Destructoid Changelog - Split Pants and Air Guitar

In partnership with

Hey, chum. How’s tricks? We’re halfway through November, if you can believe it. I get to relive my trauma of working in retail during the holiday season whenever I walk into a store and hear Christmas music for the next couple of months. Bah humbug.

I finally got a decent weekend where I could just putter around and dig through my library. For some reason, I had the inkling to play Pokemon Silver again. I could have picked up the remake, SoulSilver, but I wanted to get into some Pokemon Stadium 2. Then I realized I grabbed Crystal somewhere down the line. And then I realized the batteries had died in both my Silver and Crystal games, even though I had just replaced them a few years ago because those internal clocks just suck the life out of CR2025s. So, I got my soldering iron out.

While I was trying to get everything hunky dory, I came across the Game Pak Check screen on Pokemon Stadium 2 and noticed a familiar label on the cartridge in the N64 it displays. It’s Road Rash 64! It’s mirrored at the mid-point, and the cartridge itself is grey instead of black, but it’s still pretty obvious. Just take a look.

It’s strange. Why Road Rash 64? They could have used a blank label, or one with Pokemon Stadium on it. Instead, it’s a completely unassociated game published by THQ. Oh! Is it because most cartridge labels wouldn’t mirror as well? I dunno, guy. My hope is that it’s just because the person making the screen really likes Road Rash 64 and wanted to slip it in there, as they should.

Okay, so, weekly reminders: You can view old issues of newsletters over here at this link. We also have a list at this link of over 90 games I’ve mentioned (at least semi-positively) here in the newsletter and where you can find them. Also, if you refer someone to this newsletter using a link I will give you just below this paragraph, you will get access to our monthly special issue where I interview a cool, cool developer. This month, it will be Feverdream Johnny of Nowhere, Mi and Orbo’s Odyssey fame. They’re fun and informative interviews, and I’d love it if more people could see them. Here’s the link, then a sponsorship, and then we’re on.

The Daily Newsletter for Intellectually Curious Readers

• We scour 100+ sources daily

• Read by CEOs, scientists, business owners and more

• 3.5 million subscribers

Sign up today!

F-Zero GX

As I mentioned, I actually had time to play something that wasn’t a game for review. I tried not to go too nuts because I wanted to focus. I like playing games front-to-back. I feel like if I don’t do that, I’m just chasing endorphins and it won’t be meaningful. Anyway, I revisited a favorite from my teenage years, F-Zero GX.

But F-Zero GX is a known commodity. It’s one of the best racing games of all time and could therefore be considered one of the best games of all time. We really need a port of it. I keep hoping that, since Nintendo is giving the series a bit of attention now with their Nintendo Switch Online retro catalogs and F-Zero 99, they’ll finally get to it, but they haven’t even blinked to suggest they’re going to. In the meantime, my GameCube is always hooked up.

Anyway, I don’t just want to talk about F-Zero GX, I want to talk about how insane everything around the racing is. There’s a story mode, and I feel story should be put in quotes. “Story.” It involves Captain Falcon getting a little perturbed by Black Shadow causing explosions in “The Lightning Zone,” but for most of the narrative, he seems to just be ignoring the problem. Aside from getting accosted by his race competitiors, he also stops at a bar. Like, at best, a supervillain blowing things up is not an urgent issue for Captain Falcon.

Or maybe it’s because it’s an obvious trap. But eventually, Falcon just decides to fall into that trap. He barely puts up a fight. I struggle more when it’s time to do grocery shopping. After he escapes, it’s time for the Grand Prix. Spoiler alert: He wins. It turns out the championship belt has secret powers when combined with the F-Zero Underworld Grand Prix belt, and it’s a super weapon of some sort that can destroy the galaxy. I guess that’s a good trophy.

So, that’s pretty weird, but you can also get cutscenes for beating a circuit on Master difficulty with a driver (not a custom vehicle). Every driver has a special cutscene, and I mean every driver. Even the AX drivers you unlock by beating a Story mission on Very Hard. And the cutscenes are just bizarre.

They range from a number of the characters dancing or having an awkward flex off to Blood Falcon shrinking his clothes at the laundromat and Captain Falcon splitting his pants while saving a baby. Absolute Looney Tunes.

It’s nearly a half-hour of your favorite pilots playing air guitar and failing at video games. And, much like the aforementioned Road Rash 64 in Pokemon Stadium 2 mystery, I have to wonder how this happened. Somebody pitched this. They said, “We make elaborate (for the time) cutscenes for every pilot and give them their own theme music.” And somebody signed off on it, which couldn’t have been cheap.

It’s easy to focus on F-Zero GX just being a terrific racing game, but then you might miss the strange bit of personality it has behind that. It’s something of a rarity in big-budget games these day, but you can feel the personal intent within the game itself. It feels like the development team was having fun with the tools they were given, and that adds a touch of sweetness to the game, even if you might just be there for the high-speed thrills.

Elsewhere on Destructoid

Cruel but meditative repair game Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is out next month

Aw, yiss. Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop has been one of my most anticipated games this year, ever since I tried out the demo. It’s a fully tactile job simulator game (sort of like Papers, Please) that requires you to learn the ins and outs of a bunch of complicated spaceship bits. It’s flanked by some extremely dark humor, and it’s a lot of fun. And it’s out next month! Woo!

Webfishing finally has a “Straight” title, but it’s going to cost you

“Straight” has been the default for a long time, and not having to play as a straight character is maybe not a massively revolutionary thing, but it’s appreciated as someone who isn’t entirely straight. But some people don’t like playing as non-straight characters, which is totally cool, and there are lots of totally straight games, but Webfishing is legendarily not one of them.

However, the developer has decided to compromise on some level by allowing players to gain the “straight” title. However, as David Morgan points out, it will cost you a significant fortune and it comes equipped with those quotation marks. And maybe you could look at those marks as meaning emphasis rather than suspicion, kind of like how your local diner advertises they have the “best” all-day breakfast in town. You’d be wrong, but you could look at it that way.

STALKER 2 could become a FPS nightmare on mid-level GPUs

“Game has high system requirements” is helpful but somewhat unremarkable news, but I feel this one is so STALKER. I was excited about the first game before its release. Like, back when it was called STALKER: Oblivion Lost. I let myself get so hyped about it based on all the tech videos they were putting out. And it’s easy to forget now, but when STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl launched, it was a shadow of what was promised back in the early days of its development. Also, it was very buggy. Despite that, it eventually became a PC darling, though I’m maybe never going to get over my initial disappointment.

So, it makes sense that STALKER 2 is a smidge excessive in the technical department. It’s not even the GPU part that bothers me (my computer still falls under “high”), it’s the 160GB of space you need to install it. Shuffling around what games are installed at any one time has been a marked feature of this era of video games for me.

GOG is launching GOG Preservation Project to ensure old games remain playable on modern PCs

I complain about old games not working all the time. I finally worked out most of the wrinkles in getting Interstate ‘76 working fully on my PC, and it’s still not completely perfect. So, GOG is going back to its Good Old Games roots and focusing on game preservation again. As part of that, they launched the GOG Preservation Project, which has them taking on the maintenance of old games from their original developers. Games that they confirm are working just fine on new setups get stamped and put under the program, letting you know that they’ve been vetted.

The launch leaves something to be desired. A lot of the new patch notes just say that they confirmed it’s working on the latest builds of Windows and that they’ve added cloud saves. That’s… something, but there are cases where users complain that SimCity 2000 isn’t the best version, and after this program launch, it still isn’t the best version. They just confirm it works. However, this is obviously supposed to be the groundwork of a concerted effort, so we’ll see how it goes.

Reviews for review this week

Irem Collection Volume 2

When my life gets rough, and I can’t really focus on more long-form games, I’ve found it’s a good idea to sink into arcade titles. By nature, they generally cap out at around 45 minutes and try to cram in as much as possible into that short amount of time. On modern platforms, there’s unlimited continues, so that makes it a bit more of a laid back experience. So, because of this, I like grabbing arcade collections for review when I can.

Irem Collection Volume 2 is notable for featuring Gun Force II. Also, GunForce 1, but that’s probably the least interesting game in the bunch. Gun Force II is something of a progenitor to Metal Slug. It’s made by a lot of the same people who would go on to form Nazca, and it’s a run-and-gun shooter. Unfortunately, it’s not nearly as tight as Metal Slug, but it is over-the-top in an extremely entertaining way.

Wait, I’m talking about the review here and not, specifically, Gun Force II. In terms of the collection, in general, it’s not a great value. Three games for $25 isn’t the worst, either, but at that point, you’re basically at three Arcade Archives releases and not far from a Taito Milestones. We won’t even talk about Capcom Arcade Stadium. But none of those have Gun Force II, I guess.

Lego Horizon Adventures

I got reasonably far in the first Horizon, but didn’t finish it. I might go back when the remaster is out. Hopefully, the saves will be compatible. However, Steven “Stapler” Mills is a bigger fan and has checked out the Lego Horizon Adventures spin-off. Strangest damned Lego game I think I’ve seen, but anyway.

Unfortunately, Mr. Mills doesn’t really see the point in the whole exercise. He seems to wonder who it’s for, since it doesn’t quite capture what makes Horizon games great and offers seemingly no value to existing fans. Well, maybe aside from co-op.

Great God Grove

I did an article on Smile For Me around the time that I first started writing for Destructoid in earnest. I really didn’t know what I should be writing about, so I decided indie games would be a good bet since I wouldn’t be stepping on the toes of any of the cooler staff members. So, I was interested in Great God Grove, especially because of its interesting premise.

You play as a Godpoke that can suck (very specific) phrases straight from someone’s mouth and fire them at others. Effectively, it’s an adventure game with words taking the place of items. It’s wrapped in a spectacularly executed aesthetic, and that alone is worth seeing. However, it’s also thematically dense. Just try it.