whitechocolate
Bench
My post wouldn't make much sense if the games I mentioned weren't already picked.
The 2025 Desert Island Video Game Draft
- Thread starter Capt. Factorial
- Start date
I fixed it. They had, indeed, already been picked.
Löwenherz
Starter
Can say with veracity that is categorically untrue.
I mean, it's quite possible to be intelligent and an absolute doof at the same time. Nailed it!
I work in academia. Can confirm.I mean, it's quite possible to be intelligent and an absolute doof at the same time. Nailed it!
Insomniacal Fan
Starter
It is more common than not!I mean, it's quite possible to be intelligent and an absolute doof at the same time. Nailed it!
Tetsujin
The Game Thread Dude
Okay. Was waiting to make my pick until after Spike went but since he’s not been on, I will have to go with…
Rampage World Tour (Arcade/Pretty much every single gen 1/2 console ever)
Rampage, it’s not just a bad Dwayne the Rock Johnson movie!
So back in the day before the internet was a thing, people would get a lot, if not most, of their collaborative gaming done in these quaint things called arcades. For me, the arcade in question was the Straw Hat Pizza in Rancho Cordova by the light rail station (though if we really want to date ourselves, that light rail station was under construction for a huge chunk of the relevant years). This Straw Hat was the main fundraiser site for pretty much every single big youth group thing I was in… Cub Scouts, soccer, orchestra, the Cordova Gardens chess club, you name it.
One of the machines (and the only non-ticket spewing game my grubby capitalist elementary self would play) there in the arcade corner was this one.
Picture a fighting game featuring all the classic big movie monsters of old. Now picture them approximately 75% sillier due to copyright reasons and you’ll have this game.
I will do the write up once I get home from work/if I’m not really feeling Summer Slam tonight.
Rampage World Tour (Arcade/Pretty much every single gen 1/2 console ever)
Rampage, it’s not just a bad Dwayne the Rock Johnson movie!
So back in the day before the internet was a thing, people would get a lot, if not most, of their collaborative gaming done in these quaint things called arcades. For me, the arcade in question was the Straw Hat Pizza in Rancho Cordova by the light rail station (though if we really want to date ourselves, that light rail station was under construction for a huge chunk of the relevant years). This Straw Hat was the main fundraiser site for pretty much every single big youth group thing I was in… Cub Scouts, soccer, orchestra, the Cordova Gardens chess club, you name it.
One of the machines (and the only non-ticket spewing game my grubby capitalist elementary self would play) there in the arcade corner was this one.
Picture a fighting game featuring all the classic big movie monsters of old. Now picture them approximately 75% sillier due to copyright reasons and you’ll have this game.
I will do the write up once I get home from work/if I’m not really feeling Summer Slam tonight.
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Funny, for a non-hardcore gamer who resides on a sports website and who happens to be doing a video game draft, I haven’t actually picked any…sports games? Gonna fix that now with my 13th round pick. The designated winner:
Out Of The Park Baseball 21 (2020) for Macintosh
You may remember March of 2020. That was the month that everything ground to a halt. And there I was, relegated to “work” from home, basically not allowed to go outside…just me and my lonesome spending 15 hours a day in my recliner without a ton to do. And no idea when it was going to all end, but certain that “two weeks to stop the spread” was not exactly how it was going to go down. Sports are over. Basketball? The Bubble wasn’t even a gleam in our eye. Baseball season? Maybe gone, who knows?
And that’s when I learned about Out Of The Park Baseball 21, which had just been released. The game is an incredible simulator - not a time-it-up-and-press-to-swing game, but a full-fledged run-whatever-baseball-team-you-want-at-whatever-level-of-detail-you-want simulator. And with not much else to do, I bought it.
This game is nutty in its complexity. You can control this thing down to individual hitting/pitching strategy in each at bat, and you get to play out an entire season as both manager and GM at about whatever level of detail you want. I chose to skip the draft, let the minor leagues play themselves out, pretty much eschew any trade market, but took the in-game play to the highest level of detail possible. I played one game a day - just like it was a regular baseball season (though I skipped the off days) - and played out a virtual season. Each game took about an hour to play, and it was a heck of a release from the state of the world and my flailing attempts to make myself useful at work via a remote desktop connection.
This game was a big part of just “getting me through”. It deserves a spot on my island.
Out Of The Park Baseball 21 (2020) for Macintosh
You may remember March of 2020. That was the month that everything ground to a halt. And there I was, relegated to “work” from home, basically not allowed to go outside…just me and my lonesome spending 15 hours a day in my recliner without a ton to do. And no idea when it was going to all end, but certain that “two weeks to stop the spread” was not exactly how it was going to go down. Sports are over. Basketball? The Bubble wasn’t even a gleam in our eye. Baseball season? Maybe gone, who knows?
And that’s when I learned about Out Of The Park Baseball 21, which had just been released. The game is an incredible simulator - not a time-it-up-and-press-to-swing game, but a full-fledged run-whatever-baseball-team-you-want-at-whatever-level-of-detail-you-want simulator. And with not much else to do, I bought it.
This game is nutty in its complexity. You can control this thing down to individual hitting/pitching strategy in each at bat, and you get to play out an entire season as both manager and GM at about whatever level of detail you want. I chose to skip the draft, let the minor leagues play themselves out, pretty much eschew any trade market, but took the in-game play to the highest level of detail possible. I played one game a day - just like it was a regular baseball season (though I skipped the off days) - and played out a virtual season. Each game took about an hour to play, and it was a heck of a release from the state of the world and my flailing attempts to make myself useful at work via a remote desktop connection.
This game was a big part of just “getting me through”. It deserves a spot on my island.
And as long as I went with a sports pick in round 13, might as well turn the corner and do it again for round 14, though in a very different fashion.
Ice Hockey (1988) - NES
This one’s a lot less customizable than my last game, but you *do* get to control the players. My typical game would pit myself as the Americans against the computer Russians (unless I was playing a friend in a two-player game, then we’d have to fight over who got the U.S.), and I’d swap out my players to get three Big Uglies and one Skinny dude. The Skinny guy is fast and wins face-offs, the Big Uglies are good at throwing their weight around on defense and shooting the slap shot hard. (Never found much use for the mid-sized guys, they did everything OK but nothing great, what’s the point?)
It’s not a really faithful simulation, but you can fight over the puck and if you’re aggressive enough you can get yourself (or if lucky, your opponent) sent to the penalty box. It *will* call icing, too. Outside of that? Shoot and score. Anyway, I probably spent more time playing this game than any other sports game on the NES, and I’ve even whipped this one out on the mini from time to time, all these years later. Bit of nostalgia, bit of fun. And yes, I’ve still got it!
Ice Hockey (1988) - NES
This one’s a lot less customizable than my last game, but you *do* get to control the players. My typical game would pit myself as the Americans against the computer Russians (unless I was playing a friend in a two-player game, then we’d have to fight over who got the U.S.), and I’d swap out my players to get three Big Uglies and one Skinny dude. The Skinny guy is fast and wins face-offs, the Big Uglies are good at throwing their weight around on defense and shooting the slap shot hard. (Never found much use for the mid-sized guys, they did everything OK but nothing great, what’s the point?)
It’s not a really faithful simulation, but you can fight over the puck and if you’re aggressive enough you can get yourself (or if lucky, your opponent) sent to the penalty box. It *will* call icing, too. Outside of that? Shoot and score. Anyway, I probably spent more time playing this game than any other sports game on the NES, and I’ve even whipped this one out on the mini from time to time, all these years later. Bit of nostalgia, bit of fun. And yes, I’ve still got it!
Löwenherz
Starter
I freakin love your island
Tetsujin
The Game Thread Dude
Getting pretty late into the draft and I have to say I’m pretty surprised a Spider-Man game hasn’t been taken yet, which means I shall be taking one… Just not the one everyone probably expects.
Spider-Man (2000, PlayStation)
Yes, I am taking the ‘classic’ Spider-Man from 2000, an at-the-time groundbreaking open world game where you got to swing the streets of New York (really at this point just a series of non-descript tall beige blocks) as Spidey and square off with his rogues gallery. While this is also pretty much how every single Spider-Man game has gone since then, this game also has the benefit of being the closest to ‘classic’ comic book (or at least 1990s animated cartoon) canon. Also unlike most of the subsequent games, this is narrated by Stan Lee who was still both young and lucid enough to deliver enthusiastic prose to get you to think the red and blue blob fighting other blobs was actually Spider-Man fighting to save New York City.
The mechanics for the web-slinging and fighting are surprisingly fluid for the time and I of course spent hours trying to stretch the limits of the game by swinging all the way to the edges of the game map and just beating up random rooftop thugs.
Low-key though, I’m mainly picking this game because the end of this game scared the crap out of me as a kid. Spoilers for a 25 year old game here so avert your eyes for the next couple of paragraphs if so inclined but the Doc Ock-Carnage boss ‘fight’ gave me nightmares to the point that my parents had to take my PlayStation away, which looking at videos of the game in question now seems hilarious in hindsight. But the combination of the constant ‘Die!” Growling, endless corridors, the boss being undamageable, and the fact that the chase scene goes on for way too long was apparently just too much for my mind to handle.
Try as I might, when I eventually did get my hands on this game again, it took me ages to actually beat this game, entirely due to this one sequence. Looking at the footage of it now, I am 99.9% convinced it’s due to how terrible the camera is at providing depth and accurately tracking Spidey’s movements (seriously, the second analog stick on every single modern console is a lifesaver if only because it gives you the ability to manipulate the camera in pretty much the majority of 3D games out today. But back on the classic PS1, that was unfortunately not a thing and accidentally getting caught on a corner or deadend because the stupid camera didn’t pan the right direction quick enough leading to your violent disembowlment by a chubby Carnage with octopus-legs was how most attempts to finish this game were going to go. But if you did somehow manage to beat it, you were treated to a truly wild end of the game cutscene experience that is quite possibly the most comic booky thing I’ve seen committed to a different medium.
This was really one of the forgotten classics of my childhood/adolescence and it absolutely needed to be brought up in this thread so I’m glad I was the one able to do it.
Spider-Man (2000, PlayStation)
Yes, I am taking the ‘classic’ Spider-Man from 2000, an at-the-time groundbreaking open world game where you got to swing the streets of New York (really at this point just a series of non-descript tall beige blocks) as Spidey and square off with his rogues gallery. While this is also pretty much how every single Spider-Man game has gone since then, this game also has the benefit of being the closest to ‘classic’ comic book (or at least 1990s animated cartoon) canon. Also unlike most of the subsequent games, this is narrated by Stan Lee who was still both young and lucid enough to deliver enthusiastic prose to get you to think the red and blue blob fighting other blobs was actually Spider-Man fighting to save New York City.
The mechanics for the web-slinging and fighting are surprisingly fluid for the time and I of course spent hours trying to stretch the limits of the game by swinging all the way to the edges of the game map and just beating up random rooftop thugs.
Low-key though, I’m mainly picking this game because the end of this game scared the crap out of me as a kid. Spoilers for a 25 year old game here so avert your eyes for the next couple of paragraphs if so inclined but the Doc Ock-Carnage boss ‘fight’ gave me nightmares to the point that my parents had to take my PlayStation away, which looking at videos of the game in question now seems hilarious in hindsight. But the combination of the constant ‘Die!” Growling, endless corridors, the boss being undamageable, and the fact that the chase scene goes on for way too long was apparently just too much for my mind to handle.
Try as I might, when I eventually did get my hands on this game again, it took me ages to actually beat this game, entirely due to this one sequence. Looking at the footage of it now, I am 99.9% convinced it’s due to how terrible the camera is at providing depth and accurately tracking Spidey’s movements (seriously, the second analog stick on every single modern console is a lifesaver if only because it gives you the ability to manipulate the camera in pretty much the majority of 3D games out today. But back on the classic PS1, that was unfortunately not a thing and accidentally getting caught on a corner or deadend because the stupid camera didn’t pan the right direction quick enough leading to your violent disembowlment by a chubby Carnage with octopus-legs was how most attempts to finish this game were going to go. But if you did somehow manage to beat it, you were treated to a truly wild end of the game cutscene experience that is quite possibly the most comic booky thing I’ve seen committed to a different medium.
This was really one of the forgotten classics of my childhood/adolescence and it absolutely needed to be brought up in this thread so I’m glad I was the one able to do it.
Sorry guys - emergency trip to Texas. Yes, I survived.
BurgerTime (1983)
The best game intellivision had to offer. Especially for a kid like me who got the console at a yard sale and who loved(s) burgers. Before I had an Atari 5200, I got an Intellivision from a yard sale. Many of the games made little sense. This one, however, was straightforward. Make a burger before you get eaten. It was quite a graphic death.
The best game intellivision had to offer. Especially for a kid like me who got the console at a yard sale and who loved(s) burgers. Before I had an Atari 5200, I got an Intellivision from a yard sale. Many of the games made little sense. This one, however, was straightforward. Make a burger before you get eaten. It was quite a graphic death.
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Central Texas even. Not sure where I am on the list anymore. The draft, not "the list."
BurgerTime was a Golden Age game, in the Golden Age of arcades.
Write-up to follow.
Yep, you're up again.
Dead or Alive 2
Pick #13 wasn't for Slim, and this one isn't either. This was one of my favorite fighting games AND one of my favorite Dreamcast games. Why?
Fighting was fast and fluid. The stages looked incredibly realistic (by 2000 standards), and there was the ability to counter and reverse attacks,.which made it all the more compelling.
Fun fact. This game also has an age setting in the options menu. While it's definitely NOT why my friends and I enjoyed the game, it was an added bonus. Since this is a family board, I won't tell you what the age setting managed.
Pick #13 wasn't for Slim, and this one isn't either. This was one of my favorite fighting games AND one of my favorite Dreamcast games. Why?
Fighting was fast and fluid. The stages looked incredibly realistic (by 2000 standards), and there was the ability to counter and reverse attacks,.which made it all the more compelling.
Fun fact. This game also has an age setting in the options menu. While it's definitely NOT why my friends and I enjoyed the game, it was an added bonus. Since this is a family board, I won't tell you what the age setting managed.
Löwenherz
Starter
I love when the ladies took a break from busting each other’s heads to play a little beach volleyball.
Insomniacal Fan
Starter
Is there anyone on this board under 35?
Padrino
All-Star
With the 150th pick in the 2025 Desert Island Video Game Draft, I select:
Citizen Sleeper (2022)
Developer: Jump Over the Age
Publisher: Fellow Traveler
Game Director: Gareth Damian Martin
Musical Score: Amos Roddy
Genre(s): cRPG; Point-and-Click Adventure
Platform: PC
We're nearing the end of our lovely little draft, and I wanted to use this opportunity to select one of my all-time favorite indies, a little sci-fi gem that came out a few years ago with a beautifully-crafted visual and aural aesthetic, and a wonderfully unique approach to game design.
In Citizen Sleeper, you play a "sleeper", or a human consciousness that's been uploaded into a synthetic body to do the bidding of the Essen-Arp Corporation. But, much like the replicants of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, you've tired of serving your corporate master, and you've boarded a freighter to escape your indentured servitude, hightailing it to the Eye, a space station that's become a bit of a rogue state and home to all manner of refugees and revolutionaries. Your only real goals are to survive life on this unwelcoming station and to evade capture by bounty hunters in the employ of Essen-Arp.
Citizen Sleeper lies somewhere between a proper cRPG and a classic Point-and-Click Adventure. It plays out over the course of many days (or "cycles", in the game's parlance) and features a pretty novel gameplay system. Each morning, your synthetic body rises to a pool of dice, which you roll to determine how many and what kinds of actions you will take during the course of a day. After rolling, dice can be applied to whatever tasks the player is most interested in pursuing. Higher numbers generally equate to better outcomes when completing a variety of important tasks, but lower numbers aren't entirely useless, either.
See, there is an "upper" layer to the Eye, where all of the station's lively surface concerns occur, and where your higher-numbered dice are generally put to good use. Then there is a "lower" layer to the Eye, and this is the data cloud, where your consciousness is able to float free of its synthetic body, and where dice are employed differently as actions than they are in the station's upper layer, creating value for those low-numbered dice that doesn't exist as strongly in the upper layer of the Eye. In the cloud, you can use your dice to create "matches" that help you acquire vital data. This data may prove influential over the outcomes of your dice rolls in the upper layer of the station in the cycles to come. But you have to be careful as you hack your way across the station; doing so can put you at risk of detection and capture. As I said, it's a very novel gameplay system that elevates Citizen Sleeper from a simple Point-and-Click adventure into something deeply interactive and engaging, while simultaneously reinforcing the game's philosophical interests by marrying its form and its themes.
Elsewhere, your lower-numbered dice might also be spent in the upper layer of the station on, say, working a shift at a noodle bar, where even if a rolled "1" doesn't result in an overwhelming outcome, you get a meal out of the experience, replenishing your "energy". Though sleepers' bodies are synthetic, Essen-Arp designed them with physical needs and a lifespan as an insurance policy to disincentivize escape. As a sleeper on the run, the player character exists outside of the corporation's protection, and so energy depletion is a major concern. It is essentially Citizen Sleeper's stamina bar, and if your energy gets depleted too far, your synthetic body's "condition" will decay. The practical gameplay impact of this is that you start to lose access to your individual dice, which results in fewer available actions, which makes it more challenging to survive on the Eye, and makes it more difficult to stay a step ahead of the bounty hunters.
As you pick up jobs on the Eye, you begin to meet more and more characters, and though its gameplay is incredibly engaging, where Citizen Sleeper really shines is in its short-form storytelling. There are many dozens of small stories scattered across the Eye, told in the experiences of the down-and-out, blue-collar types who live and work on the station. And their stories unfold slowly, as cycles pass, giving you a strong sense of what the grind of life is truly like on the Eye. If you're a fan of sci-fi storytelling with a profoundly humanist bent, Citizen Sleeper delivers the goods. I have to imagine this one will be right up @hrdboild's alley, if he hasn't played it already. And I'd encourage everyone to do so. It's less than $20 on Steam right now, and a sequel just came out back in January that I have purchased but have yet to play. I cannot wait to do so, however, as developer Jump Over the Age has crafted something truly special with this little series.
Citizen Sleeper (2022)
Developer: Jump Over the Age
Publisher: Fellow Traveler
Game Director: Gareth Damian Martin
Musical Score: Amos Roddy
Genre(s): cRPG; Point-and-Click Adventure
Platform: PC
We're nearing the end of our lovely little draft, and I wanted to use this opportunity to select one of my all-time favorite indies, a little sci-fi gem that came out a few years ago with a beautifully-crafted visual and aural aesthetic, and a wonderfully unique approach to game design.
In Citizen Sleeper, you play a "sleeper", or a human consciousness that's been uploaded into a synthetic body to do the bidding of the Essen-Arp Corporation. But, much like the replicants of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, you've tired of serving your corporate master, and you've boarded a freighter to escape your indentured servitude, hightailing it to the Eye, a space station that's become a bit of a rogue state and home to all manner of refugees and revolutionaries. Your only real goals are to survive life on this unwelcoming station and to evade capture by bounty hunters in the employ of Essen-Arp.
Citizen Sleeper lies somewhere between a proper cRPG and a classic Point-and-Click Adventure. It plays out over the course of many days (or "cycles", in the game's parlance) and features a pretty novel gameplay system. Each morning, your synthetic body rises to a pool of dice, which you roll to determine how many and what kinds of actions you will take during the course of a day. After rolling, dice can be applied to whatever tasks the player is most interested in pursuing. Higher numbers generally equate to better outcomes when completing a variety of important tasks, but lower numbers aren't entirely useless, either.
See, there is an "upper" layer to the Eye, where all of the station's lively surface concerns occur, and where your higher-numbered dice are generally put to good use. Then there is a "lower" layer to the Eye, and this is the data cloud, where your consciousness is able to float free of its synthetic body, and where dice are employed differently as actions than they are in the station's upper layer, creating value for those low-numbered dice that doesn't exist as strongly in the upper layer of the Eye. In the cloud, you can use your dice to create "matches" that help you acquire vital data. This data may prove influential over the outcomes of your dice rolls in the upper layer of the station in the cycles to come. But you have to be careful as you hack your way across the station; doing so can put you at risk of detection and capture. As I said, it's a very novel gameplay system that elevates Citizen Sleeper from a simple Point-and-Click adventure into something deeply interactive and engaging, while simultaneously reinforcing the game's philosophical interests by marrying its form and its themes.
Elsewhere, your lower-numbered dice might also be spent in the upper layer of the station on, say, working a shift at a noodle bar, where even if a rolled "1" doesn't result in an overwhelming outcome, you get a meal out of the experience, replenishing your "energy". Though sleepers' bodies are synthetic, Essen-Arp designed them with physical needs and a lifespan as an insurance policy to disincentivize escape. As a sleeper on the run, the player character exists outside of the corporation's protection, and so energy depletion is a major concern. It is essentially Citizen Sleeper's stamina bar, and if your energy gets depleted too far, your synthetic body's "condition" will decay. The practical gameplay impact of this is that you start to lose access to your individual dice, which results in fewer available actions, which makes it more challenging to survive on the Eye, and makes it more difficult to stay a step ahead of the bounty hunters.
As you pick up jobs on the Eye, you begin to meet more and more characters, and though its gameplay is incredibly engaging, where Citizen Sleeper really shines is in its short-form storytelling. There are many dozens of small stories scattered across the Eye, told in the experiences of the down-and-out, blue-collar types who live and work on the station. And their stories unfold slowly, as cycles pass, giving you a strong sense of what the grind of life is truly like on the Eye. If you're a fan of sci-fi storytelling with a profoundly humanist bent, Citizen Sleeper delivers the goods. I have to imagine this one will be right up @hrdboild's alley, if he hasn't played it already. And I'd encourage everyone to do so. It's less than $20 on Steam right now, and a sequel just came out back in January that I have purchased but have yet to play. I cannot wait to do so, however, as developer Jump Over the Age has crafted something truly special with this little series.
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"Definitely" not.
whitechocolate
Bench
The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening - Game Boy, 1993
My favorite Zelda game, and one of the few Game Boy cartridges I still have. It's top tier Nintendo and Zelda, so the craftsmanship, music, sound effects, and graphics are all top notch. Every sprite, even those of the pots Link frequently throws, and the plants he cuts down are memorable. Minor characters are all memorable. The world is filled with oddities and is slightly surreal. The game treats everything Link does like he's uncovering a secret. The game's magical nature ties everything together from small things like a chest appearing out of thin air after clearing a room of enemies, to the nature of the world. As a kid I thought it was weird that the game always referred to my character as thief. It didn't occur to me it was because I stole from the shop every play through.
Löwenherz
Starter
I think it’s fairly clear I grew up a Nintendo uber-fan. But I want to give Sega praise for delivering one of the finest, most imaginative, and exquisitely vibey RPGs in history on a system that punched way above its weight and deserves to be celebrated.
Skies of Arcadia (Sega Dreamcast) - 2000
My affection for this game is a bit paradoxical. I generally hate random encounters, and the biggest complaint of Skies, particularly on the Dreamcast, is there are just too many of them. Historically, I’ve tolerated random encounters with the original US-release trilogy of Final Fantasy and early Pokemon games and that is it.
Ironically, the GameCube “Legends” version not only tweaks this problem to make it less of one, it is also considered the enhanced “Director’s Cut” version with more content. But I have no connection to that game, and by the time I had a GameCube, Legends cost more than a Dreamcast did at launch.
Which brings up another point: I haven’t had access to this game in nearly 25 years. My first college “punk” roommate was honestly a good guy, but a bit of a poser who hoped if he dyed his hair green, listened to Bad Religion (and AFI), and owned SLC Punk on VHS, without adhering to any other punk ethos, you’d forgive, or at least forget, that he grew up in total affluence in Novato. Again, good guy, just struggling with his identity as much as I was or most anyone else. And he was certainly not above using that affluence to drop what I used on books and food to pick up a Dreamcast and a half dozen games on a whim one night because he found out it was cheaper than a PlayStation.
And good thing too. While I had foolishly “retired” from gaming at that point, that Dreamcast became the bonding tool for us and a number of our floor-mates, as well as a vital stress-reliever while navigating that first year.
Skies has become a game locked and crystallized in my memories with its stature only increasing through time as the small cult of fans continue to shower seemingly hyperbolic praise on it. When the truth is the actual mechanics and story of the game are not particularly special, but it all functions and flows together beautifully to enrich the phenomenal aesthetics and vibes of the world.
Searching the skies for treasure in a custom flying ship, exploring dungeons and towns on floating islands, hiring a crew and upgrading your ship to improve your chances in Ship to Ship and Ship to Monster air battles. Sounds like someone poured a mixed bag of awesome into a blender and flipped the switch to "amplify"
That is the energy of the experience in Skies, even if the individual mechanics set in a vacuum are rather tame.
Vyse, Aika, and Fina are a delightfully fun if standard RPG trio - something of a more lighthearted Cloud, Tifa, and Aerith. The combination of classic RPG elements with ship-building and air-to-air combat is a unique experience even if combat is a very traditional turn-based party system complete with color-coordinated elemental magic attacks and buffs, and the ship battles are a little like a puzzler mini-game. There are no real subversion of tropes in the narrative, but there don’t need to be. The world itself is the draw and everything else works to enrich that experience.
Sometimes you don’t need intriguing, trope-shattering storylines with shocking twists and turns; deeply involved and nuanced combat mechanics; and complex characters with psychologically grimdark backstories, competing interests, and internal strife.
Sometimes you just need a swashbuckling adventure with a cool group of friends sailing through the open skies.
Skies of Arcadia (Sega Dreamcast) - 2000
My affection for this game is a bit paradoxical. I generally hate random encounters, and the biggest complaint of Skies, particularly on the Dreamcast, is there are just too many of them. Historically, I’ve tolerated random encounters with the original US-release trilogy of Final Fantasy and early Pokemon games and that is it.
Ironically, the GameCube “Legends” version not only tweaks this problem to make it less of one, it is also considered the enhanced “Director’s Cut” version with more content. But I have no connection to that game, and by the time I had a GameCube, Legends cost more than a Dreamcast did at launch.
Which brings up another point: I haven’t had access to this game in nearly 25 years. My first college “punk” roommate was honestly a good guy, but a bit of a poser who hoped if he dyed his hair green, listened to Bad Religion (and AFI), and owned SLC Punk on VHS, without adhering to any other punk ethos, you’d forgive, or at least forget, that he grew up in total affluence in Novato. Again, good guy, just struggling with his identity as much as I was or most anyone else. And he was certainly not above using that affluence to drop what I used on books and food to pick up a Dreamcast and a half dozen games on a whim one night because he found out it was cheaper than a PlayStation.
And good thing too. While I had foolishly “retired” from gaming at that point, that Dreamcast became the bonding tool for us and a number of our floor-mates, as well as a vital stress-reliever while navigating that first year.
Skies has become a game locked and crystallized in my memories with its stature only increasing through time as the small cult of fans continue to shower seemingly hyperbolic praise on it. When the truth is the actual mechanics and story of the game are not particularly special, but it all functions and flows together beautifully to enrich the phenomenal aesthetics and vibes of the world.
Searching the skies for treasure in a custom flying ship, exploring dungeons and towns on floating islands, hiring a crew and upgrading your ship to improve your chances in Ship to Ship and Ship to Monster air battles. Sounds like someone poured a mixed bag of awesome into a blender and flipped the switch to "amplify"
That is the energy of the experience in Skies, even if the individual mechanics set in a vacuum are rather tame.
Vyse, Aika, and Fina are a delightfully fun if standard RPG trio - something of a more lighthearted Cloud, Tifa, and Aerith. The combination of classic RPG elements with ship-building and air-to-air combat is a unique experience even if combat is a very traditional turn-based party system complete with color-coordinated elemental magic attacks and buffs, and the ship battles are a little like a puzzler mini-game. There are no real subversion of tropes in the narrative, but there don’t need to be. The world itself is the draw and everything else works to enrich that experience.
Sometimes you don’t need intriguing, trope-shattering storylines with shocking twists and turns; deeply involved and nuanced combat mechanics; and complex characters with psychologically grimdark backstories, competing interests, and internal strife.
Sometimes you just need a swashbuckling adventure with a cool group of friends sailing through the open skies.
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