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There is a wide variety of answers to the question "What makes a good video game?". It may be the controls, or the gameplay, or the story, or any number of things.
...This is not the first time I've opened an article like that.
In my article about F.I.S.H. from all the way back in May 2022, I started the article with something along those lines. In that article, I went on to explain how each of those came together to make F.I.S.H. at that time my favorite video game. (I actually also did something similar for my article about This Way Madness Lies.)
I went on to conclude that because F.I.S.H. met all those requirements, it was my new favorite game. In fact, that was even in the title of the article. In retrospect, I think I was a bit overzealous about F.I.S.H. at that time; I had just found a new game that went into my list of "good games" and tried to claim automatically that it was my number one favorite game.
I have, since then, played many a game that has fallen into that spot. They usually only last in there for a few weeks before they get replaced by something different and more noteworthy; this might be due to the fact that sometimes I have a hard time differentiating between "favorite" and "this current thing I'm liking".
Ever since I wrote that article, I've been thinking a lot about this concept of favorites vs. current likings, and I think I finally found a game that has managed to survive the couple-week survival time of "favorite game" and has triumphed as a Good Game: Trombone Champ.
(I am writing this review after beating both the Switch and PC versions and getting every achievement on PC.)
The first thing I wanna clear up is that Trombone Champ is not similar to Wii Music. It feels like everyone makes that comparison when they first see this game. It is indeed a very tempting comparison to make, due to the two game's immediate apparent similarity: both use Mii-looking characters, both involve music, and both are inherently silly games. However, I feel the comparison should end there.
The gameplay of the games are very different; in Wii Music, the gameplay boils down to just wagging your Wii Remote to the "beat" of the music.
In Trombone Champ, the gameplay is wildly different: you are moving your mouse to control a cursor, overlapping a note, clicking to toot the trombone, and thus actually playing your music. That's actually one of the taglines of the game. This leads me into a point; yay, transitions!
In Trombone Champ, you're not following along with the music, you are actually playing the music. This fact defines a core aspect of what I love about Trombone Champ: the game actively gives you reason to play well. In most rhythm games, not playing a song well isn't the end of the world, you just hear less of that instrument. In this game, if you are playing badly, you will feel it, because the entire main lead of most of the songs has just disappeared. Going back to the main point, playing the actual music is fun and enjoyable because you're not penalized for just going hog wild and adding little extra toots in there. You can play the song however you want.
Another area I want to focus on is difficulty. Most rhythm games will up the difficulty to insane amounts just because they can. In Trombone Champ, most of the songs are not difficult once you get used to the controls and find a good sensitivity. There are a good couple difficult ones, however most of the songs are easy, and the amount of easy ones are even increasing with future content updates. Additionally, you can play any song at any time after completing the tutorial. I often find myself in rhythm games unlocking a new level, beating it, and thinking that I could've done it before the harder level before it, so this is a nice change of pace.
Remember about five seconds ago when I mentioned "future content updates"? Yeah, that's yet another thing that this game has got going for it. Additional, free content is something I feel all games should have. The more content that you add, the more that people will want to play and come back. It's the reason why games like Minecraft and Terraria are so popular. I think that rhythm games are one of the best choices for games that could receive more free content later down the road, due to the way that they are often played: people will often play them to see if they can "Perfect" all of the tracks. Trombone Champ has been getting two new free tracks about every three months for about a year now. They did say in their most recent update that they were going to slow down in that regard, so maybe this point should count for less now, but I still think it's good.
Lastly, Trombone Champ is very moddable, and has officially-backed mod support. When I say "officially-backed", I mean not that the developers are making official mods or have an official song editor (although an official song editor is being worked on, along with Steam Workshop support, for which I am very excited!), I mean that the developers are actually working with the mod creators to make sure that the mods work and are not actively trying to take the mods down. I feel like mods are a right of passage for published video games. They will happen, and it's up to the developers to decide if they want to try to stop them or embrace them and have a thriving mod community that people come to often. The way that I said that makes it seem like people should always support mods, which is what I think, but sometimes it can make paid DLC seem less inviting. In any case the developers of Trombone Champ handle modding very well, in my opinion: they embrace it, and have specifically made certain tweaks to the game to ensure mods run and behave the best they can.
All around, Trombone Champ has the perfect mix of community content, official content, and fun gameplay to make it one of my new personal favorite games. I highly recommend it.
I've been koola, and wait, did I just get all my articles in for a year?!!?!?!?
(YES I DID! Unfortunately September's article looks like it came out in October, but that's because I submitted it at like 11:30 EST. See y'all in '24!)
So, I think that I can say that my last post was good. Thank you to everyone that said that it was good! I didn't think that it would be like that! Back to the point at hand. (Not like I even started with a point... [wait I'm delaying myself even more my saying that ARRRRRRRRRGhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh])
So, I think that most of my family can agree that my hobby is glitching/breaking/bugging-out/bugging out games. (Heck, I've even broken the hyperlinked images on my blog. If it doesn't show reload the page. [Sorry, bickman2k.]) Traditionally breaking games is easy, if you know where to pick at. Platformer genre in general is all about clipping into things. Role-playing, executing more than one move at once, or dealing too much damage at once. Shooter, clipping and dealing too much damage at once. You probably can guess. PC games allow you to mess with the games files, allowing you to break the game(s) really easy. Here's an example:
Say Example: The Movie: The Game wants to access file1.fileex And file2.fileex is something you want to break the game by accesing earlier than intended.
Rename file2.fileex to file1.fileex (Usually most files in a game like this that are gonna work are of the same file extension, in this case .fileex , but if they are of different extensions, then they need to be the same.)
And, if your game didn't crash, then congratulations, you've caused the game to load the wrong file!
Now usually it will carry out instructions that are contained in the file that it just loaded. (file2.fileex)
(If you're wondering how I glitched out the hyperlinked images on RFGeneration, I created a .png file with only one letter in its base:m. By doing that, most websites will cause them to not even show an image, breaking the tag altogether. [If I hurt your feelings bickman2k, then sorry.])
Now here's the part where coding comes in. Most of my breaking games actually helps in coding because then it's easy to understand what's going on behind the scenes in the games. I've seen t-poses, a-poses, unanimated models and sprites, completely given up games, confused games, black screens and wait--
[img]https://onedrive.live.com/?cid=64B3378894533E83&id=64B3378894533E83%213291&parId=64B3378894533E83%211191&o=OneUp[img/]
Rebooting MerryGoRoundGaming's_trying_to_write_an_article.exe...
Success!
Anyways, as I was saying, I've seen a lot of how games break. And that helps me code, because I know what the polished developers do.
Coding is fun, but often times it can be very repetitive. Variables are my friend. It is fun to code, in my opinion.
In summary, I just like to test things and see what I can mess with.
Whew! I haven't gotten to geek out like that in a while!
😊
Crash image owned by Nintendo, used in one of GameXplain's videos, where I promptly edited it.
Hello, everybody! I finally worked up enough courage to write an article on here. It was mostly slackur that helped me work up the courage so kudos to him. Speaking of which, I am his son. I have said this many times over, but this feels kinda final, y'know? Now, obviously, living in a house with well over 15,000 games will be making you want to play them. slackur has a rule in his house so that every hour we are outside is hour of screen time. On Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays I have to be outside, using the aformentioned rule, Play with my younger brother and his therapist or do chores to earn screen time. On Mondays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays I can play video games whenever I so choose. Game genres like RPGs, Puzzles and Sandboxes and Platformers appeal to me. I'm actually making my way through Miitopia right now. This is a list of my favorite games, in no particular order.
I feel like I want to get at least a "good amount of video games" but I do feel like my collection is too small at times. Animal Crossing: New Horizons is one of my favorite games. I really like playing it, but I did get bored of it. Sometimes I wonder if I get too bored of games too often...
[img width=220 height=220]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/77/Miitopia_3DS.jpg/220px-Miitopia_3DS.jpg[/img]
Miitopia has quickly became one of my favorite games lately. I've been playing it pretty much whenever I have an excuse to. I don't really have any "good aspects of it" to list, it's just a good game overall.
[img width=220 height=220]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/b4/TomodachiLifeBoxartNA.jpg/220px-TomodachiLifeBoxartNA.jpg[/img]
Like Animal Crossing, Tomadachi Life is one of those games that you can just unwind and play. I would say it is very different to people, most people think it's too boring, others think it's really fun. I think it is really fun, myself, which is why I'm putting it on this list.
[img width=220 height=313]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/3e/Nintendo_Land_box_artwork.png/220px-Nintendo_Land_box_artwork.png[/img]
Nintendo Land is a party game that I would reccomend. Some people say that it's Gimmicks: The Game, which to that, I say "It's definitely not." If you haven't yet, grab a few friends and play this game. It's definitely worth your while. Just, play this game with friends that trust you.
[img width=220 height=279]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/1a/Mario_Party_10_Small_Official_Boxart.png/220px-Mario_Party_10_Small_Official_Boxart.png[/img]
Mario Party 10 is another great party game. I listed "Mario Party 10" and not "Super Mario Party" because, I like Mario Party 10's Bowser Party Mode. If you're playing Bowser Party, definitely play it with people that really trust you, because it can get really hectic. And speaking of hectic...
[img width=219 height=103]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/be/Cuphead_%28artwork%29.jpg/220px-Cuphead_%28artwork%29.jpg[/img]
Cuphead is not my kind of game, but It's definitely one that I'd reccomend. Play it, and you'll understand why.
[img width=220 height=220]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/38/Luigi%27s_Mansion_3.jpg/220px-Luigi%27s_Mansion_3.jpg[/img]
Luigi's Mansion 3 is a game that really blew me away. I played some of "Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon", (or Luigi's Mansion 2 If you're not from South Korea or North America), and I just didn't really like it at all. But, when Luigi's Mansion 3 came out, I thought I'd give the series a second chance. And boy, did I like Luigi's Mansion 3. it was one of my favorite games of 2019, actually. It's a puzzle game, and a really funny one, at that.
[img width=220 height=77]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1a/BaBa_is_You_Logo.png/220px-BaBa_is_You_Logo.png[/img]
Now, I love coding and I kinda like puzzle games, so what about a game that combines those two things?
Baba Is You is my favorite game. You control a critter called Baba, and you move blocks. But that's not all. The actual rules of the game, are, themselves, blocks that can be pushed around, allowing you to completely mess with the game. Now, I like glitching/messing around with games, and Baba Is You is a playground encouraging breaking the game up to solve the puzzles.
[img width=220 height=220]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/c7/Super_Mario_Maker_2.jpg/220px-Super_Mario_Maker_2.jpg[/img]
Now, I dwove many hours into the original Super Mario Maker, just messing around with it, and seeing what I could do in it. Now, you can imagine my surprise and love when the sequel was announced. I sold a lot of my game collection just to get this one game. Granted, most of those were games I did never play, but still.
[img width=220 height=263]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/b0/Castle_Crashers_cover.jpg/220px-Castle_Crashers_cover.jpg[/img]
Now, me, my older brother, my friend and her sister used to play Castle Crashers all the time. When they announced Castle Crashers Remastered, I knew I had to pick it up. And so far, slackur hasn't gotten Castle Crashers Remastered yet. So that's a game that I have that he doesn't! (At least on Switch, anyway)
And that just about does it for my favorite games list. I thank you for reading you all the way through!
All images in this article are from Wikipedia.
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This is koola6's Blog.
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Welcome to my little side of the internet! This is where I post game reviews, video-game related things, and stuff about MY game, OMNIFATE. Expect a new article about every month; sometimes I post more than once in a month or take five-month long breaks.
(The schedule is a guideline.)
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