into a wall, the camera just keeps moving forward with the shattered bits of your body,
like you’ve driven into a wall and been thrown out the front windshield. And honestly, just that would be more than
enough for me to accept the “rhythm violence” moniker, but of course, there’s more to
it than that. Because in Thumper, if you slalom down this coaster from hell for long enough,
you reach one of the bosses at the end of its levels, and oh very cool very chill, cool
cool cool cool cool.... (I’m also obligated to mention that Thumper
is best played in VR, where the track feels even more visceral and the bosses feel 10,000
feet tall, and it is not for the faint of heart but WOW.) Thumper is really hard, and one of the reasons
for that is the “rhythm” part of the game is sometimes difficult to pick up on. Although
one of the game’s two leads is Brian Gibson, former developer on Guitar Hero and Rock Band,
the soundtrack feels less like any of the predictable anthems from those titles, and
more like the band Lightning Bolt, with...oh, with Brian Gibson! The music in
Thumper is weird and dark and the time signatures are actually bananas- level 2 is in 2/4, level
7 is in ⅞, level 9 is in 9/8! Getting a handle on the tempo of Thumper’s
tracks is significantly trickier than in rhythm games with more traditional music, and it’s
also essential because that tempo is the only help you’re going to get going through these
curves at the speed of sound. There are monsters and lasers and centipedes, but at least the
music track under all of it is consistent. Well. Actually. Remember how this is an essay
about the ends of games? You would be forgiven for thinking that the
end of Thumper is basically like the rest of the game. It is the fastest track with
the most unforgiving tricks and at the end you fight the biggest monster, and all that
is well and good and if credits rolled after that I wouldn’t be disappointed. But instead
of the monster vanquishing in a supernova of light, the path just continues, through
the teeth and churn (another mention, this is truly nightmarish in VR), and then you’re
out the other side and the level is still going, and not only is it still going it’s
getting faster within the course of a single level, and when it’s just teetering on the
edge of fully out of control- well, it teeters for a while, and then it falls over the edge. Throughout the game, you’ve got little hints
of this, I dunno what to call it even, just some big malicious inverted pyramid. It shows
up, plays an ominous tone, and then you fight a boss. But at the end, big pyramid shows
up to STAY and it shows that it is more in control of this hellworld than anything else
in the game because suddenly- It’s hard to communicate just how destabilizing
this is. The game is breaking basically the foundational principle of its own world. The
sound itself, the tempo, the beat that underlies the entire gameplay system, warps. Previously,
it didn’t feel like the world could be any more hostile. Spikes, bugs, tentacles. But
now it’s like the laws of physics, the air itself has turned against you. If performed correctly, there’s only about
45 seconds of gameplay like this. But in that 45 seconds, it effectively expands the possibility
space of the world. In many ways, it makes you feel even smaller. Although you technically
emerge victorious against the big mean triangle, the pervasive sense isn’t mastery here.
I felt more like I had been allowed to glimpse the world past the shadows on the wall for
just a moment, before being snatched back down. And I think this only works when something
this radical is saved for this late in the game. If the time warping was present throughout
the whole thing, it would just become another mechanic, another feature on Mr. Bones Wild
Ride. But because it’s reserved until you assume you’ve really seen anything, it becomes
more than a gameplay quirk; it’s a transgression, the game betraying the common language you’ve
built up over the past several hours. And I love it. PISTOL WHIP is a game that doesn’t need
to be complicated, and isn’t. It is John Wick with a rhythm section. It’s Time Crisis
in VR. It’s that one scene from Baby Driver. And, because all those things sound absolutely
rad, Pistol Whip is my...let’s see, my third favorite VR game. However, it’s not really a game built on
surprises. The joy of Pistol Whip is playing the same levels at increased difficulties,
easily bobbing and weaving through a hail of bullets while firing back exactly in time
with the music. The enemy spawns are eminently predictable, their types are visually distinct
(this one has armor! This one has more armor!). Pistol Whip is absolutely a power fantasy-type
game, and the fantasy is being perfectly knowledgeable about what you’re going to face. The music
aids you in this- start vibin with the beat, and you can predict when and where the faceless
goons will show up on-screen. Pistol Whip has had excellent support since
release, and has added a whole buncha new tracks to the game, completely free. It’s
been a real pleasure to sign in every couple months, see that new stuff got added, and
get to mastering new levels. And a few months ago, they dropped a huge and more experimental
update, a set of levels that actually follow an explicit story and has a character and
dialogue and stuff. This, already, is a really fun change within the rules of the game. The
story is intentionally schlocky, somewhere in the Far Cry Blood Dragon-iverse of goofy
faux-throwbacks, but the music is still good and it’s always fun to shoot robots. Again though, the setting might be different
but the gameplay is largely identical. Rows of dudes show up, shoot once or twice at you,
you duck the bullets and return fire in time with the music. One cool wrinkle it throws
in is the addition of burst fire for your guns, which adds a surprising amount to the
moment-to-moment gameplay but still fundamentally feels like the same experience. And then, in the final level of the story
pack, you get into an argument with a robot, it says [“Fine. I’ll kill you myself”],
the music crescendos, and- I get that, in your standard game, this might
not seem radical. We’ve all fought helicopters or gunships or some other flying mean thing
before. But in the context of Pistol Whip, this is breaking ALL the rules. First, and most simply, this ship is persistent.
For every other level, enemies basically stand still or run forward a little bit, and you
eliminate them within seconds of them appearing on screen. The feeling of pumping dozens of
rounds into a persistent foe is completely new here, and it’s super mobile. This thing
flies off screen, comes in for strafing runs, repositions itself constantly. There are moments
when it seems completely gone and you have to shoot standard enemies again, but you’re
constantly glancing around, just waiting for this thing to swoop back in. It is, truly,
unpredictable. And that’s to say nothing of how it attacks!
Whereas before, each enemy would shoot one bullet at you, or maybe some focused rapid
fire from a turret, this thing is an absolute barrage. This boss fight perfectly gets across
the tone of the level, the “Fine, I’ll kill you myself” of it all. What’s so clever is it’s not actually that much harder
to dodge this boss than the other stuff you’ve been doing all game. You just bob and weave,
more or less like normal. But it FEELS exponentially more dangerous. There are some really good moments here- one
of my favorites is when it starts dropping obstacles right in front of you. Lean left,
lean right, duck! And then, when you’ve ducked down low and are more or less crawling
through this tunnel, bam! Another barrage! This is the game asking you to roll around
on the ground and god it’s fun. I think we’ve all played games that change
the mechanics in a frustrating way right at the end. I’ve climbed and shot my way through
Uncharted, and right at the end it’s asking me to swordfight?? It’s not fun when a game
feels like it’s training you to do one thing, and then asks you to do something else. Where
Pistol Whip excels is that every skill you’ve been practicing remains- it’s just that
the framing of those actions is pushed WAY beyond what you thought the game was able
to do. It’s not unusual to give a player a big,
game-breaking power right at the finale. Souped-up gravity gun, infinite rage mode, the basic
stuff. That’s not what SUPERHOT MIND CONTROL DELETE does. Mind Control Delete is the Superhot special.
“Time only moves when you move,” as it has in the original Superhot and Superhot
VR. The graphical style is the same, the sound design is the same, even the glitchy storytelling
aesthetic is the same. But one of the ways MIND CONTROL DELETE differentiates itself
is with its special abilities- at the beginning of a set of levels, you get the opportunity
to pick an almost-superpower to use. You might be able to lunge forward and smack a guy,
much faster than you can ordinarily move. You can bring a katana to throw, and then
immediately summon back to your hands, slicing anyone in the way in half. You can swap bodies
with enemies, teleporting you across the map and making your old body explode. It’s fun to play with these abilities. MIND
CONTROL DELETE gets pretty tough, and so your survival is often contingent on your ability
to effectively harness your superpowers. It’s alarming, therefore, when the game demands
you give them up. If I didn’t have the bodyswap ability, I simply would not have been able
to get this far, and now, sayonara! But okay. I understand what the game is doing. The final
couple levels are gonna be a real test of skill, strip out all the fancy stuff, just
you and the enemies and the time that only moves when you do. Classic. That is what I thought. And then, after a
single level, the game asks what you want to give up next. Shooting? Punching? Jumping?
Looking? This is weird. I give up jumping, something I rarely did anyway. Another level.
What do you want to give up? Shooting? Punching? Throwing? Looking? And so on. Keep giving things up. Keep making
yourself weaker. Truly one of the most memorable game moments I’ve had in the last year is
being unable to do anything except move and punch. I couldn’t even glance to one side
or the other, just blindly strafing, hoping bad guys would walk into my fists. And they
did! And then I gave up punching too. Ultimately, you just have to give up entirely.
You give up, and everyone dies, and the game ends. But I refused for a long time. And let
me tell you, it’s a weird experience to feel like there’s something more you need
to accomplish, but you literally can’t MOVE to do so. In some ways, MIND CONTROL DELETE falls into
the category of “gotcha!” indie games. I haven’t even told you the bugnuts crazy
part where after you give up and everybody dies, you have to sit for two and a half hours
while the screen flashes SUPER. HOT. at you (no this is not a joke. Yes, it used to be
eight hours before what I like to call “the coward’s patch”). This kind of gimmick
falls more in line with something like Frog Fractions or Doki Doki Literature Club, games
I’m sure people have already written theses about in the comments. That “gotcha!”
is cool! I don’t mind when a game kinda trolls you. But MIND CONTROL DELETE isn’t
built around this twist, it’s a full game that does more than enough weird stuff throughout
the whole experience. And when it comes down to it, I’ve played a lotta “gotcha!”
games and a lot of SUPERHOT, and neither have ever made me feel like I did at the end of
MIND CONTROL DELETE. It’s like when HAL gets unplugged in 2001 except I AM HAL, and
my version of singing Daisy, Daisy, is struggling in vain to complete a level when I can’t
move, look, or punch. The last game I want to talk about kind of
breaks the rules that I’ve set up here, which is uhh, fitting for the thing this essay
is about. I was originally only going to have the previous three in this essay, a good number,
solidly made my point. And then I played The Wonderful 101. The Wonderful 101, developed by PlatinumGames,
does not quite fit the formula I’ve set here, because it is a game that is doing everything,
all of the time. Previously, I’ve talked about games that do a really defined thing,
and then they surprise you by offering an unexpected twist on that same thing. The tempo
doesn’t stay consistent in Thumper, Pistol Whip maintains its mechanics but throws in
a boss. I kinda don’t even know how to pin down the “one” mechanic in Wonderful 101,
but the end of that game is so bonkers that I need to talk about it to someone or I feel
like my head is going to explode. So. I’ll do my best to explain what’s
going on here because this game is harder to parce visually than almost anything I’ve
ever played. You control not just one, but an entire swarm of superheroes. 100, as it
turns out. That’s where the name’s from. You run around these environments, and I want
to emphasize that, even though the camera is really far back and their movement is insect-esque,
you’re not supposed to be tiny here. It’s just that everything else is HUGE! To measure
up to the apartment block-sized enemies you’re fighting, all 100 heroes can link together,
making giant tools- a big fist! A big sword!- out of their actual bodies, and then swing
those giant tools at the giant-er enemies. Because the game’s primary mechanic would
be basically the ludicrous climax to any other story (or, ya know, a Bollywood movie), Wonderful
101 tries to continuously one-up itself with the situations it puts its characters in.
Falling down a skyscraper, throwing propane tanks at a dragon! Making your bodies into
a machine gun to shoot a UFO! Getting into a lava-filled boxing match with a giant robot!
It is relentless, and overwhelming, and to be clear, not all of this works. I messaged
multiple friends saying “this is literally the most frustrating game I have ever played.” But by the time I reached the end...well that’s
a bit of a misrepresentation. Let me tell you the times I thought I reached the end.
I thought I was at the end when all the buildings in the city came together to form a giant
robot that I used to knock out an even giant-er robot. I thought I reached the end when I
flew that giant robot into space to use an orbital laser to wipe out the remaining alien
invaders. I thought I reached the end when a death star appeared, I smashed directly
into it, attacked the brain that controlled it, and ultimately grabbed my own ship like
a gun and pulled the trigger, completely annihilating the control center. At any of those points, the credits could
have rolled and I would have messaged those same people I was venting to to say that good
lord did Wonderful 101 really turn things up at the end there. But all of those would
have been pre-emptive. Because it would have missed when the space station transformed
into a planet-sized evil robot and I had to beat it by drawing a giant P on screen, a
P for Platinum, aka PLATINUM GAMES, aka THE STUDIO THAT MADE THIS VERY GAME DELIVERING
A FINAL BLOW TO THEIR OWN FINAL BOSS. And then, the cherry on top of the cherry on top
of the cherry on top of the sunday, every character in the game joins together to shoot
the biggest possible laser at the biggest possible robot, screaming the whole time,
hammering their control panels as you hammer your controller. It is maybe the single most
absurd ending I’ve ever had the privilege of playing through and I need everyone to
know about it. The Wonderful 101 can be an infuriating game.
It did not sell well when first released, according to steam only 20% of players have
actually finished it, there were many times that I thought about putting it down. There
is very little logical or rational reason for Platinum to have put the sheer, ludicrous,
gobsmacking amount of effort into the last few hours of the game that they clearly did.
But despite that- no, because of that, I can’t help but adore it. To grossly oversimplify,
you make the first level perfect because it makes sense. It’s the first thing people
play, it’s what you show off for demos, it's the sensible, marketable, profitable
decision. You make the last level perfect because you love the goddamn thing. And it’s
impossible for me to leave these experiences without feeling a little bit of that too. This video was sponsored by CuriosityStream
and Nebula. When I was a kid, I loved to watch DVD bonus
features- bloopers, featurettes, those weird games where you’d use the arrows on your
remote control. Those have mostly gone away in the streaming world, but on Nebula- a platform
featuring me and your other fave video people...we’ve kinda started doing it again? For instance,
I lost my mind at The Wonderful 101’s ending, but this isn’t unusual for Platinum Games.
And on Nebula, instead of this ad read, I’m talking about some of their greatest hits. [It would be the highlight of most other studio’s
careers, but instead for Platinum, it just seems to set the standard that they then attempted
to one-up for basically every other game they made.] I’m not the only one who does this! Legal
Eagle has...more law stuff, Jill Bearup talks even more intensely about swords- I love these
kinda bonus features. And, because of Nebula’s partnership with CuriosityStream, you can
get both of these, for a year, for less than 15 bucks by following the link right there. CuriosityStream, in the meantime, has apparently
dedicated itself to making things specifically for viewers of this channel, because there
is now a tab on the browse section labeled “MEGASTRUCTURES.” Are you KIDDING? Was
this button made for me specifically? I watched a documentary on Gaudi, it ruled, CuriosityStream
rules. Get em both, for a very reasonable rate, by signing up at CuriosityStream.com/JacobGeller
In a game full of bombastic set pieces, Titanfall 2 really managed to go all out with the final sequence. The time travel mission is certainly more creative and mechanically interesting (and probably the better level over all) but the climax of the game really felt like it had the perfect amount of oomph behind it that I don't think many FPS campaigns manage.
Thumper is genuinely one of my favourite games in VR, and massively underappreciated.
I completely agree with the video, it truly gets more insane the further you go on, and more violent.
Just pick any random moment in a later level and you'll understand what rhythm violence is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLOr9CfGpzc
Not sure if this fits the theme of video that well, but with the wonderful 101 section, I feel like I need to mention the ending of a schmup called RefleX. SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING OF RefleX, though you probably already knew that, and it's a fairly old game so it doesn't really matter too much.
It's your standard vertical bullet-hell schmup but you have a shield that you can activate to destroy/reflect projectiles and you have multiple hitpoints instead of a single one like in most schmups. what really gets me is the final level. You encounter this giant mech that you've caught glimpses of over the last couple levels and give chase attacking and chipping away at it. The mech then activates a shield very similar to your own and reflects your deflects your projectiles, this is the only enemy that has done this in the game aside from yourself at this point. It also throws everything you would expect from a final boss at you, requiring you to use all the mechanics at your disposal. Then once you get the boss about half dead it runs away and you deal with some other enemies for a bit. The boss comes back and traps you in a tractor beam that it used previously. You've survived being trapped like this before, strategic use of the shield when it attacks will keep you alive till it lets go. But then it attacks, and it doesn't stop. your shields drop lower and lower, until you run out of shield and it just keeps firing, shredding your armor til nothing remains and your ship is an exploding wreck. Game Over right? Wrong, this activates some sort of contingency program in your ship and your shield's power goes through the roof and your ship is revived with 1 hit point. The ensuing battle is hard fought and hard won. It's one of my favorite moments in gaming, it gets a lot of emotion and feeling out of just the actions of sprites on a screen with no dialogue.
It's also nice that there's an extra level after that which ties in one of the other games made by the studio.
Link to a video of the final stage of the game
Happy to see the “2089” expansion for Pistol Whip get some recognition. For a short rhythm campaign that’s only about 20 minutes long, it really is a real crash course on introducing a new mechanic to the player and testing their proficiency. I have really high hopes for the new western-themed campaign they have planned for the summer
SPOILERS FOR CAMPAIGN THAT ARE ALSO IN VIDEO
The final boss really threw me for a loop when I first came across it, and I think his first-time assessment is entirely accurate. You have a brief moment of “ok, this is the last level of the campaign, what surprise does it have now” before the large door opens and it’s just non-stop shooting until the end. Really makes the whole thing replayable as a whole campaign with the ups and downs of the story, and not just as individual songs.
Of course the facade is a bit broken when you learn the boss always dies at the end of the song no matter how much you shoot at it, and the boss itself wasn’t much of a surprise as it was introduced in the first level. But to those playing it for the first time, it really is one of those feelings you can only get in VR, after having shot countless robots to bits you feel both threatened by and prepared for the last challenge as the game inches your character towards it
OK what's the background song? I know it from somewhere, maybe a flash game?
It's funny that he mentions Thumper, because the ending was the one part I didn't really like (I just played through it last week).
The entire game is about learning segments/settling into rhythms even in uncommon time signatures, but the final boss breaks that in a way that is really not fun.
Interesting bringing up Pistol Whip! that made me think of another vr game that pulled a similar thing at the end, Budget Cuts (spoilers!)
The whole game is spent sneaking around killer robots in an office building while you get to the next level after collecting the item or whatever. But the last level introduces a "boss" of sorts; and throws the entire game on its head. You come into a dark area and find this particularly large robot that suddenly SPRINTS to your location as soon as you teleport. It's the most terrified I've ever been in VR... And the most frustrating. To hide from him you have to go inside places he can't get to, like vents and stuff. So you spend a lot of time being hunted by this motherfucker pissing your pants while trying to figure out a way to get past him. There were many instances I was on my hands and knees in a vent with my back aching absolutely terrified and waiting for the guy to go somewhere else. Ugh.
Needless to say, that final part was quite a surprise indeed. And then afterwards the game has a pretty freaking great end credits scene that was also quite surprising and memorable on top of that.