When the Voice of Cards games were announced I was excited. I like deckbuilders, I like RPGs, I like most of what Square Enix does, it was co-directed by the fantastic Yoko Taro; the idea seemed like a guaranteed hit. Then the games released to mixed critical reception and I read somewhere that they weren’t real RPGs with stories, just dungeon crawlers that used cards for everything in annoying ways, so I decided to wait for a price drop. And I waited quite a long time because the price stayed high, as most Square Enix releases tend to. Finally I bit after the trilogy plus DLC dipped below $40, and now having played through the Isle Dragon Roars I can say that while the game wasn’t quite what I imagined it also isn’t as dull as its reputation might suggest. This is a combination of an old school JRPG and a D&D session with cards serving more as a visual motif than anything else. All the characters, equipment, and abilities are presented on cards and the environmental tiles are made of cards (there are also visual dice rolls) but this is not a deckbuilder game and the mechanics are very much straightforward JRPG stuff. You have three party members, they each have a few items of equipment, they gain XP and level up, unlocking new abilities, etc… You can only equip four abilities (and passives that unlock as you level but all stay equipped) per character at a time, which is a bit limiting, but it’s far from the first JRPG to restrict you like that.

If the impact of the card element of the game is less than expected then the impact of the voice element is greater. The game is presented as a tabletop roleplaying campaign, with a single narrator who describes the action, reads the dialog and descriptions of events, and also comments on the things that happen, praising you after combat if you win quickly. It’s an interesting mode of storytelling; you lose the benefit of distinct character voices and sometimes dialog altogether as he describes the content of what’s said rather than reading it verbatim, but it also creates an element of intimacy to the proceedings. You feel like there’s someone with you on the adventure, guiding you and creating the experience, like it’s a solo D&D campaign. There are also D&D elements in the way that dice are used (most RNG happens behind the scenes but some attacks add visual damage dice) and the fact that instead of mana you get “gems”; counters that you accrue once per each character’s turn (or through other items or abilities) and are expended to use more powerful skills. The game also uses D&D number scales. Rather than the traditional JRPG trope of having everyone have dozens of HP right from the get go you start with 25 or so and gain one per level, meaning that much of the damage in the early game sticks to the single digits. It helps with this sense of smallness and intimacy compared to many JRPGs and their world spanning plots to kill gods.

The story is also small and contained. You play an adventurer who takes up the call of the realm’s queen to slay a dangerous dragon. Along the way you meet companions and visit towns to talk to people and take on a handful of optional quests. It’s all very straightforward and simple, and I understand why people who are more into those big, dramatic, JRPG plots might not vibe with it. Having narrative description instead of cut scenes to show the action is also an acquired taste (though something that Yoko Taro also experimented with in parts of Nier.) I personally enjoy the grounded approach. Not necessarily more than the standard JRPG nonsense, but as a nice change of pace. There are some twists and turns later in the story that make it a little less plain than it seems at first, and again I’d say that the game’s reputation for having only a rudimentary story is not earned, but though it goes to some pretty dark places it never really leaves the human scale that it starts on. For a 13 hour or so adventure it more or less works and stays reasonably engaging, though I wouldn’t call the game story driven.

What works less well is the way the characters are handled. The game does have characters, with names and personalities and everything, but they’re very lightly drawn. Your main character is a rude jerk, your monster companion is more or less a loyal puppy, and the witch you meet early on is angry at the dragon but otherwise kind of nice and…that’s it. There are a couple of other main characters who join your party and they both provide their share of comedic relief (the game has a lot of humor, especially considering how dark it gets in the back end), but nobody really changes or evolves as the game progresses, other than your main character being slightly less of a brat over time. Side characters, other than your rivals, are encountered once and either give you a quest or say one thing. You can unlock some detail and backstory for some characters (and even monsters) in your card codex, and some of these are kind of sad or funny or whatever, but they don’t make you care about any of these people. If you play JRPGs to fall in love with the cast and the people in the world you won’t find that here.

What you also won’t find is top notch combat. It’s a very basic system where everyone gets a turn, you select an action, and you may get a critical hit or encounter a status effect or elemental weakness, which can add some small wrinkles. Deciding when to use your gems gives it a bit of strategy, as does the effectiveness of certain status effects for “crowd control” (though you never face more than 3 enemies at once.) Combat isn’t terrible but in terms of complexity it’s a system that wouldn’t be out of place on the NES.

A lot of the systems in The Isle Dragon Roars similarly feel very basic and a little undercooked. Its towns are simplistic, with standard shops that are identical from town to town, a few NPCs to talk to, some incredibly menial side quests that won’t take you more than two minutes to resolve, and whatever people and special locations you need to advance the main quest line. Its dungeons are simplistic with only a very few traps or other interactive elements. There’s one tower where you can fall to lower levels if you step on the wrong tile, but because you can jump to any tile you’ve previously discovered it’s trivial to climb back up. There are events that play out randomly in the overworld and even some dungeons, resembling random events in a D&D campaign, but generally you will end up fighting a monster or finding some treasure or encountering a shop, nothing special. Very early on I ran into one event twice that had me fight a special monster for a huge boost in XP granting multiple levels. This led to me being overleveled for the first half of the game (I was level 12 when I found a new party member who was level 7, presumably around what you should be at that point), which would have been an issue were the game not generally quite easy. I never party wiped and the only time I came close was against the final boss. You get choices in conversation at certain point but as far as I can tell none of them actually matter or affect the plot; though rarely they might alter how a specific encounter plays out. They’re just for flavor.

Which is something that the game needs. If there’s one overarching issue with this game it’s that it’s all a bit flavorless. Nothing is terrible or broken. The graphics are fine. The combat system works. The story is bland but sufficient to drive the action and the characters…exist. There are unique elements like the card aesthetic, the random overworld encounters, and the fact that some battles have random events occur throughout them (everyone might take damage or gain attack power for a turn). But as the game wears on and the novelty of the card aesthetic and the narration wear off there’s just not much of a hook. If the story were epic or the characters charming or the combat exciting and strategic they could carry the game, and the rest of the systems would be good enough to hold it together. Even if it just had an amazing soundtrack that might be enough to help carry it, but while there are some good tracks that are reminiscent of Nier, there are also some legitimately awful tracks that are headache inducing in their boring repetition. Overall it’s not a bad soundtrack but it isn’t one that can elevate the game. Instead with nothing spectacular The Isle Dragon Roars is like a dinner of tofu and broccoli. It’s not unpalatable and it will do when you’re hungry, but it’s not something you’d actively want. I wouldn’t warn anyone who liked kind of basic JRPGs away from the game and it didn’t annoy or anger me the way that something like Trinity Trigger did, but it’s almost impossible to think of the kind of person for whom it would be a must play, except perhaps a Yoko Taro megafan who has to play everything he works on.

I think Square Enix made some mistakes in the way the Voice of Cards games were released, which really hurt their reception. Releasing them all within 11 months oversaturated their own market. Yes they are bite-sized and budget priced JRPGs, so players would have time to finish and be ready for the next one, but they are also novelties, and I think for a lot of people a few months is not enough time to want to go through another similar campaign with the same graphical style and ideas (though apparently the mechanics did evolve throughout the series.) It’s the kind of series you want to give some time to breathe so people could say “oh yeah that was fun I could go for another short campaign like that” rather than “another one? I just finished the last one I don’t want to do it again.” I also think that $30 was a high price point. It’s not unreasonable for what is a decently polished and fun RPG with a lot of voice work and illustration, but it’s a short, simple, game and especially with the compressed release schedule you’re asking the same price as something like Hi-Fi Rush, and nearly as much as Sea of Stars. Voice of Cards is a chill, shorter, experience you play between the big releases, and while $30 is far below full price it’s 50% more than a game like Pentiment, which has illustrated visuals and a lot more bespoke content, and twice the cost of Norco. Asking a premium price (for smaller games) for an experience that’s pleasant and low stakes but lacks a wow factor and ALSO has cosmetic DLC is risky, and doing so 3 times in under a year just looks greedy. I paid a little under $40 for the complete versions of all three games and that feels about right to me, so $20 each at launch might have gotten more people to bite.

With Square Enix announcing that it’s no longer going to be making smaller games and instead is focusing on big HD stuff it’s unlikely that we’ll see another Voice of Cards game or even a similar experiment for awhile. I’ve played a lot of these small scale Square Enix JRPGs, including I Am Setsuna and Lost Sphear, and while I don’t hate the games I kind of feel like we’re not losing much if they go away. I’d rather just play remakes and remasters. I certainly had more fun with Grandia, Final Fantasy IX, and Wild Arms than I did with any of these new old school RPGs. Now you can argue those are all stone cold classics, but even something like Okage: The Shadow King, despite being deeply flawed, was a better time because at least it was interesting.

I still like the classic JRPG formula, proven by the fact that I enjoyed both Wild Arms and Okage last year. And I like new games that use that formula to do something interesting, as demonstrated by both Sea of Stars and In Stars and Time, also from 2023. When people are nostalgic for JRPGs from the 16 and 32 bit eras the games they are nostalgic for are those that try something interesting in terms of plot or mechanics or aesthetics or all 3, or games they played as a kid. Nobody is excited about the idea of a bland, simple, RPG done in that style. The Isle Dragon Roars may have worked with the same story and mechanics in 1993 (though obviously with different graphics and no voice narration) but it wouldn’t be particularly well remembered. So why would people want a version of that today? These smaller Square Enix games aren’t bad, but they might be more interesting if they were. Instead they feel passionless and corporate. The kinds of JRPGs an AI might make, with all of the parts properly in place but no actual reason to play unless you just love JRPG-like substance. But there are lots of JRPGs out there. We don’t need more of them unless there’s a reason to need that specific game. And for The Isle Dragon Roars there really isn’t. You’d be better off just finding something well regarded that you missed, unless you really adore the aesthetic for some reason.

In full disclosure I’ll probably play at least the second game in this series. I already own it and I’m curious to see how they evolve things. 13 hours is short for a game like this, and I didn’t have a bad time. It wasn’t like Trinity Trigger, which made me angry with its blandness because it was actively annoying to play. The Isle Dragon Roars was...fine to play. Enjoyable at times. There were some funny jokes, some good music, even a couple of decent fights where I had to use strategy and thinking to win. But I came away feeling incredibly meh. It wasn’t just a 6/10 but a 6/10 across the board in basically every character. Give me Okage, with its 4/10 dungeon design and 3/10 combat but 9/10 world design and bonkers character interactions over that any day. At least it’s memorable. I thought that having Yoko Taro involved would mean that at the very least The Isle Dragon Roars would do some interesting things. I was wrong.

This is mostly a reminder to myself. I have a lot of fun making fun of the Amico and its tribulations, but at the heart of the story there is a real and serious scandal. Whether or not it rises to the level of criminally or civilly actionable fraud depends on certain facts that aren't publicly known, but even if it doesn't meet the legal definition, the fact is that a lot of lies were told and a lot of money was taken...for nothing.

While the Amico project was initially pitched as not requiring crowdfunding of any kind, that tune changed swiftly and there were several rounds of collection for the project. Part of this was a pre-order campaign, allegedly fully refundable, but the majority was done through shady investment websites that offer convoluted time-limited revenue shares to investors. You pay in X dollars and you get a share of the company's revenues in the future.

This is inherently a bad type of investment, especially for a pre-revenue company. Not only does it generate the obvious risk of the company never generating significant revenue (*cough cough*) or taking too long, but even if the company does actually get a product to market having to immediately pay out cash to investors will hamper that company's growth during what is often a cash poor period. There's a reason that venture capital funds make their cash through IPOs and not by immediately withdrawing funds from a company as soon as it earns its first penny. Of course mature companies often pay out cash via dividends or, these days, stock buybacks, but that's once their finances are secure and their high growth period is done.

So who would buy into Intellivision under these terms? Rubes. Intellivision tried to find deep pocketed investors in the VC area and struck out so they turned to shady "investment advice" groups that are often "pay to play" where, for a fee, what is in essence a conman will tell a group of unsavvy investors that he has a hot tip, and then will offer the tip for a fee. The conman can collect money at both ends, from the rubes and the "hot tip" company or just from one or the other, but the goal is to collect the fees, not make good investments. The investors themselves are often older people who don't understand the market and have reduced critical thinking skills that make them vulnerable to the hard sell and to promises of great riches from someone who wants to share their secret for...some reason (the very concept of these tips make no sense because if someone was such a great investor they'd have gone the Warren Buffet route and just become rich themselves.)

Already Intellivision was acting unethically, but to make matters worse it then proceeded to try to sell these crappy "investments" via a series of outrageous lies. There were frequent claims, or at least heavy implications, that the system and software were finished or very close to finished and they just needed a little money to get the product manufactured and distributed (even though they claimed to have a huge manufacturing line of credit and lots of product orders; remember they're selling to rubes so they don't need to be consistent.) They claimed to have numerous games in development or under discussion that were clearly never made, and consistently offered up release dates that were completely impossible for them to hit.

It was lie after lie after lie after lie.

Funny, at the time, to sophisticated industry watchers who knew that the project was a mess (though relatively few predicted it would never even make it to market) but actually quite sinister when take into account the over $15,000,000 taken in from crowdfunding, primarily from these unsophisticated, vulnerable, older adults.

And what did they do with the money? Some think they outright stole it. Others that they just mismanaged it into oblivion. They spent freely on expensive offices that never filled up and prematurely hiring expensive staff for functions like marketing well before they even had a product to sell. Did they pocket it or fritter it away by growing way too big too fast? Some combination of both seems the most likely, but unlike many I don't think that this was intended as a pure investment scam. I think they meant to make a product and make money off it. They just didn't have the discipline or planning skills to get anywhere near their goals, despite substantial funding (likely quite a bit more than products like PlayDate or Evercade that managed to make it to market and get quite a bit of software support.)

The scam continued with "physical products" that were essentially game boxes with digital IOUs for games to be created later that mostly never came out in any form. Then there was a long series of roadmaps and promises that never came to fruition and the continued promise that console will be released in the future (possibly to stave off lawsuits; who knows why Intellivision does what it does.)

But while at this point we've descended into the realm of farce and it's funny to watch fanboys scramble over and over again to explain away lies and failures, at the heart of this thing there is all that crowdfunding and the people who fell for a hard pitch and will never see a dime of their money back. There are also the pre-orders that never got refunded despite their guarantee, though there the exposure is just $100, not the thousands or tens of thousands fleeced from the "investors."

Even if someone did file a lawsuit the money's probably gone at this point and it's not worth it. They probably got away with it.

And that's the legacy of Amico. Millions of dollars squandered or stolen, nothing to show. I'd say the people involved should be ashamed of themselves but that's clearly impossible.

Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore is a joke game. Meant as a riff on the infamous CD-I games Link: The Faces of Evil and more specifically Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon the game only is the way it is in order to reference a misstep so creatively disastrous that it prevented Nintendo from licensing its IP to partner companies for decades. If the games were just bad they would be vaguely remembered sidenotes, but they also feature unforgettable cut-scenes, animated in a weird hand-drawn style with bizarrely aggressive NPCs and weird twisting faces that have to be seen to be believed. Throw in a version of Link who acts more like a bratty, spoiled, teenager than the stoic and adventurous defender of Hyrule who is probably Nintendo’s second most beloved iconic hero, and you have a product that will continue to be memed and remembered for generations to come.

It is these cut scenes that Arzette seems most interested in directly copying, with a style that’s drawn directly from them, including a useless bard character who is obviously just Link with fake facial hair, which is pretty funny. In some ways it feels like Arzette was made just to have an excuse to animate these cut scenes, though even they can’t quite match the madness of the original, with too many sedate moments where characters just stay on screen talking to make jokes or advance the plot without twisting and deforming like an LSD hallucination, though there’s also plenty of that. Elsewhere Arzette compromises the “vision” of the original games in pursuit of playability and giving the user a good experience. It’s as if the game were started as a joke and somewhere along the line someone decided “hey we have to try to sell this thing so maybe we shouldn’t make it a miserable experience?” and also started to fall in love with their own joke story and lore to the point where they wanted other people to care about them.

This leaves Arzette as a very weird product. The basic set up is that you play Arzette, the princess of the kingdom of Faramore. 10 years earlier a band of intrepid heroes, including Arzette and the bard Dale (the Link analog) defeated the evil Daimler and trapped him in a book with a magic jewel (which is pretty much how Wand of Gamelon ends). A duplicitous henchmen freed him and he has vowed revenge on the kingdom. Your father, the aging king, sends you out to stop him, while Dale refuses to participate and instead revels in his own uselessness.

As a game Arzette plays like a stage-based action platformer with adventure game and Metroidvania elements. There are 15 stages, unlocked as you progress, with one of them being the castle town where you can talk to NPCs, get quests, and shop for consumable items. The rest of the stages involve platforming and fighting enemies, with things to collect and their own set of quests and NPCs to interact with, as well as secrets in all of them and bosses in six. You will have to revisit areas multiple times because it’s impossible to collect everything the first time through due to magical barriers you will need certain tools to dispel or quests you get from NPCs that may require you to go somewhere else to get what they want. Each area is short on its own, requiring about 5 minutes to traverse from beginning to one of the multiple exits (though you can exit at any time by using up one of your ropes) but the game as a whole is about 3 to 5 hours long your first time through, depending on how much of the side content you want to do.

Gameplay in Arzette is strange. Arzette herself controls like a standard 2D action platformer character, able to run, jump, crouch, and slash with her sword. Over time she gains additional abilities like a double jump, ranged attacks and bombs, and an absolutely useless backdash that exists purely as a reference to Symphony of the Night. All of this works well and feels good to control. The levels themselves are where things get strange. I believe they’re built from image file background with the actual geometry of the level invisible and laid over the image. So you might see a tree branch as part of the background as a platform, but my understanding is that your character doesn’t interact directly with that tree branch but rather with an invisible platform that exists on top of it in the game world (since the tree root is just part of the background image.) This is similar to how the old Resident Evil games worked, and, of course, the Faces of Evil/Gamelon games. In general it’s not noticeable but there are some areas where there seem to be invisible barriers or platforms that don’t line up quite where you’d expect them to based on what’s on screen. It’s unclear whether this is an intentional reference or not, like a lot of this game’s issues, but it creates an uncanny feeling when it happens, though it doesn’t really impede gameplay.

Also strange is the design of the levels. Essentially they’re built out of a bunch of small screens that scroll horizontally and vertically, with the ability to traverse between screens at certain specific exit points. The original games were made this way because of limited RAM, allowing the CD-I to only hold one area and its relatively large background file in memory at a time, but it’s just not something that’s really done in more modern games, at least not in this way, with most of the areas being small and contained with frequent screen transitions.

Finally there are the enemies. They are extremely simple in their behavior. There are some flying things that swoop at you (though they are not nearly as numerous or irritating as in the original games) and some enemies that march back and forth on the ground, some flinging projectiles, but that’s pretty much it. In a world where even Shovel Knight has more complicated enemy behavior it feels rudimentary. Bosses are a serious lowlight, with most of them posing absolutely no challenge whatsoever.

The game is generally extremely easy on normal mode. You don’t start out with a lot of life and on normal mode there are no health drops. It’s easy to die from annoying flying enemies or projectile spam early on, and lots of the levels have poorly signposted instant death pits, but death just results in a “try again” screen and a respawn at the start of the area you’re in (with some of the larger levels having checkpoint flags.) If you play carefully you will not die outside of purely communicated pits, but I just played fast and sloppy and never struggled. It’s…kind of fun at first I guess, but by the end when you’re fully powered up and just searching the levels for whatever you haven’t collected yet it becomes very boring.

What never really gets boring is the charming insanity of the cut scenes. Again, these seem like the actual inspiration behind the game and why it was made. They’re not quite as poorly animated or insane as those in the original games but they’re delightfully unhinged, with charmingly and intentionally amateurish voice acting and all kinds of weirdness. I completed every side quest because I wanted to see them all. In many ways this is more like an adventure game with platforming and combat than anything else, with some quests requiring you to trade multiple items with multiple characters in multiple areas before finally getting your reward.

Yet despite the game being almost insultingly easy and kind of a joke I have to say that I really enjoyed it. The novelty of how it plays means that even when it isn’t good it is at least interesting. The basic structure of exploring platforming levels looking for secrets and bombing walls or breaking down barriers with newly acquired items is a time-honored design trope for a reason, and is fundamentally fun, but this is a different spin on it. Most of the strange little quirks are amusing and the game is short enough that it doesn’t really wear out its welcome.

I also must specifically shout out the music, which is incredible. I think that if Jake “Button Masher” Silverman had not nailed the music the game could have been a chore, but he did with a series of tracks that is period appropriate for the 90s but also stacked with absolute bangers. It manages to evoke the feeling of game music during that experimental period when games on CDs were new in a way that even very good soundtracks for retro-style games rarely do. It also sticks in your head and reverberates there for days, but not in a bad way. Just an astonishing achievement.

Playing through Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore I knew I was playing a very easy game that was objectively bad by most design standards but I…didn’t care. I was having a great time, at first, and then a good time in the final third once I’d opened everything up and it was getting more repetitive. I never played the CD-I Zeldas so there was no specific nostalgia here, though I was aware of the games and saw some demos running in electronics stores. Instead what I was just vibing on the exploration, the weirdness, and the fantastic music. It wasn’t a great experience in terms of design or balance but it was a novel experience, and it was funny and strange and that was enough, at least for an adventure that took less than 5 hours to finish.

A lot of games discourse focuses on gameplay being king and challenge and engagement driving a game’s quality. Arzette’s gameplay is serviceable but nothing special. It papers over its mediocre level design and intentional throwback flaws by just not being very demanding or punishing. I’ve often said that if a game is going to have bad or mediocre gameplay it should at least be easy so you’re not repeating annoying sections over, and Arzette follows that path. It’s very standard platforming with the unusual mechanics mostly being an annoyance at most, like a lot of screens that are pitch black when you enter and must be illuminated by a lantern with consumable oil. It also has a lot of useless upgrades like carrying pouches that expand your already quite generous upper limits for consumables (never an issue because you can always return to the shop) or boots that let you glide after jumping, which is a move that is never actually needed with the already quite easy platforming. Then there are the aforementioned boss fights, universally disappointing with no real challenge or interesting mechanics.

But while Arzette plays acceptably the unusual visuals, fantastic music, and fun cut scenes are enough to make the experience fun. Sometimes it’s great to follow a low stress journey in a virtual world. Jump on a few platforms, whack a few flying hornets with your sword, and talk to some oddly aggressive weirdo who wants you to find a random item for arbitrary reasons. In many ways Arzette is more of an adventure game than an action platformer, and adventure games have often focused on story and presentation, with gameplay being the weakest part of the package. In Arzette’s case if it had dynamic action and brilliant level design it would undercut the joke at the heart of the project.

I like a lot of games that are gameplay first. Balatro is currently my game of the year, and I adored chasing medals in Neon White and was able to have fun with Gran Turismo 7 despite hating the café presentation and the awful progression systems. But a lot of the games I like are not gameplay first, and that’s okay. Norco was a favorite in 2022 because of its lyrical texts and haunting visuals. In Stars and Time captivated me last year despite an annoying exploration system and combat that was downright boring in the back half of the game. Paradise Killer is fantastic even though it barely gives you anything to do except wander around and talk to people. Gameplay is just part of what makes games good or bad, and it’s okay if passable gameplay serves as a platform for great music, funny jokes, and weird animation that leaves you eager to see what strangeness the next NPC will get up to.

Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore was the right game for me at a time when I needed something chill and pleasant to play. It held my attention, made me smile, impressed the heck out of me with its soundtrack, and made me eager to see what was on the next screen and how the NPCs would react when I brought them the things they were looking for. Boring level design, stupid enemies, and disappointing bosses don’t take any of those things away. It’s okay for a game to be good enough in some areas if it’s great in others, and Arzette is not only great in some areas but weird and different enough to make a real impression.

Fellow Amicoans. By now you have heard the news. If you’re anything like me your initial reaction was abject horror. I felt like a beloved family member had suddenly died. Like a massive terrorist attack had wiped out thousands of lives. Like my doctor had called to tell me I had stage 4 cancer. We have all built our lives and identities around the Intellivision Amico and to hear that the Intellivision name and library had been sold to our hated rivals at Atari was more than I could easily bear. I wept and held my Amico branded t-shirt close to my breast, remembering all the good times we’ve had with Amico. The big announcement. The rocket ship getting its fuel in the form of a wildly successful crowdfunding campaign. The wonderful E3 presentation that filled the world with excitement for Amico. Playing Cornhole for 8 minutes before getting bored and doing something else once the app launched after we were finally able to get it running after only 2 hours of setup. All those memories that have made Amico the cornerstone of our existences.

I won’t lie. In a moment of pure weakness I thought about destroying my most precious possessions in the world. The physical products that show that I got in to the Amico experience on the ground floor. My boxed copies of the greatest games in the world, some of which even exist. I almost let the darkness win.

But as I stood holding a bronze bust of Tommy Tallarico I had commissioned with my inheritance from my aunt poised above my head ready to smash the copy of Biplanes that meant so much to me I paused. Not only because the bust is very heavy and I couldn’t hold it up, but because I had an epiphany.

This is a good thing.

Let’s be honest. Intellivision has always held Amico back. Amico was not built around the past. It was not some cheap attempt to cash in on Intellivision’s past glories. Amico was a vision for the future. A vision of a world where families and friends can come together and play games in the same room. A vision of a different kind of game, a game that is a reskin of a previously released game but with tacked on multiplayer and uglier graphics. A vision of father and son, brother and sister, greatuncle and grandniece sitting down together and playing Shark! Shark! for 11 minutes before someone quits because it’s impossible to play Shark! Shark! for over 10 minutes without wanting to quit.

Amico was never about retro reimagined. If it were then there would be hundreds of documented uses of that term by the ex-CEO frontman. It was never about Intellivision. If it had been they would have dangled follow ups to beloved Intellivision properties as important releases and modeled the controller over the old Intellivision one. It was never about some ancient console or its legacy. Intellivision was a mistake that was holding Amico back. It made people think that one of the most innovative and forward thinking products that has almost been developed in the last 50 years was tied to a brand from the distant past.

But now Amico is free. Free to soar to fantastic new heights. Who knows what it could achieve? It might even end up existing! Wouldn’t that be something? It’s a new chapter for Amico, where it can put itself forward as the product it actually is. A footbath looking shell wrapped around the guts of a budget cellphone from 8 years ago with a barely usable controller, none of which is actually ready for manufacture because the company spent its money on fancy offices and E3 presentations instead of nailing down the hardware and software and actually getting it made. Oh, and salaries and predatory loans too. A lot of money was spent there. Not on making payments on office furniture leases though. That’s not where the money went.

So now Amico is free to perform on its own merits. Flush with cash from this sale who knows how the company will use it. New offices? Paying off debt? More executive salaries? The sky is truly the limit for what they can achieve. Not making a console, though. That’s not on the agenda.

My fellow Amico fans I can honestly say that I’m more excited than ever about the future of Amico. Wipe your eyes and dry your tears because we are only now entering the true age of flourishing for this incredible machine. Our little community of the best that humanity has to offer; scammers, fanboys, trolls and bottom of the barrel hangers on will soon welcome new members with open arms when people flock to the rebranded Amico and the excitement that only its library of half-finished shovelware can bring.

Amico will rise like a phoenix from the ashes. But not the game Phoenix. That’s owned by Square Enix, an actual company that makes video games. Like a mythological phoenix. Because that’s something that doesn’t exist. Like the Amico. The parallels are endless.

The Intellivision Amico is dead. Long live the new age of Amico. Amico is forever. Which is also how long it will be until it comes out.

Why is there a remaster of the barely remembered 3DO FPS game PO'ed? I'll admit that it had an attention grabbingly insane premise of a chef fighting aliens but it is not fondly remembered. It's the kind of game that would be interesting as part of a 3DO mini-console or retrospective pack (something like the Atari 50th collection for the 3DO would be great) but doesn't seem like it would be worth playing on its own in 2024, when we have access to so many amazing games.

Except it is available as a standalone. For $20.

This is part of Nightdive studios remastering of old FPS games, which up until now has focused on games that were culturally important like Blood or Turok. Those games have a lot of nostalgic fans who want to play them again and are important to have accessible for people interested in the evolution of FPS and even gaming culture in general. But while $20 is a lot to pay for an old game like Turok you're at least getting an experience you might actually enjoy from it. PO'ed has never been considered good, and was a novelty at the time.

You can argue that there's room for remastering of novelties, and I fully agree. I think it's great when weird old stuff is resurfaced. You can play Ninja Golf on your Switch or PS5 today, legitimately. That's fantastic. Ninja Golf is kind of a bad game, but it's a cool curio, and fun for about 15 minutes. It was also sold as part of a much larger selection of games, all contextualized within a very cool documentary package, for $40. That package included actual classics like Tempest 2000 and a bunch of foundational arcade games, along with a lot of supplemental material. Ninja Golf for $20 on its own digitally would be kind of insane.

Like PO'ed is.

And it's not just PO'ed. The prices on these rereleases have been climbing for years. What used to be sold as parts of large collections are now being sold game by game, often for as much or more than a current indie.

You can argue that the game has been remastered, and it has and I'm sure they did a good job. You can argue that people don't need to buy it, or they can wait for a price drop, and that's true. Nightdive can do whatever it wants, and it's not like they'd holding a true classic hostage. We all remember when Nintendo packaged 3 Mario roms for $60 and then only sold that for 6 months. That sucked! But those were also Mario roms. That package included two of the greatest games ever made AND the only rerelease of Mario Sunshine. The games could back up the pricing.

And it's not like PO'ed is the only rerelease from that era. Quake 1 and 2 were remastered, sold for $10 each, and with online multiplayer. To say that Quake 1 and 2 are more worthy of remastering than PO'ed would be to state the glaringly obvious.

It's fun to have weird curiosities on modern platforms, and in the end PO'ed will become affordable and I might grab it for $5 for a laugh. My real concern is whether this pricing is sustainable. Are people buying PO'ed at $20? Dark Forces at $30? $30 is only $10 less than Helldivers 2, a fully modern game experience. And that's for a remaster of an ANCIENT game. At least Dark Forces is good and it's Star Wars. That's not nothing.

I guess I just miss the pricing days of the Virtual Console and even Sega Ages on the Switch, or those various compilation packs that seem to have dried up. Even I, someone who is kind of obsessed with old games and weird games, have to tap out at $20 for PO'ed. At a certain point you're paying new game money for what is, essentially, a prank on yourself.

I should start off by saying that I never played Killzone back when it was relevant. My first experience with the series was in 2014 when I played the HD PS3 version of the first game. I kind of enjoyed that game.

I then tried Killzone 2 in 2019 and...I really didn't like it. While Killzone 1 was sort of an interesting throwback shooter from the PS2 days, slow paced and not quite like anything "modern," Killzone 2, at that point, just felt like an inferior version of a standard console FPS.

I'd like to point out, as I always do when complaining about these things, that I do have recent experience with games contemporary to Killzone 2. In recent years for FPS alone I've finished The Darkness 1 and 2 and the original Bioshock. I enjoyed all of them, clunky though they were at times. If you want to expand it out to include third person shooters the list is much longer and includes generally ill-regarded games like Fuse and Inversion, along with the pretty good Shadows of the Damned (which they are now remastering.) I just finished the Switch version of Bayonetta this month and enjoyed that quite a bit. I rehash this to head off the criticism that it's not fair to compare Killzone 2 against 2024 games, and it's not. It is, however, fair to compare it to The Darkness or Bioshock, both of which are two years older and much, much better (admittedly Bioshock is considered an all-time classic, but The Darkness scored 9 points lower on Metacritic than Killzone 2 did.)

So what don't I like about Killzone 2? It's not so much the visuals, though they are ugly and desaturated like so many shooters from the era, or the story, which is "What if Gears of War was a lot more boring with characters you didn't care about at all?*" Neither are great, but they're far from unforgivable. The real problem I have with Killzone comes down to two things. The Dualshock 3 and the insane inaccuracy of the guns.

I've never liked the Dualshock 3. The Dualshock 1 was an incredible controller when it was released. I actually remember going to the store to get mine (mostly because I helped an old man who had fallen when I was on my way back home) and I will support it as a better overall controller than the The N64 trident. The Dualshock 2 was also very good for the time. I thought it was inferior to either Xbox controller (I WILL DEFEND THE DUKE) but on par with the beloved Gamecube controller and clearly better than the kind of bad Dreamcast controller.

But by the time 2006 rolled around the Dualshock design was old and outdated**. Admittedly it's better than the Wiimote for most traditional games (what isn't?) but it was thoroughly outclassed by the Xbox 360 controller, especially when it came to shooters. For a game like God of War 3 or Mortal Kombat 9 (which I played on PS3 because of Kratos) the Dualshock 3 is adequate, and I can understand why fighting gamers in particular prefer its more responsive shoulder buttons to Xbox's triggers. But for racing games the lack of good analog triggers was an issue and for FPS games those loose, stubby, analog sticks just weren't adequate. I've never understood how people could actually like them. The Dualshock 4 isn't my favorite controller by any means and I've had my issues with the Dualsense, but both those controllers at least manage to have tight enough sticks to allow precise control. Trying to aim with the Dualshock 3 makes it feel like your crosshair is sliding over a layer of butter. Every time I go back to that tiny little piece of plastic and those loose sticks I get angry all over again.

A lot of PS3 shooters compensate for this in various ways. The Infamous series (and I played Festival of Blood last October so I have fresh memories of it) gave you a lot of abilities with explosive effects meaning that precise aiming wasn't overly important. Uncharted's "stop 'n pop" style of gameplay and ability to move quickly and shoot from the hip or use stealth and melee meant that it was only a major problem when sniping. But Killzone 2 doubles down and is pretty fast paced with your character being fragile AND has incredible amounts of scatter on all the guns. Aiming in Killzone 2, even if you get the reticle dead on target, often feels like you're giving vague suggestions to the bullets as to where they might want to go. And those bullets are drunk and hard of hearing. Gunfire just sprays all over the place, everywhere but on target, and it sucks. You can sort of aim down sights by clicking in the left thumbstick (what a horrible system) but even then your accuracy is crap. Combine that with the bad controller and you have a shooter game where IT'S NOT FUN TO SHOOT. It's frustrating, even when you're not dying. Thanks, I hate it.

Booting up Killzone 2 again I remembered exactly where I was. At the end of the Salamun Bridge level where you have to take down a gunship on a rooftop. This encounter isn't super hard or anything (the trophy has a 42% completion percentage on PSN so it's something even casuals can do) but it compounds all of Killzone 2's problems. The way you do it is by shooting these blue electrodes sticking out the side of the roof to stun the gunship and then shooting it with a rocket. Repeat 4 times (at least on normal) and the boss is dead and the level passed. Sounds straightforward and there's in game dialog telling you what you should do so it's not confusing.

It's an awful experience. The first time I got to this point I tried it a few times and I just put the game and walked away. FOR FIVE YEARS. The second time I had to readjust to the controls and scenario but was immediately and viscerally reminded as to why I stopped playing. The fight requires you to grab a rocket launcher from the ground to shoot at the gunship and while I think you can use your assault rifle to shoot the electrodes and then grab the rocket launcher (you can only carry one long gun at once) to shoot it I think the better way is to use your pistol to shoot the electrodes and use the rocket to damage the gunship. The pistol is extremely inaccurate though, even aimed down sights, and things are made worse by the fact that the gunship often hovers out of range of the electrodes and also fires missiles that create smoke and particle effects that make it impossible to see them. It's a battle that leans into all the worst aspects of the game and often involves getting killed from nowhere or being in situations where you can't do anything for the smoke to clear or the gunship to swing back to where you can stun it (if you shoot a rocket at it while it's not stunned it dodges.)

It probably took me fewer than a dozen tries to finish the battle, but it felt so chaotic and random I had to grit my teeth through the whole thing. Just an awful encounter. And it's not the only example of a Killzone 2 area that annoyed me. There's another part where you have to fight endless respawns until you do something to trigger a cut scene, and that one the game does not really explain to you and it really made me miserable.

I know Killzone 2 was mostly popular for its multiplayer, which is long dead, but I can't imagine this inaccurate shooting was more fun in that mode. Killzone did some interesting multi-mode hopper stuff before most games so maybe that was part of it, but the shooting in a game has to be good for the modes to matter, and I really hate Killzone 2's shooting. I'm confident the multiplayer wouldn't have saved it.

I'm well aware that you can use a Dualshock 4 or Dualsense with a PS3 now, and that might resolve part of the issue. I'm also aware that I can just not play Killzone 2. It's a 15 year old game that Sony hasn't even bothered to remaster or, last I checked, stick on PS3 streaming. Guerilla Games has moved on to the Horizon series, which I really like. Nobody cares.

But Killzone was a major franchise and I want to understand why I don't like it. I'm also stubborn and I don't want this game to "beat" me. I like playing older games sometimes and the Hellghast are cool enemies. There are also some times, such as when you're using a shotgun where accuracy isn't necessary, where the game is okay. I don't know, I make bad gaming decisions. As many complaints as I have this is far from the first game I've ever played.

I just don't understand why it was so beloved. To me it's at most a 6.5 or 7 out of 10, not a 91/100 (the metacritic average.) It has nothing on The Darkness in any area except, perhaps, the multiplayer. And I'm not even going to bother comparing it to Halo.

I got a PS3 in 2010 but it was by far a secondary system for my HD gaming that generation. The controller was a big part of it. I did enjoy Uncharted, inFamous, God of War 3 and even Ascension. I also really enjoyed smaller Sony projects like Flower and rain, and of course Journey is an all time classic (some of those I played on PS4), so it's not like I consider PS3 a bad console. But I played the vast majority of my multi-plats on Xbox 360 and the Dualshock 3 is the main reason why. And I never tried the Killzone franchise because I thought I'd hate it with that controller. Now, 15 years later, I know I was right.

*Killzone 1 predates Gears so the setting isn't a rip off, but the storytelling in Killzone 1 was very different from 2, which is clearly heavily influenced by Gears.

**I never used the Six-Axis but everyone seems to have hated it.

Fellow Amico enthusiasts, it’s time to get excited!

For those who used to follow the intellivision Amico project the last couple years have been fallow. Tommy Tallarico has left the company and the Internet, abandoning his previous commitment to posting through every failure and disaster, and activity has died way down. Intellivision still exists as a sort of zombie company but they’re not claiming they have any looming date when a console will actually come out. Instead they’re focusing on publishing their small handful of games within the mobile app they put out that, with the power of Amico’s cutting edge engineering, allows you to play mobile phone games so long as you have at least two mobile devices (one to run the game and one to act as a controller.) Unsurprisingly this app hasn’t exactly been a raging success, seemingly only being of interest among the tiny core of Amico followers who remain part of the cult despite Intellivision’s remarkably consistent record of dishonesty and failure.

Despite the fact that the age of Amico has long passed the Amico Reddit remains robust. A lot of the conversation there reminds me of my friend who is a massive Pittsburgh Steelers fan and loves to rewatch entire old football games during the offseason just to relive the glory. They talk about years old posts and drama and relitigate old arguments with the benefit of hindsight, reveling in showing just how full of shit Tommy and his supporters/enablers were (not that it was very hard to see it at the time.)

But some of the discussion focuses on the rare updates that Intellivision continues to issue about its barely used app and the games available on it. Why does Intellivision keep running this app and its games even though it’s not commercially viable and will never be commercially viable? Nobody knows for sure. Some speculate that they think this will stave off litigation. I don’t think it has much effect there but who knows what people believe. Some think it’s a way of draining whatever resources remain in the company or avoiding triggering debt obligations that might be due if the company folds. Maybe the owners just like the attention, maybe they’re deluded enough to think this could actually become a viable business someday or that they can sell the corpse for an appreciable amount of money if they just keep pretending it’s alive in a corporate version of Weekend at Bernie’s. The ways of Amico are mysterious and not for us to know.

What is for us to know is that the updates themselves are hilarious.

Basically the updates act as a series of confessions where the people who run Intellivision, led by John Alvarado who was one of Tommy’s right hand men during the glory days, tell on themselves. Mostly what they reveal is the absolutely terrible state that Intellivision’s games were in even as the company blustered about rocket ships on launch pads and getting ready to ship the hardware on which these games would play. The most hilarious recent example is Cornhole, whose list of fixes read like something from a real game’s early alpha. These fixes address problems that were found by random clueless users of the app who actually tried to treat it as a serious thing and discovered that a lot of what was on it was flat out broken.

Intellivision somehow managed to launch Cornhole on their “service” with the campaign mode entirely broken and unable to progress, despite being almost half a decade after the game was originally supposed to come out and after over a year of alleged bug testing by volunteers. Alvarado also claimed this was his favorite of the Amico games, proving conclusively that pretty much everyone who claims to be a huge Amico fan doesn’t actually want to play the thing. This makes sense, why would you want to play crappy versions of old flash games when there are real video games to play (or you could go outside and take a walk or read a book or watch Blight Club or whatever), but I find the fake enthusiasm for the product kind of fascinating.

It's one thing to go on the Internet and talk excitedly about something you’re into, even if you do so partially for clout and attention. It’s entirely another, much sadder, thing to fake that. If you’re doing it for money I understand but at this point there’s no money left, and a lot of these people never got paid in the first place. There were nearly a dozen regularly updated Youtube channels at one point where people talked about how excited they were for Amico and yet none of them actually wanted to play these games. Some of them got “test units” (prototypes) and could play to their hearts’ content and continued to make videos about how much they loved them and how great they were and yet they didn’t even play enough in their testing to find the most basic flaws that anyone who actually liked a game would discover in less than half an hour.

People who have been keeping up with my blogging for the last few years could possibly remember that as part of my Amico hate I finished both Fox ‘N Forests (the basis of Finnigan Fox) and Rigid Force Redux because I wanted to know what Amico games would actually be like. I got those games on other platforms and I played them until I rolled the credits, and even a little beyond just to get to understand them. I can’t say I hated either game, they’re okay for modestly priced indies even if neither is exactly Hollow Knight or Andro Dunos 2. But I can’t say I loved either of them and I played them mostly out of morbid curiosity because I wanted to know what I was talking about when I said they weren’t very good and wouldn’t be able to move consoles to anyone.

Now it turns out that I, an amateur Amico hater who never took the thing that seriously and followed it pretty casually, may have spent more time with these games than the people who created entire podcasts around the games, who bought “physical products” for them. Who went on the Internet on camera and said they were super excited about them and that their jaw was hitting the floor at the amazing graphics, yet never actually bothered to play much of them?

You’ll find me doing a lot of weird things around video games. I’ve played games I didn’t really like, I’ve stopped playing games I was really enjoying for dumb reasons. I’ve put off playing games I was excited about. And I’ve written a lot about games and gaming for no money and almost no attention. Just because I had thoughts and I wanted to share them with anyone who’d listen. What I’ve never done is start a podcast about a system, claimed to be excited about it for literal years, covering up every misstep the company made and actively fighting against “haters” who tried to be honest, all the while claiming that these games were amazing and everyone would love them, and then NOT ACTUALLY PLAYED MUCH OF THOSE GAMES WHEN GIVEN THE CHANCE.

It's bizarre, pathological, behavior. For the people who were in on the financial scam and making money off the project at least I get where they’re coming from. A lot of people have claimed to like things they didn’t actually care about for money. But the volunteers? They carried water for a scam for years, made it part of their identity, spent hours every week talking it up and then they didn’t actually bother to play the games when given the chance. If I’d done something like that, which I never would, you can be damn sure I’d have finished those games. Just so I could talk about them convincingly if for no other reason. That IS why I played those games. To completion! It took me hours and nobody actually cared, but I wanted to know what I was talking about!

I’m never going to play Cornhole on the Amico app. Why would I? It’s a beanbag toss mobile game that requires at least two devices to play and is more of a pain to set up than actual beanbag toss. But the fact that it launched with these glaring issues that were only discovered because some rando tried to treat the project seriously shows how unserious the whole thing always was. Everyone involved, from the people making the system and games to the unpaid shills pretending that an obviously outdated and ill conceived system was an exciting new frontier in video games has now demonstrated that they never actually cared about playing video games on this thing. When given the opportunity they didn’t even bother. It was not an ill-conceived but well-intentioned system, it was a Potemkin console, an obvious emperor has no clothes situation where nobody even tried to feel the fabric because they knew there wasn’t any.

Nobody ever wanted this thing, at least not once the games started getting shown, and those who claimed they did were lying, which we know because when given the opportunity to play it they…didn’t.

My jaw is hitting the floor.

I want to be clear from the outset that I’m not talking about Microsoft’s involvement in games being under threat. Xbox owns Minecraft and Call of Duty. It spent almost $100 billion buying game makers over the past decade. The gaming division is now bigger than Windows. Microsoft isn’t leaving gaming, or if it does it will be by spinning off the gaming division into its own company or possibly selling it off, not by shutting it down.

But the Xbox console business is in big trouble. You can argue it always has been. Xbox launched with the expectation of losing money the first generation, which it did, and then making money during the second generation, which it may have, a little bit, but was definitely hampered from by the red ring of death, which cost the division billions.

The first half of the 360 generation was still successful in terms of selling consoles and building the brand, but the Kinect era was another massive misstep and killed a lot of that momentum, allowing Sony to catch up. Microsoft stopped investing in internal development and what it did make was for its disastrous peripheral that only worked well with a very limited number of games.

We all know the disaster that was the Xbox One launch, and while the generation as a whole wasn’t a total failure and Xbox might have been slightly profitable, the Xbox Series X was the opportunity for Microsoft to right the ship. They came out with a fine piece of hardware (The PS5 performs better at least some of the time and has the better controller, but there’s nothing wrong with the Series X) and the Series S was an interesting idea that has caused some issues but also created some opportunities. Of course the launch of the PS5 and XS consoles was thrown completely off by the pandemic, but even out of the gate the PS5 was seen as more desirable and now, probably halfway through the generation or a bit more, it has an even bigger lead over XS consoles than the PS4 did over the Xbox One. Microsoft likes to blame this on path dependency and digital libraries with backwards compatibility; if you bought a PS4 you bought a PS5 because your games would all transfer over. There’s something to that, of course, but it doesn’t really explain why Xbox has lost even more ground. People enter and exit the console market all the time, and people are willing to buy multiple consoles. If Microsoft was doing well then maybe they could move from 50% of the sales of the PS4 to 75% the next generation before catching up, even with library carry over. Instead they’re losing ground.

Why? There are a number of reasons. In addition to personal path dependency there’s friend group dependency. You might own an Xbox but you want to play games with your buddies who own PS5s so you get one of those. Xbox has also never performed well outside North America, and as the US economy’s share of the global economy continues to shrink that continues to be a bigger and bigger issue (though it’s worth noting that Japan, the region where Xbox does the worst, barely buys consoles anymore, so this is not as big an issue as it might have been.) Xbox’s decision to put all its games on PC certainly hurt console adoption, though Sony has followed suit (albeit less aggressively) so that’s a smaller factor than it once was.

I think the real issue, underlying everything, is that Microsoft can’t make hit games, and it can’t get games out in time.

I bought an Xbox Series X at launch and do you know what I played with it that first couple months? Dirt 5, Immortals: Fenyx Rising, Watch_Dogs Legion and Cyberpunk 2077. I actually like all those games, but they’re also all available on PlayStation and none are made by Microsoft. The Xbox Sereis launched with almost nothing by Microsoft. There was a new version of Forza Horizon 4, an all-time great game that was years old already. There were a couple of timed third party console exclusives of middling quality in The Medium and The Falconeer, and that was it. Everything else was a multi-plat third party game or old. Mostly both. When I got my PlayStation 5 a couple months later it came in a bundle with Demon’s Souls and Miles Morales (also available on PS4, but that hasn’t seemed to matter) and with Astro’s Playroom included. I played my Xbox Series X because it was the most advanced console I had, but I played my PS5 because it had a bunch of stuff on it that I couldn’t get elsewhere. The Xbox Series X was supposed to have Halo soon after launch and other things, but we gave it a pass because of the pandemic.

Since then Microsoft has continued to underperform in terms of getting games out on time and in good quality. When they bought Bethesda a lot of Xbox fans were excited because they thought it was only a matter of time before those games came online and changed things. That was half a decade ago and since then Bethesda’s output has been slow and anemic. Starfield was very late and disappointing. High Fi Rush was great, but failed to set the world on fire. We don’t need to talk about Redfall. We all know about Ghostwire: Tokyo and Deathloop being timed PS5 exclusives, but other than some decent remasters of old games it’s been kind of pathetic.

And Microsoft’s own studios are in many ways worse. Halo Infinite wasn’t terrible but it was incredibly late and they couldn’t keep up with the live service side. Gears 5 seemed okay but was also 5 years ago. Getting one okay game every 6-7 years is not exciting. Forza Motorsport has been spinning its wheels (pun intended) for a long time. The seeming one bright spot is Playground Games, which Microsoft bought and left alone. And even there it’s not clear that Fable is going particularly well. There have been a number of Minecraft spinoff games, which should print money but instead seem to revel in mediocrity and be quickly forgotten.

Microsoft is bad at making games. They haven’t created a hit new franchise since Forza Horizon and haven’t been able to sustain their old ones, while PlayStation’s stable of software is seen as top tier. Talking about Nintendo would just be cruel.

On the smaller game side there have been some critical bright spots like Pentiment and the aforementioned Hi-Fi Rush and even Grounded, which was in Early Access for eternity but is now out and seems well liked. Rare has done a good job of maintaining Sea of Thieves. Minecraft continues to truck along. It’s not that there’s nothing, but it’s not what you expect from a platform holder. This isn’t about exclusivity it’s about identity and core experiences that drive people to your platform. Instead Microsoft has tried to do that with Game Pass, but you can get that on PC and it’s clear that people won’t buy a system to get into that service. When the games you’re putting on Game Pass are either old, throwaways, or small titles people just aren’t that excited by it. The premise of Game Pass was always big games on day 1, and the games aren’t there.

Ultimately this comes down to Phil Spencer. Whether it’s his personal fault, or the fault of the people he hired, or his inability to handle interference from above, none of that matters. He’s been head of Microsoft for a decade and while he says all the right things and I truly believe he is passionate about games and is smart about the industry and has good ideas for services and new ways to sell games, he can’t manage game production. He has failed to do so. For a decade. He’s taken over huge publishers and built his own studios, and poured billions of dollars into making games and the games that have gotten made aren’t good enough. That’s the core of the Microsoft problem.

And now Daikatana’s biggest fan, Jeff Grubb, the news guy who has been thoroughly bitchified by John Romero for hours on end, reports that Perfect Dark is a mess. Of course it is. All Microsoft games are messes. Some of them get fixed and come out. Some don’t.

And because of that, and the recent cuts and closures, Xbox, the console business, now has the death stink on it. For a decade Xbox hasn’t been the cool place to go for games, and everyone knows it. Nobody thinks they have to get an Xbox to play anything, and people are now worried about the console and the longevity of the business. People are nervous about buying into a platform that may not last. This is how a spiral happens. You fail, people see you as a failure and don’t want to support you, you make less money and have to cut back so you fail some more, and it feeds on itself. People won’t want to go to work for Microsoft because they don’t make cool games (and they fire all their developers!) It all just weighs the business down. And eventually Microsoft will decide that the Xbox console is too expensive to invest in and while they might not discontinue it outright they will allow it to atrophy. We see this on a much smaller scale with the Atari VCS. It came out, flopped, people stopped putting games on it, and while it’s still for sale it’s not a real product anymore. I’m not saying Xbox is in anywhere near the same position now, and it’s a totally different situation, but it’s hard to get the stink off you, and Xbox has the stink.

Is it possible to turn this around? Of course. For one thing Microsoft has endlessly deep pockets and can maintain Xbox as long as it wants. The brand isn’t totally dead and other brands have recovered from worse. The death spiral gets tighter as you go but Xbox isn’t towards the center yet. It has millions of users and pulls in a lot of revenue. And it’s attached to a division that still makes money. But it needs to change and relatively soon. It needs to be desirable again.

I can see two roads forward. The first is to open up the platform. Let people put Windows on their Xboxes and thus have access to Steam and Itch.io. I don’t know how much Microsoft makes from their cut of third party software on the system, but I can’t imagine it’s a huge part of the revenue. Yes this will create piracy issues and the box will get hacked within weeks (probably a large part why they don’t do it) but if you turn the Xbox into more or less a Steam machine that might make it intriguing to a lot of people who want the best of both worlds, a console and an open platform.

The second is to make some hit games. Not just one, unless it’s a monster megahit, but a series. If the next 5 big games Microsoft puts out are huge hits people will take notice. If they can put out something at the level of a Bloodborne or The Last of Us it will draw attention. And if they can do it repeatedly it will draw sales.

I just don’t think they can. At least not under Spencer. I used to like the guy, before this year’s bloodletting, but while I think he does ‘get’ games he has a track record of not being able to get them made on time or at high quality.

But I’m not a fortune teller or even a games business guy. Maybe they’ll turn it around. Maybe consoles will die in general and it will all go PC and cloud and this won’t matter. Maybe there’s some other brilliant move I don’t even see coming that will change the industry. The Xbox Series has sold more than the Wii U and the Switch may be the biggest selling console in history. It’s not impossible to turn things around with the right series of moves. But the Switch sold on the one two punch of Zelda and Mario, not just its hardware. And Microsoft sure isn’t going to sell a bunch of Xbox Series Zs with the lineup it has now.

@zombiepie has accused me of downplaying the gravity of Microsoft, and by association Phil Spencer’s recent actions so I want to start off by acknowledging that the recent job destruction at Microsoft is a choice, made by someone at Microsoft, totally unnecessary in a company as rich and profitable as it is, and inexcusable in both their existence and execution.

But while Microsoft’s implementation of its “new direction” (if it even has a direction) has been particularly awful, I think it’s important to note that it’s part of a broader pattern. Sony has cut basically all of its smaller scale development to triple down on huge single player tentpoles and live service games as seemingly its only first party offerings going forward. Sony was once known specifically for its quirky weird experiments like Parappa The Rapper and Tokyo Jungle. Now it’s got Spider-Man, God of War, whatever Naughty Dog is working on, Gran Turismo, Destiny, and not a lot more. We’ll probably see another Ratchet & Clank some day and a few other things but the days of Puppeteer are long over.

Square Enix recently announced that it was taking over $100 million in losses to cut back on smaller games and focus on its tentpoles. Activision, long ago and well pre-merger, cut back on making almost anything that wasn’t Call of Duty or a mega Blizzard franchise, very occasionally putting out a Crash Bandicoot game or a Tony Hawk remake, often to great critical and even commercial success, before shrugging and going back to making more COD.

Take Two just gutted Private Division, its mid-sized division. Ubisoft occasionally puts out something smaller, but Ubisoft is a baffling company at this point and it just released the world’s AAAA game so who knows what its direction is.

Capcom seemingly makes Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, Street Fighter, and remasters of its old properties. Exoprimal is live service, and Dragon’s Dogma II seems like it’s AAA, though admittedly it is not a core franchise. But prior to that the last games that don’t fall into one of those categories were the weird Ghost and Goblins Resurrection game and Devil May Cry 5. That’s fewer than one game per year.

EA, of all companies, is one of the few publishers still regularly trying new things, with its EA Originals label putting out the Hazelight games and some experimental stuff like Lost in Random and Tales of Kenzera: Zau. But it too has announced that it intends to shift focus towards its core IP. Maybe we’ll see another Hazelight game in the future, and I’m sure it will take some shots at tiny games like Unravel or Fe just to generate good will, but it seems unlikely we’ll see another year with a slate of mid-size titles like Wild Hearts, Immortals of Aveum, and Deadspace ever again, after all three seemingly underperformed despite none of them being outright bad and Deadspace being very good by most standards.

Nintendo will continue being Nintendo and part of that does include making mid-sized games to fill in its schedule between tentpole releases. The Bayonetta series has gotten 2 releases on Wii U, there’s been a new Pikmin game, new 2D Metroid, new Warioware, and a host of remakes and strange one off experiments. It doesn’t seem like Nintendo is stepping away from mid-sized games because its business model requires a constant stream of games and it doesn’t have enough mega properties to fill in the schedule.

So who does that leave outside the big N, and perhaps Bandai Namco, which puts out a bunch of mid-sized licensed stuff? There are still a few mid-sized publishers who have survived the various consolidations in the industry. Koei-Tecmo comes to mind. Sega could be seen as mid-sized, though it’s almost as big as Square by market cap, and it has been focused on megaprojects and core IP over the last few years. There are also some boutique publishers who are putting out some bigger games that are larger than what traditional indies are. Annapurna, Kepler, and Focus Entertainment all come to mind. Embracer and its various appendages seemed to specialize in this kind of game, but who knows what’s going on with Embracer these days. My point is that there is some hope for the mid-sized game out there, but mostly from these smaller companies. The biggest companies are only interested in the biggest games.

Why does this matter? There are a few reasons. For one thing, mid-sized games benefit from being made in large organizations. Not only is there (or rather should there be) financial stability provided by being part of a big company that’s not a couple flops away from going out of business, but the shared resources and marketing muscle mean that these companies have traditionally been better positioned to get the mid-sized games to break through into the cultural consciousness. When Sony put out a quirky project people paid attention because it was Sony. Ubisoft got people to notice Starlink: Battle for Atlas and Immortals: Fenyx Rising despite their terrible titles because, again, they are Ubisoft. Tim Schafer talked about how when Double Fine joined Microsoft he was able to both offload a lot of overhead work like administering benefits to the parent company and was also able to use internal Microsoft resources to help develop Double Fine’s games, while bouncing ideas off other people within Microsoft Studios. That might have just been PR, but ideally that’s how it should work. Big companies have unique advantages beyond just being big.

And what they also have is a whole lot of IP. Microsoft alone is hoarding a huge chunk of gaming’s most venerable franchises, from all the Activision stuff from the 2600 days to Fallout, Elder Scrolls, the ID software stuff, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, the list goes on and on. And that’s just Microsoft. Each of these companies have a treasure trove of IP buried in their vaults. This matters for a couple reasons.

The first is that this IP can boost sales for these mid-sized projects. There are a bunch of indie extreme sports games out there right now but all of them combined probably have less attention and sales than the Tony Hawk remaster brought in. Part of that is because Activision put some budget into it, part of it is the quality of that product, but part of it is that people care about the IP so they pay attention to it and are willing to give it a chance and talk about it. Tony Hawk will always get more attention than some no name game, even if they were the same in every other way. The same can be said about Crash Bandicoot 4 and even something like Sackboy’s Big Adventure. It’s easier to launch a game that’s not going to be a blockbuster supported by 9 figures in advertising if you’re doing so with an IP people know and care about.

The second is that there needs to be a way for people to access old games without piracy. People say “emulation” a lot, but what they mean is piracy. I’m not passing a moral judgment here, but piracy is going to be something a lot of people aren’t comfortable with and that isn’t even possible in certain situations. We saw what happened with the Switch emulators and while that was for current gen stuff, Nintendo has taken down “emulation” repositories in the past. Additionally, piracy just isn’t a possibility for cultural institutions like universities or museums, which can carve out exceptions for their own academic pursuits but can’t provide ways for other people to access the material they’re talking about. For a medium to thrive people need to be able to access its past, especially its recent past, and for many games that’s very difficult to do legitimately these days. The more these companies are oriented towards only putting out mega hits the less interest they have in making their catalog available.

In addition to the promotion issue and the IP issue, there’s the issue of institutional knowledge. It’s not just about people losing their jobs and leaving the industry, or leaving the industry because they don’t want to be support staff on Call of Duty for the rest of their careers. It’s also about teams being broken up and companies losing the ability to manage projects at a reasonable scale. I think we’re seeing the fruits of this in the way that Microsoft can’t find people who can actually lead teams and get games out in good shape. And Ubisoft seems to have similar issues. When you don’t let people cut their teeth on mid sized projects and you don’t have teams that cohere and learn to work together the product suffers, regardless of the size. And while some of these teams are reconstituting in smaller studios, often enough is lost that it just isn’t the same. Parts of the Burnout team have gotten back together but the games they put out aren’t Burnout. Playtonic isn’t Rare. Even if Microsoft wanted to make a new Tony Hawk game, Vicarious Visions isn’t Vicarious Visions anymore, and that team, build over 30 years, was sacrificed to the alter of crappy Call of Duty games even though Tony Hawk 1+2 outperformed expectations.

Your team makes a game, even a great game, even a game that makes money for the company and gathers acclaim and positive press, and these companies do not care. They’ll absorb the team or disband the studio or whatever. Nothing makes people invest more in their jobs than seeing colleagues get a pink slip after crunching to put out a great piece of software that’s received well and makes the company money.

So why are these companies like this? Every company is a little bit different, and Microsoft’s current manifestation of sociopathy is clearly partially a result of overexpansion, but I think that there are two other primary causes. The first is that these companies don’t know how to do things economically. Yes they can budget a mid-sized game at mid-size but they no longer have the capacity to promote games that aren’t massive blockbusters. They may have had some mid-sized studios but they didn’t have mid-sized promotion teams so you got a lot of games that came out and tried to sell either based on the strength of their IP or review scores or, conversely, got too much money poured into promotion so they underperformed. We still get breakout mid-sized games from time to time, like Helldivers 2, but they seem to either depend on the games themselves doing something clever (Helldivers with its wholesale ripping off of the Starship Troopers movie’s tone) or being fantastic or just getting lucky. That’s not a great way to run a business. Helldivers 2 is also a live service game, which meant that Sony actually did care about it.

But the flipside is that even when the games do break through and do well, like Tony Hawk, it’s not enough to move the needle for these behemoths. Activision did call out Tony Hawk as a profit center in its financial reports, but at the end of the day having the occasional game hit every couple years is not the reliable firehose of revenue that Call of Duty is or Overwatch and WoW have been. When you have a golden goose even the very productive other animals on the farm get neglected and sacrificed to pamper it. We’ve seen this before in other ways. Valve more or less stopped making games because Steam got so big. Epic lost interested in franchises like Unreal, once its big driver and the thing its engine is named after because Fortnite blew up. Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption are now the only games Rockstar makes, and they used to make a lot of different stuff. The huge money makers come to dominate the company and everything else becomes an afterthought. Something to move off the balance sheet when things dip. Gaming has always been a hit driven business but the hits were never this big and they never lasted this long. GTA III exploded but Rockstar had to follow it up so we got Vice City, San Andreas, but also a bunch of smaller titles and other attempts at franchises. GTA V ended that because it just kept making money year after year. Now we’re going to get GTA VI, probably 12 years after the last one and with one game from a different sub-studio in between.

I don’t know if the way these companies do business is actually right economically. The fact that so many are going down this route could be group think, or it could be that it’s just how the numbers work. What I do know is that it’s frustrating for me and devastating for developers. In many ways it has broken the business of making games. A lot of other media has gone the same way. There are fewer movies from the big studios than ever before, and they take many fewer fliers on mid-budget releases. It’s mostly blockbusters and indies these days. The book publishing industry is in turmoil. Media is a complete and total mess in so many ways. But while mid-sized games are still getting made, and some are doing well, the exit of these big companies from anything but the top end of the market is a loss, primarily for the developers affected but also for the art of game making and the consumer.

None of this is to take the spotlight off how badly Microsoft has handled its cuts and its business in general. I’ve got more to say about that in another post, but it’s not just Microsoft. It’s most of the huge legacy publishers at this point.

It's 2024 and we're all used to constantly being cheated, manipulated, scammed, and nickeled and dimed in our real lives. It's just part of living in modern society, especially in the U.S. Whether it's grocery store shrinkage labeled as "new and improved," printers that have chips to avoid you using after market ink replacements AND that refuse to print in black and white after emptying their own magenta cartridges while "cleaning" themselves, or the constant barrage of robocalls for various scams even on cellphones, modern life just involves a bunch of predatory companies and people trying to take advantage of us.

It was always this way to some extent but the Internet has made it worse, as has consolidation of companies. When Amazon has driven most of its competitors out of business and damaged local retail in a lot of places it can afford to ship you the wrong products (or clearly used products sold as 'new' for 'new' prices) and what are you going to do about it? Go to the local department store that closed in 2012? Get mad about the cheap print on demand books and order your books from ebay, only to end up with a print on demand cheap copy?

When you can set up a new company with a few clicks of a mouse and be exposed to tens of millions of new suckers customers there's just no reason not to cheat people, besides morality and scruples but who cares about those? And conversely when you're a huge monolith and the only game in town there's also no reason not to cheat and steal. What are your customers going to do? Go to a fly by night Internet only operation that will cheat them even worse?

Health insurance denies valid claims. Telecomm companies tack on hidden fees. Online ticket sellers charge more than the cost of the ticket for "convenience" fees. It's a non-stop barrage of bullshit that insults your intelligence and plunders your wallets.

And it's in games too and only getting worse.

I think that this is behind a lot of the outrage over seemingly smaller issues when it comes to live service games. People play games to escape the bullshit of life. They play games to go into a fantasy world where they're a wizard or the First Baseman for the Yankees or a Race Car Driver or a college senior with a bunch of hot suitors or whatever fantasy a particular game is selling. It's escapism because we all need to escape sometimes.

But now when you escape to a fantasy world the bullshit follows you. When you bought a copy of Final Fantasy VII in 1997 you got to go to Midgar and be ex-SOLDIER Cloud fighting to free the people and the planet. And for some games, including the FF VII Remake games, this is still mostly true (though those games do have DLC.) But when you buy a copy of Suicide Squad you do not get to be King Shark bounding over the rooftops of Metropolis fighting Superman with a gun (for some reason.) I mean you do, but you also get a virtual used car salesman trying to get you to buy cosmetics that 25 years ago would have been unlocked through in game achievements or cheat codes. And when you buy a copy of The Crew Motorfest you get a virtual used car salesman trying to sell you virtual cars for real money.

And it sucks. It's one of the worst things about modern life transported into games in a REAL WAY. It's as if Gran Turismo found a way to really injure you when you crashed your car. Or if Spider-Man's subway based fast travel system forced you into 30 minute delays like the real subway does. Or if you could marry a girl in Fable only to have her cheat on you with the milkman and take your house in the divorce.

We don't play games to experience the shitty parts of life unless they're very specific games and those shitty parts are presented in very specific, generally, cathartic, ways. We play games to experience some kind of curated, enjoyable, experience. If I wanted to experience sunburn from going outside I could just go outside without sunscreen. Games don't make you worry about high UV index days because that stuff' not fun.

And neither is the hard sell. But games DO make you experience that. And they reshape their worlds to make it more appealing. Whether it's lowering XP curves to make the booster more appealing or making the free costumes boring to inspire you to spend real cash on the "premium" ones, games make your fantasy worse so they can upcharge you. Like a car company intentionally nerfing its software so you'll buy a more expensive package. More nickel and diming, more manipulation, and even more scams.

Helldivers II recently added a PSN login requirement for PC players. And people will say it's free, it's just to get you into the PSN eco system and to be able to spy on you a little. It's just to sell your information to data brokers and track you and that kind of thing. No biggie. We all deal with it constantly. But that's for now. Who's to say what the future will hold. And this is a game people already bought and paid for and were playing. They were already in the fantasy world of Super Earth spreading Managed Democracy and here comes real world Sony wanting to pry into their data and maybe their wallets in the future having already gotten $40 plus microtransactions for their game. Here comes the greedy real world business guy sneering with his hand out wanting more and more and more.

It's not fun. And it ruins a lot of what IS fun in games. Because it adds predatory bullshit to a fantasy world that you already paid for.

This is one of the big reasons modern gaming feels less fun. It isn't every game, of course. If you buy Penny's Big Breakaway you just get a fun little platformer adventure. And Tears of the Kingdom just sent you off to save Hyrule the same way the original game did, just with more bells and whistles. Super Mario Bros. Wonder partially helped keep its wonder by NOT turning the Mushroom Kingdom into a big scammy mess where you log in to see advertising and a bunch of bullshit currencies with "best value" plastered all over. It's not every game.

But it's more and more games, and it goes against what makes gaming valuable and fun. It goes against the spirit of escapism. It's like a reverse version of The Ring, where the horrors of the real world crawl through the TV into the virtual world to stalk you and take your money. And it sucks.