Analysis of Windjammers 2

Well brought up to our time, Windjammers 2 is an excellent continuation of the original that only flies in the small details.

Everything has its context, and if video games have been changing over time it is because its context has changed. It is not only that technology has evolved, but society, both economically and socially, has also done so; Different circumstances have brought different ways of playing, and it is not the same to play on a computer, on a desktop console, on a laptop, a mobile phone or a recreational machine. That is why it is so difficult to bring back to the present franchises that have already been sleeping the dream of the righteous. Because, we like it or not, the context has changed, and what could once have sense on laptops, computers or recreational, maybe it does not have it anymore in a present that values ​​more other ways of playing.

Basic information

• Developer: Dot emu
• Editor: dot emu
• Platforms: PS5, X / S Series, PS4, One, Switch, PC, Stadia

• Proven version: PS5
• Availability: 20/01/2022

From the publication of Windjammers from the hand of Data East, twenty-six years have passed. The game offered us a derived version of the pong where we replaced the rectangles by people in a swimsuit and the ball by a Frisco, being able to move along and width of our half of the playing field. The rules were simple; As in the pong, we scored points throwing the Frisco, passing from the other player, and reaching the field limit at the other end. As in the pong, our Frisco can bounce on the walls, making everything a geometry game of knowing how it will move at every given moment. Unlike pong, players can take the Frisco and keep it in my hands a few seconds without moving, throw it in a balloon shape to fall to the ground and earn points if the rival does not manage to take it on time, and that the amount of points That we earn with each annotation will depend on where between the Frisco.

To all this, aspects of the most modern video game that were unthinkable for the Era of Pong. In Windjammers there were special shots, we could move along our half of the field in eight directions and there were several maps available, of different sizes and with different features, including some with obstacles in the center. All this made the game more dynamic, crazy and technical than it seemed in the first instance, but it was, above all, that it was more arcade: an easy game to catch and enjoy it the first time we meet him, but with Enough depth to be able to improve, dominate it and, of course, be satisfactory to compete against other people who want to challenge themselves. Something to what pong could not, if you even tried, aspire.

The problem is that we are now in 2022. Recreational halls, such as physical places, in the West live from the past and what Japan produces, not being a usual way, or even popular, of playing video games. For that reason, what does Windjammers 2 have to contribute? Well, precisely return the feeling of what is to play an extremely solid arcade... for the good and for the bad.

To begin with, what the most is the attention of Windjammers 2 is its change in the aesthetic. While it is maintained at the basics, since it continues to have a beach style that brings us back to the mental image we have of the US coast of the eighties and nineties thanks to Sort Series as Corruption in Miami or the Beach Watchers, The aesthetics passes from a pixel art arcade of the nineties to assume a purely cartoon style that, although respects the tone and design of characters and scenarios, play with a more contemporary aesthetic. With spectacular effects, careful care in the characters and great attention in the readability of the scenario by very clearly delimiting the different elements with the use of flat colors with light brightness and textured, the game is delicious to see without therefore Never sacrifice your gameplay or feeling to be playing a sequel to Windjammers.

Something similar happens with animations. Following the wake of the originals, here they appear much more care, demarcating much more the poses to give greater sensation of dynamism and power in the movements, giving the whole style with more force, with an undeniable touch anime. Something unthinkable, and probably impossible to reproduce, in the original game.

For the rest, the game is still the same. It has the same rules, the same mechanical, the same modes, but now with a grateful face washing: we can play against the AI, modifying all the possible parameters, and we can play against other people, either in local with two controls or online Against friends in casual games or ranked If we want to enter the world of competitive game, something that adds a new layer of depth to the game respecting its purely arcade spirit.

But Windjammers 2 is not limited to bringing the original game to a contemporary context. It also builds from your timbres, even if everything you do is make Windjammers 2 even more Windjammers. Not for nothing, we have more characters, more modes, more scenarios. And all this supposes the introduction of subtle changes, but substantial, in the way of playing.

Among the new modes, surely the most grateful is the arcade mode. Adding cinematic and small stories for each of the players, in addition to three modes of difficulty, in each encounter we can choose between two possible rivals and sands against which to face. This is important, considering that both the sands and the characters of this new iteration have another extra layer of depth, making this kind of decisions more important than ever.

The differences in the specials and the movements are, in general, little significant. Except Sophie of Lies and Jay Reynosa, which by speed and the particularity of his movements are a little different from the rest, the bulk of characters continue to have the same differences as in the original. The strong characters move slowly, but they are very strong and difficult to stop, the quick characters attack with very little strength and are fast, and in general the special movements do not excess between characters with similar statistics. This makes sense, and it is desirable, to maintain the greatest possible symmetry between characters, but plays against the diversity of game styles.

But just like the characters are relatively similar to each other, even if they are a little less than in the first installment, where they have been allowed to add an extra point of madness is where the game inequalities can be mitigated more sharply: in The new scenarios.

While it is true that they lack radical changes, some new scenarios introduce small changes that more evidently favor certain more specific strategies. Either because they are much larger or smaller sands than normal, because they have obstacles that move with the impacts, or even, in the case of a specific, because the amount of points therefore scored is determined randomly at the beginning of each Round, the diversity of them adds a radically different approach to gameplay. Although it seems a limit change, we do not play the same when a Frisco falling to the ground serves to give us two that when it serves to give us four points, something that continues the wake of the original scenarios, where each section gave us number of different points, and Reinforcing that uniqueness to make known each scenario and its specific rules is part of the goal of the competitive game without altering the enjoyment of the most casual game.

The problem arrives, precisely, in that more casual style, because although Windjammers has the spirit of an arcade, it also reproduces certain limitations that does not have a platform that is not a recreation. What do we mean? On the one hand, to the fact that the controls do not always turn out as much assembled they should, forcing us to play with joystick if we want to have a response that results, at least, competent. On the other hand, that the game tutorial is a mere slide show where we are explained to us with an image of the buttons and a video each of the movements; Something I would make sense if we were in a recreational machine and our time was limited, but that it lacks everything in a game that leaves both PC and consoles. Two details that do not radically release the game, and that certain people will not even notice, but that they do several steps behind the current trends of similar games.

Of course, it is possible to take Windjammers 2 entirely as an arcade. Plug our arcade stick and learn by throwing hours and hours, trying to find out how controls work through the test and error and the game against AI or other players. But that absence of self-consciousness of his environment makes the game, even though he was brilliant, is not absolutely magisterial as it could have been.

Because we like it or not, Windjammers was born in the recreational, but Windjammers 2 aspires to the online tissue. To meetings of friends with piques in front of the television. The competitive game through ranked with Arcade Sticks designed specifically for the game. And for that reason, that last push to be equally accessible to everyone, makes the game do not finish shining as strong as it could. But we do not cheat on us: Windjammers 2 is as good as we remember Windjammers, and even more. A master example of how it should be an arcade - fast, exciting, deep in its simplicity - and why it is still possible to do arcades in 2022. Because even if the arcade as space is now marginal, the arcade as a philosophy of design is more alive than never.