Category: Multiplayer

Super Battle Golf

I’ve never really played sports games, but I’ve played a fair amount of golf games. This is because golf is not a sport. It’s an activity, like lawn darts or bowling. Golf in the real world is reserved exclusively for rich assholes, the sort of people who will ban Michael Jordan from their country club because he’s wearing the wrong pants, a real thing that actually happened.

Part of the problem I think is that golf is often a deeply unsatisfying activity. Every time I’ve ever picked up a club, there’s a little voice inside me screaming that it would be far more satisfying to give someone a good smack across the ankles with it then it would to hit some dinky little ball into a hole. This voice only grows louder with each missed putt and as my score careens higher and higher, further and further out of actual contention.

Super Battle Golf is not the first golf game to recognize this primal urge. Golf With Your Friends had collisions on by default. Fore Scores key mechanic was impeding other players with obstacles.

The difference though, is that Super Battle Golf is the first game to recognize that tension, and then design key systems around it.

The core system of Super Battle Golf is a fairly simple golf game. You have a club, you have a ball, and there is a hole. You need to get the ball into the hole to win. There is only a single type of club, and you can adjust the angle of your shot, and control the power by clicking down, and releasing when you’re at the point you want to be at. Standard stuff, the chips in a metaphorical golf nachos. But the toppings are where everything gets interesting.

The first noticeable thing is that after hitting a ball, unlike many golf games, you do not follow the ball, or teleport to it’s resting spot to take another shot. Instead, you must walk there on your own, golf club in hand. Additionally, while there bonus points for finishing under par, the majority of the scoring rewards being the FIRST person to reach the hole.

One way to be the first person to finish is after taking your first swing, to turn and give the next closest golfer a swift thwack across the ankles, knocking them down, and setting up for a second swing that can send them flying back, and ragdolling.

Alternately, if you time your first shot perfectly, you’ll get a boost of speed to start, often giving you the edge to rush forward and be the first to claim one of the games Mario Kart style item boxes. Players can hold up to 3 items, and unused items will be carried over to the next hole. Items generally fall into two categories, traversal or combat, with my personal favorite, the elephant gun sitting neatly in both.

The secret sauce, the thing that really makes Super Battle Golf work though, has to do with the boost system, and a special type of hit called a homing shot. First, the boost system.

When you hit another player in Super Battle Golf be it with a item box weapon, golf club, ball, or running them over in a golf cart, you get a temporary boost of movement speed. This speed is the key to pulling ahead of other players, because while everyone can be reasonably good at the golf part of the game, it’s more important to be the first person to reach your ball as quickly as possible for the next hole.

Critically, if you are losing, choosing to grief or attack other players around and in front of you isn’t kingmaking. Instead, it’s the mechanic by which you gain ground.

The same is true of homing shots. Without going into too much detail, there is a mechanic by which you can hit shots so that they will track a player in front of you like a heat seeking missile. If it connects, it will knock that player down, giving you the aforementioned speed boost, while forcing them to wait out the knockdown.

This is what really differentiates Super Battle Golf from every other lite multiplayer golf game. It rewards and encourages combat, as opposed to just making it possible. And while it’s not the deepest combat ever, there is a fair amount of strategic decision making, politicking, and routing.

If I have any complaints, or reservations, it might be the map pool, and the always online voice chat. There are 27 holes, which doesn’t quite feel like enough. On the flip side, I find the always online voice chat incredibly funny, but that’s quite possibly because I have a deeply broken sense of humor.

Some “highlights” of said voice chat include:
1. The entire lobby grouping up to repeatedly pummel someone screaming a racial slur in a Russian accent.
2. Hearing “get Kirked” moments before being shot by someone with a dueling pistol.
3. A discussion about how shooting up schools is a real “white person” activity.

If you don’t find early XBox Live level (read: fucking cesspool) of interaction and voice chat funny, you will not have a good time online, and should probably stick to playing with your friends, or immediately mute everyone when you join a public lobby.

On the other hand, I find something deeply satisfying in using a rocket launcher on someone calling me a series of both inaccurate and offensive racial slurs.

Your personal millage may vary.

Super Battle Golf is $7. It’s pretty great, but given that public lobbies are cesspools, I highly suggest getting it if you have 4-5 more friends you can play with. The game is best about 5-8 players, and while I wish there were more maps, the ones that do exist justify the price.

Battlefield 6 is fine, but too expensive.

As we approach the end of the year, I’m pretty tired. I have a bunch of cool writeups I should finish up (Blue Prince! Omegathon!), and a few posts like my writeup of Horses that could go up, but I’m somewhat hesitant to actually post, because they’re both A) slightly soul scouring and B) I think Horses purely as a video game is pretty banal, and not some sort of incredible and transformative piece of interactive media. Wheels of Aurelia was more innovative in its mechanics and narrative.

So while scrounging around for something to talk about, I remembered that I’ve played 100+ hours of Battlefield 6. So let’s talk about that real quick.

A quick confession.

I loved Call of Duty. However, just over four or so years ago, I stopped playing Activision-Blizzard games. If I wasn’t clear enough, when Diablo 4 came out I made some statements that will probably prevent me from ever being invited to certain press events. Really, the kick-off for all of this was when Blizzard censored a Hearthstone player protesting for Hong Kong. I really don’t like it when companies bow to authoritarians of any stripes, so I stopped playing their games. No Overwatch. No StarCraft.

But I missed Call of Duty the most. I loved me my stupid gun shooty game, and I’d fire it up every day after work on my travel laptop. There’s some deep think-pieces on the the soft power image control of the military gun violence fantasy, or the jingoistic nature of the campaigns in these games.

I don’t think I’m qualified to write that piece and frankly, I’m not very interested in trying to write it. I didn’t even play the campaign in Battlefield 6, because I’ve never understood why you would play the campaign in one of these live service shooters. I’m just gonna talk about the game as it is for me, which is mostly Call of Duty methadone.

The General Overview

I was gonna joke that I could just copy my Battlebit review across for this part, but I actually can’t. My general take on Battlefield 6 is that once you’re in a game, the experience is pretty good.

Guns work well. Movement feels good, and a lot of the weird secondary gadgets are quite useful. Maps are mostly even and pretty well designed.

There are definitely weak points. The map pool is a bit anemic, and pretty much every game mode reuses the same maps. I wish the engineer class had a second gadget that was actually useful in modes without vehicles.

But once you’re in a game, it’s a good time. Everything that isn’t the game though?

It sucks.

The game is $70, with an in-game cash shop and battlepass. The battlepass has it’s own mini-battlepasses, with timed challenges for maximum FOMO. If there’s a way to make more than 3 loadouts for a class, I haven’t found it in the labyrinthine menus. Getting the game to even launch for the first time is a pain; not a huge pain, but a pain.

Every update also seems to make the game slightly worse. The most annoying one for me is that helicopters seem to have some sort of animation culling turned on now when they’re far away from me, and given that helicopters are in the sky, they are usually far away from me. It makes it look like a Pokemon game.

Also, now it’s time for the longer set of complaints

Battlefield isn’t realistic, or super memorable.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from reading ACOUP, it’s that I don’t know anything about war. And if there’s anything else I’ve learned, it’s that games will almost always sacrifice fidelity for fun. By default this does not annoy me. When Battlefield 6 added the cash shop, I wasn’t pissed because someone could now play as their fursona, I was pissed because I had already paid $70 fucking dollars for this game.

That said, for a game about high troop number combat, you would think there would be literally any way to meaningfully communicate with the other 28 people on your team. I’m pretty sure modern war isn’t conducted by taking 32 dudes, giving them thousands of dollars in military hardware, and then pointing at a burnt out mall and saying “Go fuck em up!”

But wait, you say. “You said 32, then 28.” Those are different numbers. Yes, they are, because you do have voice chat with your squad, but you only have text chat with the rest of your team. I have used the text chat maybe 4 times total in 100+ hours. The only time it had any measurable impact was when one teammate was complaining that a challenge was too hard, that they could not overcome it, to which I suggested that “through jesus christ all things are possible”, which was followed by a series of “amens” from other team members.

They managed to complete their challenge.

Side Note: I suspect that the Lord, if real and in the habit of intervening in the mortal world, has better things to do with their time then help someone get three air vehicles kills in one match, but what do I know.

I also mention this because in 134 hours, it’s the only memorable moment I’ve actually had in the game. There’s no building, so there’s no real opportunity for anything clever or tricky, just destruction. It’s a bit of a bummer.

The lack of communication would bother me less if the classes were less obviously synergistic. The assault’s spawn beacon is the only reasonable way to make extended pushes across the map, but you can’t push with one person. The engineer is the only class that can reasonably deal with vehicles, but without extra rocket rounds refilled by the support, it’s going to do have a very hard time doing that. Recon can paint vehicles with its gadgets, enabling faster lock-on for the engineer, but without that engineer to followup, it’s pretty much useless. Support enables everyone to do their job better, with extra gadget and grenade usage, but can’t do any of those jobs particularly well on its own.

It’s just aggravating for a game where communication is key to have no communication. Now, if I remember correctly Battlebit did have local voice chat, and the result of that was every game started with a cacophony of racial slurs, Free Bird, and Fortunate Son, but at least it was possible shout “Rez me” at someone.

Overall

I personally enjoy Battlefield 6. I don’t really recommend it though. It’s a pain in the ass to get running, it costs too much too much money, it’s lacking quality of life features, and goes hog wild everything that’s bad about modern live service games.

I don’t even think it’s a bad game. I just think you can get more better games for $70. For that sort of money, you can go buy Titanfall 2 and Blue Prince, and a lot more if you’re willing to wait for a sale.

Battlefield 6 is that one restaurant in town that’s just a bit too pricey, but no one in your friend group hates. It’s a good place to hang out, chat, catch up, but if anyone could really make a choice, you’d all go somewhere else.

Q-Up

Q-Up is a lot of different things. It’s a incremental game. It’s a competitive coin-flipping eSport. It’s a weird satire of live service games and tech startups. Oh, and it has a really cool grid based node engine building system, and slightly less interesting, but still compelling item system. Finally, it’s a game that I feel weirdly conflicted about.

Before I go any further, I want to note that I do recommend Q-Up. It’s a weird one, but if you like incremental games/engine building experiences, and enjoy strangeness, you’ll probably have a good time. And if you’re on the fence because of that “incremental game” element, Q-Up generally respects the player’s time. It took me about 6.5 hours to reach the “end” of the game, and I suspect it would have been closer to the expected 8-10 hours if I hadn’t played a lot of the demo to get familiar with mechanics beforehand.

If you’re the sort of person who really loves incremental games… well, there are some absolutely busted end-game builds, and semi-competitive ladders, and the folks on the game’s discord seem to be having a good time.

A lot of what I’m going to be talking about here, I already covered in my writeup on Q-Up’s demo. If you want a spoiler free discussion of the game, I suggest you go read that instead.

Q-Side

The premise of Q-Up is simple: it’s the hottest new competitive game on the market. Games are 4v4, and after queuing up, and getting placed in a match, you’ll either be put on Q-Side or Up-Side. A coin will be flipped. If it lands on Q, Q-Side team gets a point. If it lands on Up, Upside team gets a point. First team to 3 points wins.

And yes, this does mean that you as a player have zero agency over who wins or loses any given game of Q-Up. That’s the point. Something something comedy, something something frog.

But just because you can’t influence the outcome doesn’t mean you can’t change the results. After all, it’s not about winning or losing. It’s about getting as much stuff as possible.

Oh The Stuff You Can Get

Q-Up has four main resources: Q, experience, gold, and gems. Lets start with Q.

After each flip in match, you’ll gain or lose Q. Winning the flip starts you out with a positive amount of Q, losing with a negative amount. Q determines your rank, with higher ranks giving more Q, and lower ranks give less.

This amount, however, will be adjusted by your character’s skills and items, which is as good a place as any to talk about experience and gold.

Experience points are… experience points. You get enough of them, you level up. When you level up, you unlock skills and skill points to use on the skill grid.

This is the engine building part of Q-Up. The skill grid is a set of interconnected trigger-able nodes. Nodes can trigger when you win, lose, or always. They can do a variety of things, including triggering other nodes. Nodes also have activation stock: a maximum number of times that they can be triggered during a given flip.

It will start out reasonable, and it will rapidly turn into something that is very much not that.

It’s a very fun and unique system, with each of the game’s eight characters having their own nodes and builds. Some want high numbers of combos, others generate Q by spending gold, or clone items.

Which brings us to gold and items. There’s a shop, you buy items in it. Then you equip those items.

They’re mechanically impactful, and very functional, but there’s nothing here that makes it different from any other item shop.

Which means it’s time to talk about gems! You get gems by ranking up, and recycling unwanted items. They’re used to unlock meta-progression-y style stuff, like the ability to stop shop items from rotating out, and extra item slots, and other things.

And this is the core loop of Q-Up. Play a match, get resources. Spend those resources to improve your build. Rinse, repeat. Often, in the middle to late portions of the game, that’ll involve reworking your build to generate a specific resource you might want, such as gems or experience points, or tweaking to maximize getting as much Q as possible.

So I’ve talked about the mechanics. I’ve talked about the theme. Which leaves the narrative.

Narrative

From here on out we’re talking spoilers. If you want to play Q-Up, this is a good time to leave.

Q-Up trades in a lot of different fields/themes. Fortunately for me, I think I recognize most of them, as they’re related to my job and interests.

This narrative starts out as one poking fun at what I’d generally group as “Live Service Games”, perhaps more specifically the “single match” live service game. League of Legends, Dota 2, Valorant, CS:GO, that sort of thing. This is where the game stays mechanically, but narratively, it’s going to become Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride real fast.

The writing is very good. I wish there was more of it.

I can’t think of a better way to dissect the narrative and the struggles I had with it, without laying the full structure, so here we go.

After you start playing Q-Up, at some point you’ll either get a 3-0 loss, or 0-3 win. This introduces you to Alice and Bob. Alice is the head of a quantum computing company and Bob is the head of the company running Q-Up. Alice and Bob are at least somewhat fighting over the company Bob is running.

This opens the second part of narrative, which is mostly about conflict between Alice and Bob. Notably, it’s also not told in any straightforward way, and most of the information you get given is filtered through the lens of “You just joined this project, and everyone is using terms you don’t understand, and acronyms no one’s explained” sort of energy.

Fortunately, I work in a tech company. I have LIVED this exact experience. Multiple times. So again, I was pretty in my element for this bit.

This is the sort of thing I think you can only write if you actually have worked at one of these tech companies.

Anyway, this culminates with Alice attempting a hostile takeover, and Bob using you, the player, to stop it by proving that Q-Up is a game of skill, and not a game of gambling. You enter the Q-Up championships, and attempt to win your way to novice rank.

Then things get odd.

I have a hard time summarizing what exactly happens next, because I’m pretty sure this is where the game starts playing around in the space of Information Theory. I don’t know anything about Information Theory.

Anyway, after you get banned from Q-Up by Alice, a sentient artificial intelligence intervenes in order to get you unbanned, and also to use you to free itself. At the same time, the server room for running Q-Up seems to start to collapse, because… again. I think something Information Theory related.

This leads to the finale of the game, where a pair of cosmic intelligences attempt to restart the universe.

It’s this last tenth or so of the game where Q-Up completely lost me. Not because it was bad, but more so because I was just incredibly confused. The sentient AI part is mostly fine, and foreshadowed pretty hard, but it’s also not really paid off to the extent I would like. The same is true of the cosmic intelligences. To me, they just come out of absolutely nowhere, but I suspect that the writers may be trading in themes or ideas that I’m simply not familiar with.

It left an unpleasant taste in my mouth, because the rest of the game is actually fairly interesting. I was much more invested in Alice and Bob of all things than I was in any of the “wacky hijinks” at the end. And in the last moments of the game, that story got pushed to the wayside for cosmic strangeness.

It also doesn’t help that this last section of the game feels very short and sudden. Things are escalating, escalating, getting exciting… and then it’s all over.

Putting on the introspective critic hat for a moment

Given that Q-Up is already trading in a bunch of specific themes in its aesthetic and narrative, I think that what is actually happening here is that I am just out of the loop for the joke. This last portion of the game probably isn’t “random wacky hijinks,” but is instead Who’s On First for quantum computing or information theory, or perhaps some third thing I’m completely unaware of.

Maximum insider baseball that I am no longer an insider for.

But it was incredibly jarring, because I had been an insider for the rest of it, and the result was that a narrative I cared about, that I was curious and excited about, suddenly felt like it pulled a Fish Guys.

It just left me feeling really weird about a game that I had, until that point, really enjoyed.

Hat is off, back to final thoughts

I like 90% of Q-Up. I like its mechanics, I love the theming and UI, and I love most of the story.

It’s the suddenness with which the story ends that really bummed me out more than the weirdness, if I’m being honest. Everything felt like it wrapped up too quickly. Q-Up is not a very long game narrative. The majority of the game takes place across 70 or so emails, and the finale across another 30. And that’s probably overcounting a bit.

Q-Up was $9. I think I got my money’s worth. But I wish I felt different about the ending.

I wish I could call the game a masterpiece, instead of just very good.

P.S. This is not my finest write-up. If it feels stitched together, that’s because, well, it is. I wrote 3-4 different versions of this, and none of them were exactly what I wanted. So instead, you get this mess. Sorry about that.

Have some gems.

Also.

TowerFall

Do you remember the Ouya? The Kickstarted Android console that cost $100 ($140 adjusted for inflation) and was never a commercial success? The one that released 12 years ago?

No? You don’t? Oh. Okay. Well, it was sort of a thing. Not a “thing” thing, but boy did people like talking shit about it, and writing articles about how it was a doomed to fail.

Anyway, when it released, one of its exclusives was TowerFall, a 2d multiplayer platform fighter. It became the Ouya’s best selling title, at just around 7000 copies.

TowerFall ended up being ported to all the other consoles, including Switch, and it was on Switch that I ended up playing it recently at a friend’s birthday party.

And this is how TowerFall should be played. A full six players. A giant screen. Preferably a crowd of onlookers. In this sense it resembles one of my favorite discontinued games, Killer Queen Black.

Unlike Killer Queen Black, though, TowerFall is every person for themself. Everyone starts with three arrows. Getting shot with an arrow or goomba-stomped kills you. After only one player is standing, the next map is loaded, and the next round starts. Victory points are awarded for kills, and the first person to reach 10 points wins.

Of course, there are a few more meaningful mechanics. There’s a dash that allows the player to grab arrows out of the air, and the screen wraps both directions, so falling into a pit to go up is an entirely viable strategy. There are also a few subtle catch up mechanics, as players who fall significantly behind get a shield that blocks one hit.

Perhaps your friends don’t want to turn each other into pincushions. That’s okay! There’re also a few co-op campaigns: a 1-4 player one, and a 1-2 player one. It’s hard to find much to say about these. They’re fine, and mildly interesting, but in most cases I’d rather be playing the versus mode.

As a fairly mild point of criticism here, I will say that I generally dislike how the ideal strategy for some of the co-op modes was memorizing when/where certain enemies would spawn, and setting up to kill them immediately upon spawn.

It’s hard to think of much else to say about TowerFall. It’s fun. It’s fine. I think it’s best as a party game or in person couch co-op, and it’s one of very few games that works on one console at six players.

I’m going to get back to worrying about the collapse of society now. See you folks next week.

Interestingly, the designer Maddy Thorson would later go on to make Celeste, which sold a million copies in under a year. Slightly more than TowerFall’s 7000 on the Ouya.

Note: I usually try to take my own screenshots, but this week I’m just using images from the Steam store page, and I usually prefer to call it out when I’m doing that. Anyway. Hope your week is going better than mine.

Deadlock Preview

This isn’t a review.

Deadlock isn’t out yet. You can’t even play it without a closed beta invite.

They’re not hard to get, but still.

By the time Deadlock is out, it’s likely that it will have morphed into something completely different from what it currently is.

That said, even in its current state, I’ve already played 80 hours. So I do want to talk about why, and why you might enjoy this game enough to try to play it now.

Why You Might Like Deadlock

Deadlock is Valve’s most current semi-public project. It’s a MOBA/FPS hybrid, taking elements from both genres, and adding a few new elements of its own.

And that’s the first reason to try it. Most of the folks I’ve been playing with are Dota 2 and League players. If you really enjoy those games, and generally like FPS games, Deadlock might be for you.

The other big reason is if you have an appetite for novelty. There hasn’t been a game like this in a long time. Monday Night Combat and Super Monday Night Combat servers went down ages ago, and Deadlock offers a much greater depth from its MOBA elements than those games ever did. There’s also tons of weird interactions to discover, tricks to find, and just general space to play and explore the game’s systems.

This is a game where (at least at my skill level) it’s possible to win a fight with expert positioning and the ability to click heads. It’s equally possible to just have a good enough sense of the map to farm everything out, and show up to the fight with flush with items and wipe everyone out with abilities while being unable to shoot anything.

These are the things that make me love it. But they might not work for you.

…and Why You Might Want to Wait

Deadlock is unfinished. It is probably not quite balanced yet. And it can be kind of buggy. And has a bit of a learning curve.

Most of these (outside of the bugs) are positives for me. But if you’re the sort of person who gets really annoyed when someone on the enemy team shows up and kills you in two seconds, you may have a bad time. If you’re the sort of person who gets annoyed when a creep wave bugs, and doesn’t push properly, you are going to suffer.

And there is a big learning curve. Just like Dota, this game has dozens of items to learn, many of which have activated abilities. It also has one of the densest maps I’ve seen in a MOBA, and even after the 80 hours I’ve played, I only have a general sense of where everything is.

Also, the art, while quite good, is not up to the Valve standard just yet.

Overall, Though

Deadlock is likely to be my most played new game of the year. It’s entirely possible it actually replaces Dota 2 as my “lifestyle” game, a slot that Dota 2 has occupied for almost 10 years.

There’s no reason to rush to play Deadlock just yet. It’s likely that it will be a much more complete game by the time it reaches a full release. But while there isn’t any reason to rush in, I really cannot overstate just how fun I’ve found Deadlock to be.