Wondering what the Paste Games team has been playing lately? Don’t have time to read new game reviews, and prefer something quick and direct? Just looking for 1000 words to eat up a couple of minutes of your wait at the doctor’s office or airport lobby? Our new column Bytes ‘n’ Blurts offers a quick look at what games editor Garrett Martin and assistant games editor Elijah Gonzalez have been playing over the last week—from the latest releases to whatever classic or forgotten obscurity is taking up our free time. This week we look at the latest Dragon Ball game, one of 2024’s first big hits, and a recent smash that we simply can’t stop playing.
Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO
Year: 2024
Platforms: PlayStation 5, PC, Xbox Series X|S
The fighting game skill curve can look like an upwards pointing horseshoe. On the left you have the absolute beginner, the new player who knows no combos or strategies but just mashes the buttons as fast as they can and sees a surprising amount of success that way. Then you have the long, deep middle, where you start to actually learn the game and try to play it properly, and frequently get destroyed by the mindless button-mashers and true experts alike, before gradually improving and moving back up the rankings. And finally, after you put it all together, and actually know what you’re trying to do and how to do it, you’re back on top, at the right end of the curve, broadly able to defeat anybody stuck down in that horseshoe still trying to master the game.
I have spent most of the last week at the absolute dead center of the lowest spot of the shoe with Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO.
The brand new fighting game is the latest in the Budokai Tenkaichi series of 3D Dragon Ball fighters, and it’s proving to be a much tougher nut to crack than the more traditional Dragon Ball FighterZ—the only other Dragon Ball game I’ve ever played. I’m mostly sticking to the episode battles right now, the narrative track that summarizes storylines from the anime and challenges you to play through some of its most pivotal fights. It seems like a good way to both learn the game but also learn more about Dragon Ball, which I’m almost totally ignorant of. (As I wrote yesterday, I’m not a Dragon Ball guy. Didn’t grow up with it, never watched or read it, and all I know comes from one of two videogames, Sparking! ZERO included.) And I don’t know if any fighting game more fully supports that upwards pointing horseshoe theory.
Most battles in each Sparking! ZERO episode battle chapter can be easily beaten by pounding the buttons as quickly as possible. The first couple of fights in most chapters are basically gimmes used to set up whatever story is being summarized. And then there are always battles that, in order to follow the story of the anime, don’t need to be won; sometimes you just have to whittle the computer opponent’s health down enough, or survive to a certain point, and sometimes you can literally just lose the match and keep progressing through the story. You’ll often even win a match, seemingly, only to find out in the following cutscenes that your character didn’t actually win in the real story. I’d say the first two-thirds or so of every chapter in the episode battle mode isn’t really about competition; it’s about letting the player have fun and gain experience with the battle system in unchallenging bouts while watching heavily condensed episodes of Dragon Ball.
And then, suddenly, after breezing through a handful of quick and easy fights, the difficulty will spike to absurd heights and you’ll start to think you’ll never actually finish this, or any other, chapter ever again.
The first real sign of this comes in Goku’s episode battles, when that short sourpuss Vegeta somehow turns into a 200 foot ape-man and just constantly wrecks your shit over and over. One of the hallmarks of the Budokai Tenkaichi games, apparently, is that the different versions and transformations of Dragon Ball’s characters are their own unique fighters. That’s why there are almost 200 playable characters in this game; half of them seem to be different Gokus and Vegetas. So you’ll just be sailing along, flying and dashing through the game’s huge 3D levels, ripping through combos and Z Dashes and Super Finishers like it’s nothing, without ever really having to learn how and why these underlying systems work, or starting to understand its most complicated maneuvers and strategies, before smashing headfirst into the unbreakable wall of a mountain-sized space gorilla.
Yes, this is frustrating. Yes, it grows ever more frustrating as you keep flinging yourself at Great Ape Vegeta and losing, again and again. He’s not just insanely tall, but his size neuters a lot of the moves and combos you’ve relied on so far, forcing you to leave your safety zone, get creative, and actually try to learn what you can really do in this game. It never gets easy, but if you keep trying—and return to the training sessions, and move on to the early missions in other characters’ episode battles, and fight a lot of one-off exhibitions against the computer—you eventually should figure out how to beat this asshole. At which point you’ve already climbed a good bit of the way out of the other side of that pit at the center of the horseshoe.
And that’s just one fight in one chapter of one character’s episode battle path. There are many more chapters for several other characters, and many of them end with a challenge as seemingly insurmountable as Great Ape Vegeta.
Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO doesn’t make it easy. Those episode battles turn brutal in a hurry, and even if you reduce the difficulty after a few losses the major battles remain tough. The only way to get past them is to actually understand how the game is played. You can’t spam your way past Great Ape Vegeta. And so the game’s episode battles are really useful for two reasons; not only will they start to catch Dragon Ball ignoramuses like me up on the most important plot points of the 40-year-old series, but they’re better at improving a player’s skills than most fighting game story modes. Stick with it, and you’ll either make it to the other side of that horseshoe, or break yourself mentally in the process.—Garrett Martin
Helldivers 2
Year: 2024
Platforms: PlayStation 5, PC
While Helldivers 2 hasn’t even been out a year at this point, it feels like the game has already gone through several live service game lifetimes: the launch was massive, and then there were several cycles of people being angry for a bunch of reasons, some more justified than others, and now after the latest patch, they’re mostly happy again. The biggest change as of late is that the entire game has been massively rebalanced, making it so that a far wider range of weapons, stratagems, and playstyles are valid. Basically, this has made the game way more fun. Instead of your loadout being entirely dedicated to countering specific threats, like heavily-armored enemies, there’s way more room to experiment with this arsenal of deadly tools. You can use sticky grenades to take down looming Bile Titans, wield machine guns to tear through incoming bug swarms, and drop 500kg bombs that turn Automaton Hulks into smoldering wrecks. The game is still hard, as evidenced by the new Super Helldive difficulty setting, but now it feels like you have a fighting chance. It’s all very satisfying!
But the weird thing is that this effort to make firefights more empowering has the unintended consequence of contradicting the whole anti-fascist parody the game is attempting. Previously, as you fumbled with ineffectual weapons, thrown into endless meat threshers as you cycled through lives (which are literally represented as new soldiers being sent to the front), there was a sense of hopelessness that tied in relatively well with the jingoism-satirizing vibe. On the one hand, rebalancing things was obviously the best choice for Helldivers 2 as a live-service game, because it has once again made it into an engaging shooter worth coming back; my friend group is certainly happy about all these changes, and I mostly have been as well. And Sony probably isn’t upset that this rebalancing creates an extra incentive to buy the war bonds (these are basically battle passes) outside of Steeled Veterans, which used to have almost all of the meta weapons. But as my buddies and I gleefully tear through a jungle with HMGs committing war crimes like we’re the cartoonish gunner in Full Metal Jacket, I can’t help but wonder if trying to do a Starship Troopers parody was the best fit for a live service game in the first place. —Elijah Gonzalez
Balatro Mobile
Year: 2024
Platforms: iOS, Android (original version available on consoles and PC)
Yes, this column is ostensibly about new game reviews, but we’re still playing Balatro, the amazing poker / solitaire roguelike hybrid that came out earlier this year. Now that it’s on phones I think we’ll always be playing Balatro whenever we have a spare moment. There are definitely nits I can pick with the iOS version—the size of the phone screen means the text is so small that I can struggle to read it sometimes (not a dad but some real dad problems there), it absolutely kills the battery; and it weirdly freezes occasionally and needs a quick swipe out and back in to get running again—but overall this is maybe the closest to a forever game I’ll ever personally get. In the last two weeks I’ve played Balatro on planes, on trains, in automobiles, while waiting in line and watching TV and trying to fall asleep and after waking up during an unexpected nap and… Balatro can be played anywhere, is my point, not just technologically now that it’s on phones, but because of its ingenious design and structure, where basically every hand is its own little game of Balatro in microcosm that can be picked up and spat out in under a minute. Balatro has truly reached its final form now that it’s always in my pocket.—Garrett Martin