Two weeks back, my esteemed colleague BEAT presented the following bullet point:
VIBES BASED GAMING: I love this game for a shitload of reasons, but one of them is just how NICE it feels to exist in the game’s environments. Those lowpoly sparsely populated Dreamcast-esque cityscapes have this beautiful feeling to them that’s difficult for me to put into words. It’s not a quantifiable aspect of game design that you can put points into. It’s just a feeling.
I may as well put a few points in there.
When I first wrote about Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, I made note of all the ways that BRC is practically the anti-Goggle Bob. I have no artistic skills or balance. This may as well be a game about flying through Narnia and belching fire for all the ways I could emulate this gameplay in reality. There are real-life people that skateboard and tag graffiti across crowded cities, but I am definitely not one of them. In fact, if I were to even attempt some of the stunts in Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, this blog would be over, as I would immediately break every bone in my body (and traction makes updating difficult). Bomb Rush Cyberfunk looks like fun, but it is the kind of fun that I must keep far away from my fragile body.
But, hey, I could say the same thing about any given Mario game. And I have a lot of things to say about Mario games…
Said it before, and I’ll say it again: the most important thing in a videogame is your joy of movement. This is obvious in any action title, but it applies to even sedentary games like the entire RPG genre. If you are battling monsters all day, and it is an uphill battle just to activate the “FIGHT command, you are going to have a bad time. Just ask Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood! And, in the much more obvious action-y example, if you need to run up a hill, dodge some bombs, walk a narrow plank, and fight a king to earn a star, you damn well better believe it should feel good to accomplish those complicated tasks. There should be joy in moving in any videogame. And when that joy of movement is there, you can sit through a million crafting expeditions or useless sidequests with the promise of getting back to that satisfying feeling. Joy in movement is essential.
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk proves something else: if you do not have joy in the place you are moving in, your joy of movement doesn’t mean a damn thing.
Compared to San Andreas or the whole of Eos, New Amsterdam is fairly small. But a synonym for “small” can be “tight”. And New Amsterdam is definitely tight. To look at it, you can see a city, a mall, and a pier. But to actually be there, to play there, to move there, you will find an infinite collection of rails, halfpipes, and whatever that was that allows you to bicycle upside-down through a shipyard. The entire combo system is based on the concept that you can find new places to “trick” practically every breath of every second you spend in New Amsterdam, and you are rewarded appropriately for shredding all over the block. Your “rep” is based on how much you can make this world work for you, and you better believe this city was meticulously designed so you can do exactly that.
So, my esteemed colleague, I disagree that the finer qualities of New Amsterdam are not assessable. The city of Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is quantifiably amazing, and it was designed from the bottom-up to facilitate further joy in your ever movement.
Just do something about the cops in that town, and I’ll move to New Amsterdam tomorrow.
(And break every bone in my body.)
Even Worse Streams Presents Bomb Rush Cyberfunk
Night 4
July 30, 2024
Random Notes:
- Welcome to an in-depth description of Ready Player One by Caithness, Goggle Bob, Cassandralyn, Chromes, and BEAT. Maybe BEAT is also playing Bomb Rush Cyberfunk.
- Beowulf! Grendel! Edgar Allen Poe! We gettin’ literary tonight!
- The finale is blocked by a pile of amps. Remember all the crazy ways games have blocked your progress? Remember Mother 3? Let’s talk about Mother/Earthbound naming schemes.
- Apparently, I am five months older than Super Mario Bros.
The final dream sequence! Assume that there is a brain in there somewhere…- The final boss! After a speedy recovery from decapitation!
- The Titanic came out in ’97, The Matrix came out in ’99. I wonder which film influenced future movies more…
- Caliscrub arrives just in time for the ending. Don’t worry! We still have post-game content!
- Time to pick up some extra characters! And imagine a world where the Bomb Rush Gang talks like Star Fox.
- AJ Vark joins as we nab the cop for our gang.
- All the cool kids make their own crewmembers at home.
- Chromes recounts his many online accounts. Anyone who remembers LiveJournal doesn’t understand.
- Chromes also explains the secret origin of how he got into Powerup Comics as BEAT goes for a high score with the Flesh Prince.
- And we close on Bomb Rush Cyberfunk (for now?) while tricking around the city. It is the way this crew was always meant to be immortalized…
Next time on Even Worse Streams: This, that, a bat, and a man with a racoon hat.
Gravity is not a law, man